S
am hasn’t started the new novel. It’s due in six months, and he can’t write. That old ability to conjure, to invoke the imaginary, has disappeared. Every time he tries to work, to imagine, his mind careens with the
real
stories: the only ones that really matter anymore. The truths. Besides, the words don’t work anyway.They are too flat; on the computer monitor they are dimensionless, just pixels, without even the frail substance of ink. How do you do justice to something real with words made of air?
And so instead, he remembers. But the memories come in fragments, in twinkling pieces of tissue paper and sequins and colored beads inside a kaleidoscope. Trying to capture one moment, to examine it, is nearly impossible, because it appears but is also reflected again and again, making patterns too intricate and beautiful to deconstruct.
This morning, instead of rising to go to the loft to write, he stays in bed. And as the sun comes up over the lake, as its weak light travels through the paned window on the other side of the room, it glances off his arm, refracting onto Mena’s hair and bare shoulders. This sliver, this softly shining shard, reflects a thousand other mornings, each exactly the same as the other:
birdsong, stillness, breath, hair.
How many mornings has he awoken next to Mena? To the identical fragile scent of Ivory soap and that lilac lotion she uses on her hands?
He turns the kaleidoscope’s wheel, and the pattern shifts, the scents change and he is lying next to Mena, but a different Mena, hair tethered in a tight rubber band, body curled tightly away from him, the whole room smelling of that sweet smell of breast milk.The sheets are the same, but the space between them is wet with milk; Mena is asleep, but not asleep, that strange fugue state in which new mothers reside.The birdsong, the cooing of doves, or the sounds of seals barking or of waves crashing on sand are still there, but underneath, the tissue paper breaths of Finn and Franny, one sleeping in the crook of Mena’s arm, the other in the bassinet next to the bed. He was worried about crushing them, about rolling over, about Mena falling asleep and dropping one of them. But he has watched her (for days now, how many days, weeks now?) as her eyes rest, but her arm remains vigilant, a cradle of bone and skin holding them tight.
Twist,
the sun shines through the pale curtains, waking Mena, her eyes (the lashes like a curtain rising), with the look of surprise she always has when she sees him there (as if he might one day just vanish). The warmth in her brown eyes is gratitude. And this is his favorite pattern: both babies (are they babies anymore?) still sleeping in their crib, the space between them closing in, Mena’s skin coming close to his, he can feel the warmth of sunlight and her skin radiating. Always, even before the children, she whispers,
morning, morning, morning.
Twist,
this moment is the same, but different, two toddlers, heads full of curls the color of spun sugar, pouncing between them, one curling up under the quick of his arm, the other straddling his back, riding like a pony, Mena’s hair spilled across the sheets like ink,
morning, morning, morning.
This pattern, of four instead of two (it is always two or four, never three, never three) is predictable, certain.
Later, alone, stolen time, her hair cool across his arm, they whisper,
morning, morning,
which becomes the moaning of desire, hers, his, indiscernible. Until.The padding of feet in the hallway, two identical fists knocking, she covers his mouth with her hand, giggles, and he closes his eyes, smelling that scent of lilac on her palm against his lips.
Twist,
all of them, lying on that great expanse, adrift on a sea alone but together and content, this bed their raft. Legs grown, stretching to the edges, but still, four bodies and the gentle nudging,
Wake up, Daddy. Get up, get up, get up.
And then other mornings when they were alone again in their bed. The kids asleep or making breakfast on their own (he knows the sound of cereal being poured into a bowl, the glug, glug of milk). In this pattern, Mena curls into him like a child herself.
The landscape beyond the window changes: California, Florence that one glorious summer, visits to friends in New York, Portland, Michigan. Hotels and motels and here.
Here
where he is now. It is once again
morning, morning,
but the birds, the doves, he can’t remember the word for them anymore. It sounds the same, but it isn’t at all the same.
Morning.
If there were a name for this pattern: the tear-stained cheeks of Mena, her black hair matted with the sweat of another migraine nightmare, for the way the sun mocks them both.
Mourning.
There it is.
Birdsong, repose, breath, hair.
These fragments cannot be reassembled or scrutinized; they just spin endlessly, beautifully, full of splintering sorrow in every configuration.
He should be writing, but words can no longer do justice. To all that old bliss. Or to this impossible sadness.
Mena rises as she always does, when the nightmare ends, and she carefully tiptoes out of the bed and out of the room. He pretends that he is asleep. And he will give her another hour, two, before he follows her into the morning.
M
ena quietly walks across the cold dusty floors of the cabin at dawn, leaving Sam to sleep. They have been here almost a week now, and she’s still getting the headaches she thought would go away when they left the house in San Diego. It is only 5:00
A.M.
, but she knows that trying to go back to sleep would be futile.
It was Sam’s idea to come here. In the morning, after they had gone and picked Finn up at the border station, as he knelt on the cold bathroom tiles, vomiting, Sam sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. “We need to get out of here.”
“What do you mean?” Mena had asked. She was making muffins, stirring blueberries into the bowl. She watched as they smeared in violet streaks across the clean white batter. She would overfill the muffin tins, making enormous muffins, each a meal in itself.
