Reunion: A Novel (18 page)

I
wake up in the middle of the night. My back is moist, my hair damp. I look at my phone. It’s 3:15. I’d assumed Mindy was the one who would have nightmares about those geese. But it was me, and in my dream, Nell’s story came to life. Only I was Stan. I was the one killing geese. I was the hunter.

I slip off the top bunk and tiptoe downstairs. There’s nothing specific that I’m after. No middle-of-the-night sip of wine or bite of ice cream. It’s just that Atlanta is starting to feel small again. I’m starting to feel its suffocation. I’ve been away from my own world too long. I feel displaced, uneasy.

Downstairs, Elliot is fast asleep on the couch. He’s thrown off the top blanket. I tiptoe toward him and place it carefully at the foot of the couch. If he wakes up and he’s cold, it’ll be within his reach.

There was a time—so many years ago it hurts, but there was a time—when I could have crawled into bed with Elliot and there would have been nothing out of the ordinary about it. Nobody would have raised their eyebrows or thought anything suspicious was going on. It would just be a brother and his little sister curled up together like two sleeping puppies.

I miss being young. I miss the lack of boundaries. I miss the easy cluelessness of it all.

I make a beeline for the kitchen before I talk myself into getting into bed with Elliot, which would be sheer madness, but there’s no trusting me at all these days. And of course, as if to prove the theory, the cash tin is sitting on the kitchen island. Just sitting there. All by itself. My heart makes a thudding sound.

Outside the kitchen window, there is a spark of fire. A moment later, I smell cigarette smoke. This makes sense, because when I open the back door, I find Sasha sitting on the swing, sitting in darkness and smoking a cigarette.

“Guilty pleasure,” she says.

Thud, thud, thud.

I close the door quietly behind me and take a seat on the concrete railing across from her. “I thought weed was a guilty pleasure,” I say. This is the first time the two of us have been alone since she winked at me.

“I am a woman of many vices,” she says. Then, after a slow inhalation, she adds, “Do you want one?” She holds the pack toward me so the moonlight hits the plastic wrapper.

I shake my head, then say, “Actually, yes. Sure. That sounds different.”

I take a cigarette. She lights a match and holds it so that I have to lean in close.

“You left your money on the counter,” I say.

She nods. “I hide the cigarettes underneath.”

“I can put it away.” I half rise.
Thud, thud, thud.

“No, no,” she says. “Sit.”

I do as instructed. “Where do you get it?”

“Get what?” she says. “The weed?”

“Your money.”

She lowers her cigarette to a coffee mug next to her feet and taps the tip gently at its mouth.

“You’re a nutso little thing,” she says.

I clear my throat. “There’s nothing little about me.”

She smiles and shakes her head. To Sasha, I am both adorable and inappropriate, and for some reason—at least at this moment—she’s fine with the combination. “My parents have been generous,” she says.

“Family money,” I say. Thought so.

“But I’m not a trust-funder or anything. I saved a lot when I was younger.” She pauses, as though she’s really considering the question, as though she’s never had to put the answer into words before. “I wanted my twenties to be about working on my body and working on my bank account. What my friends were doing—drinking, shopping, eating—looked boring to me.”

I nod. She wouldn’t have liked me in my twenties.

“Your father and I found each other at an interesting time in our lives.”

I nod and smoke my cigarette, which is making me instantly light-headed.

“He didn’t have any real friends,” she says. “At the club, there were people who glommed on to him, but he was too generous. They took what he had and moved on.”

“Not you?” I realize it sounds like an accusation, which is definitely not how I mean it, but there’s no going back now.

“You know what I loved about your father?”

It’s a rhetorical question—of course I don’t know what she loved about Stan. I’ll never know. That’s the point. And yet she’s certainly taking her time with the answer.

“Listen,” she says. “There are people—lots of people, most people—who spend a terrible amount of time caring about what other people think. Your father wasn’t one of those people.”

Maybe he should have been. Maybe he should have cared more.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she says.

