After cleaning up the porch and washing the morning dishes, Holly found Taina in the second-floor sitting room, looking through the footed telescope.
“Let it go, Tai,” Holly said. “They didn’t mean to exclude you.”
“Like hell.”
Holly sat down, stretching her legs across a cushioned bench. The deck outside overlooked stunning rooftop views of blue sky and colorful sailboats. “Did I ever tell you about the time I was hypnotized?” Holly said.
Taina sighed, just to let Holly know that she knew full well that she was trying to distract her. “It was a long time ago, right?” Taina kept up her vigilance, her back to her sister, telescope pointed outward.
Holly nodded even though her sister wasn’t looking at her. “The last time I pursued our biological roots was before I had kids. I’m not the type to bother looking up records and such, so I thought I’d cheat. I figured the truth about what happened to us is somewhere in my brain.” She put an index finger on each temple. “This was before David’s brain tumor proved that I was right.” She looked back out to the water. “While I was being hypnotized, I remember feeling like my mind was like a heavy metal ball that was sinking into deep, deep water. The hypnotist made a tape of our session. It was hard to hear.”
“Hard to hear?”
“In both senses of the word. During the entire interview I stuttered.”
Taina blinked and turned back for a quick glance at her sister. “What did you say in the tape, in the stuttering voice?”
Holly shrugged. “I spoke Spanish, so I didn’t understand a word. I just remember that strange voice coming out of me. It was creepy.”
Taina’s voice rose. “Do you still have the tape?”
“Nah, I threw it out. Too freaky.” She twisted a lock of her hair.
“That was dumb. You should’ve kept it.”
“Turn around. Look at me.”
Taina twisted around slowly.
“Adrian is our brother.”
“He’s not.”
“To hell with DNA, Taina. It doesn’t mean anything. I agree with David. We came into this life—this life, not that other life, not the one back when we were babies, but the life we’ve known for thirty years—together.”
Taina turned back to scouring the horizon. She saw a couple that looked a lot like Julia and Adrian depart on a sailboat from the neighboring island. The woman—yes, it was Julia—unfurled the sail. The sail trembled, opened up, and the vessel glided off into the shimmering sea. She felt her stomach clench. “Oh come on, Holly, haven’t you ever wanted something you couldn’t have?”
Holly stood up. “I want a baby daughter. And I want this house, Taina. I want this life.”
Taina made a face. “Your house has five bedrooms and a pool. You have a husband you love and three beautiful boys. Are you out of your mind? What’s wrong with your life?”
Holly sighed again then held up a catalog of preppy clothes that was resting on her lap. It had a picture of a man bending over a lobster pot, the sea, and a lighthouse in the background. “It’s not this life. I want to be anchored in permanence and surrounded by beauty. These people aren’t transient.”
“We were unwanted, abandoned orphans, lucky to have what we have. What makes you think it’s okay to want more?”
“Being American, Taina.”
Taina shook her head. “Even Julia doesn’t have ‘this life.’ Her parents worked their asses off to keep up their stake, and they have to share it with like, fifty other people. Personally, I’d be happy with a little condo on South Beach.”
Holly wrinkled her nose. “To be near Adrian.”
Taina took the magazine out of Holly’s hands. “If we have sons, we want daughters. If we live in Florida, we want to live in New England. If we have a detective husband, we want a singer instead. C’mon, admit it—don’t you find your pilot to be a little dull? After all, we always want the opposite of what we have,” Taina said. “Don’t we?”
Holly’s face turned red. “Fine,” she said, getting up. “I’ll leave you alone with your incestuous jealousy and your voyeurism.” She stomped off, and Taina heard her footsteps descending the creaky stairs. Taina fiddled with the telescope, because she couldn’t seem to hold the view. She found a switch that made all the difference, and the image came in steadily and as sharply as if they were standing ten feet away. She witnessed the moment that Adrian leaned over to reach a rope that was on the floor of the boat, and with his other hand, gripped Julia’s bare thigh for support for just a few seconds. She saw how Julia stopped what she was doing and stared at that hand before Adrian quickly withdrew it. Taina noticed the main sail’s tentative flapping, saw how it leaned, cupped, and filled with wind. The vessel turned just a few degrees and suddenly picked up speed and glided away.
