Wish You Were Here (46 page)

“Did you notice a bathroom upstairs?” she whispered to Ken. “Just's got to go.”

“Sorry. He didn't go in the restaurant?”

“Apparently not.”

The doors parted and they got on, Meg holding Justin back so they'd be the first off. She kept him in front of her, her hands on his shoulders, looking up as if she could see where they were going. When she glanced down to see how he was doing, he raised his face and gave her a pitiful grimace.

“We're almost there,” she promised.

The elevator shook as if pushed by the wind, slowed and then paused, making them wait before the doors rolled open.

She'd forgotten what a mess it was up here, dank as a subway station. The noise disoriented her, hundreds of conversations from the switchbacked line rising and then ricocheting down from the open rafters. She hurried him through the crowd, trying not to cut people off, all the time searching the walls for a sign. She found the women's first, the featureless girl in her sixties A-line, and the men's just beyond.

“See it there?” she pointed, and he took off, nearly knocking over a toddler, the mother glaring after him.

Sarah and Ella were right behind him, taking advantage of the break. Ken and the rest of them headed for the gift shop, her mother waving to make sure she understood.

“I see you,” Meg waved.

She positioned herself between the men's and women's and lit a cigarette. Around her waited young husbands in shorts and baseball caps. One of them guarded a stroller with a purse in it. The concrete floor was filthy, spotted with discarded brochures and flattened paper cups. She thought of the waitress at lunch asking her if she wanted anything to drink, and drew the smoke deep into her lungs.

It was a perfect day for drinking. Rainy, nothing to do. A day like today, she liked to turn off the lights and unplug the phone and sit on the couch under a blanket and argue along with the soap operas, feeling, after a sip or two, that she understood everyone's problems (and all of them were better off than her, that was the sad thing). One glass of scotch, one of water. Not a lot, just enough to get the job done. First a sweet clarity and then the muffling fog, her brain as saturated as the clouds outside, the TV tireless, showing her her own life, the rest of the room as utterly still as she was, only her hand slowly lifting one glass and setting it down, picking up the other, the mountain of butts growing in her favorite ashtray, all of it cleaned up by the time Sarah's bus squealed to a stop at the bottom of the drive, and then the purgatory of making dinner, getting ready to answer Jeff's questions or endure his silence, already dreaming of tomorrow when the house would be hers again, a slow and formal world with its comforting, deliberate rituals.

It was exactly that kind of destructive behavior she was trying to change. She wasn't supposed to miss it. She thought she didn't, and then she would remember it at times like this with something like nostalgia, her blurry days a painless, voluptuous cocoon.

She missed Jeff, and she hated Jeff, so maybe it was the same. She hated herself for what she'd done, the person she'd been then. She was trying to get rid of her and it wasn't working.

She couldn't do anything about the past except apologize and move on. Forward, not backward, no excuses.

The line shuffled herdlike through the maze of rails and she tapped the ash off her Marlboro and crossed her arms, holding herself close. All these people wasting their vacations. She searched the faces of the adults for a genuine smile and wasn't surprised when she couldn't find one. She couldn't blame them; it really was a miserable day.

And here Justin was, the front of his shirt stuffed down his pants, but happy to see her, glad he'd made it.

“Feel better?” she asked, jagging him. She suppressed the urge to fix his shirt.

“What are we waiting for?”

“Your sister and Ella felt the need as well.”

“Where's everyone else?”

“They went to check out the gift shop.”

“Are we going to have time to see the Believe It or Not museum?”

It was not quite five. “I don't think so, Spud. Sorry.”

He seemed to be all right with it, but it was like him not to complain. He stood beside her watching the people sweep by, the sunburnt mothers and fathers in their makeshift rain gear. Everyone was trying, she thought. Nothing was easy.

“Hey,” she said. “Did I ever tell you you're a good kid?”

“Yeah?” he said, unsure, like it might be a trick.

“Well you are.”

