And then, inexplicably, Nick’s erection is strong, visible in the street-lit room, even though Emily is on the other side of the bed. He opens his arms to her, whispers, “If you still want to . . .” Moves toward her in that languid, almost feminine way of his and kisses her long on the mouth, deeper than since she can remember, refusing to come up for air until she laughingly turns her face away, gasping a little. Her head is still pounding; she can’t remember a time anymore when her head didn’t hurt; she can’t remember a time anymore when loving her husband and trusting his love seemed simple. She goes down on him, though it is honestly the last thing on earth she wants to do now, grateful only that it’s not real sex, where she has to worry that Miles would hear the bedsprings and be repulsed—why, really, why is it a necessity that sex continue on and on this way, beyond the point when two people can possibly see each other in those terms anymore? Why is it part of the intricate artifice of life that, all combined, has worn her down to the bone? Nick comes, empties emptiness into Emily’s mouth, but silently, whereas she used to have to beg him to quiet down, The boys, they’ll hear us! Nothing now but the pounding of her head, the illusory satisfaction that she managed to make a man’s penis rise and shoot something out its end—a task even easier, more commonplace, than having a baby, yet she can’t seem to manage either thing—she can’t seem to manage anything properly anymore.
She rests her head on Nick’s chest obligatorily. The rapid pulse of her own heartbeat against her cheek disquiets her. It is too fast; her head is too loud.
“Nick. I don’t feel so good.”
He strokes her hair. “You’ve been through a lot.”
“No . . .” She means to say more, but can’t, the words aren’t coming. She tries to move her right arm, slung over his body, but nothing is happening, it’s like when they slide the epidural needle into your spine and suddenly your body is gone—you can’t even feel yourself breathe. What comes from her mouth is a guttural sound, and then there is Nick, at attention, kneeling over her, his face over her, then dark, in, out, where, how? She is . . . somewhere. Screaming that cannot belong to her. The world is an accordion, contracting and expanding, her eyes and brain with it.
“Emily? Em, baby, stay with me, stay with me now.”
“Mommy! Daddy, what’s wrong with her?”
Nothing’s wrong, my little bird. It’s all right, put your head on my chest. I just needed a bit of air, that’s all.
“Ma’m?” It’s someone else’s face, someone not of their Home. “Emily? Emily, how many fingers am I holding up here?” But that is impossible since she is in her bed, since no time has passed. “Emily, can you squeeze my hand?”
She is squeezing as tight as she can.
“Can you try squeezing my fingers with your right hand?”
“Look at you, so hoity-toity,” her mother drawled, cigarette burning too close to her fingers, long fingernails filed to nearly a point. “Since you have contempt for everything I do and say, what is it that makes you think you’re too good for me and your shit doesn’t stink?”
Where is the bed? She was in the bed, and Nick was there, Nick has always been there. Flawed, maddening, hers to hold cheaply. After all these years they are almost like brother and sister, and isn’t that what siblings are entitled to: to take one another for granted—to not have to be careful? How did they become so careful?
I want to show everything to you, and have you love me anyway. You were supposed to be the one who knew where all the bodies were buried. How could you make it seem, Nick, like I was never, never enough to hold you in place? Take me back to bed, make this stop, stop this.
But of course, she never showed him everything. She never showed him much of anything at all.
“What do you even want, Emily?” her mother demanded. “Money? Fame? With a teaching degree? Who are you kidding? Those who can’t do, teach.”
I just wanted a normal life. I just wanted a family, and respectability, and love. But that can’t be true, because she has those things and the world has felt cavernous and lacking in oxygen anyway.
“I’m tired of leaving,” Nick, so impossibly young, promised, gripping her hand. “I want a home. You’ll see.”
“She can’t squeeze my hand,” the strange voice says, even though Emily is doing it, even though the stranger lies.
“Mom? Mom, we’re right here, we love you, we’re right here, we’re coming in the ambulance with you.”
You’re not coming with me.
“Mommy, stop it! Stop it now, be regular!”
“Please, Miles, please take your brother. Em—Em, can you look at me?”
