“Your parents somehow managed with four,” said Melissa. “I have no idea how they did it.”
Maybe their parents were an aberration, their love and their success as parents with Danny. Maybe the real truth was children ruin things. Maybe it was the three of them that made their parents that way. But then what was Danny? How could three destroy something that a fourth could save?
“Well, they did it in shifts,” said Libby. “It’s not like they had all four of us in the house at once. Besides vacations, Tom and Danny have never lived in the same house at the same time.” Maybe that’s the trick, not too many. Maybe it’s all mathematical, Gwen thought, maybe prime numbers are the key to success. Families of three or one. But not two, not her alone with a baby; she didn’t want to burn the kid’s dinner while she dreamed about glory days smoking spliffs.
“Too bad, both those boys could’ve used it,” said Melissa.
The boiling water rattled the lid on the steamer; Gwen turned the heat down a touch, looked at the clock.
“They would’ve killed each other,” said Gwen.
“You’re the only person Tom can stand to live with,” said Libby. “I couldn’t live with anyone, except for maybe Gwen.”
Gwen ran the eggbeater, and Libby sat at the table with Melissa. When the noise stopped, Melissa said, “Tom’s definitely better than some of the roommates I’ve had; at least I don’t have to put my name on my food. And I’m certainly not his idea of the perfect roommate. I stay up too late. I load the dishwasher wrong. I have to sleep with the room pitch black, and when he gets up to pee he trips over the laundry basket because he can’t see. He says I’m a safety hazard. Half the time, he sleeps in the guest room because he’s afraid he’ll break his neck.”
“Get him a flashlight and tell him to shut the hell up,” said Gwen. Living with her ex-husband, Reed, Gwen had felt like she woke up in a mausoleum. Was this where Melissa was, entombed within the blue walls of their house? Was she living on wine offerings and dead leaves? Tom must know better, Gwen thought, than to leave his wife alone in an empty bed.
The unplugged beater in her hand like a gun, Gwen walked through the china closet to the dining room and called toward the open porch door for Danny.
“Dan, table, please.”
She was tempted to confront Tom right here and now: “You aren’t fucking this up, are you?”
Through the window she could see her brothers sitting on the porch each reading a book, two sweating cocktails on the table between them. She imagined them as old men living together in some dust-filled apartment. Maybe they wouldn’t be so bad together. They seemed to know how to coexist. But she and Libby and Danny had great plans to retire to Florida and glue tiny shells on lamps that they’d sell on the curb. She waited as Danny slowly turned down the corner of a page, read a last sentence, and put the book down, before going back into the kitchen.
Melissa was slicing strawberries; Libby was peering into the steamer.
“I think these puppies are done,” Libby said.
Then Melissa gasped, throwing the knife onto the table like it burned her. She gripped her left hand to her chest.
“You okay?” Libby and Gwen said together, moving close to her.
“I can’t—” Melissa shook her head. “Just leave me alone a second.” They stepped back, and the tears came down Melissa’s face and blood came from between her fingers, smearing on her shirt. Air hissed through her teeth as she stood there frozen. Gwen hurried down the back hall and returned with a dusty first-aid kit from the seventies. She opened it, and the plastic hinge broke off. Libby grabbed a roll of paper towels and pulled off a few sheets as Gwen began to unpack the kit onto the table.
“Let’s just see how bad,” said Libby, easing Melissa’s hands away from her chest. Libby covered the bleeding hand with the towels, and Melissa sat down. Libby held Melissa’s hand to her own chest so that Melissa looked as if she were raising her hand to ask a question. Libby is the one who should have a baby, thought Gwen. She has the partner; they have a family to expand. Libby hadn’t been very maternal as a child; she carried her first doll around by the hair. But now Libby was the one who tied shoes and changed diapers and understood the difference between Dora and Diego. Libby is already more of a mother than I am, thought Gwen, no matter what she’s avoiding. Gwen already had her foray into motherhood, giving Danny bottles and baths and suctioning snot out of his nose. How many times in life did you need to do those things? Libby looked at Gwen, eyes wide, prompting.
“Melissa, don’t you wish Libby had brought Patricia?”
Libby rolled her eyes, and Gwen shrugged. If Libby wanted distracting conversation, she couldn’t get choosy.
