The East End

by Jason Allen

  “Goddamn, what a mess,” he said, and flung his hat onto the couch like a Frisbee.

  Her first thoughts: I don’t love you. I don’t even like you. But she needed him to cooperate and at least take some of his boxes, maybe even the rest of his clothes along with them, so she batted her lashes and met his puzzled look with a smile, only then realizing that her teeth and tongue had probably been stained purple. She brought her lips back together and her hand to her mouth, surprised at how badly she’d just slurred when she asked if he wanted some wine.

  The room blurred like a scene through a rain-coated windowpane and she closed her eyes, feeling hollow, dizzy, then settled into a familiar space, faintly aware that her arms had wrapped around Ray’s back and her head now rested on his shoulder.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll have some of that rotgut you drink. But first—”

  “You’re gonna take your stuff, right?” she mumbled, and heard him answer, “For once, just do me a favor and stop fucking talking, G.”

  His hand settled on the loose knot of her bathrobe belt, and with one deft movement he whipped the fuzzy cord through the loops. Gina’s skin prickled as the robe fell open. She forgot all about his faults and bit his lip, curling her body back as he bit hers. Her eyes closed once more, and then somewhere along the way she fell into thinking about how she’d typically go to any lengths to avoid emotional discomfort, but in moments like this how much she craved physical pain. It seemed the only way to escape anymore. Alcohol hadn’t been working, not as it had for so many years, no matter how much she drank. She hadn’t wanted to think about the significance of this. She’d kept herself together most days but had also made promises to her sons after a handful of the rougher nights, when they’d seen her bleary-eyed or hunched over the toilet or staggering in and out of a blackout. She’d even considered sitting in the back of an AA meeting and seeing what that was all about, though she hadn’t made it to one yet. Each time she’d promised to stop drinking or at least cut way back, she’d meant to commit to changing for Corey and Dylan. Truly, she had. But whenever she did manage to string together a week or two of sobriety, in the same way other people might mourn the death of their best friend, she missed the relief she’d been so accustomed to finding in a bottle of wine or a pitcher of beer. And worse, each time she’d tried to quit, she snapped at the boys more often; she snapped at other drivers on the road. And although he usually deserved it, she didn’t feel good about snapping more at Ray, either. The word kept coming to mind—snap. Snap, snap, snap, like a mousetrap...

  Ray kissed her neck and twisted her arm behind her, his calloused hand raking the small of her back while his other hand held her head arched backward by the hair—which hurt a little, though the shiny streaks of pain reminded her why she’d married him. He pulled harder and she heard herself squeal, suddenly removed from the room, the accompanying flood of endorphins like hundreds of tiny flashbulbs bursting inside her veins, a flurry of bright pulses, an opiate effect flooding her abdomen and chest while the air ensconced her in the steamy heat and humidity of a jungle. Here again the pleasure and pain Ray had provided on the better days during their marriage had begun working its magic, dulling her anxiety about the upcoming crazy work weekend at the Sheffield estate, erasing all the mundane details of the day...

  But then he ruined it, squeezing her face too hard in his rough hand as he shouted, “Hey! You’re not fuckin’ passing out on me, are you?”

  She opened her eyes to find that he’d dragged her down the hall and onto the bed they used to share, crimson smears and spots already decorating the cream-colored down comforter like a Jackson Pollock–inspired crime scene, her foot or toe or both cut deep enough for a few stitches.

  Ray peeled off his T-shirt while Gina searched for the neon red numbers on her alarm clock, panicked now, realizing that he’d arrived late and she had no idea what time it was or what time it should have been to be safe. Although the boys had said they wouldn’t be back till late, she had no reasonable guess as to when they might come stomping through the front door, and no good thoughts as to what they’d do if they discovered blood and broken glass in the living room and Ray in the bedroom on top of her. Dylan would probably throw something that would leave a crater in the drywall before storming out, maybe wouldn’t speak to her for a few days, but Corey had a lot more of an edge to him. After seeing him come home with a black eye last week, she’d been worrying. And he had exactly zero love for Ray. If he walked in on this, who knows, he might come charging back in with the bat, and swing.

