The From-Aways Page 9

  “You’re a pretty girl,” Jethro says. “You look just like an Irish setter I used to have.” He twirls the end of my hair around his finger.

  “You make a girl feel special, Jethro,” I say, batting his hand away.

  This is when the bartender, Sara Riley, tells me she thinks I’d better go outside. Leah is driving around the parking lot in circles. The woody used to be a red car. Now it’s old-lady-lace-colored. There are orange stripes, like rings around an Easter egg, circling the passenger door, roof, wood panels, and driver door. The best part is the hood, which is a cheerful springtime green. In sloppy green script, on the driver’s-side door, is inscribed: THE MENAMON STAR.

  “This is my lobster pot!” Leah drunkenly yells as she passes me, black hair flapping out the window. “It is Henry’s family boat returned unto him!”

  I weigh my tactical options. “Let me buy you a drink, Captain!” I yell through cupped hands. Leah stops the car, straddling two spaces, and says okay. She leaves her car door open and heads for the bar. I slam her door shut. My palm comes away painted, a red negative space in the shape of a hand on the door.

  Settled at a table, Leah tells me that she’s probably been fired from the Star and also her house. She says Henry was supposed to be a lobsterman and he sold his family history so she could have a home but did not tell her about it because she and Henry are hasty and underinformed.

  “I see,” I say. “Sorry for ditching you.”

  “Ohhhhhhh,” Leah moans. “I didn’t understand that it was for your life, not for a story.”

  “It was for a story,” I say. I don’t know why I say it. It just seems so much easier to slip across the surface of things, to avoid the sucking mud below.

  “It was for your father,” Leah says. “Fathers are not stories.”

  “Mine is,” I say. I explain about the cats. I point at Jethro, who is drinking a beer with one hand while petting taxidermied Agatha with the other. I try to get Leah to fight with me about the story, the way we usually do.

  “You never told me about your father,” she says. “And then I was in trouble with Charley. For not knowing my famous Menamonians.”

  “I’ll be sure to give you the scoop next time,” I say.

  “No!” Leah says, and slams down her glass. She spatters beer all over the table. She closes her eyes and shakes her head back and forth. “That’s not what I mean. I mean you should tell me things. I bet you tell zero people zero things. And not telling people things is not a favor! If you try to not bother people by not telling them important things, all you do is put fluffy unknowable stuff between you, and that is sad and also dangerous.”

  “You have paint all through your hair, you know that?” I reach across the table and pinch out a piece of green that’s dried there.

  “Quinn,” she says. “I am being very serious. What about your mother? Is your mother a famous Menamonian too?”

  My mother is buried in the ground with a fucking weeping willow growing roots through her pelvis. My mother is a song I have stuck in my head that will never play on the radio again. A song of memories I’m stuck remembering in a looping, fragmented way, pieces missing. My mother was my only home.

  “Marta is gone,” I say. And then I say, “I told him I was you. Carter Marks.”

  “What? Why?” Leah says.

  “Because you’re good at things, Bernstein! And I’ve basically never met him before and I had this whole plan, but then things weren’t going the way they were supposed to and you’re so good at questions and understanding what needs to be said that it just seemed like it would be easier if he met you first. I thought I could meet him later.” I suck air in and blow it out of me in a stream. Three long, hissing exhalations. I feel calmer. Your breathing is like a pressure release valve, Marta said. You have to let the stream escape slowly. You’ve got to let that stuff out, or the whole joint will blow. “And let me tell you, Leah Lynch,” I say. “You really cocked up this story.”

  Leah looks down at her damp, paint-spattered body. “I am good at things?” she says, and starts laughing so loudly the few people still left in the bar turn to stare. “You can be me whenever you want,” she says. “Do you want to be me later when Henry sees his car?”

  I laugh. I’m getting a warm and fuzzy pleasure out of rubbing the sorry state of my life up against the sorry state of hers. I go pull a chair up behind Leah, one knee on either side of her waist. I start picking all the paint from her hair, piece by piece, like one of those monkeys on nature television. Grooming, they call this.

