Wish You Were Here

by Stewart O'Nan

  Ella nearly believed this, or some of it, fitting together the pigeons at the feet of one beefeater, but when she was done with them the feeling of being deserted returned and the pieces stumped her, vague and shapeless, just color. She held one in her hand and searched the ragged edges for a match.

  She couldn’t think of anything she’d done. She’d tried so hard to be low-key, to resign herself to the fact that it was never going to happen, but once she’d succeeded (easy, because it was true, and safer for her; impossible, because she couldn’t give up), she began to dream of Sarah again, her thin arms and knobby wrists and long fingers, the whole cycle starting all over for no reason. It was like she wasn’t listening to herself, and she felt even more helpless, a bystander, angry at her own hope.

  She dropped the piece she was holding so the cardboard side showed, a blot on the picture. Beefeaters guarded the empty courtyard, the rows of blank windows. The sky above the palace was unfinished, the wood grain of the table a dull brown cloud.

  Her mother came in from the porch, flopping in her swim top. “I’m taking lunch orders. We’re having sandwiches.”

  She said it hard, like a final warning, because she knew Ella hated sandwiches. Ella didn’t care. She could eat the turkey and leave the bread. No one would check.

  “What about your cousin, do you know what she might like?”

  And what a complete loser she was, because she did. Salami with provolone cheese and lettuce, just a little mayo, on wheat bread, cut diagonally. Macaroni salad, not the mushy potato stuff. She knew Sarah liked salt-and-vinegar potato chips better than sour-cream-and-onion ones, and that she liked the garlic dills and not the bread-and-butter slices Sam liked. And Diet 7UP, nothing with caffeine.

  It was just like at school. She knew all the unimportant things, the things that didn’t matter.

  “Maybe you can take it up to her,” her mother suggested. “I think she’s in the doghouse.”

  “What did she do?” Ella asked, a challenge.

  “Just what you’re doing. So keep it up.”

  She was glad to have an official excuse to see her, and something to do—anything to kill the minutes so she wouldn’t look totally desperate. She fixed a plate for each of them, taking care putting together the sandwiches, arranging the chips between the cut halves, and the macaroni salad, the pickles off to the side so the juice wouldn’t get the bread soggy.

  “That’s very nice of you,” her mother commented.

  “It’s just lunch,” Ella said, getting forks for them.

  “Can you handle both of those?”

  The thought of her mother coming up with her made her say she could. She’d have to come back and get their drinks.

  “Don’t forget napkins,” her mother said.

  Her first test was the door to the stairs, elbowing it open. She set one plate on a step to close it behind her for privacy, then headed up slowly, keeping her hands level in front of her. How stupid would she look if she dropped them, macaroni salad all over the carpet. As she climbed, the air grew thicker, a hot, stale smell of dust and plaster and bat poop and the tar shingles of the roof. Sarah didn’t even have the fan on, and Ella thought she must really be pissed off. Ella wouldn’t smile, she’d just be quiet, let Sarah talk if she wanted to, or not. She would be a friend and take on whatever she was feeling—and she would know what that was, the way she and Caitlin did at home, their moods matching like sisters’.

  She expected Sarah to be on her sleeping bag, reading or playing solitaire, but when she turned at the head of the stairs, Sarah was going through the red, white and blue dresser, piling the clean clothes on top of it, then shoving them back in the drawer, moving on to the next. Each time Ella saw her she was surprised by the fact of her body, struck by something new.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “My watch,” Sarah said.

  Ella set the plates on the low wardrobe and started helping, opening the shallow top drawer.

  “I already looked in there,” Sarah said, shutting her down.

  Ella was hurt—stunned as suddenly as her bee sting—and at the same time it hurt her to see Sarah so upset. It was Aunt Margaret’s fault, whatever happened. She looked behind the cedar chest and under the beds until Sarah said, “Forget it,” and ordered her to stop.

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah said, meaning Ella was okay, it was everything else.

  Ella followed her plan, waiting for Sarah to explain, but she just looked at the plates.

