If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go (19 page)

When she could get through, Marcel would climb over dirty snowdrifts to my house to escape her own. My parents either didn’t remember
their edict about not wanting me to see her or they didn’t care to enforce it, now that John Paul had been acquitted.

“I feel like she blames me for something,” she said, sitting in the rocking chair in my bedroom, watching the snow fall through the window.

“What could she possibly blame you for?” I asked.

She sighed. “I don’t know, being here, I guess,” she said. “I mean, it’s over between her and my father, I know that.” We were silent for a minute.

“Are you sad?” I asked her. I was, even though I knew what she said was true. Charlie never told stories anymore. He never cracked jokes or did more than stumble from room to room. Sometimes when he drank, tears would roll down his face, which no one would acknowledge.

Marcel sighed again. “I was, but not anymore. It would be worse if I didn’t have James.”

I looked at her. “Do you love him? I mean, are you in love with him?”

She smiled. “I love him,” she said simply. “How could I not? No one’s ever been this good to me. Not that I’ve dated that many other guys, but—” She shrugged.

“Do you think it would be different if he lived closer?” I asked. “I mean, if you saw him all the time and shit?”

“You mean like absence makes the heart grow fonder?” She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know. He was here that one time for three weeks and I didn’t get sick of him. I mean, what about you and Luke? You don’t see him ever, and look at how you feel.”

“There is no me and Luke,” I said. “Yet.” The thought of having Luke around all the time, of having him for myself, was so unreal I couldn’t get my mind around it. It seemed too marvelous a thing to ever happen.

Marcel shrugged again. “I miss him when he’s not here,” she said. “I wish we were together. He talks about later, you know, when I finish school.”

“How is school?” I asked. Marcel had missed a lot of time due to her
hysterical blindness, and had been having trouble catching up. When given the option, she’d enrolled in the new alternative high school, which had a reputation as being a haven for kids who were troublemakers. “Is it bullshit like they say? Not that Elephant Beach High is—”

Marcel laughed. “What, are you afraid of hurting my feelings? Yeah, it’s bullshit. I mean, we’re supposed to be prepping for exit exams and they do things like ask us to write a poem about the beach at midnight. To describe how the moon looks on the water. Shit like that. At this point, it’s cool as long as I get my diploma.” She looked at me, turning serious. “James is—he’s like my family now,” she said. “Like you are, only different. You know I love you, but—”

And suddenly she was weeping, her face crumpling like Christmas tissue paper, and then her head was in her hands, tears leaking through her fingers. I jumped off the bed and went and knelt in front of the rocking chair my parents had given me for my sixteenth birthday. I looked up into her face and put her hands in mine.

“I feel like I’m in the way,” she said, her voice cracking. “Like, okay, man, I get that she doesn’t love my father anymore. And John Paul, he was always her love child and you know I love my brother, man, but he’s gone, too.” She stopped crying, wiping her eyes with her hands. “I feel like she thinks I’m keeping her from going away to lead this whole new life, away from all of us.”

“She wouldn’t leave you alone, you know she’d never do that,” I said. But then I thought about the maps, the cards, the working late, and I knew I was only talking about my own life, my own mother. It was something she’d never do, but I couldn’t be sure about Claudine.

Marcel sighed. I gave her a handful of Kleenex from the box on my night table, but she already looked clear-eyed again, her face peaceful, serene. She took the tissues and smiled. She took my hand. “I’ll always remember how you sat by my bed and read to me when I couldn’t see,” she said.

“Now you’re the one who sounds like they’re saying good-bye,” I said. “Are you and James thinking about, like, getting married? Are you—”

“We talk about it,” she said. “We do. He has two more years in the—”

“Would you move away?” I asked. My stomach was jumping like it always did when I was nervous or frightened.

Marcel gazed out the window. The snow had stopped. Outside, the sky looked hushed and empty. “Away from what?” she asked, and her voice had a bitter, grown-up quality I had never heard before.

“But your mother,” I started, and then said, “Claudine, I mean, it’s weird that if she wants you out of the way, she’s never seemed to—she never talks about James like he’s—like he’s permanent, you know what I mean?”

