We coaxed Tripp into the wicker love seat on the porch, far from the door and the stairs. Propped up his feet, settled a pillow beneath his head. Tom took the damned surfboard and wet suit down to the basement to hide them. I would have preferred sending them straight to the dump.
I stood there for a long time watching over Tripp, as if he was a baby. His skin nearly as soft and plump as a child’s too. So unfair that he should be this unlined, unmarked by life. Hadn’t we experienced all the same things? Had I simply felt them all more deeply, and they’d carved themselves into my face like a painful tattoo? His hair only dusted with gray, mine overcome with it. His eyelashes still long. Sometimes when I look back on our photos, I almost look like his mother. Or older sister, at least. Is this why, I wonder—so I’d love him even now when he was broken in two, so clearly not himself? Only when he stripped off his clothes, layer by layer, could you truly see where gravity had reached him, where flesh hung off bone, where skin had given up, let itself down, down, down, in relief. I look like that too, everywhere. My breasts are deflated and, at the same time, relaxed, no longer tired of all the trying and posing. The body at rest, finally. That’s what I see at dusk down by the water, when I bike over to that sliver of public way next to the Galley some of the locals call the Gaza Strip. The ladies unabashed in their flowered suits and bathing caps, their husbands nowhere in sight. It’s the same thing I see at art museums, the Botticellian happiness of not trying to be anything you are not. Relief. Joy. Gravity.
“We have to watch him more carefully,” I whispered through the screen door to Tom and John. They sat next to each other, checking their phones, silent as toddlers playing with their own trucks. They stood up, walked out to the porch, as if I needed them then, at that instant.
“You mean we have to watch him,” Tom said.
“We’ll work in shifts.”
“Alice,” John said softly, “he probably needs to go into a facility.”
“I am all too aware of that,” I said and sighed.
“Maybe I can help with the research?”
“Yes, John, that would be lovely.”
“Or Caroline probably knows some places,” he added.
“Does she now? Has she been planning for our demise?”
“You shoulda quit while you were ahead, John,” Tom said.
“I just mean she knows a lot of people who’ve gone through similar things. With parents and…grandparents, et cetera.”
Tom and I exchanged looks. He had the same skin as his father, plump and golden, the German in them, I supposed. Almost buttery looking, delectable, as he was as a child. Caroline more thin skinned, stretched, brittle. Was that all it was? The only difference, destiny in skin?
Sydney came out to the porch and whispered, “Is Grandpop asleep?”
“Yes,” John said. “Are you feeling tired too?”
“Nope.”
“All the excitement didn’t wear you out?” Tom asked, looking up from his phone.
“It wasn’t that exciting, because we never got to that exciting place he was talking about,” she said and sighed. “Guess he didn’t drive fast enough.”
“So he…drove slowly?” I said, relieved that he’d done something, finally, right.
“Yeah. People were honking at us because he couldn’t find the turn.”
John looped an arm around her shoulder. “Well, we were worried because that, um, that van didn’t belong to Pop, you know?”
“When he told me to get in, he said he was borrowing it. And that we’d be right back. And that it was okay with Mom.”
Everyone nodded. It made perfect sense, and I was relieved that they weren’t going to blame the child for doing something that seemed natural—going for a drive with her grandfather.
“Well, always check with us first,” John said.
Caroline had disappeared, as she sometimes does, nowhere to be found. Soaking in a bath, taking a power walk, I didn’t know. I just knew she was prone to this, to not being around when she was needed. Letting John take up the slack. So worried about her father and her daughter, and yet she would leave them both and go off to do whatever.
Oh, the thought of me doing that when Tripp and I were younger! When I think of all that could have gone wrong or gone undone. I used to tell my girlfriends that Tripp couldn’t make a sandwich without me in the house. Didn’t know where the knives were, the toppings, the bread. The questions I fielded from upstairs: Where are the napkins? Where is the milk? Tom and Caroline innocently asking him for something while I bathed, and him keeping it a secret that he did not know how to fill their simple, earnest needs. He’d make a joke, tickle them, suggest a game, anything to kill time before their mother came downstairs and could do whatever needed to be done. But I didn’t care, no, that’s the truth of it, because I was particular. I preferred things done a certain way, and he would never be able to perform them up to snuff. My friends joked about “training” their husbands, but mine would have required boot camp.
My children learned how to work, to be independent, though there is nothing like adolescence to make you throw up your hands and stop trying. The only way to deal with it, really. I see Caroline now with Sydney, though, doing the opposite. Hanging in there, on the sidelines, as if she can still change the outcome. And I want to shout, to scream from the rooftops, It won’t work. Don’t waste your breath! Just let her go, and when she’s twenty-one, she’ll find her own way home if you leave out snacks and vodka for her friends!
But no, Caroline is always hovering, always suggesting. Why don’t you. How about you. Go here, go there, take this, make that. Ninety-nine percent of what she says is dismissed, of course, because who wants to hear suggestions all the time. Who wants a drone in their ear? And then she starts in on me, suggesting activities for Sydney and me to do together. To create memories, which is a phrase I’d like to banish from the dictionary forever. I don’t want to go catch hermit crabs. I want to exclaim over them when she brings them to me! She needs playmates, and she needs a family, each distinct from the other.
When Tom and Caroline were young, they only came home when they were hungry or bleeding. They swam; they took out the dinghy in the harbor; they rode their bikes to the yacht club to play ping-pong or find a tennis match. And yes, they sometimes found more adventure than they bargained for. A dead body, tangled in the spartina down at Jetties after a storm. Broken beer glass on the beach when they were running barefoot. These things happen.
Caroline was so strong and brave as a child, she was almost like a boy—because I made her that way. There was no makeup on a vanity for her to play with, no hairspray, no perfume, nothing but Chap Stick. We gave her sports equipment, lessons, not dresses. But now she’s turned into a nervous Nellie, a veritable handwringer around her daughter. Once I was visiting and had to pick Sydney up at dance class when her mother ran late—and Caroline gave me their secret code word! Can you imagine? Koala. As if that could keep her safe. As if she should be taught that one should be wary of grandparents too! Why don’t you just lock her up until she’s eighteen? I’d said. And Caro had looked at me with those hazel eyes that could turn almost yellow when she was angry and informed me that the world is a dangerous place. Well, of course it can be! I’m not an idiot. But it’s as if she doesn’t realize it’s the exposure to things—the nicks and bruises—that form you, that make you strong and certain.
Would she have ever married a gentle man like John if she hadn’t encountered a couple of rough young men in her own backyard?
“Could we fly off-island and get him seen in Boston?” Tom asked.
“Getting him seen isn’t the issue, Tom. He’s been seen.”
“Well, maybe he needs more tests. Maybe they missed something?”
“Caroline and I wondered if he was having a reaction to medication,” John said.
“He’s not on any medication,” I said and sighed. “And he has a doctor appointment scheduled when we get back.”
“I guess you can’t hire a bodyguard on Nantucket,” Tom replied.
“Oh, you probably can get one on the Cape,” John said and smiled.
Tom laughed. It was something Tripp always said, that you could get it on the Cape, as if that was easy. As if that was close or convenient when you’re a two-hour ferry ride away.
“But he needs a kind of hybrid. A nurse-slash-commando.”
“He’ll have to make do with you two,” I said. “One of you can be the nurse and the other commando.”
“I call commando,” Tom said. That was the world, wasn’t it? No one wanted to be a nurse to anyone anymore, and that was that. Not even me. Especially me.
“So we let him sleep, then what?”
“Then do something that isn’t criminal,” Tom said.
“And that isn’t surfing,” Sydney added, and we all laughed.