by Meg Donohue
“Gracie!” he says, looking up.
Kate laughs. “Hi to you too.”
Her father winks at her. “Laundry?”
“Nope,” she says. “Just saying hello.”
Her father’s face clouds, his hand slowing to rest on Gracie’s head. “Hello,” he says.
The sandbox in the backyard has been gone so long that the dogwood tree that took its place is now taller than the back wall. Kate and her mother sit across from each other at the table on the small brick patio and drink Arnold Palmers and watch Gracie sniff the mulch between the hostas. If Gracie digs under the rock in the far corner of the flowerbed, will she find Colin’s stash of cigarette butts? Or would they have disintegrated by now, leaving all evidence of his habit buried only in Kate’s memory?
“We made him part of our family,” Kate’s mother says, and, for a moment, Kate is confused. “I don’t think I’ll ever understand.”
“Mom.” Her parents fell in love as juniors at PFS—her father was on the football team; her mother covered sports for the school newspaper. They married the summer after they graduated from college and that was that. Kate loves a good chick flick as much as the next girl, but she suspects the small, steady flame of her parents’ marriage is as close to true romance as exists in the world outside of Hollywood movies.
“I just think he needs to explain himself. It isn’t right.”
Kate squelches the urge to defend Peter. “His timing has always been terrible,” she settles on finally. She doesn’t want to say anything she might regret later. What if they get back together?
“His timing! Kate, aren’t you angry? You’re allowed to be mad at him. I’m mad as hell at him.”
In the years since Colin’s death, Kate’s mother has tapped into her anger. This anger is never directed at Colin—to Kate’s great relief, death has absolved him. But beware the Society Hill driver who brakes for less than a full three seconds at the stop sign in front of the Harrington home. Junk mail, also, now routinely bears Kate’s mother’s unchecked wrath, as do solicitors who call during dinner, Comcast technicians, and Republicans. These things have surely always aggravated her, but she now seems incapable of containing her feelings, as though tolerance were a finite well, now dry.
Kate asks herself if she is angry and decides she is not. “I’m just sad,” she says, her voice, finally, cracking on the word.
Later, back on the front stoop, her mother hugs her. “Good night, my good girl,” she says, reciting an old incantation. “Sleep tight.”
Good girl. Kate knows this is how her mother thinks of her, has always thought of her. And for a long time, it was true. Kate was the one who got straight As and set the table and watched PBS with her parents on nights when her brother claimed to be at the movies. Her mother’s incantation to her brother was “Good night, sweet boy” and this, in its own way, was also true. Colin was sweet. He was loyal and fun. He was also deceitful and moody and lost.
Her brother had loved Philadelphia at night, his adolescent-boy energy feeding off the dark streets and swinging car lights and disembodied, echoing voices. Kate, on the other hand, feels unnerved by the city after the sun has set. She knows only a fool would believe that her years in the city provide her any sort of protection—anything can happen at any moment to anyone. She hurries toward her apartment, one hand wrapped in Gracie’s leash, one hand on her stomach. If her brother were alive, she would have told him about the pregnancy. They told each other everything. Well, almost everything.
“You’re seeing someone,” Kate remembers blurting out in the kitchen of the Avalon beach house she rented with Vanessa and Dani the summer after their junior year of college. Beach shack was a more appropriate term; it was one of the 1950s-era bungalows over the Twenty-First Street Bridge on the bay side of the island that were quickly being purchased and torn down to make room for huge, Hamptons-style shingled homes. The bungalow had two tiny closet-less bedrooms that each contained a built-in bunk bed and not a single other piece of furniture; they draped their clothes on chains of hangers that hung vertically down the walls and slept with the doors and windows open and their faces inches from box fans that pushed hot, salty, back-bay air through the house. The fall after they moved out, the bungalow was razed. The following summer, Dani told Kate that a cookie-cutter home with a big white wraparound deck had been squeezed into its footprint. Even if they’d wanted to, they couldn’t go back.
