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  “Are you saying you’re gay?” he asked, wanting her to say yes, wanting her to be honest with herself, finally.

  “I’m saying I’m with Patricia.”

  At this he saw their father, not because of the last three years that she had been lying to him, but because she had been lying to herself.

  “You don’t have to look so disgusted, Tom. You know, I realize that you believe the coming flame will wipe out people like me, but maybe you could drop the neo-con crap for five seconds and just remember I’m your sister.”

  They were silent for a moment.

  “You think I care that you’re gay?” He said this quietly.

  Tom couldn’t look at her as he spoke. He surveyed the slate tiles on the Burketts’ roof, looked for their striation, the tooth at the end of each shingle. “I care that you can’t talk to me about it. I care that you’ve been in a relationship for three years and you’ve been pretending it’s something else. Call a spade a spade. I care that you’ve been lying to yourself and me.”

  His mouth was dry, and a hot sweat at the back of his neck made him feel sick. He felt seventeen again. He felt the urge to run, to start the engine and fly from this quiet spot. To find the car keys and take to the small hills of the island too fast, making his stomach lurch up into his ribs. I don’t care that you’re gay, he wasn’t talking to her anymore. I care that you cheated on my mother, that you’ve been lying to all of us for decades. I care that you are worthless and that I am ashamed. I care that you are dead and never came clean. I care that without even realizing you taught this sweet girl to perpetuate your lies.

  Tom looked at her here now. She was flushed and her hands dangled from her wrists, resting on her knees. He and Libby were the hope for the future of the Willoughby clan. Gwen was a lost cause, and Danny not far behind her. But only if Libby accepted things, only if she could stop living the lie that their father had so mastered.

  “If you are just experimenting, fine. But a three-year experiment? That is not an experiment; it’s a way of life. At first I waited for you to say something. I just kept thinking maybe you weren’t that serious about her, but eventually it seemed you just preferred the lie. Is that it? Are you not serious about her?”

  Libby’s fingers worked over each other, picking at nails and cuticles, careful and slow. She looked a bit confused, the way she always looked when doing homework as a child, or trying to work out a burr from the dog’s coat with a doll comb.

  “You don’t want me to be straight?”

  Why did they all think he was oblivious? Why did they spend their lives underestimating him?

  “Of course I—Hawk—” He pointed, his finger following the bird’s path as it soared over them. “Of course not. Just because I voted for Bush twice doesn’t mean I’m a brain-dead bigot. Melissa and I have talked about how long it would take you to embrace it. To be open with me. Why has it taken this long?” Libby crossed her arms, watching the hawk. It circled back over the island and then out past the mouth of the creek, looking for fish. She seemed to be considering something, the same expression on her face as that day staring at the whale rock. He wondered what part of her was dying now, or was being resuscitated.

  “We are serious,” she said. Here he saw something he recognized. A sheen of embarrassment in her eyes. At least she was telling him. At least there was no dark path, no looming loss. She would not be buried with her lie.

  “So you’d call her your girlfriend?” he asked.

  “What, would you prefer I say wife?” She leaned back against her hands and looked him in the eyes.

  “If that’s what you mean, if that’s the truth, yes. I mean, you could do a lot worse than Patricia.”

  “Well, she wants to move in together.”

  “Then ‘wife’ would be the more appropriate term, don’t you think?” His sister with a wife, and he about to lose one.

  Libby sat up straight, took a deep breath.

  “Yes, actually. Patricia is my wife.” Suddenly, all relief and assurance, she was the image of Scarlet. And he wanted to cry. Because she was gone. His mother. And because Libby would be a wife too, and he knew too well what happened to wives. But maybe a wife with a wife of her own was different.

  The lobster pots began to dip now. The post office would be closing soon. He stood and clasped the wheel.

  “So will you be the wife who cleans or the wife who cooks?” He smiled and started the engine. “Hoist that anchor. The mail waits for no man.”

  Libby rolled her eyes, but she laughed and pulled up the anchor. Tom doubted Libby could actually afford to buy him out. Would she still joke with him if he took this house from her?

