The From-Aways (15 page)

“So you’ll write it, right?” Charley says.

“Of course I’ll write it, but we’re getting the story from Cliff on Monday. Right now I have to go. It’s Friday fucking night and I have band practice.”

O
UR BAND IS
called Cassandra Galápagos and the Aged Tortoise, and while we didn’t spell out particular roles, I’m pretty sure I know who’s who. Rosie’s glammed up. Her hair is crimped, which means she wore braids to work, and she’s got on eyeliner, which I’ve never seen before. “Hey, lady, we’re not a band yet,” I say.

“Notebook,” Rosie says.

I’ve brought out the slim green notebook with my songs in it. I try, fail, try, to hand it to Rosie, the way you work up the nerve to jump off a cliff.

Rosie snatches the notebook from me and pages through breezily, which is excruciating. She meditates on some songs and dismisses others entirely. I hold my breath. I wonder what Carter would think if he knew I was writing songs. Did he ever have an embarrassing notebook, one he had to work up the nerve to show Marta, his song for her tucked away in there? That must have been worse, now that I think about it, because Marta never spared a word for the sake of someone’s feelings ever. Sharing anything personal and possibly inadequate with Marta was stone terrifying.

Rosie snaps my notebook shut. “I can’t read music,” she says. “You’re going to have to sing them to me.”

Once I’ve taught her the melodies and strummed through the music a few times, Rosie starts singing. She has a breathy little voice, and though sometimes it’s flat or sharp, she always sounds haunting. She makes songs I thought were half-assed sound big, and when she sings her face contorts into fantastic ugly shapes. My fingers hurt because I don’t normally play this much, but I keep going so I can watch Rosie.

And just like that, she stops singing, and looks at me. I stop strumming. I would have played all night, I realize, if she didn’t stop me.

I shake my hand loose. “You sound like a fucking beautiful little bird, Rosie. You know that?”

She rubs her eyes like she’s just waking up and smudges her eyeliner. “I’ve always wanted to be in a band,” she says.

R
OSIE SAYS THE
season demands a tree. December, so fucking pushy! We’re at Arden Nursery to pick one out. A ferret-faced boy in a Santa cap gives us cocoa in wax-paper cups. A man’s footsteps creak in the snow. As we sip our cocoa Henry approaches. He’s a little bowlegged, and wearing a red hoodie that says
MR
.
LYNCH
on the breast. The hood is up. His smile is a good one, no less good for being snaggletoothed. He grasps a saw in his left hand. I wonder if he saw my handprint on his car.

“Quinn Winters,” I say. “I work with your sister and drink with your wife.”

“I remember,” he says.

“This is Rosie,” I say.

Rosie says, “We know each other. From school.” Then she curtsies. Rosie was in junior high when Henry was a senior.

Henry vigorously rubs his ears through his hood. “How big a tree you looking for?” he asks.

“Our room is not capacious,” Rosie says.

He gestures and we follow him into the forest. It’s dark out, but strung across the rows are wires hung with steel-caged lanterns, illuminating spots on the snowy ground. Rosie leaps from one light spot to another. I do a big double foot hop onto a patch, which surfaces on my sneakers. Henry looks over his shoulder to see what we’re up to and I feel ashamed, like he might roll his eyes at our silliness.

“Never can squash them out, can you?” He concedes a snaggle smile. He points at a tree. “This your size?”

“I think so,” I say, but Rosie is walking the aisle now, appraising the trees’ relative virtues.

Henry scans the row of firs. “Last year,” he says to me, “in New York, I tried to talk Leah into getting one of these.” He gestures at the little trees. “They were selling them in front of the drugstore. It had snowed, so they were sopping wet, but lit up nice. So we go look at them but Leah keeps shaking her head and saying they’re too tiny.”

I laugh, because I can imagine Leah scoffing at these four-foot shrubs. “How’d things work out for you?” I say.

