She nods and passes the joint to him.
“How’d you manage to get this?”
“Let’s just say I have my ways.”
He leans closer, whispers in her ear, “I like your ways.” He kisses her neck. Her body shivers, but she shakes the pleasure away. When they have finished the joint, she drops the roach on the ground.
“You’re really not going to tell me where you got it?”
“Well…,” she says.
“So secretive, Alison.” He twists a strand of her hair around his finger.
“It’s no big deal, really. Edwin gave it to me.” She says it like it is the least interesting fact in the world.
“Oh,” he says, stiffening. “Well, lucky us. We’ll have to thank him.” He pulls her hair away from the back of her neck and kisses her again.
“I have to go,” she says. She pecks him, quick and delicate, on the lips.
“Come on, why don’t you—”
“Shhh,” she says. She is the star in a script she knows by heart. “Later. I’ll find you.”
She begins to walk away, but he holds on to her hand.
“Where?” he asks.
She smiles coyly. “I promise.”
DOES ALISON seem awful to you? I admit that, as I channel my sister, I sometimes have an urge to shake her. I find her incessant judginess toward our parents and her fellow resort guests self-righteous and bratty, especially the judgments she renders on the blond boy, who is practically her double: bright, privileged, attractive, and tasteful enough to know to be self-deprecating about such things. Equally frustrating is the way she exempts Edwin and Clive from her judgment. How desperate she is for their approval, their special attentions, how badly she needs them to know that she is more than, better than, all the basically decent people from her world.
What I can’t figure out: Was Alison insufferable in a perfectly ordinary teenage way, or was something darker at play? Was her behavior typical or troubling? What destiny lay ahead of her as she toyed with the blond boy and danced at Paulette’s Place and swam out beyond the black rocks in the rain-swelled surf? Who was she?
AS THE eggplant-colored Vauxhall Astra (how she loves that name!) rumbles down Mayfair Road, she sees her last night on Saint X spread above her like a sky dense with stars. She feels the night’s promise in the itch of the upholstery against the backs of her thighs and in “Boombastic” blasting from the radio. She wears a turquoise halter top and a short jean skirt; she is an island girl, flying away from Connecticut at the speed of light. I think I’ll stay in tonight. Honestly, Nika? These campus parties just feel very tame to me lately.
It is hot inside Paulette’s Place. Sweat gleams on skin. “Buy me a drink,” she tells them. She takes a shot of rum, then another, and struts onto the dance floor. She sways her hips and presses up against Edwin, then spins away to uncertain Clive, back and forth. Irresistible. She sees herself from outside herself, from somewhere up in the mantle of stars, like the story of her life is already burned in light and she has only to navigate by it to make herself into herself.
Once Clive is a few drinks in he is not so hesitant. When she dances with him, he holds her hips.
“Check you out, Goges!” Edwin hoots.
Clive grins.
She winks at Edwin and moves in closer to Clive.
His hands, so clumsy and searching, stir something in her. As they dance, his eyes wander from her breasts to the floor to Edwin to the ceiling, never settling anywhere, as if looking at any one thing too long is just asking for punishment. An image comes to her, a baby boy with damp black curls and eyelashes to the horizon.
It’s then she understands. It isn’t only Edwin she wants. It is the two of them together, the power of two men so different from each other, and all eyes on her. They will dance a few minutes longer, and then she will say, “Let’s get out of here.” They will go to some deserted beach, or they will sneak into an unoccupied hotel room at Indigo Bay, or maybe they will only make it out behind Paulette’s, to the scruffy patch of sand and grass at the edge of the parking lot, hidden from view by an old junked van. Things with Edwin will reach their natural conclusion. Even as she does it, she will be telling Nika, It was pretty good. Not, like, earth-shattering or anything.
