Blue Jeans and Coffee Beans (26 page)

An hour later, Maris sits in her kitchen surrounded by country baskets and dried flower arrangements, blue china plates displayed on the pine wall shelf behind her.

“This kitchen is divine.” Paige sits at a breakfast stool. Sunlight streams in through the white window shutters. Dried flower bunches hang from the painted ceiling beams. “You must be loving your summer here.”

“I am, in a way,” Maris begins, holding the coffee decanter aloft to fill their mugs. “This beach just gets more beautiful with age.”

“You sound like my brother.” Paige adds cream to her coffee. “He was never happy being away from here.”

“Neil?”

“No.” Paige shakes her head. “Jason.”

Maris sips her coffee. “I thought it was Neil who adored this place. He obsessed over every detail, studying the old cottages, the landscape.”

“Only because his big brother did. That’s such a misconception people have about Neil. More than anything, he was
Jason’s
biggest fan. He copied everything about Jason.”

“Tell me about him.”

Paige considers Maris. “In the past seven years, you ended up being the best medicine for him.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s really had a difficult time since that wreck. It’s taken everything out of him just to put himself back together. First there was depression, and later he was practically dependent on pain medication. I mean, it really got out of hand. But he’s clean now, has been for a couple of years.”

“No way. I can’t even imagine it.”

“That’s what I’m saying. He really wasn’t easy to be with, so you’re like this beautiful breath of fresh air in all of our lives. But mostly his. He started to come around after he got his second prosthesis, but I think you’re his magical cure.”

“Wait. A second prosthesis?”

“The first one wasn’t a good fit. It didn’t have the technology this one has either, and its limitations were such a reminder of the accident. Once he got his natural gait back, the best he could, he reached for all the other pieces of his life, especially architecture. Barlow Architecture is his real strength now.”

“He mentioned he tried corporate work, right after the accident?”

“He did. It’s only been two years that he’s back to the cottage designs. Before that, he worked with large firms in Hartford, which didn’t really suit him. But his head was still messed up too, so it served a purpose, giving him time until he could get back to where he and Neil had left off. They were quite a team.”

“Only now he’s flying solo.”

“Not really. Neil’s influence is in all his designs, so on some level, they’re still together. I think that’s what brought him back here, that connection.”

“A good sign?” Maris asks. “He’s facing things?” She pulls warm cinnamon rolls from the oven and sets them on a blue china plate between them.

“I thought so, until he pulled that disappearing act this morning. Even though I’m sure it meant the world to him that you were at the church.” She reaches for a swirled roll. “Yes, I really think you’re his reason for coming back to life this summer.”

“I don’t know about that.”

Paige runs her tongue over her teeth, collecting a sweet bit of the roll’s curlicue of icing. “Listen, for the past seven years, he completely indulged his guilt. And he never thought he’d meet someone who could get him past that, until he saw you again.”

“I really can’t take that credit. I’m not sure you’re right.”

Paige plucks her sticky fingers from her mouth before wiping them on the napkin. “Oh, I am. I’ve heard all about things. The carousel? Mini-golf? The Sand Bar?”

Maris tips her head. “He told you about all that?”

“In passing. The thing is, you haven’t seen how self-absorbed he’s been all these years. His world shrank to his injury and Neil’s death. Period. You mean a lot to him.”

She looks at Paige, then turns away, uncertain. Her eye catches a glimpse of the sketches she’d set out earlier in the dining room, one of a leather jacket with denim details at the collar, in the side inserts, in the lining. It still needs work, the final layer. Leather sketches have to be rendered in layers to see the dimension of the material. White paper comes first, showing through the initial color to give it highlights, then darker tones to illustrate the nap, followed by an extremely soft layer of black pencil over the whole thing, to pull all the colors together. It is a beautiful sketch, and almost done. She thinks it one of the best pieces in her new line and had been anxious to finish it this morning. How easy it would be to turn her back on all of Stony Point, on the quirks and accidents and friends and familiarity and happiness and problems and just sink into her designing, sink so deep she couldn’t find her way back. To have an important meeting to get to, one where trend reports would be reviewed. To get on a plane for the summer textiles trade show, where she’d lose herself even more in the fabric samples needed for this line, awash in deep sea blue denims. To return to Chicago to oversee the final prototypes of her fall styles, and see them fitted on models so she can make final adjustments. Or to settle in Manhattan. After all, the design firm there wants to talk to her asap about their brand aesthetics and conceptual development and international travel balanced with telecommuting as they entice her with their job offer. Where else could she work from home
and
travel abroad?

