by Unknown
“That last summer, Keeley and Michael started fighting a lot. No one knew what about. Neither of them would say what was the matter. One day, they’d be all lovey-dovey and then next, they wouldn’t be speaking. Now, Rose, the woman that you knew as Mrs. McGrath? When we were little, she was mean, the island girl-bully, the kind that pinched you and tripped you when a grown-up wasn’t looking. Remember the story I told you about how the Barefooters met? The slap heard-round-the-world? That was the same Rose. But when we got older, she got in a kind of competition with your mom. And Michael was at the center of it. For some reason Rose saw him as hers.”
Hannah’s eyes grew wide. Now it was making some kind of sense, that day at Mrs. McGrath’s, the stuff she’d said.
“Whenever Michael and Keeley were having one of their fights, Rose would come out of the woodwork and follow Michael around while he was down in the dumps, act like his buddy. All the time, she was inviting herself over to Michael’s house, visiting even when Michael wasn’t there. His parents were nice about it, invited her in, gave her refreshments while she waited for Michael to show up.”
“She would insist to them that Michael had invited her, but Michael, nice as he was, hadn’t. He didn’t give her a hard time about it though, just smiled, shrugged. See, Michael was a sucker for lame ducks. If someone had a problem, he tried to help them. If someone was picking on someone, he’d step in. If a kid was a loser, he’d be that kid’s champion.”
“Most boys that were good-looking like him, who were athletic and smart and funny like he was, were either dismissive or oblivious to kids who didn’t fit the same mold. Not Michael. He always said he was lucky, that’s all, and some kids weren’t. But he wasn’t a pushover. He could fight with the best of them. He beat the crap out of Charlie Whittaker when Charlie wouldn’t give back the Hooper twins’ savings he’d taken for those cheesy sea-monkeys. Remember, Keeley?”
Keeley nodded slightly, and made a circular let’s-move-this-story-along gesture with her right hand.
“Anyway, Rose was like a fly, annoying and always buzzing around Michael whenever Keeley and he were in one of their funks that summer.”
Hannah interrupted, curious, “But wait. Why were they fighting?”
Aunt Zo nodded. “We all wondered. It turned out, I mean, I found out-“
There was a rustling behind them and the nurse stuck her head in. “Time’s up, ladies.”
Hannah turned around to look at the nurse, “No! Please? This is important!”
The nurse, a heavy-set dark haired woman with a long pointed nose, didn’t look impressed. She shook her head. “Sorry, hospital rules. You can visit longer when she moves out of ICU, but right now she needs her rest.”
“Oh!” Aunt Zo said. “Just a little longer. I’ll be quick?” Keeley was grunting through her tube and waving her hands.
The nurse spread the curtains wide and gestured to them to leave. “Okay, out. Now Mrs. Cohen’s become agitated. Let’s go.”
Aunt Zo turned to Keeley. “Don’t worry. I’ll tell her. I only wish you could chime in. I’m not sure how to tell this whole thing by myself.”
Keeley reached for the pad and pen by the bed again. The nurse stood, arm still outstretched holding the curtain open and making loud impatient sighing noises while Keeley wrote. She handed the pad to Aunt Zo.
“You can do it,” Zo read out loud. “Okay. Let’s hope so. Get better quick, Key. We need you, all right?” She reached over and tried to pat Keeley’s thigh, barely reaching it with her good left hand.
Hannah stood slowly. She didn’t want to go. She looked over at the nurse again, but there was no sympathy there at all; the woman’s face was impassive. She went and kissed her mother’s cheek, listened to her mother’s little squeak in reply, and then pushed her Aunt Zo in her wheelchair out of ICU.
They ended up in the hospital’s cafeteria. It was the best place for them to talk. Ben was on the phone outside in parking lot, calling his contacts in the medical community. Pam and Amy were keeping their distance, just nodding at Zo and Hannah when they came out of the ICU rather than jumping up and running over to compare notes. This was extremely unusual among the four friends, chatterboxes all. It was then that Hannah knew that that the story she was about to hear was something between just her mother and Aunt Zo, something that even Amy and Pam didn’t share with them.
