The Summer We Fell Apart Read online

  I tried closing my eyes but everything spun around so much I was forced to open them. When I did, Finn towered over me swaying from side to side. “Don’t drink any more,” he said, spittle caught in the corners of his mouth. His eyes were so bloodshot they looked like they were bleeding. “I’m serious, don’t drink,” he repeated.

  I moaned and shielded my eyes from his constant swaying. I didn’t know what was worse—eyes closed or open. “Go away,” I said and tried to shoo Finn back to the game. Because I suddenly seemed incapable of stringing together a sentence, all I could think was: Pot. Kettle. Black.

  Miriam had her skirt tied up between her legs as she ran down the yard with the ball. She kicked and missed and fell on her face laughing. Her skirt had come undone from its knot and billowed out around her like an opened parachute. When Finn saw this he ran to her and helped her up. I watched them for signs of something else but I didn’t trust my instincts. I had been wrong about so much.

  “I’m hot,” George announced as he dropped his tuxedo jacket on the ground by my feet. “We need water.”

  “Swimming!” Miriam sighed as if Jesus had suggested it.

  Down at the water everyone seemed to strip without thought—at least down to his or her underpants. However, my sense of modesty in front of my brothers made me keep on my bra. I knew it was different for Miriam; it always would be. Yet tonight she surprised me by keeping my mother’s scarf tied around her chest and for once I wished she’d taken it all off.

  The water seemed to sober me just enough to know how drunk I really was, but it didn’t have that effect on the others. I floated on my back with my eyes closed but it still made me dizzy. When I opened them I saw that Miriam had followed Finn and George to the highest ledge. George dove first. Finn and Miriam stood side-by-side giggling like new friends on the playground. When George popped up I swam over to him. “Can she do that?”

  “Now or never,” he answered.

  “What does that mean?”

  George looked up at the sky like he was exasperated by my questions. “It’ll be fine, Amy, really.”

  I stared at George as he taunted Miriam with chicken calls. Finn belted out, “Come fly with me, come fly, come fly away,” in a halfway decent Sinatra imitation.

  All at once I knew I was going to be sick. I coughed and bile shot up into my mouth. I spit it out into the water and swam to the bank. When I got out, I grabbed my dress and jammed it back over my head and down my hips without doing up the zipper. The fabric clung to my wet skin like tissue paper but I would be damned if I was going to be naked and puking. I broke out in a sweat and barely made it to the bushes before I threw up everything I’d eaten that evening and then some. It was only when I was done coughing and my stomach stopped cramping up that I turned around just in time to see Miriam follow Finn into the water. The tails of the scarf fluttered in the breeze like a fragile pair of wings.

  Her execution of the dive sucked but she came up sputtering and triumphant. My legs trembled and I sank down onto the ground and put my head between my knees. I smelled awful, my mouth tasted like pond scum, and there was spittle on the front of my dress, but at least my stomach was settling down. My eyes and nose ran from vomiting and I wiped at my face with the back of my hand, drawing away a long, thin line of mucus.

  When I was able, I got up and walked back down to where my brothers and Miriam were playing in the water. There were multiple rounds of high fives and then Miriam noticed me first standing there watching them. She seemed skittish as she avoided looking me in the eye by tucking her chin down and studying the water.

  I took the path to the diving spot. As I passed the lower ledge and kept climbing, George and Finn called out to me, but I squared my shoulders back in an attempt at some sort of dignity and refused to acknowledge them. My entire body felt like the morning after when it was still the night before and that was never a good thing. When I stepped out onto the ledge, I had no idea what I was doing and so I kept my eyes focused on the trees and the light from the moon. I had a sudden overwhelming urge to see my mother. It was an odd sensation. I couldn’t remember the last time I had purposely sought her out. I was so accustomed to turning to George when I was in need. Now here I was drunk, but not drunk enough that I didn’t realize I was about to do something incredibly stupid and I wanted my mommy. My legs trembled again and I took a deep breath and planted my feet farther apart in a power stance while I contracted my muscles. I bent over at the waist and stretched my spine; the metal tines of the zipper scraped against my skin but I wasn’t about to take the dress off.

  A bat flew out of the trees close to my face and I flinched and pressed back as flat as I could against the shale wall as another and then another and another followed. When they were gone, I gradually inched closer to the edge and felt with my toes until a rock I dislodged went skittering over the side. George and Finn were still yelling something at me, but my heart was thudding so loudly in my ears I couldn’t hear them if I wanted to. I did notice that Miriam was now treading water with her head tilted back as she too stared up at me.