  “We shouldn’t do this,” she muttered, but Ray just kept chewing on her ear. “Really, we shouldn’t.” She’d tried to sound serious but the words came out garbled, as if she’d spoken underwater. Her worry faded, though, as he distracted her, kissing her inner thigh and then hovering there, tying tiny bows with his tongue all around her softest skin.

  She inhaled deeply and stuttered, “Promise me you’ll take your stuff when you go.” But Ray wasn’t listening. He wanted sex, nothing more. And so did she, though she hated herself for this need. It only took a second to worry again, to snap back to the reality of their past—the beating he’d doled out two months ago, the reason he didn’t live there anymore.

  This. This shouldn’t be happening—

  “Stop,” she said, barely able to hear her own words with all the blood thrumming in her eardrums. She’d come to hate him. His violent temper. His complaints like drips in the soundtrack of her days and her dreams, his knack for holding a mirror up to all her flaws. But then things had gotten worse, so much worse. Dangerous. She shoved him, managing to create a little space between them, then summoned all her remaining strength to push him farther away.

  “Get off me, Ray. This is a mistake. We’re done.”

  “You hear something?” he whispered, still panting, his body rigid and his eyes focused on the bedroom door.

  She mumbled, “I said to get off me,” and as he did, she rolled to her side. “I feel sick.”

  Not looking at her, he whispered again, “You hear that? Sounded like a car door.”

  She didn’t answer. The wine and pills had reduced the room to a hazy splinter of light. Her limbs each lay heavy as an ocean liner, while her head and torso had begun levitating, disintegrating to mist, the parts that mattered most all insubstantial as a hologram.

  “Fuck is wrong with you?” He crawled off the bed and listened at the door. Gina’s eyelids fluttered open just enough for her to fix on his naked body, to linger on the dark hair on his shoulders and the way it spread away from his spine. His hand turned the knob so as not to make a sound, but he couldn’t keep the hinges from straining when the door cracked open.

  She watched him turn and creep over to the bed, and just then a sensation like a trio of slithering eels entered her stomach and a sour taste burned the back of her tongue. She barely had time to swivel her head to the side before the afternoon’s wine came spewing out over his arms and hands and splashed over the comforter. Barely conscious of Ray’s cursing or of him backing away, she wretched more of the red liquid as though purging a demon, unable to calm the spasms.

  “Jesus,” he said, “you’re a fucking disaster... Hey, can you even hear me? Just nod if you can hear me.” She strained to answer, and at the same time tried to discern his face from the smudges of movement and shades of color. “Someone just parked,” he said, followed by the faraway words, “Fuck this, I’m so fuckin’ outta here.”

  Take your stuff first, she mouthed, faintly aware that the words had likely never left the shelter of her mind. In the haze, she sensed him snatching up his clothes and flinging the bedroom door open. Ray, her soon-to-be ex-husband, the townie piece of shit, he’d shown his true colors. How in the hell had she allowed herself to even come this close to having sex with him? Well, she’d damn sure never meet with him like this again. She’d be sober next time, and he’d take his goddamned box
es, and that would be the last she’d see of him. She faded closer to surrender and let her eyelids fall, a deeper sense of defeat sinking in with each soft echo of his shrinking footsteps, followed by the opening and closing of the door.

  The silence may have spanned an hour, or may have lasted no more than a few seconds. Her eyes had been closed long enough for her to doubt that Ray had ever even been there. Then a door opened and closed. It seemed someone had entered the house through the front, not the back door, which Ray had slammed shut either on his way out or possibly in her dream.

  Footsteps pounded down the hall and then her younger son called from the bedroom doorway. “Ma! Open your eyes!” Dylan pushed up one of her eyelids and covered her body with something soft, her robe maybe.

  She mumbled an apology as he shook her. “Ma! Wake up!”

