The Spaces Between Us Page 6

  Grimshaw asks, “Are they rich?”

  “Rich?” I repeat. “I don’t think so. They stay in this old unpainted house every summer, and all their cars are old. No, they’re not rich.”

  “Oh,” she says. “When you imitated her, she sounded rich. She sounds like how rich people talk on TV.”

  “I don’t know why she talks like that. But it’s not because she’s rich. Everything’s old in that house. Old rugs, old furniture, old dishes. Old books.” I imitate my grandmother again: “‘Don’t walk on that rug with your bare feet!’ ‘Don’t sit in that chair with your wet bathing suit!’”

  It makes her laugh. “There,” she says. “The way you just said that. Rich.”

  “No,” I insist. “If they were rich, they’d buy new stuff.”

  “Right,” she says. “Like these guys. They should buy new stuff.” She makes a gesture that includes the Spragues, the Helmers, the Getmans, and the Purdys. She frowns at Mr. Sprague and affects an upper-class accent that actually sounds somewhat like my grandmother. “Don’t lie there, Mr. Sprague,” she says. “Your filthy bones are messing up our grass!”

  I sigh about the shame of it all and shake my head. “I’d rather he were on drugs.”

  She lies down on the Helmers and stares up at the sky. “I’d rather I were on drugs,” she sighs. “It’s gonna be a long summer.”

  “Last night before I snuck out, Scot got really mad at me and said my father killed himself.”

  “Really?” She sits up. “I thought your father died in a car crash.”

  “That’s what I always thought. But there’s this unmentionable quality when his name comes up, like he did something so bad we cannot speak his name. Whenever I ask, my mother sighs and gets really sad and says she’ll tell me when I’m older.”

  “Do you think he committed a crime?”

  “Maybe. That’s always the feeling I get about him.”

  “Wow. That’s kind of sexy. I hope it was a good one. My father died when a car fell on his sternum and crushed him. How sexy is that?” She shakes her head, like you can’t even trust a Grimshaw to die right. Then she thinks of something and snaps her fingers. “Hey! Your dad! Maybe he’s alive! Maybe we pass by him all the time and don’t even know it!”

  We both think of it at the same time. “Mr. C.!” we say together.

  “He’s your dad!” she says, laughing. “That’s why he failed us!”

  “Because he cares!”

  “Yes! So he can watch over us one more year!”

  “Then his work is done!”

  But when we’re done laughing about that, Grimshaw gets very gloomy again. “I’m seventeen,” she sighs. “Where’s my life?”

  four

  IN THE SUMMERS, MY DEAD father’s family lives in a rambling, shingled place on a cliff overlooking a cove that opens to the ocean in Maine. It has a barn in back and a small beach down a steep walkway. No Internet, of course. We visit them there every year, although it’s more like a summons than an invitation. We share their DNA, so they have to deal with us once a year. By the time I get there, Allegra has already found not just one job but two, at an ice cream store and a gift shop in town, and Aaron has been hired as a junior counselor in a youth soccer league. It’s just me and my grandmother, so I try to make myself useful. I offer to paint the trim on the house, but no, I’d probably just drip paint on the shingles and make a mess. I offer to mow the lawn. No, I’d be taking bread out of the mouths of deserving local people. I offer to polish the—no, no no, my grandmother waves me away. After that, my choices are to either get a job and be a productive citizen or read, so I read. The house is full of books, and it takes me a week just to read all the titles, making sure I stay at least two rooms away from my grandmother.

  Last summer I took sailing lessons, so when I find the book I want to read for the day, I go down to a little rocky beach on the cove and take out our sailboat, the Signal. I’m not a very courageous sailor, I just venture around and get to know the inlets and little islands. I always take a sandwich with me, too, and whole days can go by with nobody saying anything to me at all. This begins to feel like my real life, like there is this other Serena who lives with a family in a faraway place and has one friend, who occasionally laughs at her jokes. Sometimes I miss that Serena, and I can see that her life really isn’t so bad, and I can’t remember what she was always so angry about, and I can see that she could be nicer to people, even her stepfather, and follow more rules, maybe, and not act like it’s her divine mission to point out the lapses in other people’s logic.

