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I needed a drink and stopped to buy two large fresh-squeezed lemonades. The drink was tart and cold and puckered my mouth. It was delicious. It was liquid summer.
James had told me the big fight with Alex was during his senior year of college, when they were both twenty-one. I’d always assumed alcohol was somehow involved. Booze has made and broken many relationships.
“And you’ve never been back until now?” I asked.
Alex shook the ice in his cup before sipping. “No.”
He’d left the country when he was twenty-one upon the invitation of a guy he met at a club and after a fight with his best friend so catastrophic neither of them would discuss the cause. Or maybe I was extrapolating and the fight had been of such minor consequence, the rest of it coincidence, that neither felt the need to comment.
I poised on the edge of asking for details but then backed off. Asking him to elaborate would mean I’d have to admit I didn’t know, and what sort of wife wouldn’t know something like that about her husband? I didn’t know Alex Kennedy well enough not to care what he thought about my marriage.
“Well, we’re glad to have you now.” It was the right sort of thing to say, I thought, but he only gave me another of his slow glances and a smirk.
“I said I’d treat you to lunch at a fancy place,” he said. “But I’m starving for a good burger and some nachos.”
That sounded better to me than something hoity-toity, anyway. Even in the casual resort atmosphere, I felt under-dressed for a place nicer than a burger stand. We grabbed food and found a table, where we ate and talked.
He was better at listening than he was at sharing, with a knack for drawing answers out of me I’d have withheld from someone else. He was both subtle and forthright, asking questions that might have sounded rude from someone who wasn’t at the same time so disarming. It’s easy to be interesting for someone who’s interested, and I found myself waxing poetic on subjects I hadn’t touched in a long time.
“I just wanted to help people,” I said, when he asked me why I hadn’t gone back to work after the funding for the shelter failed. “I don’t want to work at Kroger, bagging groceries. Or in a factory, putting lids on jars. And besides, if we have kids …”
He was leaning back in his chair, but his body weight shifted when I said that. “Do you want kids?”
“James and I have been talking about it.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
The breeze had picked up and gotten colder. I looked at the sky. It had grown darker while we talked. The rumble of the roller coasters masked faraway thunder.
“It’s going to storm.”
“Yeah. It might.” He looked back at me. I must’ve looked disturbed. “You want to go.”
He didn’t ask. He just knew. I thought about shrugging it off, protesting I was fine, but I didn’t.
“Yes,” I said. “I don’t like being on the water in a storm.”
We made our way back to the marina. The water had turned choppy and gray. The sky wasn’t black, not yet, but the clouds were no longer fluffy white sheep.
Alex moved fast without rushing. Steady. He unrigged, we pushed off and he pointed us toward home. I gripped the Skeeter’s sides. I didn’t have a life vest on. I wouldn’t let go long enough to grab one.
The wind fought us, and though we made progress toward home, it was slow and rough. Spray whipped our faces every so often. I tipped my face to the sky, no longer needing my sunglasses to protect my eyes from the glare. Was the rain coming? The lightning and thunder?
I saw the blue-white flash of it from far away and heard the hint of a rumble. My stomach lurched. We were halfway between the Point and home.
I could swim. If the boat sank, I could swim. I knew I could. But people drowned all the time in sudden squalls because they weren’t prepared, because they’d taken chances, because they’d been stupid. Even people who could swim. Even those who’d won medals for it. And still, I couldn’t make my fingers let go of the boat’s sides long enough to grab up the faded orange life vest.
Alex muttered a curse when the wind came up and tried to steal the sail. He yelled for me to grab a rope, pull a knot, something I didn’t understand. I didn’t know how to sail. I’d never learned.
The boat rocked and jumped on sudden waves. One took us higher than expected, and when we dropped into the valley it left behind my stomach heaved into my throat. Up. Down. A roller coaster without exhilaration. Without the safety of brakes and seatbelts.
The rain coming across the water looked like lace curtains or the scrolling of the numbers and symbols on the black screen in the opening frames of The Matrix. It looked like the tornado from The Wizard of Oz, its curving dinosaur neck bringing doom.