In the cafeteria they got coffee, which was surprisingly good, as well as buttered rolls, and found a table in the corner of the dining room. Aunt Zo busied herself with her coffee, stirring it and adding more and more sugar until Hannah started to wonder if her godmother was going to have a little coffee with her sugar. Then Aunt Zo rearranged herself in her wheelchair, clearing her throat over and over. Finally, she said, “Okay. I’m nervous. Can you tell?”
Hannah nodded.
“It’s pretty obvious, huh?” she said, looking at her coffee and stirring it. “You don’t know how long I’ve waited for this. I just never imagined it would be like this. We were supposed to be at Captain’s sitting on a dock or in the living room at the Barefooter house. There would be wine or champagne or something. Your mom would tell her part, be there to help me tell mine. You know how we always finish each other’s thoughts. It would be easy. This isn’t.”
Aunt Zo cleared her throat again and sat, continuing to stir her sugary black coffee and stare at it. Then she began to speak, slow halting words that trickled one by one at first, before flooding out in a rush, blocking out the empty cafeteria and filling it with late-summer memories of their eighteenth year.
Chapter 61
Zooey just couldn’t stop saying, “I’m sorry,” that summer. She was sorry for everything. Sorry she had missed all of June and most of July on Captain’s. Sorry Michael and Keeley were fighting for no apparent reason. Sorry she was too tall and flat-chested and weird-looking, still Zork the Stork at eighteen.
Most of all, she was sorry because she was the reason her father was dead. If she hadn’t gotten drunk that Friday night in December after she received her early-decision acceptance letter from Wellesley, hadn’t gone to that party with her friend from school, Amanda Hobson, and then gotten behind the wheel of her family’s old Volvo, giggling and oblivious to everything, the roads caked with ice, she wouldn’t have crashed the car and ended up in the hospital with a concussion and a cut on her forehead. Then her father and mother wouldn’t have had to endure the embarrassment of the charges of drunk driving and the fear for their daughter’s life.
That was what had done it, made her dad have a heart attack only a week later. She knew it. She didn’t care what people said about him being older, in his sixties already, with a family history of heart disease. No, it was her fault. She should have been a better daughter. Her father couldn’t have loved her more, couldn’t have been more supportive or interested in everything she said and thought and did. Although Wellesley was her mother’s alma mater, it was her father who had always encouraged Zooey’s artistic dreams and backed up her choice of a major in Studio Art there. A frustrated artist himself, her father’s family never allowed him to consider art as a vocation; it was only something to enjoy as a hobby.
“You’ll do it, Zooey. You have the talent and the drive,” he said, eyes shining with pride when they’d discussed her plans.
He had been the one to buy her first set of watercolor paints as a girl. He’d been the one to make sure she was continually enrolled in local art programs. They would go together to various picturesque spots on the weekends and paint, each checking each other’s canvases, commenting and making suggestions. Now, he was gone. There would be no more blissful days like that, the sharp smell of turpentine permeating and euphoric.
When she finally arrived on the island with her mother in late July, she could tell as soon as they got off their boat and started unloading that her mother wouldn’t stay. She was barely there anymore. Her vibrant zany mother had left. This ghost only wanted to be back with her four older sisters in Mich
igan, where they’d been staying since her father’s death. There her mother was cared for and petted, a child again in her family’s presence. Zooey had never realized that her mother, though acting the part of a grown-up, had also been a child in her marriage.
Her mother had never held a job, balanced a checkbook, made a deposit at the bank, or even paid a bill. It had been her father taking care of her and Zooey all along. There had always been plenty of money – both of her parents came from great wealth – that wasn’t a problem. Her mother would never have to work or worry about expenses, but it was clear that all she wanted to do was go back to Grosse Point, get a house in the same neighborhood where she grew up and where all her sisters lived, and be watched over by them. She had been resistant to Zooey’s pleas to go to Captain’s, finally giving in only when her sisters said it would be a good idea.
