Saint X (ARC)

by Alexis Schaitkin

  Two months after his release from prison, he flew to New York. He thought Edwin might come to say goodbye, but when the time came to drive to the airport in his grandmother’s church friend Verna’s car and Edwin had not come, he was not surprised.

  He made his way in New York, as he had already told me. He built a life passed in the solitary fellowship of other men. He had been gone three years when Sara told him she had married Edwin. That was over fourteen years ago, so long that it was difficult to believe it wasn’t always true, that there was a time before the mother of his child married his best friend. He had been through so much. He had lost his father and been abandoned by his mother, gotten a girl pregnant and become a father too young, been a suspect in a murder, gone to prison, started over in a new country, had the shit kicked out of him in a vacant lot in Brooklyn. Yet it seemed to Clive that the man who lived through all that was still an innocent, for he had not yet lain awake at night imagining his son walking between Sara and Edwin, one hand in each of theirs. His boy, laughing with delight as they lifted their arms and swung him into the air.

  Why had Edwin done it? Did he love Sara, or had he only married her to hurt him, to reject the love that had hung in the stars like an open question on their last night together? Or maybe marrying Sara had been a way of holding on to the only part of Clive that Edwin could have—Bryan; maybe Edwin’s most wounding action was also his greatest act of devotion.

  Two years after Sara and Edwin married, Clive received a letter from his grandmother. It was autumn. He remembered because just before he found the letter in the metal mailbox he shared with his roommates, he paused on the stairs outside the apartment building to scrape the tacky samara wings from the bottoms of his shoes. He read the letter in the dark hallway. Buried in updates about the renovation of St. George’s, about the local election and Verna’s nieces from Toronto, was the news that Sara had given birth to a son, Edwin Jr. Eddie for short. Clive saw his son and Edwin’s growing up together. More than mates, more than breds. Brothers. The thought of it was so sweet to him his chest ached. He knew that to feel this way after what Edwin had done made him a chump. Edwin had stolen the only life he had ever wanted, a quiet existence with Sara and children and not-so-bad work and Sunday afternoons at Little Beach. Yet he was grateful. It seemed to him that this life was better off without him in it, for surely he would have spoiled it with his clumsy touch.

  What if he had known everything that was waiting for him? What if, when Edwin approached him in the schoolyard on the first day of second grade, back when he was only Clive, you had shown him all that was going to happen and said, Will you take this life? What is there to say? He would have walked right up to Edwin and joined the game. Because of Edwin he’d lost everything, but without him, he would not even have had these things to lose. He needed Edwin. He could make no sense of his life without him.

  Years passed. He was thirty-five. One summer evening he was walking through Prospect Park—the air redolent with charcoal, laughter and music wafting into the huge night above the lawns—when he heard his name.

  “Gogo? Clive fucking Richardson, is that you?”

  It was Bery Wilson. She marched right up to him and wrapped him in a tight embrace. “I’ve thought of you,” she said. That was as close as she came to talking about the past. She told him she was an artist now—something about the city as canvas, pain as art. She wore her hair in a Mohawk, shaved on the sides and natural on top. In the purple twilight, he could make out tattoos of birds on her arms. An Asian girl and a white guy ambled over and said hello. Bery introduced them to him as members of her collective.

  “Join us,” said the guy.

  “We have veggie dogs,” said the girl.

  “Yes, please, come sit,” Bery said with a smile. How had she managed it? The anger seemed to have evaporated out of her altogether.

  He told her he was running late, though the truth was he had nowhere to be.

  “I understand,” she said. Then her face turned serious. “You’ve heard about Edwin?”

  Clive spent the months after Bery told him that Edwin was dying waiting for his friend to reach out to him. (“Cancer,” she’d said, and when he asked what kind she said she wasn’t sure, she only knew that it was everywhere now.) He imagined it so many ways. He would be getting out of the shower, or paying for dinner at the Little Sweet, when his cell phone would ring. “He’s asking for you,” Sara would say. Clive would fly home, arriving just in time. The house would be dark and quiet, Bryan and Eddie having been sent out to occupy themselves despite their protestations, for they knew their father was dying and did not want to leave his side. Clive would walk through the kitchen and the parlor to the bedroom. When he first saw Edwin in the bed he would gasp. His friend would be unrecognizable—his skin ashen, his cheeks sunken, the sockets of his eyes alarmingly prominent.

