Summer People (17 page)

Beth bumped her head against the passenger window. She felt sixteen, as emotionally inept as her children. “I’m tired,” Beth said. “Will you please take me home?”

They drove back to Horizon in silence. David let her out at the end of the driveway, but as she walked past his window, he grabbed her arm.

“You never once said you were sorry,” he said. “You broke a solemn vow without explaining why. I figured it out eventually— you were too young, you were scared—but you didn’t even apologize.”

When she looked at him, she saw the past in his eyes. She recognized the look of loss on his face as he stood at the front door of Horizon confronting her father. It was too painful to remember. Beth turned away.

“Good night, David,” she said.

H
e’d been on Nantucket for three weeks but it felt like three months. Or three years. His reality had changed. He was now a person who ate steak and lobsters, he was a person who lounged on the beach and took outdoor showers. He was a person who read Robert Ludlum novels and played Monopoly, amassing paper fortunes.

Now that Garrett was dating Piper, Marcus spent a lot of time alone with Winnie. Since the night he found her eating in the kitchen, they’d grown closer. Marcus saw that Winnie was like Arch—beneath her little-girl, noneating, self-pitying facade lay a decent heart. She listened, she asked questions, and she moved through her days utterly devoted to him, Marcus, a black kid from Queens with a now awful-looking Afro. Not because she felt sorry for him, but because she thought he was special. Marcus could tell she was genuine in this.

After nine months of losing people in his life, he had found a friend.

They spent practically every day at the beach together. Swimming in the waves—almost always the butterfly, which was Marcus’s stroke. He was teaching Winnie how to improve her form; he wanted her to be a kick-ass flyer in time for her senior year. When the tide was right, they swam out past the breaking waves where Marcus could still stand on the sandy bottom and he held Winnie—one hand under her stomach, one hand on the back of her thighs—and showed her how to strengthen her kick. He only touched her when they were in the water, and he had to admit, he was starting to like the way she felt weightless in his arms. He liked to watch her body do the stroke, her ass bucking through the water. He liked how she tried so hard to do exactly what he said,
keep your head down, lengthen your reach.

One day when they were drying off, she said, “So what do you think? Are Garrett and Piper having sex?”

Marcus fell face-first onto his striped beach towel. This wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have. Especially since he knew the answer was yes; he’d seen a Trojan wrapper in the bathroom trash when he emptied the can three days before. “What do you care?” he said.

“He’s my twin brother.”

“I’d think that would make you not want to know.”

“Of course I want to know. I mean, I guess it’s no big deal if he has sex before I do. He
is
a boy.”

“Whatever that means.”

Winnie rested back in her chaise. “I just worry about getting left behind.”

“It’s not a race,” Marcus said.

Winnie rolled her sweatshirt up under her bikini top. “Piper is so pretty. Don’t you think she’s pretty?”

“She’s pretty,” Marcus said. “But not as pretty as you.”

Winnie whipped her head around. “Really?”

“Relax,” he said.

“You just implied that I’m prettier than Piper. You think that? Really, Marcus?”

“The correct response was ‘thank you.’ I never say stuff unless I mean it, but I’m not going to repeat it a hundred times so you can feel all wonderful about yourself.”

“How about repeating it once?”

“You’re prettier than Piper,” Marcus said. Winnie beamed and lay back in her chaise, smiling at the sun. Yes, she was prettier. Piper was good-looking, but she knew it. She wore outfits that put her commodities on display for the world to see. Winnie was pretty in a quiet, natural way, like Beth. Half the time, she looked terrible—hair wet, eyes red and puffy from crying, and always wearing that god-awful, misshapen sweatshirt—and yet her humanity made her beautiful.

As July approached, Marcus found himself with two new worries. The first was that twenty-one days had passed and he’d gotten nowhere with his writing. His legal pad was blank but for the one sentence:
My mother is a murderer.
The five hundred dollars, gone forever, took on
Alice in Wonderland
—like proportions in his mind. He now had three unopened letters from his mother, which he’d stuffed into his left dock shoe. His dock shoes were in the back corner of his closet where he didn’t have to think about them. He would only open his mother’s letters if he got really desperate. Marcus tried to banish the memory of Zachary Celtic (
your own mother, pretty woman, too, facing the strap-down on the gurney, the long needle …
) and concentrated instead on Nick’s sole comment, “You get to tell the story in your own words, kid.” It was beginning to seem that Marcus had no words. Not on this topic, anyway.

