by Sara Shepard
I wove around the cars haphazardly parked on Jeff’s lawn. Mark made a gagging noise, as though he might puke, but then rallied. He started talking about fixing up an old dirt bike with Andy Elkerson next weekend. ‘You want to help?’ he asked me.
‘I don’t know,’ I said in monotone, my thoughts sloshing, my emotions tangled. ‘Maybe.’
‘Elkerson’s so lucky, out of school and all that,’ Mark said.
‘We only have a couple more weeks,’ I told him.
‘I don’t know if I can do it, man,’ Mark said. ‘Fucking Mr Tole.’ He turned to Kay. ‘Did I tell you how this guy bought dope off of that guy that works at the gas station? Barney something?’
‘You told me,’ Kay said quietly.
I forked onto Wyndell, which is full of thick woods and blind turns. ‘We should tell the PTA, don’t you think?’ Mark was saying. ‘How can these drugged-up bastards teach at our school and get a paycheck? I mean, at least hire someone who isn’t shit-faced all the time. Like hire me.’
‘You’re not done with school yet,’ Kay pointed out.
‘I will be soon enough.’
‘You wouldn’t want to teach here,’ I said. ‘Teach somewhere else, if you want to teach. Just not here.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with teaching here,’ Kay said.
‘It’s easy for you to say, Rich,’ Mark talked over her. ‘You’re getting out of here. You’ve got it all. Me and Kay, it’s different.’
‘It’s better,’ Kay said, her voice gnarled and abrasive, like steel wool. ‘Real people stay in Cobalt. Honest people. They do what they have to and they stay.’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ Mark said. He often thought people were making fun of him when they weren’t.
But I knew better. ‘Shut up,’ I said, too. I met her eyes, finally, right across from me. Then she faced forward, screamed. There was the deer, long legs, wide eyes, erect ears. A thick-antlered buck. He stared at the car, and I stared back at him. His eyes glowed blue. For a moment, right before we collided, the expression on the buck’s face looked almost human, startlingly cognitive. It was like he understood what was happening-not just with the car in front of him, but also with me. He looked straight into me and saw what I’d said to Kay, what I’d given up.
Then there was the crunch, and a long few seconds of nothing.
When the noise stopped, it was so quiet. Like death. The wind brushed peacefully through the trees. There was a far-off swish of another car going by on a distant road. When I sat up, some of the window’s glass had shattered into the inside of the car. It was all over the seats, glittering in the moonlight.
I saw clearly, then. I realized I could defer the scholarship. I could go in a year or so. Kay and I could live in married students’ housing with the baby. Maybe she could even go to school there, too. My life wasn’t ending-it was just starting a little sooner than I’d planned.
I pushed out the car door. It crackled with more broken glass. I saw the deer lying on the ground, enormous and immobile. I turned back into the car and looked at Kay. I wanted to tell her. But then…
I told you this in a series of visits you made to my room. It was like I was a serial novel, or perhaps a soap opera. You were tuning in for the next episode of Richard Davis’s tragic, young denouement. You knew nothing about me except for this-and, ironically, doctors knew everything else about me except for this, in this kind of detail. By the time I got to this part in the story, your eyes were very wide. ‘But then…what?’ you asked.
I looked down. Kay was covered in blood. She wasn’t scrunched up or cockeyed or bent in an unnatural angle or anything, though-it seemed more like she was just sleeping. When the ambulance came, I grabbed an EMT’s arms and told him he should be very careful with Kay; she was pregnant. I heard a gasp behind me and turned-they had pulled Mark out of the car and laid him on the pavement. He had come to, and was staring right at me. In the back of my mind, I’d always wondered if he’d suspected what was going on between us. Maybe I’d hoped that, deep down, he had always known. But he hadn’t, that was obvious. He hadn’t known a thing. It was the last time Mark ever looked me in the eyes.
I told you about how, a few days after that, I had lain on the carpet in the living room, the TV blaring. I told my mother I wouldn’t be taking the scholarship for college. ‘But we worked so hard,’ she said, astonished. And it was true, it was we. She’d pushed me into taking the accelerated courses, she’d bought me the encyclopedias, she had filled out the paperwork for the scholarship and ridden me until I finished the essays. You need to get out of Cobalt, she always said. You’re destined for better things.
