Pieces of My Sister's Life (22 page)

24

T
HE FERRY RIDE
on our way to Boston was the last time I can remember truly being happy. It was the week before everything went bad.

The afternoon was the kind that brought tourists on day trips, clear skies, the solstice sun as high as a New England sun could get. As the ferry gathered speed, I watched a little boy running hard along the jetty. He was waving frantically as he ran, chest heaving, his face tense with determination, as if he knew he could catch us if he just ran hard enough. When he reached the end of the jetty he stopped, gathered a breath and turned, then raced back to shore with that same fervor.

Watching from the deck I thought I knew how he felt, like almost anything was possible if you only ran hard enough. School had just ended, the worst year of my life in so very many ways, and the summer stretched out in front of me like a lanky, purring promise. We’d both found new jobs, Eve in a gallery on Water Street and me as a shelver in the town library, but even with these responsibilities, still I saw the three of us floating free along that summer promise, with a clear view on all sides and only a gentle dip and sway.

The ride to Point Judith was barely an hour long, but in that hour we ate enough junk food to make us sick. Eve made friends with the boy behind the snack counter and I watched his face redden each time she ordered, watched Eve’s flirting and felt an insane kind of pleasure. This was how life was supposed to be. Here Ryan Maclean didn’t exist, or existed only as a name in a list of four hundred congressmen. This was the Eve I’d known all my life, a girl who’d only pretended to be world-wise.

After reaching Point Judith we started the long drive north. I sat in the front seat of Justin’s Ford with Eve in back, leaning forward to talk, elbows draped over our seats. “This is it!” she said as the Boston skyline came into view, cement monsters with glistening, lidless eyes. “I’m serious, I’m gonna live here someday, go to museums, eat out at French restaurants, open a coffee bar.”

We drove past the harbor, its rust-coated ships ten times larger than anything on the island, its black and still water more like a huge stagnant pond than ocean. Even under the steady sun, the city seemed dark and brooding. I glanced at Eve but didn’t say anything. Already part of me was homesick.

“Holiday Inn,” Justin said, pointing over my shoulder. He glanced at the hotel brochure, then pulled off the interstate, but the streets kept twisting, and the hotel kept appearing in places it shouldn’t.

In the backseat Eve was providing a running commentary. As we passed a huddle of unshaven men in stained T-shirts and ragged jeans, she grinned and tapped on the window. “Forget Harvard Square, there’s plenty of eligible guys right here. Hey, what’s that girl think this is, an alien parade? Whadda you think, Jussy, think I’d look good with purple hair?”

“This is ridiculous,” Justin said. “Let’s get directions.”

He slowed down and Eve stuck her head out the window, calling to a man in a navy suit. “Hey, sweetheart, how do we get to that hotel? We been driving around for hours.”

As he turned towards Eve, the man’s eyes softened. He flashed her a grin. “That’s Boston for ya,” he said in a thick accent.

“Baahston?” Eve said, grinning back.

“Try going thataway,” the man said, pointing the opposite direction from the hotel. Eve raised her eyebrows and he shrugged. “You’ll get there, trust me. So what room you staying in? I’ll look you up.”

“Just go to the front desk and ask for Kerry,” Eve said. Justin pulled away and we all burst into laughter, our first genuine laughter in what seemed like months.

The road he’d sent us on turned sharply, leading us directly to the hotel’s parking lot. We checked into the orange-carpeted room, where Eve and I would share one double bed and Justin would take the other. Eve, who wore her thin silk nighties every summer night at home, had instead packed flannel pajamas and her terry robe. The sweetness of this, her unexpected guardedness around Justin, made my insides ache. And I longed for that night when I’d curl with her in our shared bed and we’d breathe each other’s breath, take back our world.

We walked out to the T station through streets lined with traffic and honking horns. The people were everywhere, bustling home from work with their heads down, eyes on their feet. We sat waiting for the train, the three of us squashed in a seat meant for two, until we saw a foot-long rat scuttle under the tracks. Eve made a face and jumped to her feet. “I’m going for a walk,” she said.

A man in a torn sweatshirt, his face ragged with stubble, sidled his way across the platform. He walked towards me, caught my eye before I could look away and gave a gap-toothed grin. “’Scuse me, honey, you got some spare change? I didn’t eat today or yesterday neither.” He watched my face carefully, then shook his head, speaking with a practiced despair. “And the thing is…Thing is, it’s my
birthday,
see.”

“Well, tell you what,” Eve said, appearing from behind a post.

The man startled away, staring from me to her and back, like he was regretting that last bottle of cheap vodka.

