Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (16 page)

� 146 � The Last Summer (of You and Me)

they gotten out before her? Her first order of worry was that they had discovered her absence, but when she saw the state of her mother's closet, the robe in a pile on the floor, her worry kicked up to a second order, that there was something wrong.

"Hello?" she called down the stairs. "Hello?" she shouted to all parts of the small house. No one was in the bathroom. No one answered.

With a hectic feeling in her chest, she ran back into the kitchen and flipped on the light. This time, her eyes went straight to the note on the counter, the tipped scrawl.

Alice--At Good Samaritan with Riley.

Tried to find you. Call my cell.

She grabbed the kitchen phone. Her fingers were clumsy on the numbers. She thought of dreams she'd had where she had to make an urgent call and dialed the number wrong again and again and again.

Good Samaritan. Good Sam, people called it. A nickname for a hospital. It was Riley. Was it Riley? Was it her dad? The phone buzzed in her ear.

"Alice?" her mother's voice came on.

"Mom? What is going on?" The background noise was loud and the connection was fuzzy.

"Alice?"

"Yes!" she practically screamed into the phone. "It's me! What happened?"

"Riley, honey. She's--" Her mother broke off in the middle of an intercom announcement and a lot of noise.

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"She's what? What?"

"She was having trouble breathing last night. We thought it could be pneumonia or asthma, but now they seem to think it is something with her heart."

Alice suddenly thought of the siren in the middle of the night. She thought of her own placidity, her nakedness, the indulgence of Paul's body. She felt a chill, the haunting feel of a punishment bub bling up from darkest pitch. The kind you deserved, and even taunted fate to get.

Her mother's voice was ragged and poor. "The doctors have picked up some kind of valve damage. They are trying to figure out what caused it."

"How can you have heart damage that young?" Alice de manded.

"I don't know. That is what we 're trying to figure out."

"What's she doing? Is she awake? Does she feel bad?"

"She's awake. She says she feels all right now."

Alice couldn't imagine Riley being conscious and saying any thing else.

"Can they fix it?"

"We don't know. We'll find out soon."

Her mother used the off-putting "we." Ordinarily, Judy was quick to divide from Ethan, and though Alice usually resented it, she would have found it comforting right now. It would have meant that her mother could play at misfortune, that marital dis cord was the worst of her troubles.

"I'll come, then," Alice said.

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She wanted her mother to say, Don't come, Alice, we'll all be home soon. There's no reason for you to come. But she didn't. She said, "It's room six ninety-four."

Alice thought of telling Paul before she went to the ferry. He would get dressed hurriedly and come with her. He wouldn't con sider anything else. He would be worried about Riley.

But for some reason she didn't. The drizzle soaked her bare arms and the bay smashed against the breakfront and doused her. She kept her head down for the long walk to the ferry.

She sat on the bench and waited. She didn't even know the time or which boat she was waiting for. There was nothing else but to sit here until the next one came.

It was her penance. She remembered the long and short blasts in the middle of the night. Or rather, she hopped over the memory like a scalding surface too painful to land on. She'd dismissed the tragedy as belonging to someone else. She 'd practically celebrated it for its distance from her happiness. How could she have been so brazen?

She waited. It was the only punishment she could think of at that moment for having been happy with Paul when Riley was lying in a helicopter on the way to the hospital.

u

Alice sat on the bed of the plucky patient and tried to figure out what had gotten her parents so spooked.

"I had this dream where I was underwater and running out of breath, and finally I took in this big breath of water. Have you ever

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had that kind of dream? And then I woke up, but the feeling stayed. I still felt like I was trying to breathe underwater, like the water was flooding into my lungs."

"God."

Riley shrugged. "Mom heard me in the hallway, and when I tried to explain, she started freaking out and calling the security office."

Alice nodded. She moved her legs around so they made a bridge over Riley's knees. Riley allowed Alice to warm her cold fingers.

