The Cranberry Hush: A Novel (14 page)

“Just some water would be good,” I said, peering into the
fridge. I wasn’t thirsty but thought the action it provided and the time it
would consume were reasons enough.

“Zane?”

“Yes please.”

Beth took two glasses from the cupboard above the sink and
filled them from a gurgling bottle of Poland Spring. The edge of the counter
was digging into the small of my back now but I didn’t move. She held out a
glass and I took it and sipped, barely stifling an awkward compliment of the
water’s taste. We made small talk about jobs—Beth worked for some
publishing company in Cambridge—and the snowstorm and Nosebag, the fat
orange tomcat purring in circles around our legs.

Meanwhile Griff walked silently back and forth through the
kitchen, between the living room and the bedroom, packing cardboard boxes
bearing the logos of various mail-order catalogues with books and things, and a
black garbage bag with towels and shoes. The bag over his shoulder made him
look like a thin, sad Santa. On his every trip through, conversation between the
other three of us grew even more stilted and weird as we followed him with our
eyes.

“What do you do, Zane?” Beth said after Griff once again
returned to the bedroom.

“Oh, I work at the comic shop with Vince,” he said. “And I
go to Cape Cod Comm—” There was a crash in the bedroom.
“—Community.”

It was the sound of a jumble of things hitting the floor.
Plastic. Books. I heard Griff swear with more anger than the spill itself
sounded like it deserved. I was taking a step forward when Beth excused herself
and went in the bedroom. I tipped the glass to my lips, settled back against
the counter.

“Good water,” Zane said, his eyes shifting from me to the
cat.

A moment later Beth came out of the bedroom with her arms
folded across her chest and said, “He wants
you
.”

***

Something was wrong, I could tell. I put my
Economics book in the plastic stacker under my desk and pulled my chair over
alongside Griff’s bed, where he was sitting with his back against the wall,
gazing out the window with a blank expression on his face. In the corner of the
Public Gardens below, where the angel statute stood, bronze wings outstretched,
the leaves on the trees were turning red and orange and yellow.

“Are you all right?” I said.

“Physically.” Two balled-up tissues sat beside him like
tumbleweeds on the bed. “She called and I finally couldn’t hold it in and I was
like,
Look
.”

The weekend before, he had been chatting online with Ashley,
his sweetheart from Roger Williams, and received a misdirected IM—one
that obviously and devastatingly didn’t fit the conversation they were having.
Ashley brushed it off at first, said it was Griff she wanted to model her new
underwear for that weekend—but then, when she put up an away message a
minute later, Griff knew. Ashley had made a mistake. Clicked the wrong window.
Typed and sent in the heat of a moment. It happens. Funny how often secrets are
revealed when people get careless with computers.

“And what did she say?”

“That she’s been seeing someone else. Just said it like
that, fucking matter-of-factly.”

“Oh.”

“I feel so fucking pissed and orange and betrayed, man.” His
teeth were clenched. He squeezed his pillow. “I was going to marry that girl.”

“Griffin,” I said, leaning closer with my arms crossed over
my knees, “you’re nineteen. You weren’t going to marry her.”

“She was perfect. When we were going out she was perfect.”

“She wasn’t perfect, though. She was a sneaky, lying bitch
who clearly never deserved you. You know that now.” There was more I wanted to
say but I held my tongue.

He pulled his legs in front of him and curled his arms
around his knees. He had a sock on one foot; the other was inexplicably bare.
He looked small, vulnerable. I wanted to touch him, to put my hand on his bare
foot, make it warm.

“I’m sorry it hurts,” I said.

“I just feel so
alone
.
You know that feeling? Like you’ve got nobody?”

“I’m still here,” I told him, and I felt the pang of having
to remind him.

“That’s why you’re my best friend,” he said, looking at me
and then returning his eyes to the angel statue below, and the pang went away.

*

When I went in the bedroom he was stacking DVDs in
a toaster-oven box. A few still lay scattered on the mustard-colored carpet.

“How’s it going?” I said.

He smiled with his eyes closed and gestured for me to close
the door. “I don’t want her to see me packing.”