“It’s too much,” he had said. “We’re suffocating here. All of us.”
Mena looked around at the kitchen, at the warm autumn-colored walls that she had painted, at the stained-glass lamp that shone down on the kitchen table. There was a layer of Magic Marker, crayon, glitter glue that had become imbedded in the grains of the wood. This was where the twins did their art projects, where they played Uncle Wiggily and Scrabble and Monopoly.Where they learned how to add and subtract.Where they had made papier-mâché volcanoes and topographical maps. The place where they had been eating together as a family for more than sixteen years. The conversations they’d had in that kitchen rattled around in her mind, loud and loose like pebbles.
She didn’t want to go, but he was right. Franny was everywhere. Pervasive. You couldn’t turn a corner without finding her. She filled the rooms when she was alive; now that she was gone, she permeated them.
“Where would we go?” Mena asked, her voice breaking.
“Finn is going to get himself in too deep.”
Mena nodded, her throat thick, thinking of his red tear-streaked face when they picked him up from the border police. “I’m sorry,” he had cried, and he could have been six instead of sixteen. “I’m sorry.”
“I made an offer on the cabin,” Sam said.
“At the lake?” she asked. They hadn’t been to Gormlaith in five years. As the kids got older, it was harder to leave for a whole summer. Finn had his surfing, his friends. Franny had ballet. Mena still dreamed about the lake. About Franny swinging on the tire swing. About Franny floating on her back in the water. About Franny stepping onto a hornet’s nest.
“Just for the summer,” he said, pulling her into him. It was the first time he had touched her first in weeks.
In the other room, she could hear Finn wretching, spilling. The phone was ringing: Misty’s parents again, she was sure.
His face was hopeful. Bright. Sam had smelled like citrus; his hands were rank with the scent of the oranges he’d just squeezed. He touched her face, looking at her, really looking at her, for the first time in a long, long time. She knew that it must pain him, to see Franny’s nose. Her mouth. Her chin.
She shook her head. She couldn’t imagine going back to Vermont without Franny.
“We can’t lose him too,” Sam said.
She knew he was right, but still, she’d resisted the idea of the lake. She couldn’t imagine that it would be any better anywhere. She worried that at the lake there would be too few distractions. At least here there were things to do, places to go, people in their lives whose main purpose was diversion. She had her catering business, as sporadic and small as it was. She had some semblance of a life. But then, two days after the Tijuana episode, Finn gave them no other choice.
The Monday after that awful weekend, Finn disappeared. He took off for school that morning as usual, backpack slung over his shoulder, skateboard tucked under his arm, but that afternoon, he just didn’t come home. Normally, he was in the house to grab his wetsuit and surfboard by 3:00.And then he was making his way down the wooden steps that led from their house to the beach. That day, as the hours slipped by (
3:00, 4:00, 5:00
), Mena tried not to panic, but by the time the sun started to disappear into the water, casting brilliant golden shadows across the empty living room, she could feel the prickly disquiet of his absence turning into paralyzing fear. She could taste it, bilious and sour in her swollen throat.
Misty’s parents assured them that he was not with her.
“Misty is home.
Grounded,
” Misty’s mother said. “She has been punished for
her
behavior the other night.”
Mena felt scolded, ashamed.
Sam dialed the police, and as he waited to speak to someone about filing a missing person report, he paced back and forth across the kitchen floor.
The hours continued to pass
. 7:00, 8:00, 9:00
.
“I’m going to look for him,” he said.
All night long, Sam drove aimlessly around the city, looking for Finn—as if he might just be standing somewhere at the side of the road. Mena stayed at the house, in case he came home, sitting at the edge of the couch, a kitchen chair, her hands gripping anything (counters, tabletops, the walls) to keep from falling.
When Sam pulled into the driveway, the sun was already starting to fill the house with light. He opened the front door, pushing Finn ahead of him.
“Apologize to your mother,” Sam had said, pushing him toward her.
Finn shook his hair out of his face, defiant. His pupils were so large, the black obliterated the normal clear blue of his eyes.
“Why?” was all Mena could manage. She had to resist the urge to pull him into her arms, to cradle him as if he were a child still.
“Apologize,”
Sam said, his jaw set.
“Why did you do this to us?” she cried, as he came toward her. Still, she reached for him, even though she half-expected that her hands would go right through him. That he too was only a ghost.
She wants to think this was a good idea, that taking Finn to the lake would at least get him away from the kids he’s been hanging out with lately. She wants to blame San Diego for everything that is happening; she wants to believe that geography alone can save him. But she knows that it has nothing to do with California and everything to do with Franny. And as she wanders around the cabin, she knows that Franny is no less present here than she was at home. She is in the crazy quilt that covers the overstuffed chair on the sunporch (Mena’s arms still remember the way she would have to lift her sleeping body and carry her to bed). In the jelly jars they used for glasses (
jellies,
she called them). In the ticking of the clock shaped like a loon (she’d learned to tell time on this clock:
half past a feather, quarter to an eye
). But at least here Franny is still just a little girl. Here she is never older than twelve. God, even Mena has to smile at the thought of Franny at twelve.
