I see you everywhere (10 page)

“Yeah, great sky,” said Clem. “Mare’s tails.”

“Like writing,” said Sam. “Like a coded message from beyond.”

“Those aren’t clouds,” Luke said abruptly. “They’re jet trails.”

“Guess we just missed an air show,” said Clem.

“Look at the way they widen out. Any fool knows jet trails.”

“The Brie is melting,” I warned.

Luke sat on a towel. Clem remained standing. Slowly, she removed her clothes. Underneath, she wore a black tank suit, oddly modest. She is usually in the smallest of bikinis. Clem loves the sun, and the feeling is mutual.

Luke watched her intently; watched her hands pull down the suit, smooth back her hair, pull it tight to one side and knot it. She smiled at me, an apology. I looked at her scar, always uglier than I have remembered it, parched as old dry bone. Whenever I see her bare legs, I try not to look at it, the way you try not to look at a pregnant woman’s belly. To do so is unseemly—yet this, in a way, is what defines her.

“I’m going in,” she announced. The rest of us watched her swim far out, swiftly, then settle into steady laps until all we could see was the dip and arc of her arms against blue.

“Would someone like to open the wine?” I asked.

Sam said eagerly, “I’m for that.” For a moment Luke remained aloof, staring at Clem. Then he smiled and pulled a Swiss army knife out of his pocket.

“Your sister’s been in an accident,” my mother said calmly. I had just moved to Brooklyn. I was holding the receiver and looking out the window at a statue of Saint Lucy in front of the church across the street, Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 62 62

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holding her eyes on a spotlit platter. For a split second, I pictured myself as an only child all over again. That night, I had a dream in which my mother gave birth to a third baby: another sister, without eyes. In the dream, I was enraged, indignant. How dare she.

The accident that caused Clem’s injury was surprisingly ordinary. It did not happen the summer she crewed on a barkentine that was caught three days in a freak typhoon. Nor the summer she spent studying raptors, when in fact an owl whose broken wing she was securing with a splint sank its talons clear through the muscle in a forearm (a wound from which she has also kept scars, a faint constellation). Nor, miraculously, during her brief flirtation with hang gliding. It happened in Michigan, just after Clem graduated from college. She had stayed on an extra week to be with Luke. Afterward, she was to head east, for her first job with Kurt.

Clem and Luke were biking to a lake. Clem, leading, came to an intersection with a street that she thought was one-way and so looked, economically, only one way. But it was not a one-way street, and at that moment a car was approaching from the other direction. If Clem did not have such quick reflexes, she would probably not have survived; but she saw the car from the corner of an eye and, just before it would have smashed her broadside, turned her bicycle sharply away. Still, the car sideswiped her. She might have escaped with bruises if the right frontdoor handle of the car hadn’t been broken. Jagged, it punctured the front of her upper thigh like the teeth of a saw. Running an inch deep, it tore straight down to just above the knee, where, by some fluke of how she fell, it made a U-turn and tore another six inches up the inner thigh, finishing off like a fishhook or a cockeyed smile.

Luke called my parents from the hospital, crying. His fault, his fault, all his fault, he kept saying. Clem downplayed the whole thing. At the site of the accident, according to Luke, she had instructed him—

clearheaded; even bossy, I’ll bet—how to press his shirt on her wound while they waited for the ambulance. When it came, Luke was the one who fainted. “Hardly any blood,” Clem says if you ask her about it. Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 63
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“Mostly lots of yellow jellowy ooze. All fat. Disgusting more than anything else.”

The doctor told our mother that Clem was the sort of patient who gave him migraines. She’d asked him to give her directions on how to change the bandage herself so that she could dash off on some sailboat way up in the maritime boondocks. “Sixty-two stitches!” he kept on scolding, as if our mother were to blame. “Sixty-
two,
if you please!” And frankly, he wasn’t confident that the flesh inside the hook of her gash had the blood supply to heal correctly. He wanted her in bed for six weeks.

