The Whole Thing Together

by Ann Brashares

Now it had one. It was ugly but it spoke. Maybe none of them could feel the change in the air, but she could. Maybe now they could all get on with it.

  Mostly everyone had gone now. None of the words or images lingered on the warm stones. She let them all wash away except one: the picture of mint silk Sasha and sport coat Ray standing together in the center of the mess. Small and big, dark and light, left and right. Behind them, she saw that they held hands. All the opposites, everything at once came together. The despair washed away, and that was the thing that stayed. There was the past and there was the future. It felt whole.

  How hopeful we were and are. How can we be any other way?

  She sat in the wet grass and watched the rain tap the surface of the pond thousands of times. In her mind she saw their two clasped hands.

  She could stay like this until the sun dipped down and probably until it came up again. She could repair herself here for a while. But there was still something she needed to do. What must she do? It seemed faint to her now.

  —

  And then she remembered she owed Myrna a piece of cake.

  Sasha’s father was already in the car, her mother told her. Please come now, she mouthed dramatically, twice.

  Sasha had tried to keep some order among her impressions, fears, feelings, until they were simply too much. With the press of Ray’s hand against her hand all systems sizzled, shorted, and went blank.

  By now her mind was a canvas over which fleeting sensations scratched like rodents: The sting of a blister chewed into her heel by the strap of her new silver shoe. The clutch of Susan Hurn’s white fingers on the table. The flower cake rising gently into a dark gray sky.

  Before she could get into the car, Sasha needed to find Quinn. She needed to see her face to know it would be okay. Mattie said she’d seen her. She said Quinn was lying in the grass by the pond.

  Rain splashed down as Sasha tripped barefoot across the grass. Soft mud burped under her toes, her heavy sodden dress sticking to her legs, tangling her stride. Dusk had begun to fall. Her perfect green dress took light from light. Now it just looked black.

  Quinn wasn’t there. Sasha stumbled back up to the house. She could sense her father in the car, windows closed against the rain, steam clotting the outside world, the air inside so pressurized by indignation the whole thing could blow like a special effect in a Vin Diesel movie. She imagined bits of her father’s Mercedes spread from Manorville to Montauk.

  Emma had left in her own car minutes earlier. That was what Mattie had said. And yes, she seemed calm enough to drive. Mattie was going with Lila and Adam. And Ray had been designated driver of Mattie’s car to return Grandma Hardy to her old person home in Oyster Bay.

  Briefly Sasha saw Lila in the passenger seat of a car through a window streaming with rain. You are not what I thought. I imagined you better.

  She could already feel the urge to reconstruct her father and Lila and all the mythology that depended on them. And yet she knew it wasn’t the right thing to do. They didn’t deserve it. Maybe it’s for us that we hold them up, not for them.

  We’re a bunch of fantasists, she thought. Reality horned in once in a while and they all tripped over each other trying to get away from it.

  Except maybe Quinn. She wasn’t afraid.

  Sasha stepped out the front door. Her mother buzzed the window down impatiently. “Get what you need and come on! We’ll meet you at the end of the driveway.”

  Who would want to remain at the site of this disaster? Nobody. Run for the exits, put it farther away, let it be somebody else’s problem a little more than yours.

  Except Quinn. Where was she?

  Sasha found her injuring silver shoes she’d kicked off by the patio. She found her phone and her bag in the kitchen.

  On the way across the gravel out front, she finally found Quinn. Quinn sat astride her bike, still in her long tunic, soaked with rain and muddy at the hem. Her hair dripped; the dot in her nose sparkled. A cherry-red canvas bag hung over her shoulder.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes. I’m coming back. I just need to take care of one thing,” Quinn called, starting off pedaling into the darkening air.

  There was something else Sasha needed to ask, but she couldn’t think what. Heavy leaves weighted branches on either side of the driveway to form a gothic arch over Quinn’s head.

  Even now her sister did stand-up pedaling like she was in fourth grade, and it was just another thing that made Sasha feel teary.

