The Moment Before (5 page)

I blast the horn for no reason. What am I thinking? That the slippery bank will get out of the way and be replaced by a bale of cotton? Mud and hail splatter the windshield as my tires grind deep and I smell the smell of hot brakes. I hear the crackle of stiff blackberry vines. The car veers and lurches and skids to a stop against the thick trunk of a fir. I uncramp my fingers from the steering wheel where they’ve turned whiter than the hail. The heavens have opened up. Sabine’s frozen tears pelt down on the roof of her car so hard it’s like I’m inside of a pinball machine.

Nice job
, she says into the cacophony.

I’m aware of the strange vibrato of my heart. Actual fear. Something happening to my body. It dawns on me that I’m not dead, and the relief of revising my funeral scenario spreads like honey from my scalp to my toes. Right outside the window is the precipitous drop into a rich person’s backyard. There’s the outdoor kitchen, the fire pit, the greenhouse, the elaborate swing set, all Street of Dreams perfect and un-intruded upon by a 1990 Volvo and that poor, grieving Wilson girl. My fear turns to elation. To aliveness. A second chance at grace and whatever it is that born-agains sing about.

But there’s a wee problem. I seem to have slid off into a ditch and the car is buried under a rind of frozen slush.

Once the hailstorm passes, I yawn the door open and step out into the ridges of muck. Steam is lifting off of the car like a halo. The tires are halfway sunk. There’s a little wrinkle in the license plate where it’s gnawing the tree. I realize that when I conceived of this road trip I didn’t envision myself outside, actually, so I’m ridiculously underdressed in a jeans jacket and leggings and my Keds with the holes in the toe, now splashed with moldy latte. I’ve also left my cell at home. There aren’t too many options beyond pounding on one of these McMansion doors and convincing the maid to let me call—who? Mom? Dad? Martha?

There is another option, of course. The other student at Greenmeadow most likely to be cutting class. The boy who didn’t catch my sister. The wastoid pariah who is probably doing bong hits while
Wheel of Fortune
airs on a flat screen in his living room, which happens to be located just around the bend. Maybe it’s not as long a walk as I think to get back to my house? Sabine’s icy tears have stopped, and the transient blue April sky is hatching above. I give it fifteen, maybe twenty minutes before the next onslaught. Cold wet is already wicking into the canvas of my sneakers. I take a deep breath and head uphill, toward Connor Christopher’s bungalow.

Bunches of bright daffodils rising from lime-green thickets flank the flagstone in front of Connor’s house. Some are those double-bloom types with the deepest egg-yolky center surrounded by white or chick-yellow. A few are freakishly long and slender—Jack-and-the-beanstalk daffodils that point skyward. Fluorescent moss dots the path, invading any crack or opening. A fat banana slug slimes along the stone. A pile of hail is melting just ahead of it. I always try to step around the slugs and moss of the forest, but here at Connor’s house, I’m tempted to stomp all over anything that seeks to live. I envision yanking the flowers up, bulbs and all, and hurling them down the hill. Why have I come? Wouldn’t it be better to court hypothermia than to trespass on the grounds of an outlaw?

A shiver crawls along my back sideways from shoulder to shoulder. I rap the solid Christopher door with my frozen knuckles. The house greets me with stillness. There’s no evidence that anyone is home. No light on inside. No sounds of feet on flooring. Only a few months ago Connor’s family hosted the annual squad fundraiser. They had a catchy name.
Raising Cheer
. They auctioned off a bunch of booze and beach house vacations and made about twenty grand. My parents had offered our Manzanita house for a week this summer. The Christophers won the bid. And here I am again, with the next no-degrees-of-separation coincidence. But it looks like my knock will go unanswered, so, hugging the chill from my ribs, I turn around and start back down the flagstones to the potholed road. Clouds are moving in again as I jog-walk back to the car. Maybe I’ll warm up for a few minutes in front of the ancient half-working defroster before walking down the hill to my house.