The Skeeter was small, and it rocked when Alex shifted his weight to bend next to me. I drew in a breath, not screaming but heart pounding so fast and hard it hurt. My fingers gripped tighter, my knuckles white.
“Don’t worry!” He had to shout over the sound of the wind. “We’re almost home!”
The storm reared up in full force when we were just a few feet from the shore. Alex jumped out to tie the Skeeter up onto the small wooden dock James’s grandparents had built. The sail snapped and fluttered. I caught a face full of wet fabric and gasped at how cold it was.
Once we were safely on shore, my fingers unkinked. I helped him tie everything down and secure the Skeeter. The waves were storm-sized but still did no more than tickle the beach; this wasn’t the ocean, after all.
The rain came down in fat, stinging splatters. Drops struck the top of my head, my arms, got in my eyes and ears. We ran into the house and skidded on the tile floor. Alex slammed the door and the sound of the storm outside muted at once. I heard heavy breathing and realized it was me.
“You’re shivering.” He grabbed up a dishtowel from the counter and handed it to me.
I held it for a moment, the fabric inadequate to do more than wipe my face. I did that.
“My father,” I said, and stopped. My teeth chattered like dice in a cup.
Alex dripped, waiting for me to speak. Lightning from outside reflected in the puddle at his feet. I tried again.
“My father,” I said, “took me out on a boat. We were supposed to be fishing. It started to get dark.”
He ran a hand through his wet hair, smoothing it back from his forehead. Water ran down his face, off his nose and chin. His eyes caught the green light from the microwave.
“The storm came up fast. We weren’t too far out. But I didn’t know how to sail. And … he was …”
He was drinking, as he almost always was when he wasn’t at work. He’d filled his cup again and again from the jug of “iced tea” in the red-and-white cooler between his feet. The sun made him thirsty, he said. I was ten and had tasted what was in his cup. I didn’t see how it could quench his thirst.
Alex’s shoes squeaked on the tile as he came closer. His hand on my shoulder felt heavier than it should have, an undeserved weight. He meant it to be caring, but his understanding was too intimate to be borne. I didn’t want to be beholden to him for his compassion.
I shook off the memory. “We didn’t drown, obviously.”
“But you were scared. You’re still scared, remembering it.”
“I was ten. I didn’t know any better. My dad wouldn’t have done anything to hurt me.”
Gentle but firm, Alex squeezed the tension in my shoulder. He found the trigger point. My body wanted to melt into that simple touch, to give up the coils of anxiety woven into my muscles. I didn’t move, and we stayed like that, linked by the touch of his fingertips.
The flash of lightning and almost instantaneous crash of thunder made me jump. I slipped a little, but Alex was there with a hand under my elbow and a firm forearm for me to grab. I didn’t fall.
The power went out with a bleat from the microwave and came back on a moment later with a similar, electronic cry. Another rumble followed another flash, and the power stayed out. Night hadn’t fallen but the afternoon had gone dark enough to cast the kitchen into shadow.
Darkness reveals as much as it hides, sometimes. We were touching, hand to shoulder, hand to arm, hand to elbow. We dripped. We breathed. My teeth had stopped chattering, because of the heat.
“He was drunk,” I said.
Alex’s fingers squeezed again. I never said that aloud. We all knew, my sisters and my mother and I, but we never said it aloud. I never even said it to James, the man to whom I’d bound my life.
“He couldn’t get us back in. The water came over the sides and up to my knees, and I thought we were going to die. I was ten,” I said again, like it was important.
Alex said nothing, but we moved closer to each other anyway. The hem of his jeans caressed the skin of my foot revealed by my flip-flop. His shirt dripped onto my bare arm, and the water was cold.
“Families suck,” Alex said.
The power came back on. We moved apart. By the time James came home, I’d made dinner and we ate while they laughed together and I put a smile on and pretended it was real.
