The Visibles (26 page)

I looked down. Kay was covered in blood. She wasn’t scrunched up or cockeyed or bent in an unnatural angle or anything, though—it seemed more like she was just sleeping. When the ambulance came, I grabbed an EMT’s arms and told him he should be very careful with Kay; she was pregnant. I heard a gasp behind me and turned—they had pulled Mark out of the car and lain him on the pavement. He had come to, and was staring right at me. In the back of my mind, I’d always wondered if he’d suspected what was going on between us. Maybe I’d hoped that deep down, he had always known. But he hadn’t, that was obvious. He hadn’t known a thing. It was the last time Mark ever looked at me in the eyes.

I told you about how a few days after that, I had lain on the carpet in the living room, the TV blaring. I told my mother I wouldn’t be taking the scholarship for college. “But we worked so hard,” she said, astonished. And it was true, it was
we.
She pushed me into taking the accelerated courses, she bought me the encyclopedias, she filled out the paperwork for the scholarship and rode me until I finished the essays.
You need to get out of Cobalt,
she always said.
You’re destined for better things.

“I’m sorry,” I told her, sprawled out on the floor. “I can’t do it. I can’t go.”

My mother stood there for a long time. All I wanted was for her to lean down and tell me the right thing. She was so good at telling me the right thing, bolstering me up, making me feel like I was okay. But she just quivered at the edge of the room, her face growing redder and redder. “Fine,” she said finally. “Stay here, then. Ruin your life.”

“I really need to talk about this with someone,” I said. “I feel like I’m coming apart.”

“What’s there to talk about?” she snapped, twisting a hand towel around in her fingers. “It was an accident. People hit deer all the time, there’s nothing you could’ve done. Think about your friend. Think about what
he
has to face now.”

“Maybe he needs to talk to someone too,” I moaned.

She rolled her eyes. “Get off the floor. Go get a goddamn job.”
Goddamn
was razor-edged; she’d never used that tone with me.

The phone rang. My mother stomped over to get it. I knew right away it was my father. My mother’s voice dropped, a wrung-out washcloth. “Well, just come home,” she said. She slammed the phone back into its cradle. She didn’t know I was watching when she put down the hand towel and glared at the portrait of Sinatra she kept by the telephone and stuck her thumb right in his smarmy face, as if blotting out his shiny, optimistic existence.

I saw her differently, then. How cornered she felt, how purposeless. My relationship with Kay was the only thing I’d ever kept from her. Perhaps that was why she didn’t come to me when I was lying on the floor in despair—because I’d concealed it, because she thought she’d been replaced.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered, when I finally finished.

I looked up at you then. Really looked at you. “Why are you an aide here?” I asked.

You looked startled. First you touched your throat, as if checking for your vocal cords. Then you turned the little silver chain you wore on your wrist around. “I like helping people,” you said. “And I was here once, myself. A long time ago. When I was nineteen.”

“Why?”

“I used to do this.” You pulled up your sleeve and showed me scars up and down the insides of your arm. Then you pulled up your shirt and showed me similar ones on your stomach. There were more on your calves, the insides of your thighs. “I used broken glass.”

“Are you better?” I asked.

“Yes,” you said. “No. I don’t know.”

We kept things a secret for a while. When we met to play tennis, we were both very businesslike. If it seemed like I talked to you a lot during meals or spent more time with you when we drove upstate into Rhinebeck, no one said anything. So we got bolder. You would slip into Merewether while the others were watching TV. I would pull you up to my bedroom and we would hide under the covers of the twin bed and listen to Coltrane on my Discman, one earbud in your left ear, the other earbud in my right.
It was exciting, knowing that Paula, who watched over us, might walk in at any time. What can I say? That I felt alive? That I felt understood? Sometimes you said you still felt crazy. I told you I had a brownstone apartment in Brooklyn Heights, and that I wanted you to come home with me. You were hesitant—you’d had difficult relationships in the past. “Life’s not as easy as that,” you said. “You should know that by now.”

I told you I did know that. But even if things got hard, I wanted to deal with that, too. I’ve run from a lot of people when things got too hard, I told you. I ran from my mother, I ran from Kay, I ran from my cousin and my aunt and my friends and my daughter. I’m tired of running. I don’t want to do that anymore.

