A Place For Us

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  That was the first of many such afternoons for Michael. Sometimes it was Michael who siphoned off an inch or two from various bottles among his father’s stash in the basement. Other times, it was Troy who paid one of his older brothers to get the booze. But it was always Michael who ended up draining the bottle, long after Troy had said he’d had enough. After that first harsh swallow, the heat coursing through his veins, Michael just didn’t know how to stop. All he wanted was to get back to the feeling that nothing mattered and no one could touch him.

  The couple of times the two boys camped up beside the lake that summer, Michael had a buzz on the whole time. If Troy was annoyed by his friend’s behavior, he didn’t say anything. It became clear that the main purpose of these trips for Troy was to get away from his home—and let someone else in his family take care of Sylvia for a while.

  On Labor Day weekend the boys decided to have a final campout by the lake. They were heading back to school the following week, and they were both looking forward to one last taste of freedom. But when Troy came to pick up Michael that Friday afternoon, Sylvia was in the backseat with the camping gear.

  “Sorry about this,” Troy said as Michael climbed in. “It was either bring her along or not go at all. She’s promised to stay out of our way.”

  Sylvia kept her word, and was in many ways a useful addition to the party. She eagerly collected kindling, helped with the cooking, and washed the dishes after every meal. She’d packed a stash of comic books and would pore over these for hours while the boys swam and fished.

  Michael, who brought along some whiskey he’d stolen from his dad, kept himself well lubricated but functional through Saturday. By bedtime, though, he was reeling. They each had their own pup tent, and Michael stumbled into his that night and passed out cold.

  On Sunday afternoon, Michael let Troy go fishing across the lake without him. He was feeling hungover and sad. The weather had turned cooler, and Michael noticed red flares in the maples on the mountainside. He dreaded summer’s end. What was he going to do? He grabbed the bottle of whiskey, walked down to the lake, and, sitting against a limestone boulder, began to drink.

  The next thing he knew, some fly or gnat had landed on his cheek. He swatted it away. But it came back. He tried to brush it off again. It giggled.

  “Hey, there,” Sylvia said.

  Michael turned his head to see her crouched beside him, holding a feather in her hand.

  “What?”

  “I’ve been tickling you!” she said, rocking back on her heels. “For about an hour.”

  “What time is it?” Michael asked, trying to stand, but the trees spun overhead. It was almost dark. He’d emptied the bottle.

  “I have a secret,” she said. “Something I want to tell you.”

  “Oh, for chrissakes,” Michael said, furious that he couldn’t even sit up straight.

  “It’s nothing bad,” Sylvia said. “It’s good. I love you.”

  Michael dropped his head into his hands.

  “I love you,” Sylvia said, stroking the top of his head with the soft little pats one might give a kitten.

  “Don’t!” he said, jerking away. “Cut it out.”

  “No,” she told him. Before he knew what was happening, she had her arms around him and was squeezing him to her. He could feel her big belly and loose breasts pressing against him. She smelled of sweat and some deeper, ranker odor.

  “Jesus!” he cried, trying to push her away. “Get off me!”

  “What’s going on?” Troy called from the lake. He was paddling quickly toward them.

  “Your stupid sister is—,” Michael began to say when Sylvia suddenly released him. She gave out a moan.

  “I’m not stupid,” she said, scrambling to her feet.

  “What’s going on?” Troy asked again as he reached the shore and started to climb out of the boat.

  “I’m not stupid,” Sylvia said. Through his alcoholic fog, Michael watched her run clumsily toward the lake.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Troy cried, as she passed him and entered the water. “You can’t swim!”

  “I can, too!” she said, splashing water back at him.

  “Hey!” Troy called after her. “Be careful—it drops off quickly.”

  But Sylvia continued to wade out, the water rising around her.

  “Don’t go out any further, Syl!” Troy called. He started to follow her. “I’m telling you—it drops off!”

  “No!” she shouted. “I’m not—” Suddenly, she seemed to slip, her arms flailing backward.

  “Troy!” Michael heard her terrified cry.