That summer before their senior year of college was the first summer the girls didn’t stay in Dani’s father’s beachfront home on Thirty-Eighth Street. They’d pooled their money to rent that bungalow on Twenty-First Street, and they loved it—loved late afternoons sitting on beach chairs at the water’s edge, loved biking out on beach cruisers to parties at friends’ houses or for too-sweet shots and dancing at the Princeton (it was the first summer they were legally allowed into the island’s popular bar), loved feeling the wind on their faces when they rode home at two in the morning, loved sharing a pot of coffee at the rickety kitchen table before heading out to early-morning shifts at Uncle Bill’s Pancake House, the Fishin’ Pier Grill, and Avalon Coffee. They’d rented the bungalow for what they considered to be their last summer before college ended and official adulthood, with its “real” jobs and responsibilities, began; this had been the plan for as long as any of them could remember and they were finally doing it. And it was every bit as wonderful as they’d hoped it would be, right up until the day it wasn’t.
After being put on academic probation twice, Colin had finally been kicked out of Lehigh that spring. He was living at their parents’ house in Philadelphia and working as a counselor at PFS’s lacrosse camp. He talked about moving to Brooklyn at the end of the summer and taking a job with his friend’s family’s construction business. Kate couldn’t imagine her brother in Brooklyn, couldn’t, she realized, feeling traitorous, imagine him holding down a job and paying rent. She was surprised and hurt to learn he had been making plans without telling her. It was this mention of a concrete plan that made her suspect there was a woman in his life.
“Who is she?” Kate pressed her brother. “Why won’t you just tell me?”
Colin took a slug of his beer, a bemused look in his eye.
Vanessa and Dani and Tony—a cute friend of Colin’s from Lehigh who Kate would have allowed herself to have a crush on if she and her brother hadn’t maintained an unspoken agreement about not dating each other’s friends—were still at the beach. Kate and Colin had just arrived back at the house, their fair skin tender from a long day under the July sun. They’d cracked open cold beers and sat at the kitchen table, playing a sluggish game of Go Fish. Kate had felt a buzz building behind her temples—she’d had too much sun and her eyes were sensitive to light, making her prone to headaches. The skin on her thighs was mottled and red; she pressed her thumb into her thigh and when she lifted it, a milky white teardrop was left in its place.
“I’m eleven minutes older than you,” Kate reminded her brother. Her words were teasing, but her voice revealed the truth—she was frustrated, baffled, and hurt by his silence. She knew he didn’t like to be reminded that she’d entered the world first, but it was hard not to feel protective of him. She watched his eyes darken at her words and felt her heart lurch. Colin was mellow right up until the moment he wasn’t, when his anger struck you like a sucker punch. The look was gone as quickly as it appeared. He reached across the table to ruffle her hair. He laughed and so she did too, her laughter a Pavlovian response to his.
I’m losing him, she thought, even as she laughed. She’d never had this thought before—not when he’d stolen her father’s Camry in high school and slammed it into a traffic light, not when she’d driven to Lehigh to bail him out of jail after a bar fight left him with three broken fingers and a permanent record, not when he’d forgotten to pick up the cake for their mother’s fiftieth birthday party and had mumbled to a restaurant full of uncomfortably shifting adults that the cake had been—“you k
now, unbelievably”—stolen from him at knifepoint as he’d walked down Walnut Street. She didn’t fear she was losing him in any of those moments. She feared it only now, when he was sitting across from her, clear-eyed and laughing and . . . in love? I’m losing him.
A month later, Colin’s body would be found in the grasses that separated the bay from the island mere blocks from where they sat drinking beers and playing cards that afternoon.
Maybe Peter is right. Maybe she should talk to someone about what happened. Maybe it’s time to skate to where the puck has been. Maybe then she could convince Peter that she does not think about Colin every single day, that the weight of guilt does not press down on her shoulders, making it difficult to move forward.
Colin. When he’d reached out to ruffle her hair that afternoon in the bungalow, his hand had smelled like cigarette smoke and suntan lotion, a uniquely Colin-in-summertime scent that Kate, when she tries hard enough, as she does right now on an empty city street, can still—will always—smell.
5
Vanessa
Vanessa,
It was a nice surprise to see you pop up on Facebook after so many years. I’ll be in New York on Friday. Any chance you’re free for drinks?