“Your daughter?” You stopped me. “You didn’t run from Summer. She’s in Brooklyn.”

I looked away. I hadn’t been clear. But there was time to explain all that later. There was time for everything.

I want to be idealistic about you. I want to be hopeful, as hopeful as I’d been with Kay. I am still me. We are the worst of ourselves and also the best. They can try and shock it out of us but it doesn’t really go away, not entirely. And that’s okay. It made me feel great to realize that. It made me feel almost whole again.

brooklyn, february 2003

T
he family
met for dinner in Park Slope, at an Italian restaurant on Fifth Avenue. The restaurant didn’t have a bar, so we had to stand in the alcove by the door to wait while they cleared a table for us.

The alcove’s heavy plastic walls kept buckling in from the wind. Rosemary stood next to me, wearing a long, sweeping skirt, pointy boots with a bunch of tiny eyelet buttons, and an oversized plaid coat. Her dirty blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail, but many strands had broken free, spiraling around her face. Philip was talking to my father about the apartment. Structurally, it seemed very sound, he said. However, there were ways to maximize the space that might appeal to buyers. He could knock down the wall that separated the kitchen and the living room to make it one large room. The kitchen would get more light that way.

My father ran his hand over his chin. “I wonder how long that would take…”

“Not long, once you get the permit and a contractor,” Philip said. He knew a contractor who owed him a favor, actually, from when he lived in New York. He could call him, if my father wanted.

“Richard,” Rosemary warned. “We can’t knock down a
wall
. People are coming to see the place in two days.”

“True.” My father nodded slowly.

“But for the record, I was always telling him that we should open up
the space between the kitchen and the living room,” Rosemary added, snaking her arm around my father’s elbow.

“You have been,” my father said, leaning into her. “I should have listened to you.”

I looked away.

I left your bedroom untouched,
my father had written in the email that announced he had decided to sell the old Brooklyn apartment. Logically, selling it made sense—it wasn’t as if anyone were living there, as my father and Rosemary were in Vermont, and Philip and I were living in Annapolis, Maryland. He’d probably make a killing on it, too, the way the apartment values in Brooklyn Heights had gone up since he’d bought the place.

The Realtor had scheduled an open house for this Monday and Tuesday, which was why everyone had to come into town this weekend and get their stuff out. It was also an excuse for us to come back to Brooklyn and hang out together; a “family gathering,” as my father called it.

The talk transitioned to tennis, whether Roddick was the real thing or just a flash in the pan, that Hewitt was an asshole, and who were these Russian girls coming into this country and using our trainers and playing in Florida but still competing under the Russian flag? I had no idea Philip knew anything about tennis. Sometimes, he just came out with these random facts about things—famous mountain ranges, American history, the Dalai Lama. I could see the corner of his eyelid twitching, which happened whenever he was nervous. In the year we’d been together, I’d told him plenty about my father, but this was the first time they’d met. I wanted to tell Philip he didn’t have to try so hard.

“Summer, I wanted to show you this.” Rosemary pulled a binder out of her enormous handbag. Inside were photographs, notes scrawled on lined paper, and more notes and drawings on Post-its. “It’s the general premise to my book.” She pointed to the photographs. “I featured twelve gardens in Vermont, and interviewed each of the people who cultivated them. I tried to vary them as much as possible, to give people a lot of options. If it ever gets published, maybe we could sell it at my store. Anyway, I thought you might want to take a look.”

“It’s nice,” I said, leaning over, feigning looking. “Very pretty.”

“You should see the things Rosemary’s doing for that store,” my father butted in, just as the frizzy-haired maître d’ announced that our table was ready and that we could sit down if we wanted, even though Steven and Angie, his girlfriend, hadn’t arrived yet. “They raise llamas on the neighboring property, right? Well, now they don’t only just sell plants at Carson’s. Rosemary is buying some of the llama yarn to sell there as well.”

“And you should see
him
with those llamas.” Rosemary jutted a finger at my father. “There’s this one mother who was completely ignoring her baby, and Richard was so worried. He thought maybe
we
should adopt it. Had all these plans of how we could build a little llama barn off the garage.” She rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “Your dad and his worries about karma.”

I recoiled, horrified she had so nonchalantly referred to what I thought she had referred to—my father’s accident, his guilt over hitting the deer, his loss of Kay. My father had surely told Rosemary, and maybe Rosemary had assumed he’d discussed it with me. Only, he hadn’t. Not once. I wasn’t even sure if he knew I knew.

