Ask Again, Yes (22 page)

He excused himself and as he crossed the yard, he looked around for Lena, who must have gone inside. Someone had found a pack of cards and as he passed the kitchen window, he saw a group of men sitting around his table as Oscar Maldonado dealt. Some of the wood chairs from inside had somehow gotten outside, and the chaise lounge from outside was now in the middle of the kitchen. Kate had an urgent expression on her face, and walked quickly ahead of him. When he turned the corner he expected a crowd of people, but it was the dark side of the house, the side that didn’t lead to the driveway, and once he arrived at the bush where Kate stopped walking, it felt like the party was far away.

“How much did she have?” he asked Kate.

“I don’t know. I just saw her going around this side of the house so I followed her.”

He had to squint into the shadows to spot the figure on all fours, her hair hanging around her face. “Okay, I’ll take care of it,” he said, feeling mostly sober all of a sudden. “And, Kate? That’s it for all of you. Unless a kid is with his or her own parent, not a single person under the age of twenty-five leaves this house without me getting a look at them. Got it?”

“Got it,” Kate said, but then gave him a look before she jogged away.

He went down on one knee and gathered the person’s hair in his fist. She retched for several seconds, the volume and drama of which didn’t match what little came out.

“Okay, okay,” he said, and patted her on the back. “Let’s get you
cleaned up.” He took firm hold of her upper arms and helped pull her to standing. “Oh!” he said when he saw who it was.

“I’m so embarrassed,” she said as she swayed back and forth. She was barefoot, and one strap of her dress had fallen down around her elbow. She leaned for a moment against his chest and closed her eyes. When he felt the steady rhythm of her breathing, he knew that she’d fallen asleep. Her hair smelled like tea. Her frame was smaller than Lena’s. He pushed her away, gently.

“Sorry, you said your name is? I forgot to ask before.”

But she slid her hands up his arms, clutched his shoulders, and he couldn’t understand what she said.

“Oh, poor thing! That’s Joan Kavanagh,” Lena said when she came looking for Francis and saw whom he was leading around the side of the house. The card game was still going strong around the kitchen table, but Lena squeezed by the men to bring out a glass of water and two aspirin, which Francis dropped into Joan’s mouth one at a time. Lena was in bad shape herself, and after asking twice if he could handle it, she went upstairs to lie on their bed with all her clothes on, including her sandals. Joan’s daughter had already left, thank God. She’d walked to another party with a group of half a dozen other kids.

“Is she all right?” Kate asked, and Francis realized that she’d hung back and let all her friends go on without her. Sara was upstairs. Who knew where Natalie had gone off to, but she was an adult now, a college graduate.

“She drank too much,” Kate said.

It was so obvious that Joan Kavanagh had drank too much that Kate’s statement, framed with cautious certainty, betrayed her innocence. He could see that up until that hour she thought drinking too much was just for kids.

“She might have eaten something bad. Who knows?”

Kate looked at the woman for a long time, as if deciding.

“She can sleep here, can’t she? You won’t make her go home?”

“No, I won’t make her go home, but she might like to wake up in her own house.” But then he thought of the next problem. “Do you know where the Kavanaghs live?”

Kate shook her head. “One of those blocks by the playground, I think?” She glanced down at her friend’s mother as if to make sure she wasn’t listening. “I think it’s just her and Casey who live there. I’m not sure. I think the dad doesn’t live there anymore.”

Francis contemplated the sleeping stranger, curled up now with a beach towel over her shoulders for warmth. She was snoring softly with her mouth open. “I’ll sort it out, Katie. Okay? You go on up to bed.” How long had they been out there? One by one, without his noticing, every guest had left. The kitchen was dark except for the light above the stove. Francis went in and pulled the throw blankets from the couch and armchair. He turned off the TV, which was blaring music videos. When he came back outside, he pushed two armchairs together until they faced each other, and used one to sit in and the other to put up his feet. He draped one blanket over Joan and wrapped the other around himself.

He was drunk, he realized as he stared at a group of moths darting and swooping under the porch light. He was drunk and he was exhausted. He tried to remember meeting Joan at Broxton, but it was too tiring to recall, and he decided he’d do the work of remembering tomorrow.