‘I’m sorry,’ I told her, sprawled out on the floor. ‘I can’t do it. I can’t go.’
My mother stood there for a long time. All I wanted was for her to lean down and tell me the right thing. She was so good at telling me the right thing, bolstering me up, making me feel like I was okay. But she just quivered at the edge of the room, her face growing redder and redder. ‘Fine,’ she said finally. ‘Stay here, then. Ruin your life.’
‘I really need to talk about this with someone,’ I said. ‘I feel like I’m coming apart.’
‘What’s there to talk about?’ she snapped, twisting a hand towel around in her fingers. ‘It was an accident. People hit deer all the time, there’s nothing you could’ve done. Think about your friend. Think about what he has to face now.’
‘Maybe he needs to talk to someone too,’ I moaned.
She rolled her eyes. ‘Get off the floor. Go get a goddamn job.’ Goddamn was razor-edged; she’d never used that tone with me.
The phone rang. My mother stomped over to get it. I knew right away it was my father. My mother’s voice drooped, a wrung-out washcloth. ‘Well, just come home,’ she said. She slammed the phone back into its cradle. She didn’t know I was watching when she put down the hand towel and glared at the portrait of Sinatra she kept by the telephone and stuck her thumb right in his smarmy face, as if blotting out his shiny, optimistic existence.
I saw her differently, then. How cornered she felt, how purposeless. My relationship with Kay was the only thing I’d ever kept from her. Perhaps that was why she didn’t come to me when I was lying on the floor in despair-because I’d concealed it, because she thought she’d been replaced.
‘I’m sorry,’ you whispered, when I finally finished.
I looked up at you then. Really looked at you. ‘Why are you an aide here?’ I asked.
You looked startled. First, you touched your throat, as if checking for your vocal cords. Then you turned the little silver chain you wore on your wrist around. ‘I like helping people,’ you said. ‘And I was here once, myself. A long time ago. When I was nineteen.’
‘Why?’
‘I used to do this.’ You pulled up your sleeve and showed me scars up and down the insides of your arm. Then you pulled up your shirt and showed me similar ones on your stomach. There were more on your calves, the insides of your thighs. ‘I used broken glass.’
‘Are you better?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ you said. ‘No. I don’t know.’
We kept things a secret for a while. When we met to play tennis, we were both very businesslike. If it seemed like I talked to you a lot during meals or spent more time with you when we drove upstate into Rhinebeck, no one said anything. So we got bolder. You would slip into Merewether while the others were watching TV. I would pull you up to my bedroom and we would hide under the covers of the twin bed and listen to Coltrane on my Discman, one earbud in your left ear, the other earbud in my right. It was exciting, knowing that Paula, who watched over us, might walk in at any time. What can I say? That I felt alive? That I felt understood? Sometimes you said you still felt crazy. I told you I had a brownstone apartment in Brooklyn Heights, and that I wanted you to come home with me. You were hesitant-you’d had difficult relationships in the past. ‘Life’s not as easy as that,’ you said. ‘You should know that by now.’
I told you I did know that. But even if things got hard, I wanted to deal with that, too. I’ve run from a lot of people when things got too hard, I told you. I ran from my mother, I ran from Kay, I ran from my cousin and my aunt and my friends and my daughter. I’m tired of running. I don’t want to do that anymore.
‘Your daughter?’ You stopped me. ‘You didn’t run from Summer. She’s in Brooklyn.’
I looked away. I hadn’t been clear. But there was time to explain all that later. There was time for everything.
I want to be idealistic about you. I want to be hopeful, as hopeful as I’d been with Kay. I am still me. We are the worst of ourselves and also the best. They can try and shock it out of us but it doesn’t really go away, not entirely. And that’s okay. It made me feel great to realize that. It made me feel almost whole again.
PART FIVE
Brooklyn, New York,
February, 2003
blizzard
25
The family met for dinner in Park Slope, at an Italian restaurant on Fifth Avenue. The restaurant didn’t have a bar, so we had to stand in the alcove by the door to wait while they cleared a table for us.