  Whatever they had all wanted, it was too late. Maybe it wasn’t too late.

  —

  Sitting in traffic in Queens, a mile back from the Midtown Tunnel, Sasha’s father’s phone rang. He was driving. He was still too angry to talk to his wife or daughter, much less his phone. It stayed in his pocket.

  It rang again. He got madder at it. Cursed and ignored it.

  And then it rang again.

  Sasha sat up straight, her heart accelerating heavily.

  “Darling, you should pick it up,” Evie said. “What if there’s an emergency?”

  “My God, Evie. What more could go wrong today?” Robert growled.

  His words coincided with the onset of the fourth ring, and stabbed fear into Sasha’s heart. In her private religion that was the kind of thing you were never allowed to say.

  He lifted out of his seat to fish the phone from the bottom of his pocket.

  “Dammit,” he muttered. “I missed it.” He tossed the phone at Evie like he was beyond disappointment or fear.

  “It’s a six-three-one number. I don’t recognize it,” she said.

  “All of them?”

  “Four calls.” Evie waited until he came to a stop to show him the phone. “Do you recognize it?”

  Robert squinted at the screen, shook his head. “Play the voice mail.”

  Instinctively Sasha put both feet on the floor of the car, put her hands flat on the seat on either side of her. She realized the vibration in her stomach was not just agitation, but her own phone buzzing. She let it go, intent on hearing the voice mail.

  Evie pressed Robert’s phone to her head so only faint sounds leaked out. “Robert, pull over,” she said.

  Never had Evie given an order to Robert. Never would Robert have complied with one had her voice not sounded like that. Robert spun the wheel roughly to the right through two lanes of traffic and pulled to a stop on the shoulder. Two lanes worth of cars honked at him.

  His hands still clutched the wheel even though he’d stopped driving. “Who?”

  “It’s a woman from the trauma center at Brookhaven.”

  Her father’s jaw was set; his eyes were closed. She was scared for him. Why for him? Why did she imagine it would be his news and not hers?

  Evie loosed a strange animal noise followed by five words, quickly: “Quinn was in an accident.”

  Real tragedies didn’t happen gradually. They didn’t build you up with foreshadowing like in books and movies. They didn’t culminate with lessons learned or rebalance the moral ledger.

  Real tragedies happened in five seconds, in five words. They waited until you were getting herded into the stupid Midtown Tunnel and smashed you in the head. They took what you loved away and left you with nothing.

  Sasha heard an unrecognizable voice come out of her own mouth. “Is she okay?”

  From Evie’s face, Sasha was both frantic to know and did not want Evie to answer. Sasha put both hands to her head, like a punch-drunk boxer awaiting the haymaker, protecting her ears from taking in more words.

  Her father was a black hole of fear, gravitationally collapsed, too terrible to look at.

  “They say we should go to the hospital.”

  No, no. We are too far down. We aren’t ready, Sasha thought.

  Ray’s parents stayed in their darkened room in the Brooklyn house. Every so often he heard a terrible keening sound from his mother and then silence again.

  Emma and Mattie had fallen asleep on the living room couches.<
br />
  A doctor at Brookhaven had provided a bottle of sleeping pills, and by that means he suspected his sisters had taken a route to temporary oblivion.

  How long had they been at the hospital that day? Late afternoon had passed into night, and still it had seemed so abrupt as to make him wonder if he’d imagined it. They’d gone to take care of Quinn and heal her. But by the time they got there it was too late. She was already gone. There was no one there to hold or comfort. There was no one to hold and comfort them. How could you, Quinn?

  It was just two mute halves of a damaged, disoriented family staring at each other across the abyss. How are we supposed to do without you?

  There were matters for the parents to settle. He wasn’t sure how or when those things happened. He gave sway to his confusion and didn’t dare try to get to the bottom of it. They went to find Quinn and she wasn’t there and wasn’t anywhere. What did you do then? You went home.