My toes are getting numb as I round the bend toward the sunken Volvo. My shoes are caked in clumped slime. If I were in school right now, it’d almost be over. Last period. Literature. We’re reading
As I Lay Dying
. The irony is not lost on me as I plod down the hill. Now I see it, the poor car that is, at least, no longer covered in bird shit. And beside the car, peering into its foggy windows, is Connor Christopher.

“Hey,” I say just like that.
Hey
. As if.

“Brady,” he says, all startled and confused.

His eyes are the usual bloodshot. He’s wearing a hoodie, shorts and running shoes. Dressed even less weather-appropriate than me.

“What, were you thinking that Sabine drove this up here?”

I don’t know what made me say that. I’m not usually so creepy. Connor straightens up, looks past me, then back at the car, then at the darkening sky. “It’s gonna dump any minute,” he says in his deep, honey-toned voice.
Faulkner
, I think.
That’s probably what Faulkner sounds like
.

As if by magic, the first pellets of hail unload at his command. Inside my head Sabine says,
What, you both too stupid to know when to get out of the rain
? There’s not much else to do but climb in. Connor and me both, crawling over the moldy latte and the chem text and the notebooks.

We sit there in silence as the shower of ice continues. He smells like boy. A faint scent of Axe mixed with mud. And because it’s Connor, there’s that whiff of weed. Me in the passenger seat, and him in the driver’s. As though we’re on a date. A couple of truants. All we need is a six of PBR. Into the growing awkward I say, “You don’t have, like, AAA or anything, do you?”

“I didn’t know you had a license.”

“Who says I do?”

He nods. “I can get my stepdad’s truck. Pull this out.”

“I sort of hoped for something like that. I, um, actually went to your house just now.”

He turns his head now. Looks at me with squinched up forehead lines. “I heard about the whole art award thing.”

Facebook, no doubt. The town crier. I shrug. And then I notice something glimmering in the little hoodie shadow against Connor Christopher’s face. A familiar trinket. A cross with a tiny sapphire in the middle, dangling from his earlobe. Mutely, I point to it, and Connor reaches his thumb and fingers around it, rubbing it like a greedy person referring to money.

“How’d you get that?”

“She gave it to me.”

Alliances and partnerships and secret handshakes—so many things happening under my nose. Why would my sister give Connor Christopher her earring?

As if reading my face, he says, “It’s complicated.”

“I’m beginning to think that I’m the one who died. And I’m in that limbo my grandparents always talk about, where nothing makes any sense at all.”

He says, “That why you’re not in school today?”

“I overslept.”

“Yeah. A lot of that going around I guess.”

He doesn’t pursue. Doesn’t ask what I’m doing up here. A little sigh comes out my mouth. I feel my shoulders sink. Relaxation. Rest. It’s nice. So, into that space I throw a wrench. “Did you know Martha’s seeing Nick?”

He doesn’t answer me right away. And then, his voice is real quiet when he says, “It’s not exactly news, Brady.”

“Yeah, well, it was to me.”

The hail stops as though someone flipped a switch. My feet are resting on World of Chemistry, making jagged mud prints on top of the picture of the test tube. “I thought I was going over the bank. Curtains.”

“You came close.”

“It was like, in those five seconds, my brain spun out the whole thing. My parents getting the call from the EMTs, planning my service. More ashes. More rosaries and mass cards.”

I hear Connor swallow hard.

“You have no idea what it’s like to have her as your sister. You start to believe in destiny. You start to believe in the grand plan. She got everything, everything she went after.”

“Not everything,” Connor says.

His green eyes are flecked with amber. His eyebrows thick as wooly caterpillars. His fingers are wrapped around the steering wheel, pulsing nervously.

“So, you think you can pull this out?”

He nods. “We should do it quick. Before, you know…”

I do know. This situation? Me and Connor and Sabine’s precariously positioned car? Neither of us wants to have to explain it. I wouldn’t know where to begin.

