Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (24 page)

She would have given whatever gifts she had to Riley if she could've. And if she couldn't, she would pretend for both of their sakes that she didn't have them.

A woman in her seventies wearing a green Fair Isle sweater approached the counter with a multipack of toothbrushes. "Are you open?"

"Yes," said Riley. She went behind the counter and moved cry ing Alice to the side. She took the package of toothbrushes.

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"That's eight ninety-nine," she said.

"Do you work here?" the woman asked.

"Not usually," Riley answered. She had a general sense of how to work a register.

The woman handed her a ten and Riley gave her change from the drawer. "Thank you," Riley said, giving her a receipt. "Have a good night."

Alice was watching her now. She was still crying but also amused.

"I'll get a good job sometime," Alice said, wiping her nose.

"What are you waiting for?" Riley asked.

Alice shrugged.

u

The subway ride was familiar and long. Riley's excitement had carried her the other times. Her mind hadn't known worry. She'd trusted her heart. Her feet hadn't felt like this then.

Since she'd banned her parents from speaking their worries, it left more time and quiet for her own. She put a hand to her chest, as she'd taken to doing sometimes.

At the entrance to the aquarium, she paid her money and walked through the turnstile. The cashier offered her a map, but she politely refused. Here was a place where she knew her way around. She first passed down into the wide, dark hallway, to the underwa ter viewing place for the dolphins.

At first she saw no dolphins, and then one. It was Marny, she thought, though her once thick, shiny skin looked scarred

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and thin. She was getting older, too. The look of her gave Riley an ache.

For some reason, Riley couldn't conjure the pretense of the habitat. She saw the drain, the mechanics, the pits and stains in the plaster. The water had a dingy, yellowish cast. She couldn't see past all that and believe it was a pocket of the sea.

She walked slowly around the tanks and pavilions. It was a Tuesday morning, and the place was nearly empty except for one unhappy-looking group of schoolkids. They looked like seventh- or eighth-graders, Riley thought. She watched the gulls wheel ing, screeching, and bad-tempered, eating popcorn kernels from the asphalt. Besides Riley, they were the only ones who chose to be here.

Riley used to spend her attention on the big creatures with the big faces and big fins, but today the virtuous otters and the swollen-eyed walrus looked tragically pent-up and out of place. Did it make a difference to them if no one wanted to see them? She spent a long time studying the smaller tanks with the multitude of crawling, swimming things, where you could get the feeling of a whole ecosystem. These little creatures kept to themselves; they didn't notice you one way or the other, and they seemed better off for it.

She used to scorn the displays of local marine life. They were always brown. But today she looked more carefully and saw more things. She read the placards.

Her legs felt tired and her head spun a little as she climbed up the steps to the old dolphin stadium. The deck of the pool was still roped off from when they used to do the shows.

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A lone worker was scrubbing the sides of the tank with a long- handled sponge mop. She breathed in the salty smells of old herring and dead water, so damp they stuck in your nose. She watched for Marny's familiar gray back, but Marny preferred to stay under.

"What happened to Turk?" Riley called across the pool to the man with the mop.

The man looked up. "He died last year. We 're supposed to be getting a new pair."

Riley nodded. She shuffled around the deck, wondering what that meant for Marny. She wished Marny would surface for a minute or two, whiz along on her back as she used to do. It would have been such a comfort.

Riley wandered out of the aquarium and onto the incomparable Coney Island beach. She kept her running shoes on but surren dered them to sand. The spring wind crept into her inside her jacket and under her hat. The sand, sea, and sky were three hori zontal bands of clear, wide, flat color.

She watched the water with her practiced eyes. She felt a mix ture of things for Turk, sad for the loss of him, glad for his release. For Marny, she just felt sad.

u

Paul was surprised that Riley wanted to meet him for coffee. She didn't like coffee, and she never wanted to do anything inside. When she showed up, she looked tired and small.

"What's going on?" he asked.

