What I Had Before I Had You

by Sarah Cornwell

  There by the fire pit is Kandy, and there is James. The yard is a moonlit gray. Kandy is lying on her side on an inflatable pool lounger that someone has laid out as lawn furniture. I can’t see her face; her blond hair sheets down on either side, and her gaze is directed downward, where James crouches at her side. His back is to me, but I can see his outstretched hand cupping the curve of the back of her thigh a few inches below the hem of her denim skirt, his thumb dimpling the smooth bronze skin. It is a tableau, a damning evidentiary photograph. I don’t care what just happened or what will happen next.

  I go back inside. I don’t know if they’ve seen me. I need something. There are so many people in my house. Jake grabs my hand as I pass back through the kitchen crowd, and says, “What? What is it?”

  I grab a bottle of wine from the table and pull Jake across the room, rip the duct tape off the door, and yank him into the nursery. I shut the door behind us and prop a chair beneath the knob. Alone. I breathe. The room spins slowly, which makes the mobiles above my sisters’ cribs appear to be standing still.

  Jake has never been inside the house; there has always been the chance that my mother might cage him, fatten him, and bake him in a pie. I watch him take in the nursery and then my mother’s shrine. He pulls me in to him and kisses my forehead. “What happened to you?” he asks, and I breathe into his neck until I feel calmer. He is sweaty; he’s used to air-conditioning. He smells like warm tea.

  “Is it raining?” His voice or mine? We move to the window and put our faces to the glass. It has indeed started to rain: fuzzy gray verticals as if the world is suffering bad reception. The backyard is empty. How long ago did I see James and Kandy there? Everyone betrays, I think hazily.

  Jake puts his mouth over my ear and breathes warmth. “I’m filling you with my air,” he says. I picture the air in my body blue and the air in his body red, blending purple from our heads down to our lungs. He slides his fingers down the front of my jeans, and from the way he twitches, almost imperceptibly, I guess that the other girls he’s been with shave off their pubic hair. My mother says women do that to please men who wish, in the dark places of their hearts, that they were fucking wide-eyed little eight-year-olds.

  We tangle on the nursery floor. Jake holds my head in both his hands. “I love you,” he says, and as he says it, I feel something strong and fierce, so I say, “Me, too.” He pulls off his T-shirt. A line of dark hair below his navel. His body pale and dimpled, fragile like the body of a dying saint in a religious painting. “I don’t have a condom.”

  “Shit,” I say, and find his penis with my hand. He stiffens and grunts. I pretend confidence.

  “Um, do you think—” he starts. “Do you think your mom? Might? Somewhere?”

  I laugh and laugh and can’t stop laughing. I’m sure she does. But the party is still raging out there, and I don’t want to leave this room, or for Jake to leave this room, ever again. So I say no, but it’s okay, we’ll use the rhythm method, even though I’m not really sure what that is.

  We are naked, moving, entwined, and then our twining gains torque and purpose, and my knees splay out and he finds an angle. It is happening, for real. There is a sensitivity in my body like the inside of my mind—as raw-nerved and as subject to wild changes, from ecstatic to unbearable, from yes to no. There, on the floor of my sisters’ room, I feel a bright and blinding pain. Jake keeps going; he doesn’t notice. After a while, he slumps and we lie in the hazy warmth, breathing, drifting in and out of consciousness. When I shift my weight, I feel myself swollen, a deep interior rug burn. I roll over and bang into the legs of a crib, and I see that I have bled a dark stain on the powder-pink carpet, spreading, saturating, huge. The insides of my thighs are ropy with blood; I have never seen so much blood.

  “Oh God.”

  “Oh my God,” echoes Jake, sitting up on his elbows. “You should have told me.” And then, touched, feeling himself to be a special and chosen man, more softly, he says, “Oh my God, Olivia.” He grabs me around the waist and pulls me down to him, but I can’t lie there, I can’t roll around in that.

