The Dependents

by Katharine Dion

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2018 by Katharine Dion

  Cover design by Neil Alexander Heacox

  Cover image © Alex Katz / Licensed by VAGA

  Author photograph by Terri Loewenthal

  Cover © 2018 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: June 2018

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  The phrase "Love—that's a private catastrophe" here is from Anton Chekhov's story "The Dance Pianist," translated by Ann Dunnigan.

  The phrase “We end in joy” here is from Theodore Roethke’s poem “The Moment.”

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  ISBN 978-0-316-473873

  LCCN 2017963616

  E3-20180502-DANF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  One 1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  Two 10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  Three 21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  About the Author

  Newsletter

  One

  1.

  HIS WIFE HAD died in June and there was to be a memorial service for her in two weeks, at the end of the summer. Gene’s daughter had come out from California with his granddaughter to help make the arrangements, and he found himself dismayed by his general helplessness, which was not exactly the same as resenting what his daughter did for him, but the feelings existed along the same continuum. He hadn’t been able to find his swim trunks that morning, so he was wearing a pair of pants Dary had chopped off at the knee. She had cut them unevenly and the left side hung lower than the right, in a skew of brown corduroy fringe dampened by sweat against his slack thigh.

  He was also wearing real shoes, probably the only person on the entire beach. A bulky pair of sneakers made of foam and glue, the sort that older people were punished with and expected to submit to meekly, as if they were no longer discerning. On Dr. Fornier’s recommendation Dary had driven all the way out to the freezing mall, the one with the potted palms, because it was easier to do something for his weak ankles than his grief. He had fought only a little about whether he would wear them, because when he and Dary had started to bicker, his ten-year-old granddaughter had shouted from the back seat of the car, “If you’re going to fight, leave me home!”

  Now Annie was playing down the beach with a group of boys and girls who were still unselfconscious about being a group of boys and girls who played with one another. Dary had gone to get her because they were going to meet the Donnellys at the miniature golf course. He had little interest in miniature golf, but as long as his daughter was in town it seemed that he was a type of appendage to her, expected to go where she went unless she made other arrangements for him. He had promised to meet up with his daughter and granddaughter later, and they had left him behind with their towels thinned by too much washing and a single glass jug filled with what was now very warm water.

  The beach was crowded, a cluttered heap of pink skin, chipped toenail polish, ice chests, crumpled tin foil, silver cans wearing coats of sand halfway up their sides, shovels and buckets in primary colors, and striped umbrellas that stammered in the uncool breeze. A group of teenage girls had established a colony nearby. They were arrayed on their stomachs in a line surrounded by the incredible amount of stuff that had come out of their bags, the water bottles, energy bars, sun lotions, women’s magazines, hairbrushes, inflatable pillows, diet sodas, reed mats, and radios. At times they would roll over each other like seals to point out something in one of the magazines, and from them arose a collective shriek that he vaguely recognized as a form of laughter.

  Not far from them a good-looking youngish man with bronzed forearms was helping a little girl build a sandcastle with multiple towers and walkways. Whenever the man did something that pleased the little girl, she cried out, “Mommy, look what Roy did!” Then a woman sitting just beyond them with a puppy in her lap would gaze up at Roy with an expression of complete contentment, and she would lift the pudding-fleshed puppy so it too could gaze on Roy with dumb bliss. She was older than Roy but aggressively attractive; her swimsuit squished the tops of her breasts into little meat pies above the elastic. It was difficult to tell how long she and Roy had been together, and whether he had been inaugurated already into a fatherly role or was merely auditioning.

  Gene’s interest in other people lay primarily in the mystery of their happiness. Happy children, happy parents tending happy children and small animals—had they always been such evangelists of joy? He now reserved a special kind of misery for the sight of a happy couple. This particular human configuration seemed to have been invented to draw out the despair in everyone else.

  A scrum of ball-playing men moved up and down the beach, spreading out and coalescing an expansive territory. You could smell them before they passed by and again afterward, a mass of warm air cabbagey with sweat. Even men who didn’t play sports in their regular lives, the ones with the narrow bony chests white as the bite inside a pickle—even they would play with a ball at the beach. Every now and then, when they stampeded across a blanket, some lifeguard would stand up and bullhorn about it.

