Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories (12 page)

There was a group of men who looked like teachers, and women in white pants across the bar, drinking heavily, and after a time one of the men separated and sat next to her. She thought she had come this time to start something with one of them, but when the man talked to her, she pressed her body back against the wood column.

She liked waiting for the ferry, liked the people waiting with coolers and old nylon packs that they’d been using for years. When the boat came, she stepped on and took a seat near the bow.

Gene was waiting on the island with the kids. The two boys were sitting on the bench together, and he stood behind. She gave him the paper bag of groceries. All her things fit in a second bag. He asked that she start getting plastic for the groceries so they could use them as trash bags. They talked quietly of household things.

The next day they woke, had breakfast, then cleaned the house. They opened the back slider and she took out the chairs and looped curtains over the rods. He swept while she scrubbed the kitchen, scrubbing with her hair falling from its elastic, wearing yellow plastic gloves and a loose dress. He wore a flannel shirt and soft pants, and when he passed she could smell him. She had grown used to living with this gentle man.

They settled on the arrangement after her husband, his son, had left, and it was just her and the kids. Gene was living on the other side of the island. He could have been angry with her; he could have judged her. Everyone else did. They acted as if what happened belonged to the island, and wasn’t something private. What had happened was almost nothing like what it looked like, but people never realize this.

When they had decided, not long after everything had happened, she had been in her living room. Gene had come over to the house. He sat down and asked if she wanted to stay on the island. She hadn’t thought about it, and he said that she would want to think things over, that it might feel soon, but that she would need to think about it. If she wanted to stay here, then one of them would need to work on the mainland. He said that he would do it, and she could look after the kids, if she’d prefer that, but that it would probably be easier for her to get a job. He had talked quietly to her that day, and much of what they decided on ended up being exactly what they did, though at the time it hadn’t felt real to her.

She had looked at Gene that day. He looked younger, different than he had looked before, when he was simply the father of the man she had married. He was a man who had become suddenly necessary, and that changes them. She said then, Do you want to know more about anything, for me to talk about anything, so that you know? Maybe another time, he said, that might be what happens, but right now we should focus on the smaller things, these things that are going to have to happen.

Now, months later, after they had cleaned the house and after the kids had gone to bed, they poured second drinks. Have you made any friends? he asked her.

God no, she said, and tried to explain how it was there. His shirt was rolled to his forearms, and the fabric was touching the wood of the table, and she thought this was what the table had been expecting all along, him to sit there.

Maybe it would be better if they lived on the mainland, too, he said. With you. If you all lived there full time. We want to keep this certain kind of life, but maybe after a while it just does harm.

She didn’t understand his change, and said, I think that we should keep it this way right now.

She stood to get the radio from the living room. She plugged it in in the kitchen and turned the game on so low they could barely make it out. He continued with what he was saying, which was the intelligence of considering the mainland in not too long, six months, a year.

I don’t want to think past this right now, she said.

Gene had, when his son left for college, never expected him to come back. When Shaun came back with a wife, and they had children, Gene realized that he was trying not to get close to them. He expected them to leave, so there had been a lot that he had missed, that maybe other people had known before him, because he had been thinking of his own survival. He had imagined them both there and not there, so he would be able to continue on without them, and felt he had to understand that they could go and do what’s often done—send Christmas cards from Connecticut with pictures of the kids, or those postcards people are always putting on their fridges. The realization of his daughter-in-law’s inner life had been slow to materialize, had not really started until four months before, on the day she came up his drive alone. He had come out of the house, wiping his hands on a cloth. She wasn’t one for agitation, and she looked around as if she had misplaced something. He was thought commendable in the way he handled the situation, but he knew how useless he had been, trying to preserve himself as if he were anything to think of, when he was just an aging man inside his house, trying to fix a sink. A braver man would have been willing to sacrifice his happiness before that point, seeing as his happiness, and himself, were the slightest things.

She had fallen in love with another man, and her husband had disappeared with the kids. She thought they were still on the island, though, as the ferry captain hadn’t seen them. This is a lot to take in, he had said to her. Well, what should we do? he said. It was uncommon to be standing there, united in this sudden way. We could go over to Matt’s, he said. Matt was the island manager. No, she said, let’s not do that. Why? he said. Just not him, she said. Anyone but him. I see, he said, thinking that it would have been easier if the man she had fallen in love with wasn’t also the man in charge of the island. Well, he said, we’ll go, and you’ll stay in the truck.

Matt’s office was in a low cinder-block building, with the ferry office to one side and the administrative offices on the other. Matt had thick black hair, was himself a thick, strong man. Gene thought of what loneliness could do to you, that Meghan had been lonely in ways no one else had thought of, but this man had.

If he had to pick between knowing all this and not knowing, he would pick the moment when he was fixing his sink, insulated from them, thinking of how he would get cards from them, and that he would grow older alone, that you couldn’t guess at how isolated the self was, and that was what getting old could sometimes be, that it becomes quiet enough to hear it in yourself. But during the ride to Matt’s he learned that his son, who worked in a school on the mainland, had found out about the affair and gone desperate with love for his wife. Gene didn’t understand this way of taking things and wondered where his son had discovered it. Gene would have left his wife and met someone else in time. There was comfort to find everywhere. Gene wondered if it was love for her or just desperation with life. They always looked so much the same. Why do we think we can’t live without a certain person? Then there are others who don’t think this way. He couldn’t begin to understand why his son had taken the children. Maybe he thought if he ran away by himself no one would try to find him.

