Nubs of paper towel began showing up in the carpet, wherever Travolta left a mess. Kay filled out an entry form online and eleven weeks later received a forty-eight by seventy-two-inch poster for a television show on the CW, which by that time had been canceled.
—
It took everyone too long to realize Simon was failing school. “Aren’t your grades slipping?” Deb asked over his report card. “When were my grades ever good?”
Toward the end of his senior year, Jack and Deb agreed to send Simon to a wilderness retreat in Virginia for troubled teens. “We can’t take him if he’s an addict,” the program director said in their overlit Manhattan outpost.
“We think it’s just pot smoking,” Deb answered.
“Still, anything more serious, we’re not equipped for that kind of thing. If you want, there’s a place in Utah—”
Jack said, “Who said addict? It’s just the pot. It’s fine.”
For seven weeks Simon and eight other boys built campfires and ate dehydrated packs of Yankee Noodle Dandy and were called only by their Nature Names, which they were made to choose their first night there. Simon was Wind.
—
Night drained the bruisy skies. The world blinked and the streetlamps came on. Travolta died, in the bathroom, a few feet from her litter box.
—
New year new year new year. The ball thrown in the air comes down faster. The numbers grew too big, unhinged from anything that sounded like time or what kept it. Nineteen ninety-eight was a year. 2015, 2020, those were eyesights. Calendars and the Times became props from a space opera. Everyone was always putting the date wrong in the upper right-hand corners of things.
Jack had very few, basically zero, New York openings after Stanley gave up the gallery. His art got smaller, actually smaller, with no more room in his Queens apartment, which did not now seem so big, and no room for it either in the world, which had grown enormously. A school in Arizona invited him to teach, and Jack left New York for good. Or forever, anyway.
—
Doors to new drugstores whooshed open for anybody just passing. No one knew anyone with an address book but still companies somewhere kept making them. Kay was voted Nicest Girl in the yearbook, but all she’d really ever been was Most Quiet. Simon went out of his way to walk on cobblestones because he’d heard they were good for feet, though he forgot it was Jack who’d told him. He crossed the street, hair growing, nails growing, wisdom teeth two months from cresting.
Deb kept teaching at the college, studio and then dance criticism, and started dating another ex-dancer, a physical therapist called Eli, also divorced. She went to the earliest classes at Steps, fastening her hair the way she used to. She leaned close to the locker room mirror to tweeze the short grays that antennaed around her head.
Kay went to a university in California, and when she came back her name was Katherine.
Simon stayed Simon, at a college in the city.
—
On his faculty ID card, Jack wasn’t smiling. It was a webcam, and he hadn’t even known they were taking it—no flash, no birdie. In the photograph, his face, half under hologram, came out swollen on one side like he’d just had oral surgery. Or squirrelly, which is what he said to the girl who took it, meaning that he looked to be storing nuts for winter.
On Craigslist, fewer people responded to rentals without photos. Simon got a deal on a brownstone apartment in Crown Heights, where each morning sparrows hopped their cotton-ball bodies along the fire escape and would not shut up.
Deb moved into Eli’s Tribeca loft. Because of the market or for other reasons, she didn’t sell the apartment uptown.
In Palo Alto, Katherine got a job at a start-up in a technology research park, which in everyone’s head looked like Six Flags.
—
They used pens made from recycled water bottles, or they didn’t use pens.
Every screen responded to human touch.
A mole on Deb’s face turned out to be cancer, but only stage one. A little plastic surgery and the scar hardly showed. At the gym, she sat in the sauna, with the warped wooden door that snapped shut behind her, feeling surrounded by dock on all sides.
How does anyone get over anything in places where the weather doesn’t change? If you live someplace where the seasons are all the same, how do you get over any one or thing.
When her kids came to visit she wanted to make them so many dinners. I never washed a vegetable until I fed the two of you.
—
After a few years, people expressed surprise to learn Jack had ever lived in the city. The lope in his speech revived, a timbre he got not so much from Houston as from growing up around his mother. He looked like a carpenter or a woodsman, in flannel and quilted vests. He’d always dressed that way, but only here did it take the form of function over style. The irony being that in New York he had done the hard labor of a carpenter, a metalworker, even a glassblower from time to time, and here his art grew ever finer and more precise, though now he had more studio space than he could fill.
He whittled figures out of chalk, colors mint and lavender and Pepto pink, sidewalk chalk sold by the bucket at a dollar store in town.
—
The nice thing about the university health clinic was you could make appointments online without talking to anyone.
—
Katherine sent Deb an invitation to one of her company’s sites, where users set up virtual houses and decorated virtual rooms with JPEGs of furniture they could never afford in real life. Deb made an account, then did nothing with it. She got their newsletters, though, from Your Virtual Decorator, announcing the week’s most popular chaise longue. They bugled into her inbox at five in the morning, when she was usually already awake. She’d clicked the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the page. She didn’t know how to make them stop.
—
You could also cancel appointments online, at the university health clinic. Under “Reason for Cancellation,” there was an option for “Illness,” but not “Fear.”
