He worked his own shift, overlapping with Dolores, not meeting her eyes. Afterward he went to the Evergreen but Beau bristled when he walked in, so he ordered a drink and sat at a table away from the bar, and left after just the one.
His headlights swept across his house. He killed them and watched Dolores through the living room window. She was bent over, busying herself with something on the couch, folding laundry maybe, but when he went inside he saw she was bent over a suitcase.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m not going to find Peter, if that’s your question.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
Dolores sighed. She sat down on the couch next to her neatly folded things, three pairs of shoes lined up on the floor waiting to be fitted into the corners of the suitcase.
“I just wanted to wait to say goodbye to you. I’m sorry for what happened. We should’ve put a stop to all this after one night, but we didn’t. We didn’t want to. But Alex, I don’t want a baby, especially not one that came from this summer. That makes me cruel, maybe. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth.”
She said she was going downstate to stay with her father for a time, and then she would figure out where she would go next.
Alex wanted to argue with her, but he couldn’t find the words.
The next day, she left him.
Alone in the house, he found his thoughts strayed to Peter. He was jealous, after all, that Peter had stolen his wife away—as though all this was Peter’s fault, the baby, and Dolores leaving. Or maybe he was just jealous that Peter had gone away from everything, returned to his old life. Alex also missed Peter, even while feeling jealous of him. The only time he felt like the better person in the room was when he was around Peter, and then not by much. Alex might not treat others as badly as Peter did—at least not as often, and not in the same way—but he seemed to understand the things Peter did. The jealousy might not be about Dolores at all; it was about the fact that Peter made the same mistakes as Alex but got away with them.
* * *
Then, appearing like a ghost when Alex first saw him, Peter returned to town in October. He was drunk when Alex found him on a bench outside the Evergreen, jacketless in the middle of the first snow, flurries accumulating on his shoulders and in his hair.
“Thank God it’s you,” Peter said. “Will you light the pilot light? It’s freezing in my house.”
Alex took Peter home and told him the gossip on the way. Peter didn’t flinch when Alex told him Dolores was gone. He hooted his congratulations when Alex said Beau was pregnant, and Alex mumbled that things were complicated.
His wife had kicked him out, Peter told Alex. He’d lost his job for being drunk in a meeting one too many times. His daughters hated him; their mother had poisoned them against him.
“It’s good to see a friendly face,” Peter said, squeezing Alex’s shoulder. “I knew coming up here was the right decision.”
By friendly, Alex knew, Peter meant simple—because this place had always been where he’d come to escape the difficulties of his life downstate. He’d never taken seriously the way life in Opal was difficult every day, too.
* * *
Alex hadn’t yet offered Beau money, hoping she would ask. This was how he had counted on staying near her, and like so much else, it hadn’t worked. When he finally walked into the Evergreen around Christmas and handed over part of his paycheck, Beau put down the mug she was drying, took the check, and studied the amount.
“I said not to,” she said.
“I know,” Alex replied. “But I need to. And now that it looks like Peter’s staying around all winter, I’ve got the extra income, working for him.”
Beau sighed. “He’s still here?”
Alex shrugged. “He doesn’t have anything else to do.”
“Well,” Beau said, holding up the check. “Thank you for this.”
Though Beau warmed a little, there was not even dust of how she’d acted before, when the affair had first begun, but at least Alex was less of an intruder in her day. She told him they were having a girl. He didn’t know what sort of father he should be (and Beau wouldn’t give him the answer), but Alex noticed the type of father Peter was. Far away, his girls were afterthoughts. Alex knew he had other choices. His own father had been well liked. Alex remembered him as distracted, prickly, but in the end, as his mother had told him, a good man.
* * *
Peter could reliably be found at the Evergreen, getting drunk as he talked with Beau about his girls when they were babies. The three of them spent most nights there together, before dispersing. Peter sometimes stayed in town with Alex if he was too drunk to get home.