  Michael watched in confusion as Troy dove in and began to swim out to where his sister was thrashing. He heard her choking as she swallowed water.

  Michael tried to get to his feet. He fell over. He tried again and this time he made it upright, but he staggered badly as he tried to move forward. The water’s edge seemed so far away! He had a hard time focusing, and even when he could, it was difficult to make out what was happening. Where was Sylvia? All Michael could see was Troy diving repeatedly under the water. Each time Troy resurfaced, he gulped in air—and then screamed for Michael’s help.

  Help that, by the time Michael finally reached his friend, turned out to be shockingly little and just minutes too late.

  • • •

  Michael parked the pickup next to Troy’s and looked up into the woods, his heart pounding. As he stepped down from the cab, he heard the door to the cabin open. Troy stood in the doorway, arms crossed on his chest.

  “What are you doing here?” Troy called down.

  “I just want to talk,” Michael said, walking across the rutted clearing in front of the house.

  “I’ve got nothing to say to you. You want to talk, give my lawyers a call. I’m sure they’d be happy to hear from you.”

  “I’m not here to talk about the case.”

  “I don’t care—get the hell off my property.”

  “I’m here to tell you that I’m sorry, Troy. I’m sorry about how I acted when we were kids. For what happened.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding!” Troy said. He began to laugh. “You have got to be fucking kidding me! You actually think I’m going to forget about the lawsuit because you finally got around to telling me that?”

  “No,” Michael told him. “I know you’re not. I just needed to say it. I needed to clear the air. I was really screwed up back then. Just the way Liam is now. And I didn’t have anyone to help me.”

  “Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you what. I know the feeling.”

  “Troy—listen. I’m here to say I’m sorry. I’m sorry about Sylvia. Not a day goes by when I don’t—”

  “You’re breaking my heart,” Troy said, turning to go back inside. He slammed the door behind him.

  25

  Liam knew he wasn’t thinking straight, but he didn’t know exactly what was wrong. As he made his way back to campus after his fight with Brandon, he felt as though he were watching himself from above. Or on some kind of weird monitor inside his head. A boy trudging alone through the cold, empty streets of a small town in the middle of the night. Then—whoosh!—he’d be somewhere else entirely. His thoughts kept jump-cutting across space and time, starting with the day early last summer when everything really began to fall apart.

  “What would you expect? His dad’s a carpenter, isn’t he? I doubt he ever even went to college. Mom said that it sure wasn’t his raging intellect that attracted Aunt Brook to him.”

  Liam didn’t mean to listen in on the conversation between his two older cousins, but they were right ahead of him in the buffet line at the reception and were making no attempt to lower their voices. The girl who was talking was the younger sister of the bride. She and the other cousin, both bridesmaids, were wearing pink, floor-length silk princess-style sheaths that accentuated their thin arms. Liam’s mom had been so happy when Aunt Peg had asked if they could hold the June wedding in Barnsbury—and if R.S.V.P. might wa
nt to cater the affair. Brook had been working for months to make sure every last detail of this day—including the hors d’oeuvres that his cousins were busily piling on their plates—was absolutely perfect.

  “I know, but he’s just so weird. I mean, he’s like something out of Lost. Like he’s been living up here in the wilderness and raised by wolves.”

  By now, of course, Liam realized that his two cousins had to be talking about him. Which, frankly, he could handle. It was almost funny, how their criticisms were the opposite of the kind of shit he got at Deer Mountain—like “one percenter” and “Trump.” But it infuriated him to hear them talking about his dad this way—right here in the home he’d helped build. Like they knew anything about him! Carpenter? They had no idea what kind of amazingly beautiful things he created! Expensive, one-of-a-kind pieces that were collected all over the world. And what the fuck difference did it make if his dad hadn’t gone to college? Hadn’t he taught himself everything he needed to know to become a success? And didn’t that take more guts, more intelligence, more of everything, than getting free passes to Moorehouse, Princeton, and Harvard Law the way his Pendleton uncles had? Liam itched to share his outrage with the twits in front of him, but in one instance they were right: he had been feeling like something out of Lost all afternoon.

