Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (18 page)

"To the ferry."

"I figured that. Are you leaving for good?" His T-shirt was already soaked through. He hadn't shaved in days, and he felt self- conscious about it.

"Not for good."

"For the summer, though?" He didn't feel like hiding his anger. "You weren't going to say good-bye to me?"

"I didn't--well. I was going to--but--"

"You were going to? God, Alice, what is your problem?"

Her face was not sorry exactly, but it was pleading. "Paul. I just--I feel like--you don't understand, and I can't explain it right now. But I was going to call you in the city and--"

"You were going to call me?" He knew this coldness in his voice. He hated her right now in a way he never had before. He hated her stammering, stupid attempt to break his fall.

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"I think for now," she said, "we--we can't keep doing what-- we can't do what we were doing."

"What can't we do?" He caught her gaze and held on to it. "We can't fuck five times a day?"

She stumbled and stopped. She looked as though he had slapped her. She started walking again. He saw her brush her eyes with her fingers. She kept her head down.

"Is that what we're talking about?"

She pulled her bag up onto her shoulder. She wanted to get away from him, and it made him want to follow her all the way to New York City.

"Where are you going, Alice?"

She refused to look at him.

He followed her all the way to the end of the dock, where the weather was at its full power. He crossed his arms against the cold. She was shaking.

"You're a coward, you know," he said to her. "I didn't realize it before."

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Alice saw the ferry over his shoulder. She couldn't stop shaking. She didn't want to cry. What if he followed her onto the boat? What if he tried to follow her all the way to the hospital? It would be a tremendous relief, in a way, for Paul to know.

But what would Riley think? A further betrayal of her sister scared Alice more than anything.

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She wrapped her arms tight around her body to make the shaking stop. As soon as the boat docked, she strode on board. She shot up to the top deck and stood stiffly. She silently commanded the boat to pull away and end this torment. She'd rather end her life than stay here.

When you were late and running for the boat, the departure was pure efficiency. Today it was jerky and ponderous, as though they'd hired a whole new crew. At last the crewman threw the rope. She heard the engines notch up and at last the boat pulled out.

She saw him standing on the dock, watching the boat creep away. She expected relief and it came, but it was a paltry emotion and ran its course quickly.

He was shouting at her, and though she would rather not have heard him, the words made their way to her ears anyway.

"You should have left me alone!" he shouted to her.

She cried as the boat picked up speed, wishing she had. She watched in bewilderment as he strode to the edge of the dock, lifted his arms over his head, and dove into the gray water.

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Closing Up

T he sun was out, and though it was a vivid autumn sun, it

picked out surprisingly little in the way of life or color. Again, Alice thought to blame herself. She blamed her eyes, which had grown dim these last weeks, not so much to sharpness but to color.

"Look at the Jeffreys' place. They've lifted up the entire house."

It had been seven weeks since she'd left the island. The building time was well under way. Another bunch of the knock-downs and fix-ups of the kind that Riley hated and her father followed with a certain fascination.

Alice nodded blandly at her dad, not caring very much. All the changes happened off-season. You left the island one way, and you

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came back in June and it was different. It was like your school friends over the summer. You accepted that they came back differ ent without bothering too much about how or why.

He strung his arm around her shoulder. It was mildly constrain ing as they walked, but she didn't shrug it off. She knew that he knew that she was feeling sorry for not being Riley today.

Usually, Riley helped their dad close up the house at the end of the season. Riley was the one who had learned how to drain the pipes. She took a gritty pleasure in putting on waders over an old bathing suit and climbing under the house, even in October when the wind mocked you for being a one-seasoner. Riley kept her pilly, faded lifeguard suits around for that very purpose. She didn't like to throw them away.

They didn't discuss it with Riley that morning in the apartment, because they'd already had the fight in several parts. The cold water was not acceptable in Riley's condition. Her legs were still swollen, which meant that any exertion could be dangerous. That morning, Alice and her dad just ate their cereal and banged out of the house. Judy was staying home for company and distraction, though Alice doubted the success of either.

At one time, years before, Alice and Riley had made a big hole in the ceiling of their family's life and climbed out of it. Riley had enrolled in NOLS. She had spent an entire month of January in a hole in the snow. Alice had gone to college. Both of them had lived different places and met people. They'd cooked their food and washed their clothes--Riley mostly washing them in puddles in the backcountry, and Alice never separating dark from light.

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And now they were both back home. How quickly the hole in the ceiling grew back over their heads without even a scar to let you know it had once been open there.

Healing wasn't always the best thing. Sometimes a hole was bet ter left open. Sometimes it healed too thick and too well and left separate pieces fused and incompetent. And it was harder to reopen after that.

While her father muttered and cursed under the house, Alice did nonexpert things, like sweeping out the house and cleaning the moldering things out of the refrigerator.

When you stood at the open refrigerator, it was difficult not to contemplate the future. If she froze the orange juice, would it last until Memorial Day? What about the sandwich bread?

What about them--her family? Would they last longer in their cryogenic state? Would it mean they could come back as they had been before? With Riley swimming and running as she had always done?

If only she could stash Paul away along with them. But he was warm and lively, she knew. He was going forward into the world, and he'd left her behind.

She packed the deep freezer, the single appliance that would stay on through the cold months. It seemed strange in a way to devote electricity to keeping their stuff frozen, when the air outside would mostly be frozen anyway.

Whenever she thought of deep winter in the house, she felt uneasy. She thought of the cold invading the rooms, the house liv ing at an unlivable temperature. For some reason it made her think of a sinking ship, the cabin slowly filling with seawater.

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She heard her father banging and scraping his wrench under the floor. She thought of Riley's small and precise way of doing things. It seemed a shame to have to grow up to get big, clumsy, and easily frustrated.