His mother was watching him, so Sam looked at the license-plate key chain with his name on it a long time before he put it back. There were baskets full of superballs and rubber snakes and pink change purses, miniature decks of cards, pens with the
Maid of the Mist
sliding inside, giant pencils too big to hold the right way, and red maple leafs all over everything. When he moved to the next aisle she followed him.

They'd each gotten five dollars to buy anything they liked, except the metal telescope he wanted cost $6.99, and the unfairness of it was building in him. If he'd known, he would have brought money from home. He still had twenty dollars left over from his birthday check.

He kept his head down so she couldn't see him. Felt pennants, bags of cat's-eye marbles, water guns, Rugrats finger puppets. He saw
himself throwing the soldier with his plastic parachute over the wall outside, watching him float all the way down to the water. He could buy five of them and throw them all over if they let him. It was all dumb stuff. With a telescope he could spy on Mrs. Parmenter from his window at home.

His father was talking with his mother now, giving her some money.

Go away, he wished, pretending to look at some pencil sharpeners. He touched his tongue to the hole where his tooth had been, the blood sweet as barbecue sauce. Go away, go away.

It was magic just like Ella said, because she was walking off and his father was coming down the aisle.

“How are we doing?” he asked, and Sam shrugged. “Can't find anything?”

“I don't know.”

“Well pick something, because we've got to get going.”

His tongue found the tender hole again. “There's one thing, but it's too expensive.”

“How much is it?” his father asked, and then, “What is it?”

“A telescope,” Sam said, and led him to it.

He wanted his father to pick it up and look through it, but he was looking around for his mother, over by the wall of coffee mugs.

“I could use my tooth money.”

“Does the tooth fairy know you're at Chautauqua?”

“Then it would only be ninetynine cents.”

“Plus tax,” his father added. “Unless …” He reached past the stack of boxes and touched the price on the sign. Sam didn't understand.

“It's Canadian.”

His father explained how their money was different, how it wasn't worth as much.

“So how much is it?”

“I don't know. Under six dollars, I bet.”

“Can I get it?”

“You'll have to leave the tooth fairy an IOU.”

“I will.”

“All right,” his father said, and pulled a dollar from his pocket.

His mother caught up with them in line. “I thought we agreed on five dollars,” she said, and Sam was afraid she'd take it away.

“I told him he could use his tooth money.”

“That was nice of you.”

“I know.”

“You have a very nice father,” his mother said, “I hope you realize that. What do you say?”

“Thank you,” he said.

“Not me,” she said. “Thank him.”

Emily took a long last look from the plaza, the drizzle still coming down around them, the concrete the solid brown of mud. Pockets of water sat atop the rock wall like tidal pools. Kenneth waited for her, and the rest went on, heading for the parking lot.

She didn't blame them. It was a dreary day, and in truth she was glad to have a moment to herself. Kenneth kept a respectful distance, as if she were addressing someone invisible. The telescopes for a quarter with their overlarge chrome heads were their only company. Even the tour buses were leaving, dieseling at the curb, their interiors dimly lit, TVs glowing above the seats.

Across the gorge, the falls roared frothing over the edge, fed by days of rain. She gazed at the white column's endless fall, the product of countless centuries. Forty-eight years was not so long, was a blink in the larger scheme of things. It had passed so quickly—it seemed, standing here—that she was still trying to catch up with it, make sense of it the way you would an accident, slowing it down to understand what had happened, as if that might change how she felt.

There had been colored lights at night, the falls turned into a kind of giant screen they projected shapes onto—rockets and stars and planets—and fireworks after that.

She remembered Henry taking her for a steak dinner with a view and the waitress bringing champagne and asking to see her ring (she was just working them for a tip, had surely seen thousands of rings, thousands of young couples who thought the future would grant them happiness just because they were in love). She remembered both of them throwing a shiny penny from the wall for luck and then a gust of wind almost skimming the hat from her head, and Henry laughing, saying it nearly worked. She would remember more on the drive back, she knew, and yet the feeling of something left undone nagged at her, some expectation unfulfilled. She didn't feel closer to Henry here—if anything, she felt further away—and wondered if it wouldn't have been better to have simply stayed home, tended to the present rather than dredge up the past.