  “Did my mother make this?”

  “I did,” Ella said, and was grateful—saved—when Sarah thanked her and picked it up. “You want a soda?”

  “I’ll get it.”

  “It’s okay,” Ella said, and went, not ready to let her go.

  Her father had gotten home and was in the kitchen, opening a beer.

  “How’s it going, Ella-bella?”

  “Good,” she said (and he believed her, he understood nothing), and escaped again, closing the door behind her. She thought of locking it but was afraid they’d get in trouble.

  Sarah was hungry. She’d gotten some sun—her hair was brighter, highlighted—and Ella noticed as she was eating her sandwich that she wasn’t wearing Mark’s dolphin ring, the ghost of it a neat white band of skin on that finger. Instead, she had on the plain silver ring Grandma and Aunt Arlene had given them, making them twins.

  So it was the letter—not her.

  Sarah pretended nothing had happened. Ella waited, thinking she’d have to explain, but she just ate her lunch. Mark had broken up with her and she was crushed. Ella wasn’t sure how she felt about it. She thought it was wrong to be happy.

  And then, about to take a bite, Sarah stopped and looked at her sandwich, held it up like she’d found something interesting. “You cut it the way I like it.”

  “Yeah,” Ella said, pleased that she’d noticed, that a little thing like that could change her mood. “And I know you like those chips, so …”

  Sarah laughed. “You are so gay!”

  The shock of hearing it said out loud was plain on her face, Ella thought, her burning skin a dead giveaway. She knew Sarah only meant to thank her, but Ella couldn’t control her reaction. She laughed, agreeing with her, nearly choking on an undigested bite.

  “I know.”

  11

  “Yah! Gah!” Emily cried, reeling back from the mailbox into the road, waving the hot letters and then dropping them, kicking them apart to scatter the ants. She slapped at her arms, and still she felt them crawling on her, turned her wrists over to check, and then felt foolish, standing there in the middle of the road, the butt of a joke.

  She’d asked Kenneth to take care of this. Obviously he hadn’t gotten the job done.

  The sun beat down on her brow, an extra drain on her patience. She needed a shower or a dip in the water. Half the day was gone already, and she still had the unpleasant task of talking to Margaret.

  She bent down and gingerly pinched up the letters—all second-class junk. The ants were panicked, zigzagging away. She stepped on as many as she could and made straight for the garage, leaving the lid open. This time she’d take care of it herself.

  12

  His father slowly walked over to the edge of the road and waved for Sam to stop. The way he moved, Sam thought Justin must have told on him for throwing the buckeye at Rufus. He jammed on the brakes and cut the handlebars, leaned hard and let the back end fishtail, stopping right beside him.

  “Lunch is ready,” his father said.

  He got off his bike and bumped it over the grass, walking beside him.

  “Hey,” his father said, “have you seen Sarah’s watch at all?”

  “No,” he said automatically.

  He tried to remember where it was. Maybe in the pocket of the shorts he wore yesterday, somewhere on the floor upstairs. His mother would find it when she cleaned up.

  “You know what it looks like. It snaps onto your belt loop.”

  Sam pushed out
his lip in a shrug.

  “Well if you see it, she’s looking for it, okay?”

  “Okay,” Sam said.

  “And please, wash those hands before you eat.”

  Sam leaned his bike against the buckeye tree and followed him inside. His mother was working at the sink, so he went into the downstairs bathroom, not bothering to turn on the light, and used the green squirt soap. He pushed back his upper lip with two fingers to look at the bloody hole in his gums. His dollar was upstairs somewhere too, and the change he’d stolen from the dresser.

  His father didn’t know, or else he’d be mad. He was just guessing.

  13

  The ants in the mailbox, the stove dying—everything was a crisis, Lise thought. So they wouldn’t have coffee, big deal, it was easily ninety degrees out. Ken said it was probably just a fuse, he’d look at it when he was done eating, but Emily would not be calmed. The realtor was coming tomorrow (not to look at the stove, Lise wanted to say, but held back). And then, as lunch was winding down, Justin dropped his slice of watermelon on the floor of the porch, and Meg ordered Rufus and all of the kids outside. Lise could see she was having a bad day and told Ella and Sam to steer clear of her.

