The Summer We Fell Apart

by Robin Antalek

  Kate waited. She wanted to hear him say he wanted to stay, that he would work hard to make amends. That he would at least recognize she had saved his ass yet again. In all her years as an attorney, she had encountered remorse, truthful or not, in every manifestation possible. But none was forthcoming from Finn. The silence from his side of the car roared in her ears, giving her plenty of time to figure out exactly what to do next, and that always worked to calm her down.

  For Kate, getting to the end was tricky, especially since she had known the outcome at the beginning. Putting her brother on a plane and out of her life was certainly the ending she had envisioned, though she had held out some hope against it. But now she could see that there was no other way, there never had been. And everything she might have hoped or dreamed was simply that and nothing more.

  Before she followed through on her intention to send him back to Boston, Kate detoured to Shelley’s in order to return the sketchbooks and painting. Finn sat in the car. She asked him if he wanted to do it himself but he sank farther down in the seat and closed his eyes. In hindsight, she should have made him return them, as a parent would have made a five-year-old return the candy bar he stole from the drugstore, but it was too much work. For safety’s sake, Kate took the keys out of the ignition in case he got the idea to drive away. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t try on foot. He might have been faster than her at one time in his life, but Kate was certain those days were long gone.

  Shelley ended up following Kate back to the car. She went around to Finn’s side and put her palm against his window. As Kate predicted when Shelley asked if she thought Finn would talk to her, he remained mute.

  When they arrived at the house, Kate insisted Finn accompany her inside and sit on the bed while she packed his duffel so she could keep an eye on him. She did it fast so she didn’t have to think about the unfinished house and the shitty garage-sale furniture and the way the light came into the kitchen differently now that the lemon tree was gone. Finn remained slumped against the pillows with his eyes closed. He refused Kate’s offer of water or anything to eat with the barest shake of his head before they got back into the car for the drive to the airport.

  The airport throbbed with people returning back to wherever they came from for the long holiday weekend. Kate had actually forgotten that it was still the same weekend and that Thanksgiving had only been three days before. For all she’d done in the last twelve hours, the holiday seemed like it had taken place a month ago.

  At curbside, she requested a wheelchair and generously compensated a skycap to stay with her brother while she parked. At the ticket counter, she argued with the clerk about classifying Finn for emergency medical status. She managed to get him a ticket but she couldn’t get them to agree to let her accompany her brother through the gate without a written statement from his doctor. All the while, Finn sat passively in the wheelchair, huddled inside their father’s leather jacket. While they waited in the long security lines, Kate tried again to talk to Finn, but he was unyielding. The music piped in over the airport speakers played an unending Christmas rotation. Kate recognized “White Christmas,” “The Little Drummer Boy,” “The Carol of the Bells,” and “Santa Baby” enough times that it caused her to grind her molars in tune as it droned on and on and on.

  She bent over and tucked a few bills, whatever she had left in her wallet, into the pocket of their father’s jacket and told Finn he could keep the cell phone until his minutes ran out. She had no idea what he was going to do on the other end of his trip once he arrived in Boston.

  As the day wore on, the barely twenty-four-hour-old bruises on Finn’s face were a startling shade of rotting eggplant. When it was finally his turn in line, Kate saw the security guy’s eyes widen along with a sharp intake of breath as Finn unfolded, limb by limb, from the wheelchair and finally looked up, revealing his face as he submitted to the metal detector. The guy even glanced at Kate and gave her a look like she had to be kidding, especially since Finn was hunched over before him, swaying gently back and forth as he tried to stand still. There was blood on the collar of his shirt from the cuts on his face, and his wrist still bore a hospital bracelet. There was no hiding: everyone in line could see that Finn was barely well enough to travel. Still, Kate shot him a stare that dared him to say something.

  “Just try me,” she whispered, and even though he couldn’t possibly have heard her threat, he lifted the wand and waved it in the air around Finn’s battered form.

  While Kate stood on the other side of security, she was forced to watch helplessly as Finn struggled to put his shoes back on. For all the horrified expressions at his condition, no one offered to help. Instead, people stepped around him as they gathered their laptops, belts, cell phones, and coats. Finn couldn’t bend over because of the injury to his ribs and the tight bandages. It took him almost ten minutes, hands shaking the entire time, a line of spittle dangling off his lip as he bit down in what appeared to be concentration, but Kate would venture a guess that it was more like excruciating pain. Finally, Kate had to look away, and when she looked again, he had collapsed into the chair with the jacket across his lap. She could see beads of sweat on his forehead as well as his upper lip as he sunk against the seat in exhaustion and closed his eyes. The guy who had checked Finn through saw that he had finally succeeded in getting his shoes on and wheeled him off to the side. Since the only way they were going to let Kate past security to assist her brother was if she bought herself a ticket, she insisted that someone from the airline meet Finn at security, take him to the gate, and get him on the plane.

  When the person finally showed up to wheel Finn down the concourse, Kate was hopeful her brother might turn around to say good-bye; a wave, any tiny, insignificant acknowledgment. When none came, she took a step forward, yet stifled the urge to call out to him. Finn had failed Kate, hadn’t he? So why did it feel as if she had failed him? Silently, she mouthed to his retreating form: I’m sorry.