She twisted her ring around her finger, inspected the cracked skin beneath it, the age spots the color of mushrooms gone bad in the fridge, as if she were rotting. For years he'd joked that he would die first, being a man, and for years she'd said, “Don't you dare.” Neither of them had been kidding. For a second she thought of pulling her ring off and throwing it over the wall—an extravagant gesture of protest meant to soothe her—but with her other hand she centered the stone on her finger. She would take it to her grave. But that was foolish too.

The rain suddenly picked up, tapping at her umbrella, and Kenneth was by her side, asking if she was ready.

“Sure,” she said, but had to force herself to move.

Stepping in puddles was inescapable, and then at the road they missed the walk signal. Traffic was bad, everyone fleeing as dinnertime approached. With all the noise she could barely hear the water. When she looked back, a caul of mist hung over the falls, and she couldn't see anything. Good-bye, she thought, already gone.

They were waiting in the cars, Lisa driving this time, impatient to get going. Kenneth had to adjust his seat, careful of Sarah's legs. Emily set her wet umbrella in the way back before buckling herself in. By then they were mired in line.

“So has it changed much?” Lisa asked her, and though there was something artificially sweet in her tone, Emily answered seriously, for the girls.

“Not really.”

Going home was supposed to feel shorter, according to one of her mother's aphorisms, but it was bumper to bumper from the exit all the way to customs. The guards made her think of Kenneth's girl from the convenience store, and then the Lerners. She hoped Rufus was doing all right by himself. Her stomach was rumbling. She hadn't given dinner a thought. The children would need to eat something.

The agent waved them through and they were back in America. It was rush hour in Buffalo. They crawled along, peering at the houses across Lake Erie, the invisible dotted line in the water separating the two countries. When the freeway turned inland, Emily thought it was another loss—and the same with the city itself, from a distance its sooty buildings lit like the spires of a magical land.

“Crummy old Buffalo,” she said, testing herself. She was glad to have seen it again, to prove to herself she'd missed nothing, that other life she could have lived dissipating, a daydream left over from her teens. It was like cleaning out a house she'd lived in fifty years, throwing away all the broken things she'd never use again. She thought she should feel lighter instead of empty.

“Okay, everybody,” Lisa said, pointing through the windshield at a sign, “Wendy's or Burger King?”

“Wendy's,” Ella said.

“I don't care,” Sarah said.

Emily said nothing. Fast food depressed her, the idea that there was nothing better available. So many things had changed for the worse. In that sense, forty-eight years were an eternity.

“Speak now or forever hold your peace,” Lisa said. “Ken? Emily?”

“Wendy's,” Kenneth acquiesced.

“Emily?” Lisa asked.

“Wendy's is fine,” she said.

Of course it quit raining now that they were going home. Lake Erie was on her side, and Sarah could see where the clouds stopped and the miles of orange sky started, the day-glo sun almost down on the water. It was the kind of sunset her mother would say was made by pollution, but her mother was behind them, driving their car, and Grandma said maybe they would finally get some nice weather.

“Red sky at night,” Uncle Ken said.

“Are you two still planning on golfing tomorrow?” Aunt Lisa asked.

Sarah kept track of everyone's plans, just to see where they'd be. She was afraid she and Ella would get stuck baby-sitting the boys.

“Can we go tubing?” Ella asked.

“Yes,” Uncle Ken said. “When I get back, I will take everyone tubing who wants to, weather permitting.”

So there went the whole afternoon, Sarah thought. She didn't have anything specific she wanted to do, just walk around, go over to the fishponds, maybe play tennis, ride bikes. She didn't expect to run into him, not really, but being stuck on the boat meant there was no chance—unless he had one. She saw him in it with his shirt off, tan, and herself beside him in her yellow bikini. Like her mother would ever let her go out with anyone here. Ever since that girl got kidnaped and they'd seen the guys in that van she was waiting for the big lecture.