Visitation Street (33 page)

“You can’t be here.”

“We had a sub in Music Appreciation. She made us listen to something called madrigals.”

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

“Says my dad.”

“Says me.”

She crosses the living room and sits on the couch. “I can’t believe he beat you up. He’s an asshole.”

“I would have done the same thing.”

Jonathan checks that the blinds over the window next to his bed are as flush to the glass as possible. Then he turns on a small lamp next to the TV. Val is wearing a pink peacoat. Her skin is rosy with cold. She barely looks sixteen.

“Whoa,” Val says. “Your face.”

“It’s the least of my problems.”

“When are you coming back to school, Mr. Sprouse?”

“I’m not.”

“Because of my dad?”

“No, because of me.”

Val sits on the couch and fiddles with an empty pizza box. “You didn’t do anything.”

Jonathan sits on the bed. Then he thinks better of it and stands. “Valerie, really.”

“I mean, it’s not like we slept together or anything. It’s not that big a deal.”

“It doesn’t matter what we didn’t do. No one cares about what didn’t happen.”

“I’ll tell them it was my fault. That I was the one who kissed you. I crawled into your bed.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Why not? It’s true.”

“It doesn’t matter what people think of me. You’re just starting out.”

Val pulls her peacoat tighter and shrinks back into the couch. “Why should I care what people think of me?”

Jonathan feels exhausted. He wants to flop down on his bed and close his eyes. “It’s more complicated than that. Let me be the bad guy. Let people think I took advantage of you. They’ll pity you for a while, then things will get back to normal.”

“Nothing will ever get back to normal.”

“You have to go.”

“Where? Home? To my dad who beats up my friends?”

“Your dad loves you,” Jonathan says.

“How do you know? How do you know what goes on in my life?” The pitch of Val’s voice is rising.

“I don’t. But you can’t stay.”

“I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say that I’m too young. That this is inappropriate. That I should go sleep with boys my own age. You’re going to say that you’re a
teacher
. Like that makes you so old and wise.” She wipes her eyes with the cuff of her coat. “But you know what? You don’t know everything. You were wrong. Everyone was wrong.”

“About—”

“It
is
my fault June’s missing.”

Jonathan shakes his head.

“It’s true.” Val sounds triumphant. “It is.”

“No,” Jonathan says.

“You don’t believe me?” Val crosses her arms over her chest. “June told me that I still acted like a baby and that the raft was stupid. She told me I’d never have a boyfriend because I was too weird. She wanted to go into shore and hang. But I wouldn’t let her. Everyone thinks that what happened was an accident, but it wasn’t.” She stares at Jonathan, holding his gaze, daring him to look away. “I pushed her.”

Suddenly Jonathan is not thinking of Val and June, but of Eden, arcing through the air, flying backward from the boat to the water. He didn’t push her, but he let her go. His guilt doesn’t make this distinction.

Jonathan rarely thinks of what led up to the moment his mother boarded the boat. He only remembers what came after—the terrible noise of the splintering dock, the barrel roll, then the awful silence as the engine died and the boat began to sink. At night, before the booze lets him sleep, he still tries to imagine what might have happened if he’d plunged into the sound and churned the water with panicked strokes. Could he have reached Eden? Would he be able to forgive himself if he had tried?

“I pushed her and she fell off the raft. I told her to swim home if that’s what she wanted. She was my only friend and I pushed her. And for a moment it felt good.” Val’s shoulders start to shake, and her words are swallowed by a loud sob. “I just watched her tread water. She was always bossing me. She thought I didn’t care.” She swallows hard. “But I did.”

“You almost died yourself. You couldn’t have known what would happen to June.” Jonathan steps toward Val, ready to wrap his arms around her, still her sobs. But he stops himself. He stands in the middle of the room, his arms limp at his sides.

“But I pushed her.” Val wipes her nose on her sleeve. “June was such a bitch. She didn’t like hanging out with me anymore. I embarrassed her. But she didn’t have anyone else. And now neither do I.”

Jonathan sits on the couch, near enough to try and reassure Val but not close enough to touch.