Taina hated this feeling of agonized rapture. Like a moth, attracted by a bare light bulb; mesmerized, drunk with admiration, bashing herself again and again against the barriers that surrounded Adrian’s life.
The Griswolds’ sailboat was being repaired, so Julia borrowed the Lil’ Pearl, a sloop that belonged to the Rigbys, longtime family friends on Governor’s Island. Julia docked the motorboat at the Rigbys’ cottage and they headed out before a brisk wind.
The sunshine and wind speed was exhilarating to Julia, so it took her by surprise to see that Adrian’s face was tight with fear. Julia eased off the wind a bit and the boat slowed down. But Adrian couldn’t relax while they were out in the Sound, so they headed back in toward the islands. He relaxed when the islands came back into view. Julia got the boat as close as she could to a sand bar, anchored, and they paddled around in the water.
“You’ve got to start trusting me,” Julia told him, just as a passing wave deposited her into his arms. In the water she was weightless, and he held her up like a child so she wouldn’t be pulled away. She looked down at him, put a hand on his cheek and felt the prickliness of his razor stubble. There was that moment of consideration, the weighing of consequences, the probing, testing of their capacity to give in to instinct. Adrian took one last close-up look at the curve of her jaw line, her eyes, her hair. He drank in the image of water droplets rolling down along the length of her skin. They pooled and grew heavy, then split into rivulets that fled into the shadowed crevice where her breasts met. He put her down, and took a step back. “Sorry,” she said, and they both laughed, but nervously.
Adrian knew then, without a doubt, that they would become lovers. But he knew that it had to be a long time off, because he could not, would not, take her away from David. His longing for her began at that moment. Like the mechanism on an old clock, it held itself back, ticking and marking the seconds, minutes, hours, and days.
It was four in the morning and Adrian couldn’t sleep. The Griswold house was his first experience inhabiting an old home, and he marveled at how different it was from the concrete structures he had known all his life. The family had decently kept up the repairs, but the house was so old that it was sagging in places. He imagined that the whole thing could collapse and fall into the sea at any time.
It was hot and damp in his room. The one window had swollen shut and was impossible to open, so he lay with a fan pointed directly at him. There was always the option of sleeping in the hammocks that were hung out on the veranda, and that was okay for a night, two at the most. The dilemma reminded him too much of nights in Puerto Rico, in the two-bedroom cinderblock house he and his dad had lived in for so many years, without air-conditioning, without much privacy, the neighbors carrying on day and night, never quiet. Here, it was the incessant cawing of the seagulls that kept him from napping by day and the sound of waves breaking against the seawall that kept him up at night. He lay in bed, hot, wide awake, and achingly horny.
Holly told him again and again to relax, to not be so jittery. Never in his life would he carve out idle time like this again, he knew, so he was glad that he had come to Griswold Island. And who knew, he could die in a plane crash on the
way to a concert, and he would take inventory of his life and he would be glad he had taken advantage of this time with the girls, with David, and with Ray. The meals were a group effort that he greatly enjoyed. And who would have known that adults could have so much fun with a Slip ’n Slide and a piñata? And in the late afternoon, Julia brewed sun tea and they sat on the rocking chairs lined up on the veranda overlooking the water, with ice cubes clinking in tall glasses of cold tea, drifting in and out of sleep while Holly and Ray chatted away. It vaguely reminded him of village life. He sat up in bed. He had been trying to figure out what it was that was drawing him so dangerously close to his pseudo-sister-in-law. He had never known that someone like her could exist. While he hurled himself into the world, Julia seemed still, anchored, rocklike, uncomplicated.
The bed groaned below him. He stood up and put his shorts on. He turned the brass knob and opened the door. He stepped into the hall. Below his foot, the wood made a low creaking noise. He began to walk down the hall, past Raymond’s snoring, past Holly’s door, past Taina’s room. In the pale moonlight he saw the eyes of Julia’s relatives watching him from behind their gilded frames, some of the expressions stern and disapproving, some blank and distant.
