The Geometry of Sisters

by Luanne Rice

  And it was wonderful. J.D. loved life, was afraid of nothing. She felt the smallest ripple of fear, but it was too late: she was in love with him.

  Their eyes met and it seemed that he vaulted up to her. He came straight at her, smiling and with the happiest eyes she'd ever seen; she'd thought his joy came from the panorama all around them, Narragansett Bay's west passage extending out past Beavertail Light all the way to the black Atlantic Ocean, but no. It focused in on her, and he put his arms around her, and his mouth hot on hers, he kissed her hard and deep.

  He took off his shirt, laid it down on the hard grate, eased her gently down. They lay side by side, stroking each other's faces, gazing into each other's eyes. Words, endless conversation, always such an important part of every date with Andy, played no role. The only sounds came from the traffic speeding overhead—so close it sounded like the trucks might crash through the roadbed and crush them—and warm wind whistling, slicing through the bridge's suspension cables.

  He eased her shirt over her head; she wriggled, helping him push her shorts down. They fumbled over his belt buckle, the snap and zipper of his jeans. They never stopped kissing, they didn't close their eyes. Was this what he'd meant by “everything”? Because how could there be anything else?

  His mouth scalding hers, their naked bodies pressing together, the feeling of hanging in midair. The catwalk was a cradle; they had left the world. There was no such thing as time. The earth was orbiting the sun, and they were somewhere above the planet, lost to schedules, obligations, promises, plans. This was the moment they conceived their daughter.

  “What's that?” she asked when they broke apart at last, pointing at the distant white beacon that swept the water.

  “The lighthouse at Beavertail.”

  “Can we go there next?”

  He laughed, holding her tight. “I'd love that,” he said. “You want to climb it with me?”

  “Yes,” she said, stroking his face. “I want to do everything with you.”

  Maura would never let him go, and she'd never belong to Andy again. That was the new truth, and it nearly swept her over the side—as if a great tidal wave had reared out of the sea, come charging into the bay, to the tall bridge, to claim her. She felt the catwalk give way. And suddenly vertigo kicked in. The world and bridge were tilting.

  “I'm scared,” she said, clutching J.D.

  “You're okay,” he said, stroking her hair back from her eyes, understanding instantly. “I have you.”

  “How will we get down?” she asked, breathless.

  “The same way we got up.”

  But it didn't work that way. Maura was paralyzed. She couldn't let go of him—she was like a tree monkey clinging to its parent. The wind picked up; it was going to blow them off the catwalk like dry leaves. Was the bridge shaking? Yes, it was rocking slightly.

  The world below whirled as Maura swayed. She thought of Andy proposing on one knee, on the riverbank by the covered bridge. She felt a sob in her throat—but not of guilt, more of sorrow.

  “Okay Maura.” J.D. said her name so gently as he dressed her, helped her into her clothes one leg at a time, even as she clenched her arms around his neck, unable to let go even for a second. “That's it,” he said. “There, now your arms, put on your shirt … okay, one arm at a time. I have you.”

  “No,” she kept saying, her eyes squeezed shut. “No …”

  But “Yes,” he said. “Yes. We're going to climb down now. You have to do it yourself, I can't carry you. But I'm with you, Maura. I'll be right with you, nothing will make me leave you.”

  An eighteen-wheeler rumbled overhead, and she started to cry. She felt stupid, humiliated, terrified. She'd never let anyone see her like this before. She'd always been so competent, brave in the things she tried. In high school, she and a bunch of friends had gone kayaking in Vermont, down Mad River. They'd hit white-water rapids, a terrifying run.

  Her heart had been smashing through her rib cage, but she hadn't shown her fear—she hadn't made a sound, just concentrated on staying in the boat, upright and alive, and when she stepped out onto dry land, knees buckling, she said she'd had the time of her life.

  And here she was on the Jamestown Bridge, all her bravery gone. She might have expected a daredevil like J.D. to laugh or tease her, but he did the opposite. He became even gentler, softer, stroking her arms, reminding her of how strong she was, how she'd hauled herself all the way to the top.

