The Summer We Fell Apart

by Robin Antalek

  Once she thought she saw Finn go in and out, but because she had turned off all the lights so she wouldn’t be seen, she couldn’t be sure. Of all of them, he looked the most like their father and shared his slightly stooped posture and shuffled walk, so it could have been him. If she asked Finn, she knew he would deny it anyway, so she was left with no choice other than to sneak around in the dark.

  The first Friday of November, after the track-and-field season had ended and the awards were handed out, Kate went with her teammates to Friendly’s. A few of the girls on the team, obsessed with calorie intake, were debating the calories in a Fribble Shake versus a hot fudge sundae. Kate wasn’t really participating in the conversation, but she was surrounded by a glut of girls thick into the discussion. It was better than getting stuck with Alison, the best sprinter on the team, who unfortunately had it bad for Finn. From what Kate had surmised during an interminable bus ride back from their last meet, Alison and Finn had hung out and then he never called her again. Take a number, Kate had wanted to tell her. But she kept her mouth shut. With her back firmly in front of Alison’s sad face, Kate moved closer to the bigger group. Their high-pitched voices were like cotton in her ears, cramming in useless pieces of information until she was stuffed, until she just couldn’t take it anymore. When that happened, their voices blended together in one indistinguishable hum. She was trying hard to stay in that place when she saw her father way in the far back booth of Friendly’s, holding hands across the paper placemats with a woman who was not her mother.

  She stood perfectly still and held her breath and willed her father to look her way, and when he did, he smiled as though it was absolutely normal to run into his daughter at Friendly’s while he was holding hands with a stranger. The first thing she thought, as he gestured for her to come to his table and she left her friends behind, was that she bet this woman had seen the inside of the barn.

  In the middle of the table next to their still-entwined fingers was a platter of onion rings. Funions, Friendly’s called them, and Kate wondered why every menu item started with an F. Funions and Fribbles. Before Kate could be introduced, she reached for one and popped it into her mouth. The woman laughed nervously and Kate saw all of her teeth. She wasn’t that pretty, at least not traditionally. Her mouth was wide and her eyes were almond-shaped, so that when she smiled the corners of her mouth aligned with the far corners of her eyes. It was as if someone had drawn a diagram of a face but forgot to give it any fullness. Although, Kate reasoned, some of the most famous artists, philosophers, composers, and writers of generations past had taken mistresses that were more muse than beauty. This had to be the case with the woman her father introduced as Ingrid.

  Her father had done most of the talking, carrying the conversation for Kate and Ingrid as well as himself. After her father had slipped her a twenty to pay for her food, after he bragged to Ingrid about Kate’s brilliance, he promised he would soon have some writing to show Kate, because hers was the only opinion he valued. Then he got up, held a hand out to Ingrid, and left. Kate reasoned that her father introduced her to Ingrid because he knew Kate would understand that he needed more from life than the average man, the constrictions of an outdated monogamous society strangling him. No one, especially him, was to blame. It was an overriding theme in every single one of his plays and it didn’t take long for Kate to come to the realization that every male character he had ever written was a manifestation of himself.

  It wasn’t until afterward, as Kate watched him lead Ingrid through the maze of Friendly’s tables with a hand protectively at the small of her back, that she realized she had forgotten to ask if he’d gotten the cookies she left and if he had liked them.

  Once Kate knew about Ingrid, she was surprised at how nothing really changed. Even in her attitude toward her mother, when she saw her, Kate was unaffected. As Kate saw it, if her mother wanted to make a go of her marriage, she could. But she had obviously chosen not to. So what was her father to do? Abandon his family? The only person she confided in was Finn. Late one night, when she was doing laundry and Finn was at the kitchen table smoking discards from one of their mother’s many ashtrays lying about the house, she casually mentioned meeting their father and Ingrid.

  Finn smiled, although it wasn’t out of happiness, more like instinct over intent. Kate took that to mean that Finn had already known about Ingrid. But when she asked, he looked up at her from foraging through the ashtray, his ash-blackened fingertips poised over a butt, shaking ever so slightly, as he said, “Is she blond?”