David’s door was half-open. It was the last door at the end of the hall, the room just before the stairwell that went up to the master bedroom. Adrian listened to hear snoring or deep breathing, but he heard nothing. He went up the stairs, lured by the cool air that was escaping from under Julia’s door. At the top of the stairs, cut glass doorknobs glowed in the moonlight like huge diamonds. A bead of sweat rolled down his temple and down the length of his cheek. He heard the hypnotic hum of the AC unit inside Julia’s room.
Chapter 29
David
I’m sleeping in Julia’s room tonight—special circumstances. The night is extra hot and sticky, so she set up a daybed in her air-conditioned room for me. I’ve just returned from the bathroom for the third time tonight; the meds always keep me from locking in a straight sleep. So I’m lying in the coolness of the master suite, trying to fall back asleep, when I hear footsteps in the hall. I might not have heard them over the hum of the AC, except for the creaking wood. I see feet underneath the crack of the door; two dark circles that move in the soft light from the hall. As they move closer, I can actually hear the weight on the wood floor, too heavy to be one of the girls, to light to be Raymond’s. At first, I thought that someone was disoriented, lost in the labyrinth of partitioned rooms. Then I remembered that the guests were all on the floor below us. The person had to come up a set of stairs. We don’t have any sleepwalkers among us, and no one got drunk.
The dark shapes under the door come together, then stop. This is the point where someone who is lost might think, hey, this isn’t my room, and turn back. But they stand there for twenty seconds or more. Then they step closer, the toes touching the wood of the door for a few seconds before turning away. Inside my rib cage, my heart flops over itself like a cold, meaty fish.
He won’t dare. I know him. He won’t. And now he’s lying alone in his hot, muggy room. He’s staring at the ceiling, wondering what the hell to do with his dick. I get out of my bed and crawl into Julia’s. When she wakes I tell her that I had a nightmare, and can I please lie next to her? She kisses my forehead and says, “Sure. Go back to sleep.” She rolls over. I lie next to her, eyes wide open. I suddenly remember the time, back when we lived together, that she told me she was having a sexy dream. She confessed that it hadn’t been about me, and I didn’t even care. Now, I wonder. Now I very much want to know who she thinks about when she closes her eyes.
Chapter 30
On the fifth day, David had a medical appointment, a test that could be handled locally, at Yale–New Haven Hospital. The plan was for Raymond to take David across the water to meet a friend at Stony Creek dock, later that morning. The friend would drive David and Ray from there to his appointment and bring him back to the dock.
Everyone was amazed when Taina walked into the kitchen at eight. “I haven’t actually been to bed yet,” she said. “I’m really screwed up.” Julia, Holly, and Ray were having coffee at the kitchen table. David was upstairs getting dressed. Julia slipped some films out of a large square blue sleeve and held them up to the light. “Have any of you ever seen what a brain tumor looks like?”
“What a question,” Holly said. “It’s like asking if I’ve ever seen an elephant’s ovaries. Of course not.”
“I found this photo of David in the office,” Julia explained, and held the X-ray film up against an eight-by-ten photo of David. They looked back and forth between them. One captured David in what appeared to be health, the other in illness. “But they’re the same, really,” Julia said. “He already had it, in this picture, he just didn’t know.”
In both images, David is looking in the same direction, and they could see the similarities in the shape of the skull, the arch of the nose, the tilt of the cheekbones. Julia pointed. “See this wispy thing? It looks like a raw egg dropped into boiling water. That was the tumor they took out.”
Julia picked up the envelope and began to look at some of the other views, looking over her shoulder occasionally to see if David was coming down. “That stupid tumor,” Holly whispered, unable to take her eyes off it. “It doesn’t even know what it’s doing.”
“Or who it’s doing it to,” Taina echoed. “It just lives. A useless nothing.”
Julia said, “Cancer’s purpose is to destroy life.” Then, in a trancelike voice, “Cancer is, therefore, the purest definition of evil.”