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"Hold on," she said. She went to the counter and came back with two hot chocolates. She handed one to him, even though he already had a cup of coffee.

It was strange to see her in this environment, walking among strangers, counting out money. It was as though she had been cut- and-pasted into the scene, and sort of jerkily, not using the newest or best technology.

"Is everything all right?" he asked.

"Well. That's what I wanted to talk to you about."

He felt a growing unease, creeping up from the bottom of his stomach. He put both hands on his thighs, feet on the ground, square to the earth.

"I should have told you months ago, but I didn't feel like it." She tried to stir the whipped cream into her hot chocolate. "Alice wanted to tell you, but I wouldn't let her."

He nodded. "Okay." This had the quality of being forced to look at something you knew you did not want to see.

"I don't feel like telling you the whole thing, and I don't feel like answering questions about it."

He nodded again. The unease was general now, spread all around.

"I've had rheumatic heart disease, probably twice. The first time, I was really young. The second time was last summer, and it was more serious."

He sipped coffee. Then he sipped hot chocolate.

"There might have been some other underlying problem with my heart. Anyway, it's gotten a lot worse."

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He nodded. Usual expressions of sorrow were not worth much to Riley. She had an impatient look about her.

"So it made a real mess of my heart. That's the thing. I probably need a new one."

He couldn't hide his surprise anymore. "A new one."

"A new heart."

"What?"

"That's the idea."

"What?"

"Listen, Paul. My family is a wreck. Alice is a wreck. I like you when you're not a wreck, so do me that favor. It would really be helpful."

He nodded. He was suddenly anxious to hide somewhere where he could be a wreck. But he couldn't do it now.

"Thanks." He noticed that her face was blotchy and her eyes shone. "You were always my best friend," she said. "You always understood me best."

He put his hands over his mouth, because he couldn't let her see his expression. "You're mine, too," he finally mumbled.

She talked for another minute, something about Coney Island, but he couldn't listen. He looked instead at the little scar that cut through her eyebrow and gulped for a thought that might offer some relief. He would suffocate for the lack of it. He felt like he would die.

The first glimpse of her fragility had always haunted him. Among the most punishing images he had logged in his memory was of ten-year-old Riley, blinking at him in surprise, blood running down her eye and cheek. He had tried to hurt her, yes, but he had

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never believed he could. She was not a regular human being to him. She could not be hurt. He felt like shouting that at her, like it was her fault. He felt mad at her for it. He couldn't feel sorry for her.

They got up to leave. She said she had somewhere to go. He fol lowed her, dazed and unwilling to go off into the world with this knowledge seeding in his head. He didn't want to let her go and leave him with the opportunity to wreck.

"Are you going to be able to get a new one?" he asked in a voice so tight he hardly recognized it.

"I'm not sure if I want a new one."

What? What does that mean? What will happen if you don't? He followed her down the street, stinging with questions he knew she didn't want him to ask. She descended a few steps into the subway. "See you," she said. She wanted to see his fragility about as much as he wanted to see hers.

"When did it happen?" he asked. His voice was breaking, and he felt ashamed of himself. Then he thought for a minute.

"What?"

"Never mind," he said to her disappearing back. He realized he already knew.

u

Paul called the apartment later that night. He was relieved when Ethan answered.

"It's Paul," he said. He was sitting at his desk, picking a piece of red wax that had melted there a long time ago. As many times as he'd moved, he'd managed to hold on to his desk.

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"Hi, Paul," Ethan said, laying a bright tone over the deep weari ness of his voice. "Who'd you like to speak to?"

"You, please."

Ethan was silent for a few moments. "That's fine."

"I wanted to tell you I'm sorry."

Ethan waited some more. There were many possible things to be sorry for on both sides.

"When you came to see me a couple of weeks ago, I didn't hear you out."

"You were in a hurry. That's all right," Ethan said. "As you said, I should have called."

"No. I should have given you a chance to talk."

Ethan let out a breath. "Well. Consider yourself forgiven."

