Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (23 page)

Her comfort and Riley's comfort were not necessarily the same thing. She began to sense that her aims and Riley's were possibly quite different. Sometimes you had to recognize the split in order to be close.

"I love it over there," Alice said finally. "With all the dogs and horses."

It took a few minutes for Riley to realize that Alice wasn't going to say anything more.

Over the passage of the evening, Riley's face relaxed into an old kind of sweetness. While Alice paged through The New Yorker on Riley's twin bed, Riley fell asleep with her ankle crossed over Alice's.

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It took Paul a minute to recognize Ethan's face in the lobby of the philosophy building on Mercer Street. His first unchecked impulse was pleasure, and his second was suspicion. "What are you doing here?" he asked.

"I was hoping to run into you," Ethan said. He looked much older to Paul. Maybe it was seeing him in the winter. Ethan was a summer man.

"Is this like a stakeout? How long have you been here?"

Ethan looked at his watch. "Twenty minutes. Riley told me you had a seminar in this building."

"You could have just called my cell phone," Paul pointed out, feeling somewhat hypocritical.

"I could have."

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Paul walked out the doors, gathering his coat around him, and Ethan followed.

"What are you studying?" Ethan asked.

"Philosophy."

Ethan remained patient. He had put up with a lot of rejection, and he was fairly good at it. "I recognize that. What kind of philos ophy?"

Paul turned to look at him while they walked. "Moral philos ophy."

Ethan nodded.

"And political," he added in a mumble.

He remembered how Ethan tried to take a role in his education. Ethan was the one who taught him to read in the summer between second and third grade, when his school was threatening to kick him out. Ethan read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy to him and Riley during the very rainy summer after fourth grade. Paul wouldn't say it, but he'd loved that: lying on the couch with his legs pointing one way and Riley's the other, Ethan sitting in the big, brown uphol stered chair, making up all the different voices. Ethan could have been an actor, Paul sometimes thought.

They would hear the rain and the wind mixing into the sound of the ocean. Sometimes Alice would curl up with them. Paul could almost feel the way her elbows dug into him when she tucked her self between his body and the back of the couch. He always com plained, but he'd loved that, too. Alice would vanish for the scary parts, and Paul would tease her about it.

At the time Paul had thought Ethan loved him, but later he revised that view. It wasn't him Ethan was interested in. That

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summer after fourth grade was the very happiest one, and yet it ended so badly.

"Are you enjoying it?" Ethan asked.

"Sure."

"Going for the Ph.D.?"

"That's the plan," Paul said. Ethan had given up on his American history Ph.D. somewhere in the middle of his disserta tion. He once heard Ethan, at the annual bayfront picnic, describing his academic career as ABD, which he later learned meant All but Dissertation. That seemed to fit Ethan: full of intention but useless.

They walked through Washington Square Park, under the tri umphal arch. Paul wondered how long Ethan would stay with him. He didn't give much credit to Ethan's resolve.

"Have you seen the girls recently?"

Now Paul began walking more quickly. Did Ethan know some thing? The thought had not occurred to him, but now that it had, he felt a surge of agitation. "I saw Riley a week or so ago," he said casually.

He did not want Ethan to know about him and Alice.

"How did she seem to you?"

Paul hardly heard him. He made a sharp turn onto 8th Street. "Listen, I've got to be somewhere, and I'm already late. Call me if you need something, okay?"

Paul left Ethan standing on Fifth Avenue and strode hurriedly toward the West Side for no reason at all. He was relieved that Ethan didn't try to follow him.

Only later Paul realized, in his petulance and his narcissism, he'd forgotten to ask Ethan why he had come.

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The Tear in the Net

I n early March, Alice moved to her new assignment: cleaning

the Ancient Playground. It was on the East Side at 84th Street just north of the Metropolitan Museum. It was one of the great New York City playgrounds, and Alice remembered it well. When her parents took them to the museum, Riley would get antsy, and her reward was always a visit to this playground at the end.