My mother was dithering. I didn’t know whether to scream or take pity on her and simply remove the choices that had sent her into such a frenzy. The air in the attic was so hot it was like breathing steam.
“Mom, just pick out a couple and let’s get downstairs. Or better yet, bring the boxes downstairs and we’ll look at them there.”
“Oh, no, no,” my mother said, her hands fluttering like birds over the carefully labeled boxes of photographs. “I’ll just be a minute. There are so many nice ones ….”
I bit my tongue against a sharp retort and craned my neck to see the pictures she’d lifted. There were a lot of nice ones. Nobody could ever say my parents weren’t photogenic, not even in the butt-ugly 1970s prairie-style wedding gown and brown tuxedo with the yellow ruffled shirt.
“How about this one?” She held up a portrait-size photo of the two of them. She had Farrah Fawcett wings in her hair and he had mutton-chop sideburns. They looked happy.
“Perfect.”
“I don’t know.” She dithered some more, going back and forth from one to the next, the only difference between the two was the width of their smiles. “This one is nice, too ….”
The heat sapped my patience; so had the lack of sleep the night before. I’d dreamed again of the weight of stones in my pockets and water closing over my head. “Mom. Just pick one!”
She looked up. “You pick, Anne. You’re so good at that sort of thing.”
I reached for the one closer to me. “This one.” I put it in the pile of others she’d chosen for the collage Patricia wanted to put together.
“Oh, but that one—”
I gathered them up and tucked them into the manila envelope for safekeeping. “I have to get out of here before I pass out. I’ll take these.”
Without waiting for her answer, I ducked through the low-hanging eaves and down the set of pull-down stairs. Compared to the stifling heat of the attic, the second floor felt like the arctic. My vision blurred for a moment and I swallowed hard against a swirl of nausea. I could blame it on the attic, but I almost always felt a twinge of stomach upset whenever I stood in the place I was now.
The stairs from the first floor came out in the middle of the second level. We had no upper hallway, just a square cordoned off by banister railing surrounding the stairs. The three bedrooms and the bathroom all opened off this square. As they’d always been, the doors were cracked open to keep the breeze flowing.
Mary, at home for the summer while she waited to return to law school in Pennsylvania, had taken over the room that had been mine and Patricia’s. Claire had the room she’d shared with Mary all to herself. They still shared the single bathroom, but with only two instead of four, the fighting for the shower probably never reached the epic proportions it had when we all lived at home.
The door to my parents’ bedroom was closed, the only one to ever remain that way. Closed to keep in the cooler air from the shadowed side of the house, and the air from their window air conditioner. Closed to keep us out, as children, when our dad had “a headache” and needed to “rest.” A closed door that shut us out but didn’t keep us from hearing the shouting.
“Anne?” My mother’s flushed face appeared in front of me. She wore her curls shorter than mine, in a cut that emphasized the bright blue of her eyes. She’d stopped coloring her hair and now two side streaks of white painted the dark auburn. I didn’t need a time machine to know what I’d look like as I aged. I only had to look at my mom.
The world swam and I swallowed again. Dizziness swept over me and I gulped in air that no longer felt so cool.
“Sit down.” She might have been held hostage by indecision at having to choose which pictures to use, but my mother didn’t hesitate now. In a house full of pale-skinned redheads, fainting had been a common occurrence. “Put your head between your knees.”
I did as she said, knowing well enough the warning signs of buzzing in my ears and flashing spots in my vision. I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth with slow, measured breaths. She brought a cold, damp washcloth and laid it over the back of my neck. It only took a few minutes before the discomfort of the balustrade digging into my back was worse than the dizziness. My mom brought me a plastic cup of ginger ale, cold but without ice, and I sipped it.
“Should I ask if there’s something you want to tell me?” she asked, and when I looked up, her eyes were twinkling.
I shook my head, only slightly, not wanting to send myself back into feeling faint. “It was the heat, Mom. That’s all. I didn’t eat breakfast, either.”
“Okay, if you say so.”
