The Grown Ups (5 page)

“Suzie?”

They were coming fast now, little snapshots of a life once lived: a dish of chocolate kisses on the nightstand next to Mrs. Spade's bed that she and Bella always used to take from when they were younger. It had become a game to see how small they could make the foil, so as not to be found out. But no matter how many they took, the dish remained full, and it wasn't until much later that they figured out that Mrs. Spade was in on their game. By then they had started worrying about how they looked in a bikini and had stopped eating candy altogether.

“Everything's fine. I was just really missing Bella.”

“I'll tell her you called.”

“Thanks.”

“Suzie?”

“Yes?”

“It's good to hear your voice.”

Suzie swallowed hard, choking back a sudden rush of tears. Mrs. Spade sounded so kind and so caring. As if what Suzie was going through actually mattered. “You too.”

“It's going to be okay, you know. Whatever it is. It will all work out.”

Suzie laughed. “That's what every adult says.”

“Well.” Mrs. Spade laughed back. “Do you want to hear that sometimes it doesn't work out?”

“I guess I already know that,” Suzie said softly.

“I guess you do,” Mrs. Spade answered. “I guess you do.”

When Suzie woke
she was curled on her side in the bathtub, the phone on the bath mat, her neck sore from the strange angle at which she had fallen asleep. She closed her eyes briefly, trying to remember the sound of Mrs. Spade's voice. Yes, that had really happened. She unfolded slowly, stretching each limb before she opened the door, and staggered, a little stiffly, down the hall to the kitchen.

It was a surprise to both of them when Sarah Epstein entered the room. At the sight of Suzie, Sarah stopped short and blinked rapidly. Suzie watched shock, anger, and sadness flit across her mother's features like the spinning images of a slot machine: Suzie knew right then that there would be no escape.

“You're coming?” Sarah said, her voice casual, softer than Suzie expected it to be, but not entirely forgiving. Suzie watched her mother's attention shift to the items she must have placed on the counter before going to bed: her purse, the sheet of directions, a map, keys, gum, and an empty to-go coffee mug. Sarah took inventory, touching each piece, before she crossed to the coffee machine and flipped the switch.

Suzie nodded and put her hands on her hair, attempting to pat it down into obedience. She was trapped now; there would be no backing out of the drive to New Hampshire. “I'll be right back,” she mumbled.

In her room she avoided the mirror as she lifted her T-shirt over her head and caught a whiff of detergent, sweat, and grass.
She stumbled into the bathroom with her shorts around her knees, surprised again by the violent swath of blood, a mixture of brown and red, collected in the cotton crotch of her underpants. She recalled the look on the lifeguard's face when he realized she had been a virgin, and right then in his eyes he had been so much like Sam that she could barely look at him again. He seemed to be struggling to say something afterward, but Suzie had already begun the search for her clothes and wouldn't give him the chance.

She cleaned up, washed her face, brushed her teeth, and pulled her hair back into a ponytail; in fresh clothes she felt presentable, and invisible. When she returned to the kitchen she was surprised to find it empty, her mother gone. The counters had been swept clean; the light on the coffeemaker was still on. She poured herself a mug of black coffee and turned off the pot before she went into the garage. The door was open, and she could hear the car idling in the driveway. Suzie held up her free hand to shield her eyes from the sun as she walked toward the car. At the passenger's side she was surprised to be greeted by her mother, seat belt clicked in place, map spread out across her lap, travel mug of coffee in hand.

“Why don't you drive?” Sarah said.

“Are you sure?” Suzie asked, but she walked around to the driver's side door without waiting for an answer. The keys were in the ignition and the car in park. She was about to get in but then realized she would not be able to drive and hold a mug of coffee, and if she put it between them on the console it would most likely spill. She blamed lack of sleep for the fact that she had taken a regular mug, too fat to fit into the base of the cup holders. She took a deep swallow before dumping the rest on the driveway. As she settled in, she tucked the empty mug under the
front seat and closed the door. She adjusted her seat belt and put her hands on the steering wheel. Her mother leaned over and pressed the garage door opener attached to the driver's visor and they watched the door close together.

When it was shut, Suzie turned and looked at her mother. “Are you ready?”

Sarah nodded.

“I'm going to need you to tell me where to go.”

