Summer People (5 page)

Garrett closed his eyes. More teenagers he was supposed to connect with. He couldn’t believe his mother. She barely kept it together in front of her family; what made her think she might make it through an evening with other people? The topic of Garrett’s father would inevitably come up. His mother would drink too much wine and start to cry. Maybe Winnie, too. The guests would sit dumbfounded and uncomfortable, the
teenage daughters
wishing they were anywhere but trapped in this house.

“No one’s moved to the Hamptons,” Garrett said irritably.

“The Alishes,” Beth said. “Carson Alish’s parents moved to the Hamptons.”

“That is so beside the point,” Garrett said.

“What point?”

“We’re supposed to be healing as a
family,
” Garrett said. “It’s bad enough you invited Marcus, and now we’re having some strange people over?”

“Just for dinner,” she said. “Besides, they’re not strange. David and I have known each other since we were sixteen years old. For six or seven summers, he was the best friend I had.”

The way his mother said the word “friend” tipped Garrett off immediately.

“So this is an old boyfriend, then?”

“He’s a friend. From a hundred years ago, Garrett. And he’s coming with his wife and kids.”

“Dad’s only been dead for three months,” Garrett said.

Beth fell into the chair next to him. “I know you’re having a hard time, sweetie. We all are. But I worry about you especially because you’re putting up such a strong front. You’re being tough for all of us. I’m sorry I keep telling you you’re the man of the house. That isn’t fair. I want you to know it’s okay to grieve— to cry, to scream, to be angry. But don’t misdirect your anger at me.”

“Except I
am
angry at you,” he said. “You invited your old boyfriend here for dinner. You invited Marcus here for the whole summer. We’re never going to have time alone, just our family.”

“We’ll make time,” she said, patting his hand. “We’ll take bike rides, we’ll walk on the beach, and we’ll find the right time and place to scatter Daddy’s ashes. Just you, me, and Winnie. I promise.”

Beth returned to the groceries and Garrett watched for a minute. Then he heard Winnie blabbering and he turned to see her and Marcus trudging up the steps from the beach. Winnie’s blond ponytail was dripping wet; she wore the sweatshirt over her bikini. Unbelievable. But she had taken it off before she went into the water. Garrett wondered if she felt lighter, freer, without it. It was an interesting concept: grief as something she could take off every once in a while, like when she wanted to enjoy the first swim of the summer. Garrett was almost envious of his sister and the way she’d appropriated their father’s sweatshirt and made it her own symbol:
I’m sad.
Garrett’s sadness churned inside of him like food that was impossible to digest.

Marcus wore a pair of cut-off jeans as his swimsuit. He looked like a kid who should be getting wet under a fire hydrant.

“Are you two hungry?” Beth asked. “I went shopping.”

“I’m not hungry,” Winnie said.

Garrett gauged Beth’s response to this, which was no response at all. She was definitely distracted. Winnie never ate anymore, and this was a manifestation of her grief that Garrett didn’t envy. Food made Winnie sick. If she was eating and accidentally thought about their father, she threw up. Every day at Danforth she bought lunch in the cafeteria and then walked it right out the front door and down half a block to where three homeless men in turbans camped out under some scaffolding. Every day Winnie gave them her lunch then walked back to school with the empty tray.

“Do you want anything, Marcus?” Beth asked. “A sandwich or something? We have smoked turkey here, and some cheese. Or I could fry you an egg.”

“Turkey’s fine,” Marcus said.

“I’ll make his sandwich,” Winnie said.

“I’ll make it,” Beth said. “You kids dry off.”

Garrett watched his mother make Marcus’s sandwich. It was as if she were entered in a sandwich-making contest. She’d bought three loaves of Something Natural herb bread, unsliced, so she brandished her serrated knife and cut two thick slices. Then mayonnaise, mustard, three leaves of lettuce that she washed and dried first, two pieces of Swiss Lorraine, and finally the smoked turkey that she draped over the cheese one slice at a time. She put the top on the sandwich, cut it in half diagonally. Arranged it on a plate with two handfuls of Cape Cod potato chips.

“Marcus, what would you like to drink?” she called out.

Garrett had seen enough. He’d made do with an untoasted bagel with cream cheese that had traveled with them in the warm car all the way from New York. But that wasn’t what got him mad. It was something else. Winnie and his mother fighting over who got to make Marcus’s sandwich, for starters. Garrett found the urn on the mantel in the living room and he carried it upstairs to his room. They’d been here all of three hours, and already he could tell this summer was going to suck.