  Her neck refused to hold up her head, the blur dimming more and more, until finally she lay overwhelmed by darkness. Her eyelashes clasped shut. Fading in the direction of the deepest sleep, she wished she could do as her son had asked. Find the strength to wake up.

  For him. She wished she could.

  FOUR

  Nearly half an hour had passed since Casablanca ended, and Corey was still sitting on the Sheffields’ roof beside the third-story gable, gazing at the moon and its light glimmering on the lake water. He took one last toke of his joint, tapped the roach against the asphalt shingle and placed it in his cigarette pack, only then noticing the insect sounds swirling up from the landscape. After all those months not seeing her, the sight of Angelique had rattled him. He’d never been in love. Not that he’d had a hard time getting with girls, but he’d never felt anything like this, his blood thrumming at the thought of her, a drowsy calm during this unexpected period of proximity.

  The depths of his thoughts deepened so much more when he was high, or so he thought as he lay back on the warm roof shingles and stared out at the lake. A minute or two passed and he drifted, wondering if everyone he knew spent their lives finding ways to cover up their fear. The tough-guy acts of his friends had gone stale a long time ago, and Mick’s idea of settling down in their hometown and starting a landscaping business with Corey fueled a recurring nightmare. Nothing scared him more than the vision of spending his entire life right here. Most of the adult locals drank a lot but still didn’t seem happy. And no one liked their job. Everyone Corey knew worked as a servant to some degree. He’d grown up knowing his family was poor, or working-class at best, but ever since he began working with Gina at the Sheffield estate he’d seen his family’s status in stark contrast. They had to work their asses off to afford the bare necessities, while the Sheffields could loaf around, all day every day, doing nothing and still have everything.

  His string of trespasses in wealthy homes the previous summer may have begun out of curiosity and for the thrill, maybe also as a sort of benign fuck-you to the One-Percenters, but now he realized he’d been driven to it as an escape from the visceral awareness of his lowly station in life. If only for a few minutes, he could pretend to live where they lived, imagine being someone who had so much more than the minimum. The disparity between the wealthy and the working-class locals out East was just too extreme. He’d seen too many vacationers driving collectible cars worth more than his mother could make in ten years, sociopaths with perfect teeth and Botoxed faces driving to or from a summerhouse worth more than Gina could ever dream of making in her lifetime. He knew of too many private beaches where millionaires or billionaires had bought the right to keep the lowly locals away. He’d heard of too many places that he and the other locals would never see—the über-exclusive places—the world-class golf courses, the country clubs with valets, the nightclubs with bouncers in tuxedos and VIP areas where the bottles cost a thousand bucks apiece.

  He couldn’t pinpoint exactly when, but sometime during the past few years he’d begun to both hate his life for all it lacked, and to hate the rich for all they had. If not for the feeling that he needed to stay here, to watch over Dylan and to make sure his mom didn’t fall any deeper into the bottle, he’d have been counting down the seconds before he could finally get off the Island in the fall. If only he could bring himself to leave, he’d start his freshman year at one of the upstate schools that had accepted him this spring, and then never live here again. He exhaled long and slow as the daydream of freedom began fading, prefaced as it always was by the clause: If only. The schools needed his enrollment letter within the next couple weeks. If he failed to mail it in by the deadline, he’d be stuck for at least another year, killing time, wishing he were anywhere but here. Maybe he could go. Maybe Dylan would start showing up for school more and stop hanging with the burnouts who were destined to live forever in their parents’ basements. Maybe Gina would sober up and get rid of Ray for good. Or maybe all these thoughts of escaping this place amounted to nothing more than a far-off, pointless dream.