  When Gene was in college the lifeguards on this beach had been lazy party boys, scornful of enforcing rules made by somebody else, especially the state of New Hampshire. On their breaks they smoked cigarettes and sipped beer from bottles in paper bags. But something had changed. Now the beach seemed part of a larger state public service effort to deliver a serious message about health and safety. Last summer, a mobile health clinic had been stationed in the parking lot and to get to the beach you had to pass cheerful volunteers in matching T-shirts, handing out flyers promising various free screenings. It had been one of the last memorable fights between him and Maida, a fight that began when one of the volunteers asked if she could give them a flyer and Maida said yes and he said no. Maida took the flyer and read aloud about the screenings as they stumped over the dunes and he was aware of the way his No had sharpened her Yes, had made it oppositional. “They’re free,” Maida said. “Why not?” But nothing was free and he said so.

  Maybe if they had left off there, sparring halfheartedly about money, he would
have forgotten the argument by now. Instead they jumped tracks and the argument became about what it was or wasn’t useful to know. If you could know something, Maida said, she didn’t understand why you wouldn’t choose to know it. “Not knowing won’t save you,” she said, at a moment when neither of them knew she would die the next summer. Instead, he had taken a certain needling pleasure in assailing her logic. He pointed out that no test would be able to tell him precisely when he would die, or provide the details for how the how would unfold. The tests would only increase his fear, which in his estimation was generally worse than pain of a physical kind. “For a smart person,” Maida said, “sometimes you aren’t.”

  Now he picked his way down to the water through a maze of blankets, discarded cups, and scavenger birds. Airy tangles of dark seaweed crisped by the sun nested in the indentations in the sand, trapping small bits of litter, froth, and shells—mostly surf clams but also some mussels. When he was ten years old, the year his father died, Gene had gone to the beach for a week with his father’s family—the French-speaking aunts, uncles, and cousins who came from the same small town in Canada—and his cousins had told him the secret that if you held a seashell to your ear, the ocean would speak to you. All that week he collected horse mussels, dog winkles, and moon snails, and after he had rinsed them off he tested each one, thinking that if he found the right tiny, smooth, hollowed-out body and held it to his ear, he might hear instead of the cry of the ocean, the voice of his father. It astonished him that even now, more than sixty years later, he couldn’t see a seashell without experiencing the flicker of an urge to pick it up, in case the shell was the one that would return his father to him.

  A woman in a sun hat and slacks sauntered toward him along the edge of the surf. Some aspect of her gait triggered a flash of recognition, and the seas inside his cells rose in response. For a fleeting moment the woman was Maida. But when she came nearer, the illusion was shattered. Her face, her expression, was wrong, and she was round in the places where Maida was trim. Yet even after the illusion had been dispelled there remained in him a reckless hope that his wife was alive somewhere, that the person who had died in the hospital wasn’t her, and that the real Maida was making her way back to him somehow.

  There were things he hadn’t told her. Like how a week after their fight about the free screenings he had gone back to the mobile health clinic. He wanted to say he had gone back out of devotion to her, out of the kind of love that is a radical openness to someone else’s ideas, but the truth was closer to something like superstition. After you had talked so much about the idea that there might be something wrong with you, it took on a fatalistic dimension. On some level he believed that if he emphatically refused the screenings, the universe would punish him. He went back for the free blood-pressure and diabetes screenings, and then—because the frowning stethoscoping doctor recommended it—he paid for an EKG that revealed an irregular heart rhythm. Except the doctor wouldn’t tell him what was wrong with him and would recommend only that he see his regular doctor. But by the time the appointment with Dr. Fornier came around, Gene was having trouble with his ankles, and he was relieved to allow this to become the all-consuming problem.

  There were also things he hadn’t asked Maida. Like if it had been, on the whole, a happy life. He didn’t mean the outward life, but the life within the life. The tucked-away life, secret even to oneself most of the time. Had it been happy enough?

  A wave, leaping out of nowhere, crashed against his feet. The water coursed over the tops of his shoes, penetrating the webbing. He waded in and the chill grabbed at his corduroys. His body convulsed in the strange liquid way it always did when the water approached his navel.

  There were people who told him his grief would diminish, but he didn’t believe them. That his father’s death was still an experience reverberating inside him after all these years suggested that the distance a person traveled from death was just along a circle, and all it took was one new loss to show you that you were still traveling the same line. Only now he was older and more broken down and less able to absorb the devastation. Because there was only so much room inside the body to accommodate all the deaths you had to accommodate to go on living.

  A wave flung toward him and broke against his chest, splashing water in his face. He tasted the blunt gift of its salt, the roughness cutting into his nose and mouth. Then the ocean reeled back, spinning, a membrane pulled in every direction, sucked low and flat by a deep inner drain.