“I didn’t know what would happen when I pushed her off the raft. I tried to grab her, but then the raft flipped. I had no idea how strong the current was. It pulled me under and I couldn’t reach June. I tried. I really tried. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t even see her in the water.” Tears stream down Val’s cheeks, running over her lips, dripping off her chin. “I miss her every day. Every minute of every day even though it’s my fault she’s gone. And I can’t tell anyone what I did to my best friend, because then they would know that we weren’t friends and then I wouldn’t be allowed to miss her. Because missing June is all I have left of her.”

“I’m sorry,” Jonathan says. He wonders if any of Val’s classmates have ever commiserated with her for her loss instead of gossiping about it.

“I can never tell anyone what happened. I killed her. Everything’s my fault.”

“You have to stop saying that or you’ll make it true,” Jonathan says.

He looks at Val, shrinking into herself on the couch, pulling away from him, retreating into her sorrow. This is how it starts, this guilt that grabs you like a vise, that grips and squeezes tighter every year, that goes from memory, to refrain, to persistent baseline—that embeds itself and echoes throughout the day. The guilt that eats away, leaving half a person behind and makes you search out other broken people for company.

Part of him has never left the dock in Fishers Island and still stands there, drink in hand, watching Eden stumble onto the boat, watching the boat bank hard, and his mother fly away and sink into the inky sound. And part of him still watches himself from a distance, watches him watching Eden, watches him staying on dry land, watches him doing nothing. “You have to forgive yourself,” Jonathan says. “It was an accident.”

“I killed my best friend,” Val says. She doubles over, burying her face in her lap. Jonathan reaches over and strokes her back, then pulls his hand away. “Now you won’t even touch me,” Val says. “You’re as bad as everyone else.”

“I’m not the right person. I think you should talk about this with your parents.”

“No,” Val says. “You can’t tell me to go home. You’re the only one who understands. There’s no one but you. You’ve been watching me, at the pier, in school, outside my fucking window. You understand me. You have to. Because no one else ever will.” Her eyes are wild with tears. “Because you know what I did and you’ll forgive me because you did the same thing.” Val’s words are aspirated by sobs. Her throat sounds raw and scraped. “You and me—we’re the same.”

“No,” Jonathan says. “We’re nothing alike.” Val stares at him. Her mouth is slightly open. Her bottom lip vibrates. “You don’t want to be anything like me.”

“I do,” Val says. “I am.” She puts her head in her hands. “I am.”

Jonathan closes his eyes and rubs his eyelids. Now the winnowing begins—possibilities tossed like trash from a car window. This is the moment where Val will step out of her young, fresh shell and accidentally join the ranks of the incomplete or the damaged, people like Lil and him. Once Val mistakes herself for one of them, it will be too late. “What happened to June was not your fault,” he says.

Jonathan finds a paper napkin from the bulletproof Chinese and hands it to her. She wads it up and tosses it away. He wants to hold her until she stops shaking. He wants to let her cry herself out. He wants to be the one to restore her. Instead he walks to the window and peeks out a slat in the blinds.

“Don’t do that,” Val says. “Don’t fucking do that. Stop being paranoid that someone’s watching us.” She rushes to the window and opens the blinds, bending them in her fury. She wrestles with the latch and yanks up the pane. She sticks her head out into the street. “Hey,” she shouts down to Van Brunt. “I’m up here with Jonathan Sprouse. All by myself. I’m up here—”

Jonathan pulls Val back from the window. She breaks free from his grip and wheels around to face him. “Get off me,” she says. “You’re hurting me. Let me go. You don’t care about me.”

He lets go of her arm and steps back from the window. He doesn’t want their argument to carry out into the street. She lunges back toward the window, but Jonathan gets there first, slamming it shut with such force a hairline crack appears in the glass. He looks down. Biker Mike and New Steve are smoking outside the bar, their faces turned upward in the direction of his apartment.

“You’re going to get both of us in a lot of trouble if you don’t stop,” Jonathan says.

“Trouble? What trouble could I possibly get in? I killed someone. My life is over.”

“It hasn’t even begun.” Jonathan’s swollen eye has begun to throb. The things he wants to say to Val tangle with the things he shouldn’t say, and in the end no more words come out of his mouth.

Val stops crying. She wipes her face on her sleeve. Her eyes are red and swollen, her cheeks mottled, but when she speaks her voice is calm. “Yes, it
has
begun, Jonathan. And you can’t tell me what to do, because you don’t care.”