  I pull my shorts and shirt back on, and my thought is that maybe I can get to the bathroom before the blood soaks into the cloth and starts to show. I bolt, and Jake is saying, “Jesus, close the door,” behind me. I hurry through the party, and everyone is too drunk and too absorbed in their own dramas to notice mine. Two boys are making out in the bathtub, and I have to yell at them to get the hell out. They stare at me, and at the darkening of my shorts, the blood drying on my legs, and they say, “Holy shit, what happened?” I say it was a knife fight and herd them out and lock the door behind them.

  I open the toilet tank and scoop out the last of the water with a plastic cup. As I clean myself, a hundred knocks on the door, a hundred what-are-you-doing-in-theres. The blood washes down my legs, circles the drain. I feel a pang of horror—my blood in my sisters’ room. I leave my shorts balled in the corner of the tub. My mother’s pink bathrobe is hanging on the hook on the bathroom door. I wrap myself in it and go back to the kitchen, clear a path through the crowd to the sink. I get bleach, some bottles of seltzer, and a bucket.

  Jake has passed out, sprawled nude on the nursery floor. I kneel beside him and scrub my stain for half an hour with a wooden brush until it fades to nothing and the seltzer water turns to standing blood.

  Outside, the rain pounds down. Gardens drown in mud, cats stay inside. The wind tears dead and dying branches from the trees.

  IN THE MORNING, things have come apart. Jake is gone. I still feel drunk, like I am swimming through thick air. I move through the sleeping house, kids camped out on the beds and chairs, kids in piles on the ground. Some are awake, and there is a bristling hush to their talk, a darting eye that follows me from room to room. It is only when I have made a full tour of the house and circled back outside and in through the kitchen door that I find my friends. Kandy is standing in the open door to the nursery, staring in. She turns around and her eyes are red-rimmed, little wet dots of mascara smudged below her eyebrows like an angry tribal tattoo. Her hair is mussed to dandelion fluff, her shoulders hunched forward. Pam leans heavily against the kitchen counter.

  Kandy draws a deep breath. “You whore.” Four or five other kids are in the kitchen looking on, slack-jawed. Some girl I’ve never seen before puts her arm around Kandy and glares at me. I refuse to believe that Kandy cares more about Jake, who does not love her back, than she does about me. It is outside my experience, such wasted longing, and it seems unworthy of her. I feel disgust, and then the disgust sharpens to a point and becomes anger.

  “Who are you?” I shout at the stupid stranger girl. And to my friends, “Who the fuck is this?”

  Kandy bears down on me, unembarrassed now of her ugly, blotchy, wet-eyed rage. “I gave you everything,” she says, gesturing grandly, squeezing her eyes shut in pain. “And you shat on me. You shat on all of us.” I giggle at her grandiosity, and that makes it worse. Kandy’s nostrils flare. Pam turns her face away. The thought occurs to me that Pam tried to keep this from happening, that Pam is the one who gave me everything, and I have been careless of her.

  “Don’t ever talk to me,” says Kandy. She turns to go but then, after a moment’s consideration, whirls back around and punches me in the stomach. I’m not expecting it, and I fall hard. I can’t get my breath. White pulsing heat in my gut. I gasp on the floor, a beached fish. When I have enough breath to sit up, the kitchen is empty.

  I have Jake now and little else. I have Blanche. I have ghosts if I want them. I can’t help but think how my mother would nod: See how love destroys. I clean the house again, slowly this time. Nobody comes, not even Pam. James pulls up in his rattling green car, and I am gone out the back door as fast as I can run. I don’t want to see his face. It seems there is nothing for me in the world, and I cry when I am alone, fat stupid tears, and I hate myself for crying. It is August now. The city-boy li
feguards are as tan as the rest of us. The boardwalk vendors are giving away free corn to get people to buy the sausages.

  I have been avoiding Allison Street and that house with its cutesy conch-shell cutout shutters, but now I start walking the street, up and down, up and down. The shutters are closed, the blue car gone from the driveway. The porch is organized in a final way, an until-next-year way. Each year it makes me sad to see summer homes abandoned, as if they have auditioned to contain families and been turned down. I imagine the auburn crown of a girl’s head above the privacy fence as she washes off the sand in the outdoor shower. There is nothing to keep my mind from taking me there, into that lingering uncertainty—the redheaded girls, their running forms, the call of their blood.

