The Summer of Impossible Things

by Rowan Coleman

  I don’t know how to answer, so I don’t speak.

  ‘Seen Brian?’ With ease Pea changes the subject from one thing I can’t bear to talk about to another.

  ‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘I’m glad I haven’t seen him. He isn’t the sort of person you want to see when you’re … conflicted.’

  Pea snorts. ‘Conflicted. Yep, our mum tops herself and we’re “conflicted”. I take it back, you are the perfect scientist – analytical to the last.’ The spasm of hurt her words cause must show on my face, because she takes off her glasses, and leans into me. ‘You know I don’t mean it,’ she says. ‘And, anyway, it was a good job you found out what a flake Brian was before you ended up marrying him. It’s good to know if someone will be willing to stick by you in a crisis. And he, well … you know.’

  I do know. I’d discovered Brian was on a minibreak in the Lake District with another woman on the day of Mum’s funeral. It should hurt me more than it does; after all, we’d been together for two years and talked about making it official. But somehow I am numb to that petty betrayal. It took me leaving Brian to realise that, as much as l liked him, and respected him, I was never in love with him, and he knew that. When I think back, I doubt that he was ever in love with me either; it was more that I fascinated him, I was atypical, an anomaly, and, as a neuroscientist, he liked that about me. I was a woman immersed in the most rational of sciences, determined that my sex wasn’t going to hold me back, even though most of the rest of the world I moved in tried to.

  I can see, now, the reason I was drawn to him was because I thought he understood me. I thought he was like me, but that was a mistake. It wasn’t our similarities that he enjoyed about me; it was our differences that he liked to study.

  It probably didn’t help that I told him my secret. I shouldn’t have told him. That just after Mum died something started happening to me that hadn’t happened since I was a little girl. That sometimes, more and more just recently, I see things; people, places … things.

  Impossible things. Things that are not there.

  CHAPTER TWO

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  You don’t have time to go mad, is what I tell myself. Too many people need you. So just don’t go mad. Just don’t. It’s an inelegant solution, but it’s the only one I have. To seek help would be impossible. The news that I had a psychiatric problem would spread through the research community in a matter of hours, and it’s hard enough to do the work I do as a woman, a young woman not yet thirty, without there being another reason to call my judgement into question. The mad woman in the attic, that’s what they’d called me behind my back. And even if I did get a diagnosis of some kind of psychosis, Brian had already told me the sorts of drugs I might be prescribed and what they’d do to me. They’d stop me thinking.

  And if it isn’t madness, if it’s the side effect of some physical disease, then … well, I don’t have time to be sick either. Best not to think about it, best to put my faith in mind over matter, or anti-matter. That’s a physicist’s joke.

  No, everything is fine. These moments when they happen come and go quickly. They’re nothing more than flashes of reflected sunlight on glass. If things get worse, then I’ll think again, but for now everything is fine; it’s not like there are voices in my head. It’s some kind of epilepsy, Brian thought, although I wouldn’t let him put me in an MRI machine because I didn’t want to know any facts that would have to be acted on. He told me the story of a young French man who’d suffered so many tiny but relentless brain seizures that he lived in a constant state of déjà vu, as if he’d experienced every moment that he lived before. The universe inside our heads hold more mysteries and secrets than the one I’ve spent my life trying to understand, and yet I know that at its most basic level they are one and the same thing. I won’t be partitioned from what matters by medication.

  Focus, that’s what I have to do. Focus on each single second as it happens; keep hold of what is real. Focus on Pea, and being here, and everything we need to get done. I will try and spend as much time as I can looking through the lens of Dad’s camera, because – and I don’t have a theory as to why – the … episodes … don’t seem to happen when I’m looking through the camera, almost as if the lens filters out delusion.

  So focus on now, focus.

  Because I really don’t have time to go mad, we have arrived at our destination.

  Our cab slows down and comes to a rest outside our lodging house, the only place we could possibly stay when we decided to make this trip, a set from the love story of my parents. It’s in this very house that my dad stayed when he first came to Bay Ridge, on his first major freelance-photography project, embedding himself in with the film crew and shooting behinds the scenes of the first movie he was ever involved with: Saturday Night Fever. A film my little sister and I have watched at least a thousand times since we were kids and, in actual fact, far too young to see it.