A few days after his sixty-sixth birthday, the associate dean who was also his girlfriend brought Jack a bouquet of silver balloons he could see his face in. They sank from the ceiling and stayed at eye level, hovering in the hall. In the morning, he held them out the window, set them free.
—
Balloons in bare branches look like foil lungs.
All the weight lost made him look better before it made him look worse.
He seemed to spend a lot of time in the rec room, looking at his hands.
The school updated all its access passes, so you didn’t have to swipe but just hold the card to the thing, and everyone had to take new pictures. On his second ID card, he was smiling but rained on, a little deranged.
—
Jack found, before he died, among his stack of accordion folders, a portfolio of sketches he didn’t recognize. Two of Katherine, around age ten, and a few innocuous still lifes—a cracked egg with the yolk pooling out of it—from the drawing and painting class Simon had failed in high school.
A deep ache in his bones began to wake him in the night. Blood began showing up in his stool.
You ok?
Aces
You get my message?
Saw you left one
You don’t have to play it. Just happy birthday.
I sent you something in the snailmail
Where?
To your Moms
K cuz I don’t have a doorman
It’s an envelope
My very own envelope
Nothing six figures. Happy belated
Simon I love you
Love you lots
—
The cane tapping and the wheelie suitcase together sound like a horse-drawn carriage.
Sometimes a memory turned out to be only an old picture from an album, a still his brain had fooled him into believing.
And in movies, why are there dial tones anytime anybody hangs up the pho
ne? Is this magical realism?
In the end, what killed him was a mass in his pelvis, the size of a grape.
—
The end is never a surprise. People say, Don’t tell me, Don’t spoil it, and then later they say, If only I’d known. Nights in old living rooms, on pullout couches left pushed in, light reflects against the glass where the surprises were. We thought we were living in between-time, after this and before that, but it’s the between-time that lasted.
There are cobwebs in the bushes. See them, there, in the late afternoon, when the disappearing sun spins the fine sticky threads into gold.
—
In Jamestown, it was taking some time learning how to look at nature. On walks, Kay kept a few paces behind her mother and watched where the sidewalks ruptured enormously to allow the roots of trees. They walked the waist of the island, from their house on the east to the quieter docks on the west. “Crosstown,” her mother joked.
Her mother joked a lot. And said, “We’re in luck.” They were in luck the very first day, finding the single red cab and lady cabdriver outside the wood-paneled Kingston station, even though Simon lost a dollar to the one vending machine. They were lucky again in the car, thinking they’d gone the wrong way, when the right sign sprang up out of nowhere, and all the signs that followed began making sense. It was hard to pull onto their street without starting to pass it; the block was so small: four or five houses altogether, leaned uneasily against a hill.
Deb had made up her mind to be lucky, so they would be.
On the three-and-a-half-hour train ride, reading time had given way to thinking time. They were barely out of Stamford when her attention drifted, book to window. Her eyes ticked telephone pole to telephone pole, the slack of cable between, and she wished she had music to listen to, Joni Mitchell, a strong voice behind sad lyrics, to better indulge her sense of story, as if she were a character and this a beginning.
So many times she’d thought she was living her story. From five to twenty-five, every wish she made—on white horses, on eyelashes, on thin candles dipped in frosting—they were one wish. Getting into the right school, the right company, the right casting year after year. Just give me this next thing. Ballet and Jack were the great arcs of her life. Motherhood was a different kind of chapter, without auditions. Possibly there should have been. Kids were the only Big Thing she didn’t have to work to get, and she hadn’t expected to find herself wanting in that old way again. Now she saw how there might be yet another arc, even two. Who could say this wasn’t the first day of something—God, not the rest of her life, let’s not say that, but something, maybe good?
She let her eyelids droop, and outside the day blurred to green.
—
The house at first seemed more plant than house, but behind the wisteria and morning glories stood two floors, a roof shingled different grays, peeling white trim. There was a porch with an overhang that sagged in the middle and a screen door with the screen curled half away. Bird droppings, too, to match the siding. They weren’t even sure they’d found it, because the brush had grown up over the mailbox. “Oh.” Deb worried the glass heart around her neck, tipping her head out the cab’s window. “Here? This is it.”
“How do you not know?” said Simon. Surprising just that he deigned to speak. He’d had to clear his throat.
Deb overpaid the woman driver, who’d talked on the ride about her own kids, all boys. “I swear, tell them one thing and they do the opposite. And me my whole life just wanting a girl to dress up.”
“They’re pretty great,” Deb said, winking at Kay, whom she never dressed up.
—
To Kay, the house looked broken. Inside the furniture suffocated under heavy plastic. The lights were out, but Gary had left a note on the kitchen table. Property to see up in Boston. Back soon, make yourselves at HOME!! Kay had no memory of Gary, your practically-uncle Gary, he used to get you toys on your birthday, remember?—Which toys?—and either Deb could not name them, or—“I don’t know, that nanoo nanoo creature, that Furby doll”—and Kay might remember the Furby but not the person attached.
“This house is one hundred years old,” Deb said, coming up behind her with a duffel bag. She stressed the age as if it were a good thing.