Garrett’s room was on the side of the house that faced the ocean. The room had been built for Garrett’s great-great-uncle Burton, his great-grandfather’s brother. Burton had been a world traveler and insisted on a room where he could see the horizon. The room had two single beds with a nightstand between them. The lamp on the nightstand had a fringed shade. On the wall was a map of the world from 1932—no Israel, Garrett noticed, and the names and boundaries of the nations in Africa were different. The map was marked with multicolored pushpins, showing all the places across the planet where Uncle Burton had laid his head for the night. Singapore, Guatemala, Marrakech. Katmandu, the Fiji Islands, Santiago, Cape Town. Underneath the bed that Garrett didn’t use was Uncle Burton’s traveling trunk. Garrett and his father had sifted through it once, examining the masks, the kris knife from Malaysia, a ladle made out of a coconut, the postcards and cocktail napkins from fancy hotels in Europe.

Garrett placed the urn on top of the dresser. He wanted to convince his mother to let him take a year off before he went to college. He wanted to go to Perth, Australia. Garrett stepped out onto his one-person balcony, dreaming about a flat in Cottlesloe Beach, long drives into the Outback, sightings of emus and crocodiles and kangaroos, which he’d heard were as plentiful as rabbits. Arch had spent a year in Perth between college and law school, and he told Garrett all about the Fremantle Doctor, which was the name of a breeze that came off the water in January, and about the sheilas, a term for gorgeous Australian women with
Baywatch
bodies.

Garrett wanted to live a life exactly like his father’s—Austra-lia, college, law school. A career as a Manhattan attorney, a wife and two kids, including a son of his own. He could then pick up where his father’s life tragically ended. Arch’s plane crash was, quite simply, the worst disaster imaginable. The plane was a Cessna Skylark. It had been gassed up at the Albany airport, and checked by mechanics. The flight pattern was cleared by the FAA, by the tower in Albany, by the tower in LaGuardia. The pilot had over two thousand hours of flight time. But he was only twenty-five years old, and the plane had propellers, like the toy planes Garrett used to play with as a kid.

When they recovered the body, and the black box, two days after the crash, Garrett had wanted to see both. He wanted to see his father’s body; he wanted to listen to the flight recorder. But no one was willing to let him do either. The managing partner at his father’s firm, Trent Trammelman, identified the body. Garrett summoned the courage to ask Trent,
What did he looklike ? Please tell me.

He looked fine,
Trent said.
Peaceful.
That word, “peaceful,” clued Garrett right in: Trent was lying. And so Garrett was left to imagine his father’s body. Blue, bloated, broken. Garrett’s father, his dad, whom he knew so well and had seen happy and healthy and handily in control of every situation that arose since Garrett had been born, was altered forever in a matter of seconds. Killed. Boom, just like that.

The cause of the crash was ruled as ice on the wings. There had been a driving freezing rain and it was dark—the worst possible flying conditions. There was a mechanical failure— something called a “boot” on one of the wings was supposed to expand and crack off the ice, but it malfunctioned, and one wing grew heavier than the other. The pilot changed altitudes several times, but nothing worked. The pilot couldn’t recover. The plane went into a spin and crashed. The thing that Garrett hated to think of even more than the condition of his father’s body after the crash was those seconds or minute when the plane spun toward earth. What could those seconds possibly have been like for his father? Did his father scream? Did his father think about Garrett, Winnie, their mother? He must have. The only reaction Garrett wanted to imagine from his father was anger. His father would have been yelling at the pilot to regain control.
I have kids!
he would have said.
I have a beautiful wife!
Garrett chose to believe his father was too angry to be scared, too furious to cry out in fear for his life. But those images slid into Garrett’s brain despite his best efforts to push them away: his father crying, stricken with terror.

Better to watch your parent die of cancer, Garrett thought. Like Katie Corrigan’s mother who got breast cancer and died a year later. Then, at least, you could prepare yourself. You could say good-bye. But Garrett’s father had been ripped from their lives suddenly, leaving behind a hole that was ragged and bloody, smoking.

Garrett stayed in his room until the sun sank into the water. His walls turned a shade of dark pink; the urn was a silhouette against the wall. There was a knock at the door.

“Who is it?” Only one answer would be acceptable.

“Mom. Can I come in?”

“Okay,” he said.

She stood in the doorway. “We miss you downstairs. I’m about to start dinner. What are you doing up here?”

