When my father waved me back to the house, I stepped on an antique silver coin. Felt it beneath my bare foot. In the days that followed, I found that if you looked down from my window, there would often be glimmers of silvery light, sudden flashes that ricocheted through the yard on sunny days. The coins that had fallen out of my mother’s pockets on the way to the lake had become embedded in the grass, and on those bright days I could stare at the flashes and remember her a little, remember her in a way that is entirely lost to me now. When I told my father about them, he had a bulldozer brought in and tore up the yard, filling it with sand. I would never see those coins again, never grab the tail end of one of those silver streaks and follow it to a place in my mind where maybe I could see her again. When I told L I didn’t have a mother or a father, it was another false thing that was truer than a true thing. But she didn’t see it that way, and maybe she was right not to. Maybe everything in life was part true and part false, but your job was to stand on the true side and deal with the rest, not try and make believe anything was all one way or all another. Even my father, for all his bullshit, was a man who, when he proposed to my mother, filled a yard with hundreds of monarch butterflies he had gotten from the Meadowlands. She adored monarchs, so he kayaked out into the swamp, painstakingly caught each one, carried them to a van, and transported them a hundred miles, the butterflies wildly fluttering around him as he drove the turnpike, the future wide-open and golden in front of him. The man with the bulldozer was also the man with the butterflies, and there’s no sense in acting like one of those things is truer than the other. It all just comes down to what stories serve your story. Because we must forever play the hero, everyone else gets the part we assign them. Dominic Parisi played his part, and now he’s gone, with all the others.
When I stood up, I could see that everyone had returned to their tiny homes save for a family who stood in the dirt and looked up at a bright, lone light. I thought maybe it was a star, but then I could see it inching almost imperceptibly west. It could have been Renée in the plane. It could have been anything at all. And maybe the not knowing was what captivated them. I watched them stare into the sky. There was a shirtless boy, no older than five or six, and a wary man my age, and an old woman, hair like a gray flame. I approached them. They looked at me curiously as I handed the man the duffel bag. I glanced at the old woman and the boy, lightly touched his shoulder with my own slick hand, and walked away. I heard the zipper open moments after I turned. Felt their eyes on me as I departed. They were no doubt wondering what was happening. Was this some kind of prank? Was it real? And if it was real, why was it happening? What kind of a man would do such a thing? What circumstances led him here?
“Who are you?” I heard the man ask as I vanished into the night. “Hey, man. Who are you?”
I walked through the neighborhood and off toward the great unknown, his question trailing me like a ghost. Who was I? Who am I? Am I the Pretender? Don Quixote? The Somerton Man? Am I Elvis’s dead twin? Raoul McFarland? Or am I simply, in the end, the Man Who Never Was?
I looked up at the westbound light, stopped in my tracks, and for some reason thought of Laika the Space Dog. Born a stray on the frigid streets of Moscow, brought in to the warmth of the science center, surrounded by attention she could only have taken as love. I thought of her hopeful new chapter in a home with children, with toys on the floor, and the smell of bread, and the touch of small hands. All the warmth of belonging. How it must have seemed that the promise of this life had been fulfilled. How it must have seemed that all the hardships were the price you paid for the better things. But it was not to be. Laika was taken from the home in the morning. Led outside under snowy skies. She was driven back to the science center, strapped down, and shot out into the universe in a steel capsule, spinning slowly away from the home she thought she’d found. Untethered entirely from the known world, she must have looked into the deep and endless darkness and wondered what was happening to her. Why am I weightless and alone? she must have thought. Why have I been forsaken?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE FIRST DRAFT OF THIS book was written in a series of spiral notebooks nearly fourteen years ago in the Cabbagetown neighborhood of Atlanta, fueled entirely by heartbreak, two-liter bottles of Georgia water (Coca-Cola), and two-for-one 79-cent hot dogs from a gas station long since razed. It was a terrible, lonely, desperate time. Naturally, I miss it sometimes.
Years before, when I was a kid, I used to ride the Metro North from Connecticut to New York just to read beneath the great dome at Grand Central Terminal. I’d sit there for hours and disappear into weathered paperbacks, fifty-six miles and entire worlds away from home. It was there that I discovered that someone you had never met—a beautiful stranger, perhaps no longer even of this earth—could make you feel understood somehow. That is the great relief of art, and to me, one of the great wonders of life. I had to be a writer.
This, of course, is easier desired than attained, hence spending nearly fourteen years on a novel that most of my heroes probably could have written in six months with half the soda and none of the hot dogs. But that’s all right. You start out wanting to be the best, sure, but in the end you come to find that merely belonging is not an insignificant reward. It’s a club I doubted I’d ever belong to, to be honest, but I worked the fields, kept the property up, and toiled by night, and when no one was looking, I snuck in and put this baby on the shelf with all the others.