  I curled my toes around the edge, squeezed my eyes shut so tight I saw sparks, put my arms above my head, and jumped. The wind rushed under my dress and forced it up around my waist when I hit the water. Down I went passing through water that was alternately warm, cold, and then warm again until my toes touched spongy muck. I pushed off from the bottom at the same time reed-like slime twined around my legs. I panicked and groped wildly, spastically at the water as if I could move it out of my way. When my fingers closed around something soft and smooth I opened my eyes and brought my hand up in front of my face. The water was murky from my frantic churning but there was no mistaking the pattern on my mother’s scarf. My eyes stung and I ached to take a breath as pinpricks of electric shocks rippled through my lungs and filled my chest. I waited until I couldn’t take the pain for a second longer and then I kicked as hard as I could and swam toward the surface.

  two

  HOW TO CLEAN HOUSE

  What my mother does admit to me when she calls is that Finn is on another bender and she can’t possibly rely on him to help her clear out the house before Monday. She sounds so small and sad on the phone and I am in such a weird state of mind I overlook that I am being manipulated. She needs me. I can tell by the tone of her voice that she would also like me to offer to find him, just like the other times. This time, however, I am going to let him sit and pickle before I drag him back home. Besides, divesting the house of our childhood is enough pain for one weekend.

  The house I grew up in, a Victorian that would have made Edward Gorey and Edgar Allan Poe clap hands in glee, was lit up like a birthday cake when I arrived a little after midnight. I actually thought a fire was the only thing that could save the place now. The house had been in sad shape since before I was born, but now it appeared that the entire structure listed to the left. The iron spire on the widow’s walk was actually bent. I wiped the traveling crust from my eyes and looked again. Yes, the house definitely appeared as if it were trying to turn its back on the neighbors. How my mother even found a buyer was beyond me. As a restoration project it would seem that the house would fall under the category of “too late.”

  I picked up my backpack and rummaged around the passenger seat gathering the remains of my fast-food dinner from a rest-area sojourn and then reconsidered before carting more stuff inside. What would be the point? I would only be carrying things out. I dropped everything and got out of the car and stretched, forestalling the inevitable. I was a little queasy and sore all over and the night air, cool for April, felt wonderful. I had been working so hard at school that my whole body hurt from pent-up tension and anxiety and a diet high in sugar and caffeine. A part of me longed to throw myself down in the newly uncovered springtime grass and gaze at the sky until I fell asleep. Besides, I had no idea what state I would find my mother in; the range of emotions she could cover in a matter of minutes had always been frightening. While there wa
s no doubt that range was what kept her employed as an actress, for a mother it was less of a gift than a handicap. I took a deep breath and gave myself a few extra minutes by slowly ambling around to the kitchen door.

  The lights were all on in back as well, illuminating a mountain of large green trash bags that appeared as if my mother opened the back door and tossed them out without thought. Several were blocking the steps and I picked them up and added them to the pile. They were heavy and rattled as if they were filled with broken china wrapped in a miserly layer of paper.

  When I walked into the kitchen, my mother met me with two bags in her arms, obviously on her way out the back door for another trash toss.

  “Here, take these,” she said as she thrust the bags into my hands. As if it had been minutes not months since the last time we’d laid eyes on each other. The bags were awkwardly stuffed with random sharp edges poking through the thin plastic and very heavy. “Just add them to the pile out back. A Dumpster is coming tomorrow.”

  I took the bags from her but set them down by my feet and didn’t move as she turned and walked away. I called after her, “Hi Amy, how are you? I’m fine. How was the drive? Long. How’s school? Busy, what with my graduation being next month and lots of projects to finish. Coffee? I’d love some!”

  My sarcasm stopped her in the doorway and she rested a hand on her hip. My mother and my older sister, Kate, bore a striking resemblance to each other. In fact, the hand on the hip thing was a mannerism they both shared and employed frequently when challenged. They were each tall and lean, small-breasted with narrow hips and thick dark shoulder-length hair—my mother’s gray kept in check by Clairol—and from the back they could be one and the same. It was only when you got up close to my mother that you saw the waddle of skin under her chin and the lines around her eyes.

  But while Kate looked like our mother, the similarities stopped there. Kate longed to be a daddy’s darling and we all knew it. The only people in my family who had yet to admit the fact were Kate and our father.

  When I had my mother’s attention, I lamely joked, “What’s in the bags? You finally broke all the dishes so you had no choice but to get divorced?” It actually would have been better had my parents physically lashed out at each other like that, but instead their drama had consisted more of head games and sex with strangers. Only once could I remember an airborne ham during a Christmas dinner.

  She smirked and shook her head. “Trophies. Medals. Sporting paraphernalia.” She spat the words out like she tasted something bad.

  “How do you know the boys don’t want this stuff?” I prodded. During their high school years my brothers had racked up an impressive laudatory haul.

  She frowned.

  “Mom?”

  Still frowning, she shrugged and spun on her heel out the door. Over her shoulder she called, “There’s coffee in the pot on the counter. Get rid of those bags.” When she added “please” as an afterthought, I could tell it was because she thought she had to. Welcome home.

  I heard her ascend the front hall stairs, the dry wood creaking at the most minimal pressure beneath her light step. Doing as I was told, I dragged the bags across the floor, opened the back door, and rolled them down the stairs. Then I took a mug from the dish drainer and poured myself some coffee. I guessed that sleep wasn’t something I was going to get, at least not for a few more hours.

