Chapter 13 2008 #3
Somewhere outside of reality, someone is explaining a game, focus now on the rules of engagement. You have to sit every other. Or, like, as close to that as possible. A ripple of titters and strategic glances as people jostle to get close to the objects of their hidden agendas.
What am I doing here?
“Actually,” Sebastian says, “he’s probably not even our dad.”
“What the fuck.”
“It’s all there in the scripts, Lola. You should see all these other names. Our real dad could be anyone.”
Sebastian cannot possibly share any shred of her reality.
He is a resident in some fun-house world.
Of course they belong to their father! Look at the shape of their teeth, the straightness of their shoulders.
Look at their hand gestures, the bend of their wrists.
Were it not for her hair (and her eyes, and yes, her nose) she might consider herself Athena, springing fully formed from her father’s head.
His dry humor, his academic mind. His tendency to suppress his feelings, his selflessness, his discipline.
But more than every genetic marker, he raised them.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her cheeks are filling with a heat that might turn to tears. He is trying to take away the only parent they have.
“You’ll see, I’ll find him. If you think about it, we’re not even supposed to be here.”
In another universe, a bottle is spinning.
The future is unraveling: her father, her brother, everyone spinning out from themselves, a family without gravity.
Just friends? No. She raises the plastic cup to her mouth, sour amber liquid moving through her, fuzzy and quick.
Behind her, Sebastian is ejecting onto an alien trajectory, placing an arm around Lisa DePaulo, slanting and tactile.
Viola watches as the two of them stumble back up the stairs, and she is alone.
A nose slows to face her.
“Seb’s sister—it’s you.”
Lisa is holding his hand and leading him beyond the lights that slant through the sliding kitchen doors.
A breeze wafts through the cool night, carrying weed and firepit ash.
Muffled voices, the downbeat of a bass, these things pass through him.
It is quieter here, stranger; the party exists on another plane.
“You’re like a little kangaroo,” Lisa is saying as she reaches into his pocket to pull out one of the beers he snagged on their way out.
“Exactly,” he says. Tonight she is wearing makeup and Sebastian finds her attractive in the ways that she intends to be found attractive: mascaraed lashes, streaks of bleach highlighting her hair, piercing blue eyes. “Though I guess I’m a mama kangaroo,” he says.
“What?”
“Only the moms have pouches, right?”
She shoves him cutely. “You’re dumb. Come on.”
They light out into the dark. He places a hand on her back, steers her around the side of the house. She responds to him easily; it is like pushing at an open door.
In a dark fold next to a coiled hose pipe, he’s placing his hand on the wall next to her and closing his eyes and kissing her up against the house with tongue.
Out here he can hear nothing but the ocean smashing the rocks below.
Lisa’s skin is the cool aquamarine of the glorious backlight shifting off of the pool.
I am alive, he thinks as her lips pillow against his, as he opens his eyes to her closed ones, her face merging with his own, her hands tucking themselves into the pouch of his sweatshirt. I am alive!
But as the kissing continues, his mind slips away—wandering backward and forward, backward to Lola, forward to his new life, his new fantastical father. Maybe it isn’t real, but is it so wrong to wish it were?
Wait, he tells himself as he leans his hips into her hips, stay here!
“Let’s go in the pool,” he says.
“What?”
He heard a story once from Sadie about his mother jumping in the pool at a party his father brought her to, the first and only one to do so.
It was startling how vividly he had imagined the scene, despite having no details beyond the headline; not where it was or what she was wearing or what Al had done in response.
In his mind it was summer. She would have been wearing a sundress, holding a cocktail, bored out of her mind.
Impossible to know where this convergence of images had come from.
But now, as he is peeling off his shirt and jeans and holding Lisa’s hand and saying Ready?
and diving into the water, he feels this vivid past meshing with the moment (Now!) like two images superimposed on each other, moving in perfect choreography.
Inside the closet is a single, full-length ski suit and a stack of board games. Clue. Risk. Sorry!. And a tower of other boy games involving large military conquests, capturing and dominating. The faint smell of golden retriever.
For a minute it seems no one will come. Maybe this is her humiliation; no one wants to go in with her at all.
That wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Outside, whispered jostling and giggles.
Why is it taking so long? She has finished the beer, and clarity is slipping away from her.
She wonders whether time will pass differently in here, whether seven minutes will feel like seven years.
Finally, the door opens. A body crawls up next to her.
“Hi,” Zach says.
Oh no.
The hot heft of his skin, the cheap beer fuming through his pores. This is not where I want to be, she thinks. He kneels close and she is aware of the size of him, how alone they are.
“Don’t.”
“Why not.”
Calmly, he places one hot hand on her shoulder, fingers brushing unpleasantly against the back of her neck. Softly, uncertainly, he mumbles:
“You know you’re prettier than your mom?”
It’s a sudden kiss, and hot in the sense of temperature.
He runs his hand down her back, and up, under her flannel and then his animal weight is pulling toward her and she jerks away sharply, allergic to his meaty hands, his drunk breath.
Her throat constricts, every muscle electric and vile, retching feeling, seizing her—
“Fuck you.”
She is pushing out back into the light and people are gasping and laughing, and she is thudding up the stairs, crying or not crying, blasting through the stale archaeological site of the kitchen (fossilizing half-finished beer cans) and the music is getting farther and farther away, and no one is coming after her.
“Sebastian!”
And there he is, his bare, dripping back, his hands and face and some other girl, water falling against itself, creating an oblivion around them.
Don’t abandon me, she had said. Was it so hard for him to put her first? Or is it nothing for him to exchange one woman for another, to flatten her desires and fears into some inconsequential noise. Fuck you too, she thinks.