  She stayed until she could no longer distinguish him from the crowd. As she lost sight of him, it jarred a memory of when they were kids and she and Finn would race each other down their street. Instinctively, he knew how to pace himself while Kate gave it all she had right from the start. Even though she knew she would tire out and lose the race, she did the same thing every single time just for the feeling it gave her. Despite his breath in her ear and the swoosh of air against her side as he pumped his arms faster, for a few precious seconds right before Finn passed her, she was braver, more certain of herself, stronger than she ever could possibly have imagined.

  part four

  Finn

  nine

  TO THE BOY WITH THE RED UMBRELLA WHO SAVED MY LIFE

  Finn did not know where he was the first time he opened his eyes. Then again, it was not an entirely unfamiliar feeling, so he rolled over and went back to sleep. When he opened them again several hours later, he saw a woman with short, shredded dark hair sitting in a chair across the room. Her bare legs were pulled up to her chest and she was staring at something on the floor. Finn looked down. It was a monkey in a green sweater.

  “What’s up with the green monkey?” Finn asked, his voice hoarse from booze and too many cigarettes. His syntax was off—his brain not yet working. He ran his tongue over the skim on his teeth.

  The woman looked at him with a slow smile. She could easily have been mistaken for Miriam. That is, if Miriam hadn’t married some doctor last weekend and moved to Virginia. Who the hell moves to Virginia? Beneath the blankets Finn was naked. He reached a hand down between his legs and lazily scratched his balls. He remembered those stupid bumper stickers from ages ago: VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS. Who the fuck thought of that? The woman, whoever the hell she was, did not seem at all concerned that Finn was in her bed.

  At the mention of the green monkey, the woman picked it up by the arm and hurled it across the room in Finn’s direction. He sat up quickly to catch it but he didn’t extend his arm far enough. The woman was laughing as Fi
nn fell half out of bed onto the floor in an awkward attempt to save the monkey. It was a stuffed toy. He tossed it onto the floor as he collapsed back onto the pillows and groaned. Fuck. He felt like shit. Nothing new about that.

  He threw an arm across his face to block out the light. Vaguely, he recalled this woman wearing a blue wig and standing next to a carrot.

  She said, “It was part of my costume—but I suppose you don’t remember.”

  Finn still had his eyes covered but he could hear the pout in her voice.

  “You were more concerned with getting my costume off,” she added.

  So they’d had sex? Finn tried as hard as he could, and still nothing came to him past the carrot and the blue wig. Nothing. It was only because he knew what she wanted from him, the same thing they all (except for Miriam) had wanted from him, that he uncovered his eyes and asked, “Can we do it again?”

  So there was no surprise when she got up from the chair and walked back over to the bed. Finn watched as she slowly pulled a peach-colored slip over her head to reveal her body. She put one foot up on the bed and spread her knees slightly, giving him a good long look at her waxed and polished bush—something he didn’t really care for and was even more than a little disturbed that he didn’t remember—before she commando-crawled up his body to join him under the blankets.

  The doorman at Finn’s mother’s building on West 91st Street probably knew Finn better than he knew Finn’s mother. Just last week he had run into the guy crossing Second Avenue. It was a rainy afternoon and he was holding the hand of a little boy with a red umbrella. His kid, Finn guessed. He had waved and Finn had waved back and said hello to his kid. When he saw Finn in the building, he always felt compelled to shout out to Finn the latest sports scores, as if Finn gave a shit what he was talking about. It probably just made the guy feel alive, because most of the people who lived in this building had nurses and wheelchairs and were totally fucking out of it. Drool city. Finn knew enough of them by sight now from his trips up and down the elevator.

  He had been crashing at his mother’s place since Kate had thrown him out and he’d been able to stay just under the radar even though his brother, George, lived downtown and his sister Amy in Brooklyn. His mother rarely stayed here and Finn wasn’t even sure why she had purchased this apartment to begin with or why she’d given the doorman permission to give him the extra key. But he was glad she had because he had nowhere else to go. When he had landed in Logan from Los Angeles, he had sat in a coffee shop counting out the money Kate had given him. He had just enough cash to buy a bus ticket from Boston to New York. A part of him had hoped his mother would be home. Especially when the doorman caught sight of him and had steeled his jaw to toss him out on the street. It wasn’t until Finn explained who he was and offered his license as proof that the doorman gave him the key. Even at that, he had watched Finn warily for the first week the few times he had ventured outside. As his bruises faded, he left the apartment more, and the guy seemed to relent. That was when the barrage of sports scores and useless trivia greeted him as the elevator doors slid open. He supposed it was better than the alternative. Besides, the guy was probably so charmed by Finn’s mother that eventually he had to give Finn the benefit of the doubt. His mother was the type of person that people liked to say they knew; it only worked against her if you were related.

  Since the mess with Kate, Finn had been trying to be good. Or at the very least he was entertaining the theory of what good felt like. At the moment, he prided himself that there was still a bottle of his mother’s vodka in the freezer that he hadn’t yet drunk. When he let himself in the apartment, he went to the freezer and bent down and peered inside just to make sure that the bottle was still there. Even if he had drunk so much last night he couldn’t even remember having sex the first time with the girl with the green monkey, he hadn’t touched that fucking bottle of vodka.