  I shuddered when I tasted the coffee. It was swill of the worst kind: hours old. But I drank it anyway. Who was I to be so choosy? I followed the trail of cigarette smoke and found my mother upstairs, collapsed in a chair in the middle of the room that used to be George’s, her legs hung over the arm and her feet swung back and forth as she leisurely blew smoke rings into the air. The room had been ransacked: dresser drawers hung open vomiting a trail of clothes awaiting their fate, the shelves and walls stripped of George’s swimming medals and trophies, the life-size poster of Greg Louganis I had given him years ago as a joke because I knew George had secretly lusted over him. It was such a familiar mess that if it wasn’t for my mother’s presence in the room along with the missing possessions and the economy-size box of garbage bags, I could almost trick myself into thinking that George still lived here and that I still slept across the hall.

  I bent down to pick up a pile of T-shirts from the floor and hugged them to my chest before I realized that a horrible odor, a combination of mold and cat piss, was coming from the pile.

  If I was queasy before, now I was sure to hurl. “Oh my God.” I gagged as I quickly dropped the whole lot back onto the floor and pulled at my own T-shirt to shake off the stench.

  “You know how George had a habit of putting things away wet. From the smell of things I’d say those drawers haven’t been opened since before he went away to college”—she ticked the years off on her hand—“that’s a good six years of mold.” I noted her voice had a throatier timbre, probably from the smoke. She took another long, deep drag off her cigarette and squinted at me through the haze.

  I walked across the room and pushed aside the threadbare madras curtains to open a window. I rattled the old frame, trying to coax the wood up without breaking any of the tiny multiple panes of wavy glass and wedged the first thing I could get my hands on, an overdue library book on South America that was probably the remains of an old school assignment, on the sill underneath the window to keep it open.

  I stuck my head out of the window and took a series of deep breaths, slowly filling my nostrils with fresh air. Reluctantly, I pulled my head back inside and looked at my mother. “When is everyone else getting here? Why don’t you have George do his own room?”

  As I watched her expression it slowly dawned on me that she hadn’t called any of my siblings. “I’m the only one coming?” I swallowed back bile.

  My mother turned slightly in the chair to face me. “I’m tired of begging the others. I knew you’d at least take pity on me here all alone.” She sighed as if she were bored by her own voice before she reconsidered and added, “Well, except for Finn.”

  I opened my mouth, made a noise of protest, and then stopped. Obviously, this was to be her mantra for the weekend. Poor deserted Marilyn. She was right about one thing: We all left as soon as we could and honestly, it seemed expected of us to do so. The lives of my parents had been full enough without the four of us. I wanted to say that maybe if she’d acted like she wanted us around, maybe we would have stayed, or at the very least come home every once in a while without resentment. Of course now she was moving to a studio apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where there simply would never be enough square footage for anyone but her. A cachette she had called it. More than once I wanted to ask her why she’d even bothered with children, but I didn’t have the nerve. Just the thought of posing the question made me sad and I felt a little wrench in my stomach when I considered what her answer might be.

  She seemed to realize I wasn’t going to fight her over her last comment and looked at me with an arched brow. Quietly she went in for the kill, “It’s a good thing I have a life because obviously none of you are going to keep me company in my old age.” She swung her legs easily off the arm of the chair, limber as a teenager, stood, and walked to the doorway.

  “Mom…” There was nothing I hated more than a pity party, but we’d already gotten off on the wrong foot and she was filling up the balloons in anticipation of a real blowout.

  She waved her hand at me or maybe it was in the general direction of the mess that was George’s room. “Bag all this up, will you? I want to have all the rooms cleared out by the time the Dumpster gets here and then…” She yawned and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Then we’ll deal with the rest.”

  I heard her footsteps retreat and then the familiar sound of her bedroom door closing. If there was a sound I associated with my childhood it was that: the lock catching in the latch of my mother’s door. I stepped uneasily away from my fresh-air source, afraid for my stomach. I didn’t shut the window. I surveyed
the mess and my stomach flipped again. Fuck it. I was going to bed.

  My room was just as I’d left it the last time I’d been home almost a year and a half ago when Polly and I got the apartment off campus and returned to pack the van with my belongings and take it all back to Providence. I’d left so little of myself behind that the room now had a monastic look to it.

  I walked over to my desk and turned the latch on the windows under the eaves. I only had to shimmy the swollen fragile wood gently to swing them open and out. I flopped back onto my bed and surveyed the remains. There was the desk and bed and a random grouping of items I had left behind for no other reason than I ran out of room. On the shelves was a squirrel family I had been inspired to make after squirrels infested the eaves under Kate’s old room. There was also a fuzzy llama made from an old bathrobe, and a white terry-cloth cube with a face, which I’d named Tofu.

  The walls behind my bed were still collaged with maps torn from a discarded atlas. I’d drawn routes on them with crayon and little pushpin flag markers to denote places of interest along the way. Imaginary road trips I’d planned for the day I’d be anywhere but here.

  I rolled over onto my stomach and bit down hard on my lip to quell the pain as my swollen breasts met the mattress. There were other things I would have to deal with before I worried about getting a job. Soon I would have to face the fact that being tired even after twelve hours of recuperative sleep wasn’t because I had totally screwed with my body by staying up all night to work on my projects and sleeping all day. Soon I would have to face the fact that the underlying constant nausea I felt wasn’t a virus. Soon I would have to face the fact that I needed to go to the drugstore for a pregnancy test.