  TWENTY-FIVE

  DANNY

  July 11

  On the covered portion of the porch Danny sat on the wide white rail, leaning against the gray shingles of a pillar, his legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, a beer leaving a damp ring on the thigh of his jeans. Gwen and Libby sat in wicker chairs facing him, and the setting sun behind him.

  “There’s a lot of smoke, but they don’t look worried,” he narrated.

  It was Tom and Melissa’s night to cook. Danny watched them down on the concrete pier in the soft glow of sunset and the brightening light of the lone dock bulb, both of them staring down into the coals of the barbeque that was chained to the rusty pipe railing. Danny imagined that they struck the same postures when conceiving each of their children. He saw them standing together in white lab coats, looking skeptically into a petri dish, Tom gently agitating the contents, Melissa with her arms crossed.

  He wondered what they said behind closed doors. Their house was a collection of closed doors. After Scarlet died, Danny stayed with Tom, stayed with each of his siblings, passed between them, like a mild virus or an infirm house cat that couldn’t be left alone. Until winter break was over and he went back to school.

  Tom’s house had been almost too alive in some ways, the rhythm of school and breakfasts and homework, Kerry and Buster eating meals with their jackets on before going off to “practice.” Danny could never remember what sports or plays either of them did. Eventually he had to stop asking. But when he had the place to himself, the house was a maze of closed doors. In that quiet, he half expected to wake up one morning and find every piece of furniture covered with a white sheet, all the drapes drawn. A closed house.

  There were only five bedrooms, but Danny kept going into the wrong room. With all the rooms painted subtly different shades of blue, he had to look for his copy of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! facedown on the nightstand to be absolutely sure it was his room. He had wondered if he died would Tom leave the book there, open to the last page Danny had read, would this become the Dead Brother Room? No. His old room in his mother’s apartment would’ve been his shrine, but it had been packed up while his mother lay in the hospital. Packed up by dudes with duct tape and dirty quilted blankets. Packed up when they realized she wouldn’t be going home. His room was gone. No shrine. No offerings of folded laundry at the foot of the bed, no fresh glass of water on the windowsill.

  First he had stayed with Libby. “Stay with Tom a few nights,” she had said, “and then go to Gwen’s; this way Tom won’t feel bad.” At Libby’s he slept on her pullout. At least there he never lost track of his room.

  “Good thing they left us with all this cheese,” said Gwen. The round wicker table between them held a glass tray in the shape of a giant lettuce leaf spread with an array of oozing and sweating cheeses. To Danny they looked fleshy, like pieces of meat. A small basket beside the plate contained various crackers and breads. Danny built a triple-decker hors d’oeuvre, alternating different cheeses and their starch vehicles. Then, once settled back is his spot, he dismantled and reassembled them into separate selections.

  He didn’t want to think about his lost room, or the fact that he had only read another five pages of Mr. Feynman in the last six months. He hadn’t been able to read anything: textbooks, novels, even cereal
boxes. He could pretend. Sit there with a book in his hand. Or worse, actually try to read, but the effect was the same. After a few sentences his mind would drift away. Most of his spring semester he spent walking the campus, following dirt footpaths forged over grassy quads and through copses. Forgetting where and when his classes were, showing up for dinner an hour after the cafeteria had closed. If he managed to make it to a class, to find the right room at the right time, there was invariably a quiz or paper due—a living stress dream. At least his teeth weren’t falling out and he wasn’t being forced to take a shit in front of a waiting and impatient crowd.

  The birds were more muted now. The wind had died down. All seemed to quiet with the softened light. Even the distant motors moved slower, purred lower. The smell of honeysuckle was thick in the air, its tendrils wrapped the railing of the steps, snaked up the shingles and spread forth to obscure one of the rug room windows. These pretty vines want to choke the house, Danny thought, to pull it back into the sweet mangling arms of nature. There would be another hour until the light fully disappeared, a long, slow cocktail hour. Usually a languid time, tonight it felt pulled, swollen, stuffy. The slow got slower. Danny felt time thickening, hardening. He grew hotter, a prickling at the hairline, making him roll his shoulders. He rubbed his beer bottle on the back of his neck. He wished that he could take off his shirt, he’d just put it on for dinner, and already it felt heavy, stale, grimy. He envied Tom and Melissa down on the pier, where it was always cooler, a soft wind periodically luffing the flag even on such a still evening.