“Sleeping,” he said. “Thinking.”

“What are you thinking about?” she asked. She glanced at the urn.

I’m a seventeen-year old boy. I need my father.
As if there were anything else to think about. “Nothing,” he said.

T
bree days later, Marcus felt like the main character in that Disney movie where the little boy is adopted by wild animals and lives among them in the jungle. Here it was, two o’clock in the afternoon, and he was lying on a beach. There was no one else for miles, except Winnie, who lay in a chaise next to him wearing purple bikini bottoms and her Princeton sweatshirt. She seemed intent on getting a tan—all shiny with baby oil— but she refused to take off the sweatshirt. Except for when she swam, which she and Marcus did whenever they got too warm. This, Marcus thought, was what people meant by “the good life.” Sitting on a deserted beach in the hot sun—no bugs, no trash, no other people kicking sand onto his blanket or blaring Top 40 stations on the boom box like at Jones Beach—and he could swim in the cool water whenever he wanted. Plus, he had a handmaiden. Winnie made lunch for both of them—smoked turkey sandwiches and tall glasses of Coca-Cola that she spiked with Malibu rum. At first, when Marcus tasted the rum in his drink, he balked. Because he did
not
want to have his summer over before it even began for getting caught drinking. He said so to Winnie and she promised him that they would just have this one cocktail—he loved how she called it a “cocktail”—and that her mother was out doing a two-hour jog and would never know. The Malibu rum had been sitting in the liquor cabinet for a couple of years; she and Garrett dipped into it all the time, even with her father around, she said, and they had never gotten caught.

The mention of Garrett made Marcus uneasy. Garrett was lying up on the deck, presumably because he never swam and didn’t like to get all sandy, but Marcus suspected it was because he wanted to keep his distance. And up on the deck he could watch everything Marcus and Winnie were doing. Like Big Brother. Like God.

Marcus squinted at Winnie. “If you’re so concerned about getting tan, you should take your sweatshirt off.”

“You just want a better look at my body,” Winnie said.

Marcus found that funny enough to laugh, but he didn’t want to piss her off. “Why do you always wear it?”

“It was Daddy’s.”

Immediately, Marcus’s reality kicked back in. Despite the hot day, he felt the chill of humiliation as he recalled the worst personal shame of his life. At the beginning of swim season, he’d come out of the showers to find the locker room abandoned, to find his locker jimmied open, to find all of his clothes missing, even his wet bathing suit. He stood in his towel, shivering, not because he was cold, but because he’d thought the guys on the swim team, at least, would cut him some slack about his mother. But no: they, too, wanted to expose him. Marcus sat for a long while on the wooden bench by his empty locker, too mortified to wander the school’s hallways for help, too ashamed to contact his father, before he thought to call Arch, collect, at his office. Arch came all the way out to Queens with a gym bag and Marcus got dressed in Arch’s sweats. The very same Princeton sweatshirt that Winnie was wearing. If Arch had asked a single question, Marcus probably would have broken down. But Arch just offered him the gym bag and said,
Put these on and let’s get you home.

Winnie, it seemed, was trying to get his attention. “Marcus?” she said.

“Huh?”

“Now can I ask you something?”

“What?” he said, warily.

“Why do you lie out in the sun when you’re already black?” She giggled.

Marcus tried to relax. If she was going to wear the damn sweatshirt all summer, there was nothing he could do about it except let it be a reminder of how far he’d come. How he didn’t let other people get to him anymore. How he’d shown the jackasses on the swim team something by placing second in every single meet all season. Placing second
on purpose
so his name wouldn’t make it into any headlines. “Black people get tans, too, you know. Look.” He lowered the waistband of his shorts a fraction of an inch so that Winnie could see his tan line. “In winter I get kind of ashy. Besides, I like the feel of the sun on my skin.”

“Me, too,” Winnie said. She pushed up her sleeves and rolled up the bottom of her sweatshirt so that her stomach showed. “You’re right,” she said. “That’s better.” She picked up the bottle of baby oil and squirted some on her stomach and rubbed it in with slow, downward strokes that made Marcus think she was trying to be all sexy for him. The poor child, as his mother used to say.