  Kate shook her head and folded her arms over her robe and waited for Finn to light the butt and take a deep drag. “Then, she’s new.” His cheeks were concave, distorting the features of his face for a moment before he exhaled. Once he did, he waved a hand in the air, his movements economical yet somehow elegant, before he said, “No one around here thinks I’m paying attention.” He paused. “Finn the retard, right?”

  There were so many things that Kate could have said to Finn, but she didn’t. Instead, when the wash cycle ended, she got up and put the wet clothes in the dryer. She hesitated a second by the kitchen table on her way back through the room. If Finn had looked at her, given in just a little, she might have told him he wasn’t stupid. She knew he had problems with reading, with words reversing themselves, yet his struggle in school was only aggravated by his need to be smashed. Dropped from the team, he had more time on his hands to get wasted. And lately, Kate had noticed, the booze that used to mellow him out was turning him into something scary. It worried her enough that she wondered what they would do next year, after she went to college. Would they eat? Would they have clean clothes? Would any of them even go to school if she weren’t here to make sure they did?

  She shrugged in response to the conversation in her head, even though neither of them had said anything. Kate was on her way out of the room, resigned to the wall of silence from Finn, when he said, “So you’re okay with this?”

  Kate stopped and spun around. “What?”

  “With Dad? With Ingrid?” He drawled Ingrid’s name out long and slow, in a mocking way.

  “Dad needs different things…”

  “That he does,” Finn said, nodding through a puff of smoke. “That he does.”

  “So I get it that you don’t agree?”

  “What about Mom?”

  “He’s living in the barn.” She made it sound like it wasn’t their father’s fault and knew before the words were out that Finn would rise to their mother’s defense.

  Finn made a face. “Come off it, Kate. Mom is no idiot either. How would you like your husband to be fucking someone under your nose? On your couch? Huh?” He paused. “Where’s the great play? He hasn’t written anything in years—anything that could be produced anyhow. He had one fucking story in him, that’s it. If Mom didn’t take any grunt job that came along, we’d have nothing.”

  “He’s brilliant.” Kate flinched. “Brilliant. Stop talking about Dad like that.”

  Finn tipped the chair back on its back legs as he considered Kate’s statement. “The only thing about our father that’s brilliant is his ability to keep convincing younger and younger women to fuck him.”

  Kate put her hands over her ears. “Stop,” she pleaded.

  “Stop?” The chair slammed back down on all fours as Finn leaned forward. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Kate? Don’t you care what this does to Mom?”

  “If Mom wanted, she could go out there and be with him and support him. But she doesn’t.”

  Finn gave a mean laugh. “Well, what the hell do you think Ingrid is doing for him, Kate? Transcribing his goddamn notes? Huh? I’ve seen them do it, Kate. Watched right through the windows. She even saw me and she smiled and just kept right on screwing our father. He’s a liar and cheat. How can you even defend his fucking, huh? What has he done for you that he hasn’t done for the rest of us?”

  Kate rolled her eyes. She had never felt such an overwhelming urge to hurt anyone in
her entire life, and the only thing she could think of to say was “Alison wants you to call her.”

  “Who?” Finn snarled.

  “A girl I know that you screwed. She’d like a phone call.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “What makes you any better than Dad? Seems to me you’re a lot worse. You don’t even remember their names.”

  The chair scraped hard against the floor as Finn pushed back from the table and stood up. Before Kate had a chance to say anything else, he slammed the back door and pounded down the stairs.

  For a minute, Kate thought he was going to the barn to confront their father. She followed him out onto the back porch but stopped when she spotted Finn in the drive. His body was an angry twisted mass of sinewy muscle as he frantically picked up rocks and hurled them at the barn. In his fury, the rocks mostly missed their mark, landing with a soft thud onto the grass. When his hands were empty, he turned and ran off down the drive toward the road. She watched until she could no longer see his white T-shirt, and Kate knew there was no use following him. Even though she trained every day, Finn was naturally faster. She had asked him once what he did differently, and he had answered that he ran with an empty mind. Her problem, the way he saw it, was that she was thinking too much about running. She needed to just allow it to happen.

