by Sally Mandel
Amy had to laugh, which made her feel like she might start sobbing.
“I think maybe this may be my last Halloween, too,” Wayne finally said.
“It could have been your last everything.” Amy laid her head on Wayne’s shoulder. After a while, they got up and started down the sidewalk. Wayne balled up the remains of his costume and stuffed it into the Allens’ garbage can. Even so, he exuded the stale smell of a summer fireplace. At the next intersection the two split, setting off in their separate directions. Amy turned around to watch Wayne walk away from her, still clutching his bag of candy.
She was grateful for the quarter mile stroll to the house, which gave her the time to figure out what to say when they asked her how it went. She pictured Wayne, fire nipping at his costume, and was struck suddenly, as if slapped in the face, with the danger ever lurking in an ordinary day. She’d always known this in theory, of course. Her parents, her teachers, the newspapers and television were always sending out the message: Don’t Talk to Strangers! Look Both Ways Before You Cross! She was aware that her mother’s public health work took her into unstable territories, but the threats had always seemed abstract. And hadn’t Stella always come home safe and sound? Tonight, though, felt like a sharp little stab of reality, an introduction to real vulnerability. It was scary on the one hand. On the other, hadn’t she triumphed? Wayne had just stood there, paralyzed, but Amy almost reflexively determined a course of action and followed through on it. She was shaken enough that the what-ifs rose up unbidden. What if she hadn’t known how to handle the situation? What if she had been too panicked to act? It was the kind of experience her mother sometimes reported about her work abroad, keeping her head when danger loomed—like the time there had been a gun battle going on outside her office in Kingston, Jamaica and her mother simply crouched under a desk as she continued with her phone calls. Feeling her breath catch in her throat at the memory of Wayne’s predicament, Amy reminded herself of the certainty with which she had faced the flames and was comforted.
She had reached her grandparents’ house and just as she had been reluctant to leave it, she was now hesitant to reenter. She dipped into her goody bag for the M&M’s, her favorites, and shook some into her hand. From where she stood, in the light that poured out onto the lawn, the house seemed like a magnified version of her streetcar. As if she were watching a movie, she saw her parents captured in the frame of the living room window. Her father sat on the couch, elbows on knees, holding his head in his hands. Stella stood beside the couch, staring down at him. Her face was wet and she was speaking, but her father didn’t respond. Finally, he looked up at her. Amy’s heart twisted. She had never seen him look so terribly sad. Her mother held out her hand. After a moment, he took it. She drew him to his feet. Amy struggled to read her father’s lips but couldn’t make out what he was saying. Her mother was staring at him closely as if she, too, were laboring to understand. There was a long moment of stillness between them as they gazed at one another. Then her mother spoke. Amy heard the words through her eyes. I adore you, she was saying. Her father wiped the tears from her face and bent to kiss her, a long, deep kiss.
Amy lay under a quilt in the room that was always hers when she visited. Somebody had left the porch light on downstairs, and there was enough of a glow for her to make out the floral pattern of the wallpaper. Poppies, red ones. Mrs. Adams had asked Amy several times over the years if she wouldn’t prefer to freshen up the room with new paper of her own choice, but Amy always said no. She liked the way the flowers looked, all randomly scattered. They reminded her of The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy fell asleep in the field of poppies. Amy figured that flowers that made you feel like sleeping were a good thing for a bedroom wall, but tonight their spell eluded her. It seemed an eternity since she had hopped into the backseat of her parents’ car for the drive north. She needed to flip through the vivid snapshots that her mind had accumulated. She remembered standing in the doorway of the dining room with the bowl of whipped cream in her hands. There they all were, her family and Wayne. As she pictured them, her heart began to swell. Under the cotton t-shirt that she wore to bed, it grew and grew some more, pressing against her ribs as if trying to escape its bony prison. She sat up on the edge of the mattress, her pulse pounding. She was crammed with feelings, full to bursting, exhausted and yet far, so far, from sleep.
She got up and went to the desk under the window and switched on the light. She took a notebook from her pile of schoolwork, opened it and stared at the blank page. I can’t hold it all, she thought to herself. She chose a black pen; it seemed more serious than blue. “My Last Halloween,” she wrote in the middle of a page, then turned to the next one. She sat for a minute. However to start? The only way, she concluded, was to smash the piñata, crack it open with a single blow and then pick through the contents a fragment at a time.
I came to my grandma’s house today, she wrote. She stared at the sentence, not questioning that she had written “grandma’s house,” rather than “grandparents.” The inadequacy of those seven words was humbling. There was so much history to be conveyed, so much joy and adventure and change and comfort, but they were a beginning, at least. They made her want to learn how to make her words say everything she felt.
When she was done, which was very early in the morning, she leafed through her pages. There were a lot of them, more than she had ever written all at one time, even in a letter. She knew that something important had happened to her. When she had stripped off her costume tonight, it was as if she had shed her skin, the person underneath someone quite new. And so she wrote it all down, taking special care with the culinary secret she had shared with her grandmother, Wayne’s costume on fire, and finally the vision of her parents illuminated through the living room window.