Marcel made a face, shook her head. “Claudine likes to think she’s in charge of everyone’s future, but she’s not,” she said. “She’s certainly not in charge of mine.”

“Marcel—”

“Come on,” she said, standing so quickly that the rocking chair rocked backward into the bookcase. “Let’s walk to the bay if it’s not too bad out.” She opened the closet to get her coat. Somewhere inside me, I thought I heard a door close.

•   •   •

M
arcel waited until the weekend after graduation to elope with James. When I went to visit, my father insisted on dropping me off at the Port Authority bus station, insisted on coming in with me so that I wouldn’t get abducted by a pimp or a pervert. I refused his offer of buying my bus ticket, proud that I could pay for it out of my earnings from the A&P. He looked a little lost then, and I felt sorry for him without knowing why. You’d think he’d be happy to have a daughter who could pay for her own ticket. Right before I got on the bus, he stuffed twenty dollars into
the sleeve of my purse, and waved my hand away when I tried to give it back. He hugged me once, very quickly; he wasn’t one to show emotion. When the bus pulled away, my father was still standing there, watching. I waved once but he must not have seen me, because he didn’t wave back. It reminded me of that morning at the Elephant Beach train station, when Liz and I were taking the bus to Silverwood, and Mitch handed me the bill, told me to buy some lunch. Like they thought that money was the only thing they had to give you that would keep you safe.

Marcel and James were living in Buzzards Bay, near the Coast Guard station. It was a crammed and crazy place, with every fast-food restaurant you could imagine on one strip. But the apartment was cozy, on a residential street, one bedroom and a living room with orange curtains Marcel had made herself and a small kitchen that had only a breakfast bar that we never used because every morning we’d drive to the nearby International House of Pancakes, where we’d order pancake platters and hot apple pie à la mode for dessert. James and Marcel sat together, clowning around, feeding each other bites of pie from the same fork. James insisted on paying, even when I waved my father’s twenty-dollar bill in front of them. “You’re our guest,” he said, gallantly, kissing the top of Marcel’s curls, throwing change on the table for the tip.

•   •   •

T
hey appeared happy, and I was glad, until Saturday night when we went to the Red Parrot Tavern and James got mad when a good-looking guy asked Marcel to dance and accused her of flirting because she smiled when she shook her head no. We left early and they stayed in the parking lot arguing while I used Marcel’s keys to get into the apartment. When they came in about a half hour later, Marcel was walking ahead of James, her head down, buried in her sweatshirt. James’s lips were curled somewhere between a sneer and a smirk, and for the first
time I thought about how his eyes seemed to harden when he drank beer. I felt a flash of coldness then, because how well, really, did any of us know James, including Marcel? He might be less than a complete stranger, but he wasn’t one of us. They walked into the bedroom and closed the door without saying good night. I sat up on the pullout couch, smoking, thinking of what a good time I’d had at the Red Parrot until James got angry, drinking whiskey sours in a bar where absolutely nobody knew me, where I could be anything, anyone I wanted. I thought about Luke in places like the Red Parrot, asking strange girls to dance the way men had asked me. One guy, Tony, had politely asked to buy me a drink. “Just a drink and a dance,” he reassured me. “I’m engaged to my girl back in Valdosta and I miss her and she wouldn’t mind, she knows I’m lonely, and damn, girl, please let me have the pleasure of buying a fine-looking lady like you a drink!” I wondered if Luke said things like that to strange girls in bars. I wished he’d say something like that to me.

The next morning, I heard James leave for the Coast Guard station; he’d said he had to fill out a report and afterward we’d go out for Sunday breakfast, then hit the beach. There was to be a barbecue that night at somebody’s house and then I’d be leaving the next day. I looked out the orange-skirted windows. The sky was battleship gray, but summer weather was always tricky; by noon, the sun could be shining. I didn’t want to smoke until I’d had my coffee. Marcel came walking out of the bedroom just as I was about to knock. She was wearing loose drawstring pants and one of James’s tee shirts. She looked pretty and sleepy and too young to be married.

“You look too young to be married,” I told her. She smiled tightly, then went to the narrow little kitchen and began making coffee. Once it was plugged in and perking, she came and lay down next to me on the pullout couch.

“Sorry about last night,” she said, staring up at the ceiling.