  Hey, Gogo, Edwin would say, as if it had been only hours since they’d last seen each other.

  They would talk. About the boys. About their own boyhoods. Remember the time we climbed the radio tower? Remember sneaking into E.T.? Remember, remember, remember. Edwin would close his eyes, as if drifting off to sleep, and for a minute Clive would think he was gone. Then Edwin would open his eyes again, and when he did they would be glazed with tears. He would look up at Clive with that old grin.

  Will you miss me? he would say.

  Clive would take Edwin’s trembling face in his hands. He would lower his head and kiss his best friend lightly on the forehead, and they would know without having to say it that all was forgiven.

  But Clive did not hear from his friend, and one day his grandmother called and told him that Edwin had died. He tried to wrap his mind around the truth that Edwin was not still down on the island, away from him, unseen for years, but still there, still here, but he couldn’t. It was only then he recognized that all these years he had held on to the buried belief that someday, somehow, they would be brought together again, and that in their new, shared aftermath they would have all the time and words and silence they needed to understand together everything that had happened. Now this would never be. He had moved into another chapter in his life, one in which he would have to live without the possibility that the central mysteries of his life would be demystified.

  Ever since, his days passed like walking downhill. He drove his taxi, moved from apartment to apartment. He kept apprised of the news in the lives of his friends and acquaintances. There was a gallery in Fort Greene where from time to time he saw Bery’s sculptures on display. He and Ouss still got together once or twice a year for a meal. Ouss and his wife owned a hardware store on Tremont Avenue. They had four girls; the eldest was on a full scholarship at Exeter.

  At night, he walked. Every evening when he set out, the details of the neighborhood were overwhelming—a lover’s quarrel on the sidewalk, blinking lights in the windows of an electronics store, peaches at a fruit stand so ripe their perfume made him woozy. But the longer he walked, the more the city receded, until the world around him rendered itself invisible and he began to hear water lapping against the edges of the metropolis, which became water lapping at the edges of another island, and then he was not walking through New York anymore, but through the landscape of that other world, that other life. He would stop at a basketball court or a playing field to watch the boys at play, and he would see them all there, shouting and tussling on the pitch, Edwin and Des and Damien and Don. Sometimes a boy left the raucousness of the game behind to sit in the grass, or to hum a song to himself, and Clive knew that he was Bryan; his boy was beautiful and sweet and everything good. And once a year, he walked to Manhattan Beach with its gray sand and its mangy gulls swirling overhead and ate an American chocolate bar that tasted all wrong but was the best he could do, and in this way he marked the day he lost all of them forever.

  If only Alison hadn’t found it so necessary to stir up the shit between him and Edwin, to intrude in things she didn’t understand. If only she hadn’t gon
e off and done whatever she did. It wasn’t just her own life she was risking—had she thought about that? Had it occurred to her for even a moment?

  And if only … if only they hadn’t taken her out with them. If only they hadn’t been taking pretty white daughters out with them for months like the world was a place it most definitely wasn’t. If only he had gone after her when she ran. If only he’d called out to her. “Wait, don’t go,” and maybe he wouldn’t be sitting here now, with his hands numb and the snow falling on his coat.

  “But I never would have. He told me to let her go and I did.” He put his head in his hands.

  “You couldn’t have known,” I whispered. I placed a hand on his back, but he jerked away from my touch. He stood and brushed the snow from his windbreaker.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like?”

  “You can’t just leave! There’s so much more I want to ask you. I know there must be more you want to ask me, too. We can be open with each other now. We don’t have to hide.”

  “You wanted the truth and now you have it. What more could you want from me?”