Her mother tapped the map with her index finger. “Got it.”

Suzie backed down the driveway slowly and stopped at the curb. The automatic sprinklers had come on in their yard as well as in their neighbor's. Suzie noticed plastic bagged newspapers dotted along the driveways. The late-August sun seemed mellow at this time of day, but Suzie knew in an hour or so it would be brutal. For now, though, they could drive with the windows open. “Mom?”

Her mother turned to her, a single eyebrow raised in question above her large dark sunglasses. They looked at each other for a long moment before finally she nodded, urging Suzie to go on.

T
hey arrived together at Penn Station. With the ticket to
Rhode Island crumpled inside his jacket pocket, Sam shifted his backpack higher onto his shoulder and double-checked the departure board. When he looked back to the space where his father had been standing, he was gone, lost in a trench-coated army shuffling toward the exits.
Lemmings in London Fog,
Sam's mother had remarked once as they sat at the station watching the neighborhood men file off the commuter train.

They'd still had the station wagon then. Sam remembered sliding across the canyon of a backseat, the pleated and dimpled leather creating perfect troughs for marbles and plastic army men. Watching for his father, Sam had rested his chin on the high back near to his mother's scratchy wool-covered shoulder. It was past their usual dinner hour and Sam had been hungry and distracted, wanting his father to hurry up, resentful that he wasn't old enough to stay home alone like Michael. For some reason that car had always smelled like breakfast cereal, slightly sweet with the tang of warm milk. Sam had been too little to understand what his mother
meant when she called the men lemmings, but old enough to know that the smile she gave him as she said it wasn't genuine.

Now, Sam bought a bag of chips and a soda for the trip at Duane Reade and finished them before he boarded. When the train arrived in Providence he took his time gathering up his stuff. He had fallen into a deep sleep soon after they pulled out of Penn Station and his cheek had a red sleep crease where he had used his backpack for a pillow. He had to switch trains in Boston to get to Providence and he had stumbled onto the next train and fallen asleep again. Sam wouldn't have known they had stopped if the conductor hadn't tapped him on the shoulder.

Originally this was supposed to be a weekend for the three of them, but last night his father had said he thought Sam should spend time with Michael alone, have Michael show him the real college life that he wouldn't if their father came along. When his father announced this change in plans, he and Sam had been eating ravioli, a dinner Sam had prepared by boiling water and dumping sauce from a jar into a pan. Sam had overcooked the ravioli a little bit and the water held a skim coat of cheese and starch, but they tasted fine masked by excessive amounts of Parmesan. The kitchen was a man's domain now. There was an ever-present stockpile of condiments centered on the table: salt, pepper, the green can of cheese, hot sauce, soy sauce, and a sticky mound of duck sauce packets from the Chinese takeout place next to the train station. Unless there was a big spill, sweeping the table for crumbs was often forgotten, and the surface of the table was always tacky to the touch. Still, in the eighteen months since Sam's mother had left them, Sam and his father managed to eat together at this table three nights a week. A triumph, his dad called it, each time they sat down for a meal.

The last time Michael had been home was winter break. Even
though his semester didn't start until mid-January, he left the day after Christmas to meet some friends whose parents had a ski house in New Hampshire, and he had returned to school from there. Before he left he spent most of his time sleeping or raiding the fridge late at night. Aside from the occasional late-night drive-by, Sam had seen Michael only twice over the break: the neighborhood Christmas Eve party at the Coles' house that they had been going to since Sam was in diapers, and Christmas morning, which was really late afternoon.

Christmas morning/afternoon had been as depressing as a Swedish movie, yet oddly comforting. Sam and Michael had opened the boxes of socks, underwear, and identical Norwegian wool sweaters from their grandparents, along with the cards containing their dad's checks to them, by the glow of the flickering lights of the television, having abandoned the pretense of a tree. If Michael had looked at Sam even once with any interest Sam would have begged to go to New Hampshire with him the following day. But he didn't, and instead Sam had spent the week between Christmas and New Year's in Peter Chang's basement along with Frankie Cole, Stephen Winters, and Johnny Ross. Each day was a minor variation on the day before.