  He’d considered swallowing a pill or two himself. It was agony being conscious, but if he went under he’d have to wake up again and let the truth of what happened pounce on him in a weak and bleary state. He knew he needed to stay with the truth, keep a wary eye on it as long as he could.

  So, no, he would not sleep. He was far too agitated to sit down. He couldn’t be inside and he couldn’t be outside. He couldn’t be.

  He walked up and down Carroll Street, noticing the rain but not feeling it. An occasional flash of lightning woke him up and then woke him down again.

  He descended all the way to the stench of the Gowanus Canal before he realized where he needed to go, and then he walked up to the Atlantic Avenue station and caught the night’s last train bound for Montauk.

  He walked up and down the aisles. There seemed to be only a few people in each of the cars. Yes, he was annoying, but he couldn’t make his legs bend him into sitting.

  He sent a text from the train. It was hard to imagine that the words from his phone would go up into space and come down in her phone. But maybe they would. And maybe she was feeling as alone as he was.

  The town names were a strange childhood poem to his ears, but on this night they took on a ghastly aspect. Wantagh, Seaford, Amityville, Babylon, Islip, Speonk.

  His mind flashed on a story Quinn once told him about a skunk from Speonk. He could feel his face folding and he cried through the back three cars of the train. He wondered if Sasha knew that story.

  He pictured Sasha’s eyes meeting his across the waiting room at the hospital hours before. He couldn’t hold the picture for long.

  How could this be?

  He had the instinct not to see or do any more than was necessary, because every experience would mix with this night, this horror, and would be infected by proximity. And every experience tomorrow and tomorrow. And maybe every experience for the rest of his life would be poisoned by happening in the world without Quinn in it.

  He got off at East Hampton. The station was empty. There was one cab outside and the driver was asleep. He started to walk.

  The wind got stronger as he made his way south toward the ocean. After a while he couldn’t feel his feet anymore. He wondered if the numbness would climb all the way up his body.

  He promised himself to keep an eye on the truth, but it was hard. What if it wasn’t really her? What if she wasn’t really gone? What if she could still come to?

  What if he’d just imagined that it happened and some realer reality could come along and save them from this one?

  His mind kept rolling back time. What if she hadn’t gotten on her bike? What if she’d left a few minutes earlier or later? What if it hadn’t been raining? What if she’d taken a different way?

  What if the driver hadn’t been a fucking idiot? What if he hadn’t drunk margaritas at a garden party? The cops declared him under the legal limit, but still.

  What if she had fallen into the grass instead of the street? How could she have fallen onto the street?

  And then he had to get his eye back on the truth, because if it got away, if it crept behind him, it could take him down and maybe he wouldn’t be able to get up again.

  —

  Sasha didn’t tell her parents she was leaving. She’d had the idea even before she’d seen Ray’s words appear on the screen of her phone. She just snuck out. Not like her parents would notice at this hour, on this day.

  She couldn’t look at her dad again tonight. She was scared for him. He doesn’t know how to do a thing like this, she found herself thinking.

  Not that she did. But she knew she loved Quinn beyond reason. She understood that Quinn was their secret special magic. Quinn was the story and the storyteller. Without her they would just float around not making sense anymore. They would go empty. Their tanks might still feel full of her now, but they would drain quickly and without her they wouldn’t be filled again.

  In her grieving heart Sasha knew her father had yet to realize all that. He’d been caught up in pierced noses and Indian handloom, erratic hours and uneven grades. He mistook those things for what mattered. “Parents of teenagers and young adults get hung up on the absolute dumbest things,” she’d overheard a teacher say once, and she’d thought of it often. Her dad obsessed over Quinn’s nose to get a little distance, maybe. So he could try to love her a little less as she grew up and away from him.

  And now all there was left for him to do was fall and fall and fall, each collision a new trauma, while Sasha was already waiting for him at the bottom.

