The Last Life (18 page)

Night fell. No adults strayed to our end of the beach. The sounds of the small children melted and disappeared. The party was shrinking, but we didn't notice. One youth stood up and left, his steps singing softly in the sand as he strode away. Someone thought they saw a bat in the trees. Much laughter. I believed I heard three people on the far side of the circle speaking Spanish.

"Why Spanish?" I asked Chad, but he didn't answer, or appear to understand. He put his arm around my shoulder: "Cold? Want my jacket'"

I shook my head. He did not remove his arm. I couldn't—it was all so fuzzy now—figure out how to make it lift, and thought of it, obscurely, as Thibaud's protective embrace. Becky, by then, had turned her back to me. Later, when I looked again, it seemed that she had gone, until I realized that her outline had merely altered: she was shrouded in some other boy's blazer, some other arm around her. Two others drifted away. By then we were only five, Chad, me, Becky and her admirer, and a small, swarthy boy who seemed to be called "Pop" and from whose personal cache the bottles and cigarettes seemed to flow. I was blurred, and very heavy, and anxiety roiled and spun within my leaden frame. The others had grown as unintelligible to me as the chorus of tree frogs.

"I think I'd better go to bed," I said. "I don't feel very good." In France, I thought, at home, this never would have happened. "I want to go home," I said. I was trying to shake the weight of Chad's arm across my back, but even when he retrieved his limb the weight was still there. I stood, and heard the waves, so gentle a moment before, thundering in my ears.

"I'll take you." Chad was at my elbow.

"Yeah, you take her," I heard Becky say, although I couldn't really see Becky anywhere. There were no adults left along the beach to witness my stumbling. The sand filled my sandals, clawing at my feet with each unsteady step. The evening was cool, but I sweated anyway, unpleasantly moist in every crevice.

"It's not far," urged Chad's disembodied voice near my ear. His hand supported my elbow—as if, I considered in my spinning, mole-blind world, so courtly a gesture could possibly keep me upright.

"I'm okay," I lied.

"I don't think so."

"No, really."

"Let me help. We'll get you some water. We're almost there."

Between the pines the air was fragrant. It should have been pleasant. We were near the house now: I could hear the late-stayers' muted voices, interrupted occasionally by a blaring laugh (Ron's?). I could see shadows moving and the flicker of the odd cigarette, heads silhouetted against the Prussian sky, the deck where they all stood rising above like a ship's prow.

Like a ship's prow on a high sea. They tossed. I gasped. I looked down again, steps now from the open window of my room. But it was too late: the bucking of my head had triggered the outraged bucking of my insides.

"I think—"

"Oh shit, Sagesse—"

"I can't help it."

"Can't you make it to the bathroom?" Chad's voice was very small, but insistent.

"I don't think—"

The high seas loosed themselves within me. Or rather from within me, onto the patio steps, and onto Chad's trousers, and onto the pine-needle bed of the path, a roaring, victorious vomiting which signalled my utter defeat.

Upstairs, they could not fail to hear it. Those who were "responsible"—the parents—could not, even as they might have liked, pretend not to have heard it.

I could feel Chad wavering, in his spattered chinos, contemplating flight, as the bourbon and the dregs of punch jolted their way back up my esophagus in tough little spurts. But he was a Spong, and he stayed put. His hand was barely a moment away from my elbow, and when I had straightened, and closed my mouth, and swallowed on my burning throat, he led me up the steps and through my room to the bathroom, with its wicked, sallow light, and there he daubed and doused me, and his own soiled legs, and plied me with glasses of water.

There Amity Spong and Eleanor discovered us, their own tipsy faces grimacing in disapproval and worry, then in horror at the sight of the little foreign guest, tile-white, soaked in cold water, shivering on her knees beside the toilet bowl in case there was anything still left to come.

It was Eleanor, nostrils flared, who stripped me and bathed me, who fetched my nightgown and stood behind me while I brushed my teeth; who relented slightly at the sight of my tears and enveloped my shuddering body in one of her stonier embraces before leading me, chastened, to bed. Ron—poor Ron—I later learned, was dispatched along the beach to retrieve Becky from the arms of her new beau, while Chad, being a boy, and not having fled, was summarily dismissed and told that he—and we—would be dealt with in the morning, in order that Amity Spong, with the ever affable Chuck at her side, might ride the last crest of her annual fête with typical aplomb.

