I start to ride again but they’re piling into the limo, one by one. I’m way farther away than I realized and it’s like a horror movie, the way they don’t stop, the way they disappear into the car. I pump, I ride, but I’m not fast enough. The brake lights on the limo light up. Red. A plume of smoke shoots out of the exhaust pipe. It’s no use. I slow down and jump off the bike. All the buttons on my shirt are popped. I look like a nutcase.
The limo rounds the corner. There’s always more time until there isn’t. And it reminds me of the most important text that Chloe sent about tonight: The actual prom is lame but Noelle’s pool parties are fun in this cheesy way. Do you remember playing Marco Polo as a kid? You should come.
So now I will. The ride home is better. I ride shirtless. A couple of random girls whistle at me. I’m handsome. I’m free. I’m loved. I have to be. No girl would text you that much if she didn’t love you. No girl would keep asking you to come over.
And this is a night when girls want big things to happen. I think it’s gonna be good we waited to see each other. And I’m happy I don’t have to be on a loud crowded dance floor pretending to like songs I don’t know. I remember something Roger Blair tweeted. There’s always more time until there isn’t. You are born dying. Science could fix this. But they won’t. #ProgressRequiresPain.
Maybe he’s right. Maybe it’s finally our time.
CHLOE
I have to say, Noelle is right. I did look like a slut in that dress. I hate that word, but there are girls who can wear that dress and project confidence. There are girls who want to show it all off, shake what your mama made. I was only wearing it for the pictures, hoping to get under Jon’s skin, break his heart a little. I wanted him to see me in that dress and fill up with regret. The dress was wearing me, and if he even bothered to look at pictures, he was probably revolted by the desperation of it all. I keep thinking this is it, The End. Next year I’ll be in college painting and Noelle and Marlene will be these people I talk to once in a while. Next year I’ll be myself. No more this, no more hanging out with people I don’t even really like at Forty Steps, no more home. Part of me wants to leave now, pull an Irish goodbye and sneak out of the room, swim down to the drain and squeeze myself in there, out of my life, my life here that didn’t work out, that stupid dress.
I really did think something would happen tonight. I thought Jon would feel something. Feel something and do something. I watched the door all fucking night, waiting for him to charge into the ballroom and profess his love in a John Hughes kind of way. But he didn’t. And that’s that. I think of Carrig flipping off that guy in the parking lot when I broke up with him. I get it.
I did dance with Care once. I tried to be nice. I wished him luck with his sophwhore and he kept his hands on my waist, like an eighth grade boy.
“Can I say something?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“Chloe,” he said. “Just be careful.”
“Be careful how?”
“If a dude likes you,” he said, “he shows up. We’re dudes. We’re simple.”
All at once I could hear what everyone had been whispering. Poor Chloe throwing herself at Jon and he won’t even see her and Carrig’s new girl is actually hotter and he’s happier and poor Chloe’s at home on her computer it’s so sad so sad.
Now prom is over and half the senior class is at Noelle’s. I jump into the pool in my dress, because the dress failed. I failed.
Noelle is barefoot on the deck. “Dude,” she says to me. “One line.”
She’s been all over me to experiment. “Maybe in a bit,” I say.
“You’re an artist, Chloe. At least pop a molly.”
I eat a pot brownie and this night is a nightmare. It’s too crowded in the pool, too many bodies everywhere, people we’re not even friends with, people I never want to see again, people who didn’t show up to the vigils. I am unattracted to everyone on every level. I want Jon. I miss Jon. I was so brave about New York because I thought he’d be there with me. But now it’s hitting me. He’s not going. I’m going alone. I remember what Jon only just told me a few days ago, that a younger banana will suck the life out of an older banana. I painted those bananas. I sent him the picture. He wrote back. I love this so much! That’s not I love you so much!
But how could he love me? I’m not a good person. Once he asked me why I was still friends with Marlene and Noelle. I tried to be cute. They’re assholes but they’re my assholes, you know? He LOLed but I bet he was horrified. That’s a terrible thing to say about your friends. I tried to take it back, but he said my name. Chloe. And then I said his name. Jon. And then there was a beat of silence, the lull. I read so much into that silent bridge between our names. I thought that was love.