“I love Patricia,” said Melissa, looking everywhere but at her hand. “I really do. She’s the prettiest woman I have ever seen in real life. You should marry her, Bibs. She obviously makes you happy. Marriage isn’t for everyone; it’s risky, but she brings out the best in you. How many couples can say that?” Melissa looked out the window at the oak tree.
“Maybe I’m just not sure this is my best,” said Libby. She snuck a look at the cut, tilted her head from side to side, an it-could-be-worse tilt.
Holding gauze and tape, Gwen moved to stand next to Libby. She mouthed the word “stitches.” Libby shook her head. Libby rested her head on Gwen’s shoulder for a moment, and Gwen squeezed with her free arm.
Once Melissa’s finger was bandaged and she had been plied with Tylenol and whiskey, Libby doled out the mussels into shallow bowls. Gwen took a baguette from the bread box, a little stale but perfect for soaking up the juice. The cooked mussels sat on the kitchen table, their sharp little beaks open, exhaling steam.
At dinner Tom scootched his chair next to Melissa’s. He opened each shell for her, speared each mussel on a small fork, and handed it to her. She held her bandaged hand on top of her head, like she was keeping a hat from blowing away. Maybe I’m wrong; maybe things aren’t that bad between them.
TWELVE
DANNY
July 7
Danny played Ping-Pong with Gwen in the great room, while Tom stood beneath the balcony on the east wall staring up at the discolored beams. Libby had gone for a walk up the road, to “touch pavement.” Meaning she would go all the way to the paved town road, one mile each way. The rest of them had opted to stay home. Still too early in their trip for earnest exercise, Danny had explained. At least that was what he had meant by, “Hell, no.” Once Libby passed the bend in the road, Danny felt as if they were teenagers left home alone, or when someone leaves you alone in their dorm room. Gwen immediately wanted to play the most cutthroat game of Ping-Pong possible. Tom began inspecting the house. Danny wondered how long Tom would wait to announce to their sisters that he was an academic failure. What was he waiting for? Maybe Tom thought it could all be fixed, that the girls shouldn’t have to worry about Danny’s fuckup. He couldn’t bear them worrying about him anymore anyway. At least Gwen was easy to distract.
Danny sent shot after shot sailing over the table into a new corner or cobweb. The ball skittered under masts that were pushed against the long, low step of the stage. It wasn’t actually a stage, but an alcove with diamond-paned windows just under their parents’ room. Its raised stone floor and lower ceiling set it off from the rest of the great room. The whole space was like the bow cabin in a cruising boat. The cabin that his sisters always shared, while Danny had to sleep in a berth across from the galley, smelling the kerosene and cod all night long. Danny always thought this alcove cast the rest of the house as a great schooner. Each summer they embarked on an epic voyage, a transatlantic crossing, rounding the Golden Horn, skirting the Falklands, the Maldives, the Faroes. When they sat on the porch, he saw them all sitting on the deck of a steamer, or a jammer, depending on the weather.
His next shot sailed over Gwen’s shoulder and bounced up the wood step to the stones of the stage. Gwen bounded after it, and caught the ball in midbounce. She didn’t even ask i
f Danny was ready; in one fluid motion she stepped up to the table and took her serve. He tried to chop the ball, as if instead of a paddle, he wielded a hatchet.
“Dan, quit trying so hard,” said Gwen as she picked up another rogue shot from underneath the child-size pool table. “You’re wearing me out.”
“I’m trying to master backspin. You’ve got to give it some snap, you know?” Danny flicked his paddle forward.
“It might be a more effective strategy for you, if you ever actually hit my side of the table.”
She sent a fast and low serve over the net that just nicked the table, before sailing behind him into the dining room. “Like that,” she said.
Danny had learned Ping-Pong from Gwen, but she had conveniently left out the secret to backspin, which she used against him mercilessly.
“You’re a shark,” Danny said, retrieving the ball for the hundredth time from underneath the dining room table.
“I sleep too much to be a shark. And I believe that was the game point. Tom, you wanna take over?” Gwen held her paddle out toward her older brother.
