The Summer of Impossible Things

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘Look, there’s a bench under that tree, let’s sit there.’ Pea guides me over and we take a seat, watching the passing traffic. Pea puts an ancient-looking brown paper bag on the length of bench between us.

  ‘I found it,’ she says. ‘I thought maybe … I don’t know. Mum liked telling stories, and not all of them were strictly accurate, like that one she told us about fairies that lived in the woods and you went off and came back with a moth in a jar …’

  ‘There’s no way she’d make this up,’ I say, staring at the bag.

  ‘I know, but I also know she lived some her stories, she lived them like they were real, so I just … I looked and I found it.’

  The fragile bag sits between us. It’s creased and stuck to itself, by something dark enough to turn the paper black.

  ‘It was where she said it was, behind the wardrobe.’ Pea carefully peels open the bag, tearing it a little. Our hair tangles, dark and bottle blonde, as we put our heads together and peer inside.

  Reaching in I pull out a mass of shredded georgette, gently tugging at it to work it loose from the plastic it has bonded to over the years since it was abandoned. Carefully I shake loose the once-white fabric, now yellowed with aged and blotted with black stains that mesh and glue the layers of material together. A few black flakes flutter away to dust in the breeze. As tattered and as torn as it is, I know it’s the dress I saw hanging on Riss’s wardrobe when I visited her room last night.

  Time trickles slowly, like the final few raindrops after a storm, and I see it, moment by moment, fall into the palm of my hand, and as the final drop falls, I understand it all with horrifying clarity.

  The man whose blood is turning to dust on the wind. The man who raped my mother, the man she killed. They are my mother and father.

  The man that made me. And the woman that made me who I am.

  And I don’t understand anything of what is happening to me. Except that, perhaps I have stumbled on a way to change everything, put everything back the way it should have been, before the events that forced my creation set in motion a thirty-year-long row of dominos, each one pushing the other towards this moment when the truth came out.

  For although I don’t know the how or why of time, I just know, deep in my heart, that the time is now.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

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  ‘Some people might think it’s too hot for stew,’ Mrs Finkle calls from the kitchen, as Pea and I set out three mismatched plates and glasses on her table. Growing up, we were always short of grandparents; we never met Mum’s dad, and her mum died when she was a child. My dad’s parents … well, they would turn up on birthdays and holidays, with carefully selected gifts, but they never really understood why their son had brought home a blue-collar Italian-American girl, when he could have had any woman he wanted in Bedfordshire; and somehow by extension, they never really understood the two barefoot girls, who would rather go down to the bottom of the garden to catch butterflies than talk about what happened at school. There’s something comforting about Mrs Finkle ordering us around, waving us here and there with one of her long bejewelled fingers. This must be something of what it would have been like if I’d ever met my Grandma Rosa, this feeling of calm that being around her brings.

  ‘My late husband, he always said the best way to cool down in a heatwave was to heat up. That’s what they do in India, he said. I bought wine from the liquor store, red, because of the meat, but then I remembered Luna telling me that you don’t drink, Pia, so I hid it.’

  ‘Somewhere I won’t find it, I hope!’ Pea calls back cheerfully, before whispering to me, ‘I’m worried that she is so very non-specific about the meat. What if this week’s stew is last week’s tenants?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ I whisper back. ‘I need this. I need some time to think. To not think about it all.’

  Mrs Finkle had opened her front door as we had approached it earlier with her usual preternatural intuition, and had handed me a small, amber-coloured drink, which I had downed at once without stopping to enquire what it was, then or after she refilled it, although now I can see a bottle of bourbon standing on the dresser. Pea had been handed a freezing-cold can of Coke, which was the third drink given to me, and I’d taken it gratefully, pressing it to my forehead and the back of my neck.

  ‘Figured you might have had an emotional morning.’ Mrs Finkle was clearly pleased that she had guessed right. ‘So get some rest, no matter what happened, you need it, and tonight I will cook for you. No arguments,’ she cut Pea off before she could get out a word of protest. ‘I promised Henry I’d take good care of you, and that is what I am going to do.’