  “Going down will be so much easier,” he said. “We'll get closer to solid ground with every step. Don't look down… just look out across the water. See how beautiful it all is. It's there for you, Maura. I wanted to show you….”

  She forced herself to try. Her hands were glued to the ladder. He went first and kept talking to her, saying, “Move one hand, there you go. Now the other. Your left foot, down one step. Now your right. That's it, Maura… you're doing great.”

  “I can't,” she said, frozen about twenty-five feet down from the top.

  “You can,” he said. “And you are. We're a quarter of the way there. Just keep going, and we'll be on the ground in five minutes.”

  She grabbed onto that—five minutes, a quarter of the way there. One step at a time, then two, then three. She suddenly knew she wouldn't be climbing the lighthouse, ever. This had been it, their moment above the earth. J.D. was right below her.

  She had never been so attracted, and she'd never been so scared. She would return to this moment over and over, the rest of her life. Balanced on a rusty ladder, the earth tilting below. She and J.D. had just become part of each other, and that would never change.

  Andy was peace and the river; J.D. was danger and the sea. But love isn't one thing or the other. Love is all of it. Weights and measures: too much of this, not enough of that. Maura's heart kept track. No matter how hard she tried to live in Andy's world, the gentle life he'd made for her and their children, she'd never been able to give up J.D. He'd been with her all along.

  Stephen had walked over to a stone bench overlooking the half-moon bay that reached from Newport across to Middletown, the mouth of the Sakonnet River. Follow that river up, and there was Katharine's saltwater farm.

  “You can't go back to Ohio. There's another reason you have to stay,” Stephen said.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Look,” he said, reaching into his book bag. She stared at a sheet of paper covered with Beck's handwriting.

  “It's her homework for my class,” he said.

  She stared at the “A” in red at the top, along with the words Congratulations, Beck. You are a natural mathematician.

  The surface was covered with tiny, spidery notations, formulas, and diagrams of triangles, rectangles, rhomboids, and, finally, a circle.

  “This was a simple geometry assignment,” he said. “She's taken it almost to the realm of calculus….”

  “Did you teach her?”

  “I've been working with Lucy for a long time. She really wants to do proofs working toward infinity, ‘telling a story’ behind the numbers and equations. Lucy brought Beck into it—I never expected her to pick it up so quickly.” He paused, glancing down at the page. “Her work is amazing. She's got a tremendous aptitude. I'd like her to enter a math competition.”

  “What sort of competition?”

  “The Math Society. She'll go to Providence, compete with kids from private schools all over New England. Whoever wins that round goes to Boston for the nationals. Ten problems each. The students are judged on speed, precision, and style.”

  “Math, style?”

  He laughed. “You'd be surprised. It's like writing… you encourage the students to go as deep as they can, say as much as they can, in as few words as possible. It's the same in math. Occam's razor—cut away what isn't needed and get to the heart of the problem. Beck has natural instinct.” He paused. “She's a prodigy, if not a genius.”

  “I knew she was good, but…” Maura said.

  “She has a rare talen
t,” he said. “She's fearless—doesn't let her thoughts get in the way. It's as if there's a dialogue between her conscious and unconscious, and it gets expressed in math.”

  She closed her eyes. Beck was Andy's child. If she had stayed here with J.D., she wouldn't have had Travis and Beck. She remembered the evening Andy had shown up in Newport at Katharine's apartment. And she hadn't been there.

  Katharine had called her at the warehouse, told her to get home right away. J.D. had had to drive her on his motorcycle. At first he'd refused, said he'd never take her to him. She'd run out to the street, started on her own. Heard the motorcycle start, and J.D. picked her up without a word. She'd had him drop her at the corner.

  Andy was sitting in an armchair, staring at her as she walked through the door.

  “Where were you?” he asked.

  “Down by the wharf,” she said. Her heart was pounding and she felt flushed with guilt. “I'm surprised to see you.”

  “Yeah, I thought you would be,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Are you seeing someone else?”

