Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (27 page)

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"Is this yours?" Alice asked, holding up the old hardbacked copy of Huckleberry Finn. She'd come home from working in the

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conservatory gardens and found Riley on the living-room sofa under a blanket, even though the apartment felt warm.

"It's Paul's. He 's been reading it to me. He came over and read a few chapters today."

As Alice sat down with her knitting, she felt the itch again, the missing. "I love this book," she said. She sat where she imagined he'd sat. She imagined she could feel the warmth he'd left on the couch. She took her shoes and socks off and lay back on the couch across from Riley in their usual way.

"It was nice. We talked about his father. He had all these old pic tures he wanted to show me."

"Did he really?"

"Yes."

"He doesn't usually talk about his father."

"He never did before this. He wanted me to tell him everything I could remember."

Alice could imagine the warmth Paul left on the couch, but she could not imagine this. "And you did?"

"I was happy to try," Riley said. She poked her finger through a gap in the blanket weave. "Also, he wanted to know how you were."

"He did? What did you say?" Alice was past pretending it didn't matter.

"I said you were fine but that I thought you should have a boyfriend."

Tense as she was, Alice heard herself let out a laugh. "You did not."

"I did so."

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"And what did he say?"

"He was pretty honest. He said he would rather you didn't."

Alice felt her eyebrows shoot up so high that they might have disappeared into her hair. "He said that?"

Riley was quiet for a minute. She gathered her blanket all around her. "Paul always loved you, Alice. He knows I know that. I know he loves me, too. But it's different."

Alice opened her mouth, but nothing came out at first. "He loved me once. But I think that part is over," she said slowly.

"No, it's not. It hasn't even begun." Riley took Alice's bare foot in her hand and squeezed it. "I told him, though, that he better be good to you. When you came along, I said I'd share you, but I told him to remember that you're my sister. I loved you first."

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Things Taken and Returned

W hen Alice came home from her late shift at Duane

Reade, she reached into her bag for her key to open the door and saw that the door was already open. She dropped her key and closed her eyes. She didn't need to push into the apartment to know what had happened.

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Alice arrived at Columbia Presbyterian hospital just before mid night of the last day. She had her hopes, she let them hang around, but she knew.

Her parents were waiting for her in the lobby. Her hopes began to float off, seeking better odds elsewhere. Both of her parents held her.

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"It was too late by the time they got her here," her mother said.

Alice nodded into her father's shoulder.

"It was a blood clot, they think," her mother said. "They'll know more soon."

What did it matter? It was a blood clot, an aneurysm, a stroke, a heart attack. They had come to be prepared for any and all of these. It didn't matter which one.

"There wasn't anything they could do."

Alice smelled her parents' old smells. Her father's dandruff sham poo, the waxy rose smell remaining from her mother's lipstick, and the rare and particular smell of the two of them combined. People seemed to smell most like themselves in their neck, she mused discor dantly. She could imagine the smell of Riley's neck if she tried.

People passed them and just by looking they knew, Alice knew, that somebody of theirs had died. Like in highway accidents, people did a bad job of hiding their curiosity sometimes. Hey, who died? the faces seemed to ask.

My sister, their daughter. She just turned twenty-five, Alice thought of telling them. She wondered what was wrong with her that she was thinking about other people in the middle of her tragedy.

"It happened quickly," her mother said.

Alice wondered whether her mother was trying to get her to ask the gritty questions of exactly how it had unfolded. Alice didn't want to ask those questions or hear those answers, and she felt irri tated at her mother for trying to make her. And then she wondered what was wrong with her that she could be irritated at her mother at a moment like this.

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Grief was transforming, Alice knew, but it was surprising how it also left you to your petty devices.

"Did you see her?" Alice asked.

"We were there," her father said.

"I wish I was there," Alice said, and a maverick sob escaped her throat.

"You were there," her father said.

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In his tears, Ethan shook like a child, and Paul felt old and grown. He stood in the living room of the apartment on 98th Street, know ing he could give comfort here. Though he hadn't let Ethan so much as touch his shoulder since he was ten, Paul now put his arms around him. He could feel Ethan's agony. He had his own agony, but he knew it was separate. He wouldn't try to share.

"We knew this could happen. We tried to be ready," Ethan said.

"You can't be ready," Paul said.

Paul looked around the apartment with a sense of wonder. He felt numbly disconnected from what was inside of him and vividly attuned to what was outside. He considered the family's true home to be Fire Island, because it included him, but this was where they lived. He'd been in this apartment very few times, considering how powerfully his life connected to theirs. He realized he could see better here than on Fire Island, where his eyes were worn in. He could see, for instance, that it was small and mostly bereft of natural light. He'd always romanticized their economies, as though they were a style and a choice. But in the condition of the furni

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ture, the water damage along the ceiling, the sagging bookshelves he saw their privations, too.

"There are things I wish I could change," Ethan said after a while. As uncomfortable as it was to see him cry, Paul acknowl edged that Ethan did it gracefully. He was an authentic crier.

Paul nodded.

"There are parts of my life I wish I could do differently."

Paul nodded. He felt he knew a part Ethan was alluding to.

"For Riley's sake. For your sake, too," Ethan said.

Paul thought of the words Ethan used. "Consider yourself for given." He realized he was playing God, but he sensed that Ethan needed it.

"None of that matters anymore."

Ethan looked too miserable to accept this outright but also eager for the moment when he could.

"It really doesn't," Paul said, and for the first time he felt the truth of his words.

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Alice couldn't stay in the apartment with her parents. She couldn't stay indoors. She could barely stay in her skin. She didn't have a choice about that, but she walked alone through the Ramble in Central Park just in case.

