But instead of running away, I do the opposite. I bend down and touch the floor. It’s hard and cold and it reminds me of when I used to lie on the kitchen tiles with Pepper because he liked it there and I liked him. I wish dogs could get wrinkles just like people so you’d know when they were getting old and it wasn’t such a surprise when it was time to say good-bye.

  I catch up with Dad. While he’s looking for his boxes, I’m looking for a good jumping spot. The ceiling is so high that a giant could shop here without bumping his head, and the shelves are full of shiny packages that look a lot like toys. Toys for dads.

  Dad stops to talk to a worker with an ugly orange apron. Now seems like the best time because there’s a tall stepladder waiting in the aisle. I start climbing up before I can think about it too much, but it’s really hard not to think about everything. I wonder what my memory is really good for, anyway, because the only people who seem to care about it are people like Dr. Robert and Mindy Love and they’re not the nicest people.

  I reach the top of the steps and I look down. I have to hold the rail because I’m so high up.

  “Joan! What are you doing?”

  Dad and the worker are staring up at me. Dad’s eyes look like they’re about to leap out of his face and I think the worker is saying something rude about me into his shirt microphone.

  “Don’t move,” Dad says. “I’m coming up.”

  There’s a little crowd now. An audience. Dad comes up the stairs and makes me sit down with him on the platform. He tries to get me to look at him, but I can’t.

  “Joanie, please. What’s going on?”

  “I’m tired and it’s not the sleepy kind.”

  “What are you saying? I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “I want everything to go back to the way it was.”

  “I know, honey.”

  “No, you don’t, Dad. You’ve forgotten.”

  “No, I haven’t. I swear I haven’t.”

  I look up. I want to believe him.

  “Come here,” he says, and he hugs me hard.

  A Day in the Life

  36

  I tap his face. Syd. Stop playing around. Wake up. I listen for a breath, feel for a pulse. I blow into his mouth. Press his chest. Hold his nose, blow again. Press his chest, harder, harder. Try to lift his head, his body. So heavy. Find a phone. Call 911. Answer the dispatcher’s questions, follow his orders, do everything he asks. Hang up. Go to the porch, listen for sirens. Come back inside. Shake him, scream—

  I open my eyes, wake from the nightmare. But I can’t turn it off fully, not when the nightmare really happened.

  It takes a minute to remember that I’m in Veronica’s house on her foldout couch.

  I sit up, throw the afghan aside, wipe the sweat from my forehead. The window is open, but there’s no air blowing in. My feet welcome the cool kiss of the tiled floor.

  The last few nights, my dreams have been frighteningly vivid. Memories and images that I had evicted from my mind have been breaking back in. It’s as if I’m living my life in delay. He died months ago but it’s only hitting me now.

  I find a note stuck to the coffeemaker: It’s Friday! We’re going out tonight!

  The boyish handwriting reminds me of Joan, who I’ve missed rather intensely since leaving Jersey. Though she and Veronica are wildly different—the former quite serious, the latter rarely so—I’ve united them in my head as part of one family for which I feel responsible. I hope my littler sister is doing okay without me.

  In the week I’ve spent here with Veronica, we’ve gone out every night but one. It would seem every day is Friday in her world. Unless this never-ending party is all for my benefit.

  Incredibly, no matter how late we’re out each night, it never hampers Veronica’s productivity. Every new morning, she’s up with her alarm and off to work on time. She heads up guest relations at a local resort. While she’s away each day, I wander the island. I poke my head into galleries and antique stores, bird-watch on park benches, sip coffee at outdoor tables. Sometimes I just take a leisurely stroll to nowhere at all.

  And when Veronica returns home in the early evenings, we usually grab a bite and end up staying out way too late. These long nights have offered a welcome diversion from the turmoil in my head and heart. I’ve yet to ask my sister about the significant conversation she and Syd had without my knowledge. Turns out, fatherhood is, technically speaking, still a possibility for me. Part of me wishes Paige had never brought it to my attention. To learn that there’s this one last convoluted way for me to resurrect a little piece of the person I lost is proving impossible to ignore.