  While Brook and Michael had their hands full as hosts, and easygoing Tilly was quickly taken up by a coterie of younger girls, Liam was forced to hang out with his older cousins, with whom he’d always felt tongue-tied and out of place. There were three of them—these two girls and a boy, the last of his aunts’ large broods. They called each other by nicknames that Liam had a hard time keeping straight: Diffy, Mix, and Embo. A long sit-down dinner at their table, followed by a night of dancing with a live band imported from Manhattan, loomed ahead for Liam.

  Four other family friends—all in their twenties—were at the older cousins’ table. Everyone but Liam was either in grad school or launched on some career path in the city. They seemed to have gone to all the same schools together and knew the same people. None of them appeared to notice how amazing the sunset looked outside the tent, the way it lit up the cloud banks above the mountains in shades of red and purple. They seemed to exist only in their insular and entitled world.

  “. . . No, just totally forget the LIE. You take Sunrise Highway out to . . .”

  “. . . I ran into her at the Bobbi Brown counter at Bendel’s and I swear to God I didn’t . . .”

  “. . . The Tabata instructor at the Columbus Circle Equinox is definitely the most . . .”

  Liam just sat there, a stupid smile pasted on his face, turning his head from time to time, pretending to be part of the conversation. When the waiter circled the table, pouring wine, nobody registered the fact that he filled Liam’s goblet as well. As the four-course meal progressed, Liam’s quickly emptied glass was routinely topped off. Liam knew his parents would be furious with him if they realized what he was doing, but they were at a table well out of view. Besides, it was his mom’s stupid fault that the wedding was here and he was miserable and alone in his own backyard. And who would ever know?

  At first, the wine just helped to dull the anger he felt toward his cousins for what they’d said about his dad. Then it started to numb his sense of estrangement. This was what Liam liked best about getting high: all the things that usually worried him melted away. He was still ignored, but it no longer mattered. He felt himself floating above it all. By the time slices of wedding cake were being distributed and the groom was leading the bride to the dance floor, Liam was stumbling from the table, desperate to find a bathroom that was free. He wasn’t sure how he ended up passed out on the front lawn a few hours later, reeking of wine and having peed in his dress pants.

  Even now, as Liam cut through a field that bordered the campus, he could feel the ache of shame and humiliation that had overwhelmed him then—and which, in so many ways, had been building ever since.

  “We think you’re going to be happier there,” his mom had told him when his parents broke the news that they were sending him to Moorehouse. That he was heading to the prestigious prep school his Pendleton cousins had attended didn’t really register with Liam. What he heard was that he was being sent away. What he felt was that they didn’t know how to handle him. That maybe he was beyond help. This was always his biggest fear: that there was something inside him that made him different. That made him unworthy and unlovable.

  “Do you want me to go?” he’d asked his dad. He’d overheard enough over the weeks leading up to this discussion to know that his Pendleton aunts were pressuring his mom to enroll him at Moorehouse. But he’d been holding out hope that his father would stand up for him. That, no matter what, his dad still believed in him. Now, as he saw the look of pain in Michael’s eyes, he knew that he was lost. His father had given up on him, too.

  As he approached the security kiosk, he tried to focus his mind on how he was going to explain to the night watchman what he was doing out this long past curfew. When he left the dorm with Brandon and the others, they’d been able to slip out through an unalarmed emergency exit. This entrance was the only way back into his dorm at night.

  But as Liam came up to the kiosk, he realized the security guard was asleep. He could hear the snores as he approached. Liam looked down at the slack face, the body sprawled uncomfortably in the cramped space. It was Russell, an older, heavyset man who seemed for whatever reason to have taken a liking to Liam. The guard made a point of wishing Liam luck when the Warriors were playing and was always ready with a smile and kind word. He knew Russell would be disappointed when he heard that Liam had been dumped from the team. The thought of facing him—and everyone else—suddenly seemed unbearable.