Marlene offers me a spiked seltzer. “You okay, Chlo?”
“I’m okay,” I say, popping the can of caustic semi-booze I’ll never drink again after this summer. “I think I had too much of that pot brownie.”
Marlene reaches for my bottle. “Oh no,” she says. “You don’t want to mix. It’s early.”
We both hear it at the same time. Noelle, blowing her whistle. Someone shuts off the music and someone is here: It’s him.
It’s Jon.
The love must be written all over my face because Carrig glares at me. Carrig. I forgot he was here. I’m trying to swim closer but Marlene grabs my arm. “Whoa,” she says. “You look like you’re drowning.”
And at the other end of the pool, on the patio, there they are, Noelle and Jon. She points her fingers at the door. “Out,” she says. “Invite only.”
Jon is so quiet it’s hard to hear him. “I just want to say hi to Chloe,” he says.
I try to yell but the damn brownie won’t let me do much of anything. I can’t lift myself out of the water, I can’t make it to the stairs. Noelle’s hands are on her hips, you can practically see the coke in her eyes. I ask Marlene to go up there but she looks at me like I’m crazy and I get it. Noelle is scary. In third grade we did a dance routine. Noelle was the choreographer. It was terrifying, how she cut us down when we couldn’t get the steps right.
People have their phones out because Jon Bronson is scary too. Basement Boy. The guy from TV. And again she orders him to leave. But he won’t. Like a soldier, she moves her squirt gun into firing position in one swift gesture and Jon cowers. He puts his hands up like some kind of a criminal. People are laughing and I think my heart is breaking. She hates him. Always did. “Take your shorts off,” she says. “Let’s see what you got in there.”
“Noelle, I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ll go.”
She pumps her gun and he flinches, as if it isn’t full of water, harmless water. I don’t even think he can see me and I feel like I can’t see me, can’t feel me. This is how it was when we were kids sometimes, when Carrig would do something cruel to him and I’d freeze up.
And then Jon speaks. “I just wanted to say hi.”
Noelle cackles. “ ‘I just wanted to say hi.’ Are you a fucking dog? Are you a dog?”
“No,” he says. Oh Jon, don’t. Don’t.
There is no stopping Noelle, Noelle and her mouth, her gun. “Let me lay it down for you, Basement Boy. First you ruined her life by being here, acting like she should save your life or some shit. Then you ruin her life by leaving.”
“I was kidnapped,” he says, trembling.
“And then you ruined it again by coming back.”
She takes aim. This time he doesn’t flinch. There is no laughter left in the room. Phones are down. This is a horrible thing to see.
“Chloe doesn’t love you, Jon. She feels sorry for you.” She pumps her gun again. And then just like that, her nose starts bleeding. Her breath comes in a rasp and she drops to the floor. And then we’re all screaming, moving. Someone steps on my hand while I’m trying to hoist myself out of the pool. I can’t
see through the people and finally I get out. I’m running along the edge of the pool and there is shrieking. Someone call 911! I push my way through the crowd.
Jon is gone. The slider is open, he didn’t bother to close it. In the middle of all this chaos, he hurts me again. I get it now. That’s what Jon does. He disappears.
And Noelle never disappears. She’s the most dogged person I’ve ever known. Her favorite movie was Election and she could do anything. When we did that dance routine, she withheld our yogurts until we mastered our moves. Even when she was weak, there was something strong about her where it was hard to believe that she was afraid of anything. Last week, in Forever 21 in the dressing room, she quivered, What if I get to Dartmouth and everyone’s way smarter and just…better? I remember this one time at a spelling bee, this other girl made fun of her accent. I remember how Noelle looked her right in the eye. My voice is my favorite thing about me because it makes it so easy to spot the pretentious snobs like you.
She’s my best friend, my first friend, my flawed friend, and now she’s flat on her back on the pool deck. Dead.
