The Canterbury Sisters (29 page)

She hesitates again. We’re making her nervous, I think, just sitting and staring. She’s been put at a disadvantage, having to tell her story at a café instead of on the trail. Apparently it’s easier to talk when you’re shoulder-to-shoulder than when you’re face-to-face. So I shift my weight toward the street and, like Jean, begin to watch the little boy riding his bike. Give Becca a few minutes to finish the wine and pull herself together.

The child is no more than six or seven and he seems to be new to the fine art of balance. It’s as if his training wheels were taken off recently and he struggles over the cracks in the sidewalk, weaving first one way and then the other. At times the whole bike tilts and his foot flies down from the pedals, catching his weight at the last possible minute before he goes toppling over. The sidewalk is not only cracked but sloped, with stray tufts of grass poking up in random locations. Hardly optimal for a beginner learning how to ride. He stops for a moment and looks toward the door. It’s closed. His mother is inside, at least for the moment.

I finish my first glass of wine, then pour another.

“People think Sleeping Beauty is a silly story,” Becca finally goes on. “Simple and stupid, even by fairy-tale standards. The girl goes to sleep, the boy wakes her up. Boom. The end. But I was happy to have the part and happy to know I was going to get a chance to kiss Josh. On the day of the first performance, they packed us up with the props in a bus and we went to the elementary school. One of them. There are seven in our county and we were going to play them all, but this was the first. Hillary came with us. I didn’t count on that. She couldn’t be Beauty, she wasn’t strong enough to be onstage, and of course she couldn’t kiss Josh, but she was in the third week of mono by that time and she was well enough that they let her ride the bus and come along to watch. She gave me the evil eye the whole way.”

The boy pushes the bike from the sidewalk into the edge of the forbidden street and looks back at us with a guilty grimace. Bites his lip as if he’s trying to decide something. Trying to evaluate the significance of our presence in his life. Who are these ladies drinking wine on the patio—allies or betrayers, friends or foe? Will one of us tell his mother that he’s broken her only rule?

“Back at the high school we’d only practiced the play in pieces,” Becca says. “We’d never run it through even once, start to finish. And so when we set up our props—the spinning wheel and the bed and all the fairies were in costume, and the evil witch . . . it was good. That’s the thing. It all came together better than I’d ever thought it would. But then halfway into the play I’m already lying flat on my back with my eyes closed, just listening to the story going on around me and I start thinking,
Oh God, this is it. Josh is going to kiss me. I’m going to get my first kiss right here and now and it’s with the cutest boy in school.
And I started trembling. I couldn’t control it. I was lying on my bed in my blonde wig and I was trembling so hard that I was sure the kids in the audience could see it and would think,
She’s not asleep, she’s having some sort of fit.
I tried to think about anything else. I said the alphabet backward in my head. But it just got worse and finally one of the fairies leaned over, I think it was Merryweather, and whispered, ‘Are you all right?’ I think she thought maybe I was coming down with mono too because I know I was red and it must have looked like I was running a fever. But it wasn’t mono. It was the fever of waiting for Josh Travis to kiss me. It was the fever of love.”

Valerie and Claire smile at this and Jean turns from the boy in the street to face her daughter, also amused. Is this what a simple love story sounds like? I hate to keep grousing—in fact, I sound like Becca when I do—but nothing about this tale seems simple to me. She was playing Sleeping Beauty while the boy’s true girlfriend watched from the wings. And her first kiss, normally a private, even furtive, event was to be played out in front of two hundred squirming children on a well-lit stage. No wonder the girl’s notions of romance are so overblown. It hasn’t yet occurred to her that a stage kiss is not the real thing.

The little boy is coping better now that he’s on the flat street. He’s up on two wheels, pedaling straight back and forth in front of us. His view never changes. He sees nothing except the vistas he has created in his own mind. But the wobbles have almost ceased and the only time he falters at all is when he passes the door to the café and looks to the side. He knows that any moment his mother will come out to fill our water glasses and catch him. Then he will be humiliated, grounded. Maybe even stripped of his bicycle and the freedom two wheels can buy.

