What Comes After (2 page)

Beatrice started crying.

“I’m so sorry about my mom and dad,” she said. “I wish I knew what was going on.”

I waited for her to say more, to at least try to explain what had happened. Something. But she just cried. I started to comfort her, to act polite and tell her it was OK, like I had with her mom. But then it hit me again how messed up the whole thing was. Maybe her parents were splitting up, but so what? My dad had
died,
and my best friend’s parents had broken their one promise to him. And all Beatrice could do was cry about it. What about fighting for me? What about insisting that I stay with them no matter what?

But as much as I wanted to shout all that at Beatrice, I just couldn’t. She and her family were still all I had, even if it was for just this one last night in Maine. So I took off running instead.

Beatrice yelled “Wait!” but I wouldn’t, so she raced after me down the street, past shops, through people’s yards, down alleys, down to the bay. I let her catch up with me where the land sloped down to the black water — usually calm in the harbor, but churning tonight as the wind kept blowing harder and the rough ocean waves skirted the seawall.

The storm broke over us as we stood there — a summer squall, as sudden and fierce as a nor’easter.

“Come on!” I yelled over the roar of the wind and the rain. “Let’s go out on the seawall.”

Beyond the dark harbor we could see whitecaps rising, smashing hard onto the rocks. The seawall jutted out a quarter of a mile, no longer so high above the tide line. A blue beacon light shone faintly above a small stone cabin at the point.

“You’re crazy,” Beatrice yelled back. “It’s too dangerous!”

I ignored her and slid down the muddy embankment to the water’s edge. The rain kept pouring as I climbed over wet rocks and finally onto the wall.

“Iris!” Beatrice yelled after me, but when I didn’t stop, she followed me.

Soon we were running, stumbling, leaning into the wind and the hard, slanting rain that pelted us, sharp as needles on our arms and legs and faces — anywhere we were exposed. We struggled on, with the wind howling, the waves rising higher, crashing harder, the spray blinding us.

It took ten minutes to make it to the end, battling through the wind and that spray, until we fell inside the shack, exhausted. There was no door. Everything was slick and wet. Wood shutters strained but held in the one window on the ocean side. We huddled together at first, crouching low on the floor.

Beatrice wanted us to stay like that until the storm passed, but I had a different idea. I got up to open the shutters — they slammed against the outside wall — and then I stood there for the next half hour, facing the Atlantic. I gripped the frame tight until I couldn’t feel my hands, just the blasting wind and the needles of rain and the incessant spray. The waves rose dangerously high, threatening to break over the seawall.

My face burned. I was sure I would have welts from the slicing rain. For a minute it even seemed to be raining backward, the water falling up and into my face from the ocean.

Then the wind shifted, and slowly, gradually, died. The waves receded. The storm passed.

There were stars out. I shivered violently from the cold, then turned and helped Beatrice off the floor. We stood there for a couple of minutes more, leaning on each other, then staggered together back home — back to
her
home. We didn’t speak. I used to always know what Beatrice was thinking, but now, and for most of the past month, I didn’t have a clue. Maybe she kept quiet because she was mad at me for dragging her out onto the seawall, or maybe she just didn’t know what to say anymore.

I didn’t know what was left to say, either, and didn’t have the words to explain to Beatrice — or to anyone else — how good it had felt to be out there on the seawall in the middle of the storm. How it was so much better than lying awake at night, worrying about moving to North Carolina, thinking about my dad, thinking about all the things I forgot to tell him, all the ways I hadn’t been a good enough daughter, how much I missed him and how awful and deep this black hole of grief was that threatened to pull me all the way in and turn me into something the opposite of myself.

I stepped outside the next morning to a world lashed clean by the storm. The sun was blinding, the sky blue and cloudless. Beatrice and I struggled to fit my suitcases into the trunk of her dad’s car but kept getting in each other’s way. Everything seemed off — the house, the yard, the street,
us
— as if it had all been erased, then redrawn: close to the original, but not quite the same. Angles a little different, sight lines no longer clear. I put on sunglasses, but it was still too bright out. I couldn’t see the ocean.

Once we were done, Beatrice and I both climbed into the backseat. Mr. Stone got in behind the steering wheel and looked blankly at the empty passenger seat for a minute.

Finally he shrugged. “Off we go, then.” Mrs. Stone waved from the front door, sagging against the frame as if she needed the support to help her stand.

We’d only gotten a few hours of sleep, but I was still surprised that Beatrice passed out ten minutes later, not long after we pulled onto the Portland highway. Mr. Stone and I didn’t talk. He fiddled with the radio until he found the oldies station that my dad and I always used to listen to, but the ones playing today seemed to have been selected just to make me feel awful: “So Far Away,” “Operator,” “Wish You Were Here.”

I pulled my hoodie up over my ears to try to block out the sound, and spent the rest of the trip looking out the window at the blur of pine stands and strip malls and little towns and glimpses of the coast, trying to memorize everything as if seeing it for the last time, which maybe I was.

Once we got on the interstate, the real Maine vanished, though, and it seemed as if we could have been almost anywhere in America — not that I’d been very many places before: Portland a dozen times, Boston twice for softball tournaments, Nova Scotia once on the ferry. I’d never been on an airplane, but I couldn’t get excited about it, knowing what I was leaving and where I was going.

There was a lobster-roll stand where we got off the interstate, and I asked Mr. Stone if he would stop.

“You’re hungry?” he asked, looking at the clock on the dashboard. It was ten in the morning.

I shook my head. “I just wanted to get some Whoopie Pies for my aunt and my cousin. I don’t think they have them in North Carolina. I thought I should probably bring them something.”