After talking with Matt, Gene had driven with Meghan to the World War II bunker facing the open ocean. They parked near the scrub, then walked through the dunes, then stood there, listening. He jumped down and she came after, and they stood in the space with the sudden surprise of windows overlooking the water. She looked out the windows, as there was no sense in looking further for the kids. It was clear enough they weren’t there. Well, you learn quickly when looking for something that it isn’t there, and that you’re going to the very places you won’t find it. For instance, if you lose something in your house, you’ll search the same place over and over again, because it has stopped mattering where you look.

They looked next in the abandoned cottages, then went to the homes of people they knew.

On the second night they went home and she fell asleep on the sofa while he waited up. If she had been awake when the kids appeared through the front door, she could have greeted them while he ran to find his son, but in that moment when he had the choice, he picked his grandsons, picked to lower himself so he could see their eyes and try to calm them. Then she woke and he went outside but it was too late. They had spent two days looking even though they knew they wouldn’t find them; this time he admitted there was no sense in trying to find his son. Gene put the front light on and went back to his grandsons and daughter-in-law.

He had been with them since, been with her, except for when she was on the mainland. This had unintended consequences. You grow to love a woman, seeing her that way, the way she comes through the back door in her bare feet, or the way her cheek looks when she turns and there is a soft slope. If you live closely and there’s peacefulness between you, and she has something pretty in her features or movement, you’re naturally going to feel love for her, or want to protect her. He had understood this. But he hadn’t expected what it would feel like when she was away, that the feeling of everything else went away, too, or how he would try to practice, during the days she was there, her going away, so that it wouldn’t come as a shock, or hurt when it happened.

Sometimes when he went back to the house he thought he might find his son as he had been, not toward the end, but before the kids, a distant man puzzled by his surroundings. Island life didn’t prepare you for any other life, and there had been the breakdown in college. Gene had gone to Boston to visit Shaun. He remembered his son slumped on his dorm bed, his legs sprawled out, with no determinate shape to his tall, thin body. Gene had sat at the edge of the bed, unsure of what to say. Breakdowns were not in their vocabulary, and he had not thought of it that way, though the knowledge of it had come later, that it wasn’t going to come back again, how his son had been. It’s true, there’s something broken afterward, no matter what everyone says. On the island mostly it was alcoholism, which he wished Shaun had been able to muster instead, as he would have been able to survive in that way, he would have been able to hobble along with some degree of cheer, but this fragility left him no match for anything. Gene sat at the edge of the bed. Are you telling me you won’t go to your classes? he asked him. When Shaun didn’t answer, he said, Well, what do we do then? I guess we withdraw you from school, and then you and I go back? I’d rather stay here, his son said. Gene decided to go to the market to get things for the dorm fridge, which then involved cleaning out what had gone bad. He bought apple juice and poured Shaun a cup. I’m having trouble understanding this, he told his son, I’m trying, but I’m having trouble.

He woke to his son shaking and didn’t understand at first that his son was trying to cry without making a sound. Where does your roommate go? Gene asked him. To his girlfriend’s. It was a series of things that he didn’t think would affect the future. It hadn’t occurred to him that it would last inside his son. Shaun had come back and spent the summer landscaping on the mainland, and the work had been good for him, slowed him so he was able to finish school the next year, and he stayed in Boston, and met his wife, and they came back to the island and had children. When his son had disappeared after taking the children and returning them unharmed, Gene was able to tell Meghan about the time in college. He told her about holding Shaun’s hand. He rarely touched his son, but after three days he’d found himself so exhausted that he reached for him. He said that what she did with Matt would have been painful, but that it hadn’t been the reason Shaun had left, that it had come out of another time, from events that occurred before Shaun had met her. And you have your sons and this is your life now, he said. If Gene hadn’t understood him that week in Boston, years later at least he was able to understand that it was sad and that was all. I can’t get over it, Meghan had said. We stop trying to think that way, he said. We think about what we’re going to do instead.

Now his son wasn’t at home, and Meghan was on the mainland again. He had the kids wash up, then he read to them. After, he sat in the living room with a beer. Bea came over, and they sat on the front step. They had been romantic, but this had stopped months earlier. At a certain point he hadn’t wanted her to come over, so he had been going to her place, but that had stopped, too. She had come over that night because she knew Meghan was gone. Bea had pale, thin skin, and soft white hair. She grew herbs that she made tea with. During the times when he had gone over, she would drink tea while he drank beer. Now the field below was lit with fireflies, though not as many as the month before. Beyond that, you could feel the sea. She said, It seems that you’re not coming over anymore.

It’s been a while, he said.

Anywhere else, she said, that would be how it was, there’d be little sense in mentioning it. But here, she said, we get so few chances at anything, and so I wonder why. He thought of the isolation that she, because of him, would now experience, but didn’t feel it. Not in any part of him, not sympathy in any part of him for her.

And then I knew why, she said, and I wondered why it had ever seemed important to me to know why. Why had it?

When she left he watched her walking in the thick air, her white blouse lit by the moon, like she was a spectral thing moving away from him. But what good is there in keeping the things you don’t want, simply because they are something?

He turned off the front lights, put his glass in the sink. Went to the hall so he could see into the kids’ room, see that they were still there. He had held himself together and what good had it done? For whose benefit had he held himself together? Certainly not for anyone else’s, but not really for himself, either.

Gene remembered his exaltation when he finally left his son. How he’d fiddled with the radio in the truck to get a song, and rolled down the windows, and stopped for a nice dinner off the highway, then slept in his truck until the ferry came in the morning. It had been good to be home, to have slipped out from under something. He had called his son and felt stronger talking to him, more able to help. If we leave someone and feel better, we let ourselves think we have done the right thing. Of course it’s not true, he now knows, taking off his boots, lying on his bed, the blankets with their moist smell of the island.