Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (28 page)

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'd help you if I could."

He wouldn't give up. He walked back to his house. He didn't want to look at the beach. It was overwhelming. All the things that happened here were crowding in, and he couldn't keep them back. It was a dangerous idea to come here now.

Sometimes sheer vastness was terrifying. The volume of the universe hanging above them. The mystery of the ocean connect ing you to places cold and deep. The infinite nature of time before this beach and the restless eternity that stretched on after.

There was one thing to do. He climbed up the planters to the first set of eaves. The wind was starting to blow, and he half expected it to peel him right off the side of the house and fling him into blackness. Would Riley be in the blackness? He clutched the second-floor windowsill with his hands while his left foot skidded

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down the shingled surface, looking for traction. A shingle popped off, and he watched it circle once and hit the ground. His hands were shaking with the strain. At last his foot found purchase, dig ging the toe of his sneaker into a narrow ledge where the shingle had been. He hauled himself onto the sill, balancing his weight on his knees, and pressed his fingertips under the mullions to push up the sash. It was locked, of course. What was with these people? What did they have worth protecting?

He would break the window if he had to, but he didn't yet. He climbed sideways across the face of the house from windowsill to windowsill. He heard the ocean crashing at his back. And then, far worse, he heard voices. There were people passing on the beach while he was stuck to the side of the house like an incompetent spi der. He kept still. His fingers were shaking from the effort of grip ping the exterior. The sound of conversation got closer, and after a seeming hour or two, got farther away. He thanked God they hadn't looked up.

The trick was the corner of the house. Adrenaline, thankfully, had begun to flow, protecting him from the suffering of his muscles. There was the drainpipe. In his memory it was substan tial, but now it looked flimsy, particularly in relation to his body weight in rapid motion. He looked at the deck below. He pictured himself sprawled on it. He grabbed the drainpipe with one hand and swung onto it. Shit. It wailed and creaked and pulled away from the wall, but he managed to ride it long enough to get a hand on the window frame around the corner before they both went down.

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Riley would love this, he couldn't help thinking. Riley would love to be doing this right now. He felt her with him, even though he didn't believe in that kind of thing.

When he got himself settled on the window, he assessed the state of the drainpipe, now bent and dislodged. He wondered if he ought to pay the buyers back some of their money.

He climbed from the window to the narrow balcony at the side of the house. He stood on it. He'd probably stood on it two other times in his life, both times wondering why nobody ever stood on it. People didn't stand on balconies, did they? But the thing he remembered from those times was that this door didn't really lock. It had one of those wimpy doorknob latches that you could turn right through if you turned it hard enough. Indeed, the door opened in a welcoming way and he walked into his house. Which no longer belonged to him.

I guess I'm robbing them, he thought. Could you be prosecuted for breaking into a house that you'd owned for twenty-three years and taking something out of it that was yours?

He walked quietly to his room, hearing the same old creaks. He did not turn on the light, but the moon showed him that there was no longer his desk or the bed where he had slept rarely and made love to Alice repeatedly. He felt a pang, a physical ache, in the bot tom of his abdomen. There was a crib and a changing table and a glider and a rug with a pattern of dragonflies.

He went into his closet and pulled open a small built-in drawer, old and sticky with layers of paint. He put his hand in and felt all the way to the back. There it was, just as he 'd stuck it there fifteen years ago.

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He wasn't actually taking something out of the house that was his, he recognized as he bunched it up in his hand and walked down the stairs and out the back door. He was taking something that he'd stolen. Two wrongs supposedly couldn't make a right, but he felt in his heart that sometimes they could.

u

On the train ride home, Paul held Alice 's pink-beaded rosary in his sweating hand.

He considered God, whom he hadn't much believed in up to this point. Neither the father nor the son. But the rosary felt warm, and he felt guilty for being such a heathen and carrying it around like this, having no idea what you were supposed to do with it. It reminded him of the time he went to church with Alice and Riley and took Communion by mistake.

He didn't want to be at odds with God, if only for the reason that Alice believed. Paul wondered if he apologized and if there was God, if God would hear it. Sorry, he thought, just in case. Now that Riley was out there, he was kind of hoping so. He thought of his father and felt guilty again. It wasn't your fault, he told God, just in case.

u

The Church of the Blessed Sacrament on West 71st Street was filled with tragic faces, none more than theirs. For all the events and masses they had ever been to here, always anonymous, late,

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insufficiently dressed, it was off-putting to get the VIP treatment on account of being the most bereaved.

It felt like a funeral mass for a child, in a way, Alice thought. The mourners were the village that had raised them: family friends, but mostly by way of their parents; school friends, but many through her father; childhood Fire Island friends. There were three people from Riley's years at NOLS, a leader and two former students. There was one guy she 'd worked with at a restaurant in Jackson Hole the winter she 'd spent skiing there. Riley hadn't studied or worked inside any institutions. It was harder, perhaps, to create your own circle of acquaintance when you didn't like to be inside at all.

And then, when nearly everyone was seated, the lifeguards arrived. There, thought Alice. There was Riley's institution. You didn't need to be inside, did you? Another surge of tears brewed behind her eyes. The lifeguards came in force: at least twenty-five of them, including Chuck, Jim, and a couple of old-timers. They were tall and regal to a person. They understood the grandness of Riley.

Alice looked for Paul. She 'd hoped he 'd come and sit with them, but that wasn't his style. He was Riley's true lifelong friend, her partner in a thousand adventures. He was the only one, so far as Alice knew, to whom Riley ever wrote a letter. He was such a friend, Alice suspected, that all subsequent friends seemed coun terfeit by comparison.

It seemed sad to give Riley her send-off in church. She had found it almost painful to sit inside in the dark on a Sunday morn ing, whereas Alice had secretly enjoyed it.