  “So how will it be,” Leah says, “when you meet Carter Marks again later, as you?”

  I touch the fox eye in my pocket just to make sure it’s still there and the first thing I think is that I want to live in his house. It was just so fucking cozy in there, and right now, drunk as I am, late as it is, if I could go anywhere, I’d go back there, and fall asleep all curled up on his rug like a pet, like a stray dog, and maybe he would just let me stay, no questions asked. But this is an absurd fantasy and the total opposite of what I’m meant to be doing. Please, Marta said. Please.

  “I just want him to be sorry,” I say. “And to be sad. He left my mother and she missed him for years and then she died and I just want him to know how shitty that is.” I pull my chair closer to Leah so I can reach more bits of paint. It’s easy to talk to the back of her head. “So I guess my plan is just to blaze in there, you know? And haunt him, for Marta. To make him sorry, and then to leave. That’s my plan.”

  Leah pulls a red ballpoint from nowhere and scribbles on a cocktail napkin. She passes it back to me. It reads: Vague.

  “I guess you’d suggest I destroy his car?”

  “I suggest you do not ‘blaze in there,’ ” she says. “I suggest you talk to him and tell him your feelings. About your Marta and your genes.” She settles her head onto crossed arms and closes her eyes while I groom. “But you are not taking me seriously,” she says, muffled. I watch her eyes relax and see the ghosts of her retinas pulse through her eyelids. I feel like reaching out and touching her there, on her closed eyes, like resting my fingertips on the strange grape of it. She falls asleep on the table. I shake the remaining paint from her hair, clutching the end of it in my fist like a rope.

  AT HOME, I try to be quiet as I turn the key in the lock. I creep in, eyes adjusting to the darkness, and I’m about to throw myself on the couch when I see it’s occupied. Rosie is sleeping there, all rolled up in this ugly-ass quilt, mustard calico ripped to the batting.

  I’m wondering whether I should wake her or just sleep in the bed when her eyes come open. She squints, then screams, a piercing squeak.

  “Hey,” I say. “It’s okay.” I hug on to her. Rosie’s breathing fast. She gets her arms out of the blanket and grabs on to me. “Hey. Hey,” I say into her hair. I rub her back. “Who did you think it was?”

  Rosie shakes her head against me. “I don’t know,” she says. “Not you.”

  She sits up. Flips on the light. “Where were you?” she says.

  “The bar,” I say. I tell her about Leah’s car.

  “I wanted to talk to you,” she says. “I think we should start a band.”

  I laugh. “Who?” I say. “You and me?”

  “Don’t laugh,” Rosie says. “You can play guitar and I can sing. The two of us.”

  “No fucking way,” I say. I stretch out on the couch, so she’s stuck at the end and I’m taking up most of it. She clambers over and sits on my legs. “You don’t want to?” she says.

  I close my eyes. “I’m going to sleep, and we’re not starting a band.”

  “Just think about it,” Rosie says. I feel her stand up, and I wish she wouldn’t go. I open my eyes. She’s looming over me, looking down at my face. She looks like a chieftain in her quilt.

  “What?” I say.

  “I saw Carter Marks today,” Rosie says. “Breakfast shift.”

  I just can’t catch a break from this man today. He’s every
where. It’s not even his normal day to come by the Stationhouse. He usually goes on Sundays. Orders huevos rancheros, like me. Not that I’m keeping track.

  “What’d he order?” I say.

  “He looks just like you,” Rosie says, and pulls the quilt around her tighter. She looks at me real hard.

  I’d scramble for a lie so that I could keep skimming the surface and avoiding the muck, but I’m tired, and what’s the use. “Family resemblance,” I say. “Must be the Penobscot. All .0001 percent of it.”

  “I just wanted to know,” Rosie says.