  Maura just looked at him. Even now she didn't know what she would have said. Sometimes she believed she'd been ready to tell him the truth. But other times she wasn't so sure.

  “Don't answer,” Andy said. “I want you to listen to me instead.”

  “Okay” she said. She glanced around for her sister—Katharine would give her moral support, help her ease Andy through what she had to say when he finished.

  “Katharine left,” he said. “I asked her to.”

  She felt stunned—it was very unlike Andy to ask someone to leave her own house. And not like Katharine to oblige. Slowly she sat down on the sofa, across from him.

  “I know you had to come east,” he said. “For the summer. You wanted to spend it with your sister, and I tried to understand. Even though it was our graduation summer, and we're engaged, and we have to start real life soon …”

  Hearing “real life,” thinking of J.D. and what he'd said about his parents' life, Maura looked down.

  “I told myself that's all it would be,” Andy said. “A summer with your sister.”

  “That's why I came,” she said.

  “Listen to me!” he said, his voice and eyes so sharp she could hardly believe it was Andy. “Don't lie, Maura. You don't have to, okay? I've heard it in your voice these last few weeks. Every night you sound a little farther away. It's a summer romance—I can live with that….”

  “Andy…”

  He held up his hand. “Please, Maura. Whatever it is, let it stay here in Newport. I want you to come home with me right now.”

  “Right now?” she asked. Panic rose in her chest. Her mouth felt dry. She looked at Andy, cleared her throat to tell him about J.D.

  “I thought,” he said, “we were going to be married.”

  And then he started to cry. He sat in the armchair, buried his face in his hands, sobbing. She saw his shoulders shake, heard him try to hold the sounds inside, but he couldn't. And in that moment, the summer ended.

  “I know you, Maura,” he said when he could speak. “I know how to take care of you, make you happy. This is for the long term. It's the real thing, real life.”

  “Andy …”

  “Maybe you think you're in love. But what we have is real. I'm talking about the rest of our lives. Can you look at me and tell me you can have that with someone else?”

  Maura stared at him. If she opened her mouth, she would say “Yes.” She wanted J.D., she wanted the summer to last forever. But deep inside, she had the wounds of being her father's daughter. She'd always dreamed of a safe life, her own Mr. Sisson. She knew that no matter how much she loved J.D., she'd always be slightly scared with him.

  She wrote Katharine a note, and she left with Andy.

  Without saying goodbye to J.D. She'd written him a letter on the way—from the motel where she and Andy stopped, somewhere in Pennsylvania, just across the Delaware River. The first draft tore her apart; she'd said, I love you. The second draft had been shorter, measured, logical. This is better for everyone. I am sorry for everything. Please know what everything meant to me, but I have to leave.

  “Beck is very gifted,” Stephen said now, breaking into her thoughts.

  “She's made incredible leaps this year,” Maura said.

  “She has a friend,” Stephen said. “Lucy. They encourage and drive each other to new heights, to discover their limits and then push beyond. With Beck, ‘beyond’ is exciting indeed.”

  “It is. Thank you. Her father would be proud.”

  “It's all her. All Beck. So, Providence for the competition?”

  “Yes,” Maura said.

  “And you'll stay in Rhode Island and not move back to Ohio?” “We'll stay” Maura said quietly.

  J.D. finished his swim, and got dressed to meet Angus for their road trip. He gazed out the pool room's tall windows, watched Maura talking to Stephen. The reality of having her at the school, just down the street: she might as well be in Siberia. He couldn't go to her, and she wouldn't come to him.

  His bike sat under a cover, somewhere in the back of the garage. BMW R90S, a seriously beautiful and classic motorcycle. He'd kept it perfectly maintained and garaged; the only time he'd ever beat it was the time he drove from Newport to Columbus and back, and the bike was fine, it was J.D. who got wrecked.

  Not being able to ride, it still got to him sometimes. Now was one of those times. He wished he could run downstairs, take the stairs, not the elevator, jump on the bike, and go searching the streets himself for Carrie.