  In reality, Finn had been drunk since he found out that Miriam had gotten married. He hadn’t talked to her in over a year, and when Kate had given him a phone, the first thing he did was dial Miriam’s number. He didn’t even think it would be in service anymore. She had threatened as much the last time they’d talked. So when his father died and George had told him to call Miriam, he had lied and told them he had and left it at that. As a matter of fact, he was so positive it wouldn’t be her number that, as it was ringing, he forgot to hang up, and then she answered and he panicked and hung up as she was saying hello. Then she called him on Thanksgiving morning and told him she was getting married the following weekend and moving to Virginia. Her voice was timid but resolute. Even though he had begged her over and over again to tell him why, he already knew the answer. She wanted to have babies and a yard with a swing and love a guy who doesn’t throw up on her. Who doesn’t have the DTs so bad when he’s off the shit that he thinks spiders are crawling all over his body and he scratches himself until he’s raw and bloody. Who doesn’t threaten to kill her if she won’t give him the keys to the car so he can go get some more booze. She didn’t add those last few things, but Finn knew her well enough to know that she didn’t have to; she’d said it all before.

  Manhattan was not a place to be without cash and Finn had used the last of the money from his sister just to get to New York. While Finn had always managed to snag a construction job back in Boston where he knew people (eventually that had worked to his disadvantage because too many people got to know him too well), here he was just another person filling up space in a miserable city. New York did nothing for him. It was a cesspool of spoiled rich and filthy beggars. The only thing between him and the guys who constantly hit him up for change in the park was that Finn had a place to crash. Other than that, there was no difference.

  There was nothing in his mother’s cabinets to eat, and while Finn rarely did so anymore without horrible cramping pains followed by a stream of diarrhea that was incapacitating, he needed to put something solid in his body. With shaky hands, he patted down his pockets for his wallet only to discover it held nothing but a slip of paper with George’s phone number and his mother’s address. His license had expired a year ago, but it was still in his wallet. He was surprised, actually, that the police and his sister had given it back to him. He thought they would confiscate it. But he’d heard Kate argue that he needed the ID to get on the plane and so maybe that was why they had made an exception. A part of him wished they hadn’t because all it did was make him feel like shit. He peered at it sometimes if only to remember how he looked. The picture had been taken years before, when the skin around his eyes wasn’t so swollen all the time. And although the photo was too small to really see, he was sure the tiny red capillaries that had started to break around his nose weren’t there before. His entire life women had come to him easily and even now there were women who went for his damaged face and charm, and it had become a means of survival or, at best, a way to secure the next drink.

  If only he could remember where the green monkey lived. She was into some weird shit in bed but he’d done worse. Maybe he could get a few bucks. He just closed his eyes and thanked his fucking stars that his dick still worked. That and his decaying looks somehow still got him free drinks. There were some days when he woke so hard that he couldn’t even imagine that his body had enough blood left in it to go there. Even whacking off was more pain than it was worth lately.

  He rifled through his mother’s desk and then her closet, looking in old purses and on the table next to her bed. She wasn’t here enough to leave anything behind. He came up with a dime, a cough drop, and a card for the laundry room in the basement. With a resignation that at least implied he felt bad about what he was about to do, he unplugged her Bose portable CD player and put it in a shopping bag and headed downtown on foot. A long walk would keep him away from that goddamned bottle of vodka.

  In Chinatown, on Pell Street, an appendix of asphalt jammed with restaurants and beauty supply stores, Finn sat hunched over in a corner table way in the back of a restauran
t nursing a steaming bowl of noodle soup. He picked out the shreds of pork and tried to chew them slowly without getting nauseated. So far so good.

  He’d gotten fifteen dollars for his mother’s CD player and he’d have to pay three dollars for the bowl of noodle soup, but the tea was free. Before his food came, his hands were shaking so bad that he had to clasp them together in his lap and hold his entire body rigid just so he wouldn’t move the table. He pretended to study his placemat adorned with symbols of the Chinese New Year. So maybe he was wrong and it was already past Christmas. He searched the placemat for some indication of dates, but the numbers and letters swirled in front of his eyes and made absolutely no sense. That had nothing to do with the drink—it was the way he’d always been. School was torture. Being drunk was so much easier. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had read a newspaper. And the date? From the lights and the holiday decorations he’d spied in a store window, he guessed sometime in December. A winter wedding for Miriam and her fucking doctor husband. How nice.

  At the table across from him, two girls were having lunch. They looked nearly identical with their long blond hair blow-dried straight, tight T-shirts, jeans, and the street vendor’s ten-dollar pashmina shawls roped around their necks. They kept stealing glances at him and then looking away quickly—enough times so that he knew that they were interested. From the map spread out on the table between them, they were obviously from out of town, here for a good time, hoping to get his attention, and it seemed to Finn that girls like these were everywhere lately. He smiled weakly in their direction and thought how fucking pathetic they were; if a drunk like him could seem appealing, what the fuck were they expecting out of life?