The Whole Thing Together

by Ann Brashares

  He felt he needed to look somewhere else. Should he say something? It would be painfully awkward, he suspected, but had they passed the point where it was even more awkward not to? He wasn’t usually an overthinker like this.

  A friend of hers came out of the kitchen. A member of the blond, tiny-skirted tribe. He took the opportunity to keep looking at the girl a little longer. Did he know her? She cast one glance back at him as her friend drew her down the hallway. Caught again.

  She had an idiosyncratic, shuffling way with her feet. A couple of sparks flared in his memory, but they burned out before he could think of what they meant. She was a dark, humble contrast to her towering, spike-heeled friend. He saw boys’ heads swivel and gawk at the friend as the pair went by, but his shuffly girl was the actual beauty, her lovely body hidden under modest clothes. She was the kind of pretty only someone as deep as him understood. He laughed at himself for this thought and continued to think it anyway, as though her loveliness was something he’d invented.

  You’re not here to pick up girls, he reminded himself, struck and a little disoriented as she walked away.

  Parker, in the dining room, looked lost in his own way. The phone was out and glowing in his face. He looked up. “Dude, let’s go.”

  Which meant Parker didn’t know anybody or that they’d run out of beer. Ten minutes before, Ray would have happily sailed out the door, but now he held back. “There’s beer in the kitchen,” he pointed out.

  “I had three. The girls got cuter but not any friendlier.”

  “There’s beer pong in one of the bedrooms.”

  “Like ten guys are waiting.”

  “Fine. I’ll pee and then we’ll go,” Ray said.

  Ray started a slow circuit around the apartment. He knew who he was looking for, but he wasn’t sure what he would do if he found her. He went from room to room, trying not to be creepy or obvious. He held his breath slightly as he turned every corner. What was the matter with him?

  But the girl wasn’t in any of the rooms. He even waited for turnover from the bathrooms, but she didn’t come out of any of them.

  She must have left. He felt a puzzling, slow-moving ache, and behind that, a small gust of relief. He knew it the way you just know things: In that shuffle of hers was the potential for a lot of complicated feelings. The kind he’d never felt for a girl before. Now he wouldn’t get to feel them. He wouldn’t have to feel them.

  —

  Mattie and Ray had come back to Brooklyn together in the late afternoon, she to pick up clothes and go to the dentist. Now he’d gone to some girl’s party in Manhattan while she stayed home and snooped around the house until she found the photograph in a filing cabinet in the basement.

  She had an almost eerie sense of where to look for it among the relics: piles of curling prints, slippery negatives featuring black teeth of ghostly relatives.

  It was in a pile of prints, bound by a rubber band and marked with a slip of paper that said “1997” in her mother’s writing. They were beach pictures, nothing notable there, but the cast was different. Instead of her sweating, ageless, subtly out-of-place father in his flowered swim trunks and signature Ray-Ban sunglasses there was a blond man in faded wetsuit bottoms holding up a surfboard who looked like he’d been born right out of the sand. There he was leading Emma out on a miniature board. There he was holding tiny Quinn’s hand as she found her balance at the front of his longboard. There he was standing with her mother, her very young mother, their four feet melted into sand and surf. She imagined it was her mother who took the other pictures, so who took this one? Mattie suspected, somehow, that the subjects were unaware of the camera.

  The question, always, was how did this relate to the sequence of their lives? How did it relate to the Great Upheaval? It was after, but not by much. Maybe a few months. So near the moment of devastation, and yet so peaceful-seeming.

  But the particular photo she seized on, the one she couldn’t stop looking at, showed this same blond Jonathan Dawes, lately of the Black Horse Market, holding baby Mattie up by her feet. In it, she’s standing on his open hands teetering high above the sand, a balance of fear and delight in her face. Could she possibly remember this? Seeking purchase in the air on a pair of flat hands, anticipating the plunge into soft sand? No, she was too young. She probably just remembered seeing the picture.

  She studied his squinting face looking up at her. He was smiling broadly; he was all about thrills. Maybe not all about thrills. He looked a little bit careful, too.