Then she will turn her attention to Clive. She will push onto her tiptoes and kiss him on the mouth. He will surprise her. She will expect him to be timid and awkward, but he won’t be. He will hold the back of her head and kiss her hard, so that the whole weight of him is contained in his kiss. He will take her ponytail and squeeze it in his fist like a rag. He will take her hand and thrust it down his pants. The more afraid she feels, the more she will want it.
He will lay her down on the ground. The stars will wheel overhead, fine and white, and in them she will see herself, years from now, looking back at her as she is in this moment, beautiful and reckless as a young woman ought to be. She will have this night forever. She will carry it like her scar, a thing she can always feel, even when she isn’t touching it. He will move over her like she isn’t precious at all, like he is barely aware of her beneath him. She will feel so small in his arms, and she will like this so much it will suck the air out of her—the way she disappears, the way she becomes nothing at all. She will finally feel like she is in this place without herself, and maybe that is all she ever wanted, for her little life to vanish right out from under her.
She will stare into the sky. The stars will rush at her across time and space like spears. They will slash her up with their cold white light.
I didn’t have sex for almost a year after she died. At first I didn’t want to. Next to Alison, the girls at college were so mind-numbing. I’d go to parties and they’d be wearing all this makeup and this perfume or fruity shampoo or whatever makes them smell like that, and while they were talking to me they would pose and giggle like it was an audition, and it made me feel dead.
Later I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I’d go back to a girl’s dorm room and she’d light a vanilla candle or something, and all of a sudden I just had to get out of there. The girl would be embarrassed and hurt and insulted. She’d say, “Did I do something wrong, Drew?” I’d pull on my pants real quick and bolt. I’d go back to my apartment, which was a real shithole I shared with these guys I’d ended up living with, and drink beer and play Mario Kart until four A.M. I haven’t kept up with any of those guys. I can’t. I thought Alison was the love of my life and she was dead and that was it for me.
But things changed. Alison changed. With time, she stopped being this guilty conscience or this barrier or whatever she was. She became a way of … opening up, I guess. I told Shannon about her after two months, in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. I told Anjali after only two weeks, when we snuck away from a friend’s housewarming party. I’d tell the girls about Alison and they’d tell me about their mother’s drinking, or their brother’s depression, or being bullied.
I told Hayley after three months, on a road trip to her cousin’s wedding in Cleveland. After I told her, she stroked my arm and said, “You poor thing.” I drank too much at her cousin’s dumb wedding. I got loud and obnoxious with her blowhard father. I spent the rest of the night puking into the toilet at the Best Western. Hayley stayed awake all night taking care of me and the next morning she sucked apologies from me and I gave them to her, tail between my legs. I did behave badly. It would take a few more months for me to admit to myself that I hated her; I’d hated her from the moment she stroked my arm in the car like that.
With Rachel, I waited almost a year. I didn’t want her to feel like she had to compete with my murdered high school sweetheart. When we got married, Alison changed again. She became a past I was ready to leave behind. A ghost I no longer invited inside. We’re divorced now, but that was about other things. She wanted kids, I thought I did but changed my mind. “But don’t you want to see who we’d make?” she’d say, like she thought it could only end well.
Sometimes I can’t help i
t. Alison forces her way back in and I start litigating the whole thing all over again. She had a temper, no doubt about it. I think about how riled up she could get about things that were, I don’t know, just the world being the world. Like when Nick cheated on Becca and Alison slapped him. Or that teacher, I forget his name, but he had this policy where if you were late he shut the door, and if there was a test, tough luck, you failed, and once this kid Paul, this poor fucking fat kid everybody gave a hard time, I think he was probably gay, too, and this was before you could be, he showed up late on test day and this teacher wouldn’t let him in, and she went off on him. The star student challenging the teacher in front of the whole class. The rest of us sat there slack-jawed. She thought everything was her business, I guess is what I’m saying. I’ll think about that and wonder if maybe it got her into trouble. Maybe she stuck her nose where it didn’t belong.
