by Shannon Kirk
“But . . .”
“Listen. Hold on. Listen.”
I shook my head, lowered it, and flipped my hand to indicate he should continue.
“Maybe you don’t remember this, Mop, but”—he inhaled and blew out hard, indicating he was holding something painful inside, but would have to let it out—“maybe you’re not remembering how my mother died when I was ten. Do you remember the summer after? How you kept coming over and wanting to play? And I kept telling whoever answered the door to tell you I was sick?”
“I thought you were sick. I made you cards.”
“I kept all the cards. I wasn’t sick. Well, I wasn’t physically sick.”
“Oh.”
“So when I saw you like that on the bench dressed in black, when you didn’t call or write or accept anything from me, I had two instincts. One, I saw no point in pushing you through grief. I remember resenting everyone who tried to push me. I still resent them. I’m still angry at my father for making me go to soccer practices, saying it would make me feel better. He meant only good, but he didn’t know. That feeling of anger I’ll never forget, because that part is almost worse than losing my mother. I feared so much you’d resent me if I pressed you. So I left, and I waited, and London has been awful without you. I thought of transferring to Princeton. Yeah. To finish out grad school in proximity to you. Got the papers and all, but I figured that’d be big-time pushing. So I waited. I’ve been miserable. My second instinct was, and is, stronger than the first. And here it is. In my heart I know one thing.” He shook his head, chastising himself. “God, I’m sorry, I’m rushing through all this and I can’t stop. I’ve had this speech in my head for so long. Mary Olivia . . .”
Manny only ever says my real name when he’s at his most gravely serious. Like when I told him I was afraid I was pregnant, and he bowed his head and said, “Mary Olivia, we’ll wait together and see, and we’ll be together no matter what, so it’s not a terrible thing because we’ll make it great. Don’t cry. Stop crying. I love you.” Then he smiled and hugged me, although we were both scared.
“Mary Olivia, I’m serious here,” he repeated, holding my face so tight but so tender, tears welled in my eyes. “The only thing I know is this: you belong to me, and I belong to you. I have no other certainty.”
You belong to me, and I belong to you. I have no other certainty, he said. These words. These words are the vows I hold with him. And yes, I then considered the beauty of David Gray’s song “Gulls,” about how the wind belongs to no one. I remembered, too, Aunty proclaiming herself free like the wind, and I sometimes used to want to be like her. But I am not wind. I respect the wind too much to want to be like the wind: free of ownership, of connection.
In that moment on Manny’s lawn, a rush of awareness hit me like a twenty-ton wave: I was no rock, like I think I’d been trying to be, alone, an island, for two years. I then, in that single moment, accepted a wish to belong to one man, the one I’ve loved my whole life. There is power in individualism, a safeness from loss, I don’t disagree. But some of us are like an octopus, whose IQ neurons belong also in its eight arms in addition to the central brain. Like an octopus, those of us who thrive best when operating in the multiple might survive the loss of a piece or two, but we swim sideways when not attached to what makes us whole. Manny, my mother, Aunty, perhaps a few others—they comprised my insular world making me whole, a straight-swimming, complete being. It took a mountain of emotions to accept this fact, this weakness, perhaps, which I did, standing on Manny’s lawn two weeks ago. No, I told myself, looking in his eyes, which matched the horizon and at once, reflected myself to me. Stop fighting to be like the wind. You are not the wind. I am not the wind. I am Mary Olivia Pentecost, lover of Manny, daughter of Johanna, niece of Liv. And what other identities comprise me? Any?
Manny took his hands off my shoulders and shrugged, pivoting off the Duke blanket to the grass.
“I need to confess something, though,” he said. “I tried dating a couple girls . . .”
I jolted my head up, swiveling my struck face to his. My posture that of a ridgeback on the hunt.
Manny laughed. “I’m not a priest, Mop! You should be happy I tried. You know why?”
“Oh, now this is some serious bullshit right here. I should be happy you slept with some other bimbos?” I said, only half joking.
“There’s no bimbo better than you. You’re the best bimbo.”
I hit him, of course. I love how he flirts, insulting my gender as if we both didn’t insist on equality.
