The Lemonade Year

by Amy Willoughby-Burle

  He raises one brow at me and waits, but I stay silent.

  “She actually apologized for not being honest about him sooner,” Ray said. “I told her I didn’t blame her. I mean I pretty much vanished into thin air and then reappeared in the pen. Then I popped out of there and into a black hole. Sort of like that guy from Quantum Leap, but without the sidekick to help me get home.”

  “I love that show,” I say, smiling at the memory.

  “Me too,” Ray says, his voice suddenly soft.

  We look at each other like the kids we used to be. There’s a knock on the door. Ray retrieves the pizza and returns to the couch. We each take a slice and eat. There is silence for a moment. It’s comfortable for once.

  “So, what happens now?” I reach for a second slice.

  “She wants to get together to talk,” Ray says.

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “You know that feeling you get when you almost die in a terrible car accident, but don’t?” He takes a big bite of food.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s how I feel,” he mumbles.

  Me too, lately.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Lola was nine when the world stopped spinning. We were like steps down a landing: Ray, weeks away from sixteen; me, twelve; and Lola at the bottom, nine years old. I remember it like the blur of her paintings, only with shots of clarity like thunderclaps and flashes of light that exploded and whizzed down like tiny missiles going nowhere.

  We had cotton candy whirled high on a paper stick and no idea that life could change in the tiny moment between one heartbeat and the next. Every year the town closed down a few streets and set up a Fourth of July fair. We were set loose on the night and lost in its magic. Ray led us in and out of the crowd, away from our parents, calling back that just a few streets over we could see where they were launching the fireworks from the park.

  Cautious and scared as ever, I didn’t want to go past the orange cones and street blockades. Ray huffed at me and turned his attention to our little sister.

  Lola will come with me, then.

  She looked back at me, and I shook my head.

  Come on, Lola, one more street over and you can see how they set them off.

  I yelled out for them to come back, but I was no match to big brother.

  Lola, don’t be a baby. Come with me. Keep up.

  Then they were out of sight. I ran after them, passing beyond the orange traffic barriers, catching a glimpse of Lola’s hair. The fireworks reflected off its shiny blackness, making it look like a Technicolor halo.

  Boom, whiz.

  Ray was outrunning her, and in her effort to catch up, she wasn’t watching the street around her. I got close enough to reach out and grab her, but I didn’t. I just let her run. She wanted so much to be with him—her big brother.

  Boom, whiz.

  Ray sprinted across the street, and she leaped onto the pavement after him.

  Boom, whiz.

  Brakes squealed, but not before Lola was clipped at the legs and broken. Ray heard the screeching of the world on its axis and turned back to see what he had done. The part that stands out so clearly to me was Lola’s head thudding on the pavement and the blank expression on her little face.

  All else is a running together of emergency vehicles and mayhem. Mom stumbling and crying, Dad not being able to save her from the combination of grief and gin, and Ray just being gone.

  Dad’s voice shouted over the sirens. Where’s Ray? Where’s Ray? He wouldn’t leave with the ambulance. He wouldn’t leave without Ray. He kept me with him to search while Mom went away with the EMS team. When we found Ray, Dad held his hand behind him in a gesture that meant for me to stop short and I did. There was Ray, his knees folded up against his chest, hiding in the crook of two buildings whose sides didn’t quite meet.

  I’ve never seen such a look of terror and torment in a person’s eyes as I saw in Ray’s that night. Dad kneeled down in front of him, and even though I tried to, I couldn’t hear what passed between them in the darkness. Ray shook his head and closed his eyes. Dad put his hand on Ray’s arm and helped him stand up. When Ray opened his eyes and stepped forward, he looked to me like a shell of a boy being led by the arm. I imagined that if I spoke loudly into his ear, my voice would echo around in his body, rattle inside his empty chest cavity, and come back out his mouth.

  I think Ray is still folded up in that alley, waiting for the shell boy to let himself be forgiven.

  15

  A few days later, Ray calls saying that he needs me to come over. I was supposed to see Oliver for lunch, but I use Ray’s request to buy some time to think. Jack still has me rattled, and when I’m with Oliver, I can’t see past those eyes and lips and my mind is too easily clouded by his smile and the easy way he has about him. I’m trying to be practical, and Oliver makes that hard to do.

  When I get to Ray’s door, I find that I’m afraid to knock. I fear his place will look like the set from a psycho stalker movie—takeout boxes littering the floor, the TV tuned to static, the room drenched in darkness, and Ray with three-day stubble, sitting in a folding chair by the window, face like stone, holding up binoculars fixed out at the park in the distance.

  I take a deep breath and knock.

  “Ray,” I call though the door. “It’s Nina.”

  I hear rustling and shuffling, and I figure he’s scooting the chair back from the window and tossing a couple of little paper boxes in the trash. He opens the door.

  “Thanks for the warning,” he says and smiles. “It gave me enough time to put away the binoculars.”

  I must look terrified, but he just rolls his eyes and ushers me in.

  “That’s not what I thought,” I lie, though I am relieved to see that his apartment does not, in fact, look like a set from a psycho stalker movie. He’s unpacked the boxes, although they are still lying around the apartment. “Did you need something?”