She flipped back to the title page and stared at it. Something didn’t feel right. The words “My Last Halloween” swam under her bleary eyes like three lonely fish in a pond. She picked up her pen again, and under the title, she wrote carefully, “by Amy Louise Vanderwall.” She stared at it some more. Yes, this was better. But still she felt dissatisfied. She returned to the last page and read the final phrase: “I have decided that I will be a writer.” She gazed at the sentence for a minute, then opened the desk drawer. There was a straight pin in one of the little wells inside. She took aim and stabbed her left index finger. Then she squeezed a drop of blood onto the bottom of the page. She pressed her right thumb hard into it, leaving a perfect imprint.
Intensive Care
William: 1960
William shoved off from the dock, leaving the family campground behind him in the woods. He slipped the oars into the oarlocks and began to row, dipping tenderly, respecting the silken surface of the water. During late September in the Adirondacks, Dawn breathed over the lakes a mist tinted pink by the emerging sun, as the water, still warm from summer, met the chilly air. William slid in silence toward a rocky island bristling with fir trees and buttressed on its south side with an outcropping of boulders below which the fish, he knew, liked to feed.
But the first order of business had nothing to do with trout. He reached into the sack between his legs, retrieved a bottle of Glenlivet and cradled it reverently in his hands. It wasn’t entirely his fault this time. He had passed plenty of liquor stores on his way north, slowing outside a few but ultimately summoning the grit to keep on moving. But up at the cabin, someone, perhaps William himself, had cached a half-finished bottle in the kitchen cabinet behind a stack of aging tuna fish cans. It was easy enough to convince himself. Fate must have had a hand in this, presenting that long-forgotten bottle to him like a prize. Furthermore, he was well outside what he called the sobriety zone—that is, within a hundred miles of Lily. In bitter moments of self-reflection, he defined himself as an “out of town drunk.” Then, as now, the mere image of his wife’s face shamed him. He stared at the label for a moment, considering. But then … he was alone, after all, with no one to witness his degrada
tion. Didn’t he deserve a reward for months of self-denial? The familiar rush of helplessness consumed him, but excitement, too. He knew the joy that would flood him in those first moments. Quickly, he lowered the bottle, opened it, and took a swallow. The irony of it, that such heat could extinguish its own fire. Gratitude swam through his veins. Finally.
Back when he entered college, William had discovered alcohol as a corrective to some missing element in his physiology. When he drank, something clicked into place. It didn’t make him crazy drunk, just contented, normal, like other people. But after almost four years of drinking steadily, he began to have blackouts. He woke, trembling, every morning, needing a drink. So he just stopped. It was agony, the loneliest time of his life. He would ask himself in a swamp of sweat how it could be that what you needed most was the worst thing for you. But by the time he met Lily, he hadn’t had a drink in six months.
The decades had passed and every now and then, he had screwed up, usually well outside the sobriety zone. He told himself that there had always been, if not an excuse, an explanation. He had one today, too: it was his fifty-first birthday and he was all by himself. For the second year in a row, Lily had gone to visit a friend in London. This time, though, she had phoned to extend her stay indefinitely. He knew why. Not that she would ever talk about it. A year ago to the day, William had made a catastrophic mistake. He kept waiting for his wife to forgive him. It looked now as if it might never happen.
William slung the sack behind him, rested against it, and gazed up into the brightening sky. Mercifully, the liquor had begun to do its what-the-hell job. He drifted into a pleasant alcoholic reverie. While the pale celestial bowl above him eased into blue morning, he reflected on his two great loves. Alcohol was one. And Lily.
The first time he saw her was at the summer wedding of a Yale classmate. There had been cocktails on the lawn of the Greenwich estate. William stood sipping ginger ale and chatting idly with Tom Templeton, the best man. With graduation behind them, Tom was exhilarated about his new job in finance. William watched his friend’s round pink face with curiosity; what about banking could produce such euphoria? And then William caught sight of a young woman. She was standing in the garden nearby. Flowers rose about her knees in polychromatic splendor, as if placing her on a lavish display. She was tall, slender, and straight with a thick chestnut braid that fell to the middle of her spine. She wore an ivory dress of some ethereal fabric that draped her body simply, elegantly. All the other girls, with their shapeless knee-length dresses, wore their hair in pageboys and bobs. Standing among them, this young woman seemed to have stepped out of an Edwardian novel. He had never seen anyone like her.
Feeling his gaze on her, she turned toward him suddenly, shading her eyes with a hand. Their eyes met. “Who are you?” William murmured under his breath.
Tom swiveled to determine the source of the interruption. He laughed. “Forget it, Billy boy. She’s engaged.”
“You know her?” William asked.
“I’ve met her. She’s the bride’s cousin. Name’s Lily Brooks, I think.”
“Lily,” William echoed. “Excuse me, I’ll be back.”
“And that’s her fiancé she’s talking to!” Tom called after him.
Even as she returned to her conversation, Lily detected William’s approach out of the corner of her eye.
“Hello,” he said, holding his hand out to shake that of Lily’s startled companion. “Hate to break in, but the bride apparently needs her cousin for a moment.” He took Lily’s elbow and drew her away. She was just two inches shorter than he. He’d hardly even need to bend to kiss her.