  And so we are here, after an afternoon sheltering in the cool of our apartment, Pea in her room, me on the sofa, not talking, not really even thinking. Just waiting for the sun to go down. A little before we were due to go downstairs, I heard Pea go out while I was in the shower, and every one of my sore and battered muscles had tensed, wondering if she would come back drunk or sober, or perhaps even at all. She had returned before I was even dry, carrying the box we’d opened at Mum’s building.

  ‘What happened?’ I’d never seen her look so white, not simply pale, but as if the blood had drained away from beneath her tanned skin.

  ‘We’d left it, so I went back to get it,’ Pea told me, with a shudder, lowering her eyes. ‘It just didn’t feel right, leaving her in that place … Look, I know you’ll want to watch the other films, but we don’t have to do it there, where it’s dark. Where it happened. Anyway, it’s all locked up again now. We never have to go back in there if we don’t want to, we can just leave it to its own devices.’ A moment passed before she lifted her head and looked at me questioningly. ‘I suppose we just need to think about what’s next?’

  ‘Thank you for going to get this.’ I’d taken the box from her, and set it down in the corner. ‘And as for what’s next? Dinner with Mrs Finkle is what’s next.’

  Mrs Finkle’s dining room is cool and comforting, her thick, lace curtains cutting out half of the blazing evening light. Wandering away from the table, I find myself drawn to the walls of photographs that seem to line every surface, both vertical and horizontal.

  ‘Are there any photos of Dad?’ I ask Mrs Finkle as she comes into the room, carrying a streaming terrine.

  ‘I’m sure there are, although I haven’t really looked at them for a long time. I don’t like to look at them too closely. Don’t like to notice all the people that aren’t around anymore, I guess. Now I just need the potatoes …’

  Pea comes to stand at my shoulder as we scan the photographs, face after face fixed in timeless grins, celebrating some moment whose meaning has long since been lost, a gallery of forgotten happy days.

  ‘Oh god!’ The words burst out as I come across a photo of Mum with Dad, and a group of six other people standing outside of Mrs Finkle’s house. ‘It’s her, it’s Mum! Look, Pea, it’s Mum!’

  Reaching up I take the photo down carefully, a little shower of dust coming with it, and I bring it over to the window, dragging back some of the heavy lace curtains to let in a little more light.

  ‘So it is.’ Mrs Finkle comes over to look, smiling fondly at the photo. ‘There she is; she was right here all along.’

  ‘Mum, and Dad, and whoever this lot are – some more of the crew?’

  ‘Yes, that’d be right … Harvey, Jim … that one, quiet but sexy, you know …’ A tiny secret smile tells us everything else we might need to know about Jim. ‘And this one, now what he was called? … Oh, it will come back to me. Sometime I don’t need it, like when I’m at the ATM trying to remember my number or in the middle of the night, but eventually it will come back. Ladies, shall we eat while it’s hot?’

  The hardest thing about losing Mum, harder than anything else, has been the feeling of always having to leave her behind. In a grave in Oxfordshire, in a box in a derelict property or captur
ed in a photograph. Before, wherever I went, whatever I did, I took her with me somehow. And now, she’s not there. She isn’t anywhere, except perhaps somehow through a tear or a loop in time that I don’t understand and I can’t control. And even if I do find a way back, whatever happens I will still have to leave her there.

  ‘Luna?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude.’ I reluctantly rehang the photo and take a seat.

  ‘No need to apologise.’ Mrs Finkle smiles. ‘Coming across a photo of her like that, when you didn’t expect it, must be like running into her on a street corner. A shock.’

  ‘Did you know her very well?’ I ask. ‘I mean, before Dad met her?’

  ‘I did. I knew all the kids from Third Avenue well; this end anyways. Back then, we were a real community, you see; we stuck together, we were all in the same boat. All trying to make ends meet, all helping each other out, the best we could. And, of course, you’d see your neighbours at church, maybe three times a week. Your mother, she went every Sunday. Her mother was religious and she kept going after she passed and never stopped. She found a lot of comfort there, and support – and everyone loved her. I mean everyone. She was just one of those people, well, you girls will know; folks were just drawn to her. Her smile, the way she joked and laughed, she could make anyone feel like the centre of the universe.’

