The Summer We Fell Apart Read online

  He was the bartender where I went to hide out. It wasn’t a college bar and that was why I liked it. I didn’t even really go there to drink. I would nurse a beer for an hour or so and sit with my sketchbook. I just liked that the people drinking there weren’t doing so on Daddy’s gold card. I’d never brought anyone with me, not even Polly. In that sense it would be easy to take care of this. I’d never have to see him again unless I chose. There would be no chance for awkward conversations and hostile glances, no chance we’d run into each other. It was also another reason not to stay in Rhode Island and open a shop with Polly.

  “Don’t tell Finn?” I asked quietly, ashamed, despite everything, of disappointing my older brother. I opened my eyes and I could tell by the look on Miriam’s face that I was failing miserably at appearing unaffected.

  Miriam murmured, “I wouldn’t,” as she righted herself in the seat and buckled her seat belt back up. She put both hands on the steering wheel but waited to start the car. After a few minutes she cleared her throat and turned the key in the ignition but she didn’t make a move to drive.

  As the engine hummed I asked, “So what’s going on with you and Finn?”

  She looked startled that I’d actually asked about her life. “You mean…?”

  I shrugged. I wanted her to tell me without coaxing.

  She gripped the steering wheel hard and then released each of her fingers, flexing them as she did. “I’m so stupid,” she said. “Just one of those girls, I suppose.” She gave a harsh little laugh and said, “Some people just don’t want to be rescued.”

  By “one of those girls” I assumed she meant the perpetually dumped upon yet hopeful. I turned and looked at Miriam. I wasn’t used to this side of her, this vulnerability where guys were concerned. She’d always had more of a relaxed attitude toward guys, whether it be a steady or a date to prom or even marriage. They’d never been a means to an end for her. Miriam had never seemed to possess that tunnel vision that so many of my own peers, despite feminism, had been brainwashed to believe in. Even way back when I had first discovered how crazy she was about Finn, her feelings never took on that psychotic sort of lust. Now she surprised me. I wanted to ask her: Why Finn? But I had enough experience to know that question probably had no answer.

  “I just can’t help myself,” she added.

  “My mother knew he was with you this week?” I guessed correctly before Miriam responded.

  I noticed that she avoided looking at me when she mumbled, “He tells her everything. If your mother let go a little…” She shrugged like she’d said it a million times before and knew it was pointless.

  For the second time since they’d arrived I thought to jump to my mother’s defense. But then I realized that I was only feeling kind toward her because of the night before. She certainly had not warmed to Miriam, even after all this time; even after all Miriam did for Finn.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  Miriam gave a little shrug, as if we had no secrets from each other.

  “Do you miss going home…I mean, to Switzerland?”

  She shook her head and answered quickly, “It’s better if I don’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Then I don’t have anything to miss,” she said lightly.

  “It’s really that easy?”

  “Of course not,” Miriam said. “But you figure that out, Amy. You’ll see. One day you wake up and you’ve been somewhere so long that home becomes someplace you’re from, not someplace you go.”

  We were the same age yet Miriam was talking to me like she had lived a lifetime before me. It didn’t strike me until now how invested Miriam had become in our lives. She’d come to stay the year and never really left. It was almost as if my father had made sure of that. For what reason, I was almost positive we’d never know. What was apparent was that Miriam cared more about us than we cared about her. Or maybe she just cared about Finn and the rest was overflow. I felt guilty because in the years since I’d last seen Miriam, I’d barely given her any thought.

  If I tried to make up for that right now, it would just seem fake. Instead, I asked, “You’re graduating this year?”

  She nodded.

  “What’s your major?”

  Miriam peeked at me slyly out of the corner of her eye as she backed out of the parking spot. She paused a moment before she said, “International affairs.”

  We looked at each other and simultaneously burst out laughing. It felt good. On the way home she blasted Ani DiFranco’s latest tape from the cassette deck and we hummed along. At least I hummed. Miriam seemed to know all of the words. Her musical choice surprised me since Finn’s taste ran more to The Fugees. As she drove, I tried to spot the signs I’d taped to the lampposts. I counted seven including the one where Finn had drawn the smiling family. Enough, I supposed. The people who knew us, who knew of our family anyway, would surely come to the sale out of curiosity, wouldn’t they? When we were growing up in the neighborhood, there hadn’t been many families of four children so close in age. It was as if we were a walking advertisement for our parents’ inability to keep their hands off each other after a fight, especially since we were four children with such loud, dramatic, and decidedly absent parents. I guess in some regards we were lucky to have been born before the advent of increased child-and-family services.

  When we pulled into the drive at home, the headlights flashed on Finn stretched out on the dining room table on the front lawn. When he saw us, he sat up slowly and waved. Despite her recent declaration of stupidity where my brother was concerned, Miriam could hardly wait to turn the car off and get out of her seat belt.

