The From-Aways (35 page)

“Hey,” Henry says. “I love you too.” He squeezes me. Then he picks up all the blankets and quilts from the bed and gathers them in his arms. “Come on,” he says, and I follow him out the door and down the stairs.

Henry does not stop when we get downstairs. He keeps walking till we get to the back door. And then he opens it. He does not stop when we are in the middle of our yard. I hold on to Henry’s elbow and I go with him, out to the beach.

Our house dinghy is tied up to the dock, covered in a green tarp. Henry pulls it in by the rope. He flips the tarp and lays it down in the dinghy’s hull. He lays one of the quilts on top. He tosses the other blankets in.

“There,” he says. “Get in.” I look at him, but he’s waiting for me to go first, so I lower myself down into the hull. I wobble, standing for a moment before I drop down fast, crouched in the blankets.

Henry gets in next, and the whole thing rocks like it might capsize. Henry’s arms go out to his sides, like he’s taking off, but then he balances, and lowers himself into the hull.

He rolls a quilt up for a two-person pillow. We lie down and pull the blankets over us. I slide up next to him and put my head on his chest. The dinghy rocks back and forth. We have made it. We are safe. Above the sides of the boat we see a dark slice of trees and sky. There are still many stars, the same ones I saw earlier. I think I can smell the burning but mostly I smell the ocean. I hear the waves rolling up on shore then sinking back. We rock there and soon I fall asleep.

I
N THE MORNING
, when we get out of the boat, the
Menamon Star
is there on the doorstep, its plastic sleeve covered in droplets.

H
ENRY IS SITTING
at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, his eyes wide open and staring at some kind of nothing between him and the wall. I shell the paper from its sleeve and put it down on the table. Our story is the front page. Here it is, straight off the presses, and already it’s old news.

“It ran today?” Henry says.

“Yes,” I say.

Henry picks up the paper, glancing at the byline with my missing name. He’s on the third paragraph when he looks up at me and I know he knows.

Henry says, “I seem to remember once reading a
Gazette
article about an ‘Unprecedented Culture Shift’ in Bed-Stuy.”

“Henry—” I say.

“Eight-foot fences, it says here,” Henry says. “Interesting that they’d have known how tall the fences were gonna be.”

“I was going to tell you,” I say. “But then—”

“Obviously you weren’t. Obviously you left your name off the byline and were hoping I was dumb enough not to recognize your copy when I read it.”

“Yes,” I say, because I am busted and what can I do? “Not like that, but yes.”

A muscle in Henry’s cheek twitches. He holds the paper out in front of him, like evidence, but does not read it. I shouldn’t have done it but I just wanted to so badly. It seems so stupid now, after what’s happened. Me making so much fuss over words. One article.

“I’ve been thinking I might go away for a while,” Henry says, still looking at the paper.

“Away?” I say. I think: Don’t go. It is all too terrible and you cannot leave me alone now even if I deserve it.

“Back to New York. Just for a week or two. Get my head straight.”

“Because of this?” I say. “Henry, I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry.” Outside, a siren whines.

“Not just this,” Henry says. “You could say
this
doesn’t even matter anymore, in light of everything.” He flicks his wrist, cracks the paper straight.

“Would you say that?” I ask, and I hope, somehow, that this will have gotten me off the hook. Then I realize how disgustingly awful that is. I don’t want to be let off the hook like that. Not by Rosie.

“I don’t know,” Henry says.

“Henry, don’t go away. Not now,” I say.

He looks up at me, lifting the newspaper. “Do you want this?” he asks. He has asked me this so many times. In New York, on sleepy mornings, he would have finished the current events and sports pages, and he would hold up the paper in this exact same way to see if I was done. Did I still need the arts? The books? The world news and politics?

“No,” I say. “I’ve read it.”

He nods and gets up. He opens the cabinets under the sink where we keep our recycling. He puts the paper on a stack of other old papers. I watch as he methodically binds the stack up with twine. Cutting it. Knotting it.

“I’m going out,” he says.

“Henry—” I say.

But Henry lifts the stack by the strings and through the screen door I see him taking it out to the end of the drive where we leave our recycling.

And this will be happening all over town. Our story will be used to wrap up fishes at Deep’s. It will line the floors of pets’ cages. It will get crumpled into balls and used for kindling. It will blow away down the docks, the four-squared pages opening and closing like moths’ wings. It does not matter so much as my newspaper brain thinks it does. It doesn’t matter like humans do.

And then there is the other kind of news, the kind about Rosie. The kind that you give squatting next to your husband’s bed, reeking of gasoline. This news is different from the news in the paper. It is the kind that will make its way through town whether people read the
Star
or not. People will phone people. People will see people, in the supermarket, at the gas station. Parents standing around the carousel will talk in muffled voices as their children ride around.
Have you heard?
someone will say. And someone else will say,
Heard what?
And that is when it truly is the news. When you are the one who has to instill in your voice the exact right balance of kindness and seriousness with which to tell someone something that she doesn’t really want to hear.

S
OME COMPANY MEN
are brought up to repair the substation. People talk about what happened in quiet voices. And they do not stop talking about it.

In this town, people understand a death by drowning. It happens yearly. Men are yanked overboard by ropes tied wrong. There are undertows and riptides. Drunk children and drunker adults go swimming. There are squalls.

