All the Lasting Things (21 page)

“Stop it,” Claudia said. “Can I see, please?”

When Max didn’t move, Benji took the card from him. He handed it back to Claudia, who pored over the words more closely.

If she submitted herself to the same eagle-eyed study she made of Max, she could admit that his arrhythmic heart wasn’t alone. She recognized that initial pinprick of uneasiness. She felt it too. No matter how close their relationship became, part of her still sat in that Guilderland rest stop, hard and refusing, unable to imagine a
son
entering her life. Like
husband
or
wife
, the word wasn’t, even after ten years of marriage, part of her vocabulary. (She referred to Oliver as her “legally wedded boyfriend” until the day he left.) And although she and Nick and Max lived in a very different place now—on banks separated by a stream rather than a wide, uncrossable sea—she still worried whether they could ever completely close the distance between them. Would she ever truly make amends?

She placed the postcard down on her desk and turned to Benji. “Is this the work you had to be in the city for?”

He winked.

“Well, what better reason?”

“What does that mean?” Max asked.

“It means I can’t wait to see it.”

“There’s nothing to see,” he said. “I told you: it isn’t staged. It’s just a concert. It’s not even that. It’s a workshop. Seriously, neither of you have to come.”

“We want to come,” Benji and Claudia said in unison.

“What if it sucks?” the boy said miserably.

“Since when has anything you’ve done sucked?” Benji asked.

“Benji,” said Max warningly. He slouched deeper into his chair and attacked his piercing with renewed vigor.

“Are you okay?” Claudia asked. Uncertain whether the ground before her was allied or enemy land, she moved as if she might at any minute snag a tripwire.

“I’m fine.”

“Because you seem—”

“What?”

“Not yourself.”

“Who do I seem like?”

Claudia took a breath and tried again. “You seem—bothered.”

“Bothered?”

“Bothered.”

“Don’t give me a hard time.”

“I’m not.”

“You sound like Navi.”

“Well, Navi cares about you. So do I.”

No response.

Benji extended a hand to rub Max’s back. The boy bristled but bore it. “You don’t get to sweep onto the scene,” he announced hotly, looking not at Claudia but past her, to the immaculate shelves of oversized architecture books, the wall-sized corkboard on which she kept a rotating gallery of interests and inspiration, “and tell me I’m crazy.”

“I didn’t say crazy,” Claudia answered. “Do you hear me? I care.”

“We all do,” Benji echoed. “And you know it.”

Max relented with a sigh. He brushed a hand through the thick fall of his hair and apologized.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Claudia asked.

“You mean am I taking my meds?”

Claudia, suddenly surrounded by tripwires, stopped.

“It’s okay. It’s what everybody means when they ask if I’m okay.” He laughed. “Did Navi call you?”

“No.”

“Because that’s, like, his favorite song.” He strummed an electric air guitar and briefly rocked out. “Are you takin’ your meds? Are you takin’ your meds?”

“Are you?”

“That’s the whole problem. It’s why the second act is such a pile of—I can’t think right. I can’t write right. It’s like I’m walking around with a fishbowl over my head. I can’t hear the way any of it is supposed to sound.”

“You feel that way now,” Claudia ventured.

“I feel like that all the time. It’s like I’m betraying my work so I can sleep at night. I’m twenty-two. What do I need to sleep for?”

“You feel like you’re betraying your work, but you’re doing the best thing for it. You’re protecting—”

“I got it,” Max broke in. “Arnav is a broken record with that shit. No offense.”

Claudia smiled.

“Anyway, it doesn’t feel like I’m protecting it.”

Knowing how hollow any comfort she might speak would sound, she held out her hand to him. It waited in the air, waited the long minute while Max decided whether to take it. Lowering his eyes to his lap, he reached for Claudia’s hand and squeezed it.

“Honeybear,” she said.

