The Whole Thing Together

by Ann Brashares

  She knew Matthew had been trying to protect her in her grief. It was Mrs. Reese who’d called and asked her to come to work. Mrs. Reese didn’t say it, but Mattie knew he was knocked back too. He was struggling badly. They all were.

  “I don’t mind.”

  He was shaking his head, walking back to the barn. “It’s heavy, messy, endless work.”

  She kept following him. Please don’t let me off easy for once. She trailed him back to the barn to get more sheeting and back out to the orchard. “I know I’m not Quinn,” she said in a wavery voice.

  He stopped finally and turned to her. She didn’t know his face was capable of such open despair. He nodded. “You can help if you want,” he said.

  Mattie just kept following him around for the first part, trying to get the idea of it. She might have been annoying, she recognized, but she might have been more annoying pelting him with a hundred questions. She carefully watched him cover and stake the first row of melons. He let her help on the second. On the third he let her do one side and end while he did the others.

  The rain began teasingly. It started as warm slaps and quickly got cold. On the next run to the barn he brought her a jacket that smelled like him. As she pulled it on he looked skeptically at her feet. Metallic flip-flops and aqua-blue toenails. “What size?”

  This was a figure she had never spoken aloud since she was fourteen. Not to her friends, not to her sisters, not even to her mother, and certainly not to the most handsome young man she ever knew. She looked up at the sky. What was there to fear when the worst things happened anyway? “Eleven.”

  “Awesome,” he said in perfect sincerity, running back to the barn again. “You can take a pair of mine.”

  Mattie kept her head down and worked. Her arms ached and her feet hurt. The skin of her hands was raw. Under that lurked a pain somewhere deeper than her muscles, and it was caused by all the preening she’d done among the zinnias and the blueberries for the last four summers, being delightful at the front where the customers came.

  She posed at a job, posed at earning money, battled it out with stupid Dana for who could dress cuter and flirt more. I hate myself. No wonder Matthew shook his head and walked the other way. This was Matthew’s life work, his family’s work, his livelihood. She suffered a visceral self-chastisement, a long-overdue reorientation, as she worked beside him.

  When he was ready to trust her with the low crops, he ran to the orchard. She sensed he was most worried about that.

  The rain came hard and turned the ground to mud. She slid from row to row, twice falling so extravagantly she splatted in mud up to her forehead. It was a small farm, she knew, but God, it felt big tonight. Eggplants, cauliflowers, sweet corn, cucumbers, summer squash. Quinn’s tender babies, nurtured by Quinn’s mystical hands, now helpless and crouching under the fast-moving sky. Mattie’s heart went out to them, and to herself a little too. We miss you. We need you. How could you leave us?

  She had become Matthew’s shadow, his alter ego, his twin in a matching coat and work boots, racing back and forth between the barn and the fields. Row after row after row: grape tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, blueberries, blackberries, more melons. Pushing in the stakes to secure the covers got harder as the ground got softer.

  There were still four rows of blueberry bushes in front of her. She felt a frenzied, desperate energy powering a deep concentration. She had no sense of time anymore. She couldn’t bear the idea of a single berry, a single stalk going unprotected. She could go faster, and she did. The wild inefficiency of her regular mind gathered behind one simple purpose.

  She began to doubt the ice would come and then the ice came. Just little pits and sparks whizzing by at first, almost playful. The next time Matthew ran out of the barn he carried a bicycle helmet and he thrust it at her.

  “Seriously?” she said. It was just as well he didn’t hear her. She buckled the strap under her chin.

  Oh, if Dana could see her now.

  She couldn’t feel her body anymore. Just the plastic cover stretching under her fingers. She resented the sharp little pings of ice. How would that feel to a blueberry?

  When she couldn’t finish the last row she stopped and huddled three young bushes under her body and waited. She was so intense she scared herself a little, but that self and this new blueberry-mother were wide apart.