  And so, tonight, before the festivities begin, I’ve decided—just now, while standing sleepily in Veronica’s narrow kitchenette—that I will make a trip to the market this afternoon for supplies. Tonight, my sister and I are going to stay home and have a proper meal together.

  “I’m impressed,” Veronica says. We’re positioned at opposite ends of her glass coffee table, sitting cross-legged on the floor with couch pillows under our butts.

  She’s nodding in appreciation, her mouth full of mahi-mahi and black rice. “There’s something sweet in here too,” she says.

  “Navel orange.”

  “Is that it? I never would’ve guessed.”

  “I’m glad it worked out,” I say. “I found the recipe online.”

  I used to love to cook this way for Syd. It gave my days purpose when I wasn’t working or auditioning. I’d scour the web for intriguing concoctions and venture out to Whole Foods in search of sumac or tamarind paste or whatever other ingredient I’d never heard of before. It’s been several months since I’ve had the spirit to try out an untested meal.

  “You can cook for me whenever you want,” she says. “Seriously, this is the best home-cooked meal I’ve had in years.”

  “It looks like it’s the only home-cooked meal you’ve had in years. Your spice rack consists of salt and pepper.”

  She shrugs, guilty as charged. “Turns out you’re not a bad guy.”

  “What?”

  “On The Long Arm. I knew you couldn’t have murdered that man. You just don’t have it in the eyes.”

  “Don’t underestimate me,” I say.

  “I don’t.”

  Veronica changes the subject yet again and starts describing how her bike tire was so flat she barely managed to ride it home. “That was Tim’s job,” she explains. “He made sure my tires were full of air. I always forget to check.”

  “I’ll fill them up for you.”

  She smiles in appreciation.

  “What happened with him, anyway?” I ask, inching my way to the matter at hand. “You guys seemed pretty serious at first.”

  “We were. I met him right after I moved here. He introduced me to a lot of people who are still good friends of mine. Plus, he hooked me up with the job at the resort. He was sort of my whole world. But I just started to feel suffocated.”

  She relates the whole thing nonchalantly, more interested in her food than her story.

  “So you’re the one who broke it off?”

  “Yeah,” Veronica says. “And it’s a really small town, so it’s annoying. I’m surprised we haven’t run into him yet.”

  “And you started dating him when?”

  She calculates in her head. “It was about mid-December.”

  I pause for a drink. “And around New Year’s was when Sydney asked you for your eggs, right?”

  For the first time my sister looks thrown. It takes her several seconds to recover.

  “He told me not to say anything,” Veronica says. “He said you’d be mad.”

  “I’m not mad. I just wanted you to know that I know.”

  She stares at me, unsure what to say next. “He said you guys had someone else that you really liked. Someone through the agency. He said you weren’t depending on me.”

  I wish it were true. “We never found anyone through the agency. He just didn’t want you to feel bad.” Judging from her crestfallen face, it’s happened anyway.

  She looks down at her food, the fork still in her hand but her attention elsewhere. “After he called me I didn’t hear anything else about it. I asked Mom and she said you guys were putting the whole thing on hold.”

  “One of us was. That’s true.”

  “He said you were going to call me, Gavin. I was waiting to hear from you. Why didn’t you call?”

  I try to find the words. All I can say is “I don’t know.”

  She drops her fork onto her plate and crawls to my side. Her arms come over my shoulders and around my neck. “I’m sorry.”

  I am too. I should’ve called her, a year ago, seven months ago. I had so many chances, so much time. It seems so simple now. I would call, she would answer. We’d catch up for a bit, then I’d lay it all out. Tell her how scared I was to be a father. She’d tell me to get over it, that it was perfectly normal to have doubts, the same speech Syd and Paige gave me. She’d tell me she loved me, that she’d do whatever it took. Syd never would’ve had to resort to Mara.