“We don’t have any money, but since it’s your birthday, we’ll give you a song.” She pulled me from the bench and jumped up onto the seat. “Hey, guys, guess what!” she called, her voice echoing off the cement walls. “We got a birthday boy here. How ’bout we all sing!”

Everybody turned, and a laugh rippled through the crowd. I stared up at Eve in disbelief as she raised her arms, even more shocked as the crowd began to join her, the voices gradually swelling into a cacophony of disjointed song. “Happy birthday to youuu…” Beside us, Justin gazed at her in awe, then turned to me and joined in with a laugh.

“Happy birthday dear…” The voices trailed off as the crowd looked to Eve expectantly. Eve just grinned back, glanced at the man and shrugged. She raised her arms again and the crowd started back up. “Happy birthdaaay to youuu…”

The crowd cheered and the man walked away, shaking his head, his eyes wide and dazed. I looked into Eve’s face, trying to read her expression. As the crowd turned away her shoulders dropped and she stepped down from the bench. And I suddenly had the strange sense that I should find some way to comfort her. I smiled widely. “That was hilarious,” I said.

But even though she smiled back, her eyes seemed glazed, like they were trapped in some far distant place.

By the time we finally got to Fenway Park the game was in the second inning, the Yankees winning by four.

“Think I’ll root for the Yanks,” Eve said, grinning at Justin as we took our seats.

He shook his head. “You looking to get beat up or something?”

“What’s it been, seventy-six years since the Sox won the World Series?”

I stared at her. When had Eve ever watched baseball?

She shook her head. “It’s like they’re some kind of low-budget running tragedy. Maybe the actors and the plot change a little each year, but you know what’s gonna happen in the end. Ask me, I’d rather laugh with the winners than cry with the losers.”

Did she look this all up before we came? Justin smiled at her. “I’d rather not get beat up,” he said.

The Yankees led most of the game but remarkably, in the bottom of the ninth inning with bases loaded, the Sox shortstop hit a fly ball that arched over the Green Monster. The crowd exploded and Justin grabbed me round the waist with a cheer. I let the crowd’s electricity surge through me, as if it could discharge everything that had happened in the past few months.

As we got up to leave, a man turned to Justin. “I think you should tell your friend there that this is gonna be the Sox year.”

“I bet you’re right,” Justin said. “I think this is going to be the year.”

“Let’s hit the bars,” Eve said as we left the stadium.

I made a face at her. “How you planning to get in? Last I heard, the drinking age is still twenty-one.”

She smiled slowly and kissed her fingers, tapped them on my cheek. “Silly girl,” she said. “Don’t you worry, I’ll take care of it.”

Back at the hotel she hitched her skirt in half so it fell well above her knees, grabbed a black leather jacket from her suitcase and slipped it over her T-shirt. She went to the vanity, and Justin and I both watched mutely as she darkened her lipstick, deepened hollows in her cheeks, then smoothed back her hair with gel and a headband. She smiled at her reflection, tilted her head one way and then the other and grinned. “Voilà, twenty-one,” she said.

The block by our hotel was lined with bars, all themed in one way or another: sports bar, gay bar, bohemian and artsy, and then a neon-lit window fronted by yuppies in business suits, busy even on a Monday night. This, of course, was the bar Eve chose.

We were on our way in when a man in black grabbed Justin’s shoulder. “I’ll need ID,” he said.

Eve, who had already made it inside, turned around and gave him a slow, slim smile. “They’re with me,” she said. “There’s not a problem, is there?”

The man eyed Eve, a look that slid from her lips to chest to legs. Finally he flicked his chin in a quick nod. “They’ll card you all if you try and get drinks, you know that.”

Eve winked at him. “S’okay. There’s other ways to have fun.”

We sat on barstools amid the smoke, the rock beat so loud you had to shout to hear your own voice. And the men were drawn in right away, came to stand behind us, order us drinks, red-faced and feverish, making twin jokes and thinking they were funny.

But Eve was the one they ended up talking to. After a few minutes I became as uninteresting as belly button lint. They grew more and more animated, began to laugh at everything she said before she even finished saying it.

Justin and I sat with our stale beers and watched. It was incredible to see, even though I’d been with her every day of her life. Was it a scent she had? A pheromone? Was it the way she threw back her head when she laughed? Really it was all of these and more, something indefinable but everywhere. I looked the same, could say her words, I could carry myself in the very same way but I’d still only seem like a shadow.

As the room started to thin out, Eve slid her butt up onto the bar. “I want to make a toast,” she slurred.

Heads turned, the men gave their lizard-watching-a-fly grins. Justin whispered between clenched teeth, “Eve! Get down!”