  Even at seventeen, Kate knew herself well enough to realize that would be an impossible task.

  It was close to ten by the time Kate left the office and pulled into a parking lot of one of those overlit, overstocked, perpetually open big-box stores. The tendrils of her migraine wrapped tightly around her brain, the pain appeared to pulse in tandem with her heartbeat, bringing only the briefest of respites before it began again. She’d already exceeded the amount of pills she was supposed to take in a day, and the last time she had gone for a refill the doctor had warned her that the medication would cease to help if she kept abusing it. But she was desperate. It was like a junkie desperation: every thought she had was about getting rid of the pain, and she couldn’t help but wonder if this was what Finn felt like when he craved a drink. At this point in the migraine, she would have done anything to make it go away.

  Now, all she really wanted to do was curl up into a ball in a dark room. But she was feeling guilty that she had left her brother in an empty house six hours ago with nothing but water, so she ventured into the cavernous fluorescent netherworld in search of bedding and whatever else she could grab.

  She squinted against the bright overhead lights, her eyes tearing up, as she piled sheets, towels, pillows, blankets, an air mattress, a lamp, a toaster, plates, mugs, and a coffee pot into the cart. A quick trip down the food aisle yielded a case of bottled water, coffee, crackers, English muffins, popcorn, soda, and cookies, and from the personal-care section she added shampoo, soap, a toothbrush, and toothpaste, because who knew what Finn had in that duffel? Her last stop was in the cleaning-supply section, where she grabbed cans of Comet, bleach, lightbulbs, a mop, broom, dustpan, and bucket.

  Traffic was backed up on the freeway and so she got on and off exit ramps in an attempt to outwit her fellow travelers. The last time she took an exit, she picked up a sack of hamburgers and fries from a drive-thru. By the time she pulled into the driveway in Silver Lake, it was nearly midnight and the food was cold, but Finn appeared to still be here. At least there was light coming from the kitchen, one single bulb with a long pull chain that shone out of every window in the small house, casting rectangular yellow shadows across the overgrown yard. The weak light gave the tangle of trees and vines outside a postapocalyptic glow that sent a shivery feeling down Kate’s spine and propelled her quickly from the car to the house with the burgers and fries in hand.

  Finn, fully dressed, was stretched out on the nasty mattress on the floor, an arm flung across his eyes. His chest, Kate quickly noted, rose and fell evenly. She had so rarely seen him asleep that she reasoned her checking to see if he was alive was a natural instinct and not some maudlin irrational fear. She stepped gingerly around the bed and into the kitchen with the food. She stared at the turquoise refrigerator and stove, not sure what they had to do with the bags of congealed hamburgers and French fries, so she left the bags on the drain board and went back into the living room. Skirting the foot of the mattress, she made her way back out to the car and began to unload her purchases and carry them into the house.

  On her final trip from the car, Finn was leaning against the doorframe, peering out into the yard. Lazily, he scratched his belly through his T-shirt as he watched Kate struggle with the last of the bags.

  “Some help?” Kate called. If she had to bend over one more time to pick up something she’d dropped, her head was going to split in two. The air was heavy; it smelled like eucalyptus-scented herbal balm. Like the Vicks VapoRub her mother applied to their congested chests when they were young. As she walked, her arms loaded with packages, she felt the gigantic emerald ferns that grew out from beneath the bramble brush against her legs.

  When they had everything inside, Kate looked for a place to collapse. She refused to sit on that mattress, and so she leaned up against the bookshelf and closed her eyes. She could hear Finn going through the bags. Her intention was to give him all of this and then turn around and go back to her hotel, but she honestly didn’t know if she was capable of that tonight. Or was it already tomorrow? She opened one eye and looked at her watch. It was 12:47 a.m. and she had a nine o’clock conference call.

  “You okay?” Finn asked. “I didn’t think I’d see you until tomorrow.”