His back was to her as he looked up to the ceiling. Danny didn’t want to play Tom. He’d rather bounce the ball on his paddle. He knew that was unfair. Tom just approached everything like an assignment, like there was a secret instruction booklet that only he had seen, and it was his responsibility to Do It Right. Danny wondered if Tom’s manual was one large volume divided into different chapters and headings, or if he had many volumes, thousands, like a Time-Life Book collection: How to Tile Your Bathroom or Kitchen; How to Alienate Your Children; How to Belittle Your Brother Under the Guise of “Encouragement”.
“Where’s Melissa, I need a decent opponent.” Gwen said this more to Danny than Tom. Melissa was a shrewd Ping-Pong player. Danny couldn’t deny that.
Tom continued to eye the ceiling.
“Napping,” he said. “She sleeps almost as much as the kids. Teenagers.”
Danny thought it was funny how Tom said that, as if his kids were so old; Buster was only fourteen and Kerry, twelve. She wasn’t even officially a teenager. Really it was Tom who seemed old. Funny that Tom had been Danny’s age when he got married. Danny couldn’t imagine getting married. Danny could barely imagine what tomorrow would look like, maybe toast for breakfast, or cereal from those mini cereal boxes. Danny could commit to cereal, but not the big box, just a mini one.
“See this crack,” said Tom. “It runs all the way across the beam. How it’s widening at the top? That’s bad.”
Gwen went and stood beside Tom. He pointed to the stains that wormed along the plaster and across the beams. Danny paced slowly from the edge of the Ping-Pong table to the short passage that was populated with a slew of slickers and fleeces between the great room and the dining room. He bounced the Ping-Pong ball on his paddle and listened. He felt the house rolling on the waves.
“The place has lasted this long,” Gwen said, and patted Tom’s back. But she stayed there and looked.
“I don’t even know what this would cost to fix.” Tom motioned to a crosspiece on the low ceiling beneath the balcony. “This beam is just cosmetic.” Then he turned around and pointed to the four large beams, two vertical, two horizontal, that ran up the height of the two-story room like masts. “But those are structural.”
From beneath the archway between the great room and the dining room, Danny could see the stain Tom was pointing to. The long yellow plumes spread the length of the vertical beams, and in the center of those plumes, cracks.
“Let’s get someone in here,” said Danny. Engage the pumps, dump the ballast, break out the wax, the duct tape.
He wedged the ball under the paddle on the table and walked over to Gwen and Tom. The three of them stood beneath the center beam, staring straight up. Danny had spent his childhood wishing he could walk on those beams. He thought about cracks in the bones of this house, in the ribs of this room. The balconies around its edge were great arteries, his parents’ bedroom the driving heart.
“The cost would be prohibitive,” said Tom, “replacing the roof, and then the rotten beams.” Tom, so willing to let the place lose gangrenous limbs, to suffocate under its own rot.
“Plus, by now I’m sure Libby is in love with the water stains,” said Gwen. Gwen and Tom snuffled. At least Libby wants to keep the place alive, thought Danny.
Tom left the room and came back with a broom in his hand. He climbed the stairs to the long balcony that ran the length of the room. Holding on to a pillar, he climbed up on the railing.
“I don’t mean to be critical, but whacha doing?” asked Gwen.
In his free hand Tom held the broom, his hand near the bristles.
“Testing,” he said as he stretched the broom up toward the ceiling. “If the leak is squishy that means it’s new, but if it’s dry and crumbly that means it’s old.”
Danny looked over at Gwen. She had told him about the holes she and Libby had found in the roof. He didn’t want to tell Tom another thing.
With the broom handle, Tom clunked and knocked at the portion of the pitched ceiling he could reach, looking like a disgruntled downstairs neighbor.
“Tom, I wouldn’t—” A large flake of plaster dropped to the floor. Tom quickly brought the broom down.
“So what does that tell you?” said Gwen. There was a strange crunching noise. Tom stepped back to the floor from the railing. Another jagged piece of plaster fell, the size of a dinner plate. Danny and Gwen shuffled backward toward the stage. A crack opened in the ceiling, and a continent of plaster lowered at one end like a ramp, showing the lath like bones underneath. Then the continent cracked and fell directly on top of the Ping-Pong table, covering the entire thing. A cloud of dust billowed toward them. Gwen and Danny turned into each other to cover their eyes and mouths.