Where is the bed? Why can’t she see through her eyes? Where are her eyes?
Save the baby, Emily thinks, but no, that’s already done. That happened in some long-ago time. That’s not what she meant to say anyway. That baby was not her People. Save me, she thinks, I meant save me.
Save me.
ACT IV
STRONG’S LANDING
WHEN I BETRAYED, I LOVED CHAOS, LOVED MY CRAZED VERSION OF SANE. WHEN I WAS BETRAYED, I LOVED FIDELITY, HOME. I LOVE MORE CAREFULLY NOW.
—STEPHEN DUNN
Nick has been bracing himself for the Villa Moderne sign since Traverse City, but when he rolls their SUV right by it without fanfare, too quickly to even scan for the gliders he and Lina once sat on, his stomach still drops like he has stepped into an empty elevator chute by mistake and is falling down, down. Miles has his headphones on; he hasn’t spoken during the seven-hour drive except to occasionally tell Jay to shut up. Nick talks to Emily privately about this: how to handle Miles’s newfound rudeness to his brother, whom he used to coddle and baby and defend. It’s healthy, he’s convinced himself at last. Jay is treated as fragile by enough people. They need brotherly strife. It’s normal. So Nick holds his tongue. The myriad manifestations of Miles’s anger seem part of an intricate web of things he cannot possibly explain, that might merely be part of his imagination anyway, just like he can imagine his body next to Lina’s, casually draped over those hard wooden rockers outside the rooms at Villa Moderne, smoking cigarettes they’d torn the filters off of, her tiny leg slung over his, nearly weightless but possessing a kind of tingling heat from within. Miles does not ask once, in seven hours, to use the toilet. His seventeen-year-old son is a camel. A mute camel. His taste in music is equally problematic. His son mocks Wilco, says they are “too old to tour.” His beautiful son, whose face could launch ships, is full of livid, wordless rage. It is age appropriate. It is generationally appropriate, having grown up in an era of multiple wars, of Occupy Wall Street. It is gender appropriate: another angry young man. It is situationally appropriate. Who can presume the things for which Nick may or may not be to blame?
This ferry used to seem like magic to him, when Lina rode it out alone in the cold, that giant hooded coat covering her like she’d been swallowed by an animal. He would sit inside the chilly motel and text her things, stupid things, I’m imagining you now like that famous shot in French Lieutenant’s Woman, with your hair blowing across your face, romantic nonsense. The weather is beautiful in June, and he could have a beer and sit out on the deck while Jay tools around exploring and Miles covertly checks out the local girls from behind his Malcolm X shades; it could be that sort of shimmery summer day, but Nick doesn’t know how to give that present to himself, so instead they sit indoors, where the loudness of the other passengers ricochets off the ceilings and walls like the inside of a fishbowl, and they eat shit from the vending machines and he feels seasick, yet vaguely happy somehow, to have ruined their ferry ride. To have allowed the moment just enough promise not to bring down his whole house of cards, but to have denied himself some fundamental poetry or kismet that would feel like healing. He doesn’t want to heal. Except, of course, he does. The island is visible in the distance now. If he were some nihilist, he wouldn’t be here. This is a loop that never stops. If he were a braver man; if he were more selfless; if he were a hedo
nist: if if. He can play the game with himself endlessly.
“There they are!” Jay shouts, pointing at the dock. On the dock, Miguel and Chad wave back, Chad with considerable more enthusiasm, which makes Nick laugh. At first he doesn’t see Imogen, but then her fathers pull her up, one holding each arm the way Nick and Emily used to do to Miles—never Jay—a three-year-old suspended in midair, her yellow and blue sundress billowing in the wind. Imogen Strong Merry-Guerra: a Provençal sunbeam.
“What,” Miles says finally, nearly hissing at his father, “am I supposed to do here for a whole week?”
“You’re new blood,” Nick promises—he knows this part well—“the girls will take care of that for you. Just go where they can see you.”
Miles rolls his eyes. Then, suddenly, his voice pitching almost like it used to when they were friends: “Can I fake an Irish accent?”
This is their third summer at Strong’s Landing.