  —

  Leaving the party, Ray’s mind was full and his eyes were absent. The elevator doors opened, a cluster of people pushed in, and suddenly he was standing behind her, less than a foot away. He smelled her hair before he saw her. The smell made him dizzy. It took a shortcut to a part of his brain that didn’t deal in words. He didn’t mean to look down at her chest, but what could he do? He was suddenly electrified and uneasy.

  Next to her was a friend, a different friend, a girl with black hair piled high on top of her head.

  “Are you Parker Murray?” her friend turned to ask his friend.

  Parker looked up from his phone. “Yeah.”

  “You’re Zach Kaplan’s friend.”

  “Yeah. I thought he was gonna show up tonight,” Parker said. “Do you go to Trinity?”

  “No. Sacred Heart. I know Zach from the beach.”

  The two were having a normal conversation, and the elevator was beeping downward, and Ray was deep inside his brain, struggling to surface, feeling drugged and slightly panicked at the same time. He stared at the part in her dark hair, which wasn’t quite straight. He was caught in something he didn’t understand.

  Without warning she turned her head and looked up at him. She had a small, delicate face, a pointy chin, and large eyes, which in this light looked yellow-bronze. He was caught for sure, bare and bewildered, unable to close up his face in time.

  She didn’t look annoyed; he didn’t look away. She was caught too. She was bewildered too. She turned her head to face forward again and kept it that way.

  His heart was thumping so hard he wondered if it could be seen from outside his shirt, if maybe she could detect the vibration in the few inches of air between them.

  Again the question: did he know her from somewhere?

  Numbly he followed them through the lobby. They were all standing kind of awkwardly on the sidewalk under the awning of the apartment building when the girl with the black piled hair turned directly to him and said, “I’m Chloe Neil. Have we met?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’m Ray.”

  The dark-haired girl made a sound, an audible in or out of breath. It was quiet, but it shook him. He could feel her eyes on him. He looked at her, instinctively alert.

  Afterward it seemed to him like he was experiencing what was happening, predicting what would happen, and remembering what had happened at the same time.

  Chloe looked expectantly, impatiently at her friend. She kind of bumped the girl with her hip. “Hello? Do you speak?”

  “I’m Sasha,” she said to Ray, clamping strange, lovely eyes on his eyes.

  It took a while for the outlandish possibility to reveal itself. He was thinking in very slow motion, through thousands of feet of air and liquid, cloud water sloshing in his ears. Did that mean…? Could she be?

  No. Other people were Sasha. There were plenty of Rays. At least, there were a few other Rays. But the way she looked at him and the way she said it…

  She thought it too, didn’t she? And if she thought it too, then didn’t it have to be so?

  “You’re not…Sasha Thomas,” he said. He had to ask. He felt pinned under the possibility.

  “You know each other?” Chloe asked, attentive to the strange air.

  Chloe and Parker uneasily watched them watching each other.

  Sasha stared at him unguardedly. “You’re…you’re not. Are you really Ray?”

  He was sort of Ray. Not quite Ray. H
e didn’t know who the fuck he was right now. His mouth was moving forward without him. “Occasionally I go by Sasha.”

  A laugh burst out of her, unexpected by either of them. Each of them sort of looked around to see where it had come from. His heart puffed up, exalted at the sound.

  She was still laughing. She had an absolutely beautiful smile. “And I’ve been called Ray,” she said.

  “Obviously you know each other,” he heard Chloe say somewhere in the background. Apparently Chloe took a sour view of inside jokes.

  “No,” Sasha finally said, muffled.

  He felt himself straining toward her. “No,” he echoed. “We’ve never even met.”

  Chloe had called an Uber. She was checking her phone, calling the driver, pulling Sasha toward the corner.

  Sasha was barely on her feet, barely aware of her feet. Ray (Ray!) was receding from her on the sidewalk.

  “The stupid driver is waiting on Eighty-Eighth Street,” Chloe declared. “I told him Lex, and he’s the one yelling at me.”

  Ray stood there looking at her. His friend was already ambling away down the sidewalk in the opposite direction.