“Little angels,” Peter said of his daughters. “When they were babies, at least, and they didn’t ask for anything in exchange for their love.”
One night Alex went to the Evergreen hoping to talk to Beau but found her already with Peter, pouring him drinks at the bar. Alex sat down next to Peter, who extended his hand for Alex to shake.
If Dolores hadn’t left—if like Alex’s, her father were dead and she had no other place but Opal—would she be here with them, too? A shadow of her followed Alex to the bar and sat a short distance away. Alex watched her flip her hair over one shoulder and pinch a bead of sweat from the bridge of her nose.
When Peter handed Alex a drink, Alex blinked a few times, so his eyes could latch on to the image of his wife, but Dolores was gone, and there was only Peter, talking loudly before him.
The three of them had fallen into some sort of life together, while Dolores had escaped. In a way, the relationships made sense to Alex: all their other attempts had failed. Or maybe Alex was making all this up, and Beau was serving Peter as she would any other customer, and Alex was just some man who had gotten her pregnant.
When Peter noticed Beau was making his drinks weaker the drunker he got, he grabbed the whiskey from her and tipped it generously into his glass. “You just can’t trust anyone these days, can you, Alex?” His face reddened under the bar light. Alex lit a cigarette. Someone opened the door, and the breeze blew the smoke off its eddy.
* * *
A little girl that Beau and Alex named Jan was born in early May, just as the earliest of the tourists were making their way up north to open up their cottages. Peter came to visit them in the hospital, and Alex snapped a Polaroid of him holding Jan in the chair beside the bed. When the fog on the photo cleared they all three huddled together to look at Peter’s washed out, overexposed face, smiling a tired and crooked smile, and Jan, looking forlorn to be a part of this world. Peter was drunk, Alex realized, when he inspected the queasy look Peter hadn’t been able to hide in the photograph.
Peter stood and stumbled. He doubled over and coughed into his knees; when he straightened his cheeks were dotted with broken blood vessels.
“Are you okay, Peter?” Alex asked. Beau was holding out her arms and Alex brought the baby to her.
“Just fine,” Peter said. “Bring her by the lake this week. We’ll dip her toes in.”
Alex turned to Beau when Peter had swung through the curtain of the shared room. He heard the last echo of Peter clearing his throat before the elevator pinged its arrival and took him away. Beau held the baby, her face gleaming, and with one finger she lifted all of Jan’s fingers, which opened and closed like a fan.
Alex brought a chair close to them. He put his hand on his daughter’s head. He thought he saw Beau smile. And he smiled, too. “This is something else,” he said.
Beau nodded slowly, not taking her eyes away from Jan.
“Beau,” Alex said. “This feels right. I want to be with you and Jan.”
Beau blinked, looked up—broken away, it seemed, from the private moment she’d been having with Jan. Alex’s heart sank.
“Oh, Alex,” she said, because they’d been over this before—more than once Alex had tried to hint at the idea of moving in with her, to help take care of the baby. He thought that being together, th
e three of them, would finally change Beau’s mind—but while the tiny, sweet baby was invited into Beau’s solitude, Alex was not.
* * *
Weeks went by before Beau seemed to trust Alex to be alone with Jan, and if he was being honest with himself, he felt it would take longer than that to grow comfortable with Jan himself. He was an only child; he’d never had anything to do with babies. But eventually Beau couldn’t stand it; she needed a break, so Alex took Jan to Peter’s to dip her toes in the lake.
She looked up at him with wide eyes while he buckled her into her car seat. Each time she fussed or let out a sob Alex’s mind went wild with anxiety because he was driving and could do nothing about it. But once they turned down Peter’s driveway, she became entranced by the dark and light pattern of leaves and sky outside the car window.
They walked slowly from the car to the house, Alex stopping to point out squirrels and spiders. Alex knocked on the door and waited, shielding Jan’s face from mosquitoes that flew around them, but when the swarm increased he could wait no longer for Peter to answer, and he went inside, brushing bugs from Jan’s legs and calling out for Peter.