The alcove’s heavy plastic walls kept buckling in from the wind. Rosemary stood next to me, wearing a long, sweeping skirt, pointy boots with a bunch of tiny eyelet buttons, and an oversized plaid coat. Her dirty blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail, but many strands had broken free, spiraling around her face. Philip was talking to my father about the apartment. Structurally, it seemed very sound, he said. However, there were ways to maximize the space that might appeal to buyers. He could knock down the wall that separated the kitchen and the living room to make it one large room. The kitchen would get more light that way.
My father ran his hand over his chin. ‘I wonder how long that would take…’
‘Not long, once you get the permit and a contractor,’ Philip said. He knew a contractor who owed him a favor, actually, from when he lived in New York. He could call him, if my father wanted.
‘Richard,’ Rosemary warned, ‘we can’t knock down a wall. People are coming to see the place in two days.’
‘True.’ My father nodded slowly.
‘But, for the record, I was always telling him that we should open up the space between the kitchen and the living room,’ Rosemary added, snaking her arm around my father’s elbow.
‘You have been,’ my father said, leaning into her. ‘I should have listened to you.’
I looked away.
I left your bedroom untouched, my father had written in the email that announced he had decided to sell the old Brooklyn apartment. Logically, selling it made sense-it wasn’t as if anyone were living there, as my father and Rosemary were in Vermont, and Philip and I were living in Annapolis, Maryland. He’d probably make a killing on it, too, the way the apartment values in Brooklyn Heights had gone up since he’d bought the place.
The realtor had scheduled an open house for this Monday and Tuesday, which was why everyone had to come into town this weekend and get their stuff out. It was also an excuse for us to come back to Brooklyn and hang out together; a ‘family gathering’, as my father called it.
The talk transitioned to tennis, whether Roddick was the real thing or just a flash in the pan, that Hewitt was an asshole, and who were these Russian girls coming into this country and using our trainers and playing in Florida but still competing under the Russian flag. I had no idea Philip knew anything about tennis. Sometimes, he just came out with these random facts about things-famous mountain ranges, American history, the Dalai Lama. I could see the corner of his eyelid twitching, which happened whenever he was nervous. In the year we’d been together, I’d told him plenty about my father, but this was the first time they’d met. I wanted to tell Philip he didn’t have to try so hard.
‘Summer, I wanted to show you this.’ Rosemary pulled a binder out of her enormous handbag. Inside were photographs, notes scrawled on lined paper, and more notes and drawings on Post-its. ‘It’s the general premise to my book.’ She pointed to the photographs. ‘I featured twelve gardens in Vermont, and interviewed each of the people who cultivated them. I tried to vary them as much as possible, to give people a lot of options. If it ever gets published, maybe we could sell it at my store. Anyway, I thought you might want to take a look.’
‘It’s nice,’ I said, leaning over, feigning looking. ‘Very pretty.’
‘You should see the things Rosemary’s doing for that store,’ my father butted in, just as the frizzy-haired maître d’ announced that our table was ready and that we could sit down if we wanted, even though Steven and Angie, his girlfriend, hadn’t arrived yet. ‘They raise llamas on the neighboring property, right? Well, now they don’t only just sell plants at Carson’s. Rosemary is buying some of the llama yarn to sell there as well.’
‘And you should see him with those llamas.’ Rosemary jutted a finger at my father. ‘There’s this one mother who was completely ignoring her baby, and Richard was so worried. He thought maybe we should adopt it. Had all these plans of how we could build a little llama barn off the garage.’ She rolled her eyes good-naturedly. ‘Your dad and his worries about karma.’
I recoiled, horrified she had so nonchalantly referred to what I thought she had referred to-my father’s accident, his guilt over hitting the deer, his loss of Kay. My father had surely told Rosemary, and maybe Rosemary had assumed he’d discussed it with me. Only, he hadn’t. Not once. I wasn’t even sure if he knew I knew.
‘I think it’s nice he saves animals,’ I said, unable to suppress the snip in my voice.
Philip touched my arm.
‘Well, I know.’ Rosemary sucked in her bottom lip. ‘I mean, so do I.’