When he submerges, Lisa shouts, echoing into the dark. And Viola runs.
Sopping, Sebastian scrambles out of the pool, in search of a toilet or a towel or Lola. Ideally all three. He drags his shoulder along the steady exterior wall. He needs his sister to drive him home.
He isn’t sure where Lisa is. She had jumped in, having taken off her sweatshirt to reveal a bright red bra, and the two of them kissed fumblingly in the water until she said she was cold.
He remained for a moment, and he could see bodies passing through the kitchen, new lights turned on inside the house.
The movements had a strange undertone, which he realizes is the absence of music.
He grabs his clothes, pulls on his jeans. The door is ajar, and Toby’s mother is standing hands on hips, monitoring as people call their parents.
Dark, slippery pine-needle paths, the wide shoulder, the light of her phone dancing ahead of her.
Viola knows every road in this town. Her shape becomes nothing, a rhythm, the slap of shoes on pavement and the steady heave of breath.
Only once, she falls, destabilized by the new swing of her brain, shaving the skin of her knee.
Her mind militarizes, commanded to action by beer and betrayal.
How did they get here?
The box. The scripts. The names in the margins, his psychoactive imagination.
Dumbass Pandora. The problem is their mother, making her brother think that women are all vacant bodies, purpose-built for whatever men want to do with them.
Sure, why not put it all out there, Seb?
Doesn’t the world need more doubt and conspiracy and empty sex? If everyone saw your sister like that?
No, it has to be undone, and like always, it is up to her. She must release him from his own twisted mythology.
After twenty minutes, the house emerges from the woodland. Tillie’s car is still in the drive, Al’s is still out.
Good, she thinks. Because the last thing her father needs is another reminder of how much love can hurt.
Adrenaline pumps her up the stairs. Sebastian’s door is open, the locker room smell of him wafting into her face.
Stumble over his detritus, thrust up a window.
What we need is clean. Sanity. There. A messy, pored-over stack on the desk.
Her knee stings distantly. She carries her mother’s scripts to the living room.
The matches are on the mantelpiece. Strike one. Strike two.
She does not read the names written in the margins, she does not need to read them.
The important thing is that her father never will, that their ambiguity will not cast new confusion onto the marriage he is only now, a decade later, recovering from.
And maybe with time her brother will forget what or who he was looking for in here, stop wondering whether there was anything to be found.
The flames kiss the pages as she drops them onto the plinth of the fireplace.
This is an act of kindness.
“I gotta go,” Sebastian says to no one. Lisa is somewhere else, maybe with some other guy. It’s not important. He finds his way to the gate (the gate!) the slanty, sideways, upside-down gate, incidental bodies opening like a sea in front of him as he crashes out into the night.
The keys are in his pocket.
He is newly aware, sitting in the driver’s seat, of how wet his jeans are, and somehow in all of this, he has lost his shirt. He does not care.
As he drives home, he considers what he will say to his father.
I think you were fucking afraid of her. Something like that.
Because unlike you, she really knew how to live.
Unlike you, she was somebody. He will show him all the names in her scripts.
And even if it’s all bullshit, his own hopes getting away from him, at least maybe Al will admit it. That there are better ways to live.
Her brother, reeking of poor behavior, finds her in her room, pretending to read. She registers the simmer of his anger. He doesn’t know what’s good for him, she thinks. Gently, she places the book aside.
“Where did you put them?”
“Where did I put what?”
“You know what.”
She holds open her palms in front of her, as if to say: there is nothing more to be done.
“Seb, they’re gone. It’s for the best. You’re not thinking straight. Those names, none of it meant anything.” She looks at his righteous, unbending eyes, certain that she is the only one still fighting for this family.
He swings at her face without thinking, as though she were not a separate being, as though the slapped cheek, the hand grasping out for stability were his cheek, his hand; as though she never stopped being the same as him.
Viola regains her composition. She breathes in and out. Her nose is full of iron. An engine is starting and tires are blistering against the gravel and something inside her is broken.
Good riddance, she thinks.
In the driveway is that woman’s Subaru, black and unsuspecting. Any damage is good damage. Pedal to the floor. Metal smashing, the impact, his body crashing into the wheel, hitting the horn, the twisted-up smell of burnt rubber, irreparable damage.
Reverse, reverse.
The road is black as he drives directionless, turning right then left, then right, not caring where he ends up.
Sugar Baby sputters, the front bumper dragging on the road.
It doesn’t matter. As the house, the car, all of it disappears behind him, the adrenaline begins to shake out of his body.
He throws it in neutral just for the hell of it and rolls down a hill toward Little Neck, where a scant strip of sand faces Plum Island.
He drives right onto the beach, why not.
Maybe he’ll never be able to get back. He stops meters from the water’s edge.
In his glove compartment hides a matchbox and a mangled pocket Bible he uses to roll.
In the back seat is a baggy with a nugget from Toby.
The front fender is smoking. It’s cold outside, and he feels slightly feverish, but crawls up onto the roof of the car anyway, stepping heavily on the bent hood.
He lights up and puffs out into the dark sea.
It’s peaceful out here. He lets the loneliness transport him, the weed soften his rage.
Above, the stars shine darkly, alive or dead or illusion.
When the anger drains, he is unprepared for the overwhelming grief, which cannot form tears in his eyes, but hollows out the sockets of his shoulders, the tissue of his ribs, every atom of his being.
Sebastian transcends Plum Island Sound. He is on the jug-handle moon, in the milky star fluid wiped across the sky.
He is so far away that when his father’s car rolls in behind him, he doesn’t hear its punch on the gravel.
It is only when he feels the familiar rough hand on his shoulder that he remembers the horrible pain of the world going on and on and on.