Ethan was always too easy on him. He thought if he kept it nice, if he forgave Paul his ills, that Paul would feel too guilty to go on hating him. He thought if he forgave and forgave, he might put Paul in the mood of forgiving himself.

"That is more than I deserve," Paul said. "You see, when I saw you, I thought you were coming to offer me something. A Mets game or a concert ticket or something like you used to. I realize now you might have come to ask me for something. If you were, I wish I had given it."

Ethan seemed to put the phone down for a moment. When he came back, his voice was slightly muffled. "Thanks, Paul. I appre ciate it."

� 234 � Nineteen

A Stove and a Fire

W hen the air finally thawed on the first of May, Paul went

back to the house on Fire Island. He listened to more than one hundred of the albums over four days. He swiveled in the swivel chair. He sat on the carpet. He thought a lot about Riley.

He carefully packed forty-two of the albums in a box for him self--mostly the ones that stirred his memory like Joni Mitchell, Ian and Sylvia, Godspell. He saw the cover of a Joni Mitchell album that showed her naked from the back, and he remembered staring at it as a child. He found an album of dolphin and whale songs that he set aside for Riley. He put the rest away in boxes. He 'd sell them on eBay maybe, or find somebody to give them to. He didn't want to keep on going with the things in the Robbie museum.

He threw away seven garbage bags of junk. That was as satisfy ing as anything. The longer he spent with his father's things, the

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less remote and the less precious they became. He got better at throwing them away. It seemed analogous to the moment in a rela tionship when you got comfortable enough in another person's presence that you could waste time together. It seemed a shame to get to this point with his father's things and not with his actual father, but so it was. He had lost his father. He 'd already derived all possible bitterness from that.

That was the thing that kept surprising him. He imagined that any proximity, any light or air shed on this central tragedy, would nourish it. Instead, the bitterness was like botulism. It required a dark and anaerobic environment to grow.

He put the Hair soundtrack on the turntable. He remembered his mother belting along to "Let the Sunshine In." It was so happy and depressing at the same time, he had to sit down to laugh. Let ze sunshine een.

How could a person have changed so much? This house had once been chaotic and dirty, with music blasting and vari ous friends coming and going. A lot of drugs, no doubt. They had a Ping-Pong table instead of a dining-room table. Sometimes they ate at the Ping-Pong table. Now there was slip-varnished mahogany, three tiers of china, built-in drawers full of linen and real silver. When he pictured his mother's old hair, he couldn't quite picture it on her present head. It was sort of disembodied. It stood for lost time.

His father belonged to that time and got lost with it. Some people, like Lia, were good at changing. Other people, like his father, were not.

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Paul had a feeling for the old days, even though he was born too late. Part of it came from Ethan telling him stories, back when he used to listen to Ethan.

Paul looked through and saved nearly all of the photographs. The early ones were campus rallies and antiwar protests. His father always seemed to have his shirt off, his hair to his belly button, and to be hanging from a signpost or roaring into the camera. There were two newspaper clippings from when he went to jail, and a mug shot to underscore the point. He was as proud as a graduate in that picture. There were no actual graduation pictures. He'd got ten kicked out of school well before then.

Robbie had lived in D.C. for a while. He'd worked on George McGovern's presidential campaign, the first of many spectacular losses. He'd lived in his car for three cold months, according to legend, and had gotten arrested while lounging on his hood doing bong hits. There was a picture of him wearing a sandwich board in front of the White House.

Like a Beatle, Robbie had gone to India to learn about more drugs to take and brought home a few trippy, experimental pictures to remember it by. His actual memory was probably blown sky- high at that point.

He'd met Lia at a music festival in Georgia in the late seventies. He'd bought the famous sandals from a craftsperson in Virginia on the way home. They'd lived together in the East Village for a while. Lia was unabashedly pregnant and wild-haired in their one wedding picture. The officiator was barefoot, and Paul's grand parents were not in evidence.