The Invaders (16 page)

Well, I didn't almost die. It's not like I drove off a cliff or anything. I just plowed into the net of the tennis courts upside down.

Being unable to move my arm indefinitely seemed like an excessive outcome to something so small, right? I didn't really want to live anymore. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't get my fingers to wiggle. Something I could do so easily before, I couldn't even do at all now. My brain couldn't will things into existence anymore.

It pissed me off. It really did. I'm not saying that it wasn't a big deal. I ruined the tennis season for all these bastards. I was now carless. I think I made my father cry.

These were all undesirable outcomes. It just didn't seem to be fair, was all that I was saying. They put me on a morphine drip for like a week at the hospital while they checked things and opened things and made sure of things. I saw things then. I mean visions. Things that made me uncomfortable. Cheryl needed her own dose, but I wasn't about to share my pile. I counted them every few days. I just really liked to see them poured out on the counter, rounded edges like Chiclets, to make sure they were still there. Old habits and all that.

“Look how pretty the water is just before the sun rises,” Cheryl said.

It was. I looked up at the fading stars and understood why Cheryl didn't feel the urge to sleep. How could you miss all this? I held my phone up to the sky and Cheryl asked me what I was doing.

“I have this thing on my phone that tells you what you're looking at,” I said.

She smiled at me, then looked up at the sky and said, “Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Orion, Gemini, Mars, Venus . . .”

She pointed and recited and I was amazed. She put her arm down and said, “Good memory from college astronomy.”

“You're making me wish I'd paid better attention in class,” I said.

“We'll see Mercury better around sunrise,” she said, and I put my phone down and stared up at the sky.

“I fucked up, I think,” I said.

“Which part?”

“Life, school, all of it,” I said.

“Who hasn't?” Cheryl asked, still staring up at the sky.

I didn't want to hear that no one knew what they were doing.

“It's going to be a perfect day to be out on the water,” she said a few minutes later. “Let's go sailing.”

“You don't even know how to sail,” I reminded her.

“You do.”

I kinda thought she was suggesting it to piss my dad off because he had given up early trying to take her sailing. She didn't move fast enough to be of any help. He said he needed another sailor, not someone who just wanted to tan on a boat.

I told her I couldn't do it one-handed and she said she would help. She said, “We have the whole day ahead of us.”

She had a point. Days dragged on in this house and the only excitement in my life lately was doctor's visits and being jabbed by needles and other medical instruments.

“Maybe go to sleep for a while and then we'll go,” I said.

She looked at me and smiled and said she would.

Hours later, I woke up in my bed, the sun hot and bright. I got up and opened my drawers looking for clothes that were easy to put on, clothes that didn't require buttons or zippers or anything like that. I waited for her downstairs and when she came down, she looked like good old Cheryl. She wore superbright colors, like she really wanted to be noticed. Today she had on neon-green shorts and a pink top. I didn't even want to ask what had inspired this look.

We walked on the wall in defiance of the No Trespassing signs and headed toward Joanne in her slip.

Cheryl helped me pick off the seashells this time and she kept some and threw the rest of them away. She would leave seashells in the yard
and my father would go nuts saying they got caught up in the mower. Cheryl didn't care. She said she liked the way they looked with her flowers. I said, “Are you going to put those in the yard, too?” and she said, “Maybe.”

Lately, everything that came out of her mouth sounded cryptic.

I told her how to start the motor because I needed two hands to do it. She pulled the string a few times really wimpy, so I told her to really pull and on that last turn she pulled with all this anger and exhaust spilled out from the motor. We were ready to go.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked, really trying to say
Can you handle this on your own, because I'm kinda scared that I won't be able to jump in to help if shit goes awry.

She said, “I want to learn,” and we set off together as she kept saying, “This is going to be fun.”

Trapped on a sailboat together heading out to the Long Island Sound and I started thinking that maybe this was nuts. What were we going to talk about for all these hours? Maybe she'd be okay with staying silent except for when we had to move the sail. Because this was feeling kind of therapeutic right now and my physical therapist had told me to find therapeutic things to do.

I put my bad hand in the water, letting it drag off the side to try to feel things, while staring down into the water.

The wind changed direction and I told her to change the tack. I had to keep it simple, even though I'd explained some sailing terms to her when we got on the boat. It was almost hilarious, Cheryl and I sailing.

TO TAKE THE BOAT
out without even asking, without even mentioning to Jeffrey what we were doing, felt like we were making a run for it. The view of the homes from the water was something to marvel at. A row of muted tones faced out, with the slimmest breaks in between each house, the lawns blending into each other in one manicured line. Nearly every home had a flagpole with not only the American flag flying, but small, narrow yacht club flags as well. No one shied away from their nautical convictions here. When Teddy and I boarded Jeffrey's boat, I tried to ignore the Joanne in big letters staring back at me. Jeffrey and Teddy's grief was an infection that would not budge. The fear of loss kept them from really trying with anyone else. I had taken that burden on myself, though. I was in the shadow of a dead woman, a flawed, beloved woman here. There were remnants of her everywhere: long-forgotten boxes in the garage, half-finished airplane bottles of liquor jammed in the back of drawers and cabinets, a monogrammed washcloth stuffed behind our daily-use set in the linen closet. She was everywhere and nowhere.
Sometimes I wondered if things would have been different if I had met Jeffrey well after her death rather than having it infect our marriage during its honeymoon stage. It made us feel guilty for our happiness. It made us feel watched and scrutinized.

“Tack left.”

We both leaned down under the sail, and I swung it over us, and we sat on the opposite side.

“You're much easier to sail with than your father.”

“Oh yeah, he takes the joy out of anything.”

