21
As far as Michael knew, he was the only person aside from Mary Alice who could get to the old place without directions. Once he started driving, it’s the only place he ever wanted to go, even if Mary Alice refused to step foot there. “You’re more than welcome to go; it’s gonna be yours one day,” his mother had told him the first time he grabbed the rabbit’s foot off the wall. “But I’m not going to take you.”
“Fine,” he said. “Then give me directions.”
She had expected the day would eventually come, but that didn’t make it any easier. To explain the many roads and landmarks to the old place was like handing Michael a key to her most terrible memories, but he was persistent, and more than that, he was his mother’s son. She had no choice but to give him a place to make memories of his own.
The summer after his sixteenth birthday, Michael spent most days at the old place. At first, he went alone to swim and read in peace. Some weeks later he invited Kenny, calling it an “escape,” even though they had nothing all that dramatic to be escaping from. His friendships were few but fine, and his mother was cold and often sad but mostly harmless. There was never friction between them, despite the gaping hole that was his father, but Mary Alice’s allowance of space, the gift of time left alone to get to know himself, created an unintended rift. He’d never felt this happy before, far away from his mother, and decided it could only mean that even more distance would do nothing but make him happier. While floating on their backs in the oppressive summer heat, he and Kenny made plans to move off together, somewhere far away from Billington. The old place quickly became a portal to their potential selves, the place their friendship, and its future, secured its roots. They spent the next two summers there, sometimes swimming with their other friends—Mary Alice’s biggest fear was an accident in the water and she reactivated the landline in case of an emergency—but usually alone as a pair, making plans for the future they couldn’t bear to admit would likely never come true. They were smart enough to know how things worked out for boys like them. They’d seen this town pull everyone back, sometimes so tightly and so far underwater that they never came back up.
They rarely talked about Samuel’s death, and when it did come up, it came in like a breeze, when the two of them sat beside each other after a dip. “Do you remember him?” Kenny asked once.
“Sort of,” Michael said. “I tell my mom I do, because I know it makes her happy, but I don’t remember much. A few dinners, him in the car, a trip we took to San Antonio.”
Kenny nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Michael said before jumping back into the water and cutting the conversation short with a splash.
The night of their graduation, the two of them knew they would end up at the old place long before Michael had suggested it. The party was only two miles away, and neither of them liked parties all that much to begin with, so when Michael held a Bud Light to his lips and asked if Kenny wanted to bail the party, he didn’t have to explain where he had in mind.
Once both of them parked—they had driven to the party at the Martins’ separately—Michael pulled the six-pack they swiped out of his trunk and walked it to the water, where he dropped it between the two chairs. Kenny turned on the light on the corner of the house and brought the stereo outside. They drank beers and talked about how lame the entire day had been—the robes, the hats, the reception, the crying, the party—but eventually ran out of things to say.
And that’s when it happened: the first touch. Or the hundredth. Maybe even the thousandth. They’d been best friends for years, that was the thing. They had touched each other when they swam together, they had touched each other when they worked on assignments together, and they had touched each other when they played video games together, but they had never touched like this. So when Kenny’s hand slowly rested itself on Michael’s leg as they stared out at the darkness, the only sound the chorus of crickets and birds, Michael didn’t flinch. After expecting that hand for years, he felt nothing but relief. “We should go inside,” he said.
Kenny nodded. “We should.”
On the edge of the bed, Michael held Kenny’s face in his hand. The only word he got out was “I,” before they’d collapsed on each other, kissing delicately, then passionately as the stereo continued to play faintly outside the window.
Michael laughed as he took off his clothes, and Kenny did the same. They laughed because they didn’t know what else to do, and they laughed because they were happy. Look at them—naked in bed together, about to have sex—while all their friends were getting drunk in a barn.
“I want to do something,” Kenny said before nervously leaning over and taking Michael into his mouth. “Is that OK?” he asked, looking up at his friend.
“Yes,” Michael said. “It’s OK. I mean, it’s good.”
When Kenny came back up, Michael bent down and did the same, quietly relieved he hadn’t been the one to start. Neither of them had known exactly what to expect on their drive there that night, but when they were finished, lying together above the sheets, they felt they had done it all mostly right. Even better, they were eager to try again.