  “Can’t a brother invite his sister over for a visit?”

  I raise my eyebrow at him.

  “And, yes, it is what you thought.” He goes to the kitchen, I assume, to get a beer from the refrigerator. “Don’t look at your watch,” he calls to me. “It’s after 5:00.”

  I hate that he knows my suspicions. I hate that I have them. I sit down on the couch, and he sits in the chair beside it. He has two beers with him and hands one to me.

  “Come on,” he says and opens one. “I got a nice dark one. Have a drink with your brother.”

  “Thanks.” I hesitate to drink and Ray catches it.

  “I can drink a beer and not turn into Mom,” he says, putting his feet up on the coffee table. “Besides, it’s the way I keep in focus.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You know what I mean,” he calls me out on it. “You do it too. Maybe not with beer, but you do it.” He takes a swig of beer and tilts his head at me.

  “Do what?” I ask, but I know. Ray and I have never talked about this. I guess it’s about time.

  “Tell me what your trick is.” He puts his feet back on the floor and inches forward in the chair. “To remember that it’s all a game. That you’re just playing along.”

  Ray and I are not so different. I could have guessed all these years that part of what kept him whole was also what tore him apart. I find it hard to answer Ray. Hard to let anyone in.

  “Nothing,” I say and scoot over on the couch a bit, as if the extra inch or two away from him will save me from this conversation.

  “Open a door once in a while, Nina.” Ray sits back again, clunking his feet on the table once more.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Let somebody in. Let yourself out. You pick.”

  “I tried that,” I say. “It didn’t work out so well for me.”

  Ray whips around to look at me, then
shakes his head. I think he’s annoyed with me, but I’m not the object of his disapproval. He sets his beer down and raises his hands in frustration.

  “I’m a jerk,” he says. “You’re talking about Jack?”

  I nod. “It’s ok.”

  “No, it isn’t,” he says. “Come on, Nina, do your thing. Tell me I’m a jerk because in that moment right there, I forgot about your marriage ending. Here I am, talking about wanting to win my family back, and you’re sitting there on the other side of a divorce.”

  “What do you mean ‘do my thing’?” I say, stuck on that part. “I have a thing?”

  “And you know what else?” he says. “When I was so eager to tell you about Michael and drag you over to the park to look at him, I forgot that you’d been trying to have to another baby and you can’t and here one just falls in my lap and I’m rubbing him in your face.”

  “You’ve been away,” I say, trying to take the blame off him. “It wasn’t part of your world.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” he says, and thumps himself on the chest. “Now bless me out about that. I wasn’t here. It wasn’t part of my world. The only way I even know about any of this is through the family grapevine at Dad’s freaking funeral. You weren’t part of my world. But you should have been.”

  “Is that really my thing?” I ask, focusing now on his comment. “To bless people out?”

  “Yes,” he says, pumping his fist up like I should be glad of it. “That’s how you do it. That’s how you remember.”

  “By being a jerk?” I ask disheartened. “Really?”

  “By being real,” he says, his voice calm and steady. “You don’t let anyone get away with anything. You’re the voice in my head, you know.”

  “Don’t blame your insanity on me.”

  “You think it’s Lola,” he says, looking me in the eye. “You think she’s what keeps me straight. She is, in a way. But you—you follow me around like one of those devil and angel things on my shoulder. I hear you all the time. You’re all I heard when I was locked up. ‘I told you so,’ you said. ‘You better cut the crap when you get out and do better than this,’ you said.” He mocks my voice and facial expressions. It’s actually sort of funny.

  “I would never say ‘cut the crap.’”

  “Maybe you should.” He smiles at me. “You’re funnier than you think you are. At least in my head, anyway.”

  I’m so taken aback by this revelation I could cry. I had no idea Ray felt that way. I knew I was hard on him. I just didn’t know that he needed me to be.

  “I didn’t stay just because of Michael,” Ray says and looks toward the window. “I stayed because of you. Because your voice in my head if I had run off from my kid? It would have destroyed me.” He looks at me, and his eyes are moist. Mine start to sting, too.

  “I don’t know him yet,” he says. “But now that I’m here and I see what could be, I’m ashamed at not having listened to you all those times before. What else could have been different? Everything.”

  I can’t speak. Forcing sound from my throat right now would cut the threads between us.

  He leans forward and brushes a tear off my cheek, like we might survive this after all. I take a couple of sips of my beer to try to wash the lump down my throat.

  After a while I’m able to talk.

  “Have you heard from Nicole?” I ask.

  Ray picks up his beer and leans back in his chair. “We went out to dinner last night,” he says. “She hasn’t told him yet, though. Who I am, I mean.”

  “Give it time.”

  “I will,” he says. “I’m used to doing time.”

  I chuckle and then look at him to check his reaction. He’s smiling at me so I know it’s ok. I’m giddy with this new closeness to Ray. I feel included in Lola’s secret world with him. I’m not going to push buttons today—not about all those years ago, not about his drinking and self-destruction, not even about this reckless attempt to be close to the son he didn’t even know he had. Today, I’m going to enjoy what I’ve missed all these years. My brother. Today I’m going to see what might have been.