  Book by book, a month goes by, and on the first day of August, I turn sixteen. I wake up to another empty day. Nobody will remember it’s my birthday. Nobody’s even here to remember. Allegra isn’t here, having found a bunch of very successful and attractive friends in town. Aaron is away at a soccer camp. My grandmother is out. The phone won’t ring for me, and nothing will come in the mail. I go down to the beach and sit in the Signal. I can’t face opening a book today. No matter what the book was, every page would say the same thing: This is your fault. You have pushed everyone so far away that you don’t even know where to find them again. You are so alone on your sixteenth birthday that nobody says anything at all, far less happy birthday. I look out at the horizon and think that if I just went for it, just hopped in the Signal and got lost at sea, how long would it take for anyone to even notice I was gone? I imagine my own funeral and how sad and sorry everyone would be that they never realized I was really a nice person the whole time, and soon real tears are leaking down my face. But I don’t have the courage to get lost at sea. Although I wouldn’t mind being dead, I have no desire to be cold or wet or hungry, so there will be no funeral and no sorrow at my passing so young from this earth. So I just sit there in the boat on the beach with no book and feel more deserving of my own pity than anyone has ever felt.

  * * *

  When I see two people coming down the cliff toward me, I quickly dry my tears with the back of my hand. If I had a book, I could pretend I’m not as pathetic as I look, the abandoned birthday girl in a beached sailboat. It’s a tallish, blondish man in sunglasses and white linen, which flutters in the breeze, and a woman, also in white, coming down behind him. They keep stopping on the path as they descend, and he points out different features of the landscape. It’s a windy day, and they both sort of flutter together like they’re walking through a painting. I have never seen anybody but me on this beach, and I wait for them to realize they’re in the wrong place, turn around, and go away. They keep coming down, and when they reach the beach, I realize that it’s my uncle, who is hardly ever here in the summer. His name is Hugh. People say he looks like my father. The woman he’s with wears gold sandals and a white bathing suit and a sheer sarong knotted at the side of her waist. They smile gaily as they approach me and then greet me, then stoop down and kiss me on both cheeks, like we’re in Europe.

  “Hey, kid,” Hugh says. “Remember me?”

  I nod. “Hi,” I whisper, my voice having atrophied over the last month.

  “And this is Sabine.” Sabine sort of squints up her face at me, which must be how people as glamorous as her smile at people as unglamorous as me.

  “Nice to meet you,” I whisper, and then feel even more stupid than before.

  “That’s a nice hat,” Hugh says. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Here, last summer,” I tell him. “It was on the third floor of the house.”

  “What’s your grandmother think of it?”

  “Not too much.”

  That makes him laugh. “I bet she doesn’t,” he says. “She says you’re quite the reader. Do you hole up on the third floor all day?”

  “No,” I answer. “I go sailing, too. A lot.” I explain about the books and the boat and the cove, but the more I talk, the more inane I get, and I’m sure he thinks I’m a moron. Sometimes you meet a person who is as smart as you pretend to be, and then you realize your whole personality depends
on the stupidity of your surroundings, and then once you realize that, you should stop talking.

  Hugh smiles. “Reading and sailing,” he says. “It must be genetic.”

  “Oh.” I wonder if this is a reference to my father, but he just puts his hands in his pockets and looks out to sea.

  “We should get back here more,” Hugh says to Sabine. “I always forget how pretty it is in the summer.”

  “Beautiful,” Sabine replies. “The colors. I feel like I’m in a watercolor painting.”

  They are including me in their conversation, expecting me to join them in their repartee, instead of sitting like a lump. I realize this might be the moment where I should stand up and get out of the boat, so I do, awkwardly.

  “We watched your brother’s game last night,” Hugh says to me. “He’s quite the athlete.”

  “And a handsome boy,” adds Sabine.