Her sudden composure startles him. She buttons her coat and heads for the door.

Jonathan goes to the window and watches Val leave his building. The calm in her voice chills him. He wants to follow, but there are too many unwelcome faces outside the bar. He will wait and then he will break his promise to himself and stand guard across from Val’s bedroom for one more night.

He finds a bottle with a couple of fingers of whiskey left. He kills the booze, and chain-smokes his last four cigarettes, lighting one off the other.

“Nice face.” Lil has emerged from the bar for a smoke. “You’re a real piece of work, Maestro. What’d you do to her this time?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Fireman Paulie’s kid. She came into the bar looking like hell on wheels. You break her heart?”

“You served her? You served a sixteen-year-old?”

“You want to report me? She got Dirty to buy her a drink. I didn’t notice.”

“Jesus, Lil. Jesus. Dirty-fucking-Dan?”

“Yeah?” Lil picks a speck of ash off her fingerless gloves. “He actually got pissed off when I threw the kid out.”

“Where is he?”

Lil crushes her cigarette under her cowboy boot. “Left.”

“When?”

“Right after I eighty-sixed the kid.”

“Together?”

“Maestro. What happens outside the bar is none of my business.”

Jonathan has to resist the urge to slap her. He paces in a circle, looking from Lil to the point where Van Brunt gives way to the water.

“C’mon inside, Maestro. Leave the kid alone. Don’t you remember being sixteen?” Lil says. “And we’re still standing even after all the shit we did.”

All the shit we did
. “When I was sixteen, I was at Juilliard.”

“Yeah?” Lil says. “Then what happened?”

Then I let go
, Jonathan thinks,
in increments
. So slowly that he didn’t know it was happening until it was too late.

“I chose wrong,” Jonathan says.

“Who doesn’t?” Lil says. “Live with it.”

“I do. Barely. But she shouldn’t. We are not a life anyone should choose.”

“Fuck you, Jonathan.”

“Does Dirty still crash over on Conover?”

“Maestro, leave it.”

“So she can grow up to be us? You’re a shining fucking example to us all, Lil.” He hurries down Van Brunt.

Dirty Dan lives in a dilapidated one-bedroom ranch house in an incongruous row of shotgun shacks that are hidden on a small, dark street. One side of the street is taken up by a lot that contains a giant satellite. A fifty-foot fence topped with concertina wire surrounds the lot.

At some point, the row of ranch houses might have seemed charming—working-class shanties for seafarers. But now their yards are stuffed with discarded junk—children’s playhouses, bicycle skeletons, the rusted shells of car parts. On most of the houses, the clapboard siding is peeling away revealing Tyvek and fiberglass.

Jonathan is ashamed to have been to this house before. Several times, he’d joined a caravan of late-night creatures in Dirty’s living room, splaying themselves on his stained and scarred couch, allowing Dirty to chatter in exchange for keeping them supplied with whatever they needed.

From the street, Jonathan can see the blue glare of Dirty’s enormous flatscreen. Like most dealers, Dirty lives in squalor but has all the latest toys—televisions, stereos, numerous video game consoles.

Jonathan pounds on the door. It swings opens. He steps into the narrow living room, which is only illuminated by the channel guide on the television. The sticky smell of weed hangs in the air.

“Dirty?” Jonathan calls. “Dirty.”

Smoke curls from underneath a closed door near the back of the room. A toilet flushes and Dirty walks into the living room smoking a menthol cigarette. He’s shirtless. His chest is shriveled and distended like a female orangutan’s. “Now, now, now,” he says. “Guess I should install better security.”

“Where is she?” Jonathan says.

“I know not of whom you speak.”

“Valerie!” Jonathan calls.

“Why don’t we just sit down for a moment,” Dirty Dan says, trying to guide Jonathan to the couch.

Jonathan shoves Dirty to the side.

“Slow your roll, Maestro. The kiddo’s just taking a nap. Overindulged in Granddaddy Purple. Speaking of which …” He holds up a joint toward Jonathan.

Jonathan opens the door to Dirty’s bedroom. Val is sitting up against the headboard. Her knees are drawn to her chest. She’s shaking.

“You said she was asleep,” Jonathan says.

“I thought she was. I gave her some pills to calm her down. Your little girl here was on a mission. Her wish is my command.” Dirty opens his arms like a showman.