“Yes,” I say. “You probably do.” And it’s true. I have no doubt in the world that she can guess my thoughts. They’d be the thoughts of any kid who felt given up on, abandoned.

“He had this—” She stretches her hand into the air and grabs at it. Then she catches herself and laughs. “You’re going to say I sound like your father. But he had this, like, goddamn joie de vivre or something. He wanted to live. It was infectious. It was sexy. You know?”

“Until he didn’t want to live.” I say it matter-of-factly. Maybe I’m trying to bring her down. Maybe I’m just trying to reestablish a more appropriate mood. I don’t know. But Sasha isn’t having it.

“Yeah,” she says, this goofy grin still smashed across her face. “Yeah, but. Wow. The man oozed charm.”

She’s remembering something. She’s got a specific scene playing on the screen in her noggin. It’s private and probably intimate and even if I could see it, I wouldn’t understand. But I do believe her. I do believe in the way he must once have made her feel.

“I don’t believe in spiritual connections or telepathy,” she says. “But I’ve been sitting out here for the last half hour willing you to wake up and come talk to me.”

“Oh yeah?” I say. Please, please, please, do not let this woman make a pass at me.

“And now here you are,” she says. “Maybe it’s kismet.”

“I had a bad dream.”

“The geese?”

“Yes,” I say, completely surprised.

“Me too,” she says. “It was a nasty little story. Mindy’s up there sleeping like a rock, but I tossed and turned just thinking about those terrible boots.”

The cigarette is making me nauseous, but I don’t want to be rude.

“Were you the goose or Stan?” asks Sasha, and I wonder how she knows to ask that question. Is the choice so obvious? Are there only two ways to incorporate such a story into a dream? What about the little girl? What about Nell? Is there no room to adopt her point of view?

“The hunter,” I say.

“Ha,” she says. “A guilty conscience.”

Yes, I think, a guilty conscience. But unlike Peter, I don’t put much stock in dreams unless they feature famous actors.

“You were the goose?” I ask. “Zero guilt?”

“No,” she says, stubbing her cigarette into the coffee mug. “I was the little girl. I was Nell.”

I feel I’ve been tricked, but I can’t say how and so I say nothing.

“Are you working on anything lately?”

The Failed Comedian
, starring Matt Damon as Matt Damon.

“No,” I say.

“Maybe you’ll get some material out of this visit.”

I can picture it now:

“Help me,” I say. “I hope not.”

Then I think of Marcy’s requested memoir. How might that number begin?

My father is dead.

Everybody’s father is dead. Try again.

My marriage is over and my father died this morning.

Good God. If I were reading that book, I’d throw it across the room before I finished the first sentence. Try again.

My mother died when I was a little girl. My father died when I was a woman.

Am I trying for chick lit? Keep it simple. Be honest. Facts only.

On June 16, at roughly eight thirty in the morning, I get the phone call that my father is dead.
That’s not quite right, but it’s better. I’d need to get the gun in immediately.
Suicide sells
, said Marcy. Now that—
that
is vile.

Sasha says, “Wait here, yeah? I have something for you.”

She gets up and slides quietly inside the dark house. I sit in silence and slowly finish my cigarette. The nausea passes. In college I dated a boy who said it took exactly seven minutes to smoke a perfect cigarette. At the time, I’d thought that was just about the coolest thing in the world. I’d thought he knew something about life and love and what it all meant. I let him pee on me once. It was the last time we went out. I hadn’t done it right, I think. I’d just lain there at the bottom of the tub, my knees bent awkwardly so that both he and I could fit, and watched as he took aim and peed. I hadn’t held my hands up. I hadn’t opened my mouth. Afterward—after I’d turned the water on and washed myself thoroughly—he’d sat on my windowsill and smoked a seven-minute cigarette. Then he said, “That’s not how I fantasized it happening.” If I could go back, if I could go back to that moment, I would have said something better. I would have said, “You think that’s how
I
imagined it?” Or “You
fantasized
about that?” Or “What the aphid is wrong with you?” Instead, I just looked down at the pilled yellow carpet and picked at its weave.