  No couple had played a more important role in his and Maida’s lives than Ed and Gayle Donnelly. The two families had vacationed together for years at White Pine Camp, the Donnellys’ property on Fisher Lake, and they had been initiated together in the summer rituals of family happiness—swimming, boating, fishing, birding, croquet, card games, night swimming. On these trips they had shared responsibility for sick children, mosquito-bitten children, and plain old whiny children. The handed-down clothing and baby items had traveled both ways between the families. Dary, born just over a year after Ed and Gayle’s oldest, spent much of her first year outfitted in Brian Donnelly’s old clothes. Later, the two younger Donnelly boys, Michael and Colin, inherited the best of Dary’s toys. And just as there was a key to the Ashes’ house in the top drawer of the Donnellys’ secretary (beside the roll of Charles Demuth stamps and the mother-of-pearl letter opener), there were keys to the Donnelly homes in the Ashes’ front closet in the pocket of an oversize men’s coat, the circumstances of whose acquisition no one could recall. Sometimes to outsiders the Ashes and Donnellys gave the impression that each family was an extension of the other, and in moments of crisis they tended to rely on each other without waiting for an invitation.

  The first weeks after Maida’s death, Ed and Gayle had often appeared whenever Gene needed a competent stand-in. Gayle quietly went about concluding Maida’s institutional relationships in the world. She returned library books, transferred memberships to Gene’s name, canceled automatic payments to the gym he had never gone to, and generally handled the things he would have never remembered to do, though somehow it would have drained him to have left them undone.

  Ed kept the infrastructure around the house in working order. He took Gene’s car to be serviced when it was supposed to be and got an estimate for the repairs to the roof. He replaced the refrigerator the same day it discharged a foul-smelling puddle under the freezer drawer during a heat wave. By the afternoon the floor was clean and dry and the new model was restocked with everything from the old one, plus some nice beer and cold cuts that hadn’t been there before.

  All this generosity from his friends should have inspired more tenderness in him, and it puzzled him that instead of gratitude he often felt something closer to irritation. It was mostly Ed who aroused it in him, though Gene knew his friend was just trying to be helpful. But the more his irritation grew, the guiltier he felt, with the result that often he found himself balking at some proposed kindness that was in his best interest, or he would be late to some engagement his friends had arranged on his behalf. As he was now late to meet them at the miniature golf course, having waited past the reasonable moment to heave himself out of the ocean.

  The course was across the street and down the block, not far from the band shell where free summer concerts were held. He had expected the boardwalk to have emptied in the midday heat, but it was as crowded as the beach and dense with oiled bodies jogging and strolling and lolling at the rail. He had never gotten entirely accustomed to it, the sight of women walking down the street in nothing but bathing suits, the initial shock not from seeing so much flesh but from thinking that here was a person who had forgotten to wear clothes. A tanned bride-to-be in a ruffly white bikini, tiara, and sash announcing her bachelorette status posed for a photo, flanked by a group of equally tanned bikini-clad women, none of whom looked like they needed another minute in the sun. A large muscular man wearing an airbrushed T-shirt depicting a woman with obscenely large breasts was accompanied by a woman h
alf his size wearing an identical shirt.

  Gene stepped into the street and was nearly run down by a Rollerblader in the bicycle lane, who shouted at him, “Don’t die, dude!”

  In front of the penny arcades, everyone seemed to be eating something: three scoops in a waffle cone, or fried dough, or steaming slices of pizza served on doubled paper plates. The seafood restaurant that served the same food under a new name still had a twenty-foot blue marlin surging from the roof. A teenage boy wearing a sandwich board shaped like a piano handed him a flyer for a bar with private karaoke rooms.

  There was more than one miniature golf course on the strip, but only one had a pirate theme. A skeleton missing a hand greeted him at the entrance, and the attendant offered him a complimentary paper visor with a skull and crossbones, which he declined. There was no good shortcut through the course, so he simply walked the holes in order, passing entire parties in the skull-and-crossbones visors. There was a hole that had to be played through a shipwrecked boat; another that required hitting the ball through an enormous skull; another that skirted the tentacles of a monster squid. He crossed a wooden bridge and found his family putting next to a waterfall, groundwater tumbling down beige plastic rocks.

  “Well, well,” Ed said. “The beachcomber arriveth. We started without you, hope you don’t mind.”

  His granddaughter handed him a bright orange ball. He kissed Gayle hello on the cheek and asked what he had missed.

  “Ed’s threatening to sell White Pine Camp,” Dary said.

  “Well, you can’t,” Gene said. “You can’t sell it until I’m dead.”

  “Not until we’re all dead,” said Gayle.

  “I counted,” Ed said, “and last summer we were only there a total of ten days. And you”—he pointed to Gene—“we could hardly get you out there for a day.”

  “It’s the kids’ fault,” Gene said.