Marcus’s other worry was that he was attracted to Winnie. Maybe because she had brought up sex, or because Garrett was having sex, sex became an invisible third party hanging around whenever Winnie and Marcus were together. And sex was out of the question. If it ever happened, Garrett would kill him and Beth would send him home immediately.

Marcus was supposed to call his father every two weeks, but since Horizon had no phone, Marcus only called when he got the chance. At the beginning of July, he called from a phone booth in town. Too anxious to sit, Marcus stood in the booth and stared at the street, all the white people in their fancy clothes shopping for scented candles and needlepoint pillows. The first question his father asked was, “Why haven’t you answered your mother’s letters?”

“How do you know I haven’t answered them?”

“I know,” Bo Tyler said, “because your sister and I visited her last week and she told me she’s written to you three times and hasn’t heard back.”

“I don’t feel like writing,” Marcus said. Man, was that the truth!

Bo made one of his
hmmph
ing noises. Then he said, “Your mother needs our support.”

Here was the thing Marcus couldn’t get his mind around. Constance had committed murder—she was responsible for two deaths, three if you included Uncle Leon, four if you included Arch—and now she needed their support? The Newtons all went to see some kind of therapist to help them deal with their loss, and that sounded like what Marcus needed—someone to help him with his loss. He had lost his mother. She woke up on the morning of October seventh, and without warning, changed their lives forever.

On that day, Marcus was sitting in trigonometry class trying to file away what he would have to remember about sine, cosine, tangent, and cotangent for the next quiz, when the intercom buzzed and the secretary asked for Marcus to be sent to the office. The kids in his class all
oooh
ed and
uh
-
oh
ed, because a student generally got sent to the office for bad things, although Marcus was one of the least likely people in the class to be in trouble. Marcus himself thought uneasily of how, the month before, his friend Eriq had been called to the office because Eriq’s girlfriend had given birth to twin girls. And that was it for Eriq and Benjamin N. Cardozo High School. He dropped out the following week and Marcus hadn’t seen him since.

Whatever Marcus was preparing himself for as he loped down the hall to the main office, it certainly wasn’t the sight of his father, Bo, in brown pants, yellow shirt, brown sweater vest, his face twisted into an unrecognizable, sobbing mess. What could Marcus think but that his mother or sister had died? Without a word, Bo led Marcus out of the school and into a waiting police car. Marcus’s sister, LaTisha, was sitting in the back screaming and crying like her limbs had been severed, and so, Marcus concluded,
My mother is dead.

And really, Marcus thought now, wasn’t that the truth of the matter? With her incredible act of violence, Constance had ended her life. She had ripped herself from the family. Marcus and LaTisha no longer had a mother, Bo no longer had a wife. And yet here was Bo on the other end of the phone telling Marcus that they needed to support his mother. Marcus loved his father—Bo was a sturdy, hard-working man who went to church and put food on the table. But Bo had moments of ignorance and weakness and it took effort for Marcus not to feel sorry for his father. Bo worked at the printing press of the
New York Times
and so he had been one of the first people to read the incriminating articles, to see the ghoulish photographs. Right there in the newspaper that he himself printed! Marcus asked Bo why he didn’t quit on the spot, and Bo said, “I’ve had the job for seventeen years, son. It’s not something I would just walk out on.” The same was true for their apartment. The blood damage in the apartment was so bad that Marcus, Bo and LaTisha spent the subsequent twenty days in the Sunday Sermon Motel while disaster specialists cleaned up. Marcus and LaTisha had to share a room; the hotel had roaches and intermittent hot water, and it took Marcus an extra 40 minutes to get to school. The whole time, Marcus begged his father to consider moving. He couldn’t stomach the idea of living on the place where “it” happened.