  ‘Mum and Dad must have walked up and down these streets a million times,’ Pea says as we climb out of the cab, stretching our tired and travel-cramped bodies hard against the sky. ‘They probably kissed right there, on that piece of sidewalk, under that tree – hey, is that the tree?’

  ‘No, wrong street,’ I tell her. I know the exact location of the famous tree, because it’s at the top of my list of locations to find, to see if it’s still standing, and to take a photo of Mum and Dad’s names carved into its bark.

  As Pea pays the fare, I lift the camera to my eye, searching for the same frame as one of the photos I’ve pored over so often in Dad’s albums. Then this decaying building was neat, pretty, full of pride and house rules, even in the way the geraniums grew so neatly in the window boxes. Now Mrs Finkle’s lodging house looks fatigued, slouching into the ground. The once-pristine blue-and-white paint is peeling and cracked, the blue turning grey, the white yellowing like smoker’s teeth. Even so, it is a house that someone still loves; you can feel that radiating out of it. I lower the camera when I see something that wasn’t in Dad’s original photo. A statue of the Virgin Mary greets us. She is about two feet high, balanced on the window sill nearest the door, inclining slightly downwards, towards a considerable drop. She has clearly been in exactly that perilous position for some time, her paint faded away almost to nothing, her benevolent hands chipped and broken, her eyes white and unseeing. With the lens, without the lens; yes, she is definitely there.

  ‘Luna and Pia, right?’ A woman, who can only be Mrs Finkle, opens the front door and stands on the top step. I’d expected a housecoat and maybe rollers, but I am wrong. Mrs Finkle is truly elegant. Her hair, which might once have been blonde, is still glossy but now silver and pinned behind one ear. Wearing a cool white shirt over light denim capri pants, she looks more like a Lauren Bacall than a Mrs Finkle, which makes me smile. I like being wrong; being wrong always leads to something more interesting than being right.

  ‘Yes, hello,’ I greet her. ‘We’re Luna and Pia Sinclair.’

  ‘You’re here!’ She briefly clasps her hands together in obvious delight as she trots down the steps and hugs me so tightly I can feel the Pentax press into my ribcage. ‘Let me look at you!’ She takes a step back, her hands on my shoulders, her hazel eyes scanning my face.

  ‘Oh, but I see her in you, I do. I see her in your nose and your ears, and this hair. You know, when your mom left I never thought I’d see her again, but here she is, in you, oh, and you too!’ She leaves me to embrace Pea with equal warmth, and I know that I instantly love her. I love her for not noticing my blue eyes or wondering aloud who I take after, and best of all for saying that I look like my beautiful mother.

  ‘You’ve got your father’s crazy hair,’ Mrs Finkle says, smiling fondly at Pea’s cloud of curls and frizz, which should be as dark as mine, but which she insists on bleaching to oblivion every chance she gets. ‘But I see her in you, too. Marissa Lupo lived her life with her chin lifted just
a little bit higher than anyone else. You’ve got that.’

  ‘I have?’ Pea’s hand rises to her chin, and she smiles too. ‘Cool.’

  ‘So, what are we doing standing out here? Come in, come in out of the heat.’ Grabbing her bag, Pea follows Mrs Finkle up the neatly swept steps and past the Virgin Mary. ‘It’s been unbearable this year, I haven’t known it so bad since … Well, I suppose since the year your dad and the rest of the film crew guys came to stay here. The heatwave of nineteen seventy-seven … Now that was a year.’

  It’s like a little power surge to my brain; that’s always the first sign that something is about to happen. Then I sense someone watching me, eyes grazing my skin. I could look away, go inside and ignore the buzzing in my brain, but that doesn’t work. Only looking right at an anomaly makes it stop.