But I don’t spend nearly as much time thinking about this stuff as I used to. Alison’s death is a mystery like God or Stonehenge or intelligent life in the universe—if you aren’t careful, that shit will consume you, and in the end you’ll still be no closer to solving it. I’m thirty-seven years old, and if I’ve learned anything it’s that you can live a pretty decent life without unpacking life’s mysteries.
SARA
IN HIS YEARS DRIVING A TAXI, Clive has observed that there are two kinds of passengers. First, there are those who ignore him. They spend the ride as if they are alone. They may make telephone calls about sensitive matters. A few times he has heard about the merger between two large corporations, or the resignation of the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, before the news appears in the papers; I could have been a wealthy man ten times over with all the insider knowledge I’ve overheard, if I had any money to invest to begin with, hahaha—he’s heard this joke a few times around the garage. In his presence customers have called divorce attorneys (“I want him fucked, do you understand me? I want him fucked so hard his head spins.”) and parents with dementia (“Mommy, I need you to listen to Nurse Jen, okay? Can you do that for me, Mommy?”). They may belch or pick their noses in the backseat, and they will not be surreptitious about it, for to these customers, the taxi is that rarest thing: a private enclave in the midst of the city. In his backseat he has seen grown men sob. A teenage girl hold up a small hand mirror to pop her zits and scowl hatefully at her reflection. A father slap a son across the face.
Then there are those who talk to him, seeking, he supposes, the wisdom that films and television shows have taught them to expect from taxi drivers. These passengers unburden themselves to him of their darkest shames. Affairs, addictions, a stepdaughter’s birthday forgotten. To these passengers, the taxi driver is priest, the rider penitent.
Ultimately, though, these types are not as different as they seem. Both those who ignore him and those who entrust him with their most precious secrets do so because, in the end, he is no one to them.
It used to be that when he came home after his shift he could leave these people behind, but the neighborhood is changing. Last year, a white family moved into his building, a couple with a green-eyed, black-haired little girl, Maeve. It won’t be long before somebody opens a wine bar nearby. Before too long, one of those food halls might open in Flatbush, and maybe the Little Sweet will have a stall there. The white family in the building are polite and very friendly and at first it seemed there were some advantages to their arrival. When the boiler broke last winter, it was fixed within forty-eight hours; the white family, it turned out, had called 311 about it, he’d overheard them chatting with a neighbor in the vestibule, the neighbor explaining that in the past they’d gone as long as two weeks without heat, the white couple expressing outrage at the landlord’s tenant treatment. But now his roommate Cecil calls the family the 311s, because they have also called on more than one occasion to lodge noise complaints, leading to police visits. “Why can’t they just knock on a door?” Cecil grumbles, though he must know the answer to this question, as Clive does. They are afraid. Not afraid that their black, foreign neighbors pose a threat to their safety, but afraid that a confrontation will mean losing the approval they feel they’ve earned with their “Good morning”s and their “Let me get that for you”s. He remembers something Edwin used to say: Nice is some real fuckery.
So he knows what this girl, Emily, is doing at the Little Sweet. After all, she’s not the only white kid who’s become a regular recently. There is also the man with the sketch pad. (What is he drawing? Clive wonders. Scenes of locals in their natural habitat?) It’s not enough for them to live here, to overrun every last space—they need everyone else to be happy about it, too. Every time he catches himself enjoying her company, he reminds himself that’s what he is to her. Her local friend. Her badge of approval.
But the more time he spends with her, the more he forgets to remind himself. She is such an odd girl, so young to be so alone in the world. Some evenings, looking across the table at her pale hair, skin, lips, a disquieting notion washes over him: She is not real. She materializes each night so that they may speak, then melts back into the city, dissolving into the salt-whitened streets.
She may be trouble. Funny—from the time he was a child, he has always thought of himself as a person who avoids trouble and complication at all costs. Yet the facts of his life tell a different story. Sometimes he wonders if it is his fate to be controlled by people with the tug of stars, to let himself be pulled into their trouble again and again and learn nothing from it.