Sam wasn't looking forward to spending three days with his brother. He couldn't remember if he had agreed to call Michael and tell him that he was coming alone or if his father was supposed to. Either way, Sam was pretty sure Michael wouldn't be waiting for him at the station. The truth of it was, without their mother, there was no one to remind them that they once shared something other than a fist bump as they passed in the night.

Michael lived with
two other guys in an apartment on the top floor of a five-story building on Benefit Street. After Sam rang
the buzzer ten times and no one answered, he went to the sandwich shop on the first floor and spent twenty minutes reading the chalkboard menus filled with sandwiches named for people he didn't know and whose only similar characteristic was satire. His stomach rumbled from the chips and the soda, so he ordered a Godfather sandwich with the money his father had given him to take Michael out to dinner and sat at a table, hunched over the mound of bread, meat, and cheese, not coming up for air until he was done.

When he tried the bell again at Michael's he was surprised to be buzzed in. The paper on which his father had scribbled the address said top floor, number nine. Sam glanced at it before he started up the stairs and then shoved it back into his pocket. He didn't want to arrive on his brother's doorstep with a piece of paper pinned to his jacket like a kindergartner.

The sandwich was heavy in his gut and Sam burped his way up. After the air cleared he discovered he was still hungry. He could never seem to get enough of anything these days. On the top floor he hung a right down a hall that had only three doors, one on each side and one at the end. For a place that housed college students, the halls were surprisingly quiet. He'd expected something out of the movies: open doors, music blaring, guys walking around in their boxers.

The door to his brother's apartment swung open before Sam had even raised his hand to knock, and then Michael stood before him in bare feet, shorts, and a T-shirt. It was March and cold outside, but waves of heat snaked out the open door around Sam's ankles.

“Sammy,” Michael said casually, as if they were used to talking to each other. He turned and Sam followed him over the threshold, closing the door behind him. Sam was careful not to follow
too close, not wanting to seem eager, the last puppy picked from the pound.

Michael stopped in the center of the large living room. One entire wall was taken up by stereo equipment, shelves of record albums, two turntables, speakers and receivers, and several pairs of headphones. On the opposite wall was an old red couch that dipped in the middle, covered with a tapestry.

“Your bed,” Michael said when he saw Sam looking.

Sam shrugged out of his backpack and his coat and tossed them on the floor by the couch.

“You might want to take that off.” Michael pointed to the sweater Sam was wearing, a stretched-out navy blue pullover that Bella Spade once told him made his eyes look really blue. “In case you didn't notice, it's like Africa in here.” He shrugged. “That's what you get for living on the top floor in a student slum.”

Sam did as Michael suggested and peeled the sweater off and added it to his pile. Under the sweater he was wearing the Smelly Eddie's T-shirt that was so old it was nearly transparent. Smelly Eddie's had been a bar that their parents had frequented during college. When their parents had been together they liked to tell the story about how Hunt won this T-shirt in a game of quarters the night he met Elizabeth. Sam had rescued the shirt from the bottom of a pile of laundry his mother had left to mold in the basement. When his dad saw him wearing it he averted his eyes but said nothing. Michael, however, narrowed his eyes and raised an eyebrow at Sam, as if to say,
seriously?

Sam crossed his arms over his torso and waited for the tour to continue. Kitchen, bathroom, and three bedrooms. Michael's was farthest down the hall with its own separate entrance. The light in the room was dim, with one small window placed high to the left, like it was trying to escape. The only thing illuminated
was the desk, which was just as well, considering the floor was ankle deep in everything else. The surface of Michael's desk was covered in textbooks and notepads split open with edges curled, stacked one atop the other in winding piles, pencils and pens cradled in the cracks. Tacked to the wall above his desk were multicolored index cards, at least fifty of them, maybe more, each covered in scrawl that already looked like a doctor's handwriting.

Michael flopped down on his mattress. The sheets were bunched up in a ball at the end of the bed. There were stains all over the exposed mattress like tiny archipelagoes. Sam waded through clothes and books to the desk chair and sat down, continuing to look around. Several large, abstract paintings hung on the wall opposite the bed, along with a pencil sketch of what looked like Michael's profile. Michael's bike leaned against the back door.

“I signed you up for a tour of campus tomorrow,” Michael said.

“Oh,” Sam said. “I guess I thought you were showing me around.”