  As Pea follows Mrs Finkle inside, I turn and make myself see. Searching down to the end of the not-quite-empty street. At its end, in something like a halo of yellow sunlight, there is a young woman watching me. The light dances and dazzles, so that she is out of focus, almost not there. I see her for a split second before she is gone, a cool, blue shadow filling the space where she stood. My head swims as I close my eyes and I feel my knees weaken. Someone walks over my grave. That’s what my mother always used to say. Lifting the camera, I look again. The street is empty.

  Focus. I need to focus on the here and now.

  ‘Luna, what are you doing?’ Pea asks me impatiently from the doorway, which is code for ‘please come in here and help me make small talk with this woman’. With one final glance at the empty sidewalk, I follow her up the stairs.

  Our apartment is at the top of the house, the border between Mrs Finkle’s territory and her guests’ clearly marked by where her procession of framed photographs ends, and a clean, white-painted staircase begins. It’s bright and light, one small bedroom, bathroom, and an all-purpose living area with a sofa bed and a functional kitchenette.

  ‘Your father will have told you I used to have rooms,’ she says. ‘All rooms, one bathroom; that was amusing at times.’ She smiles fondly. ‘These days people want more though. I don’t normally have tourists in here. Tourists don’t come to Bay Ridge. Normally it’s young people looking for a cheap place to stay that’s not much of a commute to work. I was so pleased when you called. My last girl just moved in with her boyfriend and I was about to advertise. It was kind of like fate, to have Marissa and Henry’s girls here with me. I loved them both, you know.’

  ‘Dad speaks so fondly of you,’ Pea says, and she means it, although she doesn’t mention Dad’s colourful tales of how Mrs Finkle fell for one of the younger men staying with her, and seduced him with the skills of a noir femme fatale. ‘He’s only sorry not to see you. I think after a life travelling around the world, taking photos of the world’s most famous and beautiful, he’s finally glad to be at home in his garden, talking to the bumble bees.’

  ‘I was so sorry to hear about your mom. And I’m sorry not to see Henry again,’ Mrs Finkle says, her smile enigmatic. ‘Those were fun times, the crew, the actors, the filming. Yes, Bay Ridge sure got a little stardust sprinkled over it that year! I loved being a small part of it. You know, Travolta nearly came to my house once.’

  ‘Did he?’ Pea grins from ear to ear, her love of the subject of Dad’s first major photographic assignment knows no bounds. Once she had had a framed copy of every one of the photos he took on the set of Saturday Night Fever adorning the walls of her flat. When we were girls she watched it at least once a week. ‘Did he stay here?’

  ‘Probably a good job he didn’t.’ Mrs Finkle covers her heart with her hands. ‘I wouldn’t have been responsible for my actions; that man, so handsome. Like a Michelangelo in blue jeans. Well, get settled in. You can see me as much you want, or as little. I’d prefer the former, but I guess you have a lot you want to do and see, and you’ll finally get the Lupo building sold?’

  ‘That’s the plan,’ I tell her. ‘It’s seems like the right time at last.’

  ‘I think it is.’ Mrs Finkle nods. ‘That place, it’s been boarded up and crumbling away for so long, it’s like that little corner of the avenue is stuck right there, the day your mother left. Though, now that I think of it, your grandfather lived there a couple more years after she left. But every time I’ve looked up at it in the past thirty years, I could almost see her there, leaning on the fire escape, smoking and waiting. Waiting and smoking. I’m glad she won’t be waiting anymore.’

  CHAPTER THREE

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  ‘Can you imagine her, walking these streets?’ Pea asks me as we trail back along 4th Avenue, after a late dinner of burger and fries. ‘Young and sexy, like in those photos Dad took of her in hot-pants and wedged heels. She was quite something back in the day.’

  ‘I can,’ I say, thinking of one particular photograph, the first photograph of her that Dad ever took, one that is carefully tucked into the back pocket of my jeans right now.