  I understood then what I did want, what I had wanted for months. There was a version of this story in which two lost souls whose lives had been irrevocably altered by the same long-ago night found each other in New York and, in one of those unexpected turns you hear about with surprising frequency, built a new life together. It was the best version of the story, one with the power to salvage everything that had happened. At the same moment it became clear to me that this was what could have happened, I also understood that it would not happen, and that from then on I would be living in a different aftermath—no longer the aftermath of Alison’s death, but of this winter in New York with Clive Richardson. For, whether we’re aware of it or not, we are always living in the aftermath of something.

  “It has to mean something that I got into your cab. Don’t you see? All of this was supposed to happen. Please,” I said uselessly.

  He looked up at the sky and shook his head. “The crazy thing is I knew. I must have, right? That something with you wasn’t … You just seemed so lost and lonely.”

  “I am lost. I am lonely. Clive, please. It’s still me. I was just a little girl.” My eyes filled with tears.

  For a moment, as he looked at me, he seemed to be peering into the past, seeing the strange sunburned child I once was. He nodded. “I know.” Then he slipped the wool hat from his head and stuffed it in the pocket of his coat. “Goodbye, Claire.”

  He walked down the street and disappeared into the falling snow.

  FOR WEEKS after that I circled the Little Sweet hoping to find him. Maybe we could reconcile. Maybe it wasn’t too late. But he never came back.

  One night when I was walking past, Vincia spotted me. She left her post behind the counter and came outside.

  “He’s gone,” she said.

  “Gone?”

  She nodded. I expected her to be angry. Instead her expression was sharp with loss. It occurred to me that I might have misapprehended her prickliness toward me; maybe Vincia had harbored her own ideas about two lonely people in this city who might have found happiness together. “I heard he left in the middle of the night.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “As if I would tell you if I knew!” She turned and marched quickly back inside.

  I suppose that in the days before he confronted me, Clive must have been settling his affairs in New York and making plans for wherever he was heading to begin again once more. I stopped returning to the Little Sweet after that. It was as Clive had said: I’d wanted the truth and now I had it, as much of it as I would ever have. It was enough, wasn’t it? There are many versions of the Alison Thomas story and I suspect there always will be. The police have theirs. So do the interweb conspiracy theorists and Dying for Fun. Now I had my own. One I could accept. One I could, perhaps, move on from.

  ALISON WAKES from her stupor on the cliffs to the sounds of lovemaking. She turns and sees them, these men for whom she has performed her spectacular self all week.

  What the fuck you staring at, little girl?

  Suddenly she feels very young and very foolish. How impressed she had been with herself! How pleased their approval had made her and how convinced she was of her appeal to them. How clearly she had seen it: she would get their groans of pleasure, their black skin against her white skin, the night a souvenir to remind her who she has the capacity to be. How humiliated she is to realize this night isn’t about her and it never was, to see Edwin and Clive together beneath the stars and to know with corrosive, painful clarity that there is not a thing in her own life as true as this moment between them.

  She gathers herself up and she runs, sandals in her hands, through the scrub. When at last she breaks through to Mayfair Road, she continues to run along the ditch on the road’s shoulder, not caring how the rocks cut her feet, wanting it, even. Up ahead, she sees the lights of Indigo Bay. The illuminated fountains and the perfect lines of palms. She smells the floral air, feels the road turn smooth and loving beneath her feet. And then?

  Some months after my last night with Clive Richardson, a package arrived from Philadelphia, a slender bubble mailer addressed to Claire Thomas.

  I’m sorry it’s taken me such a ridiculously long time to send this to you. I hope it’s helpful. Sending you all my best.

  Inside was a color copy of a poster for the Princeton Modern Dance Ensemble’s “Winter Extravaganza.” Polaroids from parties. Messages scrawled on scraps of notebook paper: “12:15, just left for dining hall. C u there?” “Free ice cream at student center tonight. Let’s do this!” A postcard. On the front, a consummate sunset, lilac infinity over a tropical sea. On the back:

  Nika Nika,

  Greetings from paradise! Haha, not exactly. Hope your parents aren’t driving you as crazy as mine are. On the bright side, I met the cutest boy. Guess we’ll see!