Here she was walking around like any other person, like it was any other day. Do you have any idea what happened? she felt like demanding of the sky and the trees and the mud puddles and every creature, even dogs and babies, whom she passed. On this day they

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had no troubles of their own. You have no idea! she wanted to shout. She had not imagined that grief would feel smug.

By noon she couldn't stay in the park anymore and she couldn't stay outside anymore and she couldn't stay among strangers any more, so she went back home, where she could barely make herself stay, either. She wished she could fall asleep. Was it too early to call it a day? To call it the next day or the one after? She would have liked to sleep through the next several days and perhaps even the summer. But did time lose its healing properties if you slept through it?

She fell onto her bed fully clothed. Ordinary transitions, like getting undressed, seemed to open the way for pain to leap on you unprepared.

Her father walked by her room and saw her lying in her bed. "Paul was here," her father said when he saw her. "He was hoping to see you."

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Paul couldn't cry for himself yet, but he found himself crying for Alice as he walked down Columbus Avenue, away from their apartment. Instead of thinking his own thoughts, he found himself thinking hers. His grief was hard to feel, but hers was easy. Imag ining her face and her sorrow had the near-instantaneous magic of translating concepts into feelings.

Riley was Alice 's valiant defender, her buffer. Sometimes he wondered if having Riley out in front, taking the punches, was

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what allowed Alice to grow up so sweet. Hardship made you stronger, maybe, but it didn't appear to make you any happier.

And him, too. He thought of his house out there on the dune, belted by wind, rain, salt, and sand, offering shelter to their little house behind it. It seemed so lucky, everyone thought, him having the big house right there on the water with views to eternity. And maybe it was. But nothing stood between you and the pitiless sky. For those views, you took a beating sometimes.

Riley was gone. The house was gone. He had pushed Alice and distressed her, denied her what little comfort he might have offered. He thought of her the last time he 'd seen her, her colors faded, her motions slow, her voice slow.

He wished he could do something to make it better. He would do whatever he could to restore what he had taken from her, even if it meant getting out of her way. All the other attempts he'd made to love her had only hurt her. That was maybe the best he could do for her.

When he got home to his apartment, he saw the piles of articles he'd collected on heart research, transplants, and artificial hearts. His desk was covered with them. He'd pushed all of his school work aside to further the project. He'd already done most of the paperwork to make a gift in Riley's name to the center at Columbia Presbyterian hospital.

But now, sitting down at his desk, he didn't want to look at them anymore. He sat with his chin in his hand, staring at the wall in front of him, letting in little glimpses of Riley. And as he did, he knew she would not want to be associated with her heart disease

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forever. If he tried, he could think of what she would like: wildlife preservation on Fire Island, a new lifeguard chair to protect the long stretch of beach beyond Cutter Walk, funds to help save the white dolphin.

He put his head in his arms and he let Riley in.

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Freeport, Merrick, Bellmore, Wantagh, Seaford, Amityville, Copi ague, Lindenhurst, Babylon.

It made for a strange poetry in Paul's ears. He had never stopped in any of these places, only gone through them, but the names had a legendary feel to him, especially since he'd thought he'd made the trip for the last time.

He got off the Long Island Rail Road at Bay Shore. He waited for less than a minute for the taxi company before he got impatient and set off walking. The sun was long set, and it was a Tuesday night. He wondered how many ferries were left. He ran to the dock in time to miss the last ferry, so he took the Saltaire boat and walked.

In a strange dream, he walked along Lighthouse as it turned into Main Walk, the thoroughfare he knew so well he could barely see it. He saw it instead through Riley's eyes tonight. And Alice 's.

He walked directly to his house, counseling himself not to think of it as his house anymore. It was another strange trick of money, that in transferring a large amount of it from one person to another you could lose all official connection to a place that held the most significant experiences of your life. It would be easier in a way if

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the new owners tore it down. That way, his life in it could be laid to rest in the ground rather than overlaid by another set of lives and memories. You had to think of it like a body with a soul gone out of it, he thought.

He tried to prepare his explanation as he walked the final block. But when he got to the door and knocked and nobody answered, he had no need for it. He tried the back door, too, but doubtfully, as no lights were on. He tried turning the knob, but the door was locked. He tried all the doors, even the sliding ones. All were locked.

When had they ever locked this house? Who ever locked their house around here? He remembered going out in the off-season at fifteen and sixteen, and helping himself to food and drinks at every house on Dune Walk. But that was before they cost three million dollars.

Now what could he do? He was singularly focused. He felt the need to stay focused. He couldn't look around too much, and he certainly couldn't give up. If he could fix this one thing, maybe the rest would be fixable, too.

He strode to the Weinsteins' house two walks over and knocked. He felt a little bad when Mr. Weinstein appeared in his bathrobe. "Sorry to bother you. Is Barbara here?"

"Hold on."

Barbara, thankfully, was not in her pajamas.

"I need to ask you a favor," Paul asked. "Can I get a key for my old place? I just need to get in there for a couple of minutes."

Barbara looked at him strangely. "Paul." She looked at her watch. "It's eleven o'clock at night and you are asking me for a key to a house you no longer own."

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"I'm sorry. I realize it's an inconvenience. I won't stay long, I promise."

"Paul. You don't understand. I can't do that."

"Why not?" He realized that he looked particularly unkempt. He hadn't combed his hair or shaved in days. His shirt was dirty and his eyes, he suspected, were wild.

"It's not yours anymore. You have no more right to it than any other house on this island. I can't give you that key more than I can give you any other."

He didn't want to get angry. He didn't want to point out that she 'd been cut a check for more then two hundred thousand dol lars. "We lived there for twenty-three years," he said. "I owned it three weeks ago." Riley is gone. Can you understand that?