The Whole Thing Together

by Ann Brashares

  It made so much sense. It was the only thing there was to do. He stumped over to the patio and picked up the first plate he saw. He threw it down with a thrilling vengeance. Shards flew so high he felt them ding his forehead.

  Sasha froze, cake plate in hand. She stared at him. He stared at her. By the faint solar lights he took her in from fierce face down to bare white feet.

  A proud acknowledgment passed between them. His agony rose and reached out for hers. The set of her chin showed signs of struggle. His own face started to fold. He couldn’t let it go yet.

  He smashed another plate instead. She let loose a lemonade pitcher against the house like she was Clayton Kershaw. They moved around each other in a strange ballet of demolition, conversing in crashes.

  The sun finally peered up from under the horizon and saw what they had done. They stopped. The rain was over. Everything that had been whole was broken.

  Wordlessly she found the big trash bags in the pool house. He got the heavy-duty broom and went about sweeping like a man possessed. By the first sun he’d seen the blood all over the patio from their feet, and he couldn’t bear to watch her walk on it anymore.

  For the next stretch of time the ballet continued, silently, in reverse. Piles of broken glass, chunks of lobster, sodden paper goods went into heavy lawn bags. Tables and chairs turned back upright. With the hose on full he washed away the rest of the blood and the food.

  Together they stacked the bags neatly in the garbage shed. He admired her work ethic as he had done many times at the Black Horse Market.

  He followed her across the grass to the little rise overlooking the pond under Quinn’s favorite linden tree. You could still see remnants of her old tree fort if you looked up at the right angle.

  She stopped and so did he. Even though he was only a raisin he found himself taking her hands. Courageously she looked up at him and then he was lost. He saw the grief in her face and he couldn’t hold back any longer. Her face crumbled and so did his. His anguish came out so raw he didn’t want her to see.

  He lost his legs and found himself kneeling on the ground. She put her arms around him, buried his head in her chest. He held her waist and wept.

  At some point she got down and they eased onto the grass. They lay there holding on to each other for a long time. Her sobs made a counterpoint to his.

  Eventually they both got quiet. She turned over and he felt her heart beating under his hands. Her lovely body curled against his. He pressed his face into her neck, just behind her ear. That smell, her safe, soft smell, which he’d only gotten in faint, secondhand doses and yearned for year after year, now passed into and around him, shrouding him in mercy.

  He let consciousness scatter and muscles go. The truth could sneak up and clout him, even fatally, upon waking, but he would be here with her.

  —

  Sasha’s eyes opened. She surfaced out of sleep carefully, slowly, knowing to fear what she would find when she broke through.

  Her head was on the grass. Ray’s arms were around her, his face against her neck. This was Ray. She could tell by his heaviness he was still asleep. She kept very still. She took inventory of his parts and hers. Her feet were wound through his calves and they burned.

  Slowly, carefully, she connected the pieces that had brought them here. She didn’t let the coldest fact get to her in words right away. But the feelings she couldn’t keep away. Her eyes filled and spilled over again and again. She tried to keep very still. Tears dripped over the bridge of her nose down into the grass. She tried not to shake.

  The sun was halfway up the sky and birds were growing rowdy. Her parents would be panicked. In the frankness of morning she knew she couldn’t add to their pain.

  Very gently she rotated her body to face Ray’s. He stirred in sleep and pulled her closer. She hugged him tenderly and hard. She tried to memorize him.

  She dared lay a kiss on his jaw, another next to his ear. “I’m sorry I have to go,” she whispered as she extricated her limbs from his.

  “Please,” he murmured, and so she held him patiently through the gauntlet of waking up.

  Later he was a bit awkward getting to his feet. He wanted to walk her to her car. They both hobbled. They didn’t try to talk about anything, which was a relief.

  He watched her pull out of the driveway. He brushed at his eyes.

  She felt a cord that stretched between them pulling taut. She left him there, hands in his pockets, hair going in all directions.

  The cord stretched and stretched, until it vibrated like a banjo string as she drove on. It pulled hard on her heart, but it did not snap.

  “I can’t get married anymore.”

  Emma had been ruminating over it through her many hours of half sleep, going in and out of consciousness, in and out of dreams with no shape and days with no time. There was something she and Jamie had been trying to protect, trying desperately to hold on to, but she couldn’t do it anymore. She couldn’t even remember what it was.

  She’d told Jamie not to come over, and he waited a few days. He sent groceries from Fresh Direct. He sent a giant box of fruit from Dean & Deluca. Then finally he sent himself. He held her on the couch in the living room of the house on Carroll Street.

  “We don’t have to think about that,” he said to her.

  “I don’t want to see you for a while. I just want to stay home and lie in my bed.”

  “Okay. I understand.”

  “I don’t want to think about the future or anyone in it.”

  “Okay.”

  He was holding her closer than ever and it felt good. But it also felt confusing and forward-leaning and reminded her of things she didn’t want to have to think about.

  “That means you untangling from me and leaving,” she said.

  “Right now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I come tomorrow?”

  “No.”