  By default she did the dishes, not really caring. It was easy with the paper plates. In the side yard, the boys were chasing each other, spitting seeds. Behind her, Emily hovered around Ken as he searched the control panel of the stove for a fuse box.

  “I wonder if it could have anything to do with the heat,” Emily said.

  “Possibly,” Ken said.

  Lise finished the glasses and started in on the knives and silverware, the empty mac-salad container Emily wanted saved for no reason. She was sweating, her suit a clammy second skin under her cutoffs. The lake looked blue and breezy and cool, though she knew the sun would be that much worse out on the water.

  “There we go,” Ken said behind her.

  “Did you get it?” his mother asked.

  He had. He held the fuse between his thumb and finger like a bullet, the glass tube burned a percolator brown in the middle. Lise was always amazed at how technically proficient he was. Perhaps that was his way of compensating, making himself useful, if not entirely involved in their lives.

  Sometimes she wondered why she was with him, or why he was still with her when he found her so uninteresting. She joked with Carmela that she was jealous of his cameras, and while both of them knew that at heart she was deeply serious, they’d created a whole blue routine about what he did in the privacy of his darkroom. And she could see where it came from, there was no secret. Spending time with his family made her understand how he could see self-absorption not merely as its own reward but as a necessity, a place to hide. It was ironic—when she’d first met him, she liked him because he was quiet.

  “I know Dad’s got some in the garage,” Emily said.

  “I don’t know if he’ll have one this size,” Ken said, and went to check, single-minded, the screen swishing and then subsiding on its piston. Lise wiped down the counters, Emily stepping out of her way, thanking her absently.

  “No,” Ken came back to report. “I’ll have to try the hardware up in Mayville.”

  “Would you mind doing that now?” Emily asked, and Ken gave in.

  “It’ll take twenty minutes,” he explained to Lise on his way to the car. “It takes that long for the kids to find their suits.”

  “It’s almost two o’clock already.”

  As if to spite him, she organized the children, driving them upstairs and sorting out their suits and towels and water shoes, forcing the boys to try to go to the bathroom, then slathering their freckled shoulders and scrawny chests with sunblock while the girls did each other. She convinced Sam to wear a hat, and established that Meg and Emily and Arlene would be staying ashore.

  “I think I need a break,” Meg said.

  Lise took the kids down to the dock, Rufus tagging along with his ball. She relieved him of it, set it sopping in her beach bag with a gentle “No,” and after a while he stopped pointing at the bag and lay down in the only shade, under the bench. The kids didn’t need any encouragement to go swimming. She had her book but watched them instead, boys against girls in a massive splash battle. Justin wasn’t a strong swimmer, and she’d promised Meg she’d keep an eye on him, even though the water was only waist-deep.

  The heat melted whatever resistance she had left, made the day seem ideal. The lake was buzzing with motorboats, thick with sails, the weekend starting early. After the crappy weather, everyone was out. It reminded her of the beach, the sudden crush of weekly renters determined to get their money’s worth. That part of the summer was over, just as this part was almost gone, and she cast forward to next weekend, dragging Sam through the mall (he was a size 12 now, and she was sure he’d outgrown his winter coat). The middle school had sent home a whole list of supplies he needed. Ken had read it aloud, incredulous, as if they were being ripped off, though each of the past three years they’d received the exact same list for Ella. She’d take Sam to Staples after supper one night and fill up a plastic basket. The only thing Ken would see was the flyer. Ella had an orthodontist appointment in there somewhere to get her braces tightened; Lise would have to take off work for it, use a few hours of hard-earned comp time. She could see the blocks of the calendar filling with ink—September, October. It was their turn to have Emily and Arlene for Thanksgiving—earlier, true, but easier than Christmas.