When Michael woke up, Kenny was putting on his clothes. “Oh, are you embarrassed?” he said coyly.
“Ha-ha,” Kenny said. “I just thought it wouldn’t look great if we got home at the same time. So I’m going to head out now, but trust me when I say it’s not because I want to.” He walked back to the bed, where Michael lay with his arms propped behind him. A sort of victorious pose, a performance for the man he was starting to think he could love, if such a thing were even possible. “I’m going to kiss you right now,” Kenny said.
“I’m going to let you.” And he did.
When Kenny had one foot out the door, he turned back to his friend. “I think this is going to be a hell of a summer,” he said with a wink. Michael laughed. Kenny had never winked at Michael in his life. Maybe he’d been saving it for this moment all along.
When Katherine slammed on the brakes in the church parking lot, she could see her sister on the edge of the lawn staring out at something that wasn’t there, and knew she was too late. She jumped out and ran to her.
“Mary Alice, was he here? Did you talk to him?”
“He’s gone.”
“What did he say? Where did he go?”
Mary Alice was frozen, wholly stuck between memories. “The old place. He must have gone to the old place.” Katherine grabbed on to her sister and walked her toward the rental car. “Get inside,” she said, easing her into the passenger seat. “I’ll drive, but you’ll have to tell me how to get there.”
“Give me your keys,” Mary Alice said, swiping them from her sister’s hands. “I’m going alone.”
Katherine didn’t protest. She didn’t even speak. She just watched her rental car slowly pull out of the parking space, and drive out of view at the most normal speed imaginable, easing its way into the distance in no hurry at all, confident as could be that it would make it to its destination.
Michael had been everywhere in Mary Alice’s life since the night he left, less a ghost than a gas, floating invisibly alongside the nitrogen and oxygen and carbon dioxide, everywhere there was something for her to breathe. But the moment she laid eyes on him in line at the picnic, back in Billington, home at last, he’d never felt more distant. The version of her son she had spent twelve years imagining was destroyed the second he walked into her peripheral vision, replaced with something bursting with angry, overwhelming life. But even though, to Mary Alice, he was a refraction of himself, tiny reflections filtered to pieces of glass to create the illusion of a grown man, Michael looked like the son she remembered. The son who told her he loved her every day of his life, even that final summer spent at the old place, when he didn’t have time for much else.
It was twelve years before, and they had just returned from the funeral. The clear, bright heat of summer had finally crept in after a few mild May weeks, and they broke a sweat seconds after stepping from the roaring air-conditioning of Mary Alice’s car into the sticky garage. Kenny’s funeral had been an hours-long affair, moving slowly from the church to the cemetery, three slow-moving miles away, and then back to the hall, where Mary Alice marveled at Ellie’s composure. This is how a grieving mother should behave at her child’s funeral, she thought. With sturdy grace and respectful appreciation.
When Michael suggested that they stand beside their grieving friend and hold her hand, Mary Alice shook her head. “It would only make it harder,” she said in a pitiful whisper. “Just let her get through this day.”
His resentment over what he considered his mother’s callousness grew as they went through the motions of the funeral, and he coped by sneaking swigs of whiskey in the bathroom, and behind the hall, and, daringly, in the passenger seat of his mother’s car while she was talking with Maria and Dottie after the burial. He withheld his tears as much as he could, out of an abundance of paranoid caution, but had to channel his excess mental energy somewhere. He was on the verge of breaking, so instead of focusing on his secret sadness, he gave in to the whiskey’s advances and turned to anger. His mother was ruining this day. His mother was making it impossible to grieve. His mother would never understand his pain, and for some reason she wouldn’t even try. After she told him the news, he spent hours crying alone, staring at the door and hoping she would barge in and tell him everything would be OK. But she didn’t. She stayed downstairs and wallowed in her own shame instead of making certain her son wouldn’t feel any of his own. So when they were finally home and the door to the garage closed and Mary Alice let out a big what-a-day kind of sigh, Michael decided his mother was going to learn.
“Aren’t you going to ask how that was for me?” he said, standing beside the breakfast table with his hands in his pockets.