Beatrice stayed asleep when I got out of the car and didn’t wake up two minutes later when I climbed back in. I had to elbow her awake when we finally reached the airport. She was slumped against my shoulder and left a string of drool when she sat up.

“Sorry,” she croaked.

“For what?” I asked. “Falling asleep or getting drool on my hoodie?”

She blinked and wiped her chin. “What?”

I shook my head. “Never mind.”

Mr. Stone looked over the backseat. “Almost there,” he said. “All ready for your big adventure, Iris?”

Beatrice sniffed. “God, Dad. She’s not going to Disneyland.”

“I’m aware of that, Beatrice,” Mr. Stone said, his voice sharp. He reached back without looking and gestured at me with an envelope. “This is some spending money for your trip, Iris, and any expenses that might come up when you get to your aunt’s.”

Beatrice grabbed the envelope and counted the money: two hundred dollars in a stack of crisp twenties. Her face was red when she handed it back over, and I shoved the money into my jeans pocket and mumbled thanks.

Beatrice’s cell phone rang as we pulled up to the terminal, and I knew from the ringtone that it was Collie. They barely had time to launch into one of their whispery conversations, though, when Mr. Stone stopped at the Departures curb.

“Gotta go,” Beatrice said into her phone. “Love you, too.”

Mr. Stone said he would wait in the cell-phone lot for Beatrice to go in with me, and she started chattering the minute he drove off, I guess trying to make up for all the things she hadn’t been awake long enough to say in the car. “Call me when you get there, OK? And e-mail me as soon as you get to a computer. Tell me everything. See if you can take pictures and send them to me. And find out when you can come back to visit.”

Her phone rang again. “It’s Collie,” she said. “He must have forgotten to tell me something.”

She scooted off to talk while I got my ticket and checked my bags.

I wanted to reach over and snap her cell phone closed, but instead I just stood there seething. Beatrice had changed in the past month. The worse things were between her parents, and the closer I got to leaving, the more obsessed she’d become with boys.

She finally got off her phone, came back over, and threw her arms around me. It seemed to finally be hitting her that I was really leaving. I hugged her tight and started to speak, but before I could figure out what I was going to say, her cell phone went off again.

The ringtone wasn’t Collie’s, but she pulled away quickly. “Oh, hey,” she chirped. By the time she finished the new conversation, I was in the security line, and all she could do was call my name and wave.

I kept my eyes tightly shut during takeoff — not because I was afraid of flying but from the effort of holding it together. The minute they turned off the
FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELT
sign, I squeezed past two passengers in my row and made my unsteady way to the lavatory, where I finally crumbled into tears. I’d been holding them in for weeks, since Mr. Stone first told me I couldn’t stay with them, that I would have to live with Aunt Sue in North Carolina. But now it was actually happening. I was leaving Maine, leaving everything I’d ever known, leaving my whole life behind. I sat trembling on the toilet seat in that tiny airplane bathroom, knees drawn up to my chin, face buried in my hands. I might have stayed there sobbing for the entire flight, but people kept knocking on the door and I finally had to force myself to stop. I washed my face, pressed my hands over my puffy eyes, took a deep breath, and went back to my seat.

As we cruised over Massachusetts, I sipped a ginger ale and stared out the window. My thoughts kept circling back to Beatrice, to the bribe money Mr. Stone had given me, to the last glimpse of Maine coast through the salt-streaked car window. Finally I dug through my bag and pulled out a pen and my notebook.

I kept writing. I told Dad I loved flying, which might have actually been true if I hadn’t been so distracted. I told him about sneaking out of Beatrice’s house the night before, and about the storm, but not about the seawall. I knew he would have thought it was a foolish thing to do, even if he’d have understood why I did it. I didn’t tell him about how angry I was at Beatrice and her parents, or about how much I dreaded moving to North Carolina. I kept my letter upbeat and positive; I didn’t want to upset him.

I’d written Dad other letters like this since he died. They weren’t journal entries, or diary entries, or anything where I poured out my heart and soul. Just letters. Just the Iris news. I wrote them at times like this, when I got hit by one of these tsunamis of grief and needed something, anything, to keep me from drowning.

It had started with one of the last conversations we had. Dad had gotten confused. He thought I was going on a trip. He kept talking about my trip, and he wanted me to promise to write to him.

I tried to make him understand. “I’m not going anywhere, Dad,” I said. “I’m staying right here with you. There’s no trip. I’m staying right here.”

“It’s OK,” he said, his eyes squeezed shut, his hand locked tight around mine. “Just promise you’ll write me a letter when you get there.”

So I wrote him these letters, not that there was any place to send them. Usually I tore the letters into strips once I finished, and then tore the strips into scraps, and then threw the scraps away. I kept this one, though. I didn’t have much left of Dad, and I didn’t want to leave it on the plane.

Aunt Sue was waiting for me at the Raleigh airport, and she looked just like her voice: raspy and hard, though she was kind of pretty, too, in a fading, crow’s-feet, farmer’s-tan way. I could see my mom in her a little, though my mom had been younger and thinner than Aunt Sue the last time I saw her. Aunt Sue had on an orange baseball cap with a sweat stain in the front, jammed tight over her short gray-brown hair. Her charcoal Harley-Davidson T-shirt was tight, too, and showed off her figure. She wore old jeans, and socks and sandals, the same as me — I wasn’t sure what to make of that — and she held a sign with my name on it in all capital letters, spelled wrong:
IRIS WHITE
.

Book wasn’t with her.

I walked all the way up to her before she actually looked at me. “Aunt Sue?” I said.

Our faces were about level, though when she shrugged and straightened up I could see she was a couple of inches taller.