Zooey was right. Her mother lasted only a week on Captain’s before leaving on the next flight out of JFK for Detroit.
“You’re leaving?” Zo had been in the kitchen preparing her breakfast of toast and tea when her mother appeared carrying her suitcase.
Her mother put down her suitcase on the kitchen floor and smiled at her daughter hopefully. “I was hoping you’d come back home with me? We can go to the lake house on the weekends with everyone. Everyone wants us there. We’ve been here a whole week. That’s been enough, hasn’t it?”
“But, my friends. I was… this is our last summer before college. We were going to have our own special party at the end of August, remember?”
“Oh, yes. Dogs something?”
“Dog Days. You know, like summer? Dog days of summer? I told you,” Zo said, unable to keep the irritation of having to repeat herself once again. The mother she knew remembered every little thing Zo told her, every dream, every party, every fanciful idea. This mother remembered nothing.
“Oh, oh, right. Yes. Well, then, of course. You have to stay and have fun with your friends. Do you mind being on your own? Do you need me to stay?”
Zooey looked at her mother. She was already on her own, even with her mother around. She’d seen that all spring and early summer in Michigan, felt the coldness of it. Her aunts were kind, but she barely knew them, having only met them twice in her life – once when she was a toddler and once at a family reunion when she was ten. Oh, Daddy. Why did you have to leave us? “No. I don’t mind. No, you go.”
“I’ll be back soon. I just miss my sisters. But I’ll be back in a week or so. Definitely before the end of August and your little party. Do you need anything? Here, let me give you some spending money,” she said, forgetting again that Zooey had a large savings account as well as an enormous trust fund left to her by her father. The only thing she didn’t need was money.
Being alone in the house was less lonely than she thought it would be. In a way, being around her pale ghost-mother had made her miss all the more the family that once was. She slept in later without her mother’s oversight, and wandered around most mornings in her nightgown without bothering to put on a robe, eating meals standing up at the kitchen counter like a wild heathen. It would have been fun if she wasn’t so miserable.
Even though she had stayed on the island to be with her friends, daily she was surprised by their lack of understanding of her and what she was going through. Never before had she felt so separate from them, angry at what seemed like willful obtuseness on their part. If Pam’s clueless remarks and Amy’s impatient rudeness was bad, Keeley’s near-jubilation was the worst.
Keeley seemed to see Zooey’s lack of parents as something to celebrate. Her first remark upon hearing that Zooey’s mother had left the island was, “Oh, you’re so lucky. You’re free.”
Zo was so shocked and hurt, she simply blinked and nodded slightly. This was the girl she used to worship? Then, the next slap fell. “You know what? We should have a party at your house.”
Her house? Her haven? Where she could let go and just weep every evening sitting on her bed, holding her favorite framed photograph of her father in her hands? “Oh, no, we can’t. I’m sorry! My mom would be so mad,” Zooey said. Her mother was so disconnected she wouldn’t notice a herd of elephants running through their living room.
The four girls were hanging out at the Barefooter house, bored and hot, sitting around the edges of the rotting floor in the living area and throwing things into the hole in the corner of the room, listening to them plop one by one in the water below.
“Whatchootalkinbout Zo?” Keeley said, sticking her lower lip out. “Of course your mom won’t be mad. She won’t even know. It’ll be perfect. And your house is huge. We can invite everybody!” She grinned at the others.
“Awesome!” Pam chimed in, eyes glowing. There was a new boy on the island, Clay Duffy, that she had her eye on. You could see her thinking, figuring out how she would make her move. Which wouldn’t work, even Zooey could see that. Rose Griffin had already put dibs on him, apparently finally abandoning her quest to steal Michael away from Keeley. Rose had started following Clay around, and Clay, normally enough, seemed thrilled to have the attention of one of the island’s most beautiful girls.
“Does your dad, I mean, your mom…,” Amy was clearly wrestling with the right thing to say. “What about liquor? Is there any at your house?”