  “And then after that, your sister took us out for blackberry ice cream. We looked for you, but I guess you were out in the Signal.”

  “I’ve never had that flavor ice cream before,” says Sabine. “It was fabulous.”

  “It’s my birthday today,” I blurt. “I’m sixteen.”

  Hugh looks at Sabine, then he looks at me, then he looks at Sabine. “Happy birthday,” he says.

  Sabine steps forward and once again kisses me on both cheeks. She wishes me happy birthday in French. Instead of coming up with something to say back, I just stand there staring at her with my mouth opening and closing like a guppy. And Hugh just keeps standing there with his hands in his pockets, looking out to sea.

  “Do you know much about your father?” he asks me.

  I shake my head. “No.”

  “Come on,” he says. “I’ll show you where he hung out.” I follow them back up the steps of the cliff.

  “Did he hang out in the barn?” I ask.

  He stops and raises his hand. “Carriage house,” he corrects me with his finger in the air. “A subtle but important distinction.”

  “Carriage house, then.”

  We walk past the house to the carriage house. The door slides open heavily but easily. “There used to be bats that would roost behind this door,” Hugh says, “and they’d fly out every time you opened it. Bats were a big part of the excitement of summer.” He tells me and Sabine a couple of bat stories, chasing bats that had got inside around the house with tennis rackets and fishing poles, leaping over couches, and crashing into furniture. While he talks, I look around at a big dusty space full of large, mysterious objects covered with sheets. Iron implements, horseshoes, bits of brass, leather harnesses hang on the walls. I see horse stalls with iron dividers, and you can detect a smell of leather and hay in the air. The afternoon light slanting through the windows catches the dust that hangs in the air and fills the place with a soft golden light. Against the far wall is a car-shaped lump.

  “Is that an old MG?” I ask.

  “No,” Hugh says. “It’s called a Sunbeam Alpine. Same idea, though. A little car that goes fast when it goes, which is rare.”

  I pick up a corner of the canvas that drapes it, and there is the cutest little red two-seater sports car you’ve ever seen, with a ripped convertible top. “You mean it doesn’t work?”

  He throws back his head and laughs. His laughter makes me laugh, too, like I just said something really funny. Sabine seems mostly concerned that her white clothes not brush up against anything dusty. “Follow me,” Hugh says.

  He goes up a set of narrow stairs at the back. The stairs are creaky and kind of spongy underfoot. The light gets clearer and brighter as we ascend. At the top of the stairs, he opens the door and we step into a high-ceilinged room with lots of dormers and roof angles, all paneled with beadboard painted white; a simple single bed with an iron bedstead; a table and a chair. And books, lots and lots of books. The light through the trees shifts around and throws shadows everywhere so the place looks alive.

  “Let’s get some windows open in here,” he says.

  “So we can breathe,” says Sabine.

  “Your father created this space,” Hugh tells me. “It’s where he came when he wanted to be left alone.”

  I start reading the spines along one shelf. “Are all the books in here about China?” I ask.

  “Not necessarily,” Hugh says. “Keep looking.”

  It’s the most political library I’ve ever seen. Revolutions. Russia. Communism. The exact same books that Mr. C. has in his classroom, only more of them and just as dusty. I stand up and look around me. “I feel like I’m back in Western Civ. Mr. C. would absolutely love this place.”

  “Who is this?”

  “He’s the guy who failed me in history,” I tell him, “and I have to take it over when I get back home. He has all these books, and I read them when things get a little slow.”

  “You failed history?” Hugh asks. “How could my brother’s child possibly fail history?”

  “It’s complicated.” While I leaf through books that feature Marx, Mao, Castro, and other people that would irritate my mother, I tell Hugh and Sabine about Mr. C. and why I’m in Foundations, and my friend Melody Grimshaw, and Irony Man, and how we failed the exam together, all of which Hugh seems to find amusing. He seems interested, though, so I keep talking, and as I tell them about my life, the Serena that is far away joins with the Serena that is here and makes me feel that I am still the Serena who can talk to people. I sort of talk the two Serenas together.