  And then it occurred to him he didn’t have to go back to his dorm room. He didn’t need to face Carey or Brandon or any of them. He could just keep walking.

  • • •

  It helped that it was Sunday. Everyone would be sleeping late. The cafeteria served breakfast until noontime with students drifting in and out all morning. Nobody would miss him. Nobody would even notice that he’d disappeared until Carey got home late that night from his competition in Hartford. Even then, as the two boys were no longer communicating, Carey might very well assume Liam had gone home for the weekend or spent the night elsewhere.

  He followed the moonlight through the trees, down the wooded hills and sloping pastureland that slowly leveled off to the next large town north of Moorehouse. It was an eight-mile hike. By the time he made it to the outskirts of town, the moon was setting and the early-morning sky had taken on the heavy, pewterlike cast of snow. Everything seemed unreal to Liam as he trudged along. The houses, the cars, the gas station with its brightly lit automatic pumps—they all looked dreamlike and changeable. The one thing that seemed to attach him to the world—that made him believe he was actually awake and alive—was his hunger. He stopped at a diner, the only place open at that early hour, and ordered a breakfast of bacon and pancakes. When it came, though, he looked down at it in disgust, remembering that it was what Tilly and Carey had made for him the morning after the disaster.

  “You okay, hon?” the waitress asked when she came to clear his almost untouched plate.

  “I’m fine,” Liam said. “Just not as hungry as I thought. There’s a bus that comes through here, right?”

  “Where’re you heading?” she asked, smiling at him. It was an innocent enough question, but Liam felt instantly suspicious and on guard.

  “North,” he told her, not meeting her gaze.

  “It stops right over there in front of the tourist office. But it’s Sunday, so you may have quite a wait. You’re welcome to keep your eye out for it from here. Let me top off your coffee for you.”

  “That’s okay,” Liam said, grabbing the check and sliding past her out of the booth. He couldn’t stand the kindness and concern in her voice. Besides, he guessed she’d figured out that something was wrong with him. He’d probably
just gotten to the point where everybody could tell that something was wrong with him.

  He stopped at the drugstore across from the diner and picked up things he was beginning to realize he’d need. A plan of sorts was forming in his brain. He used the Visa card his mom had given him to buy trail mix, canned soup, safety matches, a flashlight, Kleenex packets, and a couple of pairs of cheap heavy socks. He waited for the bus across the street from the tourist office, out of view of the diner. The ticket to Northridge ate up the rest of his cash. It started to snow when they were on the highway. As Liam watched it begin to accumulate on the fields and farms outside the window, his confidence began to fade. He hadn’t prepared for bad weather. He hadn’t really thought any of this through very well. The bus’s oversized windshield wipers worked at top speed as they headed into the unexpected late winter storm.

  • • •

  He got off at the second stop in Northridge, the one by the shopping mall and across from the acres of flat marshland that bordered the state park. The snow was coming down hard now, accumulating quickly on the ground. The bus lumbered off again, taillights bleeding briefly into white, then gone. There were very few cars on the road. With his hood up and scarf wrapped around his nose and mouth, Liam knew there was little chance that he could be spotted in the near-blizzard conditions. He crossed the highway and walked onto the snow-covered marsh, his boots sinking into the frozen-over surface of matted grass and mud.

  It was like walking across a soft mattress. The sense of unreality returned as he headed toward the mountains in the distance. Though now the feeling was mixed with a giddy surge of relief. He’d cut himself off from all the bad things that had been torturing him. No one knew where he was. No one could get to him now. Finally, he’d taken matters into his own hands. He’d done it. He was free!

  He decided to wait until he set up camp before calling Phoebe. But he misjudged the distance to the state forest, and he was forced to stop and rest on the far edge of the marshland, stamping out a little shelter among some frozen brambles. He ate a bag of trail mix and a couple of handfuls of snow. He only meant to nap for an hour or two, but when he woke again, it was nearly dark. Another couple of inches of snow had fallen while he was asleep, and it was still coming down.