  Pea and I glance at each other, at home Mum never went near a church if she could help it. She never spoke about religion, never tolerated more than the typical British habit of being religious only when there were gifts of chocolate eggs involved. And although she was our sun, the centre of our world, for the most part she kept herself to herself, certainly after we moved out to the house in the Cotswolds. She loved her garden, the high wall of honey-coloured stone that enclosed it and the feetthick ancient walls of the house. She loved her world, making her films, Dad and us, and, as for anyone else, we always got the impression they scarcely mattered to her. I know that Pea is wondering the same thing: did she make the mistake of making the man that attacked her feel like the centre of the universe? And, afterwards, of course she would want to hide away, of course she would want people to stop seeing her.

  ‘What were her friends like? Who did she hang out with?’ I ask, tentatively searching for clues I wasn’t sure I wanted.

  ‘Well, Stephanie, of course. They were close; even though most of time they were fighting on the outside, you could tell those two would always stick together, through whatever. Had to, I guess, after dear Rosa passed. That’s why I was surprised that they lost touch the way they did. Stephanie would never talk about what happened between them, and she left a few years after Luna did. I always figured she was angry at your sister for leaving her behind. Their father, your grandfather, Leopold, he was a good man, but he wasn’t equipped to bring up two young women, and he had a temper. Never hit those girls, but oftentimes I used to see the kid from the hardware store going over there to patch up another hole in the wall. Funny thing is, the worse his temper got the more defiant those girls got; he never did understand them. But Leo was an important man round here, people treated him with respect …’

  ‘Was Grandpa in the Mafia?’ Pea asks, and Mrs Finkle presses her finger to her lips, as if Pea has just taken some deity’s name in vain.

  ‘Back then, you weren’t in it, or out of it. Bay Ridge was it, and the rest of Brooklyn and a lot of New York. Those guys took care of their own, and we were their own. There were protection rackets, sure, and things could get out of hand, but if there was trouble on the street, you knew who would get it sorted it, and it wouldn’t be the cops.’

  ‘What about Curtis? He was one of the regular gang, wasn’t he?’ I remember the young man from that night with Riss, slightly older than the rest of them, standing out from all the Italian-Americans with his Irish colouring, fair hair and pale lashes that fringed blue eyes, eyes like mine? I test a name from that reality on this one.

  ‘How do you know about Curtis?’ Mrs Finkle looks surprised. ‘I haven’t thought of him in years.’

  ‘Mum talked about the old days sometimes,’ I say, glancing at Pea. ‘I remembered that name.’

  ‘I guess Curtis was part of that gang. Well, hardly surprising he and Stephanie got closer and closer, especially after Riss left.’ Mrs Finkle looks at me a little too closely, and I drop my gaze. She knew his name, which meant he existed, in real life, not just in my head. It was possible, just, that I picked something up from Mum, something I’d overheard and forgotten, and that scenario was still more plausible than the idea that I travelled back through time, but still, Curtis was real.

  ‘I always thought Marissa might end up with Michael Bellamo,’ Mrs Finkle says, and my heart stops. Michael. ‘The way they used to argue, that sort of arguing when you know the people doing the shouting really care about each other, and he was so good-looking, film-star good-looking that boy was, eyes as green as grass. Travolta had nothing on him.’

  ‘Did they date?’ An awful thought that Michael could be my father? Except Mum said he was older, a pillar of the community. If anything, Michael was a little younger than Riss, and the realisation is a relief. I remember Michael walking me through the darkness, with neither of us having an idea of where I was going, or where I was from, the heat from his body, the feeling of his hand in mine. It doesn’t feel imaginary.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Mrs Finkle ladles yet another spoonful of stew onto my plate, so that gravy brims on the very edge, putting her white tablecloth at serious risk. ‘Marissa always said he was like a brother to her.’