The year the baby was born, Miguel went to Beaver Island alone to settle the sale, but at that time, of course, Nick knew nothing of it. That was his Summer of Chaos.
The world burnt to the ground that summer. He didn’t care about Isabel’s house, or even about Imogen, as the infant slowly—then with herculean strides—began to defy the doctors’ every expectation, her lungs growing and functioning normally, her appetite insatiable. Miguel’s and Chad’s lives revolved around feeding their daughter with a dropper, around each gained ounce of weight and hope, but that might as well have been happening in China for all the attention Nick paid it. His eldest son was barely communicating, seemed coiled inside himself perpetually ready to strike, while Jay’s health suffered—mild setbacks, ultimately, but Nick fixated on them to avoid facing Jay’s emotional free fall. Despite his braces, his odd gait, his undersized skinniness, Jay had never been much teased at school—he possessed, Emily often said, Nick’s “charisma,” and for the most part had been taken in by his peers, usually as an equal if sometimes in the condescending manner of a mascot. That summer, however, Jay grew clingy as a toddler, had night terrors, and when school began Nick knew in the deep marrow of himself that his son was entering the lion’s den of childhood poised differently now: a target. That horrible summer extended into a fall of fights, of visits to the principal’s office, of discussions of “special schools.” Nick took Jay to a therapist, thought he’d sit in the waiting room reading, stewing, hating himself, while someone else patched up his son—but in the end he was called in, too, every other week, until some numb peace was forged. Jay returned to his own bed at nights; the school stopped calling; birthday party invitations again began to arrive.
And Lina? As summer wore on, Nick was unclear whether anyone else realized that she had evaporated—gone up in smoke. Where was she? Even Miguel, who probably considered Lina his closest confidante, was so preoccupied, and how often did he and Lina really talk anyway? From the night of Imogen’s birth on, Lina’s mobile number went straight to voicemail until voicemail was full; soon the number was disconnected altogether. She didn’t answer Nick’s emails. Was she just avoiding him, or was something bigger . . . wrong? Did she think she was torturing him emotionally “for his own good”—some misguided notion of simplifying his already enormously complex situation by removing herself from the equation? Where was she living? With one angry and one traumatized son, mounting bills, and a new play to finish, Nick wasn’t seeing Miguel—was barely leaving the house—and had no one to ask.
He and Lina had not, since before Imogen’s conception, gone more than nine hours without contact. It was like there had been a horrifying global disaster and he was quarantined. Phones and computers looked hostile, broken, if they didn’t lead to her. They were best friends. Best friends first, before everything else, above any lover’s drama—she would never do this to him, would never make a unilateral decision to remove herself at the worst juncture of his life, not allowing him to so much as weigh in. He would not consent to it. Except, of course, his consent had not been sought. Lina had simply done it, the thing of which he believed her incapable. His life—each expanding day and week without her—was proof of her capability.
When Imogen turned three months old, her dads brought her by, unbidden, uninvited. They had some preposterous bow around her peach-fuzz head, and she looked five times the size of the misshapen walnut she’d been in NICU. Miles seemed to resent the child’s presence, could barely bring himself to buck his chin in a nod at Miguel and Chad before sequestering in his room, but Jay was entranced. Nick waited, sick to his stomach, for Jay to lose interest and leave, but only when Jay squirmed enough that Nick was able to chase him off to the toilet could he ask Miguel, “How’s your sister doing—I haven’t heard from her in ages?” Miguel quipped, with only cursory interest, “Oh, that crazy flaca left town and we didn’t even know she’d gone! She dumped poor Bebe and moved out.”
By Halloween, Nick had dropped thirty pounds. What few friends he managed to see urged, “You need to take care of yourself, man, for the boys.” They said things about “self-care” that made him murderous with sarcasm, but yes, for the boys’ sake, for the sake of what community they had left, he held his tongue, thanked people for their help. He’d always considered himself a nurturing person—the gentle one, between himself and Em—still, for months he ordered pizza almost every night in an effort to keep his sons alive, incapable of cooking, of eating, of sleeping. He drank to excess, as though this were a way to keep vigil to either Emily, whose mother had been a vitriolic drunk, or Lina, who’d exerted massive will every single day to stay clean and sober. Paradoxically, though, a blanket of oblivion made him feel connected to them both, like fucking an ex’s toxic best friend. His behavior was a sick, desperate homage that manifested as an affront—he was a specter in his own life.