“I think it’s nice he saves animals,” I said, unable to suppress the snip in my voice.

Philip touched my arm.

“Well, I know.” Rosemary sucked in her bottom lip. “I mean, so do I.”

I clamped down on the insides of my cheek. I was trying. I was trying to try.

“You really should come to Vermont, Summer,” Rosemary said gently as we all sat down. “It’s so beautiful there right now, with the snow.”

I turned away, pushing my tongue to the roof of my mouth. All in all, it was a relief that Rosemary was who she was. Before I met her, I’d pictured her as this exuberant, carefree woman, the kind that wore short A-line skirts and was always the first to get up to dance at a wedding—like Kathy Lee Gifford on those Carnival Cruise commercials. Rosemary had come to Cobalt with my father to organize Stella’s
things and make the funeral arrangements. She was a godsend—she cleaned Stella’s house top to bottom, sorted through a good deal of her things, braved places I didn’t want to go, like the basement or Stella’s closet or the kitchen pantry. Pete drove across the country to attend the funeral, too, and Rosemary cooked for everyone. She hung out in the living room doing a cross-stitch while my father and Pete caught up in the kitchen and I walked up and down Stella’s gravelly street, talking to Philip on my cell phone.

“She’s just so…ordinary,” I had told him. At this point, Philip and I hadn’t actually seen each other yet, but we were talking to each other on the phone every night.

“Does she seem nice?” Philip asked.

“I don’t really know,” I said, passing the old speed limit sign. I could still make out
Sand Niggers Go Home,
although the paint had faded almost white. “She hasn’t really said anything.” Not that I’d exactly said anything to Rosemary, either.

The third night in Cobalt, when my father and Pete were yet again drinking beer on the decluttered back porch, Rosemary started to brave a conversation with me. She did the talking. She told me she was working at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. And that she wanted to start a gardening business and write a gardening book. Rosemary had created a gorgeous garden on the Brooklyn apartment’s roof deck, and a few neighbors who had seen it from their roofs hired Rosemary to come over and make over their spaces, too. She told me she’d been working on the roof deck the day the terrorist attacks happened, and they’d put a big jagged tear in her memory for life. She wanted to move my father out of the city—to Vermont, she was thinking—as fast as she could. She said this with a lift at the end of each sentence, like a question, although I doubted she was asking me permission.

“We should both go up to Vermont,” Philip said now, his hand on my arm again. “We could learn how to ski. Or snowboard.”

“Mmm.” I dove into the bread basket as soon as the waitress placed it on the table. In Vermont, Rosemary worked at an organic plant store/coffee shop; they held folk concerts and poetry slams Sunday nights. My father didn’t do anything for a while, but then began to renovate
their farmhouse. He bought how-to books and just started…doing it. My father, who used to fear doing the laundry, now knew how to plumb and do electric work and hang windows. He knew how to frame a door and check if things were level. After he finished the farmhouse, he’d taken a job at an artist colony, repairing the studios and cottages. Apparently Vermont was full of artist colonies, places where artists went and just…existed. Writers took over run-down barns and cabins. Painters climbed uneven steps to slanted lofts and marveled at the windows and light. My father, the once-dermatologist and cancer researcher, a holder of not one but several advanced degrees, wandered around with his tool belt, making sure the windows opened properly to vent out turpentine fumes.

Now Steven and Angie stood awkwardly over us, smiling and holding hands. Angie had her purse slung across her chest like a postal worker, and Steven’s hairline was receding, which I still found shocking and funny but also sad. “Hey!” Steven cried.

My father stood up. “You’re here!” He wrapped his arms around Steven. Rosemary hugged Angie, who was petite and Asian and had the smallest teeth I had ever seen. The two of them sat down and shrugged off their jackets and bags. “So happy you made it.” My father beamed. “You get in okay?”

“Oh, sure, for once.” Angie rubbed her red hands together. She and Steven rolled their eyes in the understanding that frequent travelers had. They both worked at an Internet company in San Francisco. The website, which had something to do with online music reviews, was getting bigger and bigger, so they frequently flew around the country, attending events to promote it. This past summer, Steven had scored my father and Rosemary third-row seats to see Dave Brubeck at the Newport Jazz Festival, the musical zenith of my father’s life.