He went out onto the front porch that faced the lake and searched the beach. He didn’t see Peter, and the boats hadn’t yet been brought down from the garage. He went back inside and found himself squarely facing Peter’s closed bedroom door. The door was never closed during the day. It was nearing noon.
Alex rapped his knuckles on the door. The sound of the fan could be heard through the door; the stale smell of smoke from Peter’s clothes reached Alex’s nose.
He opened the door and saw Peter lying on his bed, beneath the covers. Alex didn’t have to look closely to know he wasn’t breathing. The dread that he would find Peter dead had been growing in him as soon as he’d stepped across the threshold and had gotten no eager response from his friend.
“Peter,” he said. He leaned over Peter and touched his neck. Jan’s head dipped down toward Alex’s friend, and she whined, and Alex pulled her up abruptly. He rushed her from the room and stretched the phone cord in the kitchen as far away from the bedroom as it would go.
He held his baby while he waited for the ambulance. He cried silently, but Jan could feel the shaking and cried herself, too.
* * *
Peter’s body was taken downstate and his brother, a man named Jim, drove north to coordinate the sale of Peter’s cottage. Arranging for the exchange of keys and a rundown on the mechanics of the cottage was all Alex had to do with the end of Peter’s life. Before Jim drove away, Alex had thought he might tell Jim he’d been Peter’s friend, that he missed Peter, but Jim believed so completely that Alex was just a hired hand that Alex was too embarrassed to contradict him.
So with Peter’s death there was one fewer person left in Alex’s life—but with Jan’s birth there was one more.
Beau held a memorial for Peter at the bar. Though he’d frustrated her, he’d been a loyal patron and, she said, raising a glass to Alex, a friend to some.
“Thank you,” Alex said afterward.
Beau smiled and handed him their daughter.
* * *
There was still one thing weighing heavily on Alex: the question of whether or not Dolores would want to know that Peter had died. Peter’s death reminded him of the life they’d had, and lost, and also that they’d never divorced, not formally, and maybe he should talk to her about that, too.
He asked around at the bar, and finally Kevin found someone who was still in touch with her father, and from there Alex found her phone number.
He held Jan while the phone rang. Finally the receiver clicked, and he heard a cough—Dolores’s cough, she’d been a heavy smoker since they were teenagers, and he would know that cough anywhere—and then she said hello.
“Wow,” she said. “You know, I’ve been thinking about calling you—I wanted to ask you something.”
She launched into her question before Alex could tell her the news, which waited dumbly in his mouth while she recounted their honeymoon. They’d gone to the Upper Peninsula to see the Shipwreck Museum. It was the only place Alex could think to go, and in any case, all they could afford.
“What did that plaque say, the one I loved? About the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
Alex reminded her. She’d studied each display carefully and lingered on the description of the last radio transmission from the Edmund Fitzgerald. “We are holding our own,” the captain had said to a nearby ship minutes before the freighter disappeared from the radar.
“Oh right,” Dolores said. “I just love that. We think we’re doing great right up until the end.”
“Dolores,” Alex said. “Peter died.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. Finally, Dolores said, “Well, damn, he beat me to it. I was planning on haunting him.”
Alex laughed. “You’re okay? I wasn’t sure you’d want to know.”
“Alex,” Dolores said. “I’m okay with everything these days. And your timing is strange. I wasn’t sure you’d want to know. But I guess there’s no getting around it. I have lung cancer. Treatment’s not taking.”
“Dolores,” he said. “What do you mean, you weren’t sure I’d want to know?”
“You know,” Dolores said. “It’s a burden, knowing this kind of thing.”
“I’ll come down,” Alex said. “I’ll take you to a doctor. We’ll find the right treatment. We’ll go to the University of Michigan.”
At that moment Jan shrieked with laughter. Dolores said, “Is that your baby?” and of course at those words Alex saw how he couldn’t go be with Dolores—not anymore.