  “Well, now you know,” I say. Maybe Leah is right and all these things we keep from each other are dangerous. Maybe sometimes you just have to tell. And I don’t know how I found myself in this situation. Suddenly surrounded by people ragging me about my life. Friends, I mean. Friends were not part of the plan.

  15

  Leah

  Outside, Henry is wearing his stripy Samba sneakers, the ones that make him look like a boy. Even though it is freezing, he is wearing shorts, and he is staring at the car, and in the parking-lot light I see that all his leg hairs are standing up. I imagine it’s not from the cold but from the horror of the spectacle before him. I tap his shoulder.

  “Christ, Leah, what do you want me to say?” His accent gets stronger when he is angry. What. Want. Crows cawing.

  “Nothing.”

  “I’m gonna have to say something,” he says.

  “Then say it, Henry!” I yell. I jog in place, in anger.

  “Leah,” Henry says, “is this about the boat?”

  And is it ever about the boat. But it is about more than that too.

  AS HENRY DRIVES home we are silent. I hunch in my seat, cursing Quinn for being a miserable traitor. She called Henry to come get me. On her way out she fed the jukebox a quarter, punched the keypad. She solemnly watched the bubbles racing through the golden Wurlitzer tubes. Then, all the mechanical guts, all the records and needles, and all the magic, grumbled to life.

  J42, she said. Carter’s best. Good luck.

  I listened to the song all the way through before I went outside. A Marks song. The one about the boy who takes the girl someplace she’s never been before.

  IN THE CAR, I’m shivering, but the paint fumes are strong enough that we’d die if we didn’t keep the windows down. We pass a few trucks, drunken teenagers who lean on their horns when they see us coming.

  “Wicked awesome ride!” one of them shouts.

  It is quiet inside the car. Henry’s jaw is quivering. Finally he says, “What were you thinking? Leah, this is not your fucking car! This is my car. I brought this fucking car back from the fucking dead!” He leans on the horn, like he’s trying to prove the car is angry too.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I say. “About the boat. And the house. And your goddamned destiny at sea?” Because that’s what’s driving me crazy. It’s bad enough that I’ve unknowingly humiliated myself by traipsing around town in a cone of silence, grinning at people and waving, trying to be friendly. Friendly to people who probably think, like Charley did, that I’ve forced Henry out of the family business for some controlling, henpecking reason. But worse than that is that Henry is the one who kept this information from me. Who didn’t want me to know all of him. Worse: not even as much of him as the guy at the hardware store knows.

  “Why?” I say again.

  “Because it doesn’t matter!” Henry waves his hands around then grabs the wheel again. “We got the house, what does it matter where the money came from? I was never gonna be a lobsterman, so it doesn’t matter what Charley or anyone else thinks. And you ruined my car, Leah. You destroyed this fucking car!”

  The paint fumes are strong and the booze is still in my veins. I feel dizzy. “So the money for the house. It came from you selling the boat.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why didn’t you just say so?” I say.

  “It seemed too complicated,” Henry says. “And you were so happy about the house. I just wanted it to be a good thing. Simple and good. I thought if you heard the whole stupid story, you might change your mind.”

  “About moving?” I say.

  “Sure, about moving,” Henry says. “About me.”

  I think about this.

  “How stupid are you?” I say. Because it hurts my heart that Henry thinks I could leave him ever, but he isn’t getting himself off the hook this easily.

  “Why did you come to New York?” I say. “Were you running away from all this? Charley and everyone?”

  Henry sighs a long and angry sigh. “It was for the jobs. I needed more work under my belt so I could get a better gig up here. And I needed to go away so they would stop asking when I was gonna take Pop’s boat out.”

  “And you didn’t want to take it out because?” I feel ill. It’s as if I’ve just discovered an extra doorway in my own home. One that opens up to a whole wing of the house I’ve never seen before.

  “I get seasick.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Bullshit!”

  Henry measures his words. “I used to puke overboard. And I don’t see why I should have to do it just because my father did. He was miserable most of the time and he wasn’t around for Mom enough and it was never gonna happen, so it doesn’t matter that I sold the fucking boat, okay?”