  She hurried down to the street and let herself out quietly. There was nothing of Quinn in this house. She had climbed the stairs and crept the halls, craving something, but there was nothing. Quinn had her own room here, but in the two years since Robert and Evie had bought the house, she had never slept in it. Quinn would have sooner slept in the park on a bench. She probably had. Quinn had eaten dinner in the dining room maybe a handful of times and never looked comfortable during one of them.

  Whatever was left of Quinn from their old apartment on Eighty-First Street had been replaced, reupholstered, upgraded. Sasha needed to hold on to what there was. Whatever smells and tastes and sounds still held some of her sister, she needed to absorb them before they released the last traces.

  The final Long Island Railroad train of the night had already left, so she took the car out of the garage. The attendant looked surprised, but asked no questions. She drove through the rainy streets like just what she was: a New York City girl who’d had her license for less than a year.

  Her father would have a heart attack if he knew what she was doing, but there was not much left to attack on either side.

  She more or less knew how to go. Maybe she’d planned this escape before. She tapped the destination into the navigation system. She’d done that for her dad on different trips. He had an unreliable sense of direction.

  She let it guide her over the Fifty-Ninth Street bridge. She couldn’t pass through the Midtown Tunnel again.

  She wasn’t wearing shoes, she realized. She must have taken off the mint-green dress at some point after they got back from the hospital and put on leggings and a flannel shirt, but she had no memory of doing it.

  It felt good to drive. Because she was poor at it, it soaked up most of her autonomic attention. There was hardly another car on the dreaded Montauk Highway.

  She was hell-bent on getting there, and as soon as she pulled into the driveway, she was overwhelmed by despair and had no idea what to do. She draped over the steering wheel and went boneless.

  When she got out she found the front door was locked, so she picked her way across the stones and followed them around to the back.

  —

  Ray heard a car pull in. His mind wasn’t working right, so it didn’t alarm him or interest him as it might have. It couldn’t be her. His entire being was clenched into a raisin at the base of his head. It didn’t possess curiosity or hope or conventional fear.

  He paced the grass. His legs were worn stumps barely connected to his torso. It occ
urred to him, vaguely, that he was still wearing his new shoes he’d gotten for the party and that they were tearing his feet to shreds. He felt dizzy pulling them off. His feet were blistered beyond feeling. His toenails would invariably turn black and fall off. He didn’t mind that so much. Mainly he just couldn’t stop moving, because then and if and if and then. He didn’t know if he could keep going, but if he collapsed then the truth would get its chance to sneak up when he wasn’t ready. He knew it would.

  He trudged down to the bank of the pond and cooled his feet. He picked up a flat, mossy stone and threw it as far as he could. That felt all right. He picked up another and then another. His arm was so loose in the joint he half expected it would detach from his body and fly into the pond too.

  A time to cast away stones.

  What was that from? From the Bible. He’d heard it at a funeral. His grandfather Harrison’s funeral.

  He threw another. He threw it so hard he imagined it soaring all the way across and pinging the house on the other side. He heard it plunk in the water like the others.

  —

  Even in the dark Sasha saw the shapes of ruin all around the patio. She hadn’t forgotten, but it had gotten buried under a thick layer of ash. The memories started like an orchestra tuning up. They didn’t turn into music but got uglier and more cacophonous.

  She stumbled over a wineglass. She picked up the two pieces and stared at them. And then she threw them down into a hundred pieces. She took a deep breath.

  Next in her path was a white china plate. She picked that up and threw it too, flat down with two hands for a sparkling blast. Another plate winked at her like a big white eye. She picked it up and smashed it. Glass bits bounced off her legs. She took a step and some of those same glass bits burrowed into her bare feet. The plates were at her mercy, her feet at theirs.

  She was ready. What else?

  Ray heard the shattering of glass in the direction of the house. He heard more. His legs drew him up the hill toward the sounds.

  The raisin inside his skull was not curious or conventionally afraid or capable of surprise. Was it her? It took him a few seconds to arrange the facts. Sasha, sum to his zero, was here at this house in the dark and she was beating the shit out of the china. The raisin was capable of enthrallment.