  “Next week?”

  “No. I don’t know. I can’t think about it. I don’t want to make any decisions. I just know I need a break and I need you to listen to me.”

  “Okay.” He put his forehead against her cheek. “I don’t want to but I will.”

  “Thanks.”

  “The thing that’s hard is that my mind is here with you all the time. I want to help.”

  “I know, but you can’t right now.”

  He sighed. “Okay. I’ll stay away until you’re ready for me to come back.”

  “That’s good.”

  “In the meantime will you promise to call if there’s anything you need? If there’s anything I can do? Anything at all, no matter how big or small.”

  “I promise I will.”

  “Okay.”

  “So now you have to take your arms away,” she said. She was crying again and so was he.

  “All right. I will.” He did. “Em?”

  “What?” she asked. He wasn’t moving.

  “You have to take your arms from around me too.”

  —

  In and out of her long hours and days of dreaming, Emma thought about the tiny apple tree given to her father by her mother on the last birthday he had while they were still married. It was late October, so they left it in its box in the shed for the winter, to plant in the spring.

  But sometime after that was when things started coming apart between her parents. Spring and summer came and went and nobody opened the box. It just sat month after month. “Well, it’s long dead by now,” her father said when another winter passed, but she noticed he didn’t throw it away.

  Emma was probably five or six at the time. She imagined how her mother felt each time she went for a rake or shovel and saw the tall skinny brown box unopened. It was another bitter stalemate between her parents with another innocent victim languishing inside.

  Quinn was the one who finally dragged the box out of the shed. Emma helped her open it. They both shut their eyes, scared to see the sad remains. The sapling did look scraggly and hopeless, but Quinn wo
uldn’t let them throw it away. She got Adam to help dig a hole at the edge of the woods. They undid the roots very carefully and put it in the ground, even though they knew it was dead.

  Are we planting or burying? she remembered asking Quinn.

  Same thing, Quinn said, and she sat with the little scrap of tree for hours and talked to it.

  Maybe it was then that Quinn embarked on her peculiar belief system about growing. Every day they ran out to check on the small tree first thing and last thing.

  Within six days two tiny green tendrils pushed out of the ends of two skinny brown twigs. She remembered the damp quiet of the morning air, the sound of their breathing, hers and Quinn’s, the wonder. The next day there were more. By the end of the second week pale green leaves sprouted from every dry brown stick.

  After a month they brought their father out, each holding a hand. “That’s not the old bare root apple tree,” he said.

  They nodded solemnly.

  “Can’t be.”

  “It is.”

  He walked away from it shaking his head, chalking it up to some childhood vagueness.

  At the end of the summer Lila saw it too. “Your father finally planted it?”

  Emma looked at Quinn, half frozen, and Quinn nodded faintly. It was the only wisp of a lie she’d ever known Quinn to tell.

  —

  Several times a day for several days in a row Emma walked down the dark hall and listened attentively at her mother’s door. Sometimes the sobs scared her away. Sometimes the silence scared her more. Today she heard a sigh, and it sounded like an invitation.

  “Mom?” She pushed the door open a little of the way.

  “Emma?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come in.”

  Her mother sat up in bed. The shades were pulled down, but not the whole way down today. Lila wore a faded T-shirt and yoga pants. Her blond hair was going in the direction of dreadlocks.

  Emma got in bed next to her. “Can I rub your back?” It was what Lila always said to them—when they slept late and she crawled in, when they stayed home sick from school.

  “Okay,” Lila said, and turned onto her stomach, her arms pinned under her.

  Emma glided her hand back and forth, using her mother’s most comforting technique.

  “What’s it like out in the world?” her mom asked faintly.

  “Same as it was. Mostly. For other people. Less than it was for us.”

  Lila nodded into her pillow. “It will always be less. But will it be something?”

  “It will be something.”

  “She was so easy to love. I took her for granted.”

  “We all did.” Emma began to cry.

  “She was the reason I became a midwife, you know.”

  “I know,” Emma said.

  “She was born in my bed. In this very bed. Can you believe that?”

  Emma knew these stories, but she could sense it gave her mother solace to tell them again.

  “There was an amazing, beautiful snowstorm the night she was born. Your father was desperately trying to shovel out the car. He wanted to call an ambulance, but I told him no. What could be less conducive to labor than an ambulance?”

  Emma didn’t know.

  “So instead he found Monica, who lived on Union Street at the time.”

  Emma knew this was the Monica who also delivered Mattie and Ray, and became Lila’s mentor and eventually her partner.

  “Quinn was born in her caul. It was like a shimmering veil over her head and face. Monica had never seen a caulbearer with her own eyes before. She said it was a sign.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of a special destiny.”

  “It was.”

  “It was.”

  Lila’s breathing got slower. They lay together for a long time in silence until she thought her mother might be sleeping.

  “How is Jamie?” Lila asked softly. She wasn’t sleeping.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in a while.”

  “Because of me?”

  “Because of everything.”

  Lila turned back over so she could face her. “You really love him, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can tell.”