“Who knows about our return flight, though?” Steven added. “All we’ve heard all day is talk about this snowstorm.”

“They’re saying three feet,” Angie said.

My father lowered his eyes, looking distraught. “They’re wrong,” Rosemary assured him.

“You think?” my father asked.

“I’m sure,” Rosemary said.

“Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s true,” I piped up. “The meteorologists are usually right about blizzards.”

“Oh, I have a feeling it won’t happen,” Rosemary said.

“It’s not like you’re God,” I said. I’d meant it as a joke, but it had come out so harsh and mean, and the whole table paused for a second.

“I’m Philip.” He reached across the table and shook Angie’s hand, breaking the silence.

“You’re here with Summer?” Steven asked.

“That’s right.”

“Do you guys live near each other in Annapolis?”

“We live
together
in Annapolis,” Philip said slowly, glancing at me.

“Oh!” Steven and Angie looked at each other in surprise. Philip kept his eyes on me, twirling a fork around in his fingers.

Steven nodded toward Philip. “You look familiar.”

I clenched my butt in my chair. Philip was going to say that he had lived in Cobalt, or Steven was going to ask how we knew each other. I didn’t want to talk about Cobalt now, or ever, not with Steven.

“Well, I lived in New York,” Philip said.

Angie snorted. “Meaning he’s completely
not
familiar.”

I began to relax; perhaps the dangerous moment had passed. Steven leaned back and regarded our father. “So I have to sort through my old room, huh?”

“That’s right,” my father answered.

“I can’t wait to see his high school bedroom.” Angie giggled maliciously, wiggling her hands like Gargamel about to muzzle a Smurf. She looked at us. “Have you guys been by there yet?”

“Actually, we’re staying there,” Philip said. “In Summer’s bedroom.”

“You’re staying there?” My father sounded confused. “You didn’t get a hotel?”

I shrugged. “My bed’s a double. We can both fit. And we’ll be out of there before the open house. Then we’re going to stay in a hotel.”

My father scratched his thick hair. It was short now, tamed, and his
beard was gone. His skin was red with either windburn or sunburn, and he wore a thick, cream-colored wool sweater, dark green corduroy pants, and complicated hiking boots, the kind that probably insulated against Vermont’s snow and ice. “And…how long are you going to be in town after the open house?”

I chewed slowly. “We’re staying same length of time as Angie and Steven. Until Tuesday. Then we’ll drive home.”

“Tuesday morning or Tuesday afternoon?”

I breathed out, sharp and cold. “Do you have plans or something?”

“No…I just…well, yes. I mean, I wish you would’ve told me,” my father said, his eyes darting back and forth.

“What’s the matter, Richard?” Rosemary looked concerned.

“It’s just…” My father fiddled with his napkin. “Never mind. Sorry.” He smiled tightly at us. A few seconds passed.

The waitress arrived and took our order. I got the risotto. Rosemary ordered vegetarian pasta, my father got duck, and Steven and Angie both ordered steak. I wondered if they were both doing Atkins together; they seemed like a couple who conquered things as a team. When they came to Cobalt to help sort through Stella’s house—I had been astounded when Steven showed up, and even more astounded when Steven seemed normal, friendly, calm, and with a
girlfriend
—they had Rosetta Stone tapes in their rental car, and at night I heard German words filtering out from underneath the old bedroom door. I wanted to say that Angie was a good match for Steven, but I really didn’t know who Steven had become. So what if I neglected to tell him that I was bringing Philip today, or that he and I lived together in Annapolis? It’s not as if Steven and I ever talked.

“So how are things going in Annapolis, guys?” my father asked us.

“Well,” Philip said, “my job is great. We’re designing a new apartment high-rise in Eastport.”

“And how about you, Summer?” Rosemary smiled at me.

“Oh, you know. Still at Chow’s. The cooking store.”

Everyone blinked.

“We have our summer stock already,” I continued, because it seemed like they were waiting for me to say something else. “Margarita blend
ers, champagne buckets, mini grills. It’s so cold, I can hardly imagine summer right now.”

My father frowned. “Have you given any thought to going back to school?”

“I’ve told her that, too,” Philip interjected, way too excitedly. “Johns Hopkins isn’t far.”