  I don’t know who I am anymore, she’d said to Matthew. Were truer words ever spoken? The sound of ice clumps falling from the sky thunking against a borrowed bicycle helmet in the middle of a field, with mud up to her eyebrows and her body stretched over blueberry bushes, was a novelty indeed.

  Matthew found Mattie there sometime later. “I think the worst of it is over,” he said cautiously.

  She nodded, untangled herself from the bushes, straightened her helmet. She tried not to weave or stagger as she walked toward him. You couldn’t cede your dignity altogether.

  “Are you okay?”

  She nodded.

  He looked over the fields with a look approaching disbelief. “You did an unbelievable job.”

  She started to shiver.

  “I don’t even know what to say.”

  She nodded again.

  “If I’d had two of myself tonight I wouldn’t have done it as well.”

  She shrugged. With shaking hands she took off the helmet. It was hard to make any words come. She finally got hold of some and forced them out. “Y-you didn’t know I could do it.”

  His whole face opened again and he looked no older than the twenty-two years he was. He covered the few feet between them in one large step and put both of his arms around her. He held her shivering body and buried his tired face in her hair. “I didn’t know you at all.”

  It was hard to come back here. They all felt it.

  It had been almost three weeks. After the first frantic night, Sasha had promised her parents she would stay put, and she had.

  Summer was over. Lila and her family had already come back here the week before. So that was maybe why they needed to do it too.

  Her dad slumped around the edges of rooms like an extra in a movie. His posture had changed since it happened. He said his body didn’t digest food right anymore. His stomach wasn’t at all fat now. It was the vacuum into which the other parts of him began to sink.

  Evie was as nervous as an insect. “He’ll get through this. We all will,” she tended to say nervously, which tended to make Sasha fear the opposite.

  The only structure holding up their lives was the family memorial they planned for late September.

  Early that morning Sasha had overheard her father trying to arrange the details with Evie over his untouched oatmeal, as though it could be just them doing it. And suddenly zing, through the muck of Sasha’s mind, sliced the sharp imperative: haven’t we gotten anywhere?

  Sasha pulled to a stop in front of the kitchen table. “You have to call Lila and plan it with her,” she told him.

  He looked up at her in confusion. No fight left, just the dust still swirling after defeat.

  Later that morning, as her father walked the edges of rooms, she saw a gradual dawning in him. At noon she overheard her father’s hushed phone conversation with Lila. Sasha listened for bitterness and recrimination in his voice, but he just sounded tired. Together they agreed on the particulars.

  It was hard for Sasha to walk into her bedroom and confusing to stay there.

  Ray had tried to make the bed. It was almost certainly the first time in their joint tenancy he had done that. Rusty smile muscles worked at her mouth. The bed looked like the work of a five-year-old.

  She was scared to think about him. She was scared to remember the feeling of their bodies curled together for those few hours of sleep on the grass. Because what if it was the fruit of a bargain she hadn’t meant to make? What if she’d unknowingly traded her greatest dread for her oldest wish?

  Her cheap, stunted, nonmystical religion required that she offer up her happiness in return for a little le
ss disappointment, a little less fear. Suffering was how you put money in the karmic bank. There were always more bills to be paid. No joy was allowed to come out of this.

  But Quinn had a different religion. A brave and expansive one. Don’t be scared of the pain, she would have said. Don’t avoid the ways you feel. Don’t bargain away your happiness. Let joy come out of this.

  Sasha now sat gingerly on the bed, their bed, breathing deep late-summer air, feeling Quinn’s presence and allowing thoughts of him to come. “I wish we didn’t keep dividing,” Quinn had said to her the day of the accident. She wouldn’t let Quinn’s death be another reason to divide.

  Sasha went into the bathroom. Sometimes a shower made her thoughts go straight. Sometimes a shower gave her a new look at the day.

  She turned on the faucets and let the water get hot. She was stepping into the shower when she saw the words magically appear out of steam on the mirror:

  I WISH I COULD SEE YOU

  —

  “How does Jamie seem?” Emma asked not long after she arrived in Wainscott late in the week. She didn’t want to ask, but she had to. She couldn’t help it.