“You know, that accident took
Jason’s
life, too, for a long time,” Paige is saying when she turns back. “And I’m not sure if he’ll ever get over the guilt.” She stands and straightens her dress. “Please, give him a chance Maris, before you go back to Chicago. Just a chance.”

“Wait. Guilt? Why is he guilty?”

Paige offers a sympathetic smile. “I’ve said too much, because that’s really his story. I’m sorry, but he’s got to tell you himself.” She reaches for her handbag from the counter. “And I’ve got to get back. The kids’ll be anxious to get on the beach.”

“Maybe Jason’s there at the cottage?”

“I doubt it. But if he is, I’m kicking him out and sending him straight here.” She walks through to the porch, pulling her sunglasses from her purse and setting them on her face. “We’ll save a chair for you on the beach, if you decide to come.”

Before getting back to her sketches, Maris brings her laptop onto the front porch to check her email and a few design sites. She opens an email Scott sent this morning, asking her to come home for only a weekend, to talk with him in their old familiar places, the tiny restaurant they love, the gazebo in the park. She reads the email again wondering if maybe she should, then opens the attachment he included, smiling at the photographs he took of the gazebo beside the flower gardens, of her empty seat at their kitchen table. They’d been together for a long time now, and he’d proposed, after all. Maybe a visit would give her definitive answers. Her hands hover over the keyboard, ready to hit Reply, when she notices her empty ring finger and so goes up to her bedroom and puts on the refitted ring. Returning to the porch, she turns her hand, watching the diamond catch the light and getting an idea to incorporate a star stud on the leather jacket she is designing. She sets the open laptop on the porch table and goes in to the dining room, to her sketches laid out.

Inspiration comes like that, suddenly, from something as seemingly irrelevant as a sparkle from a diamond. But in that sparkle she sees starlight. After pouring a glass of wine, she begins sketching various gold studs with star cutouts that can be incorporated into the leather jacket. She tries a few variations, on the denim, on the leather, unsure of just how to showcase this particular star feature.

And all the while, she knows. She knows what Scott wants with her in Chicago. It is a nice life, actually, that anyone in their right mind would find hard to leave. They live in a lovely townhouse, she’s climbed to the top of her career, and Scott is a good man who wants her back. Chicago is safe: financially, professionally, emotionally.

Yet she is having a hard time extricating herself from Stony Point where she lives essentially unemployed, homeless and single. And a part of a certain, struggling driftline.

Picking up a bronze color gel pen, she varies the color of the stud to better show the diamond cutout, when she hears the slow, crunching sound of tires on the gravel driveway.
Give him a chance, before you go back
. She sets the sketches aside and stands on the porch, watching as Jason parks and gets out of his SUV. When he steps down onto the gravel, he favors his prosthetic leg, though she wouldn’t have noticed the falter if she didn’t know him. He still wears the morning’s suit, but the tie has been loosened, the top shirt button undone and the jacket hangs casually open now.

Madison’s tail swings like a slow pendulum as she stands at the screen door. Jason laughs a little when he turns to see them both looking at him. “Maris,” he says through the screen.

“It’s open.” Her fingers lace around the wine glass she holds. He comes inside and gives Madison a good scratching on her neck. “Are you okay?” she asks, thinking he looks tired now.

“I will be. If you’re not busy this afternoon.”

She sets the wine glass on the table alongside the laptop. “No, I’m not. What’s up?”

“Take a ride with me?” A bead of perspiration clings to his temple.

“Right now?”

He nods.

“Let me get my bag and lock up the back door.”

She goes upstairs and changes into faded denim skinnies and a camisole with a light jacket. When she adds a touch of makeup, she catches a glimpse out the window of Jason in the front yard with Madison. He smokes a cigarette and is talking with the dog standing at perfect German Shepherd attention near his feet.

Maris grabs her purse knowing the twists and turns of this day are about to bring her into his world. At the top of the stairs, she turns and runs back to her bedroom to take off the diamond ring, then grabs her leather sandals. Downstairs, she sits on the porch to slip them on, noticing that Jason had finished off her glass of wine.