  I want to ask more about Michael, find out what happened to him, but Pea interrupts me.

  ‘Who else did Mum date before she met Dad?’ Pea asks.

  ‘No one seriously, that I recall,’ Mrs Finkle says. ‘She loved dancing, they all did, all the kids, get up in their best and go to the 2001 Odyssey club on a Saturday night, no need to cross the bridge and queue with the rest of the wannabes outside Studio 54; they had it all here. As I recall, Marissa loved dressing up and looking pretty; she liked the boys to notice her. But she was a good girl, your mother. And that was important back then, not like these days when you can sleep around and no one cares about it.’ She laughs. ‘What it is to be young in the twenty-first century; we never really left our neighbourhood, and you’ve got the whole world at your feet.’

  Mrs Finkle’s stew is surprisingly good, and I hadn’t realised how hungry I was. As we eat she talks, selecting tales at random and spinning them out as large as life for us, as she were projecting it over the table. This food, this evening, these stories, they are everything that I need right now. The evening ebbs away around us gently, a little oasis of space to feel and think. What next and how?

  Pea must be having the same idea, because she’s the first to push her bowl of ice cream and tinned fruit away.

  ‘Well, I’m exhausted. Shall we go up?’

  My sister wants to talk. I can see it in her face, her love and her determination to be there for me for once, to repay me for all the times that I’ve been there for her. I can see that, and the way her eyes keeps wandering back to that bottle of bourbon on the side, and the strain in her face, and the fact that she’s been crying too. She wants me to go upstairs and for us to talk it through, and for her to be there for me.

  I just don’t think I can face that yet.

  ‘You go,’ I tell her gently. ‘I’ll help clear up.’

  ‘Quite a day you had,’ Mrs Finkle tells me, as I sink my hands into the warm washing-up water. She lowers her voice. ‘Maybe now I’ll pull the cork on that red, what do you say?’

  ‘I say do it.’ I pause, my hands still covered in suds, to take a drink from the glass she gives me. As soon as I put it down she tops it up; I get the strong impression that it makes a nice change for her to have someone to share a glass of wine with.

  ‘Strange to be in that place, was it?’ She takes a plate from me, drying it meticulously.

  ‘St
range isn’t a strong enough word,’ I say. ‘The Marissa you know, when you talk about her, she seems like a different person to our mother. Your Marissa was bold and carefree and cool; our mum was quiet and sad and she struggled a lot, all of her life, with depression. It’s hard to understand that she wasn’t always like that.’

  ‘A lot happened that summer,’ Mrs Finkle says, folding her tea towel and picking up her wine. ‘Something dangerous was in the air, across the whole city. You knew about it, the crime, the violence, the poverty, the drugs … you knew about it, but it was always a couple of blocks away, always happening to someone else, that’s what you always thought, anyway. But that year, the danger came here, too. Came in with the heatwave and Son of Sam, and stayed. Though I missed him with all my heart, I was glad my darling Norm never lived to see the neighbourhood like that.

  ‘The night Marissa left, the night of the blackout, bad stuff went down around here, across Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Manhattan. If you were ever going to do something bad, that was the night to do it. You’re going to think I’m some crazy old woman, but there was evil in the dark that night. I felt it, sticky and thick. In some ways I think she got out just in time. Whatever it was that made her decide to run away that night saved her life, because it got a lot worse after that, shootings, rapes, murders. One time Brooklyn was the murder capital of New York State. You know, the cops printed out these leaflets to give to tourists when they arrived at JFK telling them how not to get mugged or killed? It stopped being around the corner that all the bad stuff was happening, stopped being a couple of blocks over. Started being right outside the front door.’

  ‘And yet you stayed,’ I say. ‘You and Mr Gillespie. Lots of people stayed.’

  ‘Sure, lots of people stayed, but that’s because lots of people didn’t have no place else to go.’ Mrs Finkle shrugs, and then something occurs to her. ‘You know, your mum wasn’t the only person to vanish that night.’