  “At work, I see how all the other men have framed photos of their family on their desks. I want that. I think I might have a shot at it,” Ray says, talking more than I’ve ever known him to.

  “I think you do.”

  “I don’t want to be the screwup,” he says. “It’s just that I’m good at it, and hey, people like to do what they do well.”

  “Tell me about dinner,” I say.

  “I remembered she likes Indian food, so I suggested we meet at Chai Pani,” he says.

  “I thought you hated spicy food.”

  “I do. But that was part of the point. She knows I don’t like it, so she knew I was there for her.”

  “What did you guys talk about?”

  “I asked her why she told me about Michael,” Ray says. “She said he’d started asking about his dad, and she thought she would give me a chance to be the person he’s asking about. I told her she might be making a leap of faith there.”

  “Is there any other kind?” I ask. “Was Michael there?”

  “No,” Ray says. “But she’s going to bring him by.”

  “That’s great, when?”

  “In about five minutes,” Ray says, sitting up like he’s ready to grab me when I try to flee. “Please stay. I need you here.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I ask.

  There’s a knock on the door.

  “They’re early,” Ray says, his eyes widening as my mouth gaps open.

  Ray opens the door and lets them in, and it’s the most awkward hello I can imagine. Nicole nods to me. Ray moves to hug her, but she steps back. She steps forward again to receive the hug, but Ray steps back. They dance around again, and I finally stand up.

  “Come in,” I say, not sure if I should greet Michael or let Nicole introduce him.

  Ray and I move aside to let them in, and they stand in the middle of the living room like people who have found themselves somewhere they didn’t mean to be.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” Ray says because that’s what people say, not because he thinks they can.

  Nicole and Michael sit on the couch, and I take the chair next to it. Ray just stands there.

  “It’s nice to see you again, Nicole,” I say. “I had just popped over to see Ray, and he said you were stopping by. I can go if you’d like.”

  “Please stay,” Nicole says a little too emphatically.

  I look at Michael as he clings to his mother’s pants. Ray and Nicole make eye contact, break it, look again. Ray sits down beside them, but not too close. No one seems to know how to start a conversation.

  “I like your place,” Nicole says. “You didn’t tell me you moved to this side of town.”

  “I was lucky to find anything at all,” he says.

  I’m sure he’s picked up the real meaning of her words—“this side of town” translates to “so close to us.” I figure he’s trying to chalk it up to the luck of the classifieds, but it comes out sounding more like the truth than he means it to.

  “Well,” she says.

  I know she wants to finish that thought with a much deserved “Whose fault is that?” but she doesn’t. Nicole is classy like that.

  She stuck out from the group Ray ran with like that much-talked about sore thumb. She was too smart, too motivated, too good for that group. She used to tell Ray that he was too smart to be hanging around with such losers, and he would tell her that she was hanging around them, too. She said hers was a problem of situation and that his was an act of intention.

  See, too smart.

  Dad had high hopes for Nicole and Ray. He saw her as a life jacket but feared Ray would be too stubborn to grab onto it. I think she loved Ray, but love can only stand so much.

  “I got
a good job now,” Ray says.

  “Really,” Nicole says. It’s not sarcastic. It’s like she’s checking something off a list. She’s got criteria that she’s holding Ray up to, and she’s pleasantly surprised to see that he’s met a goal already.

  “It’s in the computer department of that graphic design firm down the street,” Ray says. “One of the reasons I wanted to be in town here. Easy to get to work.”

  That’s a lie, but if it makes him look a little less desperate and scary, it’s one worth telling. Ray would call it luck that he got that job. Dad would have deferred to divine intervention. Given the circumstance, I’d have to agree with Dad. Ray’s parole officer had arranged for the interview with a company whose president was someone the parole officer had known back when they were both younger and going to AA. Someone who knew about second chances. Someone who would make sure Ray understood the importance of trying again.

  Ray is talking about his job and what he does all day, and I find myself using the opportunity of being forgotten for a moment to steal glances at Michael. I want to look full on at him, to study his features and memorize the way he moves, but I don’t want to seem too needy.

  “Mommy,” Michael says, and it’s the first time I’ve heard his voice. “I’m bored. How long are we staying?”

  Nicole gasps in that embarrassed mother sort of way. “Michael,” she says. “Don’t be rude.”

  Ray jumps up from the couch. “It’s ok,” he says, “I’d be bored too. I have some toys you can play with. Come see what I got.”

  Michael follows Ray down the hall, and Nicole and I are left alone.

  “I’m real sorry about your dad,” she says. “I always liked him. I wish Michael had gotten to meet him.”

  “Thanks. I wish he had, too.”

  Nicole picks at a string that’s loose from the couch and looks nervously around the room.

  “I’m assuming you know that Ray is Michael’s father,” she says. “I’m also guessing that you didn’t just pop by. Ray asked you to be here when I came over? Yes?”

  She meets my eyes, and I smile a small confirmation.

  “Evidently,” I say. “He’s just nervous. I know how crazy this will sound, but give him another chance.”