  “I wish you’d noticed that before.”

  “Let me tell you, so do I.” Lila closed her eyes. Tears spilled out of them, onto the sheets.

  Emma propped her head up on her elbow. “Yesterday I said to Mattie, ‘I like myself better when I’m with him.’ And you know what Mattie said?”

  Lila shook her head.

  “She said, ‘I like you better when you’re with him too.’ ”

  Lila smiled the ghost of a smile.

  “It’s true. I admit I am a softer, calmer person when he’s around.”

  “You should tell him that. You need to be with him.”

  Emma sighed. “That’s a little funny, coming from you.”

  Lila propped her head up too. “God, I know.” The tears resumed. “I recant. I regret. So many things. Day after day I lie here and that’s what I do.”

  There was so much in those words, feelings just laid bare, that Emma started to cry too. Her mother wasn’t even trying to protect herself anymore. “Oh, Mom.”

  “I know, sweetheart. I know.” Lila patted Emma’s hair, smoothed it back from her face.

  It was what Emma wanted, for her mother to finally lay down arms, but in another way, it was scarier still.

  “I’m sure you don’t need to go to work,” Ray’s mother told him as he came into the kitchen of the Wainscott house, finally shaved and wearing something other than his Batman pajama pants. He knew Lila wanted to keep holding on to them for as long as she could.

  “I know, but I want to. Emma went. Mattie went.”

  “They’re crazy,” Lila said.

  They’d spent nine days in a dark house in Brooklyn before his mother could face going to Wainscott. There had been calls, letters, flowers, food deliveries, and a few visitors, including George Riggs, who’d briefly stopped in from California to pay respects. Then they’d spent four days in a bright house in Wainscott, during which Lila left the house exactly once: to visit Myrna. It was a brave act and made such a sad picture in Ray’s mind he couldn’t even ask how she was.

  Now it was Monday, ten in the morning, the first day and hour to rise out of the murk. He needed to get away from his parents.

  “They need to do something. I do too. I need a change of scenery and something to do with my hands.”

  At work, Francis and the others offered awkward condolences. It seemed like no one around town could quite look at him, like they were unsure how to confront a sadness of that size.

  Ray was listless in the stockroom. He smoked a cigarette by the dumpsters with Julio. It was awful and probably the best part of his day.

  Eventually he got home and made it upstairs without talking to anyone. He held his breath as he opened the door to his room. Every time he walked in he smelled her smell and felt her presence.

  I don’t know what to do, he told her silently.

  There was a pitiless yearning in his heart. A constant ache. It came in waves, and some were unbearable. So black and mysterious were the events of August 9, he’d begun to doubt they had actually happened. He only knew Quinn was gone and so was Sasha.

  He couldn’t distinguish the missing Quinn from the missing Sasha, but it felt slightly more hopeful to miss Sasha. He couldn’t distinguish between his pain and Sasha’s. It was the same pain, the same loss. Thinking of her both compounded it and offered a strange comfort.

  He turned on the shower. He got in and turned it hot, preferring the thick steam and the sting of it on his back.

  He thought of Sasha in the shower. He thought of Sasha everywhere. Her hands turned this same stubborn cold knob. Her torn-up toes stood on the same slippery ceramic as his torn-up toes. He had a lot of complicated feelings. A few unbidden ones were admittedly lustful, but not all.

 
; He sensed they were both prisoners: of their grief and of their families and of their families’ grief. He guessed she, like he, had parents who could not let her out of their sight. He wondered about guilt sometimes too. He got out and stood in front of the mirror. This mirror got to see Sasha; why not him?

  He reached out his index finger and wrote words in the condensation. He opened the door to the cool air of their bedroom and watched the words disappear.

  —

  The sky had turned an eerie yellow color over the Reeses’ farm and the wind kept changing direction. Mattie had already moved all the produce and baskets under the shelter of the awnings.

  “Do you want me to put everything into the storeroom for tonight?” she called to Matthew.

  Matthew was hurrying from the barn with two giant rolls of tarp. He had an anxious look on his face.

  She fell into step with him. “What’s going on? It feels like a big storm, doesn’t it?”

  His face was still cloaked. They could still barely look at each other. “Supposed to be hail. Which is a fucking disaster.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to cover everything I can.”

  “By yourself?”

  He threw the two rolls down by the pumpkin patch.

  Mattie knew Matthew wasn’t older than Emma—they were born the same month, in fact. She’d seen the picture of the two tired mommies with their two fat babies. Lila once said Carly stayed around long enough to sit for that picture and not much longer. But sometimes Matthew looked like he was forty years old, if not a hundred, and that made her sad.

  She knew he was alone. Patsy and lame Dana had already left for the summer.

  Mattie remembered a night a few years before when Quinn hadn’t come home from the farm. Dinner came and went. It was past midnight and her father was pacing the floors when she finally came back from the Reeses’, soaked and exhilarated, telling the story of what you do on a truck farm in the case of hail.

  “Can I help?” Mattie asked.

  “You weren’t supposed to come at all today,” Matthew said.