  Her father was sitting by the pool dangling his feet in the cold water, his pants rolled up. He didn’t seem to notice anymore that it was full of leaves and frogs. He cocked his head at her. “Why do you ask me?”

  So he wasn’t going to make it easy. “Because I know you went to the office for a few hours on Wednesday. Evie told me.”

  He patted the space next to him for her to sit, and she sat. “I did go to the office, but I didn’t see him, because he doesn’t work there anymore. I thought you would know that.”

  She turned to him, eyes wide. “I didn’t know that. I haven’t talked to him in a few weeks. We’re taking a break…because…after everything…” Her simple goal of the day was to get through without crying and she’d only made it to four p.m.

  Her dad put his arm around her. “Oh, my dear. I understand. Of course I do.”

  She wiped her nose flagrantly on her sleeve. “When did he leave? Did he say why?”

  “He gave notice last Friday. He gave a respectable explanation to the partners. To me personally he called and explained it would be easier for the two of you. He never wanted you to think his job compromised his commitment to you.”

  “He said that? We’re not even together.”

  “Exactly. That’s why I was surprised before.”

  She nodded and sighed. “I don’t think he’s thinking of our break as a breakup.”

  “Are you?”

  She shook her head. “No. He’s in my mind all day. I miss him terribly. I just don’t think I can be with anybody right now.”

  “I understand,” he said again, and his voice was heavy with emotion. He took a few breaths. He kicked up the water and watched the drops fall. “I have a feeling he’ll be patient.”

  “He says so.”

  “He was absolutely decent about it, as you would expect.”

  She smiled. She leaned her head against his shoulder. Sometimes she and her father had their best conversations when they were sideways.

  “I said I hoped he knew I didn’t hold him responsible in any way for the unpleasantness at that party. You know I had already apologized personally to him and to his parents.”

  Emma was reminded that she hadn’t been able to bring herself to open the thick cream-colored envelope that held the letter of condolence from Jamie’s parents.

  The way her dad spoke, it occurred to Emma that they were jointly rewriting that day. In light of the real tragedy that had followed, the engagement party had begun to feel like farce to them.

  Emma nodded again. “What did he say?”

  “He said he understood and accepted my words in their most generous spirit. He said he bore no ill will, only compassion, and he wasn’t leaving the firm because of the past, but because he wanted a clean slate for his future with you.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “And what did you say?”

  He shrugged. “What could I say? I said to him, and I quote: ‘You are a good man, James Hurn, and you are right to love my daughter more than this job, because she is infinitely more important than it will ever be.’ ”

  —

  Ray decided he had to talk to his mother.

  He found her sitting at the table of the small cluttered Brooklyn kitchen in front of a mug of tea. Out the back window she watched Hank, the downstairs tenant, watering the garden.

  When he sat down across from her Lila gave him a wan and distracted smile.

  “Hey, Mom?”

  “Yeah, sweetie.” Her face was white these days.

  “You know how you were saying to Adam that the memorial is happening on our weekend and should we offer Robert to stay in the house Friday night and we’ll stay Saturday?” He needed to say it pretty fast to get it out.

  “Yes.”

  “Well.” He took a breath. “I think that’s the wrong way to think about it.”

  She put her hands around her mug. She tipped her head. “What do you mean?”

  He bounced his heels. He was always fidgety at this table. “The house belongs to all of us. I think we should share it.”

  She nodded slowly. “I know. I agree. That’s what I was saying.”

  “No, but not the regular way, like you take Friday, we’ll take Saturday, but like actually share it.”

  His mother stared at him. Her expression wasn’t so much defensive or disagreeable, but more like a computer that didn’t quite understand her programming.

  “Like we could all stay there together for the weekend,” he explained.

  Lila’s computer was still not computing.

  “You know, like all of us staying in the house at the same time.”