“I have a heavy load all day tomorrow. Fridays are my worst day, I told Dad that. But we'll hang out tomorrow night. Okay?”

Sam nodded. Hang out? Them?

Michael sat up and leaned back on his elbows. “Do you want to go to Brown?”

“I don't know.” Sam shifted in the chair. “This was Dad's idea. He wanted me to get started.”

“Get started? You should be making the decisions now on what colleges you want to apply to . . . get started?” Michael shook his head.

“Hey, don't blame me. Dad's been a little preoccupied, okay?” Sam and Michael had never talked directly about their mother leaving, about Mr. Epstein and the pictures of their mother, and
definitely not about Suzy Epstein. Michael had been at Johns Hopkins that entire summer and then he went right to college. Sam had no idea how or when he found out about everything that happened, and he never thought to ask.

Michael sighed and looked across the room at the paintings. He looked like their mother, the same coloring, the same eyes and cheekbones. Slowly he turned his head to look at Sam. “Your grades? Are they good?”

His grades barely landed Sam in solid B territory. “I guess.”

“So that's a no. What about your guidance counselor? What does he say?”

“
She
says that the CUNY and the SUNY schools are great.”

“Ah,” Michael said.

“There's nothing wrong with a state school,” Sam said defensively. Truthfully, he had no vested interest in the CUNY or SUNY schools, but Michael's sounding like a self-important junior at an Ivy League college was starting to annoy him.

Michael shrugged and rubbed at his eyes. “You can still take the tour.”

“You mean I don't have ‘state school' written all over my face?”

Michael ignored him as he rolled off the bed and went to the doorway. “I have to study. I'm making coffee; if you want some it'll be here.” He nodded his head in the direction of the kitchen before he disappeared.

Sam met Michael's
roommates and had a cup of coffee even though he hated it, and then hung out on the couch staring at the wall of albums while Michael studied in his room. After a while he picked up a paperback from a pile next to the couch and leafed through the curled, damp pages. He was surprised that he became as absorbed as he did in the story of the Russian officer
and his family. He was startled out of the book when Michael reappeared wearing a coat.

“Hey—I'm going out and I might not be back tonight. Why don't you go sleep in my bed?” He nodded at the book in Sam's hands. “You a Tolstoy fan?”

Sam nodded even though he had no idea what Michael was asking. Where was Michael going all night? What happened to studying?

“Oh, and I called Dad and told him you got here safely. So don't worry about that.”

Sam nodded again and felt stupid that he hadn't thought about calling. Would he ever think about the right things? He pictured their father in his chair by the television, chopsticks poised over a carton of black bean chicken. No triumph tonight, that was for sure.

Michael went back toward the bedrooms. Sam heard a door slam and realized that Michael must have left from his room. When Sam got down there Michael's bike was gone, but he had tossed a sheet over his mattress and straightened the pillows. Sam almost felt as if he cared.

Sam was awake
when Michael came back. It was too hot in the room to sleep and he had stripped down to his boxers. He was weighing how much he wanted a glass of cold water against his feeling too lazy to get up and get it when the back door opened and a bike tire appeared, followed by his brother.

“You're missing something,” Sam said as Michael leaned the tire against the wall without explanation and shrugged out of his jacket. Without acknowledging Sam he plopped down on the edge of the mattress and dropped his head into his hands. “You okay?” Sam asked.

“Fucking exhausted, my eyes are on fire.”

“Too bad, I'd rather be exhausted from fucking.” Sam chuckled at his lame attempt at a joke.

Michael lifted his head and twisted around to look at him. “Are you a moron?”

“It was a pun. A play on words. You know, wouldn't most people want to be exhausted from fucking? Not just fucking exhausted?”

“What are you talking about?” Michael ran his hands through his hair and slowly stood up. From the look on his face Sam could tell Michael was not even going to comment on what he'd said.

Maybe Sam was a moron. He'd had sex with Bella Spade after the winter dance when she told him his eyes looked blue when he wore that navy sweater. It had been the first time for him, but he wasn't so sure about Bella. If he was to believe Johnny Ross, Johnny had had sex with her in the deserted pool house at the club in ninth grade and again the summer after tenth grade. He thought that piece of information wouldn't bother him, but it did.