by Sara Shepard
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 online 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.
“Who knows about our return flight, though?” Steven added. “All we’ve heard all day is talk about this snowstorm.”
“They’re saying three feet,” Angie said.
My father lowered his eyes, looking distraught. “They’re wrong,” Rosemary assured him.
“You think?” my father asked.
“I’m sure,” Rosemary said.
“Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s true,” I piped up. “The meteorologists are usually right about blizzards.”
“Oh, I have a feeling it won’t happen,” Rosemary said.
“It’s not like you’re God,” I said. I’d meant it as a joke, but it had come out so harsh and mean, and the whole table paused for a second.
“I’m Philip.” He reached across the table and shook Angie’s hand, breaking the silence.
“You’re here with Summer?” Steven asked.
“That’s right.”
“Do you guys live near each other in Annapolis?”
“We live together in Annapolis,” Philip said slowly, glancing at me.
“Oh!” Steven and Angie looked at each other in surprise. Philip kept his eyes on me, twirling a fork around in his fingers.
Steven nodded toward Philip. “You look familiar.”
I clenched my butt in my chair. Philip was going to say that he had lived in Cobalt, or Steven was going to ask how we knew each other. I didn’t want to talk about Cobalt now, or ever, not with Steven.
“Well, I lived in New York,” Philip said.
Angie snorted. “Meaning he’s completely not familiar.”
I began to relax; perhaps the dangerous moment had passed. Steven leaned back and regarded our father. “So I have to sort through my old room, huh?”
“That’s right,” my father answered.
“I can’t wait to see his high school bedroom.” Angie giggled maliciously, wiggling her hands like Gargamel about to muzzle a Smurf. She looked at us. “Have you guys been by there yet?”
“Actually, we’re staying there,” Philip said. “In Summer’s bedroom.”
“You’re staying there?” My father sounded confused. “You didn’t get a hotel?”
I shrugged. “My bed’s a double. We can both fit. And we’ll be out of there before the open house. Then we’re going to stay in a hotel.”
My father scratched his thick hair. It was short now, tamed, and his beard was gone. His skin was red with either windburn or sunburn, and he wore a thick, cream-colored wool sweater, dark green corduroy pants, and complicated hiking boots, the kind that probably insulated against Vermont’s snow and ice. “And…how long are you going to be in town after the open house?”
I chewed slowly. “We’re staying same length of time as Angie and Steven. Until Tuesday. Then we’ll drive home.”
“Tuesday morning or Tuesday afternoon?”
I breathed out, sharp and cold. “Do you have plans or something?”
“No…I just…well, yes. I mean, I wish you would’ve told me,” my father said, his eyes darting back and forth.
“What’s the matter, Richard?” Rosemary looked concerned.
“It’s just…” My father fiddled with his napkin. “Never mind. Sorry.” He smiled tightly at us. A few seconds passed.
The waitress arrived and took our order. I got the risotto. Rosemary ordered vegetarian pasta, my father got duck, and Steven and Angie both ordered steak. I wondered if they were both doing Atkins together; they seemed like a couple who conquered things as a team. When they came to Cobalt to help sort through Stella’s house—I had been astounded when Steven showed up, and even more astounded when Steven seemed normal, friendly, calm, and with a girlfriend—they had Rosetta Stone tapes in their rental car, and at night I heard German words filtering out from underneath the old bedroom door. I wanted to say that Angie was a good match for Steven, but I really didn’t know who Steven had become. So what if I neglected to tell him that I was bringing Philip today, or that he and I lived together in Annapolis? It’s not as if Steven and I ever talked.
“So how are things going in Annapolis, guys?” my father asked us.
“Well,” Philip said, “my job is great. We’re designing a new apartment high-rise in Eastport.”
“And how about you, Summer?” Rosemary smiled at me.
“Oh, you know. Still at Chow’s. The cooking store.”
Everyone blinked.
“We have our summer stock already,” I continued, because it seemed like they were waiting for me to say something else. “Margarita blenders, champagne buckets, mini grills. It’s so cold, I can hardly imagine summer right now.”
My father frowned. “Have you given any thought to going back to school?”
“I’ve told her that, too,” Philip interjected, way too excitedly. “Johns Hopkins isn’t far.”
“I’m not going to get into Johns Hopkins,” I hissed.
“Isn’t the University of Maryland close, too?” Rosemary suggested.
“And there’s that job,” Philip added.
I cut my eyes over to him. “I couldn’t get that job.”
“You don’t know that.”
“What job?” Steven asked.
“It’s nothing,” I said, stomping on Philip’s foot.
“It’s a research associate job,” Philip said excitedly, ignoring me. “A friend of mine’s wife works at a biomedical institute near Baltimore. They help develop drugs and treatments by doing genetic research. I told him about Summer’s degree, and he said she should apply.”
“That sounds wonderful.” There was a frozen, hopeful smile on Rosemary’s face.
“It’s working with fruit flies,” I said limply. “It’s not that wonderful.”
