“You brought a suitcase, so I guess that means what—that you’re planning to stay? I get to enjoy your company for more than just an afternoon?”
“For a few days, I thought.”
“That’s wonderful,” he says. “If I’d known you were coming . . .”
“Well, I couldn’t very well let you know when I didn’t even know you were here!”
“No, no. I’m not saying you should have. It’s just a surprise, is all. A very nice, wonderful, amazing surprise. Here, go through that door,” he says, motioning with his head. “Blix has the first and second floors.”
I feel like I have jet lag, even though technically I’m still in the same time zone. Maybe I’ve somehow gone into a kind of weird time warp. As we go into Blix’s living room, I’m struck by the parquet oak floors, the exposed brick walls, the light from the bay windows, the art everywhere. It’s beautiful, in a rundown, funky, Blixish way. I exclaim over it, and he says, “You want the tour? You’ve never been in a Brooklyn brownstone before, have you?”
“I’d love a tour.”
He keeps stealing little looks at me as he shows me around her apartment—the living room and two bedrooms are on the first floor, and the large eat-in kitchen is upstairs along with a study and a hallway and staircase leading to the roof. Also off that hallway, he tells me, is another two-bedroom apartment. A woman lives there with her son, he says. She’s quite attractive. Amazing curly hair, nice body. (He always has to comment on women’s bodies, because, he says, that’s what life is about: noticing the beauty around you.)
“There’s also a guy in the basement,” he says. “Sort of a recluse. Something wrong with his hands and face. Blix collected characters, you know.” He tilts his head charmingly. “Perhaps, now that I think of it, you were even one of them.”
Was I? “There’s so much light in here,” I say. The kitchen is astonishing, with two huge windows looking out onto all of Brooklyn—buildings, rooftop gardens, condominiums under construction blocks away. Outside I hear sirens, crashing sounds, voices, car horns.
“So, wanna go up on the roof?” he says. “We could grab a beer or something, and then maybe you can finally manage to explain why you’re here to see my old auntie who happens to be dead.”
“And you can tell me why you’re not still on your year-long stint in Africa.”
“Oh, well, Africa—that’s a very long, weird story of great bizarreness,” he says, opening the refrigerator, an old model, oval-shaped at the top and painted turquoise. Everything in this kitchen looks old and worn out and possibly hand-painted—a scarred wooden table in the center, and a countertop that runs along the wall—something that looks like it came from a French country kitchen around the turn of the century. The last century. There’s a soapstone sink in the corner and a gas range, little vases with dried weeds and flowers and half-burned candles sitting in saucers on every surface—and the walls are painted a wonderful off-red color, with white trim around the windows and cabinets. The floor is worn and scuffed in spots. There are dishes piled in the sink, and half-emptied cups of coffee on the table.
“I have plenty of time to hear it, and the more bizarre the better,” I tell him. He hands me a beer with some unfamiliar Brooklyn label, and points the way to the hallway and a steep stairway going up. He pushes the door open at the top, and suddenly we’re on an unlikely terrace, with planters filled with grasses at one end, surrounding a fire pit and a low table. There’s a gas grill pushed over toward the corner, and several padded wicker couches, a couple of chaise lounges, and a portable basketball hoop. I have to catch my breath. The view of Brooklyn’s skyline is kind of amazing. I can see rooftops all around me with gardens and water tanks. Big windows blankly looking back at me, catching the sun.
“How long have you been here?” I say.
“I’ve been here, ah . . . three weeks maybe?”
“Were you here when she . . . when she died?”
“Yeah. Although she would prefer we said when she made her transition.”
“I didn’t even know she was sick. I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you. Yeah. Me neither. Not until I flew in. And then I found out she was dying. She’d been sick for months, maybe even years without telling. But then once I was here, she wanted me to stay, to see her across, you know.” He opens my beer and then his own and puts the opener down on the table. “She was a funny one. Kept things like that a secret, I guess. Didn’t want sympathy. Of course she and I weren’t all that close as you know.” He looks around the rooftop and shakes his head. “She was always just my crazy Aunt Blix, saying such weird woo-woo stuff it was hard to pay attention to. But you never know, do you? What’s going to happen to the people you somehow belong to.”
