“Tell me about those,” I said, pointing.
“Sharp eyes.”
I shrugged. “They look interesting.”
“They are,” he said. “I inherited them, one from each grandfather.”
“Did you like your grandfathers?”
“Never met them,” he said. “Only their widows, both of whom I loved a great deal.”
“That’s quite a story,” I said.
“There’s more,” he said.
“Tell me.”
“My grandfathers went down with the Titanic,” he said. “Each of them took off his ring and gave it to his wife once he’d made sure of her place in a lifeboat.”
The Yalies sat down.
“I’m going to have to stand up and say something,” I said.
“You’re the daughter relied upon for a good toast?”
“Indeed,” I said.
“You look as though you’re about to ask me for a favor.”
I nodded. “Would you mind terribly if I mentioned your rings?”
“I’d be delighted.”
“Thank you,” I said. “By one’s mother’s fourth wedding, it’s tough coming up with fresh material.”
My new friend started dinging his water glass with a dessert spoon.
I downed a hopeful slug of water and stood up.
The room grew quiet, all eyes on me.
“I promised our mother that I would not mention the monogrammed towel we kids gave her last Christmas,” I said, “so I won’t. Except for the part about how we had to put a hyphen at the end of her initials, so people would know they continued around on the back.”
General laughter, with one hearty basso Hear, hear from across the room’s expanse .
“We’re already tremendously fond of Larry,” I continued. “How can one help but admire a potential stepfather who introduces himself over lunch at ‘Twenty-One’ by imploring his fiancée’s gathered children to join him in a shrimp cocktail?”
Someone called “Attaboy, Lawrence!” from the bar.
I nodded. “I’d like to offer two bits of advice to my dear mother, Constance, the first of which runs as follows: Mummie, when that special time arrives, during the course of your wedding night, remember the advice Queen Victoria gave each of her daughters: ‘Just close your eyes and think of England.’ ”
Brays of laughter, all around.
I dropped my eyes, waiting for quiet.
“My second bit of wisdom has more serious import,” I said, “though I learned it only this evening, from my charming companion at dinner.”
I held my glass with both hands and looked across the room at my mother.
“A good marriage,” I said, “is when you know the other person will always make sure you have a place in the lifeboat.”
I dropped one hand, lifting my glass high. “My wish is that you and Larry will enjoy that loving confidence in one another, throughout all the many-splendored years to come.”
I sipped my water, all those around me reached for their cocktails, and I sat down amidst a round of hearty applause.
“Or for the next six months,” said my new friend.
“Whichever comes first.”
The old man clinked my glass with his.
“Hear, hear,” he said. “Hear, hear indeed.”
I looked up and saw Dean across the room, standing in the doorway to the bar. He hadn’t caught sight of me yet.
I wondered which piece of news I should tell him first: that I’d killed a man, or that I was pregnant.
I got up and started walking toward him.
“You made amazing time,” I said, standing on tiptoe to kiss his cheek back in the bar. “I thought you wouldn’t get here until midnight. You must’ve broken the sound barrier in the Porsche.”
“Bunny, I didn’t drive.”
“You came straight from La Tuque after all?”
“No,” he said. “Look, let’s go sit down, okay?”
His face was ashen.
I felt cold, ominous fingers of angst twining like briars around my heart. “I don’t want to sit down. Tell me here.”
Tell me standing up, so it doesn’t hurt as much. So I can run.
He pulled me close, pressing my cheek gently to his chest. “Astrid’s dead.”
“No she’s not,” I said.
“She took the Porsche—stole the keys out of my desk. They think she was doing about a hundred and twenty when she hit the concrete. She aimed straight for it—didn’t swerve, never hit the brakes.”
No she’s not. No she’s not.
66
Pagan pulled me out behind the church the following morning to savor a last bit of fresh air before the full catastrophe got under way.
Our headbands were firmly in place, our plaid taffeta gowns pressed within an inch of their tartan lives—but we’d donned overcoats and Bean duck boots before stepping outside to brave the cold.
I couldn’t feel anything.
“I’m sorry about Astrid. And that whole thing with the trial,” she said.
I didn’t answer.
“You okay?” she asked.
I started to cry again.
“That poor little kid,” she said. “Jesus Christ.”
I couldn’t answer her.
“Kyle said yesterday that the only way we can stomach it is if we ask the universe to protect his new sister,” she said.
“Like she has a chance in hell.”
“Maybe she does.”
You don’t believe it either.
Pagan spread her arms and looked up at the white Maine sky, a plume of breath rising from her mouth.
“Come on,” she said, kicking me in the ankle with the rubber edge of her duck boot. “We need to do this.”
We joined our hands, then bowed our heads.
“Dear Universe,” she said. “It’s really important that you take care of that little kid. Because she’s going to need it so damn much.”
And Astrid. And Teddy.
If there’s anything out there resembling a lifeboat, they both deserve seats.
“Thank you, Universe,” said Pagan. “You’re totally the best.”
We stood for a while in silence, then stomped through the snow back to the church doors.
“Why are we even here?” I asked.