“No, no, we can’t. I’m sorry!” Zo said, looking around at her friends, waiting for them to understand. They would have ignored her, too, if it hadn’t been for Michael, who heard about their plan when they went to his house after lunch at Amy’s.
He was outside on the beach in front of his house, squatting in the sand and waxing his surfboard. When Keeley announced the plan to him, the first thing he did was squint up at Zooey. “What does Zo have to say about all this?”
“I’m sorry,” Amy imitated in a sing-song voice.
Pam elbowed Amy hard and said, “Zo’s cool with it.”
Michael kept looking at Zooey. “I think I was asking Zo, not you guys. So?”
Zooey shrugged her shoulders, her mouth turning down. She was angry with her friends, but she understood at the same time that she was being selfish by not hosting this party. It was a quiet little island most of the time and the kids had to make their own fun. Here she had a huge party-perfect house all to herself. But… “I’m sorry. I just, I’m not sure I should have a party. I mean, what if something gets broken? And the liquor cabinet. My mother will notice that. They don’t really drink. I’m really really sorry.”
Michael shook his head. “Stop saying you’re sorry. You didn’t do anything wrong. Actually, you’re a good daughter.”
Keeley plopped down next to him in the sand, fell on her back and splayed her arms and legs out helplessly. “Oh, I can’t take it. It’s so boring this year. No one’s having any parties. I’m going to die from lack of fun.”
“Hey!” Pam said, her hands going to her hips.
“Yeah!” Amy said. “Thanks a lot! I guess we’re just too boring for you.”
Keeley shook her head, rubbing the back of her hair into the sand. “No. I didn’t say that. All I need is just one little party. Just one fun thing between now and our Dog Days boat party. Come on, you guys!”
Zooey stood there, torn and wavering, biting her lip and feeling her friends’ discontent pointed at her like a finger. Then Michael jumped in with a solution. They would have a small no-damages party at Zo’s. He would get the beer, that is, one of the older guys on the island would get it for them. In return for the older boy’s help, he’d be invited. It would be fun, but quiet: no wild stuff. Zooey was relieved and agreed. It didn’t sound too bad. Keeley was mollified. Pam wanted to invite Clay, but they all agreed that was impossible considering the Rose situation.
Once the evening of the party arrived and they were all sitting around holding their sweating beers in her formal living room, Zooey realized she should have given in to the original idea. A big crowd would have made up for the uptight Victorian décor and echoing hugeness of her house, particularly co
mpared to the cozy little houses on the other end of the island that all of her guests were used to.
The four girls, Michael, and the older boy who’d gotten the beer, Sam, sat there, making small talk and fanning themselves in the heat, and Zooey was watching everyone look more and more disappointed. She couldn’t stand it.
Then it hit her.
“Hey, I have an idea!”
They all looked up.
“Let’s go up to the widow’s walk! It’s got amazing views, and it’s nice and cool. There’s always a breeze up there.”
So that was where the party really happened. Up on the large widow’s walk they sprawled out and finally relaxed, watching the sun set and talking about everything and anything. Sam kept teasing Amy, which made Zooey think he liked her, and Amy teased right back in merciless manner, which made her sure Amy didn’t return his interest. Keeley sat between Michael’s legs, his arms around her, her head resting on his chest, and Zo tried not to be jealous. Her friend had a wonderful boyfriend, she should be happy for her.
It was after the sun had finished going down, the sky washed in deepening shades of blue and purple, when Keeley started complaining about Rose. “I just don’t understand why she had to go after you, Michael. I mean, I hope things work out for her and Clay, but-“
“Well,” Pam said. “I don’t. Clay deserves better.”
Michael chuckled. “Honestly, anyone who gets stuck with Rose is going to be sorry. She’s a poor thing. I feel sorry for her.”
Keeley twisted around to look up at him. “Poor thing? Sorry for her? She’s the meanest person ever! And then she has to chase after you. Leave my boyfriend alone, Rose.”