“I know how it was for you. It was the same as it was for me. It was awful when your father . . .” she said with a surprising bite before stopping herself and slowing down. “When your father died I was a complete mess. You’ll never understand why, and I hope you never do, but it can be worse. You’re lucky.”
“I’m lucky? Lucky?!” Michael was screaming now, and the smell of whiskey finally hit his mother’s nose. “Are you hearing yourself? He was my best friend, Mom, and you haven’t said you were sorry. You haven’t asked how I’m feeling. You haven’t seemed to figure out that this is hell for me, and instead somehow think it’s all fine because it could have been worse.”
“His mother was my best friend, too.”
“She still is. So congratulations, your best friend is alive.”
She walked to him and grabbed his arms, pulling them down to his side and looking at him from head to toe. When did he grow into such a handsome man? she wondered. When did he start looking just like Samuel? She shoved those questions aside and cleared her throat. “I’m sorry. But I’m trying to process this, too, right alongside you. We can talk. We can talk right now. For as long as you want. I’m sure it will help us both.”
A tear fell down each of his cheeks but with Mary Alice still clutching his hands, he couldn’t wipe them away. “Mom, I was,” he said, gasping for air. “I didn’t fall asleep at the Martins’ that night.”
Her grip loosened. “What do you mean?”
“I was lying,” he said. “We both, Kenny and I, left the Martins’ that night and went to the old place.”
“Just the two of you?” she asked, already knowing the answer.
They exchanged nods, and Mary Alice touched a finger to her brow, an impulse she couldn’t explain even at that moment. Maybe it was just something to do besides considering her son’s admission—that’s what it was, right, an admission—a way to use her body for literally anything else. But he kept talking, refusing to let her ignore the truth.
“The party wasn’t fun, too many people, too loud, too much happening. You know I’ve never liked parties, neither of us did. So we wanted to leave, and the old place was only ten minutes away.”
“So you both spent the night there.”
“Mom, I was the last person to see him alive. He left, and then,” he said, shrugging helplessly.
“Michael, do you realize what this means? Kenny’s accident happened after he left my property. Where he was drinking beer with my son. Who else knows about this?”
“Just you.”
“When were you going to say something to me?”
“I didn’t know. I just can’t hold it in anymore. We didn’t want to leave at the same time because we didn’t want anyone to see us drive back together, so I told him to go first and that I’d clean up and leave a little later. It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal. And he wasn’t even drunk at that point. They checked that.”
“You and your daddy,” she whispered into the space between them before her head fell into her hands.
Michael stood motionless apart from subtle tremors of his quiet sobbing. “It’s not my fault, is it?”
She didn’t stir.
“Mom? Tell me it’s not my fault.”
The debris of his revelations and her own grief swirled together like a funnel cloud inside her: Samuel and Kenny and Michael and all their secrets darkening the sky above the old place. Even her own, there they were, too. When she finally looked up at him, she took a deep breath. She would not be rash. She would not say something she didn’t mean. So it surprised both of them when she said, “I can’t.”
Michael could let out only one word, and it left his mouth with a squeak. “What?”
“I don’t think he would have died if not for you.”
Michael would never know if she had meant Kenny or his father, but it didn’t matter because the words should never have been spoken at all. In neither case were they true; they were an exaggeration, a product of raw, unfocused grief. But they set off something in Michael that had been stewing for a long time: a primal, instinctive rage at his mother, his life, this town. And when he threatened to leave—for good, he swore—Mary Alice called his bluff. The seconds or minutes or even hours that followed were so dark and blurry in both their memories that they may as well not have even existed. All that remained of that time is that at one point Mary Alice simply looked up and Michael was gone. Then, of course, the obituary. Ellie saw it first, and when she banged on the door, already in tears, Mary Alice couldn’t find the words to tell her it wasn’t true, or that she didn’t write it, or that she suspected Michael sent it himself out of anger. She couldn’t even find the words to tell herself, so she gave Ellie a shoulder and let her cry. She let everyone cry, all summer long, but kept her own tears to herself. And when Michael sent Mary Alice a letter apologizing for the cruel stunt six months later, just before Christmas, she kept his confession to herself, too. He wrote her every month, always with an ever-changing Manhattan return address so that the checks she sent would be delivered promptly, and within a year began sending empty envelopes just so she would know he was alive. She never wrote him back, but she always wrote a check. And there lay her biggest regret: not killing him, exactly, but letting him stay dead.