“The big moment comes,” Becca says. “And Josh bends down over me and I feel his breath and his lips were so soft. It was like the ground opened up beneath us and I knew, before he even touched me, that nothing afterward would ever be the same. My life has only two chapters—before Josh kissed me and after Josh kissed me.” She laughs. For just a moment it’s a woman’s laugh and not a girl’s. “Mr. Grayson got pissed. Because I didn’t wake up slowly like he told me to, I woke up all at once. I think I even put my hand behind Josh’s head and held him there for a second and of course the real Sleeping Beauty would have never done that. A real princess never would have grabbed her prince around the neck and practically pulled him down on top of her. But I couldn’t stop myself. And Josh . . . Here’s the weird part. The part you might not believe. He felt it too.”

“Why wouldn’t we believe that?” says Angelique. “Do you think we think that men can’t feel things?”

“It was the perfect first kiss,” says Becca. Her face has taken on a wistful quality and it’s amazing that even a girl as young as Becca can already be nostalgic. “It saved me from being unchosen and it saved him from being a man slut. Because before that kiss Josh had been one of those guys who’s so cute they can sleep with anybody and so they do sleep with everybody but that moment . . . The miracle is that the kiss changed Josh as much as it changed me.”

“So this is your story?” Jean says quietly. “You’re telling them that Josh is now your boyfriend—is that the long and short of it?”

“Well, he is,” says Becca, her voice sharp. “He comes over to the house all the time. You’ve met him.”

“Yes,” says Jean. “He comes over to the house. I’ve met him.”

“And he was my first in every other way too,” Becca says, and here her voice cracks just a little.
This is the real loss of innocence in women
, I think.
Not the first time you sleep with a man, but the first time you doubt whatever story you’ve told yourself about why you slept with that man. She’s waking up, all right, but she doesn’t always like it.
“What’s wrong with that, Mom? Why is it okay for you to have had your one big love and not me?”

“I just don’t want you to overromanticize your relationship with Josh,” her mother says. She is fiddling with her wedding ring, as she always seems to do when she gets nervous. “I don’t want you to make something out of it that isn’t there.” Jean reaches for her daughter’s arm, but Becca pulls back. Squares her shoulders and sits up taller in her chair.

“Right,” she says. “Like you don’t overromanticize Dad.”

The child on the bike is growing in confidence right before our eyes. He still rides in a neat, straight line, but now he no longer bothers to get off the bike in order to turn it. He makes a circle right there on the edge of the street, his face split open with joy and pride, before heading back the other way. And the next time he passes, he does not look nervously toward the café door.

Good for you,
I think.
Pedal hard, and when you get to the end of the sidewalk, keep going.

“Your father,” Jean says coldly, “was nothing like Josh.”

“Wake up, Mom,” says Becca. “I’m not a child. I know everything. I’ve known it ever since Dave went into rehab.” She looks around the table. “Dave’s my baby brother, the youngest, and he’s already tried to clean up twice. Has she told you that part of our family story? Any of you? I didn’t think so.”

Jean is flushed. Again. How many times has her face turned this color? I always assumed it was exertion, a woman not used to so much walking, but now, for the first time, I wonder if there is something really wrong with her. “Becca, please. You have no idea what you’re saying.”

“I know exactly what I’m saying. The file? The one with the family medical history? You left it right on the kitchen table. Maybe part of you wanted me to read it.”

“Becca, I’m serious. This has to stop. Right now and right here. You may have read something, but you can’t possibly know what it means.”

“’Cause Dave wasn’t the first addict in the family, was he, Mom?” Becca says, her voice strident and harsh. “There was a genetic predisposition toward drug abuse, isn’t that what the file said? Passed from father to son in this case, but I think part of me knew that before I read it.”

“You don’t understand what you read.”