“Who are you?” she asked, an echo of William.
He felt it, and pulled her closer. “William Adams.”
Her eyes were the kind that changed with the light. Just now they were green. There was amusement in them, and not a little alarm. “And you’re a friend of the groom?” she asked.
“Classmate.”
At this moment, a tow-headed child came careening up to her and, wailing, buried his face in her skirt. Lily bent down and cupped his face. “What is it, Georgie?” she asked. She smoothed his hair with tender fingers.
The boy sobbed out a tale of injustice that was incomprehensible to William for the heart-rending sobs that punctuated it. Lily listened attentively, then wiped Georgie’s cheeks with the hem of her skirt. “Do you see that man dressed like a penguin?”
Georgie sniffed, nodding.
“He has ice cream for the children on that tray,” she said. “I think you’d better have some, don’t you?”
Thinking it over, the child nodded again, no sniffling this time. “Will the penguin give it to me?” he asked.
“All you have to do is ask him.” Lily kissed the little boy on both damp cheeks, and off he scampered. She straightened up and turned her attention back to William, who was wondering how many children he would have with this girl. He gazed at her in a kind of rapture.
“Where’s my cousin?” she asked.
William shook himself out of his trance. “Are you really going to marry that fellow?” he asked.
“Vanessa didn’t ask for me, did she?” Lily said. She was wrapped in light, the air around her pulsing with colors, with the sounds of birds. He could sense the grass growing up around their feet, smell its sweet aroma. They were at the center of the universe. He could feel the sun’s eye on them.
Just then, Lily’s aggrieved fiancé rushed up, having perhaps made the same deduction as Lily. William, adrift on memories so many years later, could not put a face to him. Did Lily ever think about him, ever imagine what her life might have been like if she had married him, especially now, with William turning out to be such a disappointment?
The ceremony had transpired on the lawn. William’s arm, where Lily’s body had warmed it, continued to vibrate long afterwards like the surface of a struck gong. Unable to spot her in the seated crowd, he assumed she was behind him somewhere. Then, as the minister began his tribute to the happy couple, William began to sneeze—not decorous little ah-choos, either, but a spectacular series of eruptions. Suddenly there was an echo of daintier sneezes—five of them in quick succession—and William turned through poring eyes to see Lily pushing past her young man with a handkerchief to her face. The minister had halted in his tracks. The spines of the bride and groom had stiffened. William escaped his aisle seat to follow the stricken girl. He caught up with her at the parking lot, where she was leaning against a car. She sneezed again, as if in greeting, and he answered with a paroxysm of his own.
“The peonies …” she stammered. “I should have stayed out of the garden. I know better ….” She gazed at William over the handkerchief and began to laugh. “Oh, dear, this is awful!” she cried, and then he started in. Soon they were both red-faced and weeping from a combination of hilarity and pollen.
It was the first time he heard her laugh. William was to learn that Lily’s laughter could breach her remarkable composure, a phenomenon that only happened otherwise when he made love to her. Those tantalizing glimpses into her unguarded self undid him totally, captivating him even all of these years later.
William took her hand as they searched for his car. They located it, finally, and got in.
“I thought the parking lot would be safe,” she protested, wiping her teary eyes with a handkerchief.
“It’s this breeze,” William said, “strewing the pollen everywhere.”
They were quiet for a moment, recovering.
“This is fate, you know,” he said.
She smiled. “So romantic.”
“You’re not going to marry that fellow, are you?” he asked again.
“He’s telling everyone I am.”
“But will you?”
“I haven’t promised. But I might.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s a very decent man, and I like him immensely.”
“That’s not reason enough,
” William said.
“Well, why does any couple get married?”
He took her hand. “Because they can’t bear being apart.”
“Isn’t that a bit extreme?”
“No,” he said.
“Well, I’m fond of him.”
“Oh, Lily Brooks.”
“Oh, Will Adams,” she said, smiling.
The way she had shaved his name down to its diminutive made his stomach do a flip. He loved everything about this girl.
“He should take your breath away,” William told her. “I can do that.”
“I suggest that might be the allergies.”
He leaned in then and kissed her. He felt her body relax against his for a second before she pulled away, staring at him with eyes wide. “That was wicked of me,” she said. He reached for her again but she held him off. “You’re a dangerous man,” she said.
“Better than boring.”
She smoothed her dress, calming the wrinkles as if the gesture might be enough to salvage her self-possession. “That’s unkind.”
“Careful is no way to live.”
“It’s one way to live.”
“It’s why you have to marry me.”
His campaign began there. Lily resisted at first, if only out of compassion for her earlier suitor, but William was relentless. He believed that he could win her, and so he did. William was competitive, always had been, in the futile pursuit of his father’s approval. He’d won the golf tournaments at the club. He excelled in tennis. His grades were good. Nothing William ever did, however, had earned more than a grudging grunt from his father. Until Lily. After William brought her home to meet his parents, Harris Adams began to regard his son with curiosity, if not wonder, perhaps even something close to respect. Before long it became clear to William that the old man was more than half in love with her himself.