“Odd that you, of all people, would be telling that to me.”
He laughs a little bit through his nose. “Okay. Fair enough.” He looks at me for a long moment, and I’m surprised to see how sad his eyes are. “You have every right to be pissed off at me,” he says. “That was a horrible thing I did to you, and I want you to know that I’ve kicked myself many times.”
I sit down on one of the wicker couches, feeling woozy. “Really? Have you now?”
“Well, let me clarify. I’ve kicked myself for the way I handled it.”
So there we have it. He’s not sorry he left. Just sorry for the way it went down. Nice.
He laughs again. “Please. Let’s don’t talk about this. It cannot lead to anything good.”
“So what happened with Africa? Why aren’t you still there? You had to dump Africa, too, did you?”
He grimaces a little at my joke. “Yes. Africa. Well.” He sits down on the couch across from me and starts peeling the label off his beer, the way he always used to do, and launches into a story that involves Whipple signing both of them up to teach music to schoolchildren as part of a fellowship he’d gotten, but then, as he puts it, bureaucracy happened. Whipple, in typical fashion, hadn’t filed all the papers they needed and after a long, drawn-out time of bobbing and weaving and trying to go through other channels, finally they got kicked out of the country.
“Same old Whipple bullshit,” he says with a sigh. “Fun but sketchy. For a month or so, we hid by traveling around, trying to keep from getting deported. But it was touch and go, and then . . . well, I decided I’d had enough, and—well, I figured I’d come back to the US, and I arrived here in Brooklyn just before Blix died. I think he’s still backpacking around trying not to get jailed.”
He’s silent, picking something off his shoe. Then he looks right at me, and my heart does a little unauthorized flip-flop.
“She liked you, didn’t she?” he says. “That’s why you’re here.”
I look down, suddenly shy. “Yeah, I think she did. She was nice to me.”
“I know. That horrible party at my mom’s. The way she stayed there talking with you the whole time. God, my mom was so pissed that you weren’t circulating! Neither of us circulated much, I guess. Did you know that’s a guest’s job according to my mom? Apparently you can’t just go and have a good time, you have responsibilities.”
“I think I’ve heard something along those lines.”
“Yeah, well—fuck that! I went off and played pool with Whipple because I couldn’t take listening to my mom and all her fakey-fake friends. And—didn’t something else bad happen?”
“Yeah. The Welsh rarebit situation.”
He throws back his head and laughs. “Ah, yes. My mom said you wouldn’t eat it due to some snobbish thing?”
“No, I wouldn’t eat it due to who knew what the hell it even was! We didn’t have such things at chez MacGraw in Jacksonville, Florida. You might have warned me, you know, that there’d be an exam on British culinary practices. But you weren’t anywhere around. I had only Blix to defend me.”
“So that’s when it all started,” he says absently. “That’s when the whole thing unraveled. Whipple and I were playing pool, and he started telling me about
his amazing fellowship and talking me into getting in on the act with him, and I was thinking about the need for one more big adventure. You were talking to my Aunt Blix outside in the snow, as I recall. And everything got set into motion.”
“That was it?”
“That was the moment.”
“So you’re saying that if we hadn’t gone our separate ways at that party, then we would have just had our regular wedding and you would have stayed with me? Because, I have to say, that is absurd, and you know it.”
“Well, who knows for sure?” he says. He looks right into my eyes. “All I want to say is that I did love you, you know. I really thought I wanted to get married.”
“Until you didn’t,” I say, and he laughs.
“Yeah, until I didn’t. My bad.”
“So are we to conclude that in the great scheme of things, I lost you but got your great-aunt?”