“A gee-oh-blastoma,” Holly attempted. “I heard it’s like a Xerox machine with the copy button jammed. It can’t stop copying itself.”
“Glee-oh, blast. With an ‘L.’ ”
They looked up.
“Glee, as in fun,” said David. He was dressed in a fresh blue shirt, ready to go. “Blast, as in, having a fun time.”
Taina had found his comment unnerving, and the image of the tumor in the MRI was utterly terrifying. After they left, Taina stared at the photograph of David for a long, long time. She hadn’t been able to touch her sketchbook or the canvases since the day David had ripped up her work. The thought of drawing and painting again sickened her, like the remorse after a drunken one-night stand. She had once thought of visual art as transcendental, but now she just saw it as impotent, because you could only deal with what was seen—and that neglected so much. Like cancer. She had once believed that she had the power and the talent to create something really perceptive. But how superficial it was, this image of a healthy David, how incomplete.
Chapter 31
David
The friend who’s taking me to my appointment is running late. Ray and I are sitting together on a park bench in the Stony Creek parking lot. I’m brooding over last night’s incident, trying, in vain, to convince myself that I dreamed the whole thing. Ray is prattling on about things that don’t interest either of us, and I wish he would shut up and leave me to my thoughts. It’s all nervous chatter. He’s building up to something, I can tell. The wind is lifting his crazy hair, and then he looks out to the water and asks, totally out of the blue, something no one else has ever dared to ask me. “So what’s it like?”—he looks me in the eye—“Knowing that you’re going to die?”
“You tell me,” I retort. “You tried to kill yourself.”
“Not the same,” he says. “I just wanted to stop feeling bad. I wasn’t thinking about dying. I just wanted peace.” His tone is so matter-of-fact, as if we weren’t discussing death but rather our favorite kind of music, and his teenager-like openness is refreshing. I’ve never been one to pontificate, and now that I have aphasia, I take even greater care to be succinct. So I take a deep breath, to let him know that I’m working on an answer. I tap my knuckles on the envelope that contains my MRIs. “I’m not afraid of being dead, Ray. I’m afraid of losing my mind, and still being alive. I’m afraid of it being a long, hard road.”
He nods, as if this was exactly the answer he expected. Then he clasps his hands together, and touches them to his forehead for a moment, like he’s praying. “If you need help, when the time comes, I’ll do whatever needs to be done.” He nods once, and turns to looks at me. For a moment or two I assume that he’s talking about being of service in a general way, like paying my bills or rotating my tires. But then he looks up at me and his eyes are so heavy. The rims of his eyes fill, ever so slightly, and suddenly I understand that he means anything.
I don’t know what to say, so I get busy throwing pebbles into the water. I feel the sun’s warmth being sucked up by my navy baseball hat. I put my arm around his wide back. “Thanks, brother,” I say, bumping his tattoo with the other hand. “I’m not leaving anytime soon. Besides, I don’t think I’d need anything beyond the stage of morphine. It’s not like Huntington’s Disease where you live for years all messed up. But it’s good to know you got my back.”
He raises his hand above his head like some kind of Spanish dancer, then snaps his fingers once, twice, three times. “That’s the hand signal, okay? If you can’t talk anymore, and you want out, then snap your fingers like that.”
“Oh yeah,” I say. “Like in the Mayagüez police report, when I supposedly snapped my fingers for the policeman who found us on the boat. I wonder what it meant. We may never know.”
He shrugs. “Now it means put a friggin’ pillow over my head already.”
“Ray,” I say. “If it comes to that, just see to it that I have a ton of morphine if I start to get . . .” I make a circling motion next to my temple. He laughs nervously, and that’s how we end the conversation.
I don’t think I ever loved Ray until right now. I slap him on the back and tell him to tell me more about the restaurant business; I let him talk endlessly about his video game tournaments and I realize how lonely he is. I notice that he has chewed his cuticles raw. I feel guilty the whole time that I’m having my follow-up tests with Ray by my side, guilty because I know that I will leave them all someday.
Stay with Me Page 20