I nodded and shut it behind me. On the floor beside him was
a pile of clothes and a few cardboard tubes for, I assumed, blueprints. I sat
down on the edge of the bed he’d shared with Beth. The covers were
rumpled—from sleep, obviously, but still it reminded me of what had
happened so naturally here between Griff and Beth. The way he slept in this bed
was so different from the way he slept in mine.

I stood up.

With the box under his arm he walked his fingers across the
spines of the DVDs and books on the white Ikea bookcase, every so often sliding
one out and dropping it in the box. I felt bad for him for having to extract
himself, item by item, from Beth’s life and the home they’d shared. I’d
expected Beth to have already done that.

“This one’s hers, but fuck it.” He flung
Independence Day
into the box.

“Anything I can help with?” I said, my hands in my pockets.

“My blue duffel bag is on the shelf in the closet,” he said
and pointed at the slatted folding doors. “Could you grab that?”

“Sure.”

The bar that ran across the closet was filled half with
Beth’s clothes and half with empty wire coat-hangers. I retrieved the duffel
bag and held it in front of me for a moment, and then put it down and began
stuffing it willy-nilly with the pile of clothes that lay on the floor.

When I emerged from the bedroom with the bloated
duffel bag over my shoulder I found Zane and Beth where I’d left them. Zane was
on the floor rubbing Nosebag’s cream-white belly.

“Help me carry some stuff down?” I said to him.

“Yeah.” He patted Nosebag on the head—“Sorry
cat”—and stood up, leaving the cat with a scowl that seemed to say,
Where do you think you’re going, bitch?

We carried down the first load of Griff’s stuff—his
laptop bag, the box of DVDs, the duffel of clothes.

“What’s in the tubes?” Zane asked.

“Blueprints.”

“He an architect?”

“Yeah. He draws a good house.”

“I feel bad,” Zane said. We pushed through the heavy
wood-and-glass doors. “It’s like he’s getting a divorce.”

“I guess.”

“How long were they together?”

“About three years, I think.”

I set the box on the hood of the Jeep and dug out my keys.
We stacked the stuff on the back seat.

“Do you know why they broke up?” he said. “She seems really
nice.”

“She is nice,” I said, wondering if Zane was again probing
at Griff’s sexuality. “Sometimes people need more to hold them together than
just both being nice.”

“Tell me about it,” he said, and he gave me a loaded glance
that made me look away.

When we got back to the apartment there were more boxes stacked
by the door, and we brought those down too. Some of the items sticking out of
the open ones were familiar—a pair of marble horse-head bookends, a
framed snapshot of Adam Clayton Griff had taken at a U2 concert. These things had
been in our room, had felt partly mine once upon a time.

“I hope there isn’t much more than this,” I told Zane as I
stacked these boxes in the Jeep with the others. “Otherwise you’ll have to ride
on the roof.”

On our last trip up we met Griff on the stairs of the third
floor. He held one box—balancing on top was an aloe plant in a plastic
pot the size of a big coffee mug. His vest was slung over his shoulder. His
hair had been pushed back behind his ears and his cheeks were wet.

“Fucking cat,” he said, sniffling faux-allergically and nodding
up the stairs. He rested the box on his knee and wiped his cheeks with the back
of his hand.

“This the last of it?” I said.

“Yeah.”

Zane, a couple steps below Griff, held out his hands. “I can
take that one,” he said.

As Griff was passing the box the plant slid across the
cardboard and tumbled over the banister. Zane reached out and caught the rim of
the pot between his pinky and ring fingers. Dirt spilled into the stairwell
abyss. He grabbed the pot with his other hand and drew it safely against his
chest.

“Nice save,” Griff said. “That’s good luck now.” He adjusted
the weight of the box in his arms and started to go down the steps.

“I’m going to run up and say goodbye to Beth,” I said. “I’ll
meet you at the car.”

Griff went down with Zane, who watched Griff’s feet
carefully, protectively, as though afraid he would stumble. I watched them both
for a moment, going down together, Zane saying “Step, step,” and then I went
back upstairs.