“So?” my father said. “You worked with plenty of fruit flies in college.”
“It’s…” I shook my head. “I’m not going to get it, okay?”
I glowered at Philip. He tilted his head, lifted his shoulders up to chin level.
The waitress gingerly set down our dinners, warning us that the plates were hot. My father smacked his lips and said, Mmm. I could feel Philip’s eyes still on me, but then Angie asked him a question about digital cameras, something else he knew a lot about. I let the warm, soothing risotto wash over me, trying to savor this moment—I was in Brooklyn, which I’d missed ever since I’d moved to Cobalt and then Annapolis. Only, the restaurant was dingy and small—I was practically sitting in the lap of the diner next to me. Outside, scattered trash and chicken bones lined the gutters. A cab honked its dissonant horn when an SUV paused too long when the traffic light turned green. I felt hypersensitive to the smells and noise, as if I’d never lived in the city at all.
Between dinner and dessert, Rosemary stood up and checked the vibrating phone on her hip. “Ugh, work,” she groaned.
“I’m going to get some air, too,” my father said. And Philip slid back his chair, heading for the bathroom. Angie and Steven remained, draining the rest
of their wine glasses. Steven flagged down the waitress and asked for another carafe of wine.
I watched Rosemary weaving around the tables for the door. “Don’t you think it’s strange that she has to check in with work?” I mused aloud. “It’s just a plant store. And it’s not like she even owns the place. She’s just an employee.”
Angie twisted up her mouth. “I think she’s nice.”
“I’m just saying it’s silly, is all.”
Steven simply didn’t react. I watched as he took Angie’s hand. It still astounded me, the tender way he touched her. I’d had no idea Steven had it in him.
Steven leaned forward. “Was Philip in your grade? I can’t place him.”
I grabbed my wine glass and swallowed the rest, rallying. “He’s from Cobalt. He was Stella’s neighbor. That’s probably how you remember him.”
I watched the realization drip down his face. “Ah.” He laughed, then smiled, then gave me a look of disbelief. “He was still living there? Down the street? That’s how you know him?”
I shook my head. “Samantha was in touch with him. We emailed and talked on the phone for a while, and then I visited him. He was living in New York at the time, actually, but then his job transferred him to Annapolis.”
Steven sat back. His eyes were on the ceiling, and I could tell he was reliving that night he confronted me in Philip’s yard. I felt embarrassed, as I knew I would. “So I guess it’s serious, huh, if you moved in with him?” Steven finally asked.
“Not necessarily.”
Angie and Steven exchanged a glance, their eyebrows raised.
“It’s not like we’re engaged,” I said hurriedly. “I mean, who knows, right? We might not marry anybody, Steven, with the models we had for parents. And, I mean, we were into some pretty weird stuff as kids. It’s not like we had a normal childhood.”
Steven just stared, aghast.
“Well, he seems really nice,” Angie said quietly. She picked up her messenger bag and stood. “Excuse me.”
We watched as she slipped out the front door, found my father, rooted through her bag, and lit up a cigarette. Then Steven dumped the rest of the first carafe of wine into his glass. “I would appreciate it if you didn’t discuss some of the things I used to be into,” he said quietly. “Like, you know. That time in Cobalt. All that crazy stuff I used to say. I mean, Angie doesn’t really know about any of that. She wouldn’t get it.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and felt my heart knocking against my wrist. “These days, I thought you’d be saying I told you so.”
Steven’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Look—”
But I was on a roll. Here he was, finally in front of me. “I thought you’d be saying that we should’ve sent every foreigner out of the country when we had a chance. That we should’ve screened everyone, whoever they were. That this was bound to happen—everyone was saying it wouldn’t, but they were too stupid to pay attention. You would’ve found Mohamed Atta and killed him with your bare hands. You would’ve snuffed out every last one of them, and then we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“Summer,” Steven warned. “That’s not fair.”
I raised an eyebrow. My cheeks felt seared. “It’s not?”
Something I’d been holding in for years was now wafting around the room, vaporous and spectral. I wasn’t sure if it felt good or not. I didn’t even know what I was angry about, exactly, and what chances Steven had taken from me. Philip and I had still ended up in the same place, after all. Hadn’t we?
But it was more than that—Steven could have been a better brother to me. And maybe I could’ve been a better sister to him. We hadn’t really tried hard enough, neither of us. We had both a lot and very little to work with.
“It was just a phase I was going through.” Steven ran his hands through his thinning hair, making it spike up. “It was just a thing, okay?”
I sighed, suddenly out of energy. “Yeah. Okay.”
He pulled out the collar of his shirt. “Jesus. I feel like they turned up the heat, huh?” Steven twisted around and looked at Angie, who was leaning against the front window. We couldn’t see her cigarette, so it looked as if there were a thin curl of smoke rising up from the center of her palm.
Then I noticed something else. I leaned forward. “Is Dad smoking?”
My father stood next to Angie. He put a cigarette to his lips, breathed in, and blew a smoke ring toward Angie’s head. Angie laughed.