“I want to help,” he said feebly.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I had a good year down here. I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next.”
“Maybe you’ll see Peter soon,” Alex said quietly, but regretted it, and worried that Dolores would find it morbid or offensive that he spoke so plainly about her death.
But she laughed. “Yeah right. I’ll breeze by him on the way to the pearly gates. He’s probably still waiting in line, trying to bribe someone to get in.”
Alex laughed again. “He wasn’t that bad,” he said.
“No,” Dolores said quietly. “No, I guess not always.”
They passed a little more time on the phone, and when they hung up Dolores promised she would call again soon. Alex was reluctant to get off the phone, but he didn’t have anything more to say.
Alex had imagined the day Dolores would meet Jan. She’d be Aunt Dolores, and the baby would grow up knowing her. Now he would only have photos to show her, and maybe he wouldn’t even want to show those, because the pain would be too great. He could already imagine himself feeling guilty, because he’d survived and Dolores and Peter hadn’t. In a single year everything had changed, and just when he was trying to take control—by coming to terms with Peter and calling Dolores to bring her news and arrange a formal divorce—death was swooping in and solving his problems for him. He was alone with Beau and Jan.
His call with Dolores had been pleasant, and when Peter died he and Alex were the closest they’d been in years. So why did Alex feel like he’d gotten away with murder? As though he were a stone that kept skipping on water, while Dolores and Peter had plunged to the bottom. He wondered what everyone in town would say when the news came of Dolores’s illness, her death. About Peter, they seemed to remember only the bad things: Peter driving his car into a tree, Peter’s divorce, Peter on one of many of his drunken and foolish nights. And what would be remembered of Alex, himself, when his time came? He understood now why Beau never corrected the gossip that she was a lesbian. When the talk was true, there was nothing left but the person Alex was. And what he’d tried to do right, well, none of it had counted.
III
Lungs
It’s at the after party of a silent auction in Newark that I see the man from the sushi restaurant again, the one whose friend had just died and for whom I hadn’t been ab
le to muster any empathy. He looks the same now as he did then: red spring jacket, tired eyes, neat black hair parted over to one side. Very young.
I’ve come to the party with my downstairs neighbors, two Danish artists named Per and Thora. Per had a painting on auction that sold for peanuts. Thora is seven months pregnant with twins, and in the evenings, before Per gets home from his art handling job at a warehouse in Newark’s South Ward, where one of the big museums in Manhattan stores some of its collections, Thora and I have a glass of wine (I usually finish Thora’s for her). She’s asked politely what happened between me and Ralph, and I’ve demurred. I’ve said the expected things: it wasn’t meant to be, it just didn’t work out, we were tired of living the way we’d been living. None of these things is untrue, but none of them gives any details, either, and they sound as though I’ve reflected at least a little bit on the dissolution of my ten-year relationship. So, they do the trick. Per comes home, and sometimes he asks me if I’ve been writing, and I admit I haven’t been writing, and he smiles and says, “Artists need to rest.”
“You can say that,” I tell him, “because you’re prolific.”
The party is on Market Street, behind what used to be a storefront that’s now an empty event space. The scene could be a disbanded AA meeting: metal folding chairs scattered around, Styrofoam cups (filled with wine instead of coffee), and a general feeling that some people have embraced the party and others would rather be anywhere else. We’re the oldest people here. At least Per and Thora look cool. Per’s wearing a tailored white button-down, and Thora’s draped in loose, flowing linen. I look like what I am: a paralegal for an entertainment lawyer in Manhattan. A cardigan and flats.
Thora and I perch on the circumference of a small number of dancers who move beneath red spotlights strung up in every corner. Thora sips a little wine, and I sip a little more liberally and press the cup to my lips. When Thora puts her hand on her belly I pull it away and smile at her—she asked me to stop her if she ever assumes the “pregnant pose.” She doesn’t want to look like a Madonna. We sway back and forth to the music, a remix of something I don’t know, but our eyes are on Per on the dance floor.
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