By the time we trudge back up to Connor’s house and he plunges into every one of his stepdad’s coat pockets, and by the time he finally comes up with a spare hanging from a nail in his garage, finds the right rope, and gets the truck started, it’s after school already. Several more hail bursts have delivered more semi-frozen mess, and when we rumble down the lane to Sabine’s car, it’s another few inches sunken down—that much closer to falling into the Street of Dreams backyard.

“You stay here,” he tells me, bringing the Ford F-250 to a stop a few feet from the Volvo’s bumper. I’m not going to argue. Connor slides out the door, leaving it half open, the engine running, grabs the rope and loops the heavy sisal on a hook underneath the car. Me, I would have wrapped it around the bumper and it would have yanked right off. Watching him through the rainy back window loop and tie and do all those boyscouty things makes me sad. Before the accident, Connor was popular—if a little fringy. He was Sabine’s lift partner—she’s the one who convinced him to abandon wrestling for cheering. My sister could persuade a super model to gain seventy-five pounds and learn to throw shot put. That’s how she was. Everyone knew Connor had a crush on her. Half the boys, no, maybe ninety percent of the boys had a crush on Sabine.

“It’s in neutral,” he tells me when he climbs back in, his hoodie all sopping wet.

I nod. Neutral. Another thing I wouldn’t have thought about.

He throws the truck in gear and edges forward and I hear the sucking sound of tires in heavy mud. I feel us being pulled at from behind, the engine straining. Connor says, “C’mon, Baby,” low and whispery with his Faulknery voice.

The Volvo wiggles out, and then slips a little left, right, now an entire wheel is hanging off the edge, but the rest of the car is freed and following the pickup down the street. “Yes.” I half-yell.

We ease to a stop, our little caravan, and then Connor pulls the parking brake and climbs back out to undo the rope. Our adventure is over. The car is unstuck and safe. Instead of the total relief I should feel, I’m a little let down. Wishful that it could have been a bit more complicated, somehow. I realize that I, too, am damp, and I start to shiver a little getting out of the truck.

By the time I reach the door of the car, Connor has looped the rope back up and thrown it into his truck bed. I’m not quite sure what to say, but something automatically comes out my mouth. “Our secret, right?”

Connor turns around, folds his arms. Sabine’s earring flashes in a bolt of sudden sunlight. Fitting, for Good Friday. “Won’t be putting this on Facebook, or anything,” he says.

“I owe you one,” I tell him. “Seriously. At least, maybe I should have your phone number. We could get coffee or doughnuts or something sometime. My treat.”

He shrugs, scribbles his number on a piece of rolling paper, and hands it to me. The sky, all brilliant gunmetal, highlights a magenta azalea bush right behind him. The incredible beauty of it stops me cold. That’s the thing about art. You have no control over when it shows up and bursts your heart into splinters. This time of year screams with cruel beauty. You can’t go anywhere without being attacked by it. I realize then, that I owe him an apology. For yesterday’s—was it really just yesterday?—
fuck off
. I’m thinking about how to say I’m sorry, but I take too long. Connor’s already in the truck, pulling onto the goat path road, the mud flaps on his dad’s truck waving goodbye.

The summer before my freshman year, after Sabine’s first year of high school, Dad had a midlife crisis. In family therapy we refer to that summer, three years ago, as Johnsaffair. As if the entire season, the June, July, August of it had been replaced by a ninety-day month called Johnsaffair. An anomaly, like a leap year that only happened once. But Mom will not let it go. Nothing in our house has been the same since.

The woman who had a starring role in Johnsaffair was a fitness model for Nike, where Dad and pretty much everyone in suburban Portland work. She was seventeen years younger than Dad, but without makeup she was plain, sort of mannish. Her golf game was better than Dad’s, and she was a ranked tennis pro. Her name was Natalie.

When Mom found some weird receipts in Dad’s wallet, he confessed right away. I can still hear the scream that came out of the kitchen that night. The shrill piercing of a cat being squashed by a linebacker wearing an army boot. Sabine and I were watching
The Bachelor
reruns in the family room, and then all hell broke loose. Casserole dishes against cupboards. An entire closet of sports jackets flung out the front door. Mom and her Italian temper. Dad’s car keys hurled against the big living room window and the spider crack that happened because of it.