He puts his hands behind his head and looks up at the sky. “Maybe. Oh, hell. There’s a lot I regret, you know, when I think of her. Our family wasn’t very good to her. I tried to make it up to her at the end, but we never did really connect in a huge way, no matter how much I tried. She was always—well, you know . . . crazy.” He pauses. “Listen,” he says suddenly. “Want to grab some dinner? I haven’t eaten anything today but a peanut butter sandwich. I know this sweet little place on Ninth that’s got amazing burgers and stuff. Some local beers. Good people. Because as long as we’re both here, we might as well have fun, right? No hard feelings for all that bullshit that happened?”
I realize I haven’t eaten in a long time either. “Okay.”
“Are you really not so angry with me, then?”
“Not so much,” I say. “I think I’m having an Insufficient Anger Response, actually.”
“Yeah. You probably should be mad as hell. But I’m glad you’re not.” He stands up and stretches, giving me a view of his nice flat belly and low-slung jeans. It hurts, the deep long familiarity of him, the badassness of him, and finally I have to look away, so I take the last drink of my beer and look out at the lights of Brooklyn instead.
I am supposed to be here. I am supposed to be here. I take a deep, full breath of the new unknown. I should call Jeremy. I have so many feelings that I’ll have to sort out later.
“And hey, while we’re eating,” he says, “you can tell me everything that’s going on with you—and why you serendipitously showed up on Blix’s doorstep today.”
I guess that’s when it really hits me that he probably has no idea that Blix has left me the house. That thought arrives at the back of my neck first and works its way around to the front of my brain, rather like a bug making its way around a nerve-wracking circuitous path.
Just then, the door to the roof bangs open, and a kid who looks to be about ten years old, with a mop of pale hair and a huge pair of round black plastic glasses, comes charging onto the roof, dribbling a basketball and dancing all around. He leaps up onto the edge of a planter, but he doesn’t notice us until he’s making his last mental calculation, and when he does, he’s so startled that he doesn’t quite make the height he needs. The ceramic planter falls over and smashes on the ground, and dirt goes everywhere.
“Sammy, my man! What the heck you doing?” Noah says.
“Oh! Sorry!” The boy stops and looks instantly horrified.
“Nah, it’s okay. It’s just a planter. You scared me, that’s all.”
“I’ll clean it up.”
“No, go get a broom and dustpan, and I’ll take care of it. I don’t want you to get cut.” Noah turns to me. “This is Sammy, our resident lovable juvenile delinquent and breaker of pottery. His mom is Jessica, the one I was telling you about. And Sammy, this is Marnie.”
Sammy says hi to me, and pushes his hair out of his eyes, and then he runs off and comes back with the dustpan and the broom, and Noah and I get to work sweeping up all the shards while Sammy bounces his basketball over in the other corner of the roof. I keep stealing little glances over at him because he’s so adorable—like a serious little owl with good dance moves.
“Hey, Noah, guess what!” he calls after a few minutes. “My dad’s coming to get me tomorrow morning, and we’re going to Cooperstown for the weekend.”
Noah gives a fake growl. “What’s so great about Cooperstown? You don’t care about baseball or anything, do you?”
“Yes, I do! You know I do! And we’re gonna stay in a B and B and have pancakes for breakfast, and he said maybe there’s gonna be a pool.”
His mom appears just then. She’s thin and gorgeous and wearing jeans and a gray cardigan and she sighs a lot. She looks over at Sammy like any minute he might turn into something that’s going to disappear on her.
Noah introduces us—“Jessica, Marnie; Marnie, Jessica”—and she holds out her hand for me to shake.
“Oh, Marnie!” she says. “I’ve heard Blix talk about you! Oh my goodness, it’s so awful what happened—I miss her every single day.” She glances over at Sammy and lowers her voice. “He does, too. He adored her. There was nobody like her.”
Sammy is listening to us talk and dancing over by the fire pit, like a goofy bird ready to take flight.
“Sammy, it’s bath time, and you need to come in and get your stuff packed up,” she says. Her eyebrows are all knitted up in a frown. “Wait. Did you break this planter?”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“It was an accident,” says Noah. “No biggie.”