.

Chapter Twenty-Four

I
want to explain myself to you.” Jason’s attention stays focused on the highway, though he seems very much aware of her, adjusting the air conditioning and glancing at her every move. “When I saw you at the mass this morning,” he continues, “I knew I had to explain things before you left here.” He passes a slower car in front of them, then opens his window a little. “But I’m not really sure how to do this.”

“I’m listening.”

“I’m sorry about this morning, at the church. I wasn’t walking out on you, or on Paige. Jesus, Paige stood by me all the way to hell and back. I just needed to compose myself.” He pauses while checking the rearview mirror, then glances at her again. “I want you to stay, Maris. In Connecticut. In my life. But you have to know my story first, and the best way to tell it is to bring you there.”

“And where would that be?”

“The scene of the accident. There’s more to it than you’re aware of. More than anyone’s aware of, except my sister. You have to understand my leg, and my face, and what I see when I look at the scars. There are others, too. Road burns did a good job of ripping up my back.”

As they drive inland, the highway hugs the Connecticut River on the east. Pleasure boats drift about and the river’s ripples sparkle silver beneath the afternoon sun. The road curves along with the river while to the west, the towns grow more congested.

“Paige has arranged an anniversary mass for Neil every year since he died.” Jason drives at a steady pace, using his signal and passing cars infrequently. As he nears his destination, though, she notices the vehicle slows up. “And every year, it takes more and more out of me.”

The town of Addison lies on the outskirts of Hartford. Developers have filled the old farmland with tracts of colonials, sprawling ranches and contemporaries in the south end of town. The central and north end hold the older real estate, the large homes set back off the streets under the umbrella of stately oaks and maples.

Maris grew up, after her mother’s death, in Olde Addison in the historic district near the cove. The presence of water always soothed her, even here. The cove forms a little inlet, a thick comma off the Connecticut River that local residents use as a boat ramp and as a permanent summer docking for larger pleasure boats. It is a pretty little area, surrounded by woods on two sides with a large old barn and colonial homes gracing its entranceway. Patches of green grass spread out around weathered picnic tables. It’s a nice place to have a sandwich and watch the boats docked on the silver expanse of water.

Under different circumstances, Maris would have mentioned all of this to Jason. She would have suggested that they sit at a table and look at the boats for a while.

Now he drives west out of Olde Addison on streets nearly deserted and quiet in the summer heat, except for the occasional drone of a lawn mower. They pass older Federals and English Tudors with deep lawns, then a newer, close development, until they turn onto the Turnpike. There are no trees there, no summer lawns to soothe the eye with cool colors, only warehouse stores and fast-food restaurants and simmering parking lots. Less than a mile before Hartford, the vehicle slows as Jason pulls into the breakdown lane, then carefully off onto the shoulder of the road. A traffic light hangs ahead of them, with the city line a few blocks further. He opens both windows and kills the engine before sitting back with an uneasy sigh. To their left, a large cemetery covers a sloping hill, and to their right, on the other side of a swath of roadside brush, beyond an immense parking lot, a strip mall houses a grocery store, discount store and other small shops.

Jason sets his sunglasses on the dash. “This is where my brother died.”

“Here?” Maris had lived away since high school and had no idea the accident occurred just outside her hometown. “Right here?”

“Past the light there.” Jason looks at the road beyond the traffic signal. “Not in a hospital bed, or even on an ambulance stretcher where someone could have helped him, or comforted him at the end. No one wiped his face or told him it would be okay. He died alone on the street.” He unknots his loosened tie and pulls it slowly from his collar. Even on this scrubby patch of turnpike, birdsong comes in the windows. Maris takes the tie from him and neatly folds it while he looks outside. She turns and sets it on the back seat.

“We were on his bike that day. A Harley Neil bought a couple years earlier. He didn’t even ride it much, just a little bit in the warm weather. It was more a conversation piece than anything else.”

A few cars approach, and he waits till they drive past and the quiet returns before continuing. “Neil needed a part from the bike shop further back on the Turnpike. It was one of those hot days when nothing’s doing, so I went along for the ride. We drove up on the back roads from the beach.” He checks his mirrors and glances out at the pavement. “The back roads were cooler than the highway. Lots of shade. Less traffic.”