Sabine came over to my La-Z-Boy and we squished in together like kittens, while above us, a flurry of angry words.

Mom’s voice: Never. Fucking. Believe.

Dad’s voice: The girls, Sonia.

Mom’s voice: Get used to it.

Dad’s voice: Talk. Love. Calm.

Mom’s voice: Out. Never. Don’t think that.

Dad’s voice: Reason. Work this out. For the best.

Mom’s voice: Cheat. Lies. Dead.

And on it went, Sabine and I quiet until she said, “I knew about it.”

I still didn’t know what they were fighting about. I thought maybe Dad had lost money in the stock market, or something was wrong with Nona and Dad had been insensitive. But they’d never fought this way before. “About what?”

“Natalie,” she said. “I saw them out together. They didn’t see me. But I saw them, you know, kissing.”

“Natalie? Who’s Natalie?”

“Dad’s girlfriend. His lover.”

The word
lover
rolled off my sister’s tongue like a foreign thing. As though she’d said
Amiga
, over pronouncing it with a fake accent.

“Mom’ll kick him out,” Sabine said. “I know it.”

That night was like when I was eight, the only girl in second grade who still believed in Santa. Cathi Serge set me straight on the jungle gym when I asked her if she’d written her letter to Santa Claus yet. The steely hard truth clunking down from a cloud to smash the fancy dream apart. “Oh, Brady, you don’t still
believe
, do you?”

That early June night, it was another betrayal. My parents had other lives besides being parents. My heart felt pried open; moths flew out. I put my hands over my ears like the “hear no evil” monkey as the crashing and shouting and sobbing above us continued into the night. Sabine put her arm around me. We tugged Nona’s black afghan tight around us, making an Irish twin cocoon, my fingers and toes crossed for luck.

Our little beach house is slicked with moss when we get there late Friday afternoon. That’s what I notice before anything else. A green slime coating glows from the wood steps and the deck that wraps around the cottage. The ancient iron gate to the hot tub, styled with four daisies on top—one for each of us—hangs off of a hinge. A pool of rust marks the concrete beneath it. My parents sigh in tandem as we pull to a stop in the drive.

Thick, salty fog hugs the house, and us, as we make our way inside, lugging overnight bags and groceries from New Seasons. Mom has iPod buds in her ears like a sullen teenager as she shepherds a Ziploc baggie filled with a handful of Sabine’s ashes to the gas stove mantel. Dad sets the sack of staples on the counter, and before even putting them away, he pours a glass of something amber-colored. I scramble up to the loft, to the futon room, where there’s an array of DVDs and a bookcase full of romance novels. “Want a drink?” I hear Dad call. Mom doesn’t respond.

The only other time I’ve been the single daughter here is when Sabine was away at cheerleading camp a couple of Augusts ago, and my parents and I came out for the week. It was a work week—Mom was determined to erase any trace of Natalie from all surfaces. She brought new linens, paint. She even swapped out the dishes, claiming we needed an upgrade. But I knew it was about punishing Dad. She cracked the whip the entire time, presenting list after list: clean the gutters, empty and refill the hot tub, scrub the deck. We were vanquishing Johnsaffair the way people burn sage. But more first-gen Italian American wife than Native American. Penance beyond a Hail Mary. A new bed was delivered to the master. One with fancy controllers to dial in firmness. Sleep numbers.

“Sunset in twenty minutes,” calls Dad now, on this Good Friday. Sunset. Hardly. Maybe a tiny sliver of red on the horizon, but it’s a ritual, walking the strip of beach to town and back as afternoon sinks into evening. Sun or no sun, it’s what we do. And this evening we’re going to do it with some of my sister’s cremains.