  Sasha wanted to say something, but she didn’t know what. There were too many things to say for her to say any one of them. No small talk, no big talk, and nothing in between could possibly touch her feelings.

  He wanted to say something too. She could tell. She wished she weren’t being pulled away so forcibly by deranged Uber customer Chloe.

  She felt a little bit desperate. Thoughts bounced and ricocheted and didn’t quite link up. What if she never saw him again? What if this was the only time?

  And she hadn’t even managed to say anything.

  She waved awkwardly to him as her steps bent around the corner. She felt like crying, hating to break off the sight of him. She could have wrenched herself away from Chloe, but what would she do then? Run back to him and stand in front of him and say more nothing?

  She had known what he looked like in a general way. That his hair was light and straight like Mattie’s. That he was tall and athletic like Emma. She’d seen a few pictures over the years. Not enough to recognize him out of context, just enough to fit the pieces together.

  But she didn’t know how he really was, moving, talking, and breathing, in three dimensions. That his body was warm and magnetic, even three feet away from her. She wasn’t prepared for that.

  She had so many points of reference and extrapolations, but he was different when he was right there. This Ray was her Ray. This was the Ray who read her books and slept in her bed. Her Ray was the same person as this person. This person was Ray and he belonged to himself. She didn’t really have a Ray.

  “Sash, come on!”

  The driver honked at them. Chloe was already in the car before Sasha knew what was happening.

  Sasha sensed that once she got in the car and shut the door, this bewildering moment would crash to a close, so completely over it might as well not have happened at all.

  “Sasha! I’ve got four minutes to make my curfew. You’ve already blown yours.”

  Had she?

  “And you were the one who made a deal about leaving.”

  Sasha got in heavily and heavily shut the door. She cast a look at the window as they pulled into the street, driving away from him.

  Chloe turned on her. “What was that about? I thought you said you didn’t know him.”

  Sasha wasn’t ready to open up to Chloe. She wanted to hold on to the last images of Ray. There had been so much imagined Ray, such a minuscule amount of real Ray. She didn’t want Chloe’s perspective sewn into the experience, a further distortion.

  She didn’t even want the confusion of her own perspective. She just wanted to hold on to him, how he was. The particular force of him in his laugh, posture, smile. His hands, his eyes, the way his feet stood in his shoes. Not any specific trait or part, but the feeling of them, the feeling of him as a real, solid person.

  She had the ache of tears in her throat. She wished she were still near him, feeling that strange warmth emanating from his body. Had she imagined that?

  “He sure made it seem like he knew you.” Chloe kept staring at her expectantly.

  Sasha shrugged numbly. “It’s just that we know people in common.”

  “He’s super cute, don’t you think? We should have gotten his number. We can message him on Facebook. His friend was decent too.” Chloe rooted around in her bag for a piece of gum to cover the beer and smoke.

  Ray was not on Facebook, Sasha could have informed her, but didn’t. She knew this because he’d tried to friend her back in middle school and she’d shied away. A year and a half later she’d regretted the decision, but by the time she’d mustered the courage to reach out to him, he wasn’t there anymore. “He deleted his account,” Mattie mentioned, by the by, leaving Sasha hungry, as always, to know even one thing more.

  “I think he might have gone out with Piper Greenlow,” Chloe rattled on. “You know her? From Chapin? She was bragging that this super-cute friend of Zach Kaplan’s friend from Brooklyn was calling her.”

  Sasha could not answer that one. She stared at the lights on Park Avenue and willed them not to turn yellow yet. She was relieved when the car pulled over at Seventy-Fourth Street.

  “Bye. Thanks for the ride,” she called as she slammed the door. She wasn’t thinking about Chloe. Or she was only to the extent that she wished she hadn’t let Chloe drag her away from Ray. (Ray?)

  But it was useless, she thought mechanically as she punched in the code and walked into her house. It was time to check herself, her own stupidity. She didn’t like how her thoughts were traveling. She needed to shake herself out of it.

  Ray wasn’t her friend. He wasn’t her boyfriend. He wasn’t her Ray in any way. They had no relationship and never would. Even though they shared a room and she pretended they had some special bond, they didn’t. That existed in her needy mind and nowhere else. They lived on opposite sides of a chasm created by two people who actively loathed each other.