“Fuck me,” said Gwen. Tom pounded down the stairs.
“You guys okay?” He brushed dust from Gwen’s hair, from Danny’s shoulders.
“How much asbestos do we have in our lungs now?” said Danny.
“Don’t worry, there is nothing fireproof about this place,” said Tom.
From the stage the three of them looked up at the ceiling. Danny could see small lines of light around the lath. The house was shedding its skin from the inside out. Dust was settling over everything, giving the animal heads—bucks, moose, a boar, a fox—a gray tinge, aging them.
“We need to clean this up before Libby gets back,” said Tom. “This will be too much for her.”
“I told her we needed umbrellas,” said Gwen.
Tom ran up the stairs and came back with the broom.
“Could we patch this up and paint over some of that?” Danny waved his hand toward the other water stains. The three of them moved to the bottom of the stairs.
“It needs a bit more than a patch, Dan,” said Tom.
“What’s your real estate golem going to think about this?” said Danny.
“One disaster at a time, Dan.” Tom looked up. “Why Scarlet didn’t do anything about this, I’ll never know.”
“She didn’t have the B.O.B. here to motivate her,” said Gwen. Three years without their father had made Scarlet reluctant to take on much.
Danny thought Tom wanted the place to be a mess, an unsalvageable mess. He wanted it to be the fucking Titanic. Maybe Tom wanted them all to be a mess so that he could swoop in and save them, or at least look that much better standing next to his siblings at funerals, uncles and cousins saying, “You’ve turned out well.”
Gwen had turned out as they expected; Libby too; and Danny, they all seemed to just forget he existed, or that he ever grew past the age of four. “You can’t possibly be in college,” they had said. Funny, they were half right.
“Bibs won’t want a quick fix,” said Gwen, sitting on the dust-covered stairs. “She’ll want a full restoration, a historic preservation, make it the way it was when we were kids. I’m sure if she could, she’d put wallpaper back up in every bedroom.”
<
br /> Danny stood at the bottom of the stairs. Does this make Tom want to sell it more or less? thought Danny.
“Only Bibs’s room ever had wallpaper,” Tom corrected her. “The rest were always painted.”
“No, the nursery had that diamond pattern of buttercups. You don’t remember that?” Tom stood in front of them, absently sweeping dust into a small pile, creating a little clean patch.
“You’re confusing this place with Archer Avenue; that place was covered in wallpaper.”
“You just forget because you moved out of the nursery first.”
“Maybe it’s just ’cause he’s old.” Danny.
Gwen shook her head sadly, whispered, “Early onset.”
“You two are the ones killing brain cells all the time.” Tom put his fist to his mouth and made a series of sucking, slurping noises.
“Have you ever used a bong?” said Danny.
“There’s proof,” said Gwen. “Even Scarlet and Dad’s room had wallpaper; you can still see it in the closet.”
Tom turned and they all looked up at the window of their parents’ bedroom, which opened into the great room above the stage. Danny loved that window. He’d always thought that the slim diagonal panes added to the whole Heidi’s-grandpa’s-house look. One pane was cracked. Their mother had been a Ping-Pong wizard, and in a victorious frenzy she had sent a ball flying up into that window. No one had ever mentioned repairing it. Just like no one mentioned checking the closet for wallpaper. Danny had no intention of going into that room. Even the crack in the glass was too much to look at. He scratched at a fresh blister on his palm, ran the soft tip of his index finger against it. He could think about the blister. He could think about how his skin was just layers of molecules ready to peel away and disappear into the ether.
Gwen came down the stairs, stood just behind Danny, put her arms around him, and rested her chin on his shoulder. She was a good three inches taller than her little brother, and Tom was even taller than she was, both of them giants like their father. At twenty-one Danny still felt like the baby. He would never outgrow them. Even his license still had the great red mark on it, “UNDER 21.” Though now that wasn’t true. It was his only legal ID, since losing his passport this past spring somewhere between Scranton and Ensenada. And now it lied. As if the world was conspiring against his growing up. Stay small, the world whispered. Even his doctor was in on it. “I’ll give you the quarter of an inch, but you just aren’t five eight.”
North Haven Page 12
