Stay with Me

by Sandra Rodriguez Barron

  I rush at Adrian. I slap my hands onto the tops of his shoulders and shove him back. He falls and I go down with him. I hear a loud thunk as Adrian hits his head against the ledge of a table so hard that it bounces forward. I look down, where Adrian is sitting, his head tilted to the side. He touches the back of his head, then looks at his hand. His fingers are wet with blood, a bright cherry-colored splotch that lingers, and then trickles slowly down the length of his wrist. “Son of a bitch,” he says, pushing me off of him. He leaves a bright, bloody fingerprint on the breast of my white t-shirt.

  Something makes me look up, toward the parlor, toward the gilded mirror over the fireplace. I glimpse the reflection of the skull sitting on a bookshelf on the opposite wall. Its ghoulish sockets are dark, its teeth yellow and slightly parted, as if the person died in the middle a good laugh.

  Chapter 38

  As Ray walked through the door with the DNA results, he noticed, as he passed through the dining room, that the expression on the figurehead’s face was all wrong. Serena looked chaste, more like a church statue, worried eyes downcast as if to say, “Oh no.”

  From the kitchen, Ray heard Julia and David arguing. There was some kind of commotion going on, and Julia came bounding in, sobbing. She threw open the door of the icebox and reached inside. Taina was behind her, and Ray caught the tail end of some kind of argument between them. “It would kill him,” Taina was saying.

  “What would kill who?” Ray asked. Taina didn’t answer and Julia kept her lips pressed together and didn’t say anything as she filled a Ziploc bag with ice. She sealed the ice pack and wrapped it in a towel. Taina spotted her cigarettes on the windowsill and opened the package, hands trembling. Her eyes were bloodshot and she had bruised circles under her eyes. She had told Ray that she had slept no more than twelve hours in the past four days.

  “Don’t,” Julia said, pointing to the cigarette in Taina’s hand.

  Taina struck a match and held it to the tip of her Marlboro. She inhaled, without taking her eyes off Julia. The tip of the cigarette ignited.

  Julia put the bag of ice down, stunned. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “Don’t come closer,” Taina said in a low voice. She squinted at the smoke rising in front of her eyes.

  “Put it out, Tai,” Ray said. “C’mon.”

  “I’ve never seen this side of you,” Julia said, staring hard at Taina. “Your behavior is appalling. You have three seconds to get the hell out of my house with that cigarette.”

  Something inside Ray was stirred by that imperative. Those words were familiar to him; his girlfriend had said she didn’t know him anymore just before she left. It had been almost eight years now, and he had been consistently sober since then. But the words still stung, or rather, awakened memories of feeling out of control. He recognized that Taina was on the same bad ride, saw the pain in her eyes as she took a long, slow drag of her cigarette. She slid one shoulder forward, in the slow, bone-by-bone retreat of a cowboy making an exit from a saloon while trying to hold on to pride. She went outside and smoked half the cigarette, then she tossed it, still lit, on Uncle James’s grave. Ray followed her, and when she disappeared back into the house, he looked down at the lit cigarette, with the smoke curling up from its tip just below the line that spelled out the name “Griswold.” “Sorry about that, sir,” he said, and he picked up the cigarette. His fingers were trembling as he put it to his lips and inhaled. He finished it off and looked at the tattoo on his left hand. He was thinking about the envelope sitting on the kitchen table. Like a mother hen, Ray made his way through the house checking up on everyone. He could hear that Erick and Holly were arguing, even through the closed bedroom door. The children were in an adjacent room, playing a board game. Taina was on the veranda, apparently trying to sketch, but when he came up behind her, she was staring at a blank sheet of paper, and there were at least four wads of crumpled paper at her feet. David was up in his room, fuming. His aphasia was worse than ever, probably due to the hangover, and he had gotten even more frustrated trying to express himself, although he did manage to fill Ray in on what had happened.

  Julia had attended to Adrian’s head wound, and she told Ray that she wanted to make sure that Adrian didn’t have a concussion. Adrian refused to go to the emergency room, but he admitted that he was a little nauseated and wanted to lie down. Julia took him up to her room and turned on the air-conditioning. The only thing left for Ray to do was cook. He thought he might be able to restore peace with a final meal, and he headed downstairs, his great heart heavy with worry.