  He watched Gwen take a long sip of her drink. Usually she’d be cradling something low and amber, but tonight, these days, she was experimenting with seltzers and juices, with ginger ale or 7 Up splashed with mixers or bitters or sprigs of mint. Danny wasn’t sure if Gwen was doing that to hide the nonalcoholic content of her drinks from the others, or just to entertain herself. At least she wasn’t drinking, that was a good sign, right? Or was she sneaking vodka into her spritzers, hiding it in an effort not to upset him? The next time she put her drink on the table he would go over, ostensibly for a cheese and cracker, and give it a quick sip to be sure. He sniffed in the direction of her glass. He was a bloodhound. He would find out. He needed to know.

  There were too many things he ought to know. Danny was tired of questions. Tired of exam questions, of shrinks’ questions, of friends’ questions. He just wanted the peace of this house, this place of quiet. He hated that Tom was trying to ruin it, trying to cast doubt on every shingle. This place of sameness, of certainty, of every summer for twenty-one years, built on a granite slab, withstanding a dozen hurricanes in its 125 years. Tom made it all quiver with his talk of taxes and interest and equity. Tom made the place sound as if it were built on sand, as if an earthquake was coming, and all those grains would liquefy and wave like the ocean dragging them all down. What if it all went without him? I need to go down with the ship.

  Now the tears started to come. He looked out to the water, over the sputtering barbeque and the bickering cooks, over the float, past the spindle and its cormorants, out toward town, keeping his face turned as far from his sisters as he could manage. He pinched his nose, tilted back his head, but it was no use. He could tell he wouldn’t be able to stop the works. Gwen and Libby were discussing the cheese.

  “I think it’s more that all Gorgonzolas are blue but not all blues are Gorgonzola,” said Gwen. She handed pieces of each cheese to Libby for a taste test.

  Danny shuddered, one violent breath racing through him faster than he could control. Both his sisters leaned toward him.

  “Dan, you okay?” Gwen said, a hand already on his shoulder, prepared to perform a quick Heimlich if he wasn’t able to produce words. But if he spoke he would cry, so he just nodded.

  Here he was again, the child unable to keep back the motherfucking tears. Gwen pushed his feet off the rail, turning him to face them, and perched right where his feet had been. Libby stood up in front of him and squinted against the sun’s last glow to look into his face. Now the tears came fast. He was glad Tom was busy. Glad he’d kept his hair long.

  “Is this about school?” Libby asked. Danny looked at her, his lips shaking now. What does she know about school?

  “What about school?” said Gwen.

  Danny couldn’t even begin that conversation. School felt like some irksome problem, an inconvenient symptom of a much larger disease. As if his mother’s cancer had spread to him. But of course his deformed and rapidly dividing cells had been there for a lifetime. He had them as a child, watching his siblings race away in boats and cars, going farther and farther, boarding school, college, grad school. It wasn’t until the last few years that they seemed to stay, that they seemed to want him around. Here in this house they were together in a different way. They were a family who all ate at the same table, who all slept in the same house, something he had never known as a kid. In Danny’s earliest memories Tom and Gwen were already away at college. Libby at boarding school. Holidays were short and busy. It was only here since Danny could be considered an adult, too, that they had been able to do the things that siblings were supposed to do—fight over the bathroom, argue about what music to listen to, talk in whispers behind their parents’ backs.

  “We can’t let Tom sell this house.”

  That was all Danny could say. That was the best he could explain it to them. He couldn’t say, “Without this house we will go back to what we were. Separate. Without this house we will just be adults in different stages of life. Without our parents.” What had seemed slow was now exponentially accelerating, the sun sinking fast, the light changing from yellow to a failing pink. Danny felt now that even his smallest movements were happening in fast forward, and it made his stomach turn. He pinched his hands between his knees to keep them still, to try to keep them alive, to slow down the blood that raced from his fingers to his heart. He wondered if he would be the second Willoughby to die of a heart attack on this porch.