Winnie had a crush on him. Anyone could see it. The past two nights she’d enticed Marcus into playing board games after dinner. Marcus asked if there were anything to do in town, and Beth offered to drive them in for an ice cream or the movies, but there were only two movie theaters showing one movie apiece that all of them had already seen, and Winnie turned down the ice cream without a reason. Not going into town left them with what Marcus’s mother used to call Nothing to Do but Stand on Your Head and Spit in Your Shoe Syndrome. So Winnie pulled a stack of board games out of a closet. The boxes of the games were disintegrating and some games were missing pieces and dice, and the bank in Monopoly only had three one-dollar bills but Winnie cut some more out of blank typing paper. They made do. Marcus and Winnie spent two long evenings building pretend real estate fortunes and getting out of jail free.

It was as different from his life in Queens as anything could be. Winnie kept apologizing because
There’s practically nothing to do here at night, not until I get my license, anyway.
She had some notion that Marcus went out every night at home, clubbing, or hanging out on the streets. But in fact, at home, Marcus stayed off the streets. He couldn’t afford to get into any trouble, and the best way to stay out of it was to stay home. Last summer, he’d worked all day on the maintenance crew at Queens College—mowing lawns, trimming hedges, recindering the running track—and by the time he got home, his ass was kicked. He ate dinner with his family and then either watched TV or went over to Vanessa Lydecker’s apartment and drank a beer with Vanessa’s brother and fooled around with Vanessa in her bedroom.

Before the murders, Marcus’s family was nothing special. His father worked at the printing press for the
New York Times
as a supervisor, and his mother, with one year of Ivy League education and three years of city college, was a reading specialist who split her time between I.S. 224 and P.S. 136. She tutored kids on weekends for extra money, which she tucked into Marcus’s college account. And then, on October seventh, Constance murdered her sister-in-law Angela Bennett and Angela’s nine-year-old daughter, Candy Cohut. Constance stabbed Angela to death, and in the process fatally wounded Candy. Even now, when Marcus thought about the murders, it seemed so incredible it was as if it had happened to somebody else.

“I’m going to eat my sandwich,” Marcus said. He’d drained his cocktail and the ocean began to take on a wavy shimmer. He needed food.

“Okay,” Winnie said. “Enjoy.”

“Aren’t you going to eat?” he asked.

“I’ll wait until later.”

In just three days, Marcus had learned what this meant: Winnie would let her sandwich sit for another hour or two, then throw it away, claiming the mayonnaise had gone bad.

“You know why you’re so skinny, don’t you?”

Winnie didn’t respond.

“Because you don’t eat. If my father had to sit here and watch you waste a sandwich with turkey on it that costs, like, ten dollars a pound, he’d throw a French fit on your ass.” Marcus took a lusty bite of his sandwich. Even the food here tasted better. These sandwiches he’d been eating, for example. The bread was homemade, the smoked turkey was real turkey, not some white meat paste that was processed to taste like turkey, the lettuce was crisp, the tomato ripe. Beth used gourmet mustard. It was so superior to any sandwich that could be purchased in Marcus’s neighborhood or in his school cafeteria, that it was as if he’d been eating cardboard and ashes all these years and only now had stumbled upon actual food. “I mean, really,” Marcus said. “Why don’t you eat? Do you have some kind of problem? There was a girl at my school who had anorexia. She walked around looking like she had AIDS or something.”

“I don’t have anorexia,” Winnie said. “And I don’t have AIDS.”

“But you look like a skeleton. I haven’t seen you eat the whole time you’ve been here.”

“I eat when I’m hungry,” she said.

Marcus finished the first half of his sandwich, then wished he’d saved some of his cocktail to wash it down with. He eyed Winnie’s cocktail. She’d give it to him if he asked her for it. Then he remembered that Beth had slipped two bottles of Evian into their beach bag. That woman was improving in his eyes. Marcus drank one of the bottles down to the bottom. He felt much, much better.

“There are people in Queens, you know, and the rest of New York City, who don’t eat because they can’t afford to.”

“I’m well aware of that, thanks,” Winnie said. “I do my part to feed the homeless.”

“Do you?”

She sat bolt upright. “For your information, I gave my lunch to homeless people every day this spring.”

“Good for you,” Marcus said. He believed her. Although he’d only known Winnie for three days, he could tell that was exactly the kind of thing she would do. She loved charity cases. Him, for example. “But you should take care of yourself while you’re at it.”

Winnie stood up and her sweatshirt dropped to her waist. She put on her sunglasses, snapped up her towel and headed up the stairs without a word. Marcus had pissed off his handmaiden by telling her the truth. She looked like a skeleton. If she didn’t start eating soon, she was going to make herself sick.