“Two,” said Clem. “This isn’t a flea market, young woman,” retorted the doctor. Three weeks later, she was aboard the
Gannet;
sometimes in pain, but, she wrote, madly in love with the Newfoundland coast. Her leg looked different every day, she said:
like my own flesh-and-blood mood ring.
But Dr. Indignant was right about the necrotic tissue. Nasty, but no infection.
YES, I am keeping an eye on it, Lou. I do not plan on losing my leg. So no
lectures when you write back. Send Almond Joy bars and a really good juicy
novel.
I sent her
The Magus.
She wrote back and told me it was perfect. At the end of the summer, she tore up the card of the plastic surgeon her doctor had told her to call. “I’ve grown fond of it,” she said. “Of what?” I asked, bewildered. “The scar,” she said.

“What’s
with
you guys?” I whispered. We were in the kitchen. I was putting herbs in the baby Cuisinart. Clem was cleaning the fish. She had washed her hair and it shone like black plumage, matching her short cotton dress. Her necklaces swayed away from her skin as she worked, bent over the sink.

“Nothing. Plenty,” she said, not looking up. “Everything’s the same . . . nothing’s the same. You know.
Plus ça change,
however it goes.”

We could hear Sam and Luke, on the verandah. Mostly we heard Sam, off on another of his fishing benders. The man was obsessed. Once in a while, I heard Luke murmur his approval. He was grateful, I think, just to be listening.

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“You barge in here,” I said, “invite Luke, act like you’re running from the law, crash my date. You think you can stand there and tell me nothing?”

“Sorry.” The repentance in her expression was so unusual that I had no choice but to buy it. “I
am
sorry. I’ll tell you later. Trust me.”

We focused on food for a while, working quietly, listening to the men. Now they were talking about New York. Luke was talking about the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. “I saw it light up once, totally by accident. I was lost in New Jersey, and suddenly I’m driving up on this palisade—

Jersey City? I still don’t know where I was—and I saw the bridge in the distance, and exactly then the lights went on: from one end to the other, these pale green bulbs, swooping up and down along the spans like a pair of birds flying in tandem. It was . . . I could feel it in my chest—right here—do you know what I mean?”

“Oh I do!” said Sam. “Right there!”

“It was something
else,
” Luke said. I glanced at Clem, to see if she was moved by the rhapsody in his voice, but she was intent on slicing a radish.

“It’s sweet, the way he’s so openly passionate,” I said.

“Yeah. It is.” She scraped the sliced radishes into the salad. “What next?”

I gave her a cucumber. “I’m on it,” she said.

The kitchen is the only place where Clem still follows my orders. She’s a good cook, but I’m better and she knows it. I like it when she phones me long distance for recipes. In her life, for the most part, I feel superfluous.

“Okay,” I said. “I may as well ask what you think of Sam.”

Clem laughed. “Yeah, you’ll hear it if you ask or not.”

“So.”

“Great eyes. Cute, in a retro-hippie sort of way. Talks like this is nineteen sixty-eight, everything but ‘groovy.’ It’s quaint. But please, that
ponytail.
Who does he think he is, Cochise? He’s cute, though, he really is. And he’s nice. You could use some nice. Though he doesn’t seem Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 65
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overly, uh, complicated.” She was leaning against the sink, sipping vodka. She grinned pointedly. “And I’m afraid—you asked—I think he might be too self-centered. Too sort of . . . larger than his smallish life. Maybe a tad too much Kenny Rogers. I can’t put a finger on it. . . .”

“Kenny Rogers?
Cochise?
You’re so mean. And you are certainly spending the night here.” I reached for her glass, but she twisted away.

“Actually, I don’t care what you think. I think he’s sweet. And you ought to see his paintings. They are
very
complicated.”

“Well, antifreeze is sweet. Dogs lick it off the road and die.” She laughed loudly. “Just kidding.”

“God you’re a bitch.”

“Hey, you’re always telling me so. Must
be
so.”

We both laughed, but I was faking.

Clem poured me a glass of wine. After she handed it to me, she stood staring out the window. “Poor things.”

“What things?”

“Those rabbits, those birds. Victims of haute cuisine.”

“Well then,” I said, “poor trout.”

“Not the same thing,” said Clem, pointing a finger at me. “Eating
wild
animals, that’s something else.”