But there are no fires. To lose a girl this way is something this town has not practiced for. There will be no funeral because Rosie’s parents will have the services in Florida. They have said they will not be returning to Menamon. It is mentioned, about town, that their faces haven’t been seen around here in quite some time anyway.

And if the Salems do not come back, and if there is no funeral, perhaps it will be easier. It will be easier to think instead that Rosie has just gone down to Florida, a troublemaking kid collected at last by her parents. We imagine Rosie sulking over breakfast on her parents’ patio. We imagine her refusing all the fruits, and juices. We imagine her complaining about the noisy chattering bugs in the palms, the kinds that are bigger than the ones we have here. We imagine warm air stirring wax-green Florida leaves. We see her staying pale. Wearing SPF 80 and forgetting to rub in a spot between her shoulder blades. We think of the postcards she will send us, idyllic beach scenes with notes on the back saying things like,
This is dreadful. Give my regards to the Uncle. Love, Rosalind.

But then, we see her slowly unfurling. She starts cooking her parents Stationhouse specials for breakfast. She sits with her father on the beach. They both wear Red Sox caps, but sometimes, if the Sox aren’t playing, we imagine them rooting for the Rays. We hear it when Rosie starts to sing again. Murmuring little songs as she convinces her mother to dye her graying hair blond. We watch as Rosie starts a shell collection, favoring the ugly twisted ones with secret pink insides. We see her line the shells up on the shelf in her bedroom. We notice that she has started to think of it as her bedroom. And we see how she forgets all about us here in Menamon. And we are glad it is this way. We are glad when we see Rosie in an alligator-green bathing suit and a silly sun hat of her mother’s, standing knee-deep in warm Florida water. She is smiling and squinting, half blinded by the sun. She cannot see us. And we are glad.

44

Quinn

J
oe Deep decides there’s going to be a memorial. He runs an event listing in my goddamn paper, which is still coming out, without me. The memorial is down on the waterfront, today, at noon.

I’m not going. Like hell I’m going.

Carter says we’re going. I sit on a stool at the island in his kitchen, watching him crack eggs, using his thumbs too much to do it. I shake my head. “No,” I say. “I’m not going. I’m in a bad mood, Carter. My whole life is a fucking bad mood.” I take a sharp breath in. I shiver.

Carter wipes egg off his hands. He leaves the room and comes back with a sweater for me. “Put that on,” he says.

I pull it over my head and don’t bother to pull my hair out of the neck. I let him make me food. It’s been a few days, and this is what we do. I sleep. He wakes me up and says I have to eat something. I yell at him. He says, “Fine,” and then starts cooking anyway. Usually I smell it and come out.

This is what Carter and I should have done when Marta died. Eaten food. Yelled at each other. Worn large sweaters as mourning garb.

This morning he’s making omelets with cheese in them and spicy peppers—the way we like them. He puts a blue china plate in front of me. He gives me silverware and a cloth rag of a napkin. “Eat,” he says.

I roll up the sweater sleeves and I eat. Carter watches me swallow, then forks some eggs into his own mouth. “It will be good to go,” he says.

“No fucking way,” I say, my mouth full of eggs.

Carter shakes his head. “No way?” he says.

I nod.

He goes to the phone. “Remember that you made me do this,” he says.

When I hear the faint “
How’s it going?
” on the other end of the line, I know he’s bringing in the big guns.

Charley pulls up in the drive twenty minutes later. Her face is too nice.

She gives me this sad smile and says, “Get in the fucking car, Winters, or you’re fired.”

I sit on my stool and stare at her. “You can’t be idiotic enough to think this will work,” I say. “You I expected better from.”

Carter excuses himself to go get ready. He leaves us alone.

Charley holds out her hand. “Please, Quinn,” she says. I bite my lip. These fucking women with their fucking
pleases
.

“I don’t want to,” I say. “I don’t think I can. Who do I owe it to, to cry in fucking public? I’ll cry right here. I’ll grieve just as much. Okay? I promise.”

“It’s not for them, you moron, it’s for you,” Charley says. “And for Rosie.” Charley looks at the ceiling. “You know she would have loved something like this. You know she would drag you to it if she could.”

“Hah!” I laugh a snotty laugh in spite of myself. It’s true, this is exactly the sort of dumb thing Rosie would make me go to. Only it’s her own dumb thing. Her own dumb memorial. I imagine her poking at me, pulling back the covers, handing me my clothes, saying,
We’re going
.

“I’ll bum you a million cigarettes, huh?” Charley says.

I scan her pockets. I see the rectangle of a pack. “I’m not changing,” I say, flapping the big sleeves of Carter’s sweater.

“No one gives a damn what you wear, Winters,” Charley says, rubbing at her eyes. “Okay? Just come.”

“Fine,” I say. I hop off my stool.

Carter emerges, dressed in black. I know he’s heard the whole thing. “Are we going?” he asks anyway.

We follow Charley out to the car. Carter gets in shotgun and I climb in the back. I don’t put on a seat belt. Charley starts the car.

“I’d like those cigarettes now, please,” I say.

Charley tosses the pack into the backseat. “Take them,” she says. “I quit.”

45

Leah

I
have developed a fondness for the dinghy.

It used to seem like just another part of the dock, but ever since Henry and I slept in it, I’ve started coming down here. I scrubbed the hull out with water and bleach. The rope tying it to the dock was old, so I bought a new one. I’m getting better at climbing in. Today, I manage it without even wobbling.