  As much as she didn’t want to, Kate opened her eyes and looked at her brother. “You didn’t have food or sheets or…”

  “I’ve had much worse than this,” he said, although Kate sensed it wasn’t for sympathy, he was just relaying the information. Quickly changing the subject, he said, “Wow, you bought a lot of stuff,” as he surveyed the mountain of bags. “It must have cost a fortune.”

  Self-conscious, in her defense, Kate said, “I work hard.”

  “Listen, I wasn’t accusing you.”

  “Forget it.” Kate cut him off. “I just couldn’t let you…” Suddenly she stopped. She just couldn’t what? Be responsible for him living here in squalor? She was surprised after all these years of not taking care of anyone but herself, all the old instincts to make everything right for everyone else came back so easily.

  Finn raised his hands as if to say: enough said. He pulled the box containing the air mattress out of a bag and frowned. “That mattress is okay.” He gestured to the stained pallet on the floor.

  Kate shook her head. “Absolutely not, Finn. I meant to get this place at least cleared out by the time you came but I haven’t had a minute so…” She shrugged out of her jacket, folded it carefully, and placed it on top of an empty bag she laid out on a shelf. She looked over at Finn and clapped her hands together. “Let’s do it.”

  Finn shook his head at her like she was crazy, but then he picked up a corner of the old mattress and dragged it out the door. When he returned, he said, “You’re going to need a Dumpster.”

  Kate rummaged in her bag until she came up with a notebook and a pen. She tossed it to her brother and said, “Start making a list. That’s why you’re here.”

  An hour or so later, the garbage had been bagged, floors had been swept and mopped with bleach, the rust stains on the tub, sink, and toilet scoured, the air mattress pumped, and Kate and Finn perched on top of it eating the cold hamburgers.

  Finn had lent Kate a pair of cut-off pants, frayed at the bottom, and a T-shirt, since all she had with her were the clothes she’d worn to work and she hadn’t wanted to clean in them. It was strange, wearing her brother’s clothes, and she was embarrassed to hesitate before she put them on, to wonder how many people had worn them before her brother acquired them. And although they didn’t smell of a specific laundry detergent, they were at least clean. She had felt a twinge in her gut as she watched him unzip his duffel to get her the clothes—right on top w
as their father’s leather jacket.

  When they were done eating, Finn balled up the empty foil wrappers and tossed them into the trash pile. He handed Kate a bottle of water, which she drank down in a swallow. The headache meds always left her parched.

  “I’m going to stay here tonight, if that’s okay with you?” Kate ventured as she set the alarm clock on her cell phone. “It’s too late for me to drive back. Unless you mind sharing the bed?”

  “It’s your house, Kate.”

  “Right,” she said and laughed. “At least you didn’t say you’d shared a bed with worse.”

  Finn stared at her a minute, processing before he got the joke. “I can’t remember the last time that you purposely said something funny.”

  Kate sighed as her head hit the pillow, and she pulled the blanket up around her shoulders. Two bodies on an air mattress were a delicate balance. When Finn shifted next to her, she rolled involuntarily toward the middle of the bed. Her shoulder was wedged against Finn’s. He smelled like bleach and something sour but she was too exhausted to move. “Me neither,” she mumbled before she fell asleep.

  When Kate’s alarm went off, she smelled coffee. She opened her eyes. She was alone in the middle of the air mattress clutching all the blankets, with both pillows beneath her head. By the time she registered where she was, Finn had appeared at the bottom of the bed, holding a mug of coffee out to her. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had done that for her, and of course all of it circled back to Eli, and she hated that he was the first thought of her day.

  So she was a little grumpy when she accepted the coffee from Finn, and he looked pissed by her reaction, but then he said, “I forgot you’re not a morning person.”

  Kate blinked. No headache.

  “Do you want an English muffin? I found a package in one of those bags.”

  She shook her head as she sipped the coffee. “I have to go—grab a shower, change my clothes, and get to the office.” Watching Finn, she had a feeling that he had never gone back to sleep last night, which explained how she was alone in the middle of the mattress.