Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (22 page)

Later, after Riley left, Alice sat in the kitchen alone and noticed things she hardly saw anymore, like the spice rack Riley had made in wood shop in middle school. She noticed the terrible pot she 'd formed out of clay snakes, glazed, fired, and brought home in third grade, in which Judy still kept the salt. There were the two trailing ivy plants that sat companionably in the window, collecting what little light came in from the square of sky at the top of the air shaft. Alice and Riley had brought the plants home from a spring fair years ago, and Judy had watered and kept them alive all this time. There was love expressed in the places you usually forgot to look.

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The following days and weeks crumbled into units of waiting. Her father came home during his breaks at school. Her mother worked more in the apartment and less at the library. She did errands one at a time. Old plans evaporated and future ones were not made. When her parents went out in the evening, they found dumb excuses to call home.

Alice was afraid to think even a day ahead. Like a toddler, she lived in the present and she didn't follow her thoughts around the corner. She went from activity to activity with little thought about the mechanics of forward motion.

We are all going backward, Alice thought.

By late January, Alice recognized that it was not going to be mere days of waiting, and that you couldn't maintain a state of high alert for months. It was not in the human wiring.

"I don't think I want a different heart," Riley said one time when they were walking in the park. Whenever the temperature broke forty degrees, they walked.

"It'll be your heart once it's in there," Alice said.

They watched her too carefully. Alice compulsively pictured Riley's laboring heart, imagining the dreaded blood clots and anni hilating them. They all asked too many questions about medica tions and salt intake and fluid retention. Riley was eager to get away from them.

"Where've you been?" Alice asked her casually when Riley came home on a blustery evening in February. Alice didn't like to admit that she'd checked the temperature ten times since lunch.

"I went downtown to see Paul."

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Alice tried not to choke on her saliva. "I hope you stayed inside."

Riley gave her a look.

"So, how's he? Did you tell him?" Her voice came out a little too loudly.

Riley took off her layers. "He's all right. We had fun," she said, a little too loudly in return. "And no, I didn't tell him. I feel fine right now. It's a lot more fun spending time with people who don't know I'm sick."

"Thanks a lot."

"Seriously, Al. I know how much you care about me, but you're a pain in the ass."

u

People left a lot of things behind when they went in the water. Their clothes, their stuff, their makeup, their fixed-up hair, their voices, their hearing, their sight--at least as they normally experi enced them. "People look pretty much the same underwater," a scuba-diving instructor told Riley once. Some people lost their individuality in the water, but Riley always felt most herself. Water was supposed to symbolize renewal, she knew, but when Riley swam--pared down, alone, and unreachable--she felt a deeper sense of who she already was.

The ocean was the best place, of course. That was what she loved most. It was a feeling of freedom like no other, and yet a feel ing of communion with all the other places and creatures the water

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touched. The ocean was best, but an overheated swimming pool atop a building on West 68th Street would do.

Riley pushed off the wall and made a long underwater slide into a breaststroke. She built the slow rhythm between pull and kick. She'd alternate freestyle and breaststroke for the first half-mile and free and backstroke for the second. She'd promised herself at the outset that she'd stop after a mile. That was what she allowed herself.

The repetitive motion of her limbs was a meditation, the stretch of her muscles a narcotic. She heard her breath and even her heart. She gradually lost the awareness of the few other people in the pool, the activity on the deck, the buzz of the city beyond the glass.

The regular things couldn't follow you here. You could escape the demands of the world. Even the demands you imposed on yourself seemed to recede and reorient underwater. You couldn't hear and you couldn't talk. Your ears were full, but it was quiet.

Lap by lap, Riley slowly increased her pace, and toward the end, fell off again. She resisted the sixty-fourth lap, the end.

The trouble with swimming was that eventually you had to come out. You had to dry off and put all your stuff back on. You had to become more yourself again, or, in her case, less so. The demands were still there, waiting.

u

The message light was blinking madly in the kitchen, and it gave Alice a bad feeling when she came in from the park. Her fingers were frozen crooked when she pushed the button.

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"This is Dr. Braden's office at the transplant center. We 're trying to reach Riley," the message began. It went on to give spe cific and urgent callback instructions. The next message was from the same anxious receptionist, and the third was from Dr. Braden herself. All had come within the last forty minutes.

Alice felt a conditioned panic. She 'd planned this panic, even launched it several times before this. With her hag fingers, she dialed Riley's beeper and then her cell phone and got no response. Riley was dead or she was negligent.

Alice waited and worried. These were the two occupations into which she had poured her energy these last several months, but she hadn't gotten any better at them. Practice offered no advantage.

She called again and again and again. The sixth time, Riley answered. "What is your problem?"

"Did you talk to Dr. Braden?"

"No. Why?" Alice could hear Riley's breathing.

"Check your beeper."

There was a pause. "I'll call you back," Riley said.

They met up later at the apartment. Judy and Ethan were there as well.

Riley had her sock feet on the kitchen table and was pushing herself back in her chair.

"You are sure it's too late," Judy said. The tendons in her neck stuck out.

"I am sure. Dr. Braden is sure."

"Someone else got it?" Judy persevered.

"Yes," Riley said. "There is a happy heart recipient tonight."

"But not us," her mother said.

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"Not me," Riley said.

"Honey, why didn't you get the call?" Ethan asked. He clutched the back of an empty chair. "I don't understand what happened."

Alice worried that Riley would push herself so far onto the back legs of her chair that she would tip it over and crash to the floor. How ironic it would be for Riley to break her neck after all of this.

"Just explain it to us, please," Judy said tightly. "We have these systems in place for a reason."