"Kind of an overreaction with the helicopter and everything, but here we are."

Was it an overreaction? Alice wanted to know.

"You can breathe all right now?" Alice asked.

"Mostly. Yes." She sat up more in the bed. "So, what did you tell Jim?"

"I left a note at the lifeguard house saying you were sick today. Is that okay?" Alice didn't want to act too solicitous. It would make it seem like something grave was going on.

"You didn't talk to him?"

"No. He wasn't there yet. Should I have?"

"That's all right. I'll call him later." Riley pushed back her hair. Her face wasn't exactly the right color. "If you talk to him . . . don't say anything, okay?"

"About you being here?" Alice asked.

"Right. It'll sound so dire if you tell him."

Maybe it is dire, Alice worried. Maybe that's how it ought to sound. "When is the doctor going to be back?" Alice asked.

"Which one?" Riley shrugged. "There are a bunch of them."

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"I don't know. The heart doctor."

Riley concentrated on her feet. "I hope I can get out of here for the one-fifty-five. I'm supposed to teach my last swimming class this afternoon at four."

"Do you want me to call?" Alice asked.

"No. Maybe I'll get there. Anyway, I'll take care of it." She pointed to a canvas bag on the chair in the corner. "Will you see if my phone is in there?"

Alice picked it up. "What happened to your regular bag?" When Riley didn't answer, Alice turned to look at her.

"I lost it."

Alice was surprised by the guarded look on her sister's face. She hadn't meant the question as a challenge.

"I don't see your phone. I'll go ask Mom, okay?" She was eager to get out of the room and fill in a few of the holes.

Her mother was in a hallway waiting area with her head in her arm. "Is Riley going to get out of here by this afternoon?" she asked.

Her mother glared at her as though she'd spit on her shoe. "Riley's had a medical emergency, Alice."

Alice struggled to swallow past her worry. She wanted to return to Riley's side of the story. "What does that mean?"

"It means she's not getting out of here this afternoon."

Her mother usually got wound up by drama, even hideous drama. Now she looked sour and tired. "The doctors are trying to figure out what happened. They've lined up a bunch of tests today."

"Where's Dad?"

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"He 's trying to get the insurance company on the phone."

How quickly and completely Riley became their child again. How quickly her parents assumed total responsibility for their lives. Riley was twenty-four, but they weren't even letting her into the front seat of her own emergency. Whose fault was that?

"Is she going to be okay?"

Judy rarely tolerated a question asked for reassurance. "That's what we're trying to figure out."

u

"I'll be back tomorrow morning," Alice said to Riley.

Over the course of the day and evening, nurses had taken vial after vial of Riley's blood, performed an EKG and some kind of scan. Mostly Alice and Riley stared up at the TV, watching a woman build a deck on an endless home-improvement show.

Alice kept looking to the faces of the nurses the way you studied the flight attendant when your plane ride got bumpy. Did they know more about your fate than you did?

Now it was dark outside. Alice would be lucky to catch the last boat. Her father was snoring in the chair in the corner.

"Okay." Riley had a wistful look, and Alice knew it was because Alice was going back to the beach. Sometimes when you weren't there, Fire Island felt like an idea. It was hard to imagine it existing alongside a place like this, where real things had to get done.

Riley looked like a child, propped up on the pillows. Right as Alice was leaving, she sat up straight in her bed.

"Hey, Al. Can I ask you a favor?" she asked.

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Alice turned, struck. "Of course." Her spirit lifted at the thought of being able to do something. "Anything."

"When you see Paul. Don't tell him about . . . this. Okay?"

Alice glanced at the flecked linoleum, spirit downwardly plung ing. "But, Riley--"

"I mean it, Alice. Please. I don't want everybody blabbing about it until I know what's going on."

"Paul wouldn't blab. You know him better than that."

Riley's face turned uncharacteristically flat and impenetrable. "I know, but just don't, okay? Promise me you won't?"