“At the wedding?”
“On the planet.”
“To seek enlightenment, I guess,” said Pagan.
“Which is what?”
My sister thought about that for a moment.
“Enlightenment,” she said at last, “is not being an asshole.”
And she opened the door.
SUMMER 1978
Carmel, California
… From different throats intone one language.
So I believe if we were strong enough to listen without
Divisions of desire and terror
To the storm of the sick nations, the rage of the hunger-smitten cities
These voices also would be found
Clean as a child’s….
—“Natural Music,” Robinson Jeffers
Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again.
—Robert F. Kennedy
Cleveland City Club
Cleveland, Ohio
April 5, 1968
67
Mom was at the wheel of our Pacer and we’d just crested the big hill after Odello’s artichoke fields, headed south out of Carmel on Highway One. The white shoulders of Monastery Beach sloped away toward Point Lobos on our right. Above the monastery to our left, black cows dotted honeyed pastures across Stuyvesant Fish’s mountain.
I heard the throaty buzz of a motorcycle swooping downhill in our wake. It had been a week since the carving-knife debacle in Fasset
t’s kitchen.
“I’ve always thought Stuyvie should invite me to lunch up there,” said Mom. “We’d have spinach salad and a cheese soufflé.”
“Linen napkins,” I said.
“Decent flat silver.”
The monastery itself looked vaguely Tuscan: pale clotted-cream walls and a single tower rising from a stand of celadon eucalyptus, capped in roof tiles the deep brick-orange of Mom’s favored tanning unguent, Bain de Soleil.
There was a car in front of us, a rusty yellow hatchback. It slowed with a flash of brake lights just before the creek bridge, turn signal on for the monks’ long gravel driveway.
The motorcycle couldn’t see why we were slowing down and so swung around us to pass, doing a solid fifty. There were two shirtless young guys on it, long hair streaming.
Their bike T-boned into the yellow car with an explosive crack of metal and glass and I watched its rear wheel shimmy up in slow motion, pitching both riders into flight. The driver soared thirty feet, smacking headfirst into a WPA-steel bridge railing. His passenger caught a boot on the car roof and bounced once, high, before plummeting earthward to skid down the asphalt on his bare chest.
And then everything speeded up again and Mom and I were running toward them, the Pacer astride both lanes behind us with its doors winged open.
The guy who’d hit the bridge had a bloody half-softball lump swelling on the side of his forehead. He was trying to sit up but I put my hand on his shoulder. “Don’t move, okay? You’ve hit your head.”
He looked up at me, eyes out of sync. His left pupil was huge and black, drifting wide of its mate.
“It hurts,” he said.
“The other car’s going fast to the monastery. They’ll get an ambulance.”
He closed his eyes. “Okay.”
I heard Mom say, “Madeline?” and turned toward her.
The guy who’d skidded along the road was standing up. She had her arms around him, trying to get him back on the ground again.
“You have to lie down now,” she said.
I touched my guy’s shoulder. “Don’t move.”
I ran to Mom and put my hand on her charge’s bare back. “She’s right. Just lie down for a minute until the ambulance comes.”
I helped her lower him to the ground. He curled up on his side and started crying. Mom sat down next to him, Indian-style, one hand gentle on his pale shoulder.
“It’s okay… it’s okay…” she said, stretching out each “oh” long and melodic, the way she always had when we were little and sick, her cool hand testing our foreheads for fever, holding our hair back while we threw up.
Mom’s white shirt was sopping crimson with the guy’s blood now. There were bits of gravel stuck in its lacy weave.
He shivered, and then the force of a sob made his mouth go wide.
“Shhhhh,” she crooned. “It’s okay.”
I looked up and realized we were surrounded by people, their trail of emptied cars stopped behind ours on the highway.
First an ambulance and then a fire truck came wailing over the top of the hill, lights flashing, and then I couldn’t see them above the wall of bystanders.
The crowd parted for a pair of gurneys, and then they had both guys in neck-braces and everyone melted away until it was just Mom and me, standing by the side of the road all pale and shaking.
There was a bank of fog paused off the coast—sun low enough now to tip it with apricot and lavender.
“I think we’re in shock,” I said.
“Hm?” Mom’s eyes were unfocused, shiny in the soft light.
“We should go home.”
“Yes,” she said, peeling the blood-tacky shirt slowly from the flesh of her belly. “Of course.”
It was ebbing twilight by the time we pulled into our driveway: l’heure bleu.
Our house was old for the West Coast, and Spanish—a humbler version of the monastery, embraced by Brothers Grimm cypress trees, green fading to black.
Mom’s hands trembled, keys jingling in her lap long after she’d pulled them from the Pacer’s ignition.
The fog sidled in, wicking up darkness like ink-thirsty cotton wool.
The car stank of blood so I opened my door, but Mom and I both just sat there, quiet, our seat belts still fastened.
“We need a drink,” she said.
“Wine?” I grimaced, knowing the raw-but-sweet whites she favored. At fifteen I already had a taste for the stuff—just not that stuff.
Mom shrugged. “There’s Scotch. Or maybe it’s bourbon.”