“No, seriously. Everyone I dated, and there were only two—well, two and a half—reminded me that nothing compares to you.”
“That’s a Sinéad O’Connor song—‘Nothing Compares 2 U.’”
Manny rolled his eyes and smiled, pointing a finger, indicating a coming lesson. “Well. Actually, Prince wrote it.”
“Right.”
He grabbed me then, and while standing with the dramatic Atlantic to his back, we kissed so long and deep, working ourselves up so much our hands fought under clothing, trying to claw beneath skin, we had to race for shelter. We left the stolen Duke blanket behind, pinned to the grass by the still-full thermos, so we could make heated love in the swinging daybed in the pool house. The pool house doors remained open to the sea and the blue sky’s approving breeze. We were the only ones on the property, except the estate caregiver, and she was stealing a nap with the cats, up on a third floor somewhere in the main house, Manny said. And the location of his father and brothers—well, this became relevant in the minutes after we calmed our naked breaths after round two in the pool house.
I stood, no clothes blocking the summer’s sight of all my pieces and my parts, and stretched before the open door. The fishermen in bright-red boats offshore maybe could have seen me with binoculars, but they didn’t care about me: they pulled on lobster traps and checked the tension on their lines. Seagulls sang in swoops through the sky, and the air smelled of salty water and the gardenias potted around the pool house, freed for the season from the property’s hidden greenhouse.
“Babe,” Manny said from behind, swinging in the hanging daybed, a white sheet on his lower half, which is where my eyes went, wanting more. “My father and brothers are in Milan. My father inherited another hotel there. It’s weird, I know, random . . .”
I turned in full and showed my surprise at such an unexpected statement, jostling the only thing I wore, a blue sea-glass necklace my mother had started to make me before she vanished. Detectives found the starts of it and my mother’s handwritten plan to paint an infinity symbol and the words Love Forever on the glass. Aunty told police to give the plan and the pieces to me: I finished it up and never take it off. How I missed the orange sea-glass necklace Mom always wore, the piece something my father found for her on a beach in Havana.
Manny’s family, the Acistas, owns hotels around the world. That’s where their money comes from.
“So what I was thinking was, and this is so sudden, I know. But the truth is, I didn’t go with my father and brothers to Milan to see this new hotel, whatever. I came straight here after graduation in London, because I was holding out hope of finding you at your aunt’s. Too much time had passed, and if you weren’t here, I was going to camp out on your lawn in Rye.”
I smiled. God, I love Manny and his brazen certainty.
“Anyway, please come with me to Milan. I know you’re between schools. I talked to your father last night.”
“You talked to my father?”
“Yes.”
He stared at me, shrunk back on his pillow.
“Go on,” I said, throwing only curious confusion. I stepped closer to him. Perhaps I also blocked my father’s attempts to heal me, to fix my world into love again. Everyone knew I loved Manny beyond practicalities. As I thought on this further, some items came to mind out of the fog.
Perhaps my showing up at Aunty’s with the blown gasket was not mere contrived coincidence. Perhaps I had listened this time to m
y father’s pleas that I consider finding my “friend” Manny again, for he’d heard he was back from London. Yes, that’s what I believe he did in fact say, after passing me the fresh-pressed orange juice for breakfast by the pool in Rye the morning before, two weeks ago. This fact slapped me in the face, a slap of realization to the clouds I’d let hover and were now clearing. Do others in grief undergo this slow waking emergence from a walking coma? It can be extreme, the things we tell ourselves to survive. A walking coma, a walking insanity, but who’s to tell what is real, what is sane? There are billions of variations on how someone might react to grief. Perhaps I’m on the extreme end of the spectrum.
I focused on Manny, intent that he not stop talking, so I could retain certainty in at least one thing: my love for him.
In a tenuous voice, half-afraid he might misstep, Manny proceeded. I was still naked, not caring about standing with my backside to the sea, plucking the sea-glass necklace in the hollow of my neck.
“Please come for the next week with me to Milan. I want you to be with me and my family. We’ll get our own room in this Milan hotel my dad inherited—how crazy, right?”