When he woke into the blue chill of morning, she was looking at him over the edge of her blanket. In the space between their chairs were a few stained napkins, a sea of crushed potato chips. “I’m mortified,” she whispered. It was not quite dawn, and his neck felt stiff and frozen. The inside of his mouth felt like fur. She stood and neatly draped the blanket he’d given her over the back of the chair where she’d slept. “I’m leaving,” she whispered. “I’m walking home. You should go inside.”

She took a moment to look around for her shoes, and when she found
them she just hooked them on her first two fingers. As she passed by he reached out and grabbed her free hand, held tight. Twisting around in his chair, he moved his hands to her hips, then up to the narrowing at her waist, and for a second, for only half a second, perhaps, he felt her move closer to him, her muscles tensing under his palms. The morning felt thin and breakable and if he asked her a question, he knew it would lead to another. And that one to another. And so on.

“I’m going,” she said, and then she was gone.

eleven

G
EORGE WENT DOWN TO
Skillman to play basketball while Peter packed. He’d planned on helping, but that morning when they were standing at the couch shoulder to shoulder, folding Peter’s few clothes into piles, they realized it wasn’t a job for two. In early August, George took him to a Sears on Long Island where he bought Peter a set of bath towels and new, extra-long, blue and red plaid sheets for his dorm room bed. George asked what else he needed, and Peter knew some kids were getting small refrigerators, thirteen-inch televisions, but he said nothing, all his meals were included, what else could there be? On the way home they stopped at their usual diner and George cleared his throat and said that since his dad wasn’t there it was up to him to tell Peter a few things before he headed into the world on his own, and Peter felt his stomach drop, sure George was going to say something about sex that Peter already knew but didn’t want to know that George knew, too. Once, Peter had a bad head cold and left practice. He arrived home two hours early and believed, at first, that George wasn’t home. Then he heard sounds coming from the bedroom, small movements, a quick, hushed conversation. He
froze, his keys still in his hand, and then he left again. He walked down Queens Boulevard towards Manhattan’s skyline. When he got as far as the movie theater, he turned around. When he returned home a second time, there was no one in the apartment and George’s bedroom door stood wide open.

Instead, George said that he knew there was a lot of drinking that went on in college, and that might be okay for the other kids but not for Peter. “I mean, a little, sure, a few beers here and there, but you’ve probably got the gene, Peter. Some people have it and some people don’t. If you’re like the Stanhopes, then you have it.”

George had been making references to the gene for a few years now but Peter didn’t know if he meant a real gene, as in a distinct sequence of nucleotides that formed part of a chromosome, or if it was just a notion invented by people who needed to understand themselves.

“Did my dad have a problem? In that way, I mean?”

George gaped at him. “Oh, Peter. Buddy. Yes.”

“I never noticed.”

“Well,” George said. “You were a kid.”

“I don’t think so. I would have noticed. And I didn’t.”

“Okay.”

Peter removed his napkin from his lap and refolded it along the seams. He went to the bathroom, washed his hands without looking at his reflection in the mirror, and when he got back to his seat, he made himself eat two-thirds of the burger so that George wouldn’t ask why he wasn’t hungry.

Instead of packing his suitcase with his running T-shirts and thermals, Peter put his books in there because they were the heaviest and the suitcase had wheels, and George said that was the sort of thinking that got him the big bucks. He stuffed his clothes into his old track duffel. Since he’d worn a uniform through high school, he only had one pair of jeans, a few sweaters, two pairs of khaki shorts. He went through his running clothes, and anything with yellowed armpits he stuffed in
a giant Hefty bag and then carried down to the trashcan on the curb. Already, the space he’d taken up for four years was emptying of his presence, and he could begin to see how the place would close up around any memory of him, like the walling up of a door.

His classmates’ graduation parties were spread across the summer, and Peter had gone to most of them, though at each of these parties, he always wondered why he’d come. Every one of them was an incongruous mingling of friends and elderly aunts and oddball neighbors, all of whom had different ideas of what to expect from such gatherings. Peter grinned for group photos but he knew when the pictures were developed that the reluctance would be clear on his face, and that made him never want to see them. At one party, Henry Finley’s parents had gotten a keg they told Henry was full of Budweiser, but it turned out to be full of O’Doul’s, and the adults laughed at the kids who pretended to have gotten drunk. At the same party, his friend Rohan asked him if he ever saw that old girlfriend of his anymore.