“No,” says Becca. “No, Mom, I think the problem is that I understand just fine, which is why you can’t say anything else about my relationship with Josh. Not now or ever. Daddy wasn’t working that night in Guatemala. And they didn’t shoot him because he was trying to protect us.” Becca looks from her mother’s splotchy face to the rest of us. “The first story we all heard, did you get it? Did any of you figure it out at the time? That the perfect man’s ultimate sacrifice was really nothing more than a drug deal gone bad? Isn’t that hysterical? The biggest possible joke? Mom built our whole lives around that night. She taught us we should worship Daddy, she turned the date of his death into this . . . this anniversary of mourning when she knew all along that it was nothing but a—”

Jean screams. Despite the fact tension has been building around the table for the last few minutes, despite the fact we all knew something was coming, I startle with the sound, and then Valerie screams too. It is this second scream—louder, sharper, and even more unexpected—that shocks us all out of our reverie. A door opens, then slams, and now the mother is out on the sidewalk too, her face frozen, and in the same instant—one scream, the next scream, and the slam of the door—it all leads up to a squeal of tires, the loudest noise of all. The long shrill shriek of motion interrupted, of a driver frantically trying to stop a car. Trying to rein in the inevitable while it is still in the realm of the merely possible.

Then the final sound. A thud, muted but definitive, and here our story changes, yet again.

Fifteen

H
e has an unusual blood type. The emergency unfolding around us has several components, but this is the first one that arises. The child lying on the edge of the street has B negative blood, a condition that is true of slightly less than two percent of the population, at least in the States. I imagine it is similar in England.

I know this statistic because I have B negative blood.

A burst of activity exploded around us the instant the boy was struck by the car. The driver leapt out, a tall man apparently unknown to the villagers. A nobody, someone just passing through. Four or five of the locals spilled from the café at the sound of impact, one of them rushing to restrain the hysterical mother and the rest gathering around the boy. One of them identifies himself as a doctor, and it will be several minutes before any of us realize he is a veterinarian. But the veterinarian is a decisive man, which in this moment is the most important thing he could be.

The vet waves off the driver’s offer to take the boy to the hospital in Canterbury, saying he shouldn’t be moved until they’ve determined the extent of his injuries. Another one of the diners calls for an ambulance and that is when the mother says the boy’s blood type is rare. She doesn’t have it, his father did. His no-good knockabout father, gone to Spain or Morocco or God-knows-where, and the ambulance must bring B negative blood when they come, for any fool can see that he must be transfused as quickly as possible. Life is seeping from the child’s pale, immobile body, the pool of red around him growing by the minute. Blood runs between the cobblestones, and it soaks into the boy’s sweater and pants.

But I’m B negative, I tell the doctor. I dig out my wallet, with the Red Cross card I always carry and show him the proof.

No, he says. It’s risky. There’s no definitive way to measure the flow, to make sure I’m not giving too much, or that I’m not giving it too fast.

We have no choice, I say. Do we? I point at the child in the street.

And thus the table is cleared . . . the empty bowls of stew are knocked off with the broad sweep of someone’s arm. They fall to the pavement in a series of clatters, spilling out the last vestiges of carrots and potatoes as the table is moved to the edge of the sidewalk. The doctor has run to his car and come back with a bag. Steffi kneels on the pavement and untangles the line of tubes, then unsheathes the needles, her hands moving swiftly and efficiently. I bare my arm. The rub of alcohol, the making of a fist.

The stick is a hard one. Despite everything, despite the fact that we are all numb with shock, the jab of the needle is so cruel that I make a sound. Release my fist without having to be told to. Like most people with an unusual type, I have given blood many times. I know the drill.

Valerie is clutching my other hand. “Lie back,” she says, and I realize I must look terrible, as if I am about to faint. So I let her prop me on the café table and turn my head to see that the doctor is working quickly, too fast for finesse. Blood is flowing from my arm through a tube stretched from the table to the street, where it enters the arm of the boy. And it is somewhere in this process, something about the man’s bag or maybe what he pulls from it, that Steffi realizes she has been playing nursemaid to a county vet. In an instant she takes over the situation, standing up and barking out orders, dispatching the small crowd this way and that on various tasks.

How long do I lie like this, with blood moving from me to the child? I don’t know. In some ways it seems like merely seconds, in other ways, hours. In the distance I can hear the approach of the ambulance, which has that horrible
wah-wah
pulse of European danger, which seems so different from the high, steady shriek of American danger.
Lie still,
everyone keeps telling me.
Don’t try to sit up or move.