Pop was gone by the time Ron found his daughter: a mixed blessing, because with him went all trace of drugs, the cloud of pot smoke having long since subsided into the seaside breeze; but in Pop's absence the other boy, Becky's boy, had succeeded in unbuttoning the bodice of her blue dress, and Ron, poor Ron, came upon the youth clamped like a suckling infant to her tiny breast, Becky, his firstborn, lolling like a corpse alongside three empty Maker's Mark bottles with her hair in her mouth and her right nipple in someone else's. It came as a shock to her father, a shock for which his inevitable response—that nervous laughter—proved inappropriate and curiously troubling: "I thought," said Becky later, in the morning, before the thundercloud unleashed and she again turned her back on me, "from the way he laughed, that maybe he was going to kill me, to kill us both."

Which he did not. The youth, not nearly so gallant as Chad, or perhaps merely less identifiable, turned heel and sped along the beach away from the house, leaving Becky, barely more sober than I, to button her modesty and stagger back in the wake of her father's enraged bulk.

Rachel, meanwhile, who had been playing Monopoly with Isaac in the boys' bedroom, came through to gawk at me, huddled as I was in my bed and miserable, and eventually at Becky, too, to whom she muttered, in Cassandra-like litany, "You've really done it this time. You're really gonna get it. Boy, you're in big trouble," until finally Becky threw her pillow at her sister with a sharp "Shut THE FUCK up," and turned to face the wall.

When you are fourteen—or fifteen, or sixteen—none of it, on such a morning after, seems at all possible. Such moments of disbelief, so integral to adolescence, are reserved in later life for incidents of awesome import: murder, say, or abandonment, or birth. But the true, roaring, abysmal, jubilant wave of absurdity, the cry of "How can it be?" is not the less powerful, at fourteen, for exploding on the heels of the trivial. Then, to have vomited on the steps at the Spongs' country house seemed as grave as to have driven drunk and hit a child, or to have fired a weapon from on high into a giggling crowd.

Blithely to say it seems unreal is not to capture the complexity of the state: what has come before hovers like a dream, and what is yet to come is unimaginable. The future stretches far to the horizon, but between now and it a chasm has opened, for which no possible bridge can be seen. This was my second encounter with such rupture, and already I was learning that such times, when all that was fixed is suddenly inchoate, are perhaps more real than any other: the passage of time inflicts itself in each ticking of the clock, the light is brighter, the outlines of objects painfully distinct. And mixed with fear and dismay lies an undeniable, glittering anucipation, a detached curiosity: something must happen that I cannot foresee; noon will come, and evening, and tomorrow; that bridge from here to there must be built and must be crossed, and when I turn back from the other side, the very chasm will have closed up as if it had never been.

Our "trials," or, more accurately, our sentencing, occurred severally, in private. This process, which took place after a breakfast of ominous silences, was hasty: our group was to leave immediately after lunch, and none of the adults wanted their last meal together sullied by our crimes. I did not know what Chuck Spong said to Chad, nor what Chad suffered. When Becky asked him, sobered up and glum, what price he had to pay for his part in our disgrace, Chad merely shrugged and said, "Don't worry about it. I'll live."

As for Becky, and for me: I fared much the better. Throughout my interview, Eleanor paced the length of our girls' bedroom, from the window to the door, her trajectory forked by the truckle bed at the room's center, so that, in effect, she described an almond oval, the shape, I thought at the time, of an enormous, all-seeing eye.

"I am extremely disappointed in your behavior, Sagesse," she began, as I had known she would. "And frankly, concerned. It is always more difficult to discipline a child that is not your own. I've been thinking a lot about this." She paused and raised an eyebrow, in order to peer at me from beneath it, through her blinking, hooded eye. "I've lost sleep. I have some choices. You could say that it's not up to me to punish you. I could call your parents, and explain the situation, and leave it up to them." She paused again, observing with utter calm the deleterious effect her words were having on my complexion and my breathing. "Which I would essentially prefer."

"Aunt Eleanor, I—"

"Grant me the respect, Sagesse, of allowing me to say what I have to say. Respect, as you know, is a key tenet of our household."