Jane? Yes. Marry me. I’ll never marry you. Why not? I’ll never marry anyone. Never is a very long time. What do you want to get married for anyway? To dominate and oppress you, naturally. Forever? Forever. Forever is a very long time, but since you put it that way, fine, yes, I’ll marry you. Say it then. I just did. Say it again. Is this the beginning of my oppression? Say when, when will you marry me? Tomorrow. You always say tomorrow. And I mean it, but then we wake up, and tomorrow’s always today. There are words for girls like you. It’s true, and I’ll bet you know every one.

13.

I
t rose before her eyes like a city bearing her name. A vibrant, bustling hub stood at the center, the dense central ring of pedestrian-friendly shops, the drugstore, two restaurants, a community center, a nondenominational meeting house, a playground and swimming pool and gymnasium, from which lines of row houses—livably but not intimidatingly modern—extended outward like the spokes of a wheel. Alluvia had never seen the likes. Claudia imagined the streets humming and alive, neighbors strolling at dusk under the soft lamplight, gathering for concerts on the distant green. The dream cradled her for a moment, shielding her from the angry summer sun, from the irritants of the real bustling crowd building up around her, before the screech of a hot mike grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her hard. She came to in the middle of the desolate field. A thick of dark, bark-stripped trees standing where the village center one day would. A pond in place of her pool. She slapped a mosquito about to land on her neck.

The field at Compton’s Mound, surrounded by slumbering backhoes and bulldozers, remained (for the moment) untouched. Nick might have set their heavy jaws in motion long ago, but Goliath of area business though he was, the slightest breeze of negative publicity threatened to topple him faster than David’s slingshot. The only indication of the changes to come were the dozen large-scale renderings that stood on easels lining the front of the modest stage. Claudia stood before one of them, holding out her smartphone for a photo she’d been too distracted to snap. She hit the shutter and, with a few efficient stabs at the smooth glass screen, sped the image off to Max.
Wish you were here
. Cat stood a few feet away.

“Thank you,” she said.

“For what?”

“For leaving the cemetery where it is.”

Cat, who, to Claudia and Nick’s great relief, had surrendered her incendiary Save Compton’s Mound T-shirt in order to cross enemy lines and participate in the groundbreaking ceremony, lifted her sunglasses to study a rendering of the cemetery. Its shattered graves, enclosed by a refurbished iron fence, gathered around a new marble obelisk, carved with the names of the ancient veterans whose commemoration Cat and her not-always-merry band of protesters had fought so hard to secure.

“I’m glad you’re saying a few words,” Claudia responded.

“I’m not sure how I feel about the pet cemetery.” She looped her arm through Claudia’s—lightly, briefly; it was too hot for skin-to-skin—and strolled along to the next set of posters. “But I’ll keep that to myself. It’s the idea of sharing space with the neighbor’s corgi. It doesn’t exactly say sacred ground.”

There’s no such thing,
Claudia thought. By this time, after all the spinning the earth had done, there were bones under every last boot sole. The only option for building, for walking, for moving on was to do so on top of them.

“Nick thought the owners might be less creeped out. You know, by the dead in their backyards.”

“Compromise.”

“Compromise.”

Claudia’s decision to leave the scraggly little gravesites more or less alone had as much to do with Nick’s directives as it did with her budding affection for Benji’s future wife. If he asked her, that is. If she said yes. But these things, to Claudia, seemed as inevitable as Benji putting his ducks in a row and asking his sister for help buying the ring.

A month ago, Cat and her sister, Molly, made their annual pilgrimage to the Iowan field where, twenty-four years earlier, American Flight 782 crashed to the ground. There was no finely etched slab to memorialize their parents’ names. A couple who, like the 182 others who died that day, had no claim on the land, no say in whether nature would be allowed to erase so completely the tragic end of their tale. In time, the scarred earth did exactly that, reverting back to a lush, silky green sea of corn. If it weren’t for the kindness of a sympathetic farmer, who set a giant white boulder in the nearby clearing behind his barn, the site would have gone completely unmarked. No place for the mourners to go. Nowhere to point to and say,
There. It happened there
.