“She said she wanted to be able to stare up at it. For it to feel big like the tree in that
Nutcracker
ballet. So she goes ahead and pays for a ten-footer.” Henry has this look on his face like he’s marveling at the idea even now. The audacity. The stubbornness. How much he loved it, in spite of himself.

I say, “How tall were her ceilings?”

“Eight fucking feet,” Henry says, shaking his head and grinning. “I spent an hour sawing off the top of it, getting it straight, and she was crying and saying it wasn’t going to look the way she wanted, but in the end it was all right. You know, with the top sawed off it looked like that tree was growing right through the ceiling. She liked that. Said it was magical.”

“You picked a crazy one,” I say.

“It’s not that she’s
crazy
,” Henry says, carefully. He swipes his hood off. “She just imagines things better than they actually are. And it rubs off. That’s what gets me about her. Things usually look pretty shitty, the way I see them. Boring, at least. But hanging around Leah, you get to see things her way. I wanted to keep that up, and to help her keep imagining things the way she wanted.”

“So you
married
her?” I say.

“No regrets,” Henry says, smiling.

“I found the one!” Rosie yells. We tromp over. “This one,” she says, “is perfectly imperfect.” Henry raises his saw to cut it down but Rosie says, “Wait!”

She spills some cocoa on the ground. “For the gods,” she says.

17

Leah

I
call my parents.

There’s snow here, I say. Is there snow there?

Yes, they say, but it’s mostly brown.

Henry’s out selling Christmas trees, I say. It’s very festive.

We almost went ice-skating, they say. We looked at everyone going around and we said to each other, Let’s go!

But you didn’t?

The line was very long.

Have you ever done anything terrible to each other? I say.

What kind of question is that? they say.

So no, I say.

Of course we have, they say. We’re married.

Are you okay? they say.

Everything is very good here, I say.

W
E ARE WAITING
for the lights to go on.

Parked in Quinn’s car, outside Frame’s house, a bulging shadow hulks some yards off, the reason for Frame’s fine and Marks’s letter. The woods are quiet because it’s winter and there is nothing left alive out there. The blast of ship’s horn punctuates the silence. Quinn is shivering because she’s cut the engine and thus the heat, citing good investigative practice. She says an idling car would look suspicious if someone spotted us. I tell her I’m pretty sure Watergate is over and no one is on our tail but she pretends not to hear me. She’s already had one cup of coffee and is now drinking the one she got for me, which I’m not drinking because it’s only six o’clock at night and we’ve only been here half an hour. This whole thing is ridiculous, but I have to admit, a little fun too. Quinn has a way of turning everything into an event.

“Uncle later?” I say.

“Can’t,” Quinn says. “I have band practice.”

“
Band
practice?”

“It was Rosie’s idea. I’m humoring her.”

“Humoring her?”

“Dating her?” Quinn says. She gets the kind of sneaky smile a person has when they’re thinking about how wonderful something is. She’s trying not to let it spread, but she fails, and when she turns to me her face is a sloppy grinning revelation of helpless joy.

“You are in so much trouble!” I say, and point at her face. “Look at you! You are so far gone!”

Quinn shakes her head. “So much trouble,” she says, still grinning.

“What do you mean dating?” I say. “Have you been on
a date
somewhere?”

“Sure we have,” Quinn says. “We’ve been to the Uncle, the waterfront, our house.”

“You absolutely cannot go on a date with your roommate to your own house,” I say.

“We’re just—
together
,” Quinn says.

“I see,” I say. I consider this. “Would you characterize Rosie as . . .
solid
?”

Quinn laughs. “Not by a long shot,” she says. “That girl is crazy for miles.”

“Give me a sip of coffee.”

“Nope. Mine now,” she says. “Too late.”

A car comes around the bend. Its high beams project a waxy yellow triangle on Quinn’s forehead. She sinks her teeth, softly, into the rim of her Styrofoam cup.

“Halogen-lamp fuckers,” she says.

I make out someone coming through the yard. “Frame’s here,” I say.

“Shhh,” Quinn says.

“Don’t we need to interview him anyway?”

“Shhh!”

“I think it’s great about Rosie.”