I snorted. “For what, man? You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I just hope it wasn’t too weird for you.”

“Did you forget where we come from? Nothing’s too weird after Elephant Beach.” She smiled. “Did you kiss and make up?” I asked.

She sighed and shook her head quickly, so that her curls covered her face.

“Are you crying?” I asked.

She shook her head again. “It happens every time we go out,” she said. “He has three beers and thinks I’m flirting with everyone in the place, or every guy is after me. At home he’s fine, it’s good, it’s just—he doesn’t want me to work, he doesn’t like me going out by myself, it’s hard to make friends. He was still mad this morning. He won’t talk to me, sometimes the whole next day, into the night. He says I’m stubborn, but it’s him.” She took a cigarette from my pack on the couch. “I’m just sick of apologizing for shit I didn’t do.” She was quiet. We could hear the coffee gurgling in the background. “Did I make a mistake?” she whispered.

I started to say no, but stopped. “Everyone has fights,” I said, patting her shoulder. I was glad when she closed her eyes, even when tears started trickling from their corners. Her wide-open stare had taken me back to those terrible months when she couldn’t see.

•   •   •

W
hen I returned to Elephant Beach, Claudine had me over to dinner. She made a rice and lamb
sofrito
that was my favorite of her Basque dishes, and afterward Charlie retired to the living room with his drink until it was time to head over to the Treasure Chest. Claudine poured us both a cognac in the tiny crystal shot glasses her mother had given her when she left for America. I felt very grown-up and sophisticated sitting at the kitchen table, with the day’s last light painting rainbows on the walls. Claudine was wearing her hair piled on top of her head and had on a scoop-neck black blouse. She looked like she belonged more in a movie that you’d see at the City Cinema, where John Paul had
taken me and Marcel to see
Pink Flamingos
. She took a delicate sip of the cognac, turned to me, and said, “So.”

“‘So’ what?” I asked, though of course I knew. I knew she wanted to pump me about Marcel and James, and Marcel and I had discussed this and what I would tell her. I described the apartment, the orange curtains Marcel had made herself, how they held hands in the car, how they kissed over breakfast at the International House of Pancakes. I did not tell her about their quarrel, or how James had indeed stayed mad the next day, not talking to either of us until Marcel said we wouldn’t go to the barbecue at his friend’s house unless he stopped pouting.

“So? You really think she’s happy with him?” Claudine asked anxiously.

“I think it’s fine for now, Claudine,” I said.

She looked deeply into my eyes and then took my hands in her own. She told me that in October, she would be moving to Montreal. It seemed the perfect cross section of all she was looking for: very cosmopolitan without being intimidating, less expensive than Venice or Paris; she would understand both languages, English and French, which would help her find a job, and she had distant cousins living there that she’d contacted, who’d seemed glad to hear from her and had already extended an invitation to stay with them while she looked for an apartment. By the fall, she’d have enough saved from her job at McGonigle & Testa for a plane ticket and to see her through until she began working. I listened, though I wasn’t surprised. It had been in the air for some time now, Claudine’s leaving.

“What about Charlie?” I asked her.

Her eyes quickly filled with tears, and then, just as quickly, they disappeared. She sighed. “That love you feel for your first, eh?” she said. “You’ll always feel it. But love, it’s not enough. Time for something new.”

“What will happen to him?” I asked.

“He wants to find a place in the city,” she said. “John Paul is looking for him, they’ll live together, at least for a while. Until John Paul finds a
new girl and Charlie finds a new bar to keep him company.” She said this without bitterness, because it was the way of things, really. I wondered that I didn’t feel more sadness at losing them, at knowing that in a few months the Brennans would no longer be down the block and some new family would be taking their place. It would be odd to walk by and know that new secrets were breathing behind the door, things I didn’t know and would probably never find out. I must have looked sadder than I felt, because suddenly Claudine leaned forward and hugged me, and the smell of her, that biting, ocean smell, made tears come to my own eyes and I hugged her back, hard.

“My dear little girl,” she said softly against my hair, and then pushed forward and took my hands in hers. “We will still be in touch, eh? You will come visit? When I get settled? You’re an adult now. You can come and stay as long as you wish.” She kissed my forehead.