Читать книгу Among the Dead and Dreaming - Samuel Ligon - Страница 17

10

Alina

It’s so unfair that it has to be Kyle when there are all these awful people whose deaths would make the world a better place, like serial killers and rapists, all the horrible people who hurt people, and I can hardly even believe any of it until I see her at the airport and fall apart completely, because it’s so unfair that I’m never going to see him again, unless I believe in heaven, which I don’t think I do believe, but maybe I do, though I don’t think you can just decide to believe in something like that.

Mom doesn’t look that horrible is what rubs me so wrong in the car on the Cross Island, like she’s only comforting me and hasn’t been crying for days. She tells me again what happened—a motorcycle accident on the Ocean Parkway, which I already know, and this rich woman, Cynthia, who my mother obviously hates, which is weird because she doesn’t get jealous, and I’m like, “He was cheating on you?” not sure if I hope he was or hope he wasn’t, and she’s like, “I don’t think so,” but it’s so obvious she’s lying.

“Was it over between you, then?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Why was he with that woman?”

“I told you, they were friends.”

“And you didn’t like her.”

“I didn’t know her.”

Everything she says is a lie. For the first time, I can recognize it, and that feels kind of cool, just that I can tell, but also horrible, and then I remember I’ll never see Kyle again, and I wish it was me instead of him, or me with him, the two of us dead together, since my mom hardly even cares that he’s dead. She was at school with me for two nights and then I was alone two nights, with Cassandra, my roommate, who seems really nice, but I was also missing home and my mom and Kyle, even knowing he was coming to Interlochen next week, our secret, unless he told her, which I know he didn’t because I’d be able to tell, but now he’s dead and I’ll never see him again. She tells me about this lunch we have to go to with the families—right this second, so I’m not even going to drop my stuff off—and I’m like, Are you kidding me? But I see how hard she’s trying to keep from crying, her face gone bloodless, and I feel it all coming up from wherever I’m holding it, and I can’t hold it any longer, and she lets go, too, both of us crying all the way to Rockville Centre, where this stupid lunch is going to be, and that makes me feel worse, or just so guilty because of everything I felt for him but didn’t mean to feel, just how he was coming to visit and how she never seemed to give him what he needed, but her crying now and feeling it with me, both of us crying now all the way to Rockville Centre and this stupid lunch.

Mark

I didn’t expect to see Nikki at The Pavilion, seated next to Kyle’s father, big fat Gino Pantopes. People weren’t telling me the plans, or I was forgetting them. Nikki looked nearly as worn out as Cynthia had, her face drained and washed out from crying.

She didn’t know anything yet.

The Pavilion was a wedding mill, with fountains and cherubs and a dining room upstairs offering a view of the rolling lawn and duck pond out back. Cynthia’s sister, Beth, sat between me and her broker husband, Craig, who Cynthia had always called Dreg, and Nikki sat across the room with Gino and a girl who had to be her daughter. Plates of food appeared and disappeared. I thought of how Cynthia would have hated this event, how we’d have mocked it together, the duck pond and Gino’s fat purple face and Dreg asking stupid questions. If I could have told her anything, I’d have told her how much I hated her and Kyle being remembered together like this. I didn’t want to be that petty, but I was. I looked at Nikki across the room, entirely self-contained, and then I heard my name and noticed Denys standing and looking at me.

They were all looking at me.

“So, that’s fine,” Denys said. “Diana and I want to provide these opportunities to share our memories of Cynthia and Kyle. We thought you’d start, Mark.”

I looked at my untouched plate, felt heat rush to my face. What could I possibly share about Cynthia and Kyle?

“I thought we’d go around the room,” Denys said, “each of us—”

“Oh, God, no!” Celia Pantopes wailed.

She was half out of her seat, Gino trying to pull her down. When he lost his hold, she stumbled out the door, wailing.

I got away from my table before anyone could stop me.

Denys said, “Well, we don’t,” and Diana said, “Please, everyone, finish your lunch.”

I followed Gino out the door, Celia struggling down the winding staircase.

I stood against the railing above them, watching them, unsure where to go.

Nikki came out of the banquet room, leading the girl she’d been sitting with, her daughter. She stopped to introduce us, and I stuck out my hand like a car salesman. “Mark Barlow,” I said to the girl, startled by how much she looked like her mother.

“We’re going out back for a minute,” Nikki said. “To get some air.”

It seemed like an invitation. I followed them down the staircase, past Gino and Celia hunched by a fountain in the lobby. I stopped to take off my jacket, then caught up with Nikki and Alina on the manicured lawn.

“Because I want to is why,” Alina said, snapping her hand away from Nikki and storming toward the duck pond.

Nikki seemed surprised to see me. “She’s upset,” she said, and I said, “Who wouldn’t be?”

Nikki looked away. “I know,” she said.

“I’ll leave you alone,” I said, and she said, “Stay.”

We sat on a bench in the shade of an oak tree, watching Alina make her way around the pond. “She seems like a nice kid,” I said.

“She is nice,” Nikki said.

A fountain of water sprayed up from the center of the pond.

Nikki massaged her forehead with her fingertips. “This whole thing’s so weird,” she said. “I don’t know what to say up there. About Kyle. About the two of us.”

“It’s not like you’re going to reveal some secret,” I said.

She looked across the water at Alina half way around. “Secret?”