  Suddenly her circuits came to life, pinging and zapping. “Stay in the house together? At the same time?”

  “Yes.”

  “But—”

  “What?”

  Her eyes were getting a little frantic. “I don’t—”

  “Mom, there’s plenty of space. It’s not like you don’t all have the privacy of your own bedrooms and bathrooms. It’s a big house. And I’m not suggesting a permanent change or anything. Just for this one time.” He let Quinn’s image come to him, but only in flashes. “I think it would befit the occasion. I really do.”

  Lila raised both hands on her face. She still couldn’t make full sense of it. But he could see she was trying. She was beginning to grasp the idea underlying it. She looked out the window. Hank had finished with the hose.

  Her eyes were full when she turned back to him. “But do you think—” Her voice came out a little shaky. “Robert and Evie—”

  “I think you should call Robert and suggest the idea.”

  Lila considered this, her wet eyes large and unfocused. Her circuit board emitted one last fizzle. “Where would Sasha sleep?”

  —

  Ray finally wrote to Sasha.

  I don’t know what to say. It’s too hard a world.

  I just want to make sure you are still in it.

  I am still here. I’m pretty sure.

  I bought us a new kalanchoe plant. You don’t have to water it or anything. I got it because it has the exact same little orange flowers our old one had.

  Sasha thought for a long time about what to say.

  I wish I could see you too.

  —

  Same bikini. Same blond hair. Same big feet. Same Ditch Plains. But nonetheless, Mattie knew it was all different this time.

  Jonathan Dawes was surprised to see her. He dropped his board instantly, excused himself from his conversation with another grizzled surfer. He came over and hugged her.

  “I am so sorry, Mattie.”

  “I know. Thank you. Thank you for the note you sent.”

  He’d written her three lovely pages of his old memories of Quinn, wild little sprite, and she’d wept over each of them.

  He nodded. “How are you doing?”


  After everything that had passed between them, she wanted to answer honestly and not just say fine. “At first it was pure sadness. Now it’s more like I’m…uncomfortable…a lot of the time. But that’s not always a bad thing.”

  He touched her hand. “Wise girl you are. How is your mom?”

  Mattie let out her breath. “I think she’s starting to come back to life. A little.”

  His face twisted with empathy. “I can’t even begin to imagine.”

  “She was in her room for a long time. Yesterday morning she made us breakfast.”

  “Green shoots,” he said.

  “I hope so,” she replied. “None of us will ever be how we were.”

  “I know.”

  “I miss her all the time.” Her eyes began their daily quotient of leaking. She realized she trusted him. He’d told her the truth. She would keep telling him the truth.

  He looked like he was going to cry too. He was quiet for a while, but his face was moving, trying to formulate thoughts. “I’ve worried so many times I did the wrong thing, telling you about what happened back then…and then when Quinn…If I’ve added to your burden I am sorry for it.”

  She kicked the sand around with her large foot. “No.” She felt the warmth of the sun on top of her head. “Don’t be sorry for it.”

  She’d asked herself: Was it wrong? Was she angry at him for it? It wasn’t. She wasn’t.

  “It wasn’t wrong,” she said. She looked at him carefully. “I’m grateful to you for taking me seriously enough to tell me the truth and for…waking me up, I guess. It’s made me rethink some ways I am—some ways we are—that weren’t doing me or any of us much good….” She took a breath. “It’s hard to explain.”

  He nodded.

  She took another big breath. “I also wanted to say that in spite of everything I know now, and for all his faults, I already have a father.”

  He nodded again. He sort of tipped his head. “I already have a daughter.”

  She glanced up. “You do?”

  “Yes, her name is Julia. From my first marriage. She’s twenty-seven and she lives in LA. I think you’d like her.”

  “Wow.” Another potential sister, partial sister. How very strange. And strangely liberating. She’d imagined emptiness and regret for him, but Jonathan Dawes had that base covered before she was even born. “I’d like to meet her sometime.”