“My mother liked to go to Milan for fashion week,” I said, my eyes to the pool house’s tiled floor.
“I know,” he said.
He clicked his tongue, started to say something, squinted his eyes, and winked. The kind of wink to indicate a decision and a deliberate intent to change the course of the conversation.
“Hand me my wallet, beautiful. Please,” he said.
I walked to his wallet on the lobster trap–turned–glass-topped coffee table, handed him his wallet. He swung to me in the bed. I remained standing to the side. He popped a clasp on a tiny pocket and pulled out a ring with red, yellow, and pink pricks of stones set in a rose gold.
“The rose thief asks you to marry him,” he said, extending the ring, the colors the same as the petals the fox stole. “I was going to ask on the night of . . . I’ve carried this, well . . .” He shook his head, knowing he’d misstepped. He was going to ask on the night of the fire. “Never mind. I’ve held this for years.” His eyes watered, although his voice was sure, a steady steel steam liner cutting through ice.
I looked up, defiant to the past two years, defiant to Aunty, and wanted for the first time ever to run away. Ignore whatever I was supposed to remember or notice, some vague sense of a nagging responsibility. Something happened on the night of the fire to Manny and me that cut the romance, but I specifically closed the option of going through that memory door, the one he almost opened, upon his pool house proposal.
“Yes,” I said with trembling lip. “And yes to Milan too.”
He slid on the ring.
I slithered onto the swinging bed, yanked the sheet from Manny’s lower half, settled astride Manny’s bare hips, felt his immediate stirring to strength down there, which I coaxed along with my hands and then mouth, before moving up like a cobra in control upon his golden-brown body to lick the freckle under his eye like I owned it, which I do. The third time we made love was solemn and long and neither of us smiled or closed our eyes. I consider this third time the consummation of our ocean-lawn, priestless wedding, for he was the witness and I was the officiant and we were the betrotheds, all at once.
And that was that. Our reunion, quick and simple. Painless for us as a couple. Painful, however, for me as an individual, for, if I was being honest with myself, it meant I blocked the last two years.
And this mental grappling only spiraled more when Manny turned to me on the flight home from Milan a week later and shattered my delusions that perhaps all could be settled now. He brought to mind a critical memory concerning the night of the fire. I had suppressed this memory, because, I accept now, I suppressed a scattered field of items that might hurt me, anger me, deliver guilt, or abandon me. Manny and I had had such a fine time in Milan for a whole week. Eating fried zucchini blossoms, drinking ridiculous reds, buying insane fresh flowers for our hotel room, which we did not leave often or for long.
On the plane home from Milan one week ago, I turned to Manny and kissed the corner of his sapphire eye, which I do when I want to convey how much I love him. He smiled in a serious way and wrinkled his brow.
“Mary Olivia,” he said, and my shoulders sank as they always do when he means to be so grave.
“What?” I said, concerned.
In our two-seat row, he leaned in to whisper in my ear, “Listen, we had a great week, right?”
“Yes, Manny, so this is why you’re freaking me out right now. Why are you so serious all of a sudden?”
He did not lift the graveness of his smile, the type of smile that says, I’m going to hurt you with the next thing I say, but I’ll smile to trick you to listen.
“I’m a little concerned,” he said, while rubbing my arms as if I were damaged from an accident. “We’ve been together for a whole week, and it’s been amazing, and I love you more than I ever did ever before. And I’m going to ask your father for permission to really marry you, just so you know, although this seems a foregone conclusion, right?”
“Yes. Right. What? What’s going on? Whoa, whoa, whoa, my father’s permission?”
“Mary Olivia, that’s not the point.”
“Then what is the point, Manny?”
He bit his bottom lip and held a finger up to me to hold on. He squeezed his plastic cup of champagne and guzzled. A flight attendant knocked my elbow with her cart.
I held my breath, afraid.
“The thing is,” he said.
“Holy shit, Manny, you’re scaring me.”
He didn’t smile to lighten my fright, which meant he really meant to hurt me with the next line. “The thing is,” he repeated in an almost inaudible whisper into my ear. He grabbed my hand, held it to his lap in both his hands. “We’ve been together a week and you haven’t mentioned what we saw and what that woman said on the rocks, the night your mother . . . anyway . . .”