  Love ya,

  A

  Where does she turn after everything with Clive and Edwin falls apart? Isn’t it obvious? She finds him doing tequila shots as “Redemption Song” is piped in over the speakers, or sipping a Red Stripe on a lounge chair by the pool, or participating in a game of beer pong on the Ping-Pong table off the lobby, his enthusiasm changing to cool boredom the instant he spots her. Better than nothing, she tells herself. Even before it’s over she knows it isn’t enough, not even close. It is worse than nothing. It is all wrong. This boy whose baby-blue eyes match his baby-blue polo shirt match her baby-blue manicure. It only makes her feel more acutely the exact problem of her life: No matter what she does, no matter how she tries, she cannot get out beyond herself. She can only ever be Alison.

  But suppose you told her she could have a different life, swap out hers for one she’d deem more acceptable as an offering to this beautiful, brutal world? Though it would be pretty to think she’d say yes, she knows what she would really do: She would snatch up her cute dresses, her A’s, her orthodontia-sleeked teeth, the many dappled lawns of her life … the gothic dormitory washed in eventide bells, flip-flops in autumn, fresh powder on the mountain. She would take it all and she would run. There it is, her most shameful secret: She loves her life. Oh, how she loves it.

  It is very late now, and she is desperate for something, anything, with which to salvage this night, this vacation that has gone so awry from her carefully cultivated plans. It’s then that she looks out into the water and sees Faraway, a black silhouette etched against the sky. She hears the soft wash of waves. She walks across the beach to the water’s edge. She unties her halter top, unzips her skirt, shimmies out of her panties, and lets them fall to the sand at her feet. She considers moving her clothes higher up the beach in case the tide should rise and carry them away. Instead, she leaves them. Let the sea do what it will. What a story it would be, what a thing to be able to remember. She steps into the water.

  Maybe, as she strokes through the sea to the cay, she believes she is be
ing lured there by a black-haired woman with hooves for feet who has chosen her, and into whose wildness she can finally lose this self she loves and hates in equal measure. Or maybe she does not believe any of that. Maybe her strokes are powered by a desire she can’t name, a need going unmet and unmet and unmet. Maybe she simply wants to give herself her wildest wild night; proof, to some older, duller version of herself, that she was young once and didn’t squander it.

  She follows the starlit path inland, her feet sensing their way over roots and rocks. In the darkness, the spray cast off by the waterfall is a vaporous fog, soft as a caress on her skin. Maybe she slips on the moss-slicked rocks close to the water and falls in. Maybe she dives, the water appearing deeper than it really is in the dark, and hits her head. This version, too, has its blank spaces. Things I’ll never be able to know. These are the secret moments. Hers alone.

  BUT FIRST …

  In the dead of night, a little girl opens her eyes. As she surfaces from dreams, she smells the tang of blood. She has been scratching in her sleep. Then she hears rustling. She calls her sister’s name and her sister comes to her.

  “Where were you?” she asks.

  “Shhh.”

  Her sister crawls into bed with her and wraps her arms around her. When the little girl is on the edge of sleep, her sister kisses her on the back of the neck and slips out of the bed.

  “Where’re you going?” the little girl mumbles.

  “Far away.”

  “But—”

  “Shh. Don’t tell.” She pads across the room, opens the door, and is gone.

  The little girl doesn’t tell. Not when her parents ask. Not when the police question her. At first she doesn’t tell because it’s a secret, and she is good at keeping secrets. She is patient. Later, when her sister has been missing too long, she doesn’t tell because she is scared she did something wrong by not telling and everyone will be angry with her. Later still, when they tell her that her sister is dead, she knows she will keep the secret forever, because it is the last thing she has of her sister and she wants to keep it for herself. She keeps it so long, unspoken, that it becomes difficult to believe it happened at all.