“You know,” I said. “Everything you suspect or whatever.”

She looked at me and sort of shook her head—like, We’re not doing this—then looked away again. Fine by me. I didn’t know anything anyway. Not for sure. Long seconds passed. I had a memory in my mouth of Cynthia’s freezer burned forehead, even as I smelled Nikki through the humidity, vanilla or cinnamon, some kind of spice.

“This thing tomorrow,” she said. She stood and scanned the lawn, raising herself on tiptoes to look across the water, then sat back down. “I hope you don’t mind if I don’t go to Cynthia’s service. It just seems crazy to me—doing them one after another like that at the funeral home. I know they were friends and everything.”

“I’m not going to Kyle’s either,” I said.

We looked back to the pond, and then I couldn’t help myself: “What do you think they were doing on that motorcycle, anyway—after midnight on the Ocean Parkway.”

She shook her head.

“You don’t wonder?”

She looked away.

“My mind keeps circling that,” I said. “All the stuff we’ll never know.”

“There’s plenty we’ll never know,” she said. “And they were close. So what?”

“I just want to know something,” I said. “Where they were going. Where they were coming from. Anything”

“It doesn’t make any difference,” she said, and I said, “But still.”

I heard a woman clear her throat behind us and turned to see Cynthia’s sister.

“There you are,” Beth said.

The women embraced, Beth looking at me over Nikki’s shoulder as her eye makeup started to run. I knew Nikki had to know something. Just by how careful she was, how she pretended not to care. She had to wonder what was going on between them, even if she didn’t care. And her knowing and not caring made my knowing and caring seem more stupid and pathetic, her strength or indifference—or maybe just privacy—somehow feeding my weakness.

Nikki

Back in the banquet room, his eyes are on me all the time, something empty behind them, like part of him drained onto the lawn outside, and whenever I look up, whenever I wake from myself, there he is, looking at me. Cynthia’s family surrounds him, and rich people come and go, as if he’s been coronated, which makes me sort of sick, to think he’s been elevated by her death, but I’m probably just projecting that because of how disconnected I feel from Kyle’s family. Maybe her family’s always been like this with him, having taken him into their wealthy embrace long ago, something always so horrible in me regarding rich people and their money, because, I’m sure, of how the lack of it has governed my own life. Even now. Especially now. I look to his eyes fixed on me over Diana’s shoulder as she hugs him, and it’s like he’s lost, like he’s calling for me.

Alina reaches out to me, and I squeeze her hand, both of us strangers in this room full of rich people, and shy, the only reason she clings to me. Burke said he’d arrive next week, and I still don’t have a plan for the money, still don’t know if I’m going to run. My job selling ads for the paper has led to writing reviews and interviews lately, the arts editor practically promising a move to the editorial side of the paper. I’ll never find a job as good if I run again. I just need to get to Kyle’s studio and see what I can find. It’s possible he’s got money stashed or something to sell, if the place hasn’t already been emptied by Celia.

“When can we go?” Alina whispers.

“Soon,” I tell her, petting her hair. She drops her head to my shoulder.

Cynthia’s sister is pretty and flushed, and she keeps touching Mark, holding his hand, while the rich people say whatever they say to him and he looks at me. I wonder what he wants from me, what he has that the rich people want to touch. He obviously knows what I know, that there was something between Kyle and Cynthia, the way she touched Kyle the night the four of us ate together downtown, her hand on his arm, his shoulder, looking for a reaction from me every time she touched him. And her eyes in his paintings, too. I didn’t care. I didn’t have anything invested that could be taken away, part of why I should have just let him go, so they could have had each other. But I also wanted to love him like I hadn’t loved Bobby in Portland. I’ve been too careful too long, holding myself too tight. Mark was going to let it eat him alive, the way he looked at their hands on the table that night at the restaurant, the way he questioned me just an hour ago on the lawn. I didn’t care where they’d been or where they were going the night they died. Kyle and I loved each other—but I didn’t own him and he didn’t own me. We didn’t owe each other anything, except kindness and respect. But that thought makes everything so much worse, rubbing it in my face again, how I held him back and kept him from the real love he could have had with Cynthia. I put my hand to my face, shading my eyes, and let myself feel it all in this room full of rich people, trying not to shake Alina’s head on my shoulder and failing.

She runs her hand up and down my back, sniffling, “Can’t we just go?” and I pull myself together and say, “In a minute,” because I haven’t spent enough time with Kyle’s father. I don’t want to close any doors.

I watch the rich people come and go, Mark looking at me like, Get me out of here, and for just a second, I see myself in that look, a sort of recognition washing over me, and I wonder if maybe, with all the rich people around him, if maybe—because it’s only fifty thousand, impossible for me and nothing to them, Burke out there waiting to be paid, what I have to take care of before I can feel or do anything else, but as I look at Mark still looking at me, as helpless as I am, I dismiss the possibility of asking for anything, promising Alina and myself in my head, almost like a prayer, that we’ll be okay, we’ll be okay, we’ll be okay, that we’ll survive this bullshit with Burke unscathed, intact, that we’ll come out of it stronger and better than ever. And then I’ll let myself feel the loss of Kyle and forgive myself, maybe, hopefully. But Mark won’t stop looking at me. And I can’t tell if I recognize something in him or if I’m just seeing money.