Our Brothers at the Bottom of the Bottom of the Sea (18 page)

“Careful who you disturb,” said Diana.

 

 

August 29, 2013

Tomorrow I'm going to Pittsburgh. This afternoon, I gave Ethan a lot of the stuff I don't need, stuff my grandparents gave me that I was supposed to learn from, which I never actually used, stuff that would feel out of place in a dorm room: a globe, three volumes of condensed classics, a chrome desk set with pen, pencil, and paperweight. Though the occasion might have called for some kind of sentiment, it wasn't a warm and fuzzy Hallmark moment. Ethan is too honest for that.

He asked me what he was going to do with “all this crap.”

I said something about gratitude and the lack thereof, and he said, “Well, give me something to be grateful for. Not junk you don't want.”

He had a point. Right then and there I wanted to give him something real, something good, but scanning the room, I couldn't think of anything. He probably thought I was being stingy when in fact I had just come up empty.

“Nothing,” I said. “I got nothing.”

“That's all right,” he said. “I get the room to myself. That's enough.”

Saying good-bye to Diana was harder. Much harder. The more we talked about how we were going to see each other again—and soon, and often—the less real it seemed. We were on a boardwalk bench picking at a couple of hot doughnuts gone cold, feeling frustrated. Her parents, who were supposed to be out that evening in Cape May, had made a sudden change of plans that stole the house from us. I tried not to think about what we were missing, but it wasn't working.

“Talk about bad timing,” I said.

She didn't seem to hear me. “I envy you,” she said.

“Why?”

“You get to leave.”

“What are you talking about? You're leaving too.” She was headed to Fairleigh Dickinson, not because she had any particular enthusiasm for staying in New Jersey, but because it had a hospitality program.

“Not really. It's more like a pause. After four or five years, I'll be back in Happy World.”

“Is that so bad?”

“I know I should be grateful,” she said. “And I am. But.”

I tried to be sympathetic. “It's a lot of work,” I said.

“It's not just that. It's … it's lots of other things too.”

“Like what?”

A gaggle of seagulls poked around the crumbs at our feet. One of them looked up, anticipating a bite from the piece in Diana's hand. She saw the gull and began to conduct the bird's movements with waves of her wrist. “When my dad gets home from work, you know what he talks about?”

I shook my head. I had trouble picturing him as a man returning home, engaged in the casual business of pulling a snack from the fridge, picking up a remote, collapsing on a sofa.

“The injustice of it all,” she said. Her entranced seagull chased a chunk of doughnut Diana flung away. “How he can never trust anyone. This one's lazy, that one's stealing behind his back. No one does what they're supposed to.”

Including you? I wondered. But I didn't say. Just us being together was its own kind of answer.

“We have pictures,” she said, gripping the bench on either side of her legs. “Black and white. What the boardwalk once looked like, before the Stones, way back when. The Pirate's Playground? That used to be a bowling alley. Where Happy World is, that was a ballroom and a couple of taffy stands. My great-grandfather started out roasting peanuts—Stone Nuts. Then my grandfather got bigger ideas.”

“He built the first amusement park here,” I said.

“And the second. And the first french fry stand. And the first mini golf.” Diana smiled. “Before us, there wasn't much here but an ocean.”

I laughed. “We owe it all to the Stones.”

“You can thank my grandfather. Someone should.”

“Your father doesn't?” I asked. I thought of my own father. After almost thirty years, he was about to be shown the door. “Your dad has a funny way of showing his appreciation.”

“He doesn't appreciate, he resents,” Diana said. She crumbled a bit of doughnut between her fingers. She said that back in the eighties, they almost went bust—grandpa had bought one stand too many, and the debt piled high. “My father never finished college. He came back and went to work.”

“My dad too,” I said. “About the same time.” But he didn't have a boardwalk or a cute bear logo to show for it. He just had hope that everything would go back to normal, the sooner the better.

“My dad says the books were a mess, everything was a mess. Then a little bit at a time, one season after another, he built it up again. The way he tells the story, he did it all by himself.” She lowered her voice. “I'm sorry,” she said, “about your father.”

“I thought they were friends,” I said. “I just don't get it.”

“What is it people say?” Diana asked. “That it's lonely at the top?”

“It can't be that simple.”

“You think it's simple?”

For a long time, we didn't say much more. Diana threw the last of her doughnut in the air, setting the gulls into combat, and we got up to stretch our legs, walking aimlessly along the boardwalk. There was that strange, end-of-the-season vibe, as if magic carriages were about to turn into pumpkins. Stores that had gouged tourists all season were now marking down their crap by the day: 20 percent off, 25, 50. No one wants to be stuck with inventory that'll have to be stored all winter. And then find it's out of fashion next season.

The foreign workers, the “guest workers”—in their heads, they've already gone home. They're counting the hours and killing time exchanging text messages to friends and family in Israel, Russia, the Czech Republic. The people who own or manage the stands are all doing the math. How'd they do this season? Did they move enough shirts, boogie boards, hermit crab cages? Did they make a killing? Or just enough to coast until next summer?

We townies have mixed feelings. On the one hand, we all say we're glad to see the tourists go, to have the place to ourselves again, to have everything “back to normal.” But the absence of crowds just means that summer's coming to an end and the days are growing shorter. And you know what “normal” really means, but no one will ever admit? It means three seasons of hoping that the crowds return next summer and that you'll be able to hang on until things pick up again.

That's the way it's always said: “when things pick up again.” We all nod and understand without having to say anything more. It's our way. Our code. You get a coffee in the morning, shake the rain water from your jacket, and when someone asks you how things are going, you say you're holding on, you know, until things pick up again. There are three long seasons between summers.