Jeremy
Jeremy Caldwell’s e-mail has played on continual loop in Vanessa’s thoughts since it arrived in her in-box that morning. He’d accepted her Facebook “Friend” request a few hours after she’d sent it, and then, for over a week, there’d been no further communication between them. In that time, she’d scoured his Facebook page and learned that he owned a small graphic design firm, lived in Philadelphia, and was, apparently, single.
“Higher!” Lucy squeals. Despite being two, Lucy still sits in the baby swing, tolerating enclosure because she knows her mother pushes her higher when she’s snug in the bucket seat. It is 10:00 AM, and they are at Bleecker Playground. Vanessa pushes the swing from the front, unable to pass up the view of pure delight on her daughter’s face. She holds out her hands, wiggling her fingers in tickle threat as Lucy swings toward her. Laughter bubbling up from deep down in her belly, hazel eyes scrunched up with joy, dark pigtails curling behind her, Lucy crows, “I’m gonna get you!”
Lucy has recently begun using more pronouns. This is a developmental milestone: she’s asserting autonomy, recognizing that she and her mother are not the same person. Vanessa finds the process both fascinating and disconcerting. Her daughter seems to be gaining an understanding of herself at the very rate that Vanessa is losing sight of herself. It’s something of a relief that Lucy still confuses the pronouns, saying, “Carry you!” when she stretches up her hands to be carried, and “Snack for you!” when she’s hungry.
Vanessa hasn’t told Drew about Lucy’s new sentences. He’s been working late all week and hasn’t seen his daughter since Sunday. For years, Vanessa and Drew called each other frequently throughout the day, just to say “Hi” or to discuss plans for that evening or to say “I love you.” These calls came to a full stop five months earlier when Drew divulged what had happened with Lenora Haysbach. Despite her anger, Vanessa continues having conversations with Drew in her head throughout the day; she could fill a notebook each day with the things she wants to tell him: Things I Would Tell Drew If I Didn’t Want to Kill Him. They are everyday things—the latest on the new French restaurant under construction two blocks away, Lucy’s (and her own, she must not forget her own) delight at the Richard Serra exhibit, the dry cleaner’s nearly mystical ability to remove ketchup stains from silk. She hates that this list forms in her head each day, an ever-present reminder that love makes her weak.
“See Gammie today?” Lucy asks, looking up with bright, expectant eyes, a crust of peanut butter at the corner of her lips. They’re sitting on the park bench now, having an early lunch.
“Not today, Luce. Gammie is in Philadelphia. But I’m sure she’ll come visit again soon. She misses you too much to stay away for long.”
Lucy is in love with Vanessa’s mother, and Vanessa doesn’t blame her: her mother is the sort of woman who seemed born to mother, as in the verb “to mother,” the way some seem destined “to lead.” Her parents met at an antinuclear protest in D.C. in 1979; Vanessa’s mother, a white woman raised by a history professor and a sculptor, had been drawn to Vanessa’s black father because of his funny tweed beret and clear singing voice and what she called “his warm, calm, mauve-hued aura.” In their wedding pictures, Vanessa’s mother is hugely pregnant. They named Vanessa after a genus of butterfly, and few days go by that she doesn’t breathe a sigh of relief that she didn’t end up saddled with Clover or Sage, her younger sisters’ names. These names seem to have tied her sisters more securely to their parents, which was perhaps their intention. Clover, now twenty-three, lives three blocks from home and has a plot in a community garden; Sage, in her third year at Hampshire, sent Lucy a CD of her own covers of Bob Dylan songs for Christmas. Lucy loved the CD; that very afternoon, Vanessa introduced her daughter to the joy to be found in painting your toenails pink.
Sometimes Vanessa thinks the only thing she has in common with her parents is her contemplative nature. She is not talkative like her friend Kate (who often has to be reminded to take a breath) or attention-seeking like Dani (who seemed determined, back when Vanessa knew her, to never have fewer than two pairs of eyes on her at any given moment). Vanessa senses that some people take her quiet for coldness or bitchiness, but she does not think it is either of those things. And in the gallery, actually, she hadn’t been quiet at all. She’d bloomed there, becoming a better version of herself—relaxed, articulate, more prone to smile. That’s who she’d been—a gallerist expertly working the room—when she met Drew.