“Look, could we please not get into some Greenpeace debate, just for tonight? Things are tense enough, no thanks to you.” About ecology, I am a dunce. I can hardly manage cocktail banter on the greenhouse effect. Clem is always telling me alarming things about the future, how immoral we all are, how it’s too late even if (and forget it) we could change our ways. Imagine Jonathan Schell and Rachel Carson as Siamese twins: that’s my sister at her worst. She’d told me, for instance, how thousands of dollars were wasted on cleaning up birds after a major oil spill off the coast of Scotland. “That relocation business? Bleeding-heart ignorance. These are birds that nest in the same place for
life.
They go back no matter what. They’ll wade through the same muck all over again, die anyway.” She told me this after I’d just sent money to the World Wildlife Fund. “Save the pandas? Hey, no harm in trying! And you get a Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 66 66

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free tote bag, too. How much of your money went to
that
? Rule number one, Lou: don’t give a cent if they promise you a tote bag.”

The trout was, as Sam declared, flawlessly awesome. I’d stuffed it with tomato, chili peppers, and cilantro from the garden. (My filet went into the freezer.) We ate on the verandah. Sam chose the music, and the first record he played was the Doobie Brothers. “We are livin’ on the fault line!” he sang softly, earnestly, as he held out my chair. Clem rolled her eyes at me.

Luke seemed less miserable, in part because he was ignoring Clem. He talked about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, aiming his narrative at Sam and me. He had tears in his eyes when he told us about everything Roebling suffered to build his masterpiece, how in the end it literally killed him.

Sam was mesmerized. “I live right
there,
man,” he said. “I never knew all that. It’s shameful not to know the history of where you live!” He shook his head.

Clem said very little. She ate studiously, almost eagerly, but she paid only the slimmest attention to the conversation, as if it were so dull that she preferred the diversion of nearby trees, the darkened sky, the occasional passing car.

“Come to the kitchen,” I whispered. “Help me with dessert.”

I needed mint, to garnish the granita. Clem followed me out to the garden. As I groped among the bushy plants, I heard her inhale sharply behind me, almost a sob. “I swear,” she said, but nothing else. I stood up and turned around. “Cut this out right now. Whatever your big fat secret is, tell it to me now.”

“Now is not the time.”

I shook a handful of mint in her face. “Now is
never
the time, is it? Clem, no one can help you when you’re like this! Forget
me.
Luke hasn’t a clue what’s going on.”

“This was a mistake.” She went back to the house. I found her in the stone room, sitting on the table. I saw, in the brief moment before she heard the door, that she was fingering the fringes of Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 67
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her scar, absently, as if reading braille. “So this is it,” she said quickly, shifting her weight. “The place of culinary execution.”

She looked up. I looked up. Black hooks hung on chains from the ceiling.

“Game hooks.” Clem slid off the table and pointed beneath it, to the steel drain. “For the blood, what do you think?” She opened the drawer in the table, one I’d assumed would be crammed full of mittens, twine, pruning shears. It held several large sturdy knives, well used but honed.

“This guy’s a friend of yours?” She shrugged.

“Listen,” I said, slamming the drawer, “enough of your gloom! I let you come here, ruin this, this, what might have been this incredibly romantic evening, you won’t tell me what’s going on, you, you . . .”

I stopped because I had never seen her look like this. She watched me, almost submissive. She reminded me of the rabbits, the way they froze in the beam of the flashlight when I checked on them at night. “Sorry,” she said.

“Stop saying that. Just do something, tell me something, would you? You’re driving everyone crazy. Or me. You’re always so alone, such a goddamn martyr.”

She leaned against the table. “I’m not alone
these
days.”

“Yeah, well, there’s Luke to kick around now, that’s nothing new.”

“I’m not talking about Luke. I happen to be pregnant.” She stared at the coats hanging on the wall.

I stared at the coats as well, gaunt specters in the dim, windowless room. The only light came from the kitchen. I suppressed my dismay and said calmly, “I’m glad you called Luke.”

“Lou, it’s not his.” She looked as if something amusing had crossed her mind. “That’s the joke of it.”

I looked hard at her, puzzled.

“You have your fisherman,” she said, “I have mine. Though yours seems a whole lot nicer. A
whole
lot.”