Alice felt a strange desperation accompanied by punishing guilt. The single thing Riley asked she resisted. "Riley," she began. Riley wasn't thinking straight. She'd thought she was going to spend her afternoon teaching swimming.

But then Riley's face opened a crack to let Alice see in, and for a moment Riley looked neither numb nor delusional. It was as though Riley had guessed Alice's primary reservation, Alice's one possible excuse to override her.

"If it's something serious, I want to be the one to tell him myself. I think that's a fair thing to ask," Riley said.

Alice nodded. Riley was covering an earnest appeal with paper reasons, but how could Alice deny her? "So what should I say? What do you want me to tell people?"

"Monday is Labor Day. I'll call Jim to reassign my last few shifts if I have to. After that, everyone is shipping out anyway. If some body asks, just say I had to go back to the city a couple of days early."

Alice nodded again.

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"You promise?" Riley said. She licked her lips.

"I promise," Alice said. What else could she say?

u

"Alice."

Paul was waiting for her in her kitchen. So unfamiliar was his expression, she hardly recognized him.

"Where have you been?"

She had thought about this. She had tried to prepare. She'd had to walk all the way in from Field Five because of missing the last ferry, so she'd had lots of time. Maybe too much time. Whatever hope she had of lying with �lan was lost in the miles of sandy overthinking.

She considered her knuckles. "Went off-island this morning," she said to the ground. She didn't go to him as she would have. If not for all this, she'd be on his lap by now. They'd be mostly undressed. Her body felt like it had a lot of parts, all stuck out and unaccompanied. That's the way his looked, too.

She went closer. She felt tears gathering in her eyes. She needed to collapse, but she couldn't do it on him.

There was that moment the night before, when the signal was blasting and she was in his arms. The feeling of it flashed in her mind again and again. There was no moment that couldn't be rewritten and reversed in the future, no degree of joy that couldn't become your undoing a few hours later.

"All of you? You all went off-island? Where's everybody else?"

Alice realized it was easier to lie when her fingers were cover

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ing big sections of her face. She blew her nose into a paper towel. "They went back to the city a few days early," she said rotely.

"Riley went back early? Why?"

"Uh. A, uh, interview, I think. The NOLS people are in town, I think." What was she even talking about?

He cocked his head skeptically. "And you?"

What should he think? She wanted to protect him, to neutralize his questions. What sensible world could she create for him that did not include the truth? She was worn-down and confused. She was a horrible liar and possessed none of the discipline or follow- through required for large-scale deception.

She had betrayed Riley already. They both had. She couldn't do it anymore.

She couldn't tell him anything. She could tell the first lie, but she could not offer it any support. She didn't dare. Paul was dogged and he was thorough. Which of them was suited to a career in the law?

His face was hardening. "Alice, just tell me."

This was becoming an inquisition. Sides were forming. A line was appearing down the middle of them. It was because he didn't trust her. He didn't trust her because she was lying.

For all the things she and Paul had done to each other and felt about each other over the years, honesty was unquestioned. Even brutal honesty. Especially brutal honesty.

She wanted to tell him the truth so badly. But the more she needed and wanted him, the guiltier she felt, the more deserving of pun ishment. This punishment. In her mind's ear, she heard the emer gency signal again. This was a fitting curse, a near-genius design.

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She just needed to get in her room and shut the door. "Did some shopping and whatever," she mumbled into her paper towel.

"Is something wrong? What is going on?" He looked at her impatiently. "Why are you all the way over there?"

She wrapped her arms around herself. "Because I'm tired, I guess. I'm going to go to bed."

His distress showed itself differently on each of his features. She watched them closing up.

How could she push him away like this? She knew the danger of it. But how could she be with him after what had happened?

"See you tomorrow." Her voice came out so high and strange, she had to clear her throat and try again. She turned away so she wouldn't have to see the way he looked at her.

The one thing Alice knew was that she deserved neither plea sure nor comfort. She would mess up her heart, too.