Riley banged her chair down onto four legs. "I was swimming," she said, her voice uncompromising. "That's what I was doing."

u

Riley was emboldened. In the days that followed, she forbade them from talking about the list anymore. They were not to talk about the temperature outside or salt intake or pills or the scale, either. "I swear to God I'll move out if you do," Riley threatened. She stopped apprising anybody of her appointments and outlawed her mother from going with her. She gave no updates after she went.

"Stop staring at the beeper," she snapped at Judy one morning when it lay unclaimed on the coffee table.

Late at night that same week, Alice overheard Riley talking to her father. "I don't want to become this disease," she heard her sis ter saying. "I feel like it will take me over and there will be nothing left of me."

u

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Under the queasy fluorescent lights of the drugstore, Riley didn't recognize her sister for a minute. The context was strange and unpleasant, but it was more Alice's expression. Riley was thrown by the blank inwardness in Alice's face, the absence of warmth and animation that Alice always wore for her. It was a trick to see someone you loved without being seen, particularly rare with Alice.

Riley stood concealed by a tower of antiperspirants, casually perusing a wall of toothbrushes. Alice manned a register. The other three in the row were empty. With nobody to ring up, Alice stared vaguely down the shampoo aisle. A stooped woman ap peared, trying to buy a lottery ticket. A man shuffled over, pointing at something hanging behind the counter--batteries maybe.

This place bore no relationship to the outside. It was Riley's nightmare, in a way. No window to look out of. Layers of doors to keep out the air. Not that the air was so fresh on Eleventh Avenue. The light was sticky yellow; the music endlessly recirculated. Nobody looked pretty in a Duane Reade, but she'd never seen her sister look so plain. It was sometimes a hardship having a beautiful sister, but there was no joy in having her look bad.

Riley didn't want to stay, but she couldn't quite leave, either. She could understand Alice working in the park for minimum wage, but she could not understand working here for anything. Was this where her swimming membership money was com ing from?

What are you doing, Alice?

Alice went out in the evenings and told them she was seeing friends. Her parents took an almost perverse comfort from that.

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Somebody in the family needed to be living a life. What would they think if they saw where Alice really went?

Alice was supposed to be in law school, not selling lottery tick ets. They all had roles to play inside their family. Alice was the ivy- leaguer, the white-collar hope. She was falling down on the job.

Riley remembered the day Alice had gotten her letters from the colleges she'd applied to. Riley had lived in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, through that winter. She 'd come home for a few weeks in the spring before heading out to Fire Island to open up the house. Her parents had watched Alice open the envelopes with nervous fanfare, cheering to find out she'd gotten accepted to six out of eight places, including Dartmouth, where she'd ended up going. That night, their parents arranged a celebratory dinner at Moon Palace on Broadway. Riley had been happy for Alice. Mostly, anyway. That was her intention. But at the last minute, Riley had skipped out on the dinner, claiming she'd had something else to do. She'd run around the reservoir in Central Park, mile after mile, in the deep dark. She was sorry for that, when she thought of it. She hadn't meant to begrudge Alice her big night.

You couldn't get very mad at Alice. "I'd be happy to get into one school," she'd said. She would have shared her wealth if she could have.

Riley remembered the day three years earlier, also in April, when the letters had come for her. She'd opened the envelopes secretly in her room, just as secretly as she had filled out the appli cations. When the letters were all thin and the answers were all no,

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she wanted to be able to say, I want to go to an instructor's program at NOLS. It's what I wanted all along. Maybe it was.

"I chose this," she wanted to be able to say. "I always chose."

u

With numb fingers in thick gardening gloves, Alice cleared the beds along the bridle path. It was a new assignment and new scenery, which Alice was grateful for. The old scenery had absorbed her worries over time. In time, this probably would, too.

There wasn't much to do, but there were few people to do it. Everybody loved to work in the park in the spring and summer. By February, the volunteers were mostly gone and the paid force was small. Alice spent a lot of time alone in February, and the air was so cold, her thoughts slowed almost to a standstill. It suited her.

Alice saw a horse clomp by. She had never ridden a horse. She saw people and their dogs. The people looked cold, and the dogs looked happy. She saw a tiny dog carrying a large and ragged teddy bear, and though she did not like tiny dogs, she thought how they looked cute when they carried objects larger than their bodies.

She saw a runner pass with lithe and graceful strides that reminded her of Riley. It was such a familiar stride, but one she hadn't seen in a long time. She pictured Riley running on the beach and running along the boardwalks and running up 97th Street. It was harder to picture her walking. Riley used to run two miles in the time it took Alice to run one.

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Suddenly, Alice stood. She shook off the big chunks of cold dirt and walked into the path, her chaotic heart knocking around in her chest. She saw the runner moving ahead quickly on legs made to run, nearing the bend. Alice was still close enough to shout and be heard, and she opened her mouth to shout but she stopped herself. She just watched, a mysterious feeling soaking through her.

If Riley wanted to run, Alice couldn't stop her. All she could do was watch. So she did. She watched and remembered, and it made for a strangely beautiful vision.

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Riley wasn't feeling well that night. She didn't say so, but all of them could tell, and Alice knew the reason why. Judy wanted to call her doctor, but Riley said no. "I am not a minor," Riley said, and finished off the argument that way.

Later Alice went and sat on the bed in Riley's little room. She considered the few things left there from before they first left home: a picture of Alice and Riley holding each other at the top of a hill in Central Park laden with snow, an old photo of Riley and Paul and a giant sagging blue fish on a fishing boat in the Great South Bay. "I switched to working over by the bridle path today," Alice said. She looked at Riley, and Riley looked at her, and they both knew what it meant.

Riley's face pinched together, and Alice tried to think of the best way to confront the subject. She wanted to think of a good way to express her distress and also her love. And then she realized there was no good way, because the two things didn't fit together.

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