EGGS
Lo has dozens of students. Every semester there are more of them, in and out of our house for dinner, for coffee. There are always a few favorites, and right now it’s all about Marko. He’s not a bad kid. It’s just the little things, the way he tucks his hair behind his ears, repeats everything that comes out of Lo’s mouth, as if he hasn’t already won her over. Lo says I’m too hard on him, on everyone. He’s just trying to commit things to memory, Eggie. A lot of writers do that.
I have kids too, sort of. Mine just don’t come over the house for pasta. They don’t cry on the sofa about their evil boyfriends and their impossible professors. My kids can’t do any of that because my kids are dead.
Lo knocks on the wall downstairs. “Marko’s coming over for dinner.”
“I’ll alert the media.”
She sighs but she’s not mad. Lo doesn’t like to come up here to my unofficial home office. Once upon a time it was our boy Chuckie’s room. But he doesn’t live here anymore. And that isn’t because he’s away at college. He’ll never go to college. He’s eight years old, stricken. Some doctors call it autism, but it’s not the kind you see on TV or at the park. Others tell us it’s a mood disorder, a neurological affliction. The bottom line is that our boy has a mess inside of his mind, a mess no one can figure. He was violent when he was with us, trying to set himself on fire, pulling his own hair, the screaming, the wordless pain in his only language, the shrieking. We were no good for him, couldn’t protect him from his pain. They told us we had no choice. We had to send him to a special residential facility at Bradley Hospital. And there he lives, there he sleeps. It’s not your fault, not anyone’s fault, but that’s easier said than done with this, the kind of nightmare that makes your friends forget to call you back. There is a God because so few kids are sick this way, but there is no God, because this is my kid, our boy, on the other side of town with rubber walls around him.
And so, of course Lo has her kids. Of course I have my kids. You have to survive.
Back before Chuckie was born, we were excited. Lo wanted ducks everywhere in his room and we bought every duck thing we saw, soft, stuffed ducklings, ceramic ducklings we found at an art-for-art’s-sake kind of store out in Newport. And then he was born. Quiet. I prayed for him to be loud, boisterous. It’s too painful for Lo to be up here now, the walls still flush with ducks, ducks we stenciled when we were expectant, when she would come home high on a Hemingway lecture, giddy over Make Way for Ducklings. She had her favorite pages of that book framed, hung. It’s duck soup in here, my lamp is a duck and the bureau meant for his knickers is home base for an army of dusty rubber duckies. Then there’s my desk, a cargo ship in a duck pond. We got it a few years back at a tag sale in Cranston. We love this kind of furniture, the kind that makes you think of Cary Grant and cigarette smoke. Lo squeezed my hand. “You know where this could go.”
“That back corner of the living room?”
She looked down into her purse. “Or maybe Chuckie’s room.”
So we put my desk up here. Now you have somewhere to do your research, Eggie. She rubbed my back.
I should have seen it coming. Lo was no fan of my “research.” I was trying to figure out why our boy was the way he was. The doctors said you can’t go there, but it’s in my nature to solve the puzzle, to go with my gut. I had so many angles. I was investigating the bones of our house, was there something in the walls, something that got into Lo while Chuckie was gestating, some chemical in the insulation? I had calls out to the manufacturers of the milk we had at home, the milk they use at Dunkin’ Donuts. I was online finding other parents. Did they go to Dunkin’ Donuts?
Lo would see me on the floor with my boxes and papers spread out. One day she spotted a bottle of her perfume on the floor. Angel. She grabbed it. “What’s this?” she sniped.
“Lo,” I said. “I’m doing this for us, for everyone. If there’s something in the perfume, well maybe there’s a way to reverse it, help other people from being in this situation.”
She walked away. She’d never yell at me. We’d been to hell together. Our Chuckie never laughed. You could hold him but he wouldn’t hold you, he wouldn’t rest his head on your shoulder, wouldn’t lean into you. You scream less when you’ve been through that kind of thing. And a week after that incident with the perfume, I was up here with my desk.