  Jake walks with me one day when I am feeling sad and bold and sorry for myself. I stare at the closed-up house. “Let’s go in,” I say. Jake kisses my neck and says okay. Since the party, we have spoken less with words and more with our bodies. We have had sex in my house almost every day, though never again in the nursery. Each time is different, but each time since the first, there is a moment when I am vaulted out of myself for a fluttering perfect second. It feels too fragile to be an orgasm, as I’ve heard them described, but I can understand the French term now, la petite mort. It is a tiny death, a momentary reprieve from the world. I am insatiable for this feeling; as soon as the moment collapses, I am waiting for the next one.

  We jimmy open the tall wooden gate in the privacy fence and slink around the perimeter of the house until we find a loose lock on a first-floor window in the rear. Inside, the furniture sleeps beneath clear plastic. Gourmet cooking magazines curl in their rack. There are things you wouldn’t buy for your real home: white wicker footlockers and dried starfish affixed to Plexiglas and framed. The bookshelves are full of books for show: the complete works of Swift, guides to the flora and fauna of the East Coast. In the bathroom, a model Zen garden has fallen from the top of the toilet tank, sand spilled across the white tile. I step on the tiny sand rake by accident and sit on the ground massaging my heel, and when I get up, I have sand on my butt, and Jake chases me around the house, slapping it off. It feels good to be stupid for a moment.

  I scan the tabletops for old mail, something with an address. The drawers of all the end tables and sideboards are locked, which makes me think that these people are a little crazy. I know how to work this kind of lock with a bent fork, but I can’t find a fork in the kitchen drawers, so I open the dishwasher, and there the cutlery gleams, all the forks together, tines pointing up, all the knives together, blades down.

  Jake comes to the doorway, hefting a wooden statue of a fisherman. “Fucking yuppies.”

  I try the sideboard drawer with no luck: coasters, place mats, birch-bark napkin rings no doubt made by my ex-sisters at some long-ago Girl Scout camp. In the top of a bedroom closet, at the feet of two twin beds, I find a red nylon gym bag full of damp, balled-up Speedo swimsuits. I imagine Laura and Courtney swimming on their last morning, balling up their suits thoughtlessly to mildew. These are girls who can afford to replace the things they ruin. Printed on the bag is a leaping dolphin and the words: THE FLYING DOLPHINS. 92ND STREET Y.

  They are swimmers. No wonder they could vanish beneath the surface of the ocean for so long. And more important, they are from New York City. I search the rest of the house but find no envelopes or letterhead, not even scraps in the garbage that I might tape together. At least now I know where to start.

  Jake reclines on a sofa, having peeled back the plastic. I go to him and sit on his chest. He pretends to be crushed to death.

  “Jake,” I say. “When do you pick up your next package from Max?”

  “I don’t know. Whenever I want.”

  “Can it be soon?”

  “Why?”

  “I need to go on a trip.”

  “We could go to Philly,” he says. “Let’s go eat cheesesteaks and watch the Phillies lose.”

  “No. New York.” My heart pumps fast at the thought of it: to end all this. To walk up to these girls, these false sisters, and shake them by the shoulders till they spit out their secrets. To see once and for all if my hand passes through them, to see if they blow away, spiraling up amid the skyscrapers of New York, my mother’s city.

  11

  CARRIE, KANDY, AND I retrace our steps. The boardwalk, the beach, the network of alleys behind the boardwalk shops. It is full night now, and sinister. Only the bars are open. Ocean Vista has fallen to the bums and burnouts, drunks weaving their way past the closed-up snack shops, collapsing on benches and giving up on getting up. They gape at me when I approach to ask if they’ve seen a little boy, their pores yawning dark, the whites of their eyes yellow as old milk. Carrie sticks by Kandy, and they trail behind me as I investigate places where I could hardly expect to find my son: second-story fire escapes, locked-gate backyards. I feel brittle and explosive, the two of them thinking what I know they’re thinking.