  He’d been staring out at the lake for a while by the time a light went on in one of the windows below him. He uncrossed his legs and stood with his sneakers angled along the roof’s steep pitch and scaled down from the third floor to the second, creeping over the shingles quiet as a mouse on cotton. Beside the dormer, he peered at the edge of the glass pane and saw Angelique helping Tiffany into her bed, Tiffany drunk and stumbly again. In all the moments he’d watched them, he’d never seen Angelique take a sip of alcohol, which seemed strange considering that Tiffany always had a drink in hand or within reach. For a stick-thin girl she could really put them away, but now the Sheffields’ daughter appeared to have passed out the instant Angelique brought the covers to her chin.

  Angelique turned off the lamp and exited the bedroom, and Corey followed in the same direction across the roof to the next dormer, one bedroom over, where she flipped on the light and sat on the end of the bed, leaning forward with her hands covering her face. Although the double-paned window dampened the sound, Corey guessed she was crying, and wished he could figure out a way to suavely walk in and sit on the bed beside her and comfort her—nothing more, just offer comfort. He raised his fingertips to the glass, but his hand shot down as Angelique’s head jerked toward the bedroom door. Corey’s body also tensed up at the sound of crunching pebbles coming from the other side of the house. Soft light skimmed the peak of the roof and grew brighter while the sound intensified, the source of both he knew without yet seeing—tires rolling over the driveway stones, headlights.

  He climbed back up to the third-story roof, looked over the peak and saw the limousine approaching, the gates behind it creaking closed. Then a burst of red from the brake lights splashed across the driveway and the long black car parked beside the slate path at the corner.

  The driver emerged and opened a side door for a man with a paunch and salt-and-pepper hair to step out first. It was Mr. Sheffield, followed by a thin, much younger man, both dressed in suits. The headlights beamed against the hedges and the side entrance to the kitchen while Mr. Sheffield handed something to the driver and then beckoned the young man to follow him inside. The limousine swung around and crunched back down the long driveway, paused for the gates to swing open, and pulled out onto the pavement of Gin Lane. Meanwhile, keys had been jingling below and the kitchen door opened and closed.

  Corey inched down to the second-story and sidestepped over to Angelique’s room, but she’d already left, so he scurried over to Tiffany’s window and peeked in and found her trying to wake her friend. No movement from Tiffany, only Angelique’s quick head turns toward the doorway and her inaudible but obvious pleading. Then her body halted. Corey knew she heard the men inside the house. She’d been thrust into the exact same position he’d been in when the girls had arrived unexpectedly, and now she had to slip out of sight right away or face the consequences.

  Watching her, he empathized so intensely that her paralysis became his paralysis, even as the panic jitters traveled like an army of spiders racing into his fingers and toes. He imagined wh
ipping the window open and swooping in and saving her, but his body remained locked. He couldn’t help. She was all on her own, with only a few seconds to hide.

  She chose the closet.

  FIVE

  Soon after the two men entered the house, lights winked on in the master bedroom and Corey shifted over to the dormer closest to the poolside edge of the house. With the lake glimmering behind him, he peeked through the window, only to find that Leo Sheffield and his friend had already stepped through the double doors and out to the balcony. He heard their voices drifting in the open air around the corner of the house, heard the young stranger mention swimming in the pool, and weirdly enough—something about bandages. He psyched himself up to climb, and their words dropped away as he grappled up to the third-floor roof. From there he concentrated on pressing his sneakers with the utmost care along the shingles, and at the peak he spread his legs and forearms out on either side like a frog.

  He leaned just far enough over the roof lip to see the balcony railing and the well-dressed young man pouring champagne. Both he and Mr. Sheffield licked their lips and pinched at their noses, all fidgety while the bubbly wine filled the flutes and overflowed sparkling foam, neither of them seeming to relax until they clinked glasses and tilted their heads back for a long sip. They stared at one another and then out at the lake, slurping some more from the flutes, and Corey looked on, feeling as if he’d been absorbed as part of the background, while only soft nighttime sounds could be heard—the crickets, slight rustles in the oak and pine branches, a bird flapping in a low flight path across the water. And still no words spoken when the younger man leaned in, and Mr. Sheffield leaned as well, closing the distance until their lips touched.