Alice's job involved scrubbing the bathrooms, which she did not mention to her mother. She knew if she did, the wondering about expensive BAs would arise immediately and deafeningly. She was glad that she had this job in March instead of August. In August it would really start to stink. The whole city stunk in August, which was why the people who could afford it, even barely, went to the beach.

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Alice was happy on her third day at the playground, when Riley appeared. Even though it was cold, she felt happy to see her.

"What are you doing here?" Alice asked, but not in a worried way. Riley's face was too animated for bad news.

"I pictured you here and I couldn't resist," Riley said.

While Alice swept away dead leaves, Riley swung on the pirate rope, shouting things every so often.

The place was nearly empty. Because of the cold, Alice rea soned, and because school was in session.

After Riley tired of the rope swing and climbing to the top of the ziggurat, she came over and sat in the sand while Alice raked it.

"I like all the sand at this playground," Riley remarked. There wasn't just a sandbox but also big lakes of sand underlying most of the playing structures. Alice remembered that her mother made them take off their shoes and dump them out before they got on the bus to go home.

After a while, Riley started raking, too. Not with an implement but with her fingers. "Hey, look," she said, holding up a piece of broken glass.

Alice took it from her and put it in the garbage bag. "Good thing you found it."

Riley worked diligently and with deepening satisfaction for each potentially hazardous thing she found and removed.

Around lunchtime, Mrs. Boxer, Alice's superior, showed up. She saw Riley helping with the sand and looked on it with a suspi cious face. "I'm not paying the two of you," she said.

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"That's fine," Riley said pleasantly.

"We know," said Alice.

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The following week, the weather turned. Alice knew it was proba bly an empty promise, or at least a premature one. But still, her skin seemed to grow a million extra pores, and all of them opened to take in the warmth and tenderness of the air. The sun on her face made her want to cry. She was glad the playground was empty and that Riley didn't show up that day.

She lay back on the sand and felt the thaw in her bones. Her muscles, held so tight these months, turned to water. She wasn't sure she could resume her raking or even get herself home.

Into all those millions of open pores came the sunshine, and other feelings as well. In and out. She was porous.

The air smelled like beach air. The sun smelled like the sun. The bathrooms, a few dozen yards away, smelled like bathrooms. She heard the cars and the buses roaring just beyond her feet, discor dant with the sky over her head and the sand under it.

She thought of Paul, and how his back felt sandy when she put her arms around it the first time. She thought of Riley and curling linoleum and egg sandwiches and the foot wash that worked and the shower that didn't. She thought of her losses. She let them out and in and out. She felt languorous.

She felt stupid when Mrs. Boxer cast a shadow over her and asked her what she was doing. She sat up quickly.

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"Just lying here for a minute," Alice said, wiping her eyes with the front of her hand and her nose on the back of her hand.

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When she got back to the apartment, she saw Riley reading a book on the couch. "What are you reading?"

Riley turned the cover to Alice, showing a crimson-haired woman, her bodice full of cleavage, embraced by a long-haired swashbuckler. It made her laugh. "Anna and the Pirate," she read. "Is it good?"

"Pretty silly," Riley said. "Good, though."

Alice couldn't remember another instance of Riley reading a book of her own accord.

Alice sat at the foot of the couch. She realized she still wore the sunshine on the surface of her skin. "It's beautiful today. You can feel a little bit of summer."

Riley nodded. She looked tired. "I went for a walk earlier."

Alice sat there cross-legged while Riley put her feet on Alice's lap and read. It was nice. The apartment was quiet for once, no ambulance sirens or noisy trucks on Amsterdam Avenue.

After a while, Riley put her book down and moved over to make more room for Alice. Alice spread out so they pointed opposite directions on the couch, with Riley's sock feet resting on Alice 's stomach and Alice's toes up near Riley's chin. It gave her a familiar feeling.

"Can I tell you something?"

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"Okay."

"It's about Dad."

Alice nodded.