  She shrugged the thought off, shaking her head to clear it. The sky was cloudless, a thin blue bleached white at the horizon. The kids were doing handstands.

  “No,” she told Sam, “we’re not throwing mud.”

  “Yes we are.”

  “Do you want to go on the boat?”

  “Yes,” he said brightly, as if the two weren’t connected.

  “Then smarten up.”

  They wanted her to come in with them, splashing and taunting her from the edge of the dock. She hid behind her book, looking back toward shore, expecting Ken to show up any minute. She’d left her watch on the mantel but it was well past time. She didn’t think he’d taken a camera. Her worry was that he’d stop at the gas station or buy a paper, catch up on his missing girl. She promised herself not to ask. Beneath her, Rufus murmured in his sleep.

  Finally the kids quit, bored with tormenting each other. They laid out their towels on the gray boards of the dock and shivered in the wind, the water drying to dots on their skin, then disappearing. She’d have to goop them up again.

  Lying side by side, Ella and Sarah seemed years apart, Ella still bony and girlish, her proportions all wrong, where Sarah had filled in and rounded out, her body pronounced, the only baby fat left in her face. Lise hoped Ella wouldn’t compare herself to her. Lise had been a late bloomer too, and knew that impatience—the fear that things would never develop or would stop partway, her body left unfinished (she was reconciled overall but would never be happy with her nose, her legs, her stingy upper lip) . She could see that Sarah would attract boys and then men, whether she wanted to or not, the same as her mother. Lise wished she could have given Ella better genes, or more, since her eyes—Lise’s best feature—and the shape of her face were unmistakably Ken’s. She’d survive, but how much easier the coming years would be if she had Sarah’s looks.

  Lise wished she could just give in to sensation, let the heat bleed away all her thoughts. Stopped, stilled like this, it was hard for her not to think of the future—to worry, really. At home she didn’t have time to wallow, her pleasures and defeats fleeting, attenuated by her schedule. Here there was nothing to occupy her mind but their problems—common enough, and stultifying, since she saw no improvement ahead, let alone real solutions. They would talk in the car on the way back, a sort of enforced communication, but with the kids right there they couldn’t discuss anything serious, and by the time they pulled in the drive they would be too tired, so wiped out she’d be lucky to get the laundry started.

  Two jet skis
racketed past, spewing rooster tails, freeing her. She’d never been on one, just as she’d never ridden a motorcycle—Meg had owned one once—and she had a secret urge to try it, though she hated the noise, and the way at the ocean people came in close to jump the breaking waves. It looked like mindless fun, just going. There were so many things she wanted to try but had somehow never gotten around to: skydiving, bungee jumping, snowboarding, windsurfing. She had to believe it was circumstances that had prevented her, not timidity. At the pool, she’d been the first in her grade to climb the high dive, and there was the time she and Tammy Artman sneaked into school on Sunday, walking the dark halls like girl detectives, every corner a thrill.

  “When are we going?” Sam asked, half sitting up.

  “When your father gets back.”

  “How long is that?”

  “Not long.”

  “I’m thirsty.”

  “Then go get yourself a drink.”

  “Can I have a ginger ale?”

  She hesitated before she said yes, made him say please.

  “Can I please have one?” Justin echoed.

  “Yes,” she said, and then had to holler “Walk!” to stop them from killing themselves. The girls barely stirred.

  None of them had a watch. She followed a large sailboat as it patiently approached and then passed beyond the bell tower. A seaplane roared over the far shore, waving its wings for the beach crowd at Midway, a maneuver she’d only seen on TV and thought was dangerous.

  The bell rang once. Two-thirty? Two-forty-five?

  “This is ridiculous,” she said out loud, and looked over her shoulder. Nothing.

  The boys came back with their cans and a bag of Doritos and sat tailor-seat on their towels, eating, Rufus nosing between them, gobbling up anything that dropped. And then, before she could stop him, Justin held up a whole chip in front of him and frisbeed it out over the water.