Jason leans forward then, resting his arms over the top of the steering wheel. Maris thinks that his small details are his way of painting the picture of the whole day instead of just a picture of death. It seems the only way to get through that day, today, right now, or he might never get out of it.

“We were at the bike shop for about an hour and decided to go to The Elm Café for a grinder, maybe a beer. You know, hang out awhile, shoot the shit. It’s in the south end.” He turns to Maris. “Have you ever been there, The Elm Café?”

“A few times.”

He nods, as though satisfied that she is following his journey to the accident. “We figured we’d drive down the Turnpike,” he continues, his voice low, “and turn off up ahead there.” He points to a further intersection where the Turnpike comes to an end at the Hartford line.

“The thing is, when we left the bike shop, Neil tossed me the keys. Just turned around and said
You drive
. I never forget that, the way I grabbed them right from the air. I see them, I hear them jangling like it happened yesterday. It’s funny how you remember random things like that.”

The occasional car that passes them now seems out of place. Jason is taking her somewhere inaccessible to anyone else, where their lives pause while the rest of the world goes on normally around them. For him, that has been a long reality. He’d paused right here on this strip of road for seven years now.

“So I drove his Harley down this road and we stopped at that light there.” He nods toward the traffic light in front of them, his hands still resting on the top of the steering wheel. “The light was red and we were waiting for it to turn green. There were no cars in front of us, no one behind us. It was quiet, with just the bike idling.” He pauses. “We sat there for a single minute like that. But that minute, Jesus. It was the last minute of his life.”

His eyes squint then and Maris sees how easily it happens. How that day lives inside him, just waiting for any cue to begin again and again and again. Watching him tell it is the same as standing on the side of that dry, scrubby pavement seven years ago, the heat beating down on the blacktop, the sun mercilessly blinding, the air warm and heavy. Everything about the day, relentless still.

He wore a black tee, dusty Levi’s, construction boots on his legs straddling the bike, keeping balance, dark sunglasses in the bright sunlight as he waited for the light to change, glancing down at the bike gauges. Neil sat hitched behind him wearing sunglasses, his hair a mess.

Jay
. Neil’s arm reached forward, pointing to the mirror.
Hey Jay
.

He saw it then, coming up behind them. He’d never seen a car move that fast, so fast that it took a second to register that the growing shape was, in fact, a car.

A whirlpool of roaring grew louder and rose up, overtaking and spinning around them, deafening their ears to anything else. And he knew, he just knew, that engine headed straight at them was fully opened. Every bit of breathing, of pulse, of strength, went into heaving five hundred pounds of bike a few feet over. Every molecule and atom re-formed to drench every bit of his skin while burning every muscle. Time grew greedy, taking all of it and giving it to the terror behind them, leaving them not even one second to ditch the bike and run for cover.

The sunlight turned white then, pure glaring white as Jason took the force of his brother’s weight fully on his back, the impact bending him over enough that Neil’s body flowed like a wave over his head and shoulders, and without him there to bear his brother’s weight, without his resistance, the body was airborne. But that pressure on his back, it stayed, as though Neil were holding on. It was still there as the world went suddenly silent, all sound muted, unable to keep up with the motion that would not stop, that spun the bike incessantly, Jason feeling his jeans hooked onto something twisting up his leg, keeping him attached to the machine. Afterward, he would always know that sight and sound ceased working in the heat of violence. Because a soundless ripping burned through his leg, a flame of pain with no direction to take so it took it all, before that bike released his leg and flung him across the pavement off to meet the brush growing wild on the side of the road. Then, nothing.

“And I wake up,” Jason is saying as Maris listens to the story. “Now. In the middle of the night sometimes, because I hear that same absolute quiet in my sleep and I’m on this road again.”

She shakes her head no.

“See, my only escape is sleep,” he continues, “but then I
can’t
sleep because I think over all the choices I made that day.” His voice grows nearly inaudible. “And I wonder if there wasn’t a moment when I could have changed it, so I wouldn’t have killed my brother.”

Maris closes her eyes. “No, no, no,” she whispers. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“No? Neil let me drive and I didn’t even see the car coming. What the hell was I doing? He saw it before I did.” His open hand hits the steering wheel hard. “When I think that he
died
because we were short a few seconds, it makes me sick. If I’d been watching my mirrors, my brother could still be here. Everything changed in twenty seconds.”