“I guess he is,” Steven said, his voice flat.
I sighed. “Dad keeps all kinds of secrets.”
Steven frowned, uncertain. “I doubt he does from you.”
“Ha.” It came out hard, sharp.
“I’m serious. You guys are, like, the same. You always were. I always felt so jealous, actually, how easily you understood him.”
An incredulous laugh caught in my throat, but there was no trace of mockery in his face anywhere. “Well, I don’t understand why he’s smoking,” I finally said.
For one moment, even though we barely knew each other, we were connected. Steven and I held the same past that started everything, that made everything flip. Once Angie and Philip and my father and Rosemary returned, we’d be splintered apart again, but right then it was just the two of us, The Schnoz, spying on our mysterious father. Back then we’d been so certain he was a superhero, and thought that since we looked like him, we’d grow up to be superheroes, too.
It was amazing how the old Brooklyn neighborhood had remained crystallized in time. There was Mrs. Delaney walking one of her many yellow Labs, still wearing that big purple parka that made her look like Grimace from the McDonald’s commercials. There was Mr. Gould, still dancing in front of the window—he never could figure out how to close the curtains. There was Mrs. Fry’s same collection of pinwheels, trapped under a film of ice.
I put the key in the lock, anticipating the dogs’ jingling collars until I remembered they were in Vermont. The apartment looked as I had expected it would—boxes everywhere, most of the furniture gone, a big hole in the kitchen where the fridge used to be. New granite countertops and dark cherry cabinets in the kitchen. A new coat of paint on the walls, and new light fixtures in the kitchen and living room. My father had taken the curtains off the windows and stripped the freshly sanded wood floors of their rugs, making the whole place seem enormous.
We went to my bedroom. There was a poster of the Smashing Pumpkins on the wall. Pairs and pairs of Gap jeans in the closet. My old Baby-sitters Clubs from elementary school were on the bookshelves, as were my biology textbooks. I opened a random drawer; inside were things I hadn’t thought about in years. The pale pink leotard and iridescent tights from the year my mother urged me to try ballet. A little crystal box someone had given me in a Secret Santa exchange. A Nintendo Game Boy, without batteries. I shut the drawer again.
Philip swayed in the doorway. “So this is it.”
“Only for a little while longer, I guess.”
“I used to imagine you here, you know,” he said. “When we were young.”
I smiled into my chest. “What did you imagine me doing?”
“Just…being you. Lying in your bed. Looking in the mirror. I imagined you thinking about me, maybe.”
We’d had this conversation thousands of times by now—that the time we met in high school during my grandmother’s funeral was more significant than either of us had ever dared to let on, but we’d both felt silly, afterward, for holding on to it. But I guess it wasn’t silly, after all.
Over those first long phone conversations, me in Cobalt, helping Stella through the last few months of her life, Philip in New York, before his company moved him to Annapolis, I could connect to him in a way I had never been able to connect to anyone. I could tell him things I’d told no one else. Maybe it was because we weren’t face to face, or maybe it was because he told me things about himself, too—that he had been teased all his life for his father’s religion and appearance. That he’d had an obsession wit
h the ThunderCats cartoon when he was young, and wished that he could just become a ThunderCat to escape harsh, confusing pre-adolescence. That one girl he had dated had called him too feminine and sensitive and had cheated on him. He didn’t seem sensitive like my father, though—he just seemed willing to talk. And willing to accept what I had to say.
With that connection, though, came a vulnerability I’d never really felt before, and with that vulnerability came paranoia. I was stunned when he asked me to move to Annapolis with him after Stella died. I waffled over it for a few days, wondering if I really should go. I was afraid that soon enough Philip and I would discover the hateful things about each other, and our relationship would recede into alienation. Or we’d realize that there was no plausible way two people who met once as teenagers would actually end up together. There were some days when I didn’t think about it, but most days I did, at least a little.
I pulled the quilted comforter back and sat down on my old bed. “You didn’t have to kiss my dad’s ass like that, you know.”
“I didn’t kiss his ass.” Philip looked surprised.
“Yeah, you did. How you loved his shirt? How you loved Vermont? You’ve never been to Vermont.”
“I didn’t say I’d been. I said I wanted to go. And anyway, what’s wrong with wanting him to like me?”
The back of my neck ached, the same way it used to after I played Steven’s video games too long. I always played so clenched and tense, afraid that an enemy would come out from the pixilated ether and disintegrate me with his mace or sword or three fire-breathing heads. “My dad was really nervous tonight, wasn’t he?”
“Well, he was seeing all of you again. It’s been a while, right?”
“No, I think there was more than just that.” I thought about my father’s fluttering hands, how he’d gone outside to smoke. I had confronted him about it afterward and he’d shrugged, saying it wasn’t a habit or anything, just something he picked up during his boring days at Merewether. “Maybe he’s tense about selling the house. Or maybe he’s tense about me. It’s not like I’ve talked to him much.”
