Wish You Were Here (20 page)

The discussion waned, and then when Arlene returned with Rufus, rekindled. He tried to establish simple kidnaping; otherwise, why bring in the FBI? The toilet flushed behind the door, as if in rebuttal. Only Meg noticed it. While his mother and Arlene were rehashing the latest police-union snafu in Pittsburgh, Lise snuck out of the bathroom and upstairs, Meg's eyes following her, then finding him.

“Well,” their mother finally said, “this is all fascinating but I need my beauty sleep. Don't forget your lists for tomorrow.”

“Right,” Ken said, because he'd completely forgotten.

A last check on the weather—rain, Arlene insisted—and she waved her book at them and closed her door. He felt drained, as if a long game had ended. He thought he wanted a beer, but Lise came down the stairs in her bulky Tufts sweatshirt and took his arm, pressed against him to let him know she was braless, smiling at his surprise.

“We're going to take a walk,” she announced.

“Have fun,” Meg said.

Outside, he detoured around to the garage for the blanket, this time careful of the stones. The moon off the lake peeked in the windows, his father's junk nothing but black mounds. The light in the little fridge didn't work and the necks clinked together, the crimped caps biting his fingers.

“You're so sneaky,” she said, and carried the beers for him.

The dock shifted beneath their feet. It was clear and the lake was calm, the lights of Midway's boathouse drawn on the dark water like flames. He wondered if Tracy Ann Caler had done this this summer, if she had a boyfriend, maybe a guy she went with through high school. He imagined the Lerners' alarm going off again, the floods on the roof freezing them like convicts tunneling under a wall. He wished they could take the boat out in the middle and just drift, lay the seats flat and gaze up at the stars. They didn't have to make love.

It was nothing to worry about, just the usual paranoia his family brought out in him. He missed Boston, even his damn job, the daily imperative of something to do.

He spread the blanket in front of the bench and they folded down onto it. He didn't know what to do with his bottle cap, so she shoved them both in her pocket. They kissed, and he could taste the beer, but hot now. Tracy Ann. Trace. She pressed his shoulder and he lay down. He solved the copper button of her jeans while she worked on his shirt. She wasn't wearing anything there either.

“It's been a while,” she said.

“I know.”

They didn't talk. They knew each other, and sometimes, after being apart so long, they found out why they were together in the first place, discovered nerves and muscles they couldn't remember using and stretched them till they ached. They returned to each other.

It made him lie still, stricken, sticky, his mind wiped clean. It made her laugh, made her jump up.

“Come on!” she said, tugging his arm.

“What?” He was putty, and gave in, balked only when he saw she was leading him to the ladder. “No.”

“Yes. I'll go first.”

She did, groaning, her shoulders white against the dark water. She reached her arms up. “Come on.”

The wind blew through his body.

“You're crazy.”

“And you're not.”

“Yeah,” he said, climbing down, the water shocking on his ankles, freezing his thighs, “but mine's hereditary.”

Meg wished she'd left a window open, but she couldn't lower one now without turning the van on, so she leaned her seat back and lit up, the dope in the bowl crackling, warming her lungs. The smoke roiled like storm clouds, filming the windshield, then dissipated. This was her reward for telling her mother about the divorce, and she wouldn't second-guess it. She had so few pleasures left. Let her have this one without guilt.

They would talk again, Meg was sure, but the worst was over. She would have to listen to her mother's opinions and deflect her questions all week, but she'd done the hard part. She would not freak out about the money yet. She needed to let things settle, let her mother come to her. There was time.

She flicked the lighter again but the bowl was spent. She tapped it into the ashtray and lay back, looking up at the chestnut, the leaves black and overlapped, joining into a huge shadow with scalloped edges, a monster leaning over the garage. The tree had been here when she was a girl, the garage too, with its musty smell, its eaves full of squirrels. There were probably things in the garage her father hadn't moved since she was born, and the thought made her realize how odd it was that they were all here, gathered, out of all the possible places in the world, by this little lake in the middle of nowhere. It seemed wildly arbitrary, like planets suddenly lining up, electrons switching molecules.