Most nights, he passed out on the basement couch. Other evenings, he went for long walks—he never smoked in the house, still, even though he could now—and talked to Emily inside his head, a few times aloud, wondering if he’d cracked. What should we do about Jay, Em, should I put him in private school—how will we afford it? And, Do you think Miles blames me, Em? Do you think he knows? He caught himself asking her, Did you see Jay at school today, did you watch over him for me? and after that he wouldn’t go on his Emily walks anymore, smoked on the porch like in times past. He wasn’t willing to go down the rabbit hole of magical thinking that wholly: his dead wife their personal guardian angel, causing a bully to trip over a shoelace en route to Jay, capable of fixing their lives. Emily was gone. She couldn’t help anyone. The dead don’t care.
Meanwhile, every time his cell phone rang or beeped, he nearly threw up in anticipation.
It would never again be Emily—he knew that much. Her voice was beyond him.
It was never Lina, either.
Being at Strong’s Landing always feels to Nick like he is in some Ann Beattie story. Pretty-but-faded middle-aged people engaging in what Lina would call “quaint WASP activities” like softball in the backyard, the smell of barbecued meat wafting in the air. Miguel, slightly paunchy now though his hair-thinning has plateaued, presides over the grill. Gretchen, who has lost the weight Miguel gained, hurls pitches too good for Chad, Gray, or Jay to hit, so mostly it is Nick, and Gretchen’s bohunky boyfriend Ron, dashing around the makeshift bases, trying not to fall over toddling Imogen. Ron works with Dead Isabel’s widower, who took the profits on the sale of the house and got married to someone else, but “never comes over when we’re here,” Chad complains. His new wife has a son Gray’s age, and she and Eddie have a baby just a little younger than Imogen, “but we never see him. This island is the size of Wicker Park, but so help me I think he avoids us. We barely even run into him at the grocery store—it’s like he has spies out telling him when we’ve left the house so he can go into lockdown.”
“I have no idea why you’re complaining,” Miguel says from the grill. “Like we were best friends when he and Isabel were married?”
“The kids
are practically cousins!” Chad protests.
“Our kid has absolutely none of Eddie’s genetics,” Miguel corrects him. “They are nothing like cousins. They’re more like descendants from prisoners in the same POW camp.”
“I thought we bought this place because it was so important to Isabel,” Chad says, and Nick wishes they would keep their marital bickering to their room at night—he can’t bear anymore the way he and Emily no doubt used to sound, and what this pecking does or doesn’t mean about a marriage. “I thought the whole idea was to preserve Strong’s Landing as a place for family, in a way Isabel wouldn’t have allowed, and try to unify and come together here. Heal old wounds.”
Miguel shakes his head, like Chad is reciting from a script written in a language Chad doesn’t understand. “Look around you,” he says quietly. “What do you think we’re doing? What the hell does Eddie have to do with any of that?”
They talk this way in front of Ron, who drinks his beer jovially, not contributing. Every so often, Ron makes his way over to Gretchen and kisses her full on the mouth, or slings an arm around her the way Nick imagines football stars at American high schools do with their cheerleader girlfriends, and Gretchen, who looks her age more than the others, giggles like a schoolgirl. Their passion is clumsy, a little embarrassing, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t enviable just the same. It makes Nick think of Lina, though it has nothing in common with the way they were together; though Lina would probably not even consent to this Kennedys-on-the-lawn jocularity. If she were here, they would be somewhere else: in a dark bar while she nursed a soda water and covertly kissed Nick’s Jameson mouth; riding bikes through early-evening pockets of mosquitos on their way to the weird little airstrip restaurant she loved; lying together on a blanket on the beach reading; smoking on the back-porch rockers, ignoring everyone else. But Lina isn’t here.
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