  “Tell me more about Irony Man,” Hugh says. “How does he fit in?”

  “He’s my new superhero action figure,” I explain. “He rescues people in distress, but then he delivers them to a far worse situation than the one they escaped.”

  Hugh thinks this is a lot funnier than my mom did. “I like Irony Man,” he says. “I relate to him.” While we talk, Sabine stares out the window at the line of the sea, as if she is waiting for the ship that will rescue her from these books and this dust.

  “Well.” Hugh checks his watch. “It’s time for cocktails. Your grandmother is hovering angrily near the bourbon at this very moment.” He grimaces at Sabine. “Like a yellow jacket,” he adds.

  “She could come up here,” I suggest.

  “She could,” Hugh agrees. “But she won’t.”

  * * *

  That night, my birthday is observed with lobsters on the beach, along with clams cooked in seaweed with potatoes and corn on the cob. Allegra is there with a new boyfriend, and Aaron makes an appearance, too, with some soccer players. Even my grandmother joins us. My mother has mailed me a birthday in a box: a cake, sixteen candles, cards from Nora and Zack, presents, money, and a long letter from her, which I read later. She says that she has officially been offered the principal’s job, so it’s going to be a challenging year for all of us, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a good one.

  five

  FOR THE MONTH OF AUGUST, I transfer reading from the beach to the carriage house. After Sabine leaves, it takes Hugh most of the month to fix the Sunbeam, working under the car, while I’m upstairs reading, or I bring a book down and read from it while he falls asleep under the car. He’s not interested in ideas from the twentieth century. He doesn’t have any answers about my father, either: they were very far apart in age, and his way of dealing with painful subjects is not to think about them. “Cauterize the wound and move on” is his philosophy. He is sorry he’s been such a piss-poor uncle, though, and his plan is to fix the Sunbeam so he can drive me all the way to Colchis in it.

  My mother agreed to the trip when she came to Maine two weeks ago, to take Allegra to college and get Aaron back for football practice. So on Labor Day, Hugh and I leave Maine for the Minnechaug Valley, keeping to the back roads in case the radiator overheats, stopping at antique stores and old barns and roadside stands, so what would normally be an eight-hour drive takes closer to eighteen. We take turns driving through the night with the top down.

  We pull into Colchis in the morning of the first day
of school. Hugh pulls up on Main Street, in front of Al’s Superette, and gets out to stretch and look around.

  “Wow,” he says, taking in the town. “This is it? This is your town?”

  I look around at Colchis, at the nail salon and the bridal shop and the liquor store, wondering what he is talking about. All I see is Colchis, looking a little shrunken and dried out at the end of the summer. About two thirds of the stores on Main Street are boarded up, and maybe if you’d never seen it before you might think it would be a good stage set for a zombie movie, but still, the sun is coming up and the day is fresh. I watch a line of school buses follow each other out of town.

  “This is it,” I tell him.

  “I can’t believe Harry’s kids really grew up in a place like this,” he says, as if he is talking to himself. “I should have been paying more attention. I’ll be in touch this year, though, you’ll see.”

  I get out of the car and stretch. “I can’t believe I have to do the first day of school on no sleep.”

  “Wow,” says Hugh again. “Here it is, the burned-over cinder of the American Dream.” He looks across the car. I look around at the town. I don’t really see what seems so dramatic to him. The town’s two traffic lights are green. First one turns red, then the other one does. It’s so quiet on Main Street, we can hear the clunk they make as they change colors.

  “You didn’t fail history,” he tells me. “History failed you.”

  “I suppose I could just go to school,” I tell him. “So you won’t have to drive all the way up to my house just so I can catch the school bus back down.”

  “Right,” he says. “But coffee first, school later. Not that I’m expecting to find anything drinkable around here.”

  We find some coffee, then we drive into the parking lot of Colchis High School just as the early bell is ringing on the first day of classes.