“Is it even safe?” Simon shot past them, suitcase high over his head. He let it drop onto the second-floor landing and gripped both banisters, swinging his legs out from under him.
“Of course it’s safe.”
“There could be an earthquake.”
“Simon, just—cool it, okay?” Deb said. Kay watched her mother gallop down for the last of the bags. The stairs were bare wood and rounded at the edges, without carpet or rubber grips like the kind they had at school. When she turned she was face to palm with Simon’s open hand, black with dust.
—
In truth the house was worse than Deb had expected. Gary, who only ever used the place for fishing trips and painting, hadn’t mentioned any water damage, but from the base of the stairs, she’d already seen brown stains ringing the second-floor ceiling, shadows like something died up there.
From the porch the water was gray and glittering as the sun slumped low behind it. Dinner hour had settled onto the street: the clatter of silver and dishes, conversations drifting from open windows and mixing with the hum of crickets. Deb found something embarrassing in bearing witness to the ritual, the smells and sounds of families gathered together and eating.
There was nothing for them to do but eat, themselves.
—
She took the kids to a seafood restaurant a few blocks down the main strip, with outdoor seating and Christmas lights strung around. They stood staring at the menu: mussels and thirty-dollar lobster. The nicest place in town but nearly empty with high season still a few weeks away.
“Let’s do Chinese.” Simon pointed toward an orangey brick building.
Deb squinted. “I think that’s a bank.” Then she saw the sandwich board:
PEKING EMPIRE
The Empire took up only a corner of the building, which was otherwise ambiguously corporate. At the door they passed a locked freezer and a poster board advertising ice cream cones. Inside, pictures of food hung backlit above the register—the Seafood Delight, the Happy Family Special—the same photographs as at cheaper places they’d been to in the city. “Want to take it out by the water?”
“I could eat here,” Simon said.
Kay nodded yes, here.
So they stayed in, though it was clearly more of a takeout spot, with just the one table, a yellow fiberboard that pallored everything. Red tassels dangled limply from a television mounted to the ceiling. The reception was poor and they tried to guess at the movie. The food was like anything they could have ordered at home, which was what Simon and Kay seemed to like about it.
They walked back in the darkening with Popsicles the shapes of comic book characters, gumballs for eyes. To Simon they were leaving the mother ship, lo mein and Coca-Cola, comforts of home. He carried with him two spare cans of soda, fearing there’d be nothing at the house but tap. One fell as they came around a bend near their street, detonating and spraying the sidewalk, the hedges, his shirt.
“Whoopsy-daisy,” his mother said, in a funny mood. “And then there was one.”
—
The house had only three bedrooms, so the kids would share the one with twin beds. The overhead light had gone out, but luck struck yet again when Deb dug a pair of flashlights out from the supply closet under the stairs, one with batteries that worked.
Simon and Kay had never shared a room before, and when they got back it seemed they were sharing it with yet another hulking someone, the mass of Simon’s clothes heaped on one of the beds. Before dinner he’d unzippered his bag and dumped everything out in one piece, sandcastle tight.
He heaved himself onto the other mattress, thinking how stupid it was that, before leaving, he’d sent Elena a message and that now, in this stupid house, his phone was ou
t of network, and he could not get online. Let’s try to go without for a little while, his mother had said, like pioneers.
Kay shone the flashlight on the back of his head. “Where are you sleeping?”
“I don’t care.”
“You have to pick one.”
“I pick two.”
“Simonnnn.”
“Obviously I can’t sleep on both beds, Kay.” He bounced off the thin mattress and grabbed the flashlight from his sister, shining it onto his block of clothes, geological evidence of his packing order. An oak dresser in the corner waited to steep his clothes in its weird, rained-on smell. He wanted only to leave things as they were, to each morning excavate socks and underwear without ever upsetting the cube, sliding the empty case over it like a lid when this trip was finally over.
Instead he knocked the pile onto the floor. He flapped the sheets his mother had laid out over the mattress, not bothering with the corner parts, while his sister went out to change in the hall. By the time she came back, he was under covers, in the same clothes he’d put on in New York that morning, remembering what he’d written to Elena. He’d seen her the day before, sitting on the sandy dirt by the gym with Jared, when he was coming out of his geometry final.
His message had started:
heyhey. whats good?
“Simon?”
“What?”
“What are you thinking?”
“It’s not your business. Nothing.” heyhey. whats good? survive finals ok? what are u doing this summer? i’m gonna do some traveling, u? It was too many questions.
“Simon?”
“What, Kay? I’m trying to sleep.” He heard her turn away from him. Loudly he said, “I don’t know what you want,” though sort of he did. His sister wanted to talk about their parents, but Simon didn’t think there was anything to say. He couldn’t explain why he didn’t care, that there was something make-believe about all this that felt to her so real. He couldn’t explain how it was like they weren’t even there. Real life was his friends, school. He switched the flashlight off. A few minutes later, he switched it on again. He put it down on the floor between their two beds, pointed up at the ceiling, where it stayed on until morning.
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