That dusty half-gallon of Old Crow, another spot of flotsam bobbing abandoned in the S.S. Pierce Capwell’s sloppy wake.
Sucks ahoy.
“I suppose that’s what they’d call medicinal,” I said.
She climbed out of the Pacer and I followed, each of our steps making the driveway’s gravel crunch underfoot like breakfast cereal.
Mom lifted the garden-gate latch. The stout portal swung outward, sighing on its hinges, and we picked our way single file across the moss-slick bricks beyond.
I hooked a left once we were inside, shouldering open the kitchen door and sliding my hand up the wall until I’d flipped the light switch.
Mom stepped in behind me, squinting at the glare.
She didn’t say a word, just grabbed her fouled shirt at the waist to yank it up and over her head. She tossed it in the sink and turned on the cold-water tap, then turned back toward me.
Mom’s shoulders were slack and the overhead light made her eye sockets blackly hollow. Brown flecks tattooed her bra and the skin of her belly in a faint floral pattern—blood stenciled through lace.
I wet a fistful of paper towels and pressed them into her hand. She closed her fingers around the sodden mass but didn’t move again.
I opened the dishwasher, picking out a pair of glasses. “Where’s that bourbon?”
“Top of the broom closet,” she said.
The Old Crow bottle was half-empty, furred with dust. I pulled it down by its seamed jug-handle and filled our glasses about a third of the way up.
I handed one to Mom and raised my own. The brown liquor gave off fumes: kerosene cut with nail-polish remover.
“Just swallow it fast,” said Mom. So I did.
The stuff made my gag-reflex stand at parade attention, and I suddenly understood why Jack Nicholson made all those Road Runner–esque “neet-neet-neet swamp” noises whenever he took a nip off his pint of rotgut in Easy Rider.
“Jesus,” I said, wincing at the burn in my throat. “They should call it Old Festering Crow.”
Mom tipped her glass back and swallowed a bit herself, then coughed.
“People really drink this shit on purpose?” I asked.
“The first sip is the hardest.”
“I should fucking well hope so,” I said.
We tipped our glasses back once more.
“It’s still putrid,” I said.
Mom swirled the bourbon in her glass, smiling at me. “Don’t be a chickenshit.”
I finished mine off with a third swallow, not wanting to face the prospect of another mouthful after that.
“Old Festering Crow in Mold-Riddled Sneakers,” I said when I could breathe again.
Mom took two more sips to finish her own glass, then giggled.
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “The aftereffects are decent.”
I’d been hooked up to a nice BenGay IV—the burgeoning glow in my belly seeped into every sore muscle and made it go slack. The world was a cozy old place, our kitchen was my spiritual homeland, and the motorcycle guys were going to be okay.
Mom was still holding the wet paper towels. They were probably cold by now, so I took them out of her hand and tossed them in the kitchen garbage.
“I think maybe you need to take a bath,” I said.
She shook her head. “I’m tired. I want to lie down now.”
I pointed at her bloody stomach.
Mom cleaned herself up with a sponge a
nd some dish soap, standing at the sink. She tossed her bra on top of the shirt already in its deep basin and pulled the tap across to run cold water over them for a moment, then threw away the sponge.
The ship’s clock out in our living room chimed eight bells, marking the end of some distant deck-crew’s watch.
Mom wandered off to her bedroom.
I watched the dregs of blood-rusty water meandering across white sink porcelain and down the drain, then headed down the unlit kitchen stairs to my own bed, sloppy and loose on bourbon-wrought sea legs.
I lay on top of the covers for maybe half an hour, listening to pop tunes on my clock radio—something new from the Eagles and then Boz Scaggs, Elton John, and Fleetwood Mac—all interspersed with the deejay’s chipper patter about mattress sales and the occasional warm flicker of a passing car’s headlights across my ceiling.
My bourbon swoon was sneaking away like a soft tide, and then I was just hungry. I stood and started back upstairs, wondering whether Mom would want to eat, too, if I could find anything to make in the kitchen cabinets.
I navigated back through the unlit kitchen and across the dining room, sure of my way even in the dark.
In the hallway outside Mom’s bedroom, I raised my hand to knock—softly, in case she’d drifted off to sleep—but I heard soft laughter just before my knuckles touched wood.
“I miss you too,” she was saying, and then there was a phone-
conversation pause before she laughed again.
I lowered my hand from the door and turned away.
“Why don’t you come over right now, Pierce,” said my mother. “I can’t wait to see you.”
There was a sleeping bag tucked in our downstairs hall closet. I took that and my pillow and left the house. No need for a flashlight; the fog had cleared.
I crossed the night-blue driveway, silent and barefoot, then slipped away down trails I’d blazed as a child, on into the moonlit woods.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am blessed to have Amy Rennert as my agent, and doubly blessed to have Les Pockell and Celia Johnson as my editors at Grand Central Publishing. Thank you all so much for having my back, and for making sure this book became the best I could make it. A fond farewell to the inimitable Susan Richman—you will be greatly missed.
Invisible Boy Page 35