Her mother wanted a list of five things she wanted, like it was a game show, a lottery. What
she
wanted—she could admit it now, alone and stoned—was to be young again, to try it all over: love, family, everything. That wasn't what her mother was offering, just furniture, mementos, souvenirs of another life. It was all gone, she thought. With the cottage, they could pretend it wasn't, but it was, as sure as Jeff would never come back to her or Sarah would never love her like a child again. Time destroyed everything.

“Poof,” she said, the fingers of one hand extending all at once, a slow explosion.

She desperately wanted a drink but fought it off. At first she'd thought marijuana maintenance was an AA joke, but it had become her saving grace. Not that she could tell anyone about it.

Her father's glasses, that's what she would put first.

The house itself. She could hole up here, send the kids to the local schools. They'd love that, huh? All three of them alone then, with no friends.

Like any whim, it dissolved when it hit reality. Her choices were simple: stay and make the best of it, or leave and start all over again.

She licked her lips, the taste like a rich spice on her tongue, overwhelming. She had gum in the glove compartment. When she thumbed the button, a tiny light came on behind the maps and repair bills. The foot well was a nest of Taco Bell garbage, the van a fucking mess—another mark against her. She hadn't had time to deal with it. Tomorrow, she thought, already arguing against such a waste of vacation. It was going to rain anyway.

The gum was old and hard to get going but then spread its sweetness through her mouth, behind the castlelike battlements of her teeth, under her tongue. The Wrigley family came to Chautauqua. There was a real Mr. Hershey too, and she saw them walking in some formal garden of a mansion, a gravel path between rosebushes, two turn-of-the-century tycoons with canes and swallowtail jackets. That should have been her life. Instead she was getting stoned in a piece-of-shit minivan, her husband probably boffing his little girlfriend this minute.

“Asshole.”

It was like a mantra, holding off any real thought of him. And he
was
an asshole.

She sat back and felt the gum squishing, resisting her teeth. From the dock came laughter, and then footsteps, the planks shaking. The seat was low enough to hide her; she poked her head up, her nose resting on the thinly padded sill of the window.

It was just Ken and Lise. Ken had a pair of beer bottles, and Lise had her arms crossed over a folded blanket. They stopped in the yard and kissed deliberately, silhouetted in the frame of the Wisemans' oaks, the lake silver behind them, a Hallmark card, and though she wanted to
duck down so she'd be hidden, she watched them until they finished and walked hand in hand to the kitchen door and inside. He still relied on Lise, still needed her in the simplest way. She wanted someone who needed her like that. Even Justin had learned to go to Sarah when she wasn't feeling well.

They'd kissed right in front of her, and she felt jealous the way she'd been as a teenager, hurt that she wasn't the one in love, the loved one. She was too old for this shit.

“Exactly,” she said. That was the problem right there.

She found the lever and flipped the seat up, quietly got out and walked to the dock. Halfway to the boat, she noticed wet footprints—not shoes but toes and heels, the insteps missing. By the ladder they were almost solid. They'd been skinny-dipping. She would have gone if they'd asked her.

They didn't want her there.

“Duh,” she said, like Sarah.

She thought of shucking her clothes and diving in, but it was too shallow, and there was no point doing it alone. She did enough things alone.

She turned and headed back toward shore, the lights of the house drawing her on. Five things. Her mind emptied after the glasses. There were five of them, but her mother would think she was making fun of her, ridiculing something she held dear. It was her father's memory they were all paying tribute to. Something of his, she thought, something he loved.

The boat was gone, and the TV. Ken would get his tools. She'd inherited his love of scotch, that should count.

Maybe the glasses would be enough. She would come up with some obvious choices to placate her mother. A dresser, an end table. She'd ask Sarah and Justin if they wanted anything.