"Yes, Aunt Eleanor."

"I would prefer it. But I also know that your parents are in the midst of some very trying times. I'm forced to wonder—because I know you are a good person, and because we're friends, aren't we?—whether the problems at home, and your inability just now to confront them, didn't contribute—well, whether we aren't obliged to consider that there are extenuating circumstances. Tell me, Sagesse, do you do this at home?"

"Do what?"

"Drink. Get drunk."

"I've never—I didn't—no."

"I didn't think so." Eleanor seemed genuinely wistful. She stopped pacing, and flattened the pleats of her shorts with her forefingers as if contemplating her belly. "I can't just let this go. But mostly, I'm disappointed. That you didn't feel you could talk to me. That you didn't have the strength or the sense of security to admit what you were feeling. That this was the only way you could find an escape from your problems." She sat beside me on the bed, encased me with her muscular arm. "In some ways, I can't help feeling we're at fault. Ron and I. I've tried to create a secure, healthy environment these past weeks, and it clearly hasn't been enough. And now it's only a few days till you go home. So, I'm sorry. And I want you to know you can talk to me, about anything. At any time." She smiled, revealing, closest to my eye, a pointed, yellowing bicuspid.

Baffled, I could not follow the abrupt volte-face of her lecture, which seemed to have mutated into an apology. "I'm sorry," I said. "So sorry. I didn't mean to spoil this weekend. You've been wonderful to me, so kind, and I behaved very badly. I don't know how it happened. I—"

"If Becky hadn't—"

"It's not Becky's fault. Really, it's not. It's mine, it's my own—"

Eleanor stood and began to pace again. "There's no need to get into that. Becky is my own child, and I know her better than you do. I know exactly what happened. Let's leave it at that."

"Please don't blame her for what I did."

Eleanor clicked exasperation. "I'll be speaking to Becky in a minute or two. She and I will discuss her situation. This is about you. I'm glad that you're sorry. I knew you would be." She stopped by the window and looked down to the beach. "We both agree that there has to be some punishment, don't we?"

"Of course."

"So. You'll have dishes and bathroom duty, at home, until you go. Dinner dishes, every night." I waited; there had to be more. "Okay? Are we agreed?"

I nodded.

"That's all. Now you can go. Send Becky in. And tell Rachel to stop listening at the door."

"Yes, of course. Aunt Eleanor—so you won't—I'm sorry—my parents?"

"There's no need for them to be further upset just now, don't you agree?"

"Thank you, Aunt Eleanor."

She closed her eyes, as if exhausted. "I'd like to help you through all this," she said. "Ron and I would like to try. Okay?"

According to Rachel, who eavesdropped, Becky encountered no such patient understanding in her mother. Eleanor raged and sobbed and sulked and meted out arbitrary, vicious punishments: no outings, no desserts, no friends to the house. Becky, Rachel informed me, was "way pissed." Perhaps inevitably, she blamed me; to Rachel, she called me "a cunt," and said she would no longer speak to me.

"Don't worry too much about it," Rachel said, throwing herself at my midsection in unconscious imitation of her mother. "You're still the Gecko to me."

I had not thought I would be eager to go home. I had thought to have found, in my shape-shifting American self, a power unexplored: but my form was, alas, dependent upon other people's vision. Becky did not forgive readily. In my remaining Boston days, she skulked and shirked and resumed her paths of secrecy, as if I were a fat-backed spider or her parents' two-faced flunky, only faultily disguised as her peer. There were no more cemetery nights, no giggling conversations between the trees or on my bed. Rachel invited me to a final'séance, but I declined.

Nor was I relieved by my aunts concern: all along, I realized, when I had believed that I appeared to her a model girl, she had seen in me some wound, had thought me a voiceless jelly of neuroses and repressions that she, with her psychobabble, sought to reshape into something more robust. She had seen me as my brother. I was sickened, and in doubt. Perhaps I did not, as Becky had assured me, "scream virgin"; but did I instead transmit, as clear as sonar to those who could detect it, waves of sorrow and damage? If so, how could I stanch them? And if not, how could I measure my newfound hatred for Aunt Eleanor, who in imagining them had all but created them?