Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (12 page)

� 105 � Ann Brashares

In some sense, she was never really anywhere. She was happiest, Paul suspected, in transit, where the past was untouchable and the present negligible. And she would be, he guessed, for as long as she kept believing that the future would be better.

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"Paulo, they are such assholes."

He should've called it a night after the first bottle. He should've.

He couldn't now remember whether she was talking about her most recent boyfriends, his grandparents, or the staff of a hotel where she'd recently stayed. It could have been any of them. It could have been anyone in the world.

Except his father. His father was the only one permanently excluded from Lia's roster of assholes. Maybe it took dying to exempt yourself.

It used to be that she 'd speak in English until she got really angry or really drunk and then switch to Italian. Now it was reversed. He wondered if she knew that about herself.

"I mean, Paulo, you don't know. You have no idea! None! Why do they never do what they say?"

He shook his head. He didn't know.

"Assholes," she spat.

How he minded her weaknesses: her brittleness, her anger, her haughtiness, her grudging memory, her fear. Her tendency to drink too much wine. He recognized them too well.

"Paulo, I think of your father. He would not do these things. He was a good man and he loved me."

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Paul suddenly knew her tears were going to come. Her angry drunk changed into sad drunk in a predictable way. But he never really prepared himself. Even if he could have, he didn't.

"I just--I just wish--"

"I know, Mama," he said.

"If he just could have--"

"I know."

"In this house, you know. I think of him."

"I do, too."

"We were happy then. We had each other and you. And we didn't care about the other things. Do you even remember?"

"Some of it," he said. The overlay of what he'd been told was so heavy it nearly suffocated his few little sprouts of real memory.

He wondered the same things again and again, but they weren't questions he liked to follow around the corner. If we were so happy then, why did it end? What happened to him? How could he let it happen?

And he wondered of his mother, If you were so good at being happy once, why have you never been happy since?

As a child, Paul believed what he was told. But he also believed what he saw. He couldn't help it. And what did a person--a child--do when the two things did not fit together?

His mother lay back on the couch, her chin squashed into her neck at a graceless angle. Tears gathered in her eyes and flowed down her face as the black eye makeup flowed with them. Her lip stick smeared and feathered at the edges. Her face looked tired, slack, and old. Her nose ran, but she had not the self-possession to stop it. She would fall asleep here on the couch. At some point, in a

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stupor, she would bring the television to life and he would have to listen to it all night.

"Why did she let him do it?" Paul had once asked Judy, when he'd begun to grapple with the idea of his father's drug addiction.

"I think she was doing it, too," Judy had answered.

He hated when Lia got like this, though he knew she would. He felt disgusted by her and ashamed of her. And ashamed of his own disgust.

Worst of all, he felt responsible. He could take care of her bet ter. What would his father have to say?

He tried to feel sorry for her. It seemed like the generous thing. He knew she was a victim. She was widowed at twenty-nine, hated and rejected by her late husband's family. She had no family, no real support of her own. Yet he couldn't do it. He saw her as a per son who brought her troubles on herself. Maybe if she had been less adept at feeling sorry for herself, he could have done a better job. But as it was, there were no gaps to fill.

Lia didn't have to spend all that money. Paul didn't care about the money itself, whether it came or went, but he hated the way she wore it and drove it and drank it and flaunted it. He hated the pro portion of it that went to spas and suites and jet fare.

Paul's father hailed from an extraordinarily rich family, and the fact that Lia had ended up with millions of dollars drove Paul's grandparents half mad. They spent the waning energies of their lives trying to take it from her. They stuffed as much as they could in large trusts for Paul. But what had belonged to Robbie during his lifetime--a significant pile of money landed on him when his last grandparent died in 1980--belonged to Lia when Robbie died.

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Paul's grandparents sent whole corps of lawyers into battle with the most severe instructions. And Lia fought back by spending.

Partly it disturbed him for the sheer hostile waste of it, but also because he took it as a betrayal of his father. His father was an ide alist, misguided though he may have been. He was a free spirit--or as free a spirit as you could be coming out of St. Paul's. Robbie hated the culture of money and the money itself. He embraced underdogs, starving artists, and hopeless causes. He'd never sup ported a political candidate who'd been elected. He wore the same sandals every day, winter, spring, summer, and fall.

Paul knew most of these things from Ethan, not from his mother, but he remembered the sandals himself. In the full anger of his adolescence, he'd confronted his mother with these and other grievances. He didn't try anymore.

Anyway, what was to be done? The money was what Lia had. The money and Paul. And though the money was more obedient than Paul, she managed to use both in the fight against his grand parents.

Lia snored. Paul took the glass from her hand and brought it to the kitchen. Blearily, he found a blanket and put it over her. What a sorry pair they were.

It shouldn't have been disappointing. He knew how it was with her. But his capacity for hope, like hers, was irrational and unend ing. That's what it was to be a son. If he resigned himself to the truth, he wouldn't belong to her at all anymore.

� 109 � Nine

La Bella

P aul left the house with his mother sleeping in front of the

television and passed through the phragmites soon after dawn. He could pretend to himself that there was no premedita tion, but he also knew that Riley left for her shift just before six. It was a reckless sort of premeditation even so, as he let himself in through the screen door in the kitchen and walked up the stairs. He didn't know what he would do when he got to Alice's bedroom, but neither did he stop long enough to make up his mind. He opened her door and went in, knowing he had no right to.

"You don't own me," she had said to him once when she was about twelve. She was climbing onto a motorboat with a friend whose father, the driver, was visibly drunk, and Paul had forbid den her to go.

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"I never said I did," he'd snapped at her sternly. But as she'd walked away from the boat, neither of them believed themselves.

She was sleeping. Her hair pointed in a hundred directions and her face was turned away. She'd kicked off half her covers, giving him a long view of her left leg.