Paul was possibly the last to arrive. He did approach her family but not to sit. He had something for her, he said. Into her hand, he put

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a chain of some kind. She couldn't figure out what it was until she held it up and looked closely, and then suddenly memory flooded in.

He had taken it from her. He had given it back. She looked at him questioningly. His face was tight, and his eyes were swollen. "I'm sorry," he mouthed to her. Then he disappeared to find a seat at the back of the church.

She held her old rosary in two hands. Back then she'd thought it was so exceptionally pretty. "Are these real stones, do you think?" she'd asked her mother long ago. She'd hoped they were.

"I think they're glass," her mother had answered.

She remembered the nights she'd said her Hail Marys and Our Fathers again and again and again, feeling transported, wondering if she was transported.

So he'd taken it. She'd suspected him at the time, but she'd given him the benefit of doubt, as she often did.

What a shame, in a way. What a stupid thing to do. It was him she used to pray for.

u

Paul called his mother to tell her that Riley was dead. He couldn't remember the last time he had tracked Lia down and dialed her number. He felt he needed to do it, and he wasn't sure why.

As he told her, he cried silently into the phone. Then he just lis tened as Lia asked some questions and made some appropriate comments. "What a shame. What a tragedy for the family," she said, and with too little a pause, she launched into a tirade about an old friend who had stolen money from her.

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Paul held the phone away, wondering. Why had he called her?

Maybe because Lia knew Riley a long time ago, when every thing had been different. Maybe because it harkened back to a dif ferent Lia, with different hair and a different way of being. Maybe some part of him thought that he could access that lost version of Lia and, in the scald of tragedy, restore her for a minute.

When he hung up the phone, he understood his mistake.

Lia was lucky, in a way, that Robbie got out when he did. Lia considered Robbie's death her life's misfortune, but Paul now understood that it was her saving grace.

When Paul had looked at the old pictures, he saw something he 'd already known. His parents were headed in steeply different direc tions well before his father died. He could guess what would have happened if Robbie had stayed on, how it would have ended up.

But as it was, Lia could imagine they had been happy. She could imagine that she had the capability for happiness, that she was a righteous person at heart, that indeed she could be happy again.

And Paul, in his way, had indulged the same fantasy, hadn't he? He would remain passive and faithless as long he could tell himself that he would have and could have been loved if only his father had stuck around. But could he have? He'd had Ethan's love and he'd seized a reason to reject it. The idea of love was always easier than the practice of it.

It took his father's death to make the idea possible. They had him to thank. He was their martyr, leaving them with one, shining, untarnished thing. It wasn't much, maybe, but it was more than some people had.

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No Person Is Ashes

A lice and her parents went together out to the beach the last

week in July. They had avoided it until then. They walked together toward the lighthouse. They'd stripped down to their suits and waded into the ocean. The surf was rough and multilay ered, and Alice could see a look of near-panic on her mother's face. Judy hardly ever swam in the ocean anymore. Alice suddenly felt like more of an expert than she really was, more confident than she really was. She paddled to her mother, regained her footing on the bottom, and held her mother's hand. Her father walked steadily and ceremonially, holding the jar over his head.

You couldn't be too ceremonial in your bathing suit, spluttering and dodging waves. That's what was good about this idea. You could almost laugh.

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Alice wished Paul were there. He belonged with them for this. But he was gone. He had no house here anymore. He could have stayed with them, she thought aimlessly. But where would he have stayed? In Riley's bed? In Alice 's?

Ethan made sure he had a fix on the wind before he did any thing. It always swirled around the ocean, but today it prevailed from the northwest, Alice calculated. They set their backs against the wind. Ethan unscrewed the top and then he paused. Already the ashes began to rise into the air. Alice thought he was going to say something, and she girded herself for a duty of meaningful ness. It was hard to feel the right emotions at the right time. They didn't come at all when you set a place for them, and they sacked you when you weren't ready, when you were just innocently floss ing your teeth, for example, or eating a bowl of cereal. But Ethan didn't say anything. He handed the jar to her mother.

Alice had to give her mother's hand back, and she did it regret fully. Her mother's face was hard to look at, the sorrow so plain. She was less complicated than Alice had ever seen her, here with her agony and nothing else. But she accepted her job bravely. She had brought Riley into this world, and it was right for her to send Riley to the next. She hadn't been able to do much mothering of Riley in between.

The ashes seemed both heavy and light. Some sparkled, some fell. That seemed right, too. The ocean received them without much notice, but that was the ocean's job. It didn't meddle.

The ashes swirled on the surface for a while, and then they sank, folded into the body of the sea. Alice wondered if those ashes were really supposed to be Riley. They weren't, really. No

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person was ashes. It was one of those things you knew but did not believe in.

Her mother's hands were unflinching, and her face determined and raw. For a moment Alice did see a flash of Riley, but not in the ashes. She saw her in the set of her mother's hands.

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Alice had volunteered to stay and take care of the house business. That included putting the house on the market, finding a seller, conducting the sale, and cleaning out their stuff. She didn't mind. She had nowhere to be, no thoughts to think, no one to love.

There were all the subtle hierarchies, little ticks up and down, the story lines on which you spent the hours and minutes of your life, and then a tragedy blew a hole right in the middle of them. It felt useless to try to reconnect those bits and refocus on them, but what else did you have?

The second morning, Alice woke up alone. She brought her cereal out to the deck and ate it in the sunshine. You needed to think of new rituals when you'd lost someone you loved.

She looked up at Paul's old house with a certain feeling of dread. She was scared to see new people there, covering up the life that was there before. She felt violated by the thought of them, as though they had the power to take a part of her life away. Now that Riley was gone, you couldn't make more of it. You had to hold on to what you had. The price went right through the roof.