"Remember when he cheated on Mom years ago, and you asked me if I knew who the person was?"

Alice nodded again. Her heart began ticking noticeably.

"I did."

"Really?"

"Yes."

"So, who was it?"

"It was Lia."

Alice heard the word. It went into her ear but not quite into her brain. "Paul's mom?"

"Yes."

"Dad had an affair with Lia?" The concept still hovered outside of her brain. She couldn't seem to take it in. "Paul's mom?"

"Yes."

"But it couldn't have been her. Dad used to say she was a pain in the ass."

Riley breathed out slowly. "You can take my word for it, Al."

"How do you know?"

Riley tipped her head, thinking. "Because I saw them."

Alice perceived Riley's fragility. She didn't want to push her. "You saw them . . . together?"

"Together as two people can be," Riley said. She looked solemn, but she held up her book as a demonstration.

"Oh, no." The name Lia did make it into her brain, but it just sat there, unwilling to dissolve or be absorbed.

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"Paul and I both did." Riley pulled the collar of her shirt up over her chin. "We were in the bay, trying to catch bait fish with a net. Remember the old mesh net with the green handle?"

Alice nodded. She could picture it perfectly.

"Remember it got a tear in it? Paul had the idea that we could use nail polish to fix it. He said his mom had nail polish, so we went running into their house and upstairs to get it from her bathroom."

Alice nodded again, slowly. "You didn't knock, I bet."

"No."

"Oh, no." A part of Alice wanted to know just how lurid. But by the look on Riley's face, she knew not to ask. "What did Paul do?" She wouldn't ask what her dad or Lia did.

"He grabbed my arm and we ran out of there. I felt sick and dizzy, I remember. We stood in the middle of Main Walk. We didn't know what to do."

"So what did you do?"

"I walked home. He went somewhere else. I don't know where he went, but he couldn't really go home, could he? We didn't see or talk to each other for three days."

"I think I remember those days."

"And on the fourth day, he came over for cereal as usual, and that was the end of it."

"What do you mean that was the end of it?"

"For us, I mean. We never talked about it again."

"You never talked about it?"

"No." Riley shrugged. "Not straight out. We couldn't."

"God."

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"Dad tried to talk to me about it, but I refused."

Alice nodded.

"He made me see the school psychologist in the beginning of fifth grade."

"I remember that."

"I didn't want to talk to Mom, either. Believe it or not, I never really talked to anybody about it."

Alice felt stunned and a bit queasy. She wished she didn't have a million pores but only one or perhaps none. She thought to ask why Riley chose to talk about it today, whether you needed a half- working heart in order to do so, but she wasn't sure she wanted to know the answer.

She looked at Riley warily. "Do you have anything else you need to tell me?"

Riley thought about it and shook her head. "Do you have any thing you need to tell me?"

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Alice had been happy to see Riley at the playground, but visitation had its limits. She was not happy to see her under the fluorescent lights at Duane Reade.

"What is it with you and my places of work?" Alice asked. She was festering and preoccupied, thinking of Lia and her father and all the related things that made the past a less comfortable place to hang around.

"I'm checking up," Riley said flatly.

"Seriously, what are you doing here?"

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"I followed you. I found your uniform, and I knew it wasn't Dad's or Mom's."

"You're such a sleuth."

Riley looked around. "You are making me sad, Al."

Alice pressed some buttons on her register.

"Why are you here?" Riley demanded. "What are you doing working here?"

"You sound like Mom."

"Do you think you are doing this for me?"

Alice shook her head.

"Because if you are, you should stop it."

Alice looked at her thumbnail.

"You should have a good job. A real job. You can do a lot better than this. You're supposed to be the smart one."

Alice started crying into the sleeves of her smock. The material was too oily and fake to absorb any of her tears. She couldn't say anything.

Alice thought she'd known what she was doing here, but now she realized she hadn't. She thought she knew the kind of guilt that dogged her, but there were more kinds than that.