  In it, Mum is twenty years old; the light of a sunny Brooklyn spring evening dapples her tanned skin, her slim arms shielding her eyes. Half of her face is in shade, revealing slightly parted glossed lips. She is wearing a striped singlet, no bra underneath; her throat is bare, effortlessly sexy in a way that seems out of reach to me. I’d first found the photo when I was twelve years old, awkward and plump. I’d been so beguiled, so envious of the ease with which she had inhabited her skin, that I’d stolen it from between the pages of a rarely-looked-at album and kept it ever since. After Mum died I’d remembered it with a start, fearful that I hadn’t taken enough care of this precious image of her, that it would be lost. But I’d found it, at the bottom of a shoebox of old photos and drawings that I’d collected over the years. From that moment on I never went anywhere without it. And, as the night sets in, I’ll be content to simply look at it until I fall asleep, hoping to dream of her here, in the very place the photograph was taken.

  ‘She always wore the most beautiful clothes,’ I say. ‘Always turned heads.’

  ‘Like you would if you stopped dressing like a teenager,’ Pea says pulling at the hem of my habitual white T-shirt, which was paired with my usual faded jeans and one of three pairs of Converse I own. ‘And looking like one; it’s embarrassing that my older sister looks younger than me. You should drink more, smoke … I don’t know, do something to look your age!’

  ‘I dress how I dress because in my job the less men notice you’re a woman the better. I can’t help the fact that I look younger than I am, it’s no fun getting asked for ID when you’re twenty-nine!’

  Pea stops in the street.

  ‘I can’t believe that she’s dead, Luna. How can it be true that she left us like that? I can’t believe it. How can it be true that she wanted to die and we didn’t notice?

  ‘Do you know what frightens me the most? That one day it will me, it will me who can’t fight life anymore, and who feels that pain so deeply that it’s easier to die than live for the people that love you. You, you’re more like Dad, everyone always says so – and I don’t care if he’s not your biological dad, he raised you and you’re just like him. But me, I’m just like her. Luna, what if one day that’s me?’

  ‘It won’t ever be you,’ I promise her. ‘I won’t lose you too, just know that. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you safe.’ I don’t tell her that I worry that one day it might be me who can’t fight anymore.

  The moment of doubt seems to pass like the clouds over the moon; my mercurial sister has her second wind. She sprints up the steps that lead to Mrs Finkle’s front door, and down again.

  ‘We should just go, let’s just go there, now.’

  ‘Go where?’ I am moments behind her as she accelerates through her own thoughts at light speed.

  ‘Mum’s place, the building, it’s nearby, right? Let’s just go and see it and explore! Come on, I can’t sleep now, I need to do something, we c
ould just go and see it now.’

  The buzzing starts, the surge rising up through my feet, and I turn away from her, somehow managing to keep my feet on the ground.

  ‘I don’t want to there right now,’ I say.

  ‘But why, just for a little walk?’

  ‘Because …’ Even if I wanted to explain this feeling that has suddenly gripped me, I couldn’t; it’s like a kind of fear mingled with the certainty that something awful is about to happen. I don’t know why the building terrifies me, but it does.

  In my mind’s eye it’s a desolate place, blackened and decaying. And somehow this terrible, ridiculous idea has gripped me hard; this feeling of certainty that Mum is still there, trapped inside. Lost, looking for a way out, rattling frantically at window latches and door handles. And if I go there now, I’m afraid I will see her, peering out from between the boarded-up windows.

  Taking a breath, I push my heels into the asphalt. Focus on now.

  ‘Maybe I could make you some tea?’ Mrs Finkle says as she opens her door, and I’m grateful to focus on her, her long, silk negligee, and her elegant hands adorned with rings that catch the streetlight.

  ‘Mrs Finkle!’ Pea grins at me, raising her eyebrows.

  ‘I’m not spying on you,’ Mrs Finkle assures us. ‘I just heard your voices outside and I can’t sleep either. I have some camomile somewhere. Come in and have tea, and I’ll bore you with stories of your mom and dad until you’ll be begging for sleep.’

  ‘Cool, come on, Luna, tea!’ Pea takes the lifeline with both hands and bounds up the steps.

  ‘I’m just going to …’ I don’t know what to say. ‘I just need a minute.’

  ‘OK, I’ll leave the key with the Virgin here,’ Pea says, and Mrs Finkle steps back to let her in.