Samuel’s life insurance policy paid for his son’s tuition at New York University, where he had secretly applied and received a decent grant. When he graduated, it paid his rent. And when Michael got a decent job, his father’s money went toward excessive bar tabs and car rides home. There were so many empty exchanges between them, so many checks made out to cash, that she always figured their relationship would get discovered somehow, but it never did. Maybe no one cared. Maybe no one even looked. Maybe they thought it was all too sad to investigate.
In New York, where Michael quickly thrived, he only opened up to a handful of friends. But everyone who came to New York from somewhere else was escaping at least a sliver of their past, so perhaps they never felt it urgent enough for them to scrutinize; Michael was just like the rest of them. There was one friend, though, who gave his story a second look. Leslye was also escaping a family of her own, and when, one night, she asked if he would ever consider reconciliation, Michael responded as though nothing could be more unthinkable. “Why would I go back?” he answered without even taking a beat. They had been drinking—drinking was what they had in common—and he collapsed into her shoulder sitting in their favorite booth half an hour before last call.
“I don’t know,” she finally said after giving it an honest thought. Some mothers were just toxic, she guessed, quietly thankful hers wasn’t. “Maybe you shouldn’t.” Like so many of his friendships, their relationship was short, intense, and built on the backs of bars with good happy hours. That’s how Michael was with people: he would get so close to someone that he passed right through them, always moving in the same direction, never even looking back. It kept him from pain, until it caused someone else’s.
Hitting rock bottom was preceded by less of a downward spiral than the circling of a drain. Around and around he went, not getting worse but not getting better. Self-destruction wasn’t just an inevitability, it was his life-force, it’s what kept him going, until the day it finally took hold and sucked him under in a sudden gulp. He shouldn’t have been driving at all that day, but he didn’t want to pay for someone else’s parking ticket. The car, a months-old BMW coupe, was a coworker’s, and he’d been tasked with moving it while the owner was away for the summer. He had taken it on trips to the Berkshires and Provincetown without incident, but there’s no terror like driving in Manhattan, and when he slammed into the cyclist on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Bleecker, he thought the man was dead. It’s what he told the 911 operator, slurring his words so dramatically that the voice on the other end of the line didn’t even hide their judgment when asking if he had been drinking. “Yes,” Michael said, sobbing into his phone while watching a small crowd grow around the delivery person whose body and bicycle he still hadn’t seen.
The cyclist, in a helmet and big black gloves to protect him from windburn, waved away the passersby checking him for injuries, and was long gone by the time two officers put Michael in the back of a police car. “You may have knocked that delivery driver on his ass,” his court-appointed attorney told him some days later, “but he saved yours.”
When his head stopped spinning, so too did his life. The judge didn’t exactly throw the book at Michael, but he came close. His fine was one thousand dollars, the maximum for a first-time offender in New York, and he served two months in jail without explaining his absence to friends or his employer, emerging with a crumbling social life and no job at all. His most reliable friends enabled his bad behavior, and his most caring friends had long run out of patience to keep caring. And though it had once helped to have rich, trusting acquaintances who spent nine months out of every year in Beijing, when he emerged from jail to find all their plants dead, he knew he wouldn’t get the privilege again. With the little money he had left, he abandoned his mutually abusive relationship with New York City and flew to the only person in his life who he believed might still answer the door. He didn’t remember much about Katherine, just that his mother never hid her hatred for her. And that was all it took to deem her a kindred spirit.
After parking the car in the dirt driveway of the old place and slowly climbing out, Mary Alice crept toward her son as though he were a wild animal who wouldn’t budge if she moved silently, but he turned to her with a matching sluggishness. He’d expected her to come, Mary Alice realized, and that made her feel even worse.
“Tell me what happened,” he said, eyes still hovering above the stagnant water. “What happened here? What happened to Dad? Was I wrong to think there was something weird about the way people talked about him?”