But she is clearly worried about Sammy being careless, and now he’s destroyed this planter that was Blix’s, and those were Houndy’s red geraniums planted inside, and everything, she says sadly, seems to be crashing to an end all around them—and right then, my phone starts buzzing in my pocket, and I would be so deliriously happy to be able to escape from this conversation except that when I look down at my phone, I see the faces of all my family members grinning and waving—all of them, plus Jeremy—wanting to FaceTime with me. It’s as though they’re suddenly right there on the rooftop with me.
I go tearing inside, down the stairs and into the hall and skidding into Blix’s kitchen before they can see where I am and—oh God—who I’m with.
“Hi!” I say, and there they all are, jockeying for position in front of their little screen: Natalie holding up Amelia, who is blowing bubbles—“Look, Auntie Marnie, I talks with spit!” Natalie crows in a baby voice—and my mother and father peeking in from the side, trying to ask me a million questions. All of them at once.
“Where are you right now?”
“Is that really Blix’s house? Show me the kitchen!”
“Is it old? It looks really old!”
“Don’t even tell me those walls are red!”
“You look tired, sweetie cakes. Bet you wish you could just come home!”
And Jeremy, last of all, smiling so winningly. “Are you having a good time? Do you like the house?”
I hear Noah coming down from the roof, and so I dash with the phone downstairs toward the living room and sit down on the floor, as far away from the window as I can get.
“Oh, yes, it’s lovely!” I say to Jeremy, and if my face is turning ashen or bright red, either one, I can only hope he doesn’t see in the dim light of the living room. From the kitchen, I hear Noah throwing our beer bottles into the recycling bin and whistling.
“We just wanted to make sure you’re all right, that you made it in and everything,” says my father. “Also, honey, just so you know: we’ve had a family meeting and we’ve decided to teach Jeremy the quadruple solitaire game tonight.”
“Yep, I’m in way over my head,” yells Jeremy from off camera.
“So how are you, sweetie?” says my dad.
“I’m fine. Nothing much to report as yet.”
My mother’s face now looms in the phone. “CAN YOU SEE ME, HONEY?”
“Yes, Mom! Yes, I see you just fine. I hear you, too.”
“So just tell us this much: ARE YOU GOING TO BE ABLE TO SELL THAT
HOUSE, DO YOU THINK?”
I look up then to see Noah standing in the doorway of the living room, his arms folded. And if I had thought he looked shocked when I was standing at the front door earlier, that’s nothing compared to how he’s looking at me right now.
TWENTY-TWO
MARNIE
So. Here we go.
When I hang up, Noah comes all the way into the living room, walking so deliberately it’s as though the floor might be made of pointy little rocks. His eyes are round and bright with shock. He sits down on the floor across from me and shakes his head.
“Okay, Marnie,” he says slowly, “why don’t you tell me what’s going on? What are you doing here?”
I swallow. “Oh God. It’s so confusing and complicated. I thought you knew what was going on, but—well, apparently your Aunt Blix left me this house when she died. You didn’t know that?”
“No, I didn’t know that! How was I supposed to know that?” He falls back against the couch and rubs his face briskly with both hands. “She left her house. To you. My ex. Oh my God. I can’t believe this.” Then he puts his hands down and stares at me for a long moment. “Why would she do this? To my mom?”
“I don’t know. I’m as shocked as you are.”
He gets out his phone and looks at it. “Oh, fuck. I’ve had the ringer off, and there are, let’s see, um, nine, ten . . . no, thirteen calls from my mom in the last day and a half. And three texts saying I’ve got to call her immediately.” He sighs and puts the phone back in his pocket. “And my mom doesn’t believe in texting. So this means she’s really desperate. Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck. What am I supposed to do?”
“Wait. Seriously? You don’t check your phone?”
“Correction: I check my phone, but I keep the ringer off because if I didn’t, I’d go crazy from my mother wanting to be in touch with me all the time. Trust me, this is only slightly more calls than I usually get from her. My policy is that I return about every fifth call.”
“Noah! What if something’s ever really wrong?”
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