  “Dan, Tom can’t do anything on his own. This is our decision. No one’s going to let this house go if it isn’t what we want. We’ll just buy him out.” This was Libby, so practical, a seawall holding firm against the pressure of Tom and all his surging ideas. But even with her solid tanned hands on his knees he could not stop. The tears caught only to flow again, stuttering through him.

  “Alright, Danny, tell us what’s happening,” Gwen said.

  He felt like his chest was imploding, his hands were prickling with pins and needles. His arms were stretching, feeling as if they were ten feet long and limp, draped slack down the steps of the porch. Danny flexed his fingers and made fists. Gwen took his left hand in hers and began massaging it, rubbing the palm and then squeezing each joint of each finger between her thumb and forefinger. She paused at his blister and then worked around it. He wanted to run, to dive, to plunge his sleeping limbs into the ocean, to wake up. Wake up.

  “What happens if we sell the house, Dan?” Gwen asked.

  “Then there is no place for us.” Without this place he’d still have Gwen, maybe. Libby would slip away into her own world. Tom was already trapped in his own world, maybe he always had been. But really, Gwen was too unpredictable. If only she held onto this baby, something to keep her grounded, something to keep her near him. The baby would need a man in its life. Danny had learned from a good source; he could do it, if they would all just stop leaving things behind, stop pressing forward, no matter what washed away in their wakes—houses, babies, parents, ashes, brothers.

  The wind shifted, bringing the smell of smoking briquettes up to the porch. Snippets of conversation, too—

  “Everyone uses lighter fluid.”

  “Everyone who wants their dinner to taste like lighter fluid.”

  Lobster boats and small cruising yachts were coming into the harbor. Many were already at anchor, their captains wrapping mainsails in their cocoons around the booms. The lobstermen tied up at their moorings and rowed their tenders in smooth, wid
e strokes across the yellow harbor toward the dock. Dan knew they should be setting the table.

  “Dan, let’s put all these decisions on hold.” Libby said. “The house. We are years away from needing to decide that. Okay?”

  “Well . . .” Gwen trailed off. Libby shot her a look. “Who is gonna buy a place that’s caving in anyway?”

  “And school too. College isn’t going anywhere. And we have until the eleventh of August to get our deposit back for the fall semester. So let’s wait until then to decide, and if August comes and you still aren’t sure, we can just decide that you take a semester off. Just like that. Give yourself a little more time to make up your mind.”

  He didn’t even care how she knew. It was so much like their mother, who never needed telling, who absorbed all the pertinent information telepathically, broke it down and rebuilt it into solutions and options.

  “There is time for whatever you need,” said Libby firmly.

  “Do you want to drop out?” Gwen said this with so much surprise she didn’t sound like herself.

  “Time would be good.” He said this to Libby, not wanting to look at Gwen. “I wasn’t doing so great there.” He said this to his knees, to the ends of his hair. “I slept all the time. Sometimes I would wake up and not know if it was day or night, or I would think I was back at Archer Avenue. Sometimes I would wake up crying. My roommate asked for a transfer.”

  “It’s okay to miss her,” said Gwen.

  And at that moment Danny felt some perfect polished floor within him—some big empty ballroom with a chandelier reflected in the gleaming wood—he felt it all collapse. It collapsed in splinters and billowing drapes. It collapsed in shards of crystal and fragments of crown molding. It collapsed under a great rush, a flood, under a river, an ocean. A luxury liner at the bottom of the sea. It had been so exhausting keeping it at bay, walled up, preserving that perfect room with however many dikes and dams and locks and quays. With his sisters in front of him, tucking his hair behind one ear, with their voices traveling over the top of his head, with some smell in the air he had been avoiding for months, he didn’t have the strength to hold it back any longer. And he saw his mother’s hands and her rings and her fingers curling around a stone and the sharp point of her wrist bone like a perfect buried jewel. And he cried without trying to stop it, without controlling his breath or hiding his flattened chin and curled lips. Then it slowed and, for the first time, stopped without his forcing it. He turned his head to one side and wiped his nose on his shoulder.