  And of course this is what it’s really about.

  Henry’s mama: June.

  June collected shells. She knew the names of all the different kinds, and when Hank was out on the boat she used to wake up Henry and Charley early, before they went to school, to go out on the beach. The tide would have washed in all the best ones and it would still be dark out, so they brought flashlights, and net bags, and in the dark June’s beam would jump from spot to spot and the water would be aching cold around their feet. Charley was the best at finding pearly ones and Henry was best at spotting big ones that tumbled in the surf.

  June taught them how to tie knots with bits of ropes you could still find scattered about the house. An angler’s loop under the couch, a buntline hitch in the kitchen drawer. An egg loop, a stopper knot, an alpine coil. Knots holding nothing on to anything. Henry knew them all. June taught them how to hum to a snail on your palm to make him come out of his shell. She taught them birdcalls. She taught them how to count to ten in French. She always knew when they were crying for real and when they were faking it, and if it was the latter she said things like, Oh come on, enough of that.

  She taught them that when Hank came home the first kiss was hers. She showed them how hers went in the middle of his face, on the mouth, but how the next two were theirs, and how they should plant them, one on each check. How there was a perfect balance of kisses this way. She taught them not to say, Your beard prickles, or You smell like fish. She taught them the right ways to lure Hank into telling them a story. The right questions to ask, the offhand way to do it. She taught them to read the signs that meant he was in a good mood, and would sing a song or dance a jig if they asked him right.

  She could cook anything that came out of the sea but mostly June loved to bake. She was a messy baker, Henry said, and dreamy. The kind who wore an apron tied tight but got flour and egg all over herself anyway. If you tried to talk to June while she was using the mixer, she might turn to answer you, the blades still spinning, spitting off batter all over the room as she delivered a thoughtful answer, paying no mind to what she had been doing a moment before. She wore blue jeans and blouses and scarves in her hair. She used lemon soap and mint shampoo. She had coarse blond hair that she let Charley braid for her in the mornings. She read Henry Greek myths and taught Charley to throw a baseball properly.

  One morning June climbed up on an old ladder to clean the gutters, which she had asked Hank to take care of three times already. She thought she might as well do it herself. She was doing a good job, halfway through, when she heard a neighbor calling hello and so turned around to greet him, forgetting all abo
ut the gutters, the height. She turned and the ladder lost its hold, and she fell backward and down, landing in the grass. Henry and Charley found her there, the neighbor crouching over her.

  Henry is full of stories about his parents that he tells so easily it makes me think he doesn’t realize he is breaking my heart.

  Henry’s mama was the most beautiful woman in the world and I never even met her. I could never be as good as she was, this I know for sure.

  But Henry thinks I could be. He believes in the possibility that I am that sort of good woman, and that is why I love him.

  That is also why I destroyed his car. Why I crinkle his papers. Why I set his dinner free. So he’ll remember that probably I can’t. He wants to be around for me? How about now? And now? And now?

  “So this is about me,” I say, and smack the console.

  “Not really, Leah, no,” Henry says.

  “Charley thinks it’s my fault you sold the boat and let the license lapse.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Then tell her that!” I yell, because the wind is noisy, though probably not that noisy.

  “Okay,” he says. “Okay, I’ll tell her.”

  And then there’s nothing to say, so we sit and drive and stew. I let my hand coast on the currents outside the window, scooping the graspable mass of the night air.

  Henry turns left, onto a one-way street that angles steeply upward. As we climb the grade something large and bright appears in our path. It seems to be blocking our progress, balancing roundly on the crest of the hill. Henry lets up off the gas, allows us to drift back a little bit. He plants his foot on the brake.

  “Is that the moon?” I say, which is a stupid question because it is clearly evident that this is the moon in front of us. By some trick of the angle of the street and the position of the skies, it seems to have dipped down. It is fat, eroded only by an eighth on one side, and the deep orange color of wild honey.