When Cat was a girl, in the first years after the accident, she traveled to Mason City with her aunt and uncle, who provided the three McCarthy children with bouquets of daisies to lay among the carpeting flowers, the plush animals, the candles. Each year, the number of visitors diminished. Each year, the number of offerings thinned. The story worked on Claudia’s sympathies, which seemed so much more workable these days.
You’re like a brick,
Benji observed,
that’s turning back to clay.

The insult—who wanted to be called a brick or, for that matter, clay?—infuriated her, but the truth was she had so few girlfriends—so few truly close friends, period—that her softening self welcomed the chance for deeper intimacy. Plus, she liked Cat. She didn’t spend too much time mulling over why. Perhaps her affections overflowed from her outpouring for Max. Or Nick. Or the bracing sense of accomplishment that came with the largest single project ever entrusted to her. Each had the effect of a stone dropped in water. Each rippled outward into an indecipherable complex of overlapping rings.

“Where’s Benji?” Claudia asked.

“He’s meeting us. He wanted to run.”

“Literally?”

Cat nodded.

“That man has
changed
.”

“That’s what I try telling my sister.”

“She’s not having it?”

“Every boyfriend I’ve ever had she turns into one of her ex-husbands. Benji is Walter.”

“And what is Walter’s claim to fame?”

“Loser. Run-of-the-mill loser.”

“Benji’s sober. Going on a year.”

“People turn their lives around.”

“It does happen.”

“She says, ‘How do you know a year from now he’s not going to be back to his old tricks?’ So I have to wait until he’s dead to see if he stays sober. Then I can date him?”

A bearded sound tech with a bandana took to the stage and rapped a finger on the microphone. “One, two. Testing, testing.”

Cat stopped at a mounted view of the green, the Village hub rising, pale and violet, in the background, while computer-generated residents gathered around picnic baskets, threw Frisbees. “It’s Eden.”

Claudia laughed. “Secular, maybe.”

“I’m not kidding. I would live here.”

“In three years you can.”

“Three years.” Cat spoke the words like a fortune-teller whose vision had disappeared in a confounding mist.

“You say that like it’s thirty years away.”

“It might as well be. You know where you’ll be three years from now?”

“Right here, I hope. Cutting a ribbon. Are you going to be standing beside me?”

Cat flushed. “Who knows? Some of that depends on your brother.”

“The fact that Benji sees a future beyond the weekend is kind of remarkable.”

“He’s all about a five-year plan these days. It’s part of his step program.”

“Five-year plan? He never said. He probably thinks I’d make fun of him.”

“You probably would.”

Claudia raised her eyebrows, as if Cat had her there. “Independent of Benji—you have no idea?”

“So many things. I like teaching. And I’d like to get back to acting. Did I tell you I got a call for an audition?”

“Congrats.”

“Yeah. It’s only the Saratoga Rep, but—”

“No buts.”

“And kids. Maybe. At some point, kids.”

“With my brother?” Claudia burst out.

“You can’t see him as a father?”

“I think he’d be a good father. If he could stay out of his own way.”

They rubbed their eyes against a rolling wave of barbecue smoke, the char of burgers, and, beneath it, the druggy, satisfying singe of lighter fluid.

“So you’ll be here.” Cat coughed. “Cutting your ribbon.”

Claudia waited.

“With Nick?”

“I used to think I was too much of a feminist to have a family.”

“Whatever,” Cat countered with a roll of the eyes. “Feminists can’t have families? It’s not the seventies.”

“Maybe it’s too late. I chose my work.”

“Again: whatever.”