Eve beamed and hiked up her skirt. Raised her beer mug. “Here’s to the Red Sox,” she shouted. “Here’s to staying up past three and tongues that are long enough to touch the tip of your nose.”

Someone hooted from the back of the room. “You go, girl,” someone else called.

“Here’s to German beer and Marlboros, and the feel of a guy’s you-know-what when you dance.”

Justin’s face tightened. “That’s it,” he said. “You can stay with her if you want, but I’m going back.”

“You’re leaving me here?”

“I’m leaving Eve. I can’t watch this, it’s making me sick.”

I looked up at Eve. She was high-fiving men with both hands, and as I watched, one of them intertwined his fingers with hers as another lifted her by the waist.

“Okay,” I said. “You go on. I have to see her back.”

Hours later I walked Eve up to the hotel. I helped her into her flannel, squeezed toothpaste on her brush. I lay with her, breathing the liquor-sweat of her neck and the baby whisper of her hair, and the thought rose to cover me fine and gossamer as a veil, that I was the only one that knew. I was the only one who understood the truth of her.

25

T
HERE WERE SEVEN STUDENTS
in the graduating class, and as we watched the small procession, Eve on the folding chair to my right and Justin to my left, I didn’t think of my own future a year away. What I felt was the fragile shell that was finally forming again like a cocoon around the three of us. I knew how to be careful. I knew how not to break it, and in time we’d all be able to be ourselves again.

Ryan Maclean was there to give the commencement address. He sat in front of us with his wife and his two sons, and every few minutes when he turned to us, face red and slick in the hot June sun, it was me who caught his eye and slapped him back with my tsunami-strength hatred for what he’d almost taken away.

Eve felt it too, felt his eyes. He’d turn and I’d sense her stiffening beside me, but her eyes stayed on the stage. I wondered what he could be thinking, sitting there with his wife but turning to Eve. Maybe it was only that he was scared, but in his eyes it looked like more. Sitting there I began to understand the truth he hadn’t been able to tell me, the unthinkable fact that in a way Congressman Maclean actually had loved Eve.

He rose and approached the podium to a watery rush of applause. He stood for a minute, looking out over the audience, smiling and nodding, acknowledging admirers like the applause was for him rather than the occasion.

“I watch these bright young faces,” he said, “so beautiful, so full of promise. I look at you all and I wonder.” And then he turned to Eve, looked straight at her with his piercing eyes, his serene and fatherly smile. “You have so much confidence in what you’ve done so far, in the steps you’ve taken to leave your old lives behind. But before you leave, make sure you stop to reflect on the magic of the life you’re leaving, the beauty of the island, the community, and especially the people. The folks who love you more than anyone you’ll ever find on the outside.”

His gaze lingered on Eve and then shifted away. He stretched an almost mocking smile. “Remember that, remember what I’ve said as you continue on your journey. You remember the magic you walked away from and mourn the loss of it, and when you’re done with that journey just remember it’s still here for you, whenever you decide to come home.”

Eve’s face was pale, her eyes wide and startled. “Son of a bitch,” I whispered, hoping he could read my lips.

Eve stood and slipped out from the row. I squeezed Justin’s knee and followed.

She was walking so fast I had to jog to keep up, but when she reached the road she stopped, facing away from me. “You okay?” I said finally.

“Wasn’t it romantic? I think I’m in love.”

“It was disgusting, really,” I said, then glanced at her. “Do you think he really does love you?”

“I don’t know.” She looked back at the white graduation tent and shook her head. “I think he might be crazy, though. There with his wife, his kids, I think he might actually be clinically insane.”

We listened to a smattering of applause, and then the reading of the graduates’ names. More applause and the throwing of caps, then Principal Greene’s congratulations.

“We should go back, I have to do something.” Eve pulled at my arm. “Come with me.”

I let her drag me until I realized where she was going. “Eve?” I said, pulling away. “Eve!” I stared at her a minute, stunned, then rushed forward.

“You too!” Eve was saying. “And how old is Tim now?”

“He’s almost seven,” Mrs. Maclean said. “Can you imagine? It seems like the last time I looked we were still trying to potty-train.” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “We had the hardest time with it.”

“Mo-om!”

“And Billy’s what? I’d guess three years old?”

Billy Maclean held up three fingers. “And a half.”

Mrs. Maclean put an arm around him and beamed. “And you girls are going to be wearing the caps and gowns soon, right? Is it next year? I still remember when you and your dad first came to the island. You were hardly knee high.” She turned to Ryan. “What is it the Psalms say, sweetheart? Days consumed like smoke.”