  Or maybe it wouldn’t have happened that way. Maybe she would have said no. At least I would have had peace of mind. We tried, we asked, time to move on. Syd and I would have gone to the next candidate, together. We would have searched as a team, never stopping until we found our perfect match.

  And if we had never found that perfect one, so be it. We would have been able to sleep knowing we tried. We were true of heart. We were honest. We were open. We believed. What a rare thing, to believe. We were lucky. We could’ve been.

  “You okay?” Veronica asks. It’s what everyone wants to know.

  I ignore the question and say something that’s one hundred percent true: “I’m ready to go out.”

  37

  I’m all alone where the waves come onto the sand. The water rushes over my feet and it keeps my whole body cool in the hot sun.

  If I move my eyes left or right, I’m not alone anymore because I can see all the sailboats. If I turn around I see my parents waiting just a couple of jump-rope lengths away. They’re sitting in beach chairs and Mom is reading her book and Dad is sleeping with his earbuds in his ears. This isn’t the vacation Mom wanted, that’s not happening until next year, but it’s a trip that Dad thought we should take right away after he pulled me off the stepladder in Home Depot.

  It’s nice of Dad to take us here to Cold Spring Harbor for the weekend and show me Cannon Hill, which is the mansion that John Lennon and his family lived in when they wanted to leave the city and feel like they were on vacation. But my brain is still working the same way it always does, which means that visiting a new John Lennon place only reminds me of the other John Lennon places I’ve visited and the other people I’ve visited those places with. That means I’m thinking of him again. I don’t even like to say his name because he forgot all about me and that’s not fair because I can never forget about him.

  Mom startles me. “Want to swim?”

  “Not really.”

  She stands with her arms crossed over her one-piece suit and stares out at the water, trying to see what I’m seeing. “It’s beautiful here.”

  I’m having a hard time thinking about what’s here because I’m mostly thinking about what’s not here. I wish there was a way to know when you were seeing someone for the last time so you could pay extra-close attention to that person when it was happening.

  Tuesday, July 30, 2013: We get off the train from New York City and Gavin carries me on his back the whole way up the hill. He lets me down and we turn onto our street and Mom is waiting on the steps. She runs to us and hugs me. She walks me into the house and then she sends me to my room and that part happens so fast that I never think to turn my head back once more and look at Gavin.

  “Come on,” Mom says. “Let’s swim.”

  She holds my hand and we walk into the water. We go deep until my feet can’t reach and I’m kicking. Mom tilts her head back and reaches her arms out and floats. I do the same and we both look up at the sky and I think back to when I first learned to float and the swim teacher had to hold my butt up because it kept sinking.

  I think Mom is saying something but with my ears in the water I can’t hear so well. I lift my head up and shake the water out of my ears and ask, “What did you say?”

  She’s not floating anymore. She’s kicking her legs and now I’m kicking too. “I said, maybe we’ve been looking at this the wrong way.”

  I still don’t know what she’s talking about. “We?”

  “Yeah,” Mom says, looking at Dad back on the beach. “We get frustrated with each other, I know, but we each have our own strengths and weaknesses. Maybe it’s best to just let people do what they’re good at instead of forcing them to do something that doesn’t come naturally to them.”

  I look back at the beach too and I see that Dad isn’t reading his magazine anymore. He’s playing his acoustic guitar, the Gibson, which is the only guitar he didn’t stick inside a box.

  “He’s happiest when he’s creating,” Mom says. “That’s what he does best.”

  Dad has that look on his face like his head is in the clouds. I don’t love clouds because they sometimes get in the way of the sun, but I don’t mind them when Dad has his head in them because that means he’s getting lost in the music, which means he’s forgetting where he is, and that’s the only type of forgetting I really like.