I clamped down on the insides of my cheek. I was trying. I was trying to try.
‘You really should come to Vermont, Summer,’ Rosemary said gently as we all sat down. ‘It’s so beautiful there right now, with the snow.’
I turned away, pushing my tongue to the roof of my mouth. All in all, it was a relief that Rosemary was who she was. Before I met her, I’d pictured her as this exuberant, carefree woman, the kind that wore short A-line skirts and was always the first to get up to dance at a wedding-like Kathy Lee Gifford on those Carnival Cruise commercials. Rosemary had come to Cobalt with my father to organize Stella’s things and make the funeral arrangements. She was a godsend-she cleaned Stella’s house top to bottom, sorted through a good deal of her things, braved places I didn’t want to go, like the basement or Stella’s closet or the kitchen pantry. Pete drove across the country to attend the funeral, too, and Rosemary cooked for everyone. She hung out in the living room doing a crossstitch while my father and Pete caught up in the kitchen and I walked up and down Stella’s gravelly street, talking to Philip on my cell phone.
‘She’s just so…ordinary,’ I had told him. At this point, Philip and I hadn’t actually seen each other yet, but we were talking to each other on the phone every night.
‘Does she seem nice?’ Philip asked.
‘I don’t really know,’ I said, passing the old speed limit sign. I could still make out Sand Niggers Go Home, although the paint had faded almost white. ‘She hasn’t really said anything.’ Not that I’d exactly said anything to Rosemary, either.
The third night in Cobalt, when my father and Pete were yet again drinking beer on the de-cluttered back porch, Rosemary started to brave a conversation with me. She did the talking. She told me she was working at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. And that she wanted to start a gardening business and write a gardening book. Rosemary had created a gorgeous garden on the Brooklyn apartment’s roof deck, and a few neighbors who had seen it from their roofs hired Rosemary to come over and make over their spaces, too. She told me she’d been working on the roof deck the day the terrorist attacks happened, and they’d put a big, jagged tear in her memory for life. She wanted to move my father out of the city-to Vermont, she was thinking-as fast as she could. She said this with
a lift at the end of each sentence, like a question, although I doubted she was asking my permission.
‘We should both go up to Vermont,’ Philip said now, his hand on my arm again. ‘We could learn how to ski. Or snowboard.’
‘Mmm.’ I dove into the bread basket as soon as the waitress placed it on the table. In Vermont, Rosemary worked at an organic plant store/coffee shop; they held folk concerts and poetry slams Sunday nights. My father didn’t do anything for a while, but then began to renovate their farmhouse. He bought how-to books and just started…doing it. My father, who used to fear doing the laundry, now knew how to plumb and do electric work and hang windows. He knew how to frame a door and check if things were level. After he finished the farmhouse, he’d taken a job at an artist colony, repairing the studios and cottages. Apparently, Vermont was full of artist colonies, places where artists went and just…existed. Writers took over run-down barns and cabins. Painters climbed uneven steps to slanted lofts and marveled at the windows and light. My father, the once-dermatologist and cancer researcher, a holder of not one but several advanced degrees, wandered around with his tool belt, making sure the windows opened properly to vent out turpentine fumes.
Now, Steven and Angie stood awkwardly over us, smiling and holding hands. Angie had her purse slung across her chest like a postal worker, and Steven’s hairline was receding, which I still found shocking and funny but also sad. ‘Hey!’ Steven cried.
My father stood up. ‘You’re here!’ He wrapped his arms around Steven. Rosemary hugged Angie, who was petite and Asian and had the smallest teeth I had ever seen. The two of them sat down and shrugged off their jackets and bags. ‘So happy you made it,’ my father beamed. ‘You get in okay?’
‘Oh, sure, for once.’ Angie rubbed her red hands together. She and Steven rolled their eyes in the understanding that frequent travelers had. They both worked at an Internet company in San Francisco. The website, which had something to do with on-line music reviews, was getting bigger and bigger, so they frequently flew around the country, attending events to promote it. This past summer, Steven had scored my father and Rosemary third-row seats to see Dave Brubeck at the Newport Jazz Festival, the musical zenith of my father’s life.