It was this moment, right about in the middle of his sentence, for in his preceding tone and the way he looked, I heard what he didn’t finish saying: I remembered the night of the fire in a flash. I stood, walked down the aisle to the bathroom, shut the door, and stared in the mirror as if watching that night on a movie screen.
I remembered in a total rush what I blocked on the night of the fire and what Manny and I saw. No one else knew we were there that night.
CHAPTER TEN
MOP
Remembering two years ago
Manny’s property/Haddock Point State Park
Two years ago, early June, to be exact, everyone thought I was finishing things up at Princeton and due home the next week. But, truth be truth, I got to town a week early, a day before I lost my mother. I didn’t go to our Rye estate. I didn’t go to Aunty’s. I didn’t tell anyone in my family I was home from Princeton. Instead, I went straight to Manny’s to live in Manny’s pool house and also his yellow tent, for he had likewise returned from his school in London. His father and brothers were off to who knows where in the world like any other globe-trotting international hoteliers. We preferred camping with each other to anything else, anyone else. Neither of us wanted to get tangled with our families yet. We wanted to be young lovers on his ocean lawn. I still wonder if everything would have been fine for my mother if I would have been there to save her, had I gone home or to Aunty’s, had I not started my path to definite identity distinction, a clarification from the pack, a betrayal to the trio. Or if Manny and I acted upon and not ignored the woman we encountered on the rocks the night of the fire. It’s my fault is an accusation I carry to this day.
I am certain now of one thing. Guilt played a large part in the equation that made up my extreme reaction to grief, the walking fog, the constant denial, my mind’s ability to identify with only items of study at college.
That night two years ago. Manny and I sat on the ocean’s edge, our feet above crashing waves. His yellow tent sprung and waiting for us, lit from inside w
ith amber-glowing battery candles. The sky was clear. A perfect June night. A freight liner’s lights of green formed a line above the navy horizon of ocean, and above, the domed sky allowed a light blue beyond the moon’s white path. We were sharing a bucket of hot and salty buttered popcorn, sprinkled with a heavy pour of M&Ms, and laughing over misheard lyrics of famous songs.
“And the wee-wee cur,” I said. “That’s what Tom Petty says instead of whatever he’s saying in that song.”
Then we both sang, “And the wee-wee cur,” laughing, because those are the heard words of whatever it is Tom Petty is singing.
“Mary Olivia,” Manny said, reaching for his wallet.
I braced my arms on the lawn, kicked my dangling feet on the rocky edge of the sea face we sat upon, and tried to stifle my racing heart with a deep breath. The way Manny had set up this perfect June night, some hints he’d made, the way he said my full name. I believe this was the moment he meant to pop the question.
So this peaceful, humorous, romantic moment in life should not have been sliced in a thousand strips by the screams of a woman farther up the granite coast, back in the direction of Aunty’s house. But it was.
Manny and I looked left along the sea and up the granite-lined edge, but the scream was outside the moon’s illumination and into the black, the devil of night. We stood, dropping the bucket of chocolate-clumped popcorn, and ran.
The ocean shifted midway to high tide, halting our plan to plunk into the middle beach to avoid the longer way up through the brambled paths and back down onto the roof-layered granite along the water. So we stopped short and went the labored long way through the paths, weaving our way around the middle beach, scraping our legs on the thorns of the mounds of bay and blueberry bushes. We were a step from breaking through when we stopped short, my hand flying to Manny’s mouth and Manny’s to mine.
Sitting sideways before us, high up on layered granite slabs, but dangerously close to the roiling, rising tide, sat a woman in a pale-blue-and-navy-patterned ball gown. Midforties, about Aunty’s age, and puff faced. The moon had moved its spotlight to this perspective, and given her close proximity, the tear lines on her cheeks glistened and sparkled, having mixed with her glittery powder and literal circles of blush, circles like on a clown. She turned to the sea and screamed at the water from the depths of her toes like a howling, grieving wolf, and we shuddered.