  “And what you do best, Joan, is remember.” She’s facing me now. “I know you get annoyed sometimes, but no one can remember like you and you shouldn’t expect them to. That’s not what they’re good at. Remembering is your job. And it’s an important one.”

  She winks and then dunks her head back. When she pulls it up again her hair is slicked down and she looks like the prettiest creature. I want to be a creature too, but a different kind. I hold my nose and dive under the water and I pretend I’m a walrus gliding around in the dark and quiet. When I run out of breath, I come up and open my eyes and I don’t know how but it looks like the sun got a little bit brighter.

  The waitress takes our dinner plates away and she asks if we have room for dessert and Dad says yes. I’m glad we got a table next to the window because the sun is saying good night in a pretty way, making orange and purple swirls in the sky.

  Cold Spring Harbor must be lucky because John Lennon wrote most of the songs for his Double Fantasy album here and he won his only Grammy award for that album. Also Billy Joel has an album named after this town and he’s a very big artist even though I don’t like his music. Dad tried to play some of Billy Joel’s music in the car today but the only song of his I ever liked is “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and I don’t like that song anymore because now it reminds me of a person who actually did start a fire.

  Dad orders coffee with his dessert but Mom is still drinking her wine. She’s wearing her new white pants because Labor Day hasn’t passed yet. I have no idea what happens after Labor Day but Mom loves to follow the rules. One of her hands is busy playing with her hair, or maybe she’s just using her fingers as a comb. She didn’t bring her brush with her to dinner because it was too big to fit inside her fancy purse:

  She’s staring at Dad, turning her wineglass round and round, holding it by the stem, and she won’t look away.

  “What?” Dad says.

  “I think we should keep the studio,” Mom says.

  That makes my ears open because that’s all I’ve ever wanted to hear one of them say. Dad looks shocked, probably because he had to carry all those heavy boxes outside and now he’ll have to carry all of them back inside again. “What are you saying?” Dad says.

  “I saw you today,” Mom says, “sitting on the beach, playing your guitar. I haven’t seen you look that way in so long. You seemed so happy. I don’t want to take that away from you. I never wanted that. This is all I’ve ever wanted, the three of us together, no work, no projects, no distractions. If we could just set aside some time during the year, I’d be content. I just need a break sometimes so I can feel like a normal person. And I need you to take a break with me. I need you. We need you.”

  Now we’re waiting for Dad, but the waitress is back. She hands out pie and ice cream and slides the hot coffee in front of Dad. He smiles at her and when she’s gone he says, “I’ll make more of an effort. I promise. And we can take more weekend vacations like this. It’s long overdue.” He lifts the steaming mug to his lips. “But we’re not keeping the studio.”

  “I’m okay with keeping it, Ollie, really. If it makes you happy.”

  “It doesn’t,” he says, sipping the coffee and setting the mug down carefully. “Today was the first time I can remember when I was playing guitar just because I felt like it. Not for work. Not to earn money. Nothing was on the line. It was just for fun. That’s why I started playing in the first place. It was nice to feel that again. I don’t have all that pressure anymore.” He stares down at his coffee, which is so black you could show movie credits on it. “I’m okay with the way things are.”

  Dad smiles at Mom but I don’t like what he’s saying. For a second it seemed like one of my biggest wishes was going to come true. It’s like being at the rescue shelter and you ask the person to take a dog out of his cage and he wags his tail when you pet him and he thinks he’s coming home with you, but then you have to send him back to his cage because your mom says it’s just too soon to get a new dog (Saturday, September 4, 2010).

  And now there’s some lady at another table staring at me and I’m wondering if it’s because there’s chocolate on my face or maybe I’m crying and I don’t even know it. It’s really spooking me out, the way her eyes are squinting but there’s no sun in here. I’m trying to look away but for some reason I can’t.

  Now she’s standing up and dropping her napkin on the table. She’s coming to our table and I’m wiping my face just in case. Now she’s standing next to Mom, but she’s looking at me and she says, “I know you.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27