“Where would we go?” Bo said. “Our apartment is rent-controlled. We’ll stick it out, and eventually people will forget. They’ll move on to the next thing. I’ve seen enough news pass before my eyes to know this to be true.”

Bo had remained loyal to Connie through it all, but Marcus felt differently. He was going to write this book, take the money, and leave his old life behind.

“Okay,” Marcus said to his father, just to say something. “I’ll give it some thought.”

“See that you do,” Bo said. “Are you having fun up there?”

“Yep.”

“Helping out?”

“Yes, Pop.”

“All right, then. We miss you, son.”

“I miss you, too, Pop,” Marcus said, feeling like he’d eaten nothing but guilt for breakfast.

“We’ll talk to you. Please write to your mother.”

“ ’Bye,” Marcus said. He hated to admit it, but he was relieved to hang up the phone.

That night, Marcus woke up when Garrett came home from his date with Piper. Marcus checked his clock: one-fifteen. He waited until Garrett used the bathroom, brushed his teeth, and returned to his room, then he went to the door and peered down the hallway. Dark. The door to Winnie’s room was a few yards away. It was hung crooked and didn’t close properly and something about that door, slightly ajar, was irresistible. But Marcus knew what would happen if he went into her room. Just the way Mama knew what would happen when she opened the door to see Angela. Marcus tried to steady his breathing; he should go back to sleep. But his throat ached with the need to talk to someone and Winnie was the best friend he had now.

The house made some eerie creaking noises beneath his feet. He stood at Winnie’s door and held onto the frame on either side, steadying himself. He was afraid that if he knocked, the door might swing open and she would be frightened and yell. So he knocked on the frame. The wood was dense and the sound of knocking was hard to hear, even to Marcus’s own ears. Three tough knocks, indistinguishable from the house’s other settling noises. Marcus was terrified that Garrett or Beth would come out into the hallway. He figured Garrett had stayed up late many nights trying to catch Marcus in this very act: going after his sister. And then Marcus remembered the horrible scene from
Native Son
where Bigger Thomas goes in to the rich white girl’s room—she asks him to—and he’s so afraid of getting caught that he kills her. Marcus shook his head. When they’d read the book in Ms. Marchese’s English class, Marcus never imagined he’d be involved with a white girl. But here he was, scaring himself. He would go back to bed.

Right then the door opened and Marcus saw a very narrow slice of Winnie. One eye, a sliver of gray sweatshirt, one toenail painted pink.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Marcus whispered. Already, he felt like a fool. He hadn’t considered what he would say if Winnie actually answered the door, and now that she had, he sounded like a Jehovah’s Witness. “Do you mind if we talk?”

She opened the door a little wider. He could see most of her mouth. “You want to come in?”

He noticed she was wearing only the sweatshirt and some underwear. He looked beyond her to her rumpled bed. He was making a huge mistake. He should wait and talk to her in the morning, on the beach. But he couldn’t make himself move away. He was sucked into Winnie’s gravitational pull.

Winnie took his hand. She had prayed to God every night since they got here that this would happen, and now she was so elated she practically pushed Marcus into her bed. She’d made out with Charlie Hess in the humid, chlorine-smelling corridors outside the pool, but that was the extent of her sex life. She was ready for more.

Kissing her, really kissing her, lying down on the bed, Marcus almost cried. Winnie fit in his arms perfectly, like a child would have. She was so small, so slender. He wanted to go slowly. He wanted to kiss her until sleep carried them both off. But Winnie was going crazy. Her hands were all over him, and she was warm. He was overwhelmed by having her so close, and he willed his body to relax. He had a sense that sex would change things, possibly even ruin them, and yet he was so turned on, he was rigid, pulsing, and utterly confused. He should have stayed in his own bed, in his own room! He pulled away from her and tried to get his bearings—they were falling off the bed. Talk-ing—what was the right posture for talking? He sat against the headboard and gathered the covers into his lap to hide himself from her.

Winnie sat up next to him. She knew she’d gotten him worked up and it made her proud. “So,” she said, teasing him. “What do you want to talk about?”