  The entire car vibrated as she slammed the door shut. I sat tight and waited. I watched her run across the lawn and slide up onto the table with Finn. In the dark he looked like his old self. Still, his hand trembled as he touched her on the arm and pointed up at the night sky. They lay on the table on their backs shoulder to shoulder. I could tell they were talking, could see the slight movement in Miriam’s body as she sidled closer to Finn, thigh touching thigh. Perhaps we had all been wrong about him. Or maybe none of us knew anything in the first place.

  On the second floor of the house the only light emanated from my mother’s bedroom. Occasionally she moved back and forth across the room, a shadow behind the scrim of a milky-white shade. Maybe she was finally packing her things. Dividing her life into piles: before and after. Or maybe she was tossing it all away, determined not to take anything with her. I decided I would go in and help her. I would wrap the framed photos she refused to look at in the folds of her old scarves. I would seal the box but not label it. Instead I would hide it among the few she was taking with her so that one day when she least expected it she could find us all in there, trapped in another time and place.

  I released my seat belt and reclined the seat. And because deep in my heart I knew I was my mother’s daughter, despite the fury and protest of my youth, I closed my eyes. In the shadow of the home I’d grown up in, where the walls seemed to barely contain the cacophony of voices clamoring to be heard—of secrets held, of bargains struck, of respect demanded, of love being sought and lost and sought again—I knew what I had to do. Here where there was always noise, there was now a clear and remarkable quiet. And just for a moment I felt absolutely nothing.

  three

  KISSING IN CHURCH

  I purchased the pack of cigarettes that may have killed my father five days after he made a miraculous recovery from surgery for a brain tumor. As it often was during the last month of his life, I was the only one out of the four of us present at the hospital, so I had no choice but to honor his request, even though up until his illness we hadn’t talked in over two years.

  I use the word miraculous because he was sitting up in bed joking with the nurses when earlier the doctors doubted he’d live through the surgery. Because of this, the doctors had suggested post-surgery that he get in the wheelchair so I could stroll him around for some air. I found it ironic
that after all the cutting-edge treatment ideas the doctors had been spewing since my father’s diagnosis of advanced brain cancer, the antiquated notion of fresh air was still offered as an option to aid in his cure.

  Since he was given a second chance at life, I waited to hear him atone for years of neglect or even tell me he loved me. Instead what my father said to me on this walk was, “Amy baby, I really need a smoke.”

  A day later he was dead from a massive seizure and I was scared to admit to anyone that I had given him the cigarettes. George must have guessed I was sitting on something because when we were in our father’s hospital room standing on either side of his bed looking down at his dead body, he leaned over and whispered, “Well done, little sis, well done.” And in no way was there an accusatory or malicious tone to his voice. But then again, of all my siblings, I would never expect malice from George.

  The doctor who pronounced our father dead told us seizures often happen with patients that have advanced cancer of this type, and he had made sure he pointed out that he had listed this as a possibility before the surgery. He explained this in a way that was totally a veiled warning should we get the idea that he was somehow responsible for our father’s death. As if.

  The funny thing about my father smoking was that he didn’t do it until he was diagnosed with the tumor. My mother on the other hand smoked a pack a day since before I was born twenty-seven years ago and of course was the picture of health. On the single visit that she made to the hospital, a nurse recognized her and asked for an autograph for her teenage son. My mother’s recent revival of her role as a still-not-dead psychotic in the third installment of Dead, Again was a favorite among teens and video-game geeks. That a likeness of my mother currently existed on GameCubes across America was actually more frightening than her status as a horror queen.

  Of course now it would be our job to dispose of our father. Dispose? I didn’t mean that. I meant bury. He and my mother had been divorced for five years and so it would be up to my siblings and me whether we liked it or not. Our father had not specified any arrangements other than cremation—he wanted us to direct his final production—his words. This was odd, given that his profession as a playwright and director his entire life was about not ceding control. Ever.

  George said it was a trick. I highly doubted that, unless my father left some sort of macabre plan and had friends and the money to bankroll it. Twenty-some-odd years ago he might have commanded that kind of respect or control, but given his status as the man who hadn’t written or worked professionally in the last five years, the best bet was that a few pissed off ex-girlfriends might show up and demand that a debt or two be paid off.

  When George and I looked down at our father’s body, I noticed for the first time that one of the nurses, thankfully, had closed his eyes. George said, “Let’s get out of here,” and as an afterthought pulled the hospital sheet up under our father’s chin as if tucking him in for the night.

  As we exited the hospital and walked out into the parking lot I shoved my hands deep into the pockets of my thin red raincoat and shivered. It was cold for September. In my right pocket I found the pack of cigarettes that I’d taken out of my father’s drawer when no one was looking. I pulled the pack out and counted. He’d smoked only two. I crumbled the whole thing and tossed it into a trash can as we went by. If George noticed he didn’t let on.

  I sighed. “Do you think we should have moved him to the city? Maybe he would have had a better chance or gotten better treatment.” Even though my mother had sold the house we grew up in right after the divorce and moved into Manhattan, our father had, oddly enough, moved back to Nyack and rented an apartment over a video store on the main street. It was like after all the years of trying to stay away from the town where we were raised he now refused to leave. The local hospital had really not been equipped to handle our father’s case, but they also didn’t turn him away.