We have our system worked out. I haven’t even been to see Chuckie since we dropped him off, whereas Lo, she goes all the time. She isn’t a martyr about it, but it’s there, brimming, and once in a while she’ll confront me. You spend all that time up there with your boxes and maybe if you saw him, maybe you’d be able to relax and just be.
My alarm goes off on my phone, which means my tea is ready. I drink Throat Coat, marshmallow root tea. Lo can’t stand it, too sweet and soothing. But I love this stuff. It’s tender. You have to steep it for fifteen minutes, covered. It’s just like they say on the box, gives you this inner layer of protection. Protection from what? Lo always wants to know.
My phone rings, as it often does this time of night. I sit back in my chair and prepare for the deluge. “Maddie,” I say. “How are you doing tonight, my dear?”
Maddie Goleb’s son, Richie, died in his yard. He was only twenty-three, another coronary, one of the four unexplained that’s happened in the past few years. His mother calls me every few months, she gets on a tear, thinks there’s more to the story. Whenever Lo accuses me of being obsessive, I think of Maddie, living proof that time doesn’t heal all wounds, not wholly. I never tell her to stop crying. I just wait.
She blows her nose. “Eggie,” she says. “I had a dream last night.”
My heart sinks for us both. There’s nothing I can do with dreams. I listen as she describes the color of Richie’s shirt, the vein bulging on his forehead. But I’m only humoring her. I’m like those Harvard mucky-mucks who tolerated me when I would go in there with Chuckie’s file, tell them about my theories. The answer was always gonna be no. Thanks for coming by, but your kid’s on the lonely end of the spectrum. And sometimes I wished they had told me to piss off. Sometimes I think I’ll tell Maddie to piss off, maybe that would help her, but not tonight. I take copious notes. I follow up with questions. This time, she dreamed that Richie came home.
“Eggie,” she says. “He didn’t just come home this time. Normally I hug him, you know I hold him, but this time he was cold. He gave me an envelope.”
“What was in it?”
“I tried to hug him but it was like he couldn’t cross over.”
“Did you take the envelope?”
“There he is, my one and only, and he won’t come in and he wants me to open this envelope and I want him to come in and he says the man in the envelope broke his heart.”
I make a note: broke h
is heart.
“He wasn’t seeing anyone at the time, was he, Maddie?”
“No,” she says. “He’d broken up with Brian, Brian who didn’t even go to his funeral.”
Then she’s crying again. It’s more of a spasm, as if there are earthquakes in her heart. And then she’s fine again, back to her dream.
“When I opened the envelope, there was nothing in there.”
I bring things back to the physical reality, I ask her if she’s gotten any strange mail over the years, but she cuts me off. “Let me finish my dream,” she says. “He stole my envelope.”
I put down my pen. “Who did, honey?”
“The guy who broke his heart,” she says. “The man in the dream, he got to the envelope before me. I saw him running out of my house with it.”
It’s a painful thing, to hear yourself in another person. Maddie finishes her story and she says what she always says, A heart doesn’t just break for no reason. I turn the light off so I can’t see anything but my computer screen, so I can’t see the ducks on the wall. I pick up my tea. It’s cold. And then a little while later the doorbell rings. Marko.
* * *
—
Lo is always animated when her kids are here. Especially Marko; I think he has a crush on her. When I said so the other night she laughed at me. I’m almost old enough to be his mother. But here he is on his iPod, finding music for her. Lo thinks I’m jealous of him because he’s young, and maybe I am a little envious, his goddamn able body and me, I’ve got a new little ache every day, a pinch in my gut. Marko, he’s just so damn blond, chiseled, his ski slope face, his unnecessarily blue eyes. Any man would be annoyed. He’s so alive and my kids are so dead.
“So, I think I have a title,” he says, wiping the corners of his mouth.
Lo grins. “For your thesis? Is it ‘Darkness in Light’?”
“I improved on that,” he says. That’s why I don’t like him. A better kid would say yes, let Lo have the win. He bites his lip, white man’s overbite, and he says it like he’s a magician, “ ‘The Darkness at the End of the Tunnel.’ ”
Providence Page 7