Well, fine then. Marcus concentrated on his sandwich. Actually, it tasted better now that he was alone. He noticed that Winnie had left her sandwich behind, and since there was no hope that she’d ever eat it, and since the rum made him extra hungry, he finished that one, too, and drank the second bottle of Evian, and while he was at it, polished off the remains of Winnie’s cocktail. Then he lay back on his blanket and listened to the sound of the ocean. It was almost pleasant enough for him to forget about his worries. His mother. The photo of Candy, all covered up except for her shiny black shoes. The unwritten book. The tactile memory of five crisp hundred dollar bills that his editor, Zachary Celtic, handed him on the day they sealed the book deal with a handshake. Zachary gave him the cash with the understanding that at the end of the summer Marcus would have fifty pages to show him, and an outline for the remainder of the book. Marcus spent the money in less than a week, buying items for his trip to Nantucket that he’d hoped would convince the Newtons that he wasn’t a charity case after all: the all-wrong leather bag, the uncomfortable dock shoes, the portable CD player. The best thing Marcus bought was his white shirt. He’d taken the subway into Manhattan to buy it—at Paul Stuart, where a young German woman waited on him as though he might pull a gun on her at any moment. He charmed her, though, and by the end of the transaction, she suggested the monogram and threw it in for free.

Now that the money was gone (there had been some idiotspending, too: two or three meals at Roy Rogers, a ten-dollar scratch ticket, a bouquet of red roses for his sister LaTisha as an apology for leaving her alone with their father all summer), Marcus felt an urgent pressure to write. But yesterday afternoon when he’d closed the door of his white bedroom and sat on the bed to write, he couldn’t think of how to start. Zachary Celtic had spewed forth all sorts of garbagy ideas when he pitched the book, but Marcus pushed those phrases from his mind, leaving a blank slate. And so instead of writing, he’d spent ninety minutes doing a line drawing of what he saw out his window—low lying brush, a rutted dirt road, the pond in the distance.

Zachary Celtic was a friend of Nick Last Name Unknown. Nick was the boyfriend of Marcus’s English teacher, Ms. Marchese. Nick showed up at school a lot wearing gold rings and suits paired with shiny ties, and since no kid at Benjamin N. Cardozo High School was truly stupid, it was agreed upon that Nick was in the mob. For this reason, everyone behaved in Ms. Marchese’s class and everyone, even the absolute lowlifes and basketball players, turned in the assignments. Marcus liked English class anyway, and he liked Ms. Marchese, because she was the only teacher whose attitude toward Marcus didn’t change after the murders, and plus, she was always telling him he was a gifted writer. So his guard wasn’t up like it should have been, maybe, when Nick stopped by at the end of class one day with a better-looking guy in a better-looking suit and Ms. Marchese said that the second guy was a book editor from Manhattan and he was there to talk to Marcus.

Since October seventh, Marcus had fielded hundreds of phone calls from reporters, producers, publicists—from New York One, the
New York Post,
the
Daily News, The Geraldo Rivera
Show.
Everyone wanted the inside scoop on his mother. She was a black inner-city woman who had made it as far as the Ivy League—how did she end up a baby killer? In response to all publicity, Marcus’s father had issued these directives.
Politely decline, then hang up!
If photographers come to the door, tell them through the chain that they will never get a picture inside the apartment. But something about the phrase “book editor in Manhattan” got past Marcus’s radar. He thought, stupidly, that this guy was interested in him for a reason other than that he was a
murderer’s son
. He thought the editor had shown up at their high school in Queens wearing a thousand-dollar suit (which, when Marcus asked, Zachary told him he’d gotten at Paul Stuart) because Marcus was a
gifted writer.

Nick and Zachary Celtic invited Marcus to lunch. Although it was two-thirty and Marcus had already eaten lunch in the cafeteria at noon, he agreed to go along. They went to a diner down the street from the school, and after Nick made it clear that Zachary was picking up the check, Marcus went crazy ordering a roast beef club, fries with gravy, chocolate milkshake, lemon chiffon pie. Zachary asked Marcus all kinds of questions about how he liked school (
fine
), why he liked English class (
liked to read
), who his favorite writers were (
Salinger, Faulkner, John Edgar Wideman
). It was as Marcus was slipping into a food coma induced by this second lunch that Zachary announced that he was the true crime editor at Dome Books and that he wanted to offer Marcus thirty thousand dollars to write a first-person account of life with his mother, before and after the murders.