Alice folded the summer clothes that had been left in the dryer and arranged them in appropriate piles for the time when they would come back and wear them again, though she only half- believed that they would. It was hard to believe in summer in the winter, to remember health in sickness.

Would they really be back here? Would the world keep them in its rotation? It was hard to think of next summer beyond frozen orange juice.

She came upon a skirt she had last worn with Paul. She 'd worn it sitting on his lap, feeling the fabric of it bunched up around her middle. She heard the pitiable whimper in her chest as her body disloyally recollected things her mind would not allow. Had that really been her body doing those things with Paul? This very one, right down there? It was hard to imagine. She felt like someone had cut her off at the neck and had sewed her back together badly, without reconnecting the stringy parts that ran back and forth.

Her hands felt cold and damp as she wheeled the bikes into the shed. She was supposed to cover the furniture with old demoted sheets, but she balked. This was normally her mother's job, and she didn't feel like doing it. She didn't like leaving the house looking so spectral.

She sat on the rail of the deck and glanced up at Paul's house. Had he closed it up, now that it was his house? It was hard to

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picture. Had he come back this autumn? She sort of doubted it. He was good at putting her behind him. She and her family were always behind him, weren't they?

She picked up a pebble from a planter and chucked it at his house. No matter how good or bad your aim, it was a thing you couldn't miss.

"You done?" her father asked, emerging from under the house. He looked as though he had rolled over three times in the mud. He reminded her of a wallowing sow, but she didn't say so. Her father had his pride, his clinging, middle-aged vanities. She waited patiently while he took a shower and dressed.

"Do you want to go to the beach for a minute?" he asked, lock ing up the house behind them. It was part of the ritual to say good bye to the ocean after they said good-bye to the house, but the rituals were tentative this time, partly on ice.

"I'm cold," she said. "Let's just go home."

While they waited for the ferry, hands shoved in their front pockets, she heard two ladies she vaguely recognized talking about real estate. She knew it to be a riveting subject to all who owned a place here or hoped to.

She didn't really mean to listen, but she didn't take pains to walk away, either. In truth, she tuned her ears to a particular name, and for better and worse, she heard it right away.

"You must have heard the Moore house is for sale," the dark- haired one said. "Bobby told me there is already a buyer."

"Really?"

"So he says."

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"You didn't hear the price, did you?"

At the clam bar in the parking lot, Alice's dad bought her two powdered-sugar donuts and a pint of chowder. He took over the eating of the chowder when she left it to get cold.

They stopped the car at the train tracks, and he reached over and held her hand for a minute. He was sorry for her, she knew. He didn't even know what all to be sorry for, but there was some com fort in his care.

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She knew about Paul from Riley. There was nothing new in that, but it seemed ironic nonetheless. Paul and Riley had always been the pen pals. It enabled their friendship to circle the calendar in a way that Alice 's relationship with him never did. And now Alice had to pretend that her hunger for news about him had no different a cast than before.

"So, where's his new place?" She sat across from Riley at the tiny kitchen table where in the old days the two of them had eaten breakfast every morning until Riley left for NOLS. The strange ness of being back here all together dawned on Alice slowly, some part fantasy and some part nightmare.

"West Eleventh Street. He said he got a garret."

"I guess he didn't like Brooklyn." Alice engrossed herself in the clipping of her toenails.

"I guess not." Riley went back to the hole she was mending in an old pair of her shorts. "I'm going to go crazy if I can't swim.

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Dad said the water at the West Side Y is too cold. Do you buy that? He took a candy thermometer with him to check it."

Alice wasn't sure if the right answer was yes or no. She was gen uinely invested in Riley's dilemma, but she couldn't leave the sub ject of Paul yet. "Did Paul say how school was going?" It was late, and Alice knew she should be going to bed. If she stayed up talking on this subject, she would not be able to fall asleep for hours.

"He said he's started the graduate program, so I guess he fin ished that paper."

Alice chewed on her cheek. She finished with her toenails and started on her fingernails. Had Riley written anything to him about Alice? Had he asked about her? Did he know she hadn't begun law school? If so, did he care anymore? These were awkward ques tions to ask and all cast in shadow by the bigger question.

Alice pushed the clippings into a white circle on the table, a tiny thatched moon. "Did you tell him about what's going on with you?"

"What?"

"I mean, did you tell him about your heart?" Alice felt the ner vous thud of hers.

Riley looked back down at her shorts. "Not yet."

Riley had begun to tell their few extended family members and old family friends about her condition. Still, she tended to understate the seriousness of it, to control the flow of information, and to get annoyed by any noisy or outsized demonstration of concern. Their remaining grandmother in Boca Raton had called with her own doc tor's pager number and sent four giant boxes of Florida oranges.

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Alice tried to make her voice not sound strangled or psychotic. "Why not?"

"Because I didn't feel like writing it in a letter or an e-mail."

"Are you going to tell him in person?"

"Yeah. At some point."

"Why are you waiting? He is your best friend. Doesn't he need to know?" Alice's frustration came out more than she intended.

Riley gave her a look that sent Alice back on her heels. It was Alice who wanted and needed him to know. How quickly her anger was undermined by her guilt.

"He is my best friend. That's why I get to decide how and when I tell him, Alice."

Later, lying in bed and not falling asleep, she thought about Paul. Some nights it was impossible not to think about him.

Some nights she felt like she had Riley's heart with all its troubles, beating arrhythmically and inefficiently in her own chest. She felt her blood pooling and catching in places where it shouldn't have been. She wondered whether it was medically possible that she could have suffered the same affliction. Maybe it was con tagious. Or perhaps she had a version of it that you brought on yourself.