Benji stayed a fair distance from the crowd that lined up on the far side of the field waiting for free lemonade and hotdogs. He’d come straight from a four-mile run and walked up and down the patch of scrubby grass designated for parking, rewardingly wet in his wicking gear, looking for Cat’s car. In the course of the last year, he’d dropped fifteen pounds. He felt firmer, stronger, more capable than he could remember feeling, and he nursed a fledgling fantasy of entering the lottery for next November’s marathon. But Benji’s plans for self-improvement didn’t end with Alluvia High’s drama club or the abs he was just beginning to coax into view. No less than Cat or Claudia, he had committed himself to unveiling a creation of substance and pride. He meant to redesign himself, to focus less on the glittering Vegas hotel he’d always thought he wanted to be and more on something truly habitable. If this meant trading lights and the promise of a gaudy but scintillating existence for life on a humbler, more human scale, then that’s what he would do. He had Cat. He had Max. He had his students. He had his no-longer-quite-so-shaky sobriety. But there was more. More than racing Cat from their shaggy gray dock to the diving platform in the middle of the lake. More than continuing to shave seconds off his nine-minute-mile pace.

Finding Cat’s black Volvo, the rear window decoupaged with stickers from Greenpeace and Planned Parenthood and Obama 2012, Benji opened the passenger’s side door to retrieve the glossy college folder he’d left on the seat. He stood sixty credits shy of a bachelor’s degree, two short years, and then a door he thought forever shut would swing open on a teaching certificate, on a classroom of his very own. SUNY Albany was not Princeton or Yale; it wasn’t even Skidmore, where he’d started out, but he was learning to look at life with a lower wattage bulb, less glitz, less glamour.
It’s enough,
he had to keep telling himself.
It’s enough.

He leaned against the sunbaked side of the car and flipped open the course catalog to pages Cat had helped him dog-ear the night before. He leapt between this description and that—Topics in Contemporary Drama. Play Analysis. Acting III (for certainly he could bypass I and II)—as the festivities, in their official capacity, got under way. Someone from Nick’s office tapped on a microphone and tentatively began, “Hello? Ladies and gentlemen? Hello?” while a man who looked like he rode a Harley made adjustments to the sound.

As Nick took the stage to scattered applause, the crowd still more intent on free barbecue than canned speeches, Benji scanned the mob for Cat. Separated from the few remaining protesters who stood on the unsociable side of a single sawhorse police barricade, who looked about as revved up now as a shed full of unplugged power tools, Cat stood at the foot of the stage, awaiting her moment. When Benji looked at her, his mind, like a leashed dog racing round a tree, tended to make tighter and tighter circles around thoughts of diamond rings (how could he afford one?) and proposals (what would he say?), but he willfully pushed his attentions in another direction, turning back to his catalog to read a description of Shakespeare after 1600.

“Excuse me. Sorry to bother you, but you’re Benji Fisher.”

Benji looked up to find a man of medium build with a trim waist and a salesman’s smile. He had a formal, old-fashioned style of casual dress, as if he’d come straight from the set of
Mad Men
: white polo, tan slacks, navy blazer, tasseled shoes. His short blond hair thinned at the crown. And the heat of the day splashed large pink roses on his pale white cheeks. Sweating indecorously, he mopped his forehead and neck with a patterned pocket square and said, “You’re a hard man to find.”

Autograph? Gun? Benji’s mind no longer stayed there very long. “Sorry. Have we—? Who are you?”

The man reached into his blazer pocket and produced a thin silver case from which he pulled a business card of considerable tooth. “Sam Palin. Bravo TV.”

“Palin?” Benji repeated, dubious.

“No relation.” Sam laughed heartily, a show of hands in surrender mode. “I can’t see Alaska from my backyard.”

From the stage, Nick’s voice came deep and resonant as he explained to the crowd the experiment that was the Village, a new model of sustainable suburban living, a true community, words Benji heard echoing across the huge wooded lot without truly listening to them. For all he knew Nick was up there selling toxic waste, transfixed as he was by the logo on Sam’s card, blue letters bold in a black talk bubble.

“I’m in a field in the middle of nowhere,” Benji mused. “How did you find me?”

Sam held up his hands again with the same hearty laugh. “I’m not a stalker, I swear. I got your address from Nina Schweitzer. You remember her—your agent.”

Benji let go a laugh of his own. He didn’t need to be told who Nina Schweitzer was, though he did feel obliged to correct Sam and point out that Nina was no longer his agent.

“I don’t know about that. She seemed very interested in the two of us talking.”

“She didn’t think to give you my phone number?”