  I turn to see Kandy with her elbows on the boardwalk fence, tucking her head down and sideways to speak to my daughter over the wind, and I see her in that denim jumpsuit, sixteen years old, sticking her ass out, tossing her hair. She asked me once what even happened between us that summer, exactly? Which dumbfounded me. Kandy recalls her adolescence frequently and with a removed fascination, as if she is now another species, as if she is no longer responsible for the decisions she made then. I was a hellion, she tells her kids, and they don’t believe her. I’ve heard that each time you remember something, the memory is rewritten by the neurons in your brain; that the memories you summon frequently are molded and smoothed—clay on the potter’s wheel of your mind—while memories you leave buried can bubble up with photographic precision. This is what I think of Kandy’s ability to blur the events of that summer: She thinks back casually. Whereas my memories of that summer attack only on days like today, when I am too weak to keep them out, and then they come at me with a ruthless precision.

  I will never ask her the question about James. I’d rather not know. The last time I saw him was at my mother’s funeral. He sat in no special seat, just somewhere in the middle of the block of folding chairs at the funeral parlor, wearing a dingy navy suit and looking like an old man, his hair gone entirely white, his legs showing their spindly shape through his suit pants. I know that toward the end, he checked on her daily, he took her on picnics. I didn’t talk to him; I went out the back door to smoke after the service and stayed there until I saw his car pull out of the lot. He knew us too well. I didn’t want to hear anything true that day.

  AFTER COLLEGE, I moved to Chicago. Life unfurled, never simply, but fast. Once I dried out in that cold place, I followed a boy to Austin. Though I lost interest in him quickly, I found a new world in Texas, a Martian landscape with customs comfortingly different from my own. I couldn’t imagine my mother there, couldn’t phrase my guilt. I loved the long drives on parched roads, the endless land, the clouds of grackles in the trees. I hiked into the woods to swim in natural pools, so small that you were never far from shore. People there were hungry, and I admired that, too. Hot meat on butcher paper, pickles, cold beer. Roosters scratching in the road. Time slowed down, people danced steps that didn’t exist in other states.

  I lived in an apartment on stilts in what was once a carriage house for a rich estate. I kept it very clean and decorated it minimally. I worked in the basement of a library, where I had to wear gloves to file ancient documents written in languages I couldn’t read. When I brought Sam home for the first time, he asked me where was all my stuff? I rested my chin on his chest, and he lifted the hair from my eyes. This is it, I told him. This is all of it. This is me.

  That was a lie, of course. I was no blank slate. But by letting Sam generate the objects and patterns of my life, I felt, again, transformed. We had such good years. He brought me a glass of water every night before bed. He was fascinated by the natural world and would read passage
s from National Geographic aloud at the breakfast table with an awe that bordered on the religious. He took us camping and knew every tree, could make incredible meals with nothing but tinfoil and matches. In Austin, I liked running into him unexpectedly when we were out on separate errands, this dark, slim, graceful man with his crisp gray pants, his leather watch, his soft, quiet mouth—and thinking, That one’s mine. I loved to embarrass him, to bite his neck at concerts or slide my toes up his leg beneath the table at brunch and watch him get that half-pleased, admonishing look.

  When Carrie was born, Sam gave up his culinary career and took a job in online marketing for a credit union. When he was younger, his parents had insisted that he earn an MBA as backup, they said, in case cooking didn’t work out. He said he enjoyed his work, though he didn’t talk about it much. At home, he made us four-course meals. It gave him a reason to resent his parents, to call them infrequently, and I should have realized that he would also find reasons to resent me, the bearer of expensive, dream-deferring children, the carrier of the gene that would make his son a burden. Not that I didn’t give him other reasons, too.

  MY CELL PHONE rings, and it is the police. “We haven’t found him,” the officer says right away. “But we wanted you to know we’ve got everyone out looking. Are you at your friend’s house?”

  “Yes,” I lie.

  “We’re doing our best. We’ve got everyone out there.”

  I tell him that he said that already, and I hang up. I do not miss the look that passes between Carrie and Kandy. I don’t care. When my son is found, I will get the police department a gift basket or something. It crosses my mind that I am thinking when instead of if. I am excluding the possibility of real tragedy. That is probably good for me, to stay positive. Or is it a bad thing, evidence of callousness or delusion?