“No,” Mary Alice said, taking one more step toward her son. “I’m sorry you ever had to question it; I’m sorry people whispered around you, but I . . .” she said with a sharp inhalation. “But most of all I’m sorry that I never told you the truth.”
“Then tell me now,” he said.
“When he drowned, it wasn’t an accident.”
“How do you know?” Michael said, the tone of his voice unchanged.
“Because he left a note.”
“And you never told anyone?”
“Who would I have told but you? And you were only a child.”
“But why would he?” Michael said. His forearms were so tense Mary Alice figured he could break a table with a single blow if he tried. “What happened?”
“Mikey, your dad was gay,” she said, wiping her hands and raising them up like some kind of surrender. “And it was not easy back then. I mean, it was harder than it is now.”
“How long did you know?”
“Before we were married. He had a . . . there was a man. His name was Brian. We were all friends in college, but they were, well, they were more than that. But back then we didn’t, or he didn’t, think it was the sort of thing he could be. So he chose me over Brian, and we were happy. Most of the time. Then we had you, and he loved you more than he’d ever loved anything. Mikey, I promise you that. But at one point, I don’t know, Brian came back into the picture. And then he got sick.”
“Dad?”
“Brian did.”
“Mom, who is this person? Why haven’t I ever heard of him?”
“This isn’t easy to talk about, sweetie,” Mary Alice said, her face falling back to the ground.
“No shit. So instead of sucking it up and having the hard conversation you just didn’t say a fucking word?”
“Michael.”
“When Kenny died all I wanted was to tell you everything, but you never wanted to listen. When all I had left in this town was you, you made me feel more alone than ever.”
“I messed up then. I messed up long before then, too. But I’m trying to fix it, Michael, sweetie. I’m trying to fix it now.”
“Then tell me everything. Why didn’t I ever hear about Brian before?”
“He died when you were little.”
Michael’s face dropped. “AIDS?”
“Yes. It was a terrible time for us. Your father especially.”
His combativeness had melted away, leaving nothing but ache and distress. “So Dad had it, too?”
Mary Alice shook her head. “No. He was fine. They checked. After.”
“So why did he do this?”
“Not long before he went to the old place that last time,” Mary Alice said. “Do you remember when we all went to San Antonio? The trip to SeaWorld?”
“Yeah. First and only time.”
“Well, SeaWorld was actually secondary. We went up to pay our respects to Brian’s family, but we were told we weren’t welcome. They even stopped us from getting out of the car. We talked to his mother through a cracked window. Can you imagine that? In any case, we couldn’t explain a drive to nowhere to you, you were so young, but the park was nearby and so we went. We knew we’d hate it but never expected you to also. Do you remember how miserable you were? Oh, you were a stinker. Groaning and moaning so much we finally just went back to the car after that poor man got hurt at the Shamu show.”
“And then we went to lunch,” Michael said. “At the place with the gift shop. I remember that.”
“Yeah. Well. Your dad was never quite the same after that, and then by the end of the summer, he was gone.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Baby, I didn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t.”
“You told me I killed him.”
“I’m sorry,” Mary Alice said. “Not a day goes by I don’t regret saying that. I never meant it. I think I was just . . .” she said, stopping short of saying what really mattered. Michael didn’t pounce on her, as much as she deserved it. He let her think, take her time, breathe. “Sometimes I think I wanted you to hate me. I wanted you to hate me so much in that moment that you’d never consider coming back. But I never thought you would.”
“So it’s my fault now?”
“No! No. It’s all my fault. Every last bit of it,” she said, wiping her eyes. “And you know what’s worse? When I missed you and your father the most, when I remembered how much this place meant to him and you, and even Kenny, I couldn’t even bring myself to come here.”
“Why?”
“Because it felt like a graveyard.”
Michael took his eyes from the water’s edge to his mother, whose arms were crossed tightly beside him, and curled his lips into the faintest of smiles, the first she’d seen on his face in twelve years. “It’s the only place I feel like I’m alive.”
“Then you should have it,” Mary Alice said.
Michael didn’t thank her, or even say a word. He just fell to his side, confident that Mary Alice would keep him from hitting the ground, catching him in a hug that she would hold as long as he wanted. As long as it could possibly take.