WHEN THEY were sixteen and seventeen, Edwin and Clive and the rest of their class graduated from Everett Lyle Secondary School, all of them except Arthur, who had dropped out a year prior and who, as everybody save his sweet father knew, was into some serious shit by then. He could be found many nights loitering outside the bars and discos around Hibiscus Harbour, sometimes dealing to the tourists, sometimes looking to score. Damien, always the most diligent among their friends, continued his schooling; he would do well on his A-levels, receive a local scholarship, and go on to study biology at the University of the Virgin Islands. His picture would appear in the island newspaper, along with those of the other students from their form who would be attending college off-island, bound for Saint Thomas, Barbados, Miami, Washington, D.C.
“You better not come back all assified,” Don would tell Damien when they gathered to see him off.
“I’m right behind you outta here, Doc,” Edwin would say.
The rest of them found work. Don got a job in his uncle’s auto repair shop. Des, good with boats like his brother Keithley, scored a gig aboard a party boat that took tourists—mostly American college students on spring break—for all-you-can-drink tours up and down the island’s south coast. The boat had a dance floor, and the nightly tour included a dance competition in which a dozen or so girls vied for the prize of coupons for five free drinks at Papa Mango’s. Often as they danced, the girls shed their clothes—flinging their tank tops into the crowd, sliding their panties down their legs. Des had been at the job a month when he confessed to his friends that there might be such a thing as too much pum pum. After four months, a naked woman was nothing to him. He would look at the girls flaunting their hips and breasts and feel an emptiness like water.
Despite his grandmother’s disapproval, Clive joined Edwin in pursuing what Edwin referred to as his “business ventures.” It was not uncommon for them to have four or five such ventures going at any one time. They started an agency doing paperwork for charter boats on the cheap. They went to Philipsburg, on the Dutch side of Saint Martin, stocked up on Guess jeans, and resold them in the Basin. They went out into the shallows of Britannia Bay at midnight and hunted sea crayfish, which they sold by the pound to the restaurant at the Oasis. “Nobody ever got rich working for somebody else,” Edwin was fond of saying, as they hefted enormous trash bags filled with jeans through the streets of Philipsburg, or when Clive got his hand snipped by a crayfish at two A.M. They were earning a pittance, less than any of their friends,
but Edwin was certain it was just a matter of time before they stumbled on the right idea, at which point they would finally have the cash to “make a big move,” which Clive understood meant leaving—for the States, for New York, someplace with a stage grand enough for his friend’s ambitions.
His life took on a familiar shape. He worked during the day. At night, he and his friends drove to wherever they were liming that night. (Officer Roy pulling them over with some regularity and tossing them in jail for the night to sober up.) When he arrived home, he stumbled into bed and slept until his grandmother swatted him awake, and then the whole thing began again.
He was nineteen the day Edwin did something that would change his life forever. It was Carnival. They had spent the afternoon at the Grand Parade along Investiture Boulevard, watching the revelers and passing a bottle of rum among themselves, cheering when their favorite local band went by on a truck with speakers blaring, catcalling Miss Island Queen with her silly crown. As the festivities wound down, they spotted Sara and her friend across the parade route.
“Your girl’s looking fine today!” Des said.
“Check she out, dressed like a sket,” added Don.
Sara Lycott was wearing a yellow dress that ended just below her ass, a thing that was altogether unlike the proper, innocent girl Clive had known all his life.
“You going to ask to walk she home or what?” Edwin said.
“Stop fooling,” Clive mumbled.
“Who’s fooling? This is your moment! She dressed like a sket because she’s hungry for it.”
Clive took a swig from the bottle of rum.
“Look at he, too puss to even try!” Don said.
Then Edwin grabbed him by the shoulders and looked at him with such conviction it shook Clive to his core. “You want to live your life or what, man?” He didn’t wait for Clive to reply. “Go!” With that, he shoved Clive, who stumbled out into the parade. He hurried across the street and found himself standing before the tight female circle of Sara and her friends.
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