It’s been a long time, and some of the people who provided guest rooms and stocked fridges and all manner of support are lost to me now, but it’s lovely to remember them and their decency and generosity. Virginia and Mike King. Betty and Jim Sullivan. Marci Lackey. Courtney and Gail Watkins. Thank you. I’m reminded suddenly of my old Decatur roommate Matt Perry, hopping trains in the Emory switchyard, trying to be Jack and Neal in the Kerouac phase all we wannabe writers go through, and of my girlfriend in those lean but enthusiastic years, Tracy Ruffin, and her wonderful mother, Beryl, lost to an aneurysm so young.
I’m also forever grateful to Jeff and Linda Campbell and their glorious daughter Tracy. I’d also like to thank the old Point Pleasant crew, Jose Romano, George Neal, and their better halves, the Wilczynski sisters, Amy and Jill, who encouraged me while writing the novel before this one that did not end up on a shelf in the club but died a merciful and just death in the low hum of a high-end shredder.
Naturally there has to be a girl involved, so I must thank my old beloved, Rachael Keller, who inspired that original frenzy of work in the fall of 2003, and also a gentleman’s bow to her father, Jack, and also to brother Rick, who read early chapters a lifetime ago and was a true supporter. I’d also like to thank Bret Bader, Jim Donnelly, David King, Colleen McDonnell, Jennifer Zinner, and all the wonderful friends I grew up with in Fairfield, Connecticut. And much love to some of the fine friends who have made life in Los Angeles and beyond something far greater than it would have been without them: Bryan Callen. Dov Davidoff. Laura Chinn. Carin Besser and Matt Berninger. Fernando Chien. Merritt Lear. Margarita Levieva. Timmy Riley. Brantley Gutierrez. Gio Cianci. Boyd Holbrook. DJ Joo. Sam Sheridan and Patty Jenkins. Jimmy Burke. Catherine Hardwicke. Lizzie Olsen. Rachel Nichols. Joel Edgerton. Saori Wall. Samantha Ellison. Carolina Bartczak. Jade Bartlett. Elyssa Samsel. The great Renee Zellweger. And my Cali family, mighty Gavin O’Connor and Brooke Burns.
And to the SWBG team, who believed in me more than I believed in myself: the Gotham Group’s indomitable Ellen Goldsmith-Vein and Lindsay Williams were champions from the start, and I never would have slipped into this club without them. Thank you, guys. They led me to Sterling Lord’s Doug Stewart, all class, loyalty, and faith, and ultimately to Simon & Schuster, where I was fortunate enough to have Jofie Ferrari-Adler be my editor, someone who shared my dear mentor Pam Durban’s belief that no work was finished until “you exhausted the story’s potential for meaning” (she talks like that because she can). This novel would have been inferior without Jofie�
��s guidance and without the faith of the team above. Thanks also to Jofie’s many colleagues at Simon & Schuster, especially Jonathan Karp, Marysue Rucci, Richard Rhorer, Julianna Haubner, Sarah Reidy, Stephen Bedford, Alison Forner, Kristen Lemire, Amanda Mulholland, Beth Maglione, Benjamin Holmes, and Carly Loman, as well as copyeditor Beth Thomas and cover designer Lynn Buckley.
Finally, I want to thank my family, who graciously allowed me to drift thousands of miles away to follow the dreams of a boy on a commuter train. This book is for my intrepid mother, Marina, who shares my lifelong love of movies; my fiercely loyal brother, Nick; my incredible gentleman-nephews Dylan and Zac (who is already a better writer than I am); Ed and Barbara Coe; my lit-loving sister-in-law, Mary; the greatest brother-in-law a guy could ever hope for, David Coe, whose own talent is matched only by his decency; and the rock of our little tribe, my dear, dear sister, Staci, who has my eternal love, gratitude, and respect.
Oh. And to Bruce Springsteen and Paul Newman. Just because.
Anthony Tambakis
Venice, 2017
In loving memory of Anastasiya Povolotska.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© BRANTLEY GUTIERREZ
Anthony Tambakis is the recipient of the Paul Bowles Fellowship for fiction writing and a renowned screenwriter. He is currently adapting the 1961 novel and film The Hustler for Broadway and penning the screenplay for Swimming with Bridgeport Girls, his first novel. A native of Fairfield, Connecticut, Tambakis lives in Venice, California.
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition July 2017
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Interior design by Carly Loman
Jacket design and Illustration by Lynn Buckley
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-4516-8491-9
ISBN 978-1-4516-8492-6 (ebook)
“Intro to The River” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1986 Bruce Springsteen. Reprinted by permission. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.
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