Mr. Maclean was watching Eve’s feet mutely as his wife spoke. Or was he actually watching her bare legs? I narrowed my eyes at him, pulling Eve’s arm to get us out of there. “There’s a party at Jill Stanton’s,” I said. “So we should probably get ready.”

“Ryan was planning to stop by too, weren’t you, honey? Congratulate the grads and he bought gifts, plaques with an Emerson quote.”

“How sweet,” Eve said dryly.

“Should I tell you what happened the night of my graduation? It was the night we first kissed and five years later we were married.” She chuckled and squeezed Mr. Maclean’s arm. “So you have fun then. But not
too
much fun.” She laughed again and waved as I pulled Eve away.

“What’re you doing!” I whispered.

She shrugged. “I just wanted to let him know how things would be now. How it means so little to me now that I can talk to his wife without even flinching. And really, how much easier it’ll be for him, too.”

Justin came up behind us. “What were you doing, Eve? You weren’t—”

“Why’re you guys making such a big deal? Look, we’re going to have to live in the same town for how long, so we have to learn how to deal with it.”

Justin raised his eyebrows at me and I shook my head.

“So we going to the Stantons’?” Eve said.

I eyed her for a minute, suddenly realizing it would ruin something in me, seeing Eve in the green silk dress she’d bought with the Caines’ money, its low neck and spaghetti straps. All night, I knew, I’d be watching how the boys all looked at her, how she pulled back her shoulders when she sensed them looking. “I think I’m not in the mood anymore,” I said. “Could we just walk, Justin? You mind?”

He watched me carefully. “They say it’s going to storm tonight.”

I widened my eyes at him pointedly, and he shrugged. “Guess I don’t mind getting wet if you don’t.”

So we spent the evening walking through streets and watching the mainlanders with their after-dinner ice creams, hair wet from their after-beach showers. They clustered like carolers around posted dinner menus, pondering whether entrée descriptions justified their prices. They stood under streetlamps studying maps and deciding what to do tomorrow, and I felt a sort of ache watching them, their only concern whether the clouds would blow over by morning. As we walked I realized what had bothered me since our trip to Boston, that I felt like I couldn’t speak my mind to Eve. For my own sense of peace I needed to pretend she held none of the blame for what she’d done, when inside, this was how I felt: If Congressman Maclean had become crazy in love with her, to the point where he couldn’t leave it behind even in the presence of his family, that was her fault. Eve had known exactly what she was doing.

“Next year it’ll be you,” Justin said suddenly.

I looked across the harbor to the emerald lights tracing the Newport Bridge, following its rise from the blackened sea, its long run and dip back into the ocean. “It’s weird,” I said. “I feel so much older than them in a way. Like there they are, thinking how walking past that podium and taking that diploma is the most important thing. When I know it’s just one foot in front of the other going nowhere. Just this piece of paper with their name in fancy writing, but what does it change about them, really? If their life sucked before, then it still sucks.”

Justin stopped short, turned to face me. “Where’s that coming from?”

I raised my chin. “When I graduate, are you going to ask me to marry you?”

Justin blinked. “What?”

“Mrs. Maclean told us that when she graduated was the first night they kissed. And then they got married and now here he is screwing Eve.” I tilted my head to the dark sky. “I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I don’t even know, just all these thoughts are jumbled up inside me. I feel like there’s only a few really important things in your life and you have to take them when you can because you never know when they’ll go away. I need to find out if you’ll ever want to get married.”

“Well of course I will, of course I do.”

“To me?”

Justin watched me a moment, then took my hands. “Of course I do,” he said again. “That’s what I’ve been planning.”

My eyes stung as he brought my hands to his lips, whispered against them. “You are older than those kids,” he said. “Older than them and in some ways you’re older than me.” He kissed my fingers, smiled crookedly. “Of course I want to marry you.”

I slid my hands up to his cheeks. His face was flushed, his eyes full with something swollen and guarded.

I kissed him then, me and Justin in the middle of Dodge Street, off-islanders watching from the wraparound porch of the Surf Hotel. The air around us was hot with summer laughter, the yearning scraping at my insides. But somehow, I knew something was missing. A tiny chip I couldn’t name that kept the picture from coalescing, from being wholly complete. So I pulled at him, clutched his shirt in my fists and his tongue against my teeth, as if I could stop him from leaving the ground and drifting away.

It was fully dark when we got back home, the moon hazing yellow between the clouds. The rain had started, just a drizzle, but the winds were picking up and promising more. “Better not take too long saying good night,” Justin said. “I’m gonna have to make a dash for it.”