  George rolled his eyes. “He had a stage-four tumor the size of a mango, Amy.” As an afterthought he added, “And no insurance.”

  “But…” I couldn’t shake it—that we, I, never considered doing more.

  “But…” George echoed. “Woulda, coulda, shoulda, Amy.” He slung his arm around my shoulder and pulled me into his chest and said with a shade of sarcasm, “By the way, I like the hair and outfit—it suits the occasion.”

  My hand flew to my hair. In its natural state it was dark brown but was now short, shredded, spiky, and bleached blond. I’d done it myself at midnight in my bathroom because I’d been inspired by Warhol’s photos of Edie Sedgwick, but now I wasn’t so sure. I looked down at my red raincoat and the white leather sixties-style boots Owen had bought me in Brooklyn. The boots came up over my knees, like go-go boots. They were Owen’s first gift to me when he was pulling out all the stops to prove that Brooklyn was the place to be. What he didn’t know was that I had planned on moving there the night I’d met him, I was just waiting for him to ask.

  I took notice of George’s outfit: navy striped pants, suede tasseled loafers, and a tan trench coat. He did not have much room to mock my ensemble. I nudged him in the ribs and jerked away from his arm. I hated being nestled in anyone’s armpit—even my brother’s. “When did you start dressing so uptown anyway?” He looked more like a junior executive than a part-time swim coach/ninth-grade English teacher at a private boys’ school on the Upper West Side.

  He made a face like he didn’t care what I thought as he stroked the lapel of his coat. “Jules works at Brooks Brothers, I told you he gets great discounts.”

  It was my turn to roll my eyes. Jules was George’s new lover. An uptight, condescending little prick that worked behind the tie counter, for Christ’s sake, and thought he was fucking Christian Dior. Last month, before Owen’s band went out on an eight-week tour of colleges in the New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania area, I’d invited George to come to the karaoke club for the send-off party. He arrived with Jules. The entire time Jules sat in a booth looking like he smelled shit all because the bar didn’t have his special brand of liquor. I couldn’t even remember what it was now. What I do remember is George, my big soft-hearted brother George, singing the karaoke version of Olivia Newton-John’s “I Honestly Love You” and offering to run to the liquor store they passed by blocks before when they’d exited the subway. Jules simpered but wouldn’t allow George to leave. Now that I think about it, he was probably certain someone would beat the shit out of him if George weren’t around as his protector. If they had touched Jules, it would have had nothing to do with him being queer—that was for sure.

  My brother was an idiot where guys were concerned. He allowed himself to be taken advantage of over and over again. I knew that he was now sharing his four-hundred-square-foot apartment in the West Village with Jules because Jules’s roommate kicked him out when he found George coming out of his bathroom naked. Jules had conveniently chosen not to tell George that he and his roommate shared a bed. So now, when maybe George would have gotten tired of Jules after a few dates, he had a new roommate. I wondered just how long it was going to be before George was the one who walked in on Jules.

  “So,” I said as I maneuvered out of the parking space in the hospital lot, “we’re splitting up the calls. Don’t even try to get out of it.”

  George acted like he wasn’t planning on doing just that, an expression of mock indignation on his face. “Who is there to call?”

  “Well…Mom. Kate, Finn.” I stopped and thought for a moment. “And someone should call Miriam, don’t you think?”

  “Really?”

  I shrugged and suggested, “Maybe Finn can do that?”

  I got on the highway going south before I remembered that we were supposed to go to our father’s apartment and get a suit to take over to the funeral home. The nurse at the main desk said that the funeral director would transport the body that night and so we were to just deal with them from now on. From the businesslike way she had recited her spiel I wanted to add, “And do
n’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

  I glanced over at George. He was looking out the window. Keeping one eye on the road I fished around in my bag between us on the big front seat until I found my cell phone. I tossed it into George’s lap.

  “Ouch,” George cried as he picked up the phone.

  “Oh please, it barely hit you. And if it hurts that much you must be over-using it.”

  “Very funny, very, very funny.”

  I pointed to the phone. “Call Mom. Tell her about Dad.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Call Mom.”

  George sighed. “Can’t you?”

  I tapped the steering wheel. “Hey, I’m driving here. Come on, George. Pretend to be a man.”

  “Fuck you, Amy,” he said as he turned on the phone.

  “Press one, she’s on speed dial.”

  He looked at me like having our mother not only on my speed dial but as number one was an insult to him. I assumed he thought he should have the number-one slot. Of course this was from the man who as a young boy once dramatically threw his gangly body in between my parents as they were arguing. George could always be counted on to take our mother’s side no matter what the argument. To make a point I could have asked to see who was number one on his speed dial, but I didn’t.

  Finally, he did as I asked and winced in anticipation as he held the phone up in between us. I counted the rings. Our mother picked up on the third.

  George didn’t seem to think it was necessary to sugarcoat his news. As soon as she picked up he said, “Dad’s dead.”

  Our mother made a little strangled sound, not far from the grunts I’d heard come out of the animated video-game version of her voice, before she said, “Oh, poor man.”