My mother wasn’t in my face about having kids the way Mrs. Kinney was. My mom adored her grandchildren, Patricia’s son, Tristan, and daughter, Callie, but she wasn’t the sort of grandma who heat-sealed photos of her grandkids onto tote bags or wore sweatshirts that said “Grammy’s Gang” and had small embroidered stick figures representing each grandchild. My mom loved her grandkids and was happy to take them places and just as happy to send them home when she was done.
I sipped more ginger ale, feeling better. “Mom, I’m not pregnant.”
“Stranger things have happened, Anne.”
They had happened, and to me, but she hadn’t noticed back then. Or if she did, had stayed silent in the face of early morning sickness and fainting spells, of sudden bursts of hysteria and long, telling silences.
“I’m not. I’m just overheated.” My stomach rumbled. “And hungry.”
“Come downstairs. We’ll have a late lunch. It’s almost four o’clock. What time do you have to be home?”
I didn’t have to be home at any time. Alex had left the house early that morning with mention of seeing some people about projects that hadn’t been my business, and James had gone to work. I expected him home around six, but I didn’t have to be there when he walked in the door.
“I should leave soon. I have time for a sandwich. I think we might be going out to eat, later, when James and Alex both get home.”
My mother, however, had the long-time habit of being home when my father got home. This was a useless attempt at restricting his drinking; if she could keep him occupied with household tasks for a while before he settled into the easy chair, he might drink less. Or, he might not. The futility of the effort didn’t seem to keep her from trying.
I didn’t want to be here, however, when my dad got home. There would be much joviality on his part and much tension on mine as I counted the number of times he refilled his glass of “iced tea,” each time adding more whiskey and less tea. Once, as children, Patricia and I had hidden the tea bags. We thought if there was no tea, there’d be no special ingredient, either. It hadn’t worked.
“Oh, James’s friend’s still there? How long is he planning on staying?”
“I’m not sure.”
I followed her down the stairs and into the kitchen, where the ceiling fan stirred the air into a semblance of cool. It hadn’t changed much, that kitchen. The same daisies nodded on the wallpaper and the same yellow curtains hung at the windows. My mother had talked a lot about redecorating, but I suspected the enormity of choosing a new paint color, new fabric for window treatments, new potholders, had proven too much for her. We tried, sometimes, the four of us, to encourage her. But what did I care if my mother never changed the pattern on her walls? I hadn’t lived in that house since I was eighteen; if God was good I’d never have to live there again.
“Is he nice? Do you like him?” She pulled out plates, bread, lunchmeat, mustard. A jar of pickles.
I grabbed a bag of chips from the pantry. “He’s nice. Sure. But he’s not my friend, he’s James’s.”
“That doesn’t mean he can’t be yours.”
My mother had befriended my father’s buddies, opening the house to poker games and football-watching parties. Backyard picnics. She claimed as friends the wives of these men my dad brought home, but they only seemed to get together with their husbands in tow. No luncheons or shopping trips, no ladies’ night at the movies. Those things she did with her sister, my aunt Kate, if she did them at all. The rest of it was an attempt at keeping him home. If he was home, he wasn’t out driving over someone’s dog. Or their child.
“He’s only staying for a little while,” I told her. “Until he gets his new business started.”
“What does he do?” My mom looked up from the mustard she was slathering on her bread.
“I … he had some sort of transportation business in Singapore.” That was all I knew.
My mom finished making the sandwiches and reached for her leatherette cigarette case. Most smokers had brand loyalty, but my mom usually bought whatever was cheapest. Today they came in a plain white pack that looked sort of like a deck of playing cards. I didn’t bother asking her not to light up, though I did reach to pull my plate far out of the way.
“Singapore, oh, that’s very far away.” She nodded and lit her cigarette, drew in smoke, let it out. “How long did you say James knew him?”
“Since eighth grade.” Suddenly ravenous, I fell to the sandwich with gusto, adding a handful of crispy chips to my plate. They were kettle-cooked, the sort I never bought at home because I tended to finish the entire bag in front of an especially good movie marathon.