Before
.
F
inn’s cell phone doesn’t work here. He’s tried it from every room in the house, from the neighbor’s dock, even up on the roof. Nothing. He’s not even sure if they’ve gotten the regular phone hooked up yet. Maybe they won’t get it connected at all. He wouldn’t be surprised. He needs to call Misty. He just wants to hear her voice. Just shoot the shit for a bit. Sometimes, at home, he’d call her in the middle of the night, and they’d watch something stupid on TV together. Listen to each other breathe. Once he even fell asleep with the phone resting on his pillow, the sound of her sleeping on the other line.
He thinks about what she might be doing now, and it makes him crazy. He wonders how long it will be before she finds a new boyfriend. He’s not stupid; he knows that if he’s not around, somebody else, somebody better, will be.
Misty doesn’t live in Ocean Beach like the rest of his friends. He wouldn’t have met her at all if his parents hadn’t spent every dime they had to get him into Country Day after Franny was gone and he started smoking weed so he could sleep at night. He and Franny had gone to the public schools since kindergarten. They probably thought that sending him to some stuck-up private school would straighten him out. What they didn’t realize was that private school kids were actually worse than any of the stoner friends he had in OB. It wasn’t private school, but their parents’ bankrolls, that kept them out of trouble. At first, he figured Misty was just one of those bratty rich girls who got her rocks off slumming it. There were a lot of girls like that at his school, the über-wealthy chicks who hung out with the scholarship kids and kids like him to either feel cool or pretend that their whole lives weren’t dipped in freaking platinum. Misty’s parents own a gazillion-dollar place up in La Jolla: obnoxious, pseudo-Mediterranean villa crap. And the first time she brought him to her house (with its Mexican-tiled fountain out front and double winding staircase inside, its
great room
), he knew she was way out of his league.
But she liked him. God knows why. And even though her parents had more money than God, she wasn’t like some of those other girls at Country Day. She honestly didn’t seem to care too much about it. She thought it was cool that his mom and dad were artists, and that their house was just a nine-hundred-square-foot bungalow in OB. She liked him.
The real test would have been Franny though. Franny was the gauge by which Finn tested just about everything. Franny
got
people. She just did. She knew when somebody was a liar or a cheat or the kind of person who would say one thing to your face and another to their friends.
“She’s good,” Franny said. “For you.” She had said that about Finn’s
first
girlfriend, Jessie. Jessie who was smart and funny and could burp the alphabet backward. Jessie who smelled like suntan lotion and Big Red gum.
They were all at the beach, and Jessie had gone to use the restrooms. He waited until Jessie’s bathing suit was just a hot pink speck in the distance before he raised his eyebrows and said, “Well?”
Franny was digging in the sand, letting it pour out through her fingers. “She has honest eyes.” She nodded approvingly. “And
really
big boobs.”
“And that’s the most important thing,” Finn had said, laughing.
“I like her,” Franny said.
With Franny’s seal of approval, he’d asked Jessie out again, and again, and soon Jessie was a fixture at their house. And because she and Franny became friends too, sometimes she was even allowed to sleep over. The three of them would stay up all night watching old movies on TV, falling asleep spread out across the living room floor. In the morning, his mother would make mountains of pancakes, and they’d eat until their stomachs hurt.
But then Franny was gone. And he couldn’t even look at Jessie anymore. He transferred to Country Day, he met Misty, and that was that. Franny wouldn’t have liked her at all. She would have told him to turn the other direction and run away. That he knew for sure.
God, this sucks,
he thinks, peering out the window at the lake. There is haze covering everything. It’s hanging in the trees like ghosts.
He’s been thinking about how he can get back to California. He knows it’s probably ridiculous, but there’s got to be a way. They can’t watch him twenty-four hours a day. This isn’t fucking prison. If he had some money, he’d hitchhike into town and get on a bus. He’s pretty sure there’s a Greyhound that comes through Quimby. But he has no cash. Not a dime. They took away his credit card after he took out the hundred-dollar cash advance to buy weed. Maybe he could hitchhike home to San Diego. Kerouac his way back. Or maybe, instead, he could just kill them with kindness. Show them what a good boy he is. Convince them that he can be trusted. Then maybe they’d realize what a mistake they’ve made. Let him go
home
.
But he knows this isn’t even totally about him, not really. Granted, he’s been getting into a lot of trouble lately, smoking too much weed, the whole TJ thing, and then his taking off that night. But his mom and dad are cool. They’ve always been way more understanding than anybody else’s parents. Some of his friends’ folks are so uptight. They act like they were never kids. Like they don’t remember anymore what it’s like to be young. But his mother and father at least always listened to him. If he had a case to make, he was always allowed to make it. At least that’s the way it used to be.
They told him this is about the X they found in his pants pocket after his father found him camped out underneath the lifeguard tower that night, about his not coming home, about anything but what was really the problem.
Franny.
Why wouldn’t somebody fucking say it? Nobody even says her name anymore.
Franny.
They lost their grip on her, and now they’re afraid they’re going to lose it on him too. They’re cool, but they’re afraid. Both of them. Terrified of everything.