Seagulls screech, and a curved line of pelicans descends into the surf when we get to the ocean. It’s a herring run, and the three of us stop to watch the big, brown birds dive and scoop up the tiny fish into their pouchy bills. Dad points to a young bird that is pick-pocketing an adult. “Spring,” he says. “The season of generosity.”

I nod. “Easter bounty.”

Dad holds up the baggie of shards and fragments, as though lifting a young child for a better view of something.

Mom hugs her ribs. She’s wearing a shearling jacket and matching deerskin hat. She says, all wistful, “What would it be like. To be a seabird?”

We’re quiet for a few moments, gazing out at the spectacle of feeding frenzy. The pelicans lift and lower. Like cheerleaders. All together. Choreographed perfection. Riding the tide, then beating their massive wings, and rising, rising, hovering, and then crashing down again, the “U” of them. Standing at the water’s edge with my parents, I decide that my sister has joined those birds. If it’s true what Nona says, and she’s waiting for her call from God from that green room limbo place, knowing Sabine, she’s not just sitting there. She’s with these pelicans, one eye on us, her former family. Maybe she sees the baggie of ashes dangling from Dad’s fingertips. Her bill full of herring. Hungry, as always.

“I imagine,” I say, answering Mom’s rhetorical question, “it’s like being a cheerleader.”

I feel the breath of Mom locked in her throat. The shards of her own heart just like the ashes in Dad’s grip. My words hit her ears different than I meant them to. “Brady,” she says under her breath.

“Shall we?” says Dad, unzipping the bag with a fingernail.

Mom puts her hand on top of Dad’s. Not in a loving way. “No.”

“We have to do it sometime, Sonia. Bit by bit, like we discussed.”

“Not. Yet.”

Most of my sister is still in the Asian urn in our living room. This is just a start. Somewhere to begin. “Why not, Mom? Isn’t this why we’re here?”

Mom turns to face me. “I’m not sure why we’re here, exactly.”

“We need to all be in agreement,” Dad says, resealing Sabine.

The pelicans lift again, and fly off in a brown curl. Full from fish, ready to head to their nests for the night. The fog has lifted too, as it often does at the edge of the evening.

“It’s getting late,” says Dad. “Almost 7:30. I’m starving.”

“Fish on Good Friday,” I offer. “Should we go to the Clam Shanty in town?”

Nobody agrees out loud, but our footfalls continue on, leaving a pattern in the wet sand behind us. Waves lap near our feet. Rising tide will erase us soon. Then, out of nowhere, the image of Connor’s face shrouded in hoodie forms in my mind. The glimmer of Sabine’s crucifix earring against the fold of cloth. I close my eyes and can smell him, Sabine’s best friend. Her partner. The boy who knows. The boy my parents blame.

By the time we reach the main drag, it’s dusk. We wander up Laneda Street with the few tourists and second-home people who have come to spend Easter weekend at the coast. There’s the cheap taco place, the expensive taco place, and the local watering hole. Three espresso shops, all closed for the night. A grocery store. The library. A used bookstore and a bakery. Realty offices with their laminated photos of beachfront in the windows. We always stop and browse the enticing descriptions, mostly so Dad can see if the beach house he got such a great deal on is still appreciating. The second-home market is in the ditch, the economy below water, still. Dad sighs as we pass the evidence: New Low Price, Owner Motivated, Short Sale, all typed in red block letters under pictures of custom beach homes. Ours is a shack by comparison. Not really an investment. More like a retreat.

We walk on. Mom’s shearling beaded with the dew of nightfall. The kite store. The pet store. The whimsical jewelry place where Sabine and I once shoplifted a necklace, and then, guilt-ridden, secretly returned it.

Manzanita is the one beach town on the Oregon coast that runs perpendicular to the ocean rather than boardwalk parallel. Which is, according to my parents, what makes it special? There’s less college kid hooligan cruising. Less cotton candy and tee-shirt hucksters. Unlike the towns slightly north—Cannon Beach, Seaside—Manzanita has a dearth of saltwater taffy for sale.