I knocked on Beth’s door and went in. On the
counter by the sink was a ring of anonymous keys that hadn’t been there before.
Beth was standing in front of a big window in the living room, looking out at
the fire escape where a lawn chair was buried in snow. Circles of colored glass
hung from suction cups on the window and cast purple and green shadows on the
floor. She held the cat, stroked it. Orange hairs wisped from its body and
looked huge and throat-clogging in the sunbeam.

“Hey Beth,” I said. She turned around. Her eyes were dry but
sad. Griff was my hero, it was true, but he was way too complicated to have a
neat and tidy villain, if Beth could even be considered a villain at all.
“Car’s all loaded. I just wanted to come say goodbye.”

She bent over and dropped the cat to the hardwood floor.

“It was good to see you after all this time,” she said.
“Would’ve been nicer under better circumstances.”

“I know.”

“We should keep in touch better,” she said. “I thought we
were friends. I guess I don’t know what happened.”

“I had some issues and stuff,” I said, not knowing quite
what I meant.

She apparently didn’t either. She shrugged. “So he just
showed up at your house? You weren’t in touch at all beforehand?”

I shook my head. “He just showed up. In the morning a couple
days ago.”

“Well. That’s a surprise.”

“It was for me.”

She hugged me and I put my arms around her. Griff had been
the wedge that grew between us—it was probably only because she lived in
his dorm, that small dorm where it was impossible to avoid anyone, that I had
cut her off too.

“It’s your turn with him now,” she said with a level of
familiarity and camaraderie that made me uncomfortable, as though we were
parents talking about a child. “See if you can knock him into shape.”

“He’s only staying the week,” I said.

“Oh—a week? He’s not...?” She raised her eyebrows and
closed her eyes, a knowing—and almost smarmy, I thought—enjoyment
of his lack of plans. A why-am-I-not-surprised look. “Sorry, I was under the
impression he was moving in with you.”

“He’s going to Phoenix,” I said. “To help put in a hot tub.”
I meant it as a defense but it sounded weak, even to me. “For his cousin.”

“Ah, a hot tub. Well that’s great. That’s ambitious. And
that’s assuming he goes, which he won’t. Do you know what he’ll do? He’ll go
from your house to his mother’s couch.” She paused. “Did he tell you why I
asked him to leave?”

“Just that it was mutual.”

“Vince,” she said, “come on. Break-ups are never
mutual
. What happened was he made it pretty
clear he wanted to go and finally I just told him to get off his ass and do it,
do
something
.” She pursed her lips.
“That money—the inheritance?—did he tell you about that?—that’s
really the worst thing that’s ever happened to him. He’s got it in his head
that he can just live off it and not have to do anything else, but it’s not
enough money to get through your
life
with. So he’s in stasis. He does nothing. I had to even help him find the
initiative to
dump
me.” Nosebag
started clawing the sofa and Beth looked for a moment like she was going to
stop him, but instead she turned to me again. “That’s not what I want, Vince. Now
that I’m graduated I can start my life, and now that he’s graduated he acts
like his is over. In fact, the only point in the past year where he’s had any
enthusiasm for anything was during the brief fling he had with the idea of
going
back
.”

“The post-college void doesn’t scare you, Beth?”

“The what?”

I shook my head. “Well did you tell him all that?”

She sighed. “A million times. Two million.”

“I don’t know what I can do to help him.”

“Well, I know you’ll try.” She shrugged. “And I think
somewhere deep down he knows too. There are a lot of places he could’ve gone
when he left here.”

We walked through the kitchen to the door. The cat followed
us halfway and then darted into the bedroom.

“Beth,” I said, “did he ever, like, talk about me? Over the
years, I mean?”

“He missed you, Vince, if that’s what you’re wondering.” She
gave me a little smile. “Take care,” she said. “Write me a letter some time.”
She smiled again and closed the door behind me. When I heard the lock click I
started back down the stairs.

Zane was nestled between boxes like a Christmas
ornament in the back of the Jeep. He held the aloe plant in his lap.

“All set?” I said, examining Griff. He nodded; his cheeks
were dry now.

“I was thinking,” he said, “that we should drive by the old
dorm. Since we’re in town. I haven’t been through the Back Bay way in a while.”