The change that occurred within Vanessa when Lucy was born, the way her focus shifted so entirely to her daughter’s health and happiness, shocked Vanessa. Her daughter became her universe; her life would never again be the same. It seems to her that men do not undergo this same sea change; neither her own father nor Drew, both fine, loving fathers, showed any indication that they felt bereft when they did not spend the day with their children. To the contrary, they seemed to interpret “father” as “breadwinner” and became more committed to their careers. Before she became a mother, Vanessa had thought all that stuff about men and women being different was ridiculous; then she had Lucy and became gripped by something primal, biological. This transformation makes her life bigger and smaller all at once. She both pities and envies Drew for not feeling it too.
The cutout children Lucy and her grandmother created are still taped to the window in Lucy’s bedroom. During that visit, Vanessa’s mother had extracted a cardboard mac ’n’ cheese box from the trash, and—exercising her usual restraint by not actually uttering the two thoughts that Vanessa knew were simultaneously running through her mind: Boxed macaroni and cheese? and Shouldn’t this be in the recycle bin?—had snipped the cardboard into darling little children that would have given a Kara Walker piece a run for its money. Her mother made being a mother, in and of itself, into an art form. Whenever Vanessa felt as if she were losing herself in motherhood, she was inevitably chastened by the thought that her mother, on the other hand, had truly found herself in the role.
“When we get home, we’ll make a beach for the children,” Vanessa tells her daughter. “We’ll make fishies and seashells and mermaids, okay?”
Lucy’s eyes widen. “Yes, Mama! Yes!” she yells, enunciating the word “yes”—a new word in her vocabulary, though “no” has been around for some time now—so clearly that it rings like a bell in Vanessa’s ears. Beautiful or not, words are not enough for Lucy and she scrambles to her feet, losing a sandal in the process, and throws her soft, warm arms around her mother’s neck and plants a loud kiss on her cheek. Vanessa’s heart soars. Her love for her daughter is an enormous, unwieldy thing; it turns her wild with joy and fear. She blinks back tears and pulls Lucy tight to her. This is everything; this is enough, she thinks to herself three times, as though the wo
rds are a talisman or a mantra that, if repeated with intention in her heart, will become the truth.
Vanessa catches herself thinking of Jeremy’s e-mail throughout the day. She’d prepared herself for the possibility that Jeremy might be angry with her, even all these years later, for cutting him out of her life the way she had. He has every reason to be bitter. In the days after Colin died, she and Dani had packed their things and Kate’s too and returned to Philadelphia for the funeral and the remainder of the final, too-hot days of summer in the city, and Vanessa had broken up with Jeremy over the phone. He was upset but sympathetic, suggesting they speak again in a few days. After that conversation, she never returned his calls or e-mails. Eventually, he stopped trying to reach her. Now, despite her callousness all those years ago, she senses forgiveness underlying Jeremy’s e-mailed words. Still, she knows she might be reading too much into his brief note.
The last time she kissed Jeremy was on the beach in Avalon in August in the early morning hours following a party. The streets over the island’s Twenty-First Street Bridge line a narrow finger of land surrounded by bay and wetlands, and the party’s soundtrack of 50 Cent and Black Eyed Peas had carried over the island, buoyed by inlets of water. Everyone had known it would only be a matter of time before an annoyed neighbor called in a noise complaint. When the police finally arrived to break up the party, Vanessa, Jeremy, Dani, Kate, Colin, and ten or so other friends made the long trek to the beach. Dani rode on someone’s back, her flip-flops in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Kate and Colin jostled each other and Kate’s snorty laughter hooked Vanessa’s heart and Dani’s too until they all laughed, over nothing and everything—the packed party with its too-loud, Top 40 soundtrack, the police who seemed disappointed to learn that they were all of legal drinking age, this very walk to the beach on a warm, still night. They were twenty-one years old and it was summertime at the beach and their lives—not just in retrospect but even then, even while they were living them—felt golden-hued and electrifying, and this was only the beginning. Vanessa doesn’t remember much more of that walk from the party to the beach, but she remembers that feeling, that sense of surety about the present and the future that she’s never really felt again. And she remembers that last kiss with Jeremy—and its aftermath.