“Shhh.”

A man’s form, blue against blue in the night, stalks over to the phantom display. His shadow hands stretch wide and come together. He is plugging one thing into another.

And then I can’t see for all the holy brightness.

When my sight returns I see the inflatable Christmas decorations growing, like the wicked witch’s feet in reverse. Blown up and shivering from the influx of light and air and life, a panoply of hideous creatures are thronged on a wooden platform. Wobbling in the inflatable tableau are: Rudolph, a trumpet-horned monster, a New England Patriot, Snoopy, a snowman with a toothy grin, which is confusing, a yellow japanimation mouse, Mickey Mouse, Mighty Mouse, Snoopy again, but dressed up as Santa Claus, a bloated woman in a veil, maybe the Virgin, Rudolph dressed up as Santa Claus, a New England Patriot dressed up as Santa Claus, Elmo, Elmo dressed up as Santa Claus, and a five-foot snow globe with shiny Mylar flakes blowing around inside like it’s a glitter nor’easter.

Frame’s illuminated back is all we see as he slowly returns to his house.

“It’s glorious,” Quinn says. She hand-rolls down the window. All that light is kicking up glare.

“It’s the tackiest thing I’ve ever seen,” I say. “Though remarkable.”

Quinn says, “This is some grade-A revolutionary shit.”

“Revolutionary?” I say.

When we get back to the office, the windows are dark even though it’s only six.

“Maybe she’s dead,” Quinn says. But there’s a letter on the editing desk with a note from Charley.
Town hall meeting tonight. See you there.

B
Y THE TIME
we get to the middle school, I have two voice mails from Henry about the meeting. Quinn, who is driving, gets on the phone with Charley. “Write this down,” she says to me.

“Oh,” I say, “you mean in my
notebook
?” It is immensely satisfying to pull it from my pocket and wave it around.

“Just write it down, Leah!”

Here is the news: Yesterday, Mikey Eubanks from the bait shop received a citation for trespassing on the
casa grande
property, officially known as the Dorian property. The thing was, Mikey didn’t know he was on the property at all. He was just sitting on the carousel in Neversink Park, looking out at the water. He was also listening to the Stones’
Exile on Main
at full volume on his radio and sipping from a fifth of whiskey, so he’d thought
that
was the problem. But it wasn’t. Use of the area commonly known as Neversink Park, Eubanks was told by the officer who gave him the citation, was no longer permitted. The park was part of what used to be the Sanfords’ property. While the Sanford family put up a sign that said
NEVERSINK
PARK
, and permitted use of the land by the public, carousel included, they never officially gave the land to the town. Even the carousel, which was built by some original Sanford many years ago, was technically privately owned. As such, when the Dorians bought the Sanfords’ land, they bought the rights to the park and the carousel too, and they were making them private.

By the time we get there, the parking lot is packed and people are streaming into the gym. There’s hardly room to drive between the rows and Quinn almost mows down a man who spits retaliatory tobacco juice in our wake. I spot Henry pacing in front of his nursery truck. He’s stopped driving the lobster pot to avoid being teased.

“I’ll see you in there,” I tell Quinn. “Save seats.”

I slam the car door and head for Henry.

I say, “I got your messages. What’s—” But before I can ask, he grabs my hand and shakes his head. He stares nervously at the gym doors. “It’s gonna be a madhouse in there,” he says, squeezing my hand. “Stick close, okay?”

“I’ll stick,” I say, and squeeze back.

We head inside and Quinn waves us to the front. I sit, Henry to my right, Charley, Quinn, and Rosie to my left. The meeting was moved from the town hall to the school to accommodate overflow attendance. I estimate fifty people. The gym smells like rubber flooring and damp overcoats. There is a general din of squeaking sneakers as people get settled and I, impatient, nervous, count the eight basketballs trapped in an overhead net that hangs between the ceiling and us. Henry is as jittery as I’ve ever seen him. What have you got yourself into, Henry? I think. And then realize that when you are married, you have been gotten into things too.