  Ray opened the envelope, alone. He thought it was a bad omen that he got a paper cut as he ripped open the envelope from DNA Concepts. He held up his finger and watched a tiny line of blood rise up along the surface of his skin. He wondered how something as abstract as DNA could contain the power to bond people—legally, physically, morally, and emotionally.

  The individual reports were full of jargon, numbers, charts, but he immediately saw that David and Adrian had common mitochondrial DNA, and therefore it was likely that they had the same mother. There were no other genetic matches between any of them. So Adrian had finally caved in, Ray thought. He had given David what he wanted. And where did that leave them? The only two that shared blood had gotten into a fistfight. What hope was there for the rest of them to stick together?

  Ray had not been able to gather them, so there had been no final dinner. Holly and her family had eaten on the porch, while Taina, David, and Adrian had taken plates up to their rooms. Julia ate standing up, and then retreated upstairs to watch over Adrian. She told Ray that even though she understood that David has lost some impulse control after his brain surgery, she was still upset with him and preferred not to deal with him that night. Ray asked her point blank if she and Adrian were an item. He half-expected her to say that it was none of his business, but instead she turned and said, “Adrian is all about family loyalty. You know that.” Yeah, he thought. But Adrian had been right. Genetics could and would change everything. As loyal as Adrian was, he would see that their family was just an illusion. And Ray felt all alone again.

  Nighttime came and everyone went to bed. Julia kept a vigil over Adrian, who would sleep in the cot next to her bed on the third floor, so she could wake him up every hour to make sure his head injury wasn’t worse than he thought. David holed up in his room. “I’m mashing,” he mumbled, which Ray assumed was “crashing” spoken through aphasia.

  “I’m mashing too, buddy,” Ray answered, and retreated from David’s room and walked downstairs, through a house that seemed completely empty of life. In the pantry, Ray found the last of the gin, which, he guessed, wasn’t going to be nearly enough. He drank it straight out of a tall milk glass. When it was gone, he went to the parlor and found a half-empty bottle of premium Scotch, displayed like a dead fairy-tale princess in a pearly, satin-lined coffin, inside an otherwise barren liquor cabinet. Oh, that lovely bottle, with its blue-and-gold sash across its square breast. He dug his fingers into the creamy satin of the casket and lifted it out by the neck. He uncapped it, inhaled deeply, and tipped it back. He drank in long, thirsty gulps. Inside his heart, the devil put his head down. God, that’s smooth, he thought. He looked closer at the label, squinting. No wonder. It was forty years old. Inexplicably, he had smelled tobacco and Old Spice aftershave when he opened the liquor cabinet, and those scents had kept him company the whole time he was drinking the Scotch. In the kitchen, he found Taina’s cigarettes and her lighter. He lit up and drank alone until the whisky was gone. Then he was about to drop the cigarette into a large trash bin outside the boiler room when he saw pieces of broken glass and some paper towels stained with blood, evidence of the war that had taken place earlier. He got the DNA test results and put them in the trash. Then he tossed the cigarette in the trash bin, and went to bed.

  The cigarette smoldered through several days’ worth of trash until it reached the bag of gasoline-soaked tampons, well past midnight. There was an
energetic poof, as an exuberant breath of fire blew off the lid of the trashcan. It ignited a dry vine, and the fire spread to a trellis attached to the house. The wood shingles caught fire, as did the curtains of the boiler room, via an open window. The piles of laundry ignited and the fire progressed into the kitchen, where it easily devoured the cabinets. Once it entered the kitchen, it set off the smoke alarms. By the time Erick’s feet hit the stairs, the hall was already filling with smoke. He ran to get Holly and the kids, shouting to anyone who might hear him. There were loud popping noises, and a hiss. Within minutes, there was an exponential growth of flames and heat. They heard the mesmerizing crackle of a fire’s consumption of wood, not just any wood, but century-old wood.