  That was how it was and would ever be. There was no point, nothing gained by trying to cross it. It was sheer perversity to demand to know the one person in the world who was structurally off-limits to her.

  What if she had stayed standing with him on the sidewalk? What was it that needed to be said or done? She could think of nothing.

  —

  Ray told Parker to go ahead. He wanted to walk. Parker didn’t want to leave him alone. He kept walking alongside him all the way to the express trains at Fifty-Ninth Street.

  “Why are you acting spooky? Do you know that girl or not?”

  Ray didn’t feel like answering. He was too preoccupied, too freaked out. He kept replaying her face, her laugh, trying to make sense of it, to hold on to her. But once they were rattling downtown on the number 4 train, he answered anyway.

  “Yes and no. I don’t know her, but our parents used to be married. My mom and her dad.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No.” He looked at the ceiling of the subway car. He pushed his fingers through his hair, making it all stand up. Emma hated when he did that. She would pat it all back down as though it was her hair to be in charge of.

  “Geeee-zus.” Parker let out a long, sincere breath through his nose. “So she’s that kid. The one who leaves her crap around your room.”

  Ray appreciated Parker’s consideration. “As a roommate, she’s had a lot more to complain about than I have,” he muttered numbly.

  “She seemed cool. Very pretty.”

  “The thing that’s really fucked up is, I had no idea.” His face was hot at the thought of her body, the force of his attraction. “I probably should have recognized her, but I didn’t. I was looking at her like she was…you know…a girl.”

  Parker seemed to understand what he meant. “She is a girl.”

  “She’s not. Not to me.”

  “How can you say what she is to you? You just said you don’
t even know her.”

  “I don’t get to.” The lights in the subway car blinked off and on again. “To know her.”

  “Why not? It’s not like you’re related to her. You’re not.”

  Ray almost laughed a little. “If you have to say that, maybe that’s not good.”

  Emma intercepted Jamie at the front door of the Wainscott house. He looked so handsome in his jacket and khakis. His hair was combed. She knew he was doing his best.

  “No strategy this time, I promise,” Emma said to him in a low voice, kissing him on the cheekbone. “No secrets anymore. I told them everything this morning. My dad is so excited he might jump into your arms.”

  Jamie was too nervous to laugh, but he looked encouraged and hopeful, his strings taut and vibrating in tune with hers.

  She’d come to anticipate his cues: fingers going like windmills and tappy feet when he was anxious, hum of contentment low in his throat when it was just her, thumb pressed to his temple when he concentrated on work, open and honest gaze in all conditions.

  For some reason she’d had the idea that in choosing a man she was supposed to look for strength and opacity. But it was seeing Jamie’s rough seams up close that brought him into the soft part of her heart.

  She squeezed his hand. “It’s the best possible thing. You just get to be you.”

  “This is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen in my life,” Jamie said, as if on cue, staring from the terrace over the lawn and down to the pond.

  The rest of them stood around approvingly. Quinn almost had to laugh at their bobbing heads.

  It was the quickest way to their communal heart. Maybe because of everything it took to be here, to hold on to it. All the compromises and stalemates. And because it was beautiful.

  Back in the house, the big table was set. Quinn had watched Emma oversee the angle of every spoon and fork like she was the butler on Downton Abbey. And Evie, in her way, had been wise enough to step back.

  Evie was supposed to be the reigning queen of this dominion, but who was reliably and completely on her side? Not Emma or Mattie. They’d met her within a few years of meeting their own mother but remained as skeptical as though she’d arrived yesterday. Sasha was the center of Evie’s life, but Quinn knew Sasha was desperate to identify with her older sisters. Robert loved Evie but felt the desires and rules of his powerful older daughters. Quinn could understand how her father’s mind worked: The girls were the victims here, right? Just kids. None of this was their fault. Gus, the guinea pig, was on Evie’s side, unless someone else remembered to feed him. Based on Evie’s luck with the dishwasher, not even the dishes totally trusted her.