  There had been too many dramatic moments in their lives— their love, their breakup, his accident. Up the ladder to the bridge, that was one. And the end of it all, when she left and he followed, that was another. The yelling, the crying, speeding close to one hundred miles per hour all the way back home.

  But what he remembered most about that summer was how quiet it was. Little things. The morning he gave her a peach. He rode out to the farm stand in Middletown, picked out the best one he could find, brought it back for her. Juice dripped down her chin as she ate it. He wiped it off with a napkin. She just looked at him. Then she handed it to him, but he wanted her to have it all.

  On the motorcycle, riding along Ocean Drive. The sun down. No traffic at all. Sea breeze blowing. Swinging around Breton Point, leaning into the road, he felt her cheek on his back against his shoulder blade. She'd turned her head to gaze out at the Atlantic Ocean, where only the waves' white edges were visible, one after the other. But she stared anyway, as if she could see more than waves.

  He had never stopped missing the way he and Maura had been, their small moments. Not the big ones. Climbing the bridge, that had been dumb. She could have gotten hurt—look what had happened to him. He'd been young, but old enough to have outgrown wanting to show off for her. So why had he made such a grand gesture?

  The lighthouse. Desperate and stupid.

  Just such a ridiculous thing to do. And what if it had somehow contributed to what happened to Andy and Carrie? What if it had? The fact that Andy had drowned practically at its foot, certainly within sight—it seemed like an omen, a punishment.

  He had hated Andy for taking her away. And, yes, there'd been times, many times, he'd hated Maura for letting him. She hadn't even said goodbye. She'd just left. And taken their daughter with her.

  He'd gotten the letter three days later, postmarked East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. He hadn't even had to read it: she was gone. That's all the message he needed.

  But it never really sank in. He never stopped hoping she'd change her mind and return to him. Seeing her in Ohio, knowing she was having a baby, seeing the love and fear in her eyes. That's why he'd built the lighthouse.

  That's all he could think of now, up on the fourth floor, looking out at Maura and Stephen as they stood up, said goodbye, went their separate ways. He'd wanted to tell her. He'd wanted Maura to know that he'd never stopped thin
king of her.

  He never could. And the best way he knew to show it was to keep looking for Carrie. Angus was waiting downstairs, ready to drive him to Providence in the van.

  My mom seems proud. The math stuff.

  She's been sad and disconnected lately. She's been here, but not here. And I've been the same way. Here but not here. One of the things I love about geometry is how easy it is to disappear. I pick up my pencil, and I'm gone into the world of ghosts—ghost effects in the problems I'm trying to solve, spirits all around me.

  Mom came in, walked straight into my room to hug me. I was sitting on my bed with Grisby and Desdemona, working on infinities, and she leaned across the cats and my paper, wrapped me in her arms. My mother smells like my mother. It's hard to explain, a combination of tea, pencils, and shampoo that smells like the color blue. The scent always makes me feel that life is beautiful, that we're all together: Mom, Travis, and I, and, yes, Dad and Carrie.

  She sat on the bed beside me, asked to see my work. I handed her the paper. Lots of notations. My handwriting has become very neat. That was the first thing she commented on. We laughed; I used to scribble. She asked what I was doing.

  Well, hard to explain, to put into words. I'm not Mr. Campbell, who makes math seem like poetry. His notations are beautiful; I feel as if I could climb aboard them and fly. But all I could do was show my mother my finite quantities, my use of an infinitesimal. In a way it's more like an art project than homework: you have to see it and feel it. At least I do. That's how I make myself understand.

  So Mom stared at the parabola I'd drawn, and how the straight line cut the curve. I tried to show her the tangent, and the abscissa, and the ordinates, but I had to remember she isn't speaking this language. I explained as much as I could, and she sighed in the way she used to when Carrie would show her a new picture. So I knew she was content, because she knew I was doing what made me happy.

  “You're going to Providence,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I'm so thrilled,” she said. “You can't imagine.”

  “Well, it's only regionals. I don't know if I'll win and go on to Boston,” I said.