“He's not all bad.”

“Say it like you mean it, Cheryl,” Teddy said, laughing.

We stared at the waves, the water bright and shiny in the distance, and the islands that dotted the landscape.

“Where do you want to go?” I asked.

We both stared out at the stretch of water and then Teddy said, “I don't know. Far away. As far as we can go.”

I looked down deep into the water and wondered what was under us, the murky gray-green water. The jellyfish weren't out yet, floating like implants along the face of the water. It was still safe to put your hands in.

“Whatever you want.”

He leaned his hand into the water and we sailed forward and I felt in control for the first time in a long time. We sailed away from the houses, the long fence being erected, Lori's sand, and the club.

“What a beautiful day. We're so lucky,” I said.

“Speak for yourself,” Teddy said. “Speak for yourself.” He stared down at his hand as the water slid through his fingers.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“It's not your fault,” he said. “It's just the way things happen sometimes.” If I don't say anything now, I thought, he might never know. “Did you ever sail before you met my dad?” he asked.

“Once, and we capsized,” I said.

“That's the worst. My dad used to capsize us just to see how well I fared under pressure.”

“How could your mother let him do that?”

Teddy laughed and said, “She was always jumping around the shore, pissed. She loved to sail, though. That's where I get it from. That, and you know, she thought it was a super important part of networking. Starting in kindergarten with golf and yachting and private schools and shit. Get in line with your kind.”

“I wish I'd had that when I was your age,” I said.

“You grew up here, too, didn't you?” he asked.

I told him that I had grown up not far from here, in the northeastern corner of the state, where farms and chickens outnumbered people. It was amazing that a few dozen miles could create such a distance in lives. The shoreline was a dream and in the summers we'd pack up and drive to Hammonasset, the one public beach we could find, and pretend we belonged by the water. We'd stare down the shore toward the private beaches and wonder how you could own something like that, the sand and the water.

He asked me who the “we” was and, trapped on this boat, I felt like I was telling him too much.

He pressed me further, asking where they were. I didn't know, I told him. We had lost touch. It was not untrue. I hadn't spoken to my sisters in so many years. We had detached from one another somewhere along the way and never thought to realign, come together, remember who we were or where we came from. We had been too busy surviving to feel any sense of closeness from our shared history. I wondered if they thought about my mother, reached out to her, or forgave her for anything.

“All this,” Teddy said, waving toward the houses and club, “doesn't amount to much if you don't care or try, you know? You gotta want to
put on your armor of seersucker, get out there, and make the connections. I don't really care, so the tennis lessons and sending me to Kent and Dartmouth were probably worthless.”

“Those things can never be taken away from you. You're privileged.”

Teddy looked at me with disgust and said, “If I was, I'd still have my mom.”

We sat quietly and stared out at the water.

“I'm sorry,” he said after a while.

“I'm sorry you don't have your mother anymore,” I said.

The boat hit a wave and rocked violently. Teddy scrambled to grab hold of the loose ropes of the mast.

“It's fine,” he said. “Calm down. Tack right.”

I leaped forward, barely missing Teddy as we slid under the mast.

“You did a beautiful job cleaning the boat, Teddy,” I said, fingering the top of the letter J on the back of the boat.

“She would be sick to see how he's let it go to waste.”

“He just can't look at it,” I said.

“Then sell it.” He turned toward me and said it again, “Then sell it.”

“He knows you would never speak to him again.”

“Let it go or keep it and take care of it. Don't make her an eyesore. Something to be whispered about and mocked. Fuck him.”

“He's trying,” I said.

“Yeah, with you, me, and everyone. Really well. Where the fuck is he, anyway?”

“Grief hits people in different ways,” I said.

“How long is it supposed to feel like this? Forever? I can't take
forever
.”

I didn't know how to answer him. Jeffrey couldn't shake it, I could see it. The guilt radiated off him.
She wouldn
'
t be drinking so much all the time if . . .
It always came back to if they had just been better. The fact that she died so visibly and tragically—her drunken fall off the docks in the middle of the night—brought the community together and kept me
out. They martyred her without all the facts. Sometimes I wondered if it was a conscious decision or the accident everyone believed it to be. I never expected Jeffrey to get over his love for her. Or maybe I did, at first, naively.

I stared at Teddy's pained face. I could see that his rush to numb himself had a higher purpose and I couldn't blame him. I didn't want him to see me as a mother; I knew that was not the way things worked.

The question of a child of my own was taken care of quickly with Jeffrey. He simply could not have another, his choice was irreversible, and came well before me. I didn't know until I was in my late thirties, when I saw the smiling mothers, doting on their children, and panic hit because my choice would soon be gone. That's when he told me, when I had decided that I had a lack to fill.

“I'm sorry,” Teddy said.

He stared off into the water and we watched motorboats in the distance. I asked him if his friends still came home in the summer, if he told anyone about the accident. He stared at me blankly.

“We have different interests.”

He had spent most of his time in private school, so he hadn't roamed the streets like the boys from the neighborhood, who strayed from the public school, but they had all grown up together, so I thought there would be some kind of lingering affection.

He said, “What do they want with a cripple, anyway?”

We sat in silence for a while, until I said, “Don't say ‘cripple.' ”

“What's the polite way of saying it?”

“I don't know, but just not that.”

“We're not PC here, remember?” he said.

“Don't put yourself down is all.”

“What now?” he asked.

“You get better.” I wanted to believe that my actions would not be irreversible.

“No, I mean, where do you want to go?” he asked.

“Should we sail home?”

“Let's keep going. I don't want to go back,” he said.

I held on to the rope and kept the mast steady. We pressed on toward the horizon.