I reached for him. “What’s more important, getting wet or getting kissed?”

He laughed and pulled me close. It was then I saw the window.

The pane of glass beside the door was shattered, an approximately fist-sized hole. “Justin?” I whispered.

As if in response, the blustering wind blew the door open, then clicked it back to the latch. There were no lights on inside, no sounds. Justin put out his arm to stop me from coming closer, lifted a potted plant. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” he whispered. “But you stay here until I say it’s okay.”

He pushed the door and stepped inside. I waited on the porch wishing for light, something brighter than the sickly yellow moon. The rain was hitting nails against the tin roof; it was all I could hear. There could be anything out here, anywhere, behind the bushes, under the porch grating—really he shouldn’t have left me there alone.

I walked into the hall. Footsteps. I pressed myself against the wall, hand over my mouth. Something ran out from the kitchen towards me, arms raised over its head. I shrieked.

“Christ!” Justin said. “Jesus, Kerry, I told you to stay outside!”

I stared at him, then suddenly exploded into laughter. “You almost creamed me!”

Justin shook his head, then snorted. “Can’t you see the headlines? Girl bashed into coma by man wielding a dead clematis. I’d never live it down.”

“Well if there was anyone here, I’m sure they got scared off. You see anything missing?”

It was then we heard the muffled scream.

Justin and I stared at each other over the dead vines. Suddenly Justin backed away. “Eve!”

We raced up the stairs and down the hall, swung round the corner, darkness, darkness and then I saw the bodies and the flash of pale skin on tanned skin. His hand plastered over her mouth, the other round her neck, his groin grinding against her, pushing her down against my bed.

Eve screamed when she saw us but somehow Mr. Maclean seemed oblivious, hadn’t heard us, so intent he was on his grinding and thrusting, his words pitched high and wild with frenzy, maybe also with drink. “You little cockteaser. Stop pretending you don’t want it, you said!”

“Get off me!” Eve hit at him. “You son of a bitch!”

“Please,” I whispered, “oh, oh, please…”

“Stop it, stop it…” She was sobbing now. “Stoppit, stoppit!”

Beside me Justin had frozen, watching the legs and flailing arms, the black lace of her underthings and torn silk of her dress. He stared like a deer blinded by headlights and then with a roar he lunged at Mr. Maclean with strength I didn’t know he had, strength that lifted the heavy flowerpot and rammed Mr. Maclean’s shoulder, sending him stumbling against Eve’s bed. Mr. Maclean shrieked, hitting back at Justin, kicking, catching him under the chin, but Justin didn’t seem to feel it. He swung the flowerpot at Mr. Maclean’s head.

Time is elastic; Einstein proved it and everyone can feel it, how a clock tells you nothing about how long a nightmare lasts. Time stretches and each second sticks to the last: a smash of terra-cotta against bone, blood spraying from Mr. Maclean’s nose, the panic in his eyes and heaving of his chest, I saw it all. The pot lifting and battering again and then again, the rage on Justin’s face fiercer than anything I’d ever seen before. Justin, who was never angry, who wore his calmness like a badge of honor, now seemed raw and red, unhinged. Still blindly battering as Mr. Maclean gaped up at him, gurgling, his face twisted in horror. Eve gave an ear-piercing shriek and I dove for Justin’s arms, wrapped myself around his body and pulled him to the floor.

The sound of our breath. Silence. He was lying there, Ryan Maclean, with open eyes and open zipper, his penis, the first I’d ever seen, deflating slowly to curl purplish blue against his beige dress pants.

I covered my face and backed against the wall, my chest heaving, gagging, bringing up nothing. Eve staggered backwards, cowering in an identical huddle against the wall, her hands pressed over her mouth.

“Justin?” I whimpered. “Justin?”

But his eyes were on Eve, her huddled near-naked form. “Oh God,” he said, striding to her, cradling her head against his neck. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”

“He’s dead,” Eve said. “Is he dead? Is he?”

I watched them, hands still cupped over my mouth and nose, watched how Justin pressed his hands to her bare back, his fingers under the black straps of her bra.

“Did he rape you?” Justin said.

She shook her head and wrapped her arms around him, sobbing against his chest. I watched them a moment, then bent to the floor, trying not to look at Ryan Maclean’s penis or his staring eyes, the blood now pooling on the hardwood floor, lining veins into the cracks and ridges. I pressed his eyes closed and reached for his neck, wet and still warm, felt nothing but the sheen of sweaty skin. “I…” I inhaled a quick, hiccupping breath. “I…” I said again, then gagged, a sickly bile that burned my mouth.