“Don't you wish summer would never end?” I asked Diana, squeezing her hand.

“No. I wish it wouldn't begin,” she said. “Summer's a promise that can't be kept.” She looked out over the sea. “He suspects, you know.”

“Who?”

“My dad. About you. And he's not happy.”

“How'd he find out?”

“There are no secrets. This town's too small.”

“What are you going to do?”

She kept her gaze out over the water, fixed and frozen. Paralyzed. I gave her hand another squeeze. It was time to say good-bye, at least for a while, anyway. Until Thanksgiving. Until Christmas. Until next summer.

“But there'll be phone calls and e-mail and texts,” I said, trying to make the best of it. “It's not the real thing, of course, but it's better than nothing. Right?”

“Better than nothing.”

“We got to hang on,” I said. “Until…”

“Yeah,” Diana said. “I know.”

We were both crying. I walked her home. I looked at that big window facing the ocean, remembering how good it felt when we were on the other side, together, looking out.

“I'm going to miss you,” I said.

She said she already did.

 

chapter thirteen

rachel's children

The best Stan could do was point Rachel to the right general neighborhood. “Leonard was a talker, that's for sure,” Stan said as he wiped down the counter. “But he didn't have much to say about family.”

Rachel wasn't sure which troubled her more: not finding Leonard or Stan talking about him in the past tense. It had been the same story at SeaSwift Go-Carts, except that the fat ticket clerk couldn't help but smile when he said he had no idea what happened to “old Leonard.”

“He was scheduled for his shift, and he never showed up,” the clerk said, absorbed once again in his Game Boy. “I haven't heard or seen from him since.”

“That doesn't worry you?” Rachel asked.

“I got coverage,” the clerk had said. “One goes, another comes in.”

Stan, to his credit, was a lot less glib. “No, he hasn't been around,” he said, reaching for a tea bag. “I thought, maybe, he was spending more time with his friends. Or at least one of them, anyway.”

Rachel blushed. She pressed the tea bag into the bottom of her cup with the back of her spoon. “I haven't heard a word from him in days. It's not just me,” she said quickly. “He hasn't been at SeaSwift, either.”

“Really?”

“They say he just stopped showing up.”

“Huh,” Stanley said.

A party boat rumbled past the dock. On the PA, a man's voice corralled passengers for a line dance. “It's electric!” he said.

“The aunt, I think her name is Sally,” said Stan. “Aunt Sally, that sounds right.”

“Any idea where she might be?”

“Some. You know those apartments on the north end of the island, behind Memorial Park?”

“Vaguely,” Rachel said. “There are a lot of them. Do you have a number?”

“Afraid I don't,” Stan said. “But there'll be a ramp to the front door. A new one. I remember Leonard talking about it. He put it together himself.”

“A ramp?”

“For a scooter.” Stan straightened up from the counter, stretching out his arms. “This Aunt Sally is a big woman, you know what I mean? This electric scooter is how she gets around.”

Rachel thanked him and reached into her pocket to pay for her tea.

Stan waved her money away. “Uh-uh,” he said. “That's on the house. But if you find Leonard, you give him a shout for me. Tell him Stan says to bring his sorry ass back here. And, hey,” Stan said as Rachel was going out the door, “good luck.”

*   *   *

Rachel feared a needle-in-the-haystack search among the dozens of buildings, each with four or six apartments, that made up the projects. But starting along the edge that backed the old evangelical campgrounds, she quickly spotted exactly what Stan had described: a low, black metal ramp that bridged a sandy patch of yard from sidewalk to doorway, two concrete steps up from the foundation.

The name on the mailbox was only modestly helpful: S. Collins. Beside it, a tan steel door was framed by two narrow, vertical window panes, each about the width of a hand and curtained inside with a kind of white gauze. Through them, Rachel could see the glow of an ancient television.

The doorbell croaked out a rattle that didn't seem to attract attention. Rachel knocked. A woman's voice from deep inside the apartment called out, “Who's there?”

“I'm looking for Leonard Washington,” Rachel said through the door. “Are you Sally?”

There was no response, but through the windowpane, Rachel saw a scooter roll into the living room to face the door square on, as if prepared to charge like a knight on horseback. Driving the scooter, hands resolutely gripping the handles, was a large woman with a wide, pierogi face and blond hair combed straight back from her forehead.

“Leonard isn't here,” she said hoarsely. “I don't want you people coming around anymore.” The words sounded practiced, even tired, as if she had trotted them out many times before.

“My name is Rachel. I'm a friend.”

“Leonard doesn't have any friends. Not in this town.”

“Yes, he does. I know him,” Rachel said. “His mother lives in Atlantic City. His name is Washington Washington.”

On the television screen, a frieze of heavy traffic crawled between Philadelphia and the Jersey shore. A reporter's voice, surrounded by the whir of helicopter blades, said that now was not the time to leave for the beach.

“Lots of people know his name,” the woman said. “We just want to be left alone.”

“Please,” Rachel said. “I'm Curtis's sister. The boy who died on the roller coaster.”

The scooter seemed to rock back and forth, as if the driver was torn between advance and retreat. “They've already taken Leonard away,” she said. “There's nothing I can do for you.”

Rachel couldn't think of anything else to say. “Plan on leaving later tonight or first thing tomorrow,” a desk anchor said. Then Rachel noticed something over his head, above the screen. “I gave Leonard the elf,” she said. “On top of the television.”

The scooter rolled forward and out of sight. For a moment, Rachel feared she had simply left the room, bored or exasperated by the presence at her front steps. Then the door cracked open. “You'll have to take this the rest of the way,” the woman said, leaning over her handlebars. She gasped as she rolled back into her seat. “It's practically idolatrous the way he worships that elf.”