La bella. He didn't want his mother to see her.

He sat on the edge of her bed and she slept on. It was lonely when she was mad at him. He was miserable.

"I'm sorry," he leaned and whispered in her ear. He could still smell the wine in his breath. He touched the tip of a strand of her hair. "I know what you meant," he said. "I don't know why I acted like I didn't."

He needed the feel of her, just like when he was a child. What would she do? He couldn't say what he wanted or what he was prepared to offer. But he loved her. Could he tell her that? It was simple to love her and simpler still not to have to acknowl edge it.

Even after all he'd done, he trusted her to be kind. He crawled onto her bed and flattened himself out next to her. He pulled the sheet over top the two of them. Very carefully, he scooted closer to feel her warmth. Tentatively, he put his arm around her waist, barely touching her but yearning for the feeling of embrace. He nearly groaned aloud when her leg came around his. She was warm from the covers and from being a good person, he supposed. He wanted to put his face into her neck and braid his limbs with hers.

"I love you," he mouthed into her hair. He could say it when she couldn't hear.

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He lay there, gradually relaxing. His heart slowed; he let himself breathe again. His mind settled.

He'd imagined that if he ever made it into Alice's bed as a grown person, it would all be different than it was in childhood. And he did regard her differently this time. The feel and smell of her struck parts of his body that he hardly knew he had back then. If he were to let his mind run free, it would conjure possibilities he hadn't known existed back then. But he wouldn't let it run free even if it pulled and strained like an untrained dog. He 'd be dragged around the block by it. He might even lose it altogether for a moment or two, but he wouldn't let go.

There was one thought, and it tangled him up like a repetitive, half-awake anxiety dream. Could love be continuous? Could you carry it unbroken from childhood to adulthood, wrestling it over the crags and pitfalls of adolescence? Could it come out the other side as the same kind of love, just expressed in new ways? Or were those two kinds of love disjunctive and creepily at odds?

Maybe it wasn't simply the answer that was baffling. Maybe the question was wrong. Maybe there weren't two kinds of love. Maybe there were a trillion kinds. Or just one.

But now he held her. He forgot to worry as much about waking her up. She turned her body to his, eyes closed, and curled herself around him. She pressed her cheek to his chest, and he felt the tickle of her hair in his neck and under his nose. Though he was too big for the bed, she made him fit.

Trust and love went together. He understood that. But how did desire work its way in? How did it fit? How, if at all, could it be kept out?

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He didn't know if she was awake or asleep, but he felt her heart beating and the further pulse of it in her hands when he held them. He felt the ridge of her shin against his, the softness of her thigh. He didn't know what it meant, but he felt deeply comforted by her skin, her warmth, and the way she always let him in.

Maybe it wasn't so different now. Even with her breasts and her long, curving limbs, she was still his same Alice. Maybe the things he most loved about holding on to Alice were exactly the same things he always loved. The end of loneliness. The hope of ease. The feel of a body he trusted.

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Alice woke from her dream into her dream. It made it hard to keep straight sleeping and waking, but she didn't feel any need to distin guish as long as the dream kept on.

She'd been so angry with him when she'd fallen asleep the night before, and now his lovely body was all around her, and the anger was nowhere to be found. With Paul, she could never remember where she'd mislaid her anger, even the times she promised herself she would go back and look for it later.

She kept her eyes shut. She 'd grant him the power of deniabil ity. So what if by lunchtime he 'd erased the entire thing? Right now there was something, and she wanted to keep it going, that was all. For all she knew, she had Don Rontano, the tennis coach, here in her bed, but, oh, he felt good.

Still with her eyes closed, she found the hem of his T-shirt and lifted it over his head. He could disclaim her if he liked, but she

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wanted his skin. She snuggled deeper into his chest. She felt the warm passage of his back and shoulders.

Could she kiss him? Would he allow her that? Was that some thing he could pretend was nothing? What about making love? Could she just open up her legs and pull him inside her and have him all she wanted and later give her assent that it was nothing?

She pressed herself closer. She boldly matched her pelvis to his, though his shorts and her underwear came in between. Maybe the top half of him didn't want that, but the bottom half did. She moved with him a little. What body could help it? She kept her eyes closed.

I was asleep, he could say. What even happened? I thought you were sleeping, too.

If she could have him this way, really, would she take him? Was it worth it? And, God, if she ended up losing her virginity to Don Ron, wouldn't she feel stupid.

She opened her eyes. She snuck a look. It wasn't Don Ron and his eyes weren't even closed. No fair that he got to look and she didn't.

He caught her looking. She felt his hold loosen. His pelvis unstuck from hers.

She discovered a bit of last night's anger. It was there, rather plainly, in the crook of his stiffening elbow.

He sat up in bed and she sat up, too. He looked as though he was surprised to see her there.

You were the one who snuck into my bed, not the other way around! she felt like shouting at him. But she didn't want to kill the mood. It wasn't dead yet, was it?

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She looked at him there in her bed. Shirtless and tangled in her sheet, with his uneven haircut and his tortured face. At least it looked like they were doing it. Perversely, she wished one of her parents would walk into her room right now. What would he say then?

He put his two feet on the ground. Damn him, he was already erasing.

You can't erase when there's nothing there, he'd say.

"My mother's here," he said. She could smell the wine on his breath.

She nodded. That explained something. She was back to being Alice the security blanket, but she wasn't as good at the job any more. She 'd grown too needy. That was the problem, wasn't it?

"For how long?"

"Just till today."

"Oh." Alice suddenly felt mildly exposed in her bikini under wear and her undersized T-shirt, talking about his mother. "How is she?"

"The same."

She nodded. She crossed her arms over her chest. "Do you want me to come over and see her?"