Sasha returns with a shopping bag that she sets carefully next to her on the swing.

“What’s that?” I say.

“Two things,” she says. First she pulls out a large jeweler’s box, which she hands to me. I’m surprised by its weight.

“What is this?”

“Open it,” she says. I wonder if Sasha has been having moments like this with Nell and Elliot, if she’s been pulling them aside and bequeathing them random gifts as well.

I open the velvet clamshell. My mother’s gold Rolex is inside. It’s suddenly difficult to breathe. This watch is worth the equivalent of my debt.

“I don’t understand,” I say.

“It’s yours, isn’t it?”

“It’s my mother’s.”

“But it was meant to be yours. Your father told me about it when we married. He kept it in a tiny safe in the bedroom.”

I take it from the box and slip it onto my wrist. The last time I wore it I was eight, maybe nine years old, and it was far too large for me. Now, though, it fits beautifully. I imagine Stan showing it to Sasha, teaching her how to lock and unlock the safe. It wouldn’t have been his style to give me the watch himself. Of course it had to go down this way, cloaked in a veil of mystery.

“I thought it was gone,” I say.

She shakes her head.

“This is not what I was expecting when you said we needed to talk.”

“There’s more,” she says, and begins to take something else from the plastic bag. “Wait,” she says. “What did you think this was about? I’m curious.”

“It’s embarrassing,” I say, and it
is
embarrassing. People are so much more interesting than my bland preconceptions allow them to be. If only I could turn off my brain’s tendency to overthink.

“Tell me.”

I look down at the watch. My mother must have looked off balance in such a large piece of jewelry. She was more delicate than me, more bird-boned, more petite.

“It’s just—” I say. “Earlier, when you said we had to talk, I had this far-fetched theory that you were going to tell me that you’re Nell’s lover.”

She takes out another cigarette and puts it in her mouth but doesn’t light it.

“Why did you think that?” she says.

I shrug my shoulders and twist the watch back and forth.

“Who knows?” I say. “You two just seem so close. My mind goes too far sometimes.” She says nothing. “It’s a bad habit.” Still she says nothing. “Like eavesdropping.”

She strikes a match and finally lights the cigarette. She takes a long drag that feels silly and mannered. “I am not your sister’s lover,” she says. Then, after mulling it over, she says, in this sort of tragic way, “We’re friends, Kate.”

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, of course.”

“I really was in love with your father. Until he made it too hard. Then I left.”

I nod.

“Can I ask you something?” I say.

“Why not?”

“With Mindy?” I’m struggling for the right way to ask this. I don’t want her to think I’m judging her. “Did you ever think he was too old, or that it was a bad decision?”

“Are you asking me if I ever thought about not having her?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” she says. “I thought about it.”

We sit in silence. The A/C inside shakes on and the back porch hums.

“But?” I say.

“The pros outweighed the cons.”

She yawns. Like everyone else, Sasha is growing bored with me.

“Can I ask you something else?” She could be
my
friend too, couldn’t she? That’s how friendship works. It’s not a limited substance.

“I guess,” she says. “Go for it.”

“That you know of, did he cheat on you?”

Why does it matter? I don’t know. But I feel the answer might bring me insight.

She shakes her head. “I knew what his habits were,” she says. “The story we sold the family was that he was divorced from Louise before we got together.” She takes a quick drag. “That was a lie. He cheated on Louise with me. I knew he was married.”

Another adulteress. It
is
easy. I was right.

“But because of that, because I knew what he was, I made him promise.”

I nod. “And you think he never did?”

She lifts her shoulders, then lets them fall back into place bit by bit. “Maybe I’m naïve, but I believed him,” she says. “I never felt unloved. That’s the important thing. I left when his mind went, and that’s a burden I’m going to have to deal with all on my own.”

I’ve asked her too much. I’ve invaded her space.

“You would have liked him,” she says. “If he wasn’t your father. You would have liked him.”

She’s probably right.

I fidget with the watch. “Thank you.” I stand and stretch. “I never thought I’d see this again.”

She grabs my wrist.