But there’s the Clam Shanty. Known for razor clams and chowder and oyster shooters with handcrafted hot sauce. Sabine could eat a dozen-and-a-half in one sitting. A whole lemon sliced up thin, the way you do for tequila. She’d squeeze that lemon all over the jiggly oyster, dollop of sauce, then, raise the oval shell high, as though proposing a toast. The face she made when the fish slid down her throat. Repulsion and elation all at once. The same face she had when, one night, high on weed, she described what it’s like to give a boy a blowjob.

The fish place is clearing out when we get there. The sidewalks roll up early in Manzanita. A disgruntled counter girl sighs as the bell on the door announces us. She’s Saran-wrapping the deli goods, and I watch as her head sinks into her shoulders. No doubt she has after-work plans. I feel sorry for her, but annoyed. Last summer, when I worked at the Grill and Scoop in Beaverton, I never let it show how pissed off I was when last-minute customers came in. My waitress smile was solid. Professional. Poker face Brady.

Besides, we know what we want. This won’t take long. Chowder and sour dough.

“For here or to go?” says the counter girl whose nametag claims she’s Sam.

“We’ll eat here,” says Dad, and the girl lets out another sigh.

She’s already put the chowder in the walk-in. She marches off, behind strips of plastic, and comes out bearing a steam pan between two thick mitts.

We sit down at one of the red-checkered oilcloth picnic tables, a waxy cup of fountain soda wedged in my hand. Mom and her herbal tea. We hear the beep-beep-whir of the microwave being engaged. The sawing of our bread. Dad twists the metal cap off of a Hefeweizen. “Cheers,” he says.

Later, back at the beach house, alone on my futon and wrapped up in a Nona quilt, the gulls’ screeching keeps replaying in my head. I can see those pelicans on the vast horizon, the gray and foam Pacific that goes on forever. On canvas, I’d choose thick, burnt gobs of sienna. Umber. English red. The tiniest stroke of cadmium yellow. Indigo and warm gray and a dab of French ultramarine. And then, a different painting. Azaleas, like the ones from earlier, all quinacridone magenta, sap green foliage against the cerulean sky. And Connor, half-hidden, but not. Connor Christopher, interrupting my vision of the ocean and the bushes and springtime. The earring, Sabine’s dangling jewel.

Sabine. All my meanderings come back to her.

We’re too far from the beach to hear the waves crash against sand and rock, but in my head, they do. The rhythm of it all is my heart. I want to hear her voice again tonight. Just once.

I reach for my phone. Press 3 on the speed dial. I want to hear the
This is Sabine. Have a great day
.

Instead, what I hear is the computer-voice of a robot saying, “The voice mailbox of the person you’re trying to reach is full.”

No.

Can’t be.

All the messages falling in the forest. Hanging out in limbo, never to be heard by Sabine. I don’t know her voicemail password. Why don’t I know it? All of a sudden, in the deep night of my thoughts, I have a mission. To unlock Sabine’s voice mailbox. To know who is still talking to her. What they’re saying. Is Martha still calling her up? Is Nick? Is Connor? Mom? Dad? Nona?

I press in her number again, and follow the prompts. Try a code. Another code. Her birthday. Nick’s birthday. Our address. Still, it’s the computer voice telling me that the mailbox has reached its capacity.

I get up and climb down the loft ladder to use the bathroom, but the door is closed and I hear the whispering voice of Mom inside. Why is she in the guest bathroom? Who is she talking to? I sink down against the wall, crouched there, curious. My ear against the hollow door. “That’s really sweet of you,” I hear her say. “Yes, I’d love that.”

Then, Dad’s snoring from the master bedroom. Lately, it’s like a buzz saw with Dad. Mom whispers, “Maybe Wednesday. Or, if I come home early Sunday.”

Then, “I’m not sure.”

And, “Can’t wait.”

I tip-toe back up the ladder to the futon, the phone cradled in my hand like a brick I want to hurl through glass. I am sick to death of secrets. I am tired of never knowing the truth. I wish I had the nerve to call Connor is what I’m thinking as I drift off to sleep.