  “Fire!” Erick shouted and realized with growing horror, that Julia and Adrian were upstairs, on the third floor. Erick got his family out first. He left Holly in charge of the children and ran to find a cell phone, and to do his very best to rouse her siblings, but was only able to wake up Taina, who told him to go back outside to protect his family. Then she went back inside to help Raymond and David. Erick reminded her, with rising panic, that Adrian might have a concussion.

  On land, a boy who had been selling marijuana from inside the Stony Creek gazebo called the fire department. He described what he saw to the dispatcher—that the fire was thicker at the base, shaped like a tulip, and that the flames rose from the bottom like petals drawn together, opening up, “like a bloomin’ onion.”

  The fire trucks howled their way through the winding roads down to shore. Fire rescue boats and marine police boats circled the island, blasting the sides of the Griswold house with water, hoping for the best. A strong breeze lifted and blew hard across Long Island Sound, a huge breath that only gave the fire more life. The Griswold house was consumed from its core to its chipping gray shingles. A few moments later, the cupola imploded and there was a terrible roar as the floors inside collapsed. Every shred of paper, every photo, every relic, all of it, burned.

  Chapter 39

  At the hospital, Julia faced a roomful of Griswold family members. She had a bandage on her arm and shoulder, and her hair was chopped off because it had been singed right up to the neck. David had no burns but he had twisted an ankle after he jumped out of a second-story balcony, into the hydrangeas. Taina’s burns were mild but diffuse; Ray had suffered smoke inhalation. Adrian had a second-degree burn on his leg. Only Ray and Adrian stayed in the hospital overnight. It appeared, however, that no one suffered irreparable harm. No one, that was, but the Griswolds.

  Julia was trembling as she explained what little she knew at that point. David felt bitter frustration that his aphasia prevented him from stepping in and taking the heat. He tried a few times, interrupting and slowing down the conversation, until Julia stopped him, and with a quick pat to the knee, reassured him that she could handle it. She turned back to the crowd and insisted that she didn’t blame any one person for the accident. A profound change had come over the siblings over the course of the ten days together, and that tensions had been running high. The fire had been the physical realization of that energy, albeit accidental. David expressed his regret and asked the family for forgiveness. He wanted so badly to be like them, he explained, that he had driven his siblings to the edge by forcing genetic self-knowledge upon them, something that, he could see now, they weren’t ready to handle.

  But the family wasn’t quite ready to forgive. While the house itself was insured, there was the loss of the irreplaceable contents.

  “Memory is like water, if you don’t contain it, it drains away,” said an aunt, dabbing at her eyes. “We loved that house so much.”

  The ninety-three-year-old patriarch, Uncle Mick, had been the one to make the decision to loan David the house for the ten days. He said, “It’s a great shock to all of us to lose the old house. But we’re grateful that everyone got out alive.”

  Chapter 40

  David

  Once it’s determined that everyone is going to be okay, and once everyone goes home, I feel absolutely stricken. Julia’s mother, who is not a Griswold by blood, has the emotional distance to remind me, over and over, that no Griswolds were harmed in the fire, and that in the end, a house is just a material thing. “A very old thing that had served the family well,” she assures me, but I still feel awful. Every time I put on a hat I try to conjure the ghosts of the men that I have been remembering but they don’t come to me anymore. Hats, I realize, contain our essence when we put them on, because everything that we are is stored in the brain. It’s no surprise then that after we got out of the burning house, I thought I saw the lawn strewn with hats. But there were no Griswolds. It was as if they had all evaporated. The lawn looked empty, the way a field does after a graduation, when everyone has tossed their caps up in the air and moved on.

  Quite suddenly, Labor Day is upon us. That means that the school year starts up again. Julia has her nose to the grindstone this term. I see her for only a handful of hours in the month of September, and she seems tense, always in a rush. She says that she’s forgiven us, and holds no ill will toward Ray, who she feels should never have been talked into taking the DNA test. Taina and Julia had it out, although she didn’t tell me the details and I don’t want to know anything more about that whole messiness. It makes my stomach turn. In the end, Taina was the one who saved Julia’s and Adrian’s lives, so that earned her a few points with Julia and the Griswolds. They’ve made peace, but Taina has withdrawn. Maybe she’s behind at work, or maybe she’s just had enough of all of us, especially me, because she won’t answer the phone when I call. Ray is back in rehab, but struggling. His sobriety is, of course, a work in progress. He seems distant the few times we’ve talked.

