Chapter 4
WILLIAM
The coldness of the airport, its sterile efficiency, was numbing.
The passengers were a flock of restless birds, occasionally rising to peck at the woman helming the front desk, asking how much longer until they could board.
Behind William, a man popped open a newspaper, mumbling the headlines under his breath in disbelief, as if they were written to give him personal offense.
Bombings in Belfast, Syrian tanks in Beirut, Carter seeking the Jewish vote.
Between the drone of radio and television sets, the towers of newspapers at Jewel, the news had begun to feel suffocating.
William felt he was not meant to know so much.
Some days, the photographs of maimed Vietnamese children—blood caked on their faces, the stark absence of a missing calf or forearm—had made him unable to leave his bed.
He thought he saw Aunt Eleanor sitting near the window when he first arrived at the gate, but it was just another old woman in a pleated skirt.
She reminded him of a funeral he’d stolen into last month at the Presbyterian church on Michigan, or no, it had been the Catholic church on Superior.
A service for a woman with no lips and curly white hair.
He slipped into a back pew, as he had at countless churches and synagogues over the past year.
Only once had someone insisted he come closer, at the Buddhist temple, where they had him kneel so tightly between the others that his knee brushed an old man’s bare, papery heel.
He’d told no one about these visits—the cooks at the restaurant already sensed his softness, like sharks smelling chum in the water.
This would add a new layer of oddity. Faith was falling out of favor; to believe in anything made you naive, overeager, uncool.
At this funeral on Superior, no one wept.
Instead, laughter echoed across the nave.
William’s parents had made a vague gesture toward Episcopalianism when he and Shay were young, and he found comfort in the familiar lines of the Lord’s Prayer.
The woman’s family told stories of when she abandoned her car during a snowstorm and walked the six miles home.
The Thanksgiving she forgot to turn the oven on, so their turkey was eaten close to midnight, and how she insisted everyone stay awake, playing Eartha Kitt so loud the neighbors banged on their door.
William wished he could laugh now, that he could talk about Aunt Eleanor and everything she’d given him—honesty, a sense of stability, not the strong suit of either of his parents.
Tears threatened again, but he did not want to weep in this stiff metal chair, surrounded by strangers frustrated by something as small as a minor delay, and so he reminded himself that for the William he had chosen to be, the one who hadn’t had a key, Aunt Eleanor was not dead. There was nothing to grieve.
On the plane, he did not marvel at the vapors of clouds like he had on his first flight, last fall. He just stared at the back of the seat in front of him.
“Are you doing all right?” a stewardess asked. She must have been in her early forties, an age when he was unsure if women saw him as a man or a son. He still looked like a teenager, thin to the point of being malnourished.
“I’m fine, thank you,” he said, though there was a hoarseness in his voice.
She returned with a cup of coffee and a dry sugar cookie. So it was a son, then. He ate and drank what she gave him, obedient as a child.
There were only two ferries per day, and the flight delay had made him miss both; the only soul still left in the marina was an old man untying his crabbing boat.
It was nearing dinnertime. When William ran toward him, breathless, his Pumas slapping against the dock, the old man watched him approach as if he were a seagull—unperturbed, unsurprised.
On deck, the man turned over a bucket of cloudy seawater and offered it to William as a seat.
The island first appeared as a sliver of green.
Then it swelled to a slope, a mound. Boats dotted the water.
Not the graceful origami sailboats of Lake Michigan, but grimy juts of wood like the one he was aboard, with its bucket of pearly pink chicken necks propped up next to wire cages.
He’d imagined the island as Nantucket. Someplace his classmates would have summered, historic, old as anything in America, but sanitized so that nothing crumbled or rotted.
But when the old man tied the boat to the dock, William noticed algae mottling the wooden posts, seagulls burrowing into a dead fish.
The other fishermen looked like the men he knew from restaurant kitchens, muscled and capable, with unshaven necks and scars lacing their hands.
They were removed from the time: their pants baggy, their hair close-cropped.
It put him at ease. He was no longer conscious of how his left sneaker was untacking at the sole or the coffee stain splattering his Stooges T-shirt, like he would be at the hotel.
The old man gave him directions. The hotel was less than a mile away, so William decided to walk.
He smoked one of his last Winstons and passed girls biting into Popsicles as their bikes stuttered on gravel roads.
Tidy houses, their gardens rich with white gardenias and trumpets of hibiscus.