“Once in a while,” Peter said. “Not often.”

“But you’re still into her,” Rohan said. “That explains why you never came to hang out with the girls from Higgins.”

Did that explain it? Peter wondered.

He had to report to Elliott for cross-country practice, which began a week before freshman orientation, then classes would start. At graduation he had thought, maybe, you never knew, maybe he’d look over and see his father at the back of the gym, or his mother with two orderlies next to her, a van running outside at the curb, and three months later, on the day he lifted his suitcase and his duffel into the trunk of George’s car, he had the same feeling, like his parents might come walking quickly down the street, afraid they would miss the chance to say goodbye. Sometimes it seemed like a lifetime since he’d seen either of them. On the night before he left, George took him to eat at an Italian restaurant in the city, and over dinner he told a story about a man he knew a long time ago who couldn’t do the thing that was right, and the
longer he waited to do it the more difficult it became, but it didn’t mean the man didn’t want to do it.

It was a parable, Peter realized, and gave up trying to follow.

“It’s okay, George,” Peter said. “I know what you’re trying to tell me.”

The next afternoon, after checking out Peter’s room and walking around campus for a while, George handed Peter an envelope and said it was time for him to take off.

Peter clapped his uncle on the shoulder, shook his hand. “Well, thanks for everything,” he said. His chest hurt.

“Hey, hey,” George said, pulling Peter in for a tight hug. “Don’t look so worried. Okay? You always look so goddamn worried, Peter. It’s all good stuff. Okay? I’ll see you at Thanksgiving. That’s no time at all.”

Several hours later Peter remembered the envelope, which he’d shoved into the pocket of his shorts. Inside were five stiff hundred-dollar bills.

Practices weren’t much different than those under Coach Bell, and Peter saw immediately that he was the best on the team. He wasn’t used to practicing with girls—with the
women
’s team—as Coach called it. Not that the men and the women saw much of each other once they finished warm-ups. He liked that no one knew anything about him except that his name was Peter Stanhope, that he came from Queens, that he ran the fastest eight hundred meter in the city the previous spring. No, he didn’t have a girlfriend. No, he didn’t know his major yet. His parents? Yeah, they split a few years back. His mom lived in Albany now. Yeah, he saw her when he could.

On the third day of practice, one of the seniors on the girls’ team said something about having been home for the summer, back to her hometown of Riverside, which bordered Gillam. Peter calculated: she would have been a junior at Riverside High when everything
happened. For the rest of the week he made sure to stretch on the opposite side of the circle, to drop his head in case she might turn to look at him when Coach called out his name. But when she didn’t seem to recognize him or his name, he felt the heavy cloak of worry he’d been wearing grow lighter, until it was as if he’d simply shrugged it off his shoulders and let it fall to the ground. Little by little, he felt the shiver of a new idea forming, a new space opening up wide enough for him to stand in.

Friday was move-in day for the rest of the freshmen, and Peter left a note for his roommate to say that although he’d already chosen a bed, a dresser, he didn’t mind switching. The first note he wrote seemed too formal so he tore it up. The second draft seemed too brusque. So in his third draft he added a few exclamation points and only a few minutes later, when he was crossing the quad, did he worry that exclamation points might seem kind of gay. All week he’d been looking at the proximity of the two beds in his room, trying not to think about the fact that he’d never—not even in George’s apartment—lived in such close quarters with another human being. He didn’t know if his habits were normal, if he was too neat or too messy, if he was too quiet or too loud, when a person should ignore one’s roommate in order to grant a sort of false privacy, or if it was better and less weird to always acknowledge the other person and try to keep up light conversation. And would that be possible if they were to sleep and study and hang out all in the same ten-by-twelve-foot space? Wouldn’t conversation run out by Halloween? He’d known for a long time now that his tendency to be careful was part of what kept him apart. The guys on the team showered after practice and walked around in their underwear and laughed at each other’s privates and then went on to eat together, play video games.