The door to the garage was open, and she closed it. She took the kids' suits and towels off the line and brought them inside, still damp. Only one lamp was on in the living room, and the radio was off, Rufus escaped to her mother's room, crashed on one of the braided rugs. Upstairs the sink was running, Ken and Lise getting ready for bed. It wasn't even eleven yet.

What would they say if she went out to a bar, got in the car and hit the Snug Harbor Lounge, came home plowed and shouting? She could
let herself get picked up—but here the fantasy ended, turned into a sermon, that AA training kicking in, and the memory of several ridiculous nights, rooms like nightmares, men she would have never slept with sober, drives home she didn't remember, torturous mornings listening to Jeff's accusations, some of them true. Easy does it, you bet.

She looked in the fridge and then remembered the ice cream, stopping to spit her gum out before she served herself. Spooning it into a dish, she noticed her mother's goofy salt and pepper shakers and thought they were being asked to do the same thing—reclaim some lost part of themselves and pretend it had never left.

It wouldn't work. It couldn't; the world just wasn't like that.

She took her ice cream into the living room and sat on the couch. The water had stopped upstairs, leaving only her spoon tapping against the dish. When she was done, she rinsed her bowl and spoon and fit them into the dishwasher, gave the counter a light wipe-down, locked the doors and turned out the lights—all calmly, precise, her steps measured as a valet's. For the first time all day, she felt useful, human again.

The rain woke Sam up, thumping like something running across the roof. A pressure insistent as a pinch told him he had to pee, the water flogging the roof only confirmed it. Justin was asleep with his mouth open. The girls were lumps. Someone had turned the fan off. He left his warm sleeping bag, guided by the night-light beside the bathroom door.

The heat lamp in the ceiling made everything red, like he was in an oven. He sat on the toilet, staring at the glass knobs of the vanity, the light making everything look strange, his toes barely touching the cold floor. It was so quiet he could hear what he was doing through the rain, the stream interrupted by one plop, then another.

When he couldn't get anything else out, he wiped himself the way his father showed him, folding the paper in squares, then did an extra one to make sure. At home when he left streaks in his underwear they lectured him, his mother pretending she wasn't mad, but once he'd overheard her emptying his hamper, stopping dead and saying very clearly, “Not
again.
” He'd hidden in the basement with his Nintendo, and later his father had talked with him, shown him the trick of folding the paper over. Sam didn't tell him it didn't always work. Sometimes when it didn't, he buried his underwear in the bathroom garbage can. Sometimes to be safe he didn't wear any.

Silently he put the lid down, then turned to the window. He was sure he would see someone standing in the dark side yard, a man in a suit and tie like Grandpa at the funeral, not moving, just standing there looking up at him.

There was nothing, just the grass, the leaves waving and slick with rain.

He shut the light off and opened the door at the same time. There was someone in front of him.

He froze, waited for the shadow to fall on him, consume him whole.

A hand reached out of the dark and gently touched his head, as if to soothe him.

“It's just me,” said Aunt Margaret. “Go to sleep.”

She passed above him like a ship, trailing a warm scent, shutting the door behind her. The edges glowed red. He burrowed into his bag, waiting for her to return, his face aimed at the door, but then he and Ella were in a canoe on this river in the jungle and there were rocks everywhere and something to do with a book and a compass, and yet he was still waiting for Aunt Margaret. Aunt Margaret was beautiful, that's why they were in the canoe. She had put her hand on his head, passed so close he could smell her perfume. In the morning he would remember it like a dream.

Emily had asked Kenneth to remind her last night about the garbage, but it must not have been important enough, because here she was, pursued by Rufus, going through the downstairs emptying out the sticky wastebasket in the bathroom and the woven wicker one under the gateleg table and the nasty kitchen trash as well. He was like his father, he could never take a hint. Or was it just male stubbornness? Men acted so put-upon whenever you asked them to do the littlest task, as if they were taking on chores you were supposed to do.

“
Please
stop following me,” she told Rufus, and he slunk under the table, turned twice and sank down with a bony thunk, still looking to her for instructions, or forgiveness.