  In early October, Julia tells me that there are those in the Griswold family who are eager to make a fresh start, to rebuild a house that is safer, stronger, and more modern. Now that everyone put their vision for the new home on the table, the older folks are excited to have luxuries like central air and walk-in showers and bedrooms on the first floor.

  I haven’t heard from Adrian in a month, and Julia and I don’t talk about him. We talk around the subject, but I can’t get myself to say his name. I am mute with shame over hurting him, especially knowing that he would never, ever, hit me back. But I’m too proud to pick up the phone. In the end it is he that reaches out to me. Not with a phone call, not with a letter or a message delivered through a second party. No, Adrian isn’t mediocre at anything, especially at being a brother. When he decides to do something it’s 100 percent. So he blows the lid off Pandora’s Box, blows it open with a dozen sticks of dynamite, and says go on, kid, take a look inside. Are you happy now?

  Chapter 41

  Kathy Cooper saw the article online, right there on the homepage of her computer, about the budding Latino heartthrob who was hospitalized with second-degree burns after a fire in Connecticut. Otherwise, she might have heard it from Rashid, who also saw it, or from her secretary, who knew she’d been in the Dominican Republic, or from her teenage daughters, who saw it in Teen People. Kathy didn’t reply to the staff reporter, as the article requested, but rather, she sent a message directly to the website of Adrian Vega. As proof of her identity, she named the children she remembered one by one: there was Javier, Miguel, Rafael, Rosita, and Emely (“Emily” spelled phonetically in Spanish, she explained). Adrian, Taina, and Kathy met at a Boston café. That little Miguel was now a successful musician took Kathy’s breath away because Sister Juana had recognized his talent and passion for music at such a young age. “And to think that I was the first person to put a pick in your hand,” Kathy said, shaking her head, blue eyes sparkling.

  Miguel and Rosita eyed her with curiosity. Now in her early fifties, with blonde hair graying at the temples, Kathy was very different from the troubled but idealistic hippie-chick she’d been in 1979. Her life in the Boston suburbs was a world away, but she clung to her youthful, globe-trotting persona by dressing the part. She was wrapped in a
saffron-and-garnet-colored sari and had a red dot painted on her forehead. “I was supposed to have become a Supreme Court Justice by now,” she explained. “That was my parents’ career track and that’s what they expected of me. And then something happened that changed everything. Rather than tell my parents that I had no intention to go to law school, I convinced them that ‘a detour’ on the road to law school would round me out. That detour was joining the Peace Corps.”

  Kathy had been sent to the Dominican Republic, where she was assigned to create a resource network for orphanages, schools, and nursing homes. She paused at that part of the story, because it was where their lives intersected. Her hand instinctively went to her throat, and she fingered an amber pendant. In the Dominican Republic, she told them, she had met her husband, Rashid, who had been serving in a nearby village at the time. After two years of service in the DR, they had gone together to serve in India for a second term, and they married shortly after. “By this time, my parents had figured out that I wasn’t going to law school,” Kathy told them. “I was inspired by the work of a nun in the DR, who had a special way of using singing to help speech-delayed children, and it changed the direction of my life. I’m a speech pathologist now and I use a similar method, called melodic intonation therapy, to treat autistic children.” She watched Miguel’s face, how his strong jaw sagged and his lips parted when she mentioned the part about music. She finished up her introduction by adding that she and Rashid still lived in Boston, with their two teenage daughters, who had downloaded his songs and had not stopped playing them and dancing around their bedrooms ever since. Adrian encouraged her to tell them more about her daughters, but Kathy intuited that he was just delaying the moment of truth. Rosita alternately hid and revealed her dark eyes behind a pair of fashionable sunglasses even though it was a dim afternoon, just before Thanksgiving. Kathy gently turned the conversation back to them, and their past. “You’re here in the U.S., because both Sister Juana and I—” She paused, as if to gather up courage. “We were each trying to atone for something we’d done in our private lives—pain we had caused that was eating at us.” She held her hand over her stomach.