A black-and-white cat followed him for the latter half of the journey, trotting beside him like a familiar, and when a golf cart rumbled past, the driver honked the horn as if they knew him. It all made him, briefly, happy.
He was able to suppress thoughts of Aunt Eleanor until he arrived at the hotel.
He was always easily distracted—struggling to finish tests, to finish books.
He never had Shay’s impeccable academic record.
It was like the world was constantly playing different, overlapping songs, his ear always pulled by a new melody.
This was why, in the hotel lobby, he instantly began to sweat.
There were throngs of people having after-dinner drinks, a few of whom he recognized as family.
He hated crowds, hated parties, unable to follow a single conversation.
And the hotel itself felt unwelcoming, its waiters for some reason tight-lipped and on edge, like they’d rather the guests left. He wondered if they knew about Synanon.
“The brother of the bride!” someone bellowed.
He turned to find the three cousins closest to him in age: Scott, Vivian, and Oscar, whose woven shirt was unbuttoned to his navel even though he had only a few limp spirals of chest hair.
William hadn’t seen them since Christmas, though they all lived within an hour of the city.
Scott with his parents in Elgin after he lost two of his fingers in Vietnam.
Vivian in her second year of nursing school at Loyola.
Her twin brother, Oscar, selling stereos in Jefferson Park.
There was a distance, a simmer of tension, between their families.
My dad says you’re spoiled, Oscar had spat at him once during a childhood game of tag.
He says your mom thinks she’s better than us because you go to that school.
But now that William was a dishwasher, there was a warmth from them, an opening.
“The, uh, cousins of the bride,” William said in return. He began to bounce on his heels—a nervous tic.
“I don’t think anyone really gives a shit about us,” Oscar said. He and Scott framed Vivian, who sat in an armchair with one leg crossed over the other, a wedge sandal weighing down her small, dangling foot. “And you’re a groomsman, right?”
“No, I’m an usher,” William said.
“Really?” Oscar took a glass of wine from a passing waiter’s tray and lit a fresh Newport. He smoked menthols, he once told William, just so people would bum fewer cigarettes from him.
“An usher is important too,” Scott said.
“Yeah, yeah, sure. They, what, ush everyone around?” Oscar said.
“You’re in late,” Vivian interrupted, rolling her eyes. “Weren’t you traveling with Eleanor?”
“Oh, yeah.” William saw Aunt Eleanor’s forehead resting against the side of the chair, and his mouth tasted sour. He swallowed, picturing instead the apartment door unopened. “I was supposed to, but she decided she actually couldn’t make it. I don’t really know why.”
“Why am I not surprised,” Oscar said.
Aunt Eleanor was William’s father’s aunt, but his mother’s family had come to know her from birthdays and graduations, from his father’s funeral.
“Oh, leave her alone,” Vivian said. “I’m sure Shay will be sad not to have her here.”
“Will she?” Oscar asked, and Vivian swatted his upper arm.
Behind them, a teenage boy in a black vest was serving guests from his tray, the tumblers sloshing precariously as he turned. William wanted to take the tray from him. To demonstrate how he should arch his fingers, just like the waiters had taught him.
“I should probably go find my mom,” he said.
“Before you go,” Oscar said, and then lowered his voice, “I gotta ask. There’s no more trouble with Shay, right?”
“No,” he said, though did he really know? “No, everything’s fine now.”
“Good, but you know, just in case, remember that trick I told you about leaving an empty beer bottle propped on the door handle. That’s the only reason I didn’t get robbed in that motel in Detroit.
The glass breaking scared those little shits right off.
” He laughed, though William could tell it wasn’t a joke.
He checked into his room at the front desk.
His mother had told him she would pay for it, which he would have refused if he could—she didn’t make much as a receptionist at the North Center Dance Studio—but the flight had left little more than fifty dollars in his bank account.
He’d thought of pawning something, but he had nothing to sell.
Everything he owned was worthless. Cast-iron pans ringed with rust. His grandfather’s tomes on the Civil War he’d never read.
A pair of gold cuff links William had tried to pawn once, an heirloom from England, he’d been told, that ended up being made of painted steel.
It took a moment for the woman at the desk to notice him.
He coughed to rouse her attention, always feeling apologetic when he was the one being served, and she gave him a long brass key.
“Third floor,” she said flatly. “You’ll be able to see the ocean.
” He picked up his bag before he could be snagged by any other relatives.
He stepped around the boy in the vest, whose neck glistened with sweat, and began to ascend the staircase.
As he neared the landing, he heard the shattering of glass and a wave of groans.