All The Things We Didn’t Say

‘But…I mean…’

‘They might have called. My mother hasn’t said anything. Or maybe they haven’t. Perhaps I’m invisible. Although, I’m not sure how I could be invisible.’ She let out a bitter laugh, spreading out her arms, showing off her size. I recoiled, shocked by her candidness.

We were quiet for a moment, breathing out cottony puffs. Then Claire said, ‘Do you remember when we had that Mega Man tournament at the beach? You did that victory dance?’

‘I don’t know. Sort of.’

Claire pushed her sneaker into the dried grass. ‘I guess life isn’t so simple anymore.’

I stiffened. ‘What you mean?’

Claire looked at me out of the corner of her eye. My mind started to churn. It was odd that Claire wasn’t pushing to know why I’d left school. She knew I was too anal and ruleabiding to ditch, that something must have been really wrong. And yet she hadn’t asked.

The realization trickled in. I looked at her sharply, enraged. ‘Whatever you think you know isn’t true.’

Claire stepped back, startled.

‘And anyway, you shouldn’t talk.’ The words spilled out before I could harness them. ‘I know about that French guy and your mom.’

Claire’s mouth made a small o.

‘I know about her affair,’ I went on. ‘She ruined a perfectly good marriage.’

Claire slowly shook her head, then ran her hands through her hair. It took her a while to respond. ‘My mom didn’t have an affair with anyone,’ she said, speaking into her chest. ‘It was my father. He had an affair with a girl. Like, a teenager. She was barely older than me. But my mother’s too proud to take his money, which is why we’re basically living in a crack house.’

A garbage truck circling Grand Army Plaza blew its horn. Another runner passed, making crisp footprints in the dusting of snow. I thought about how Mrs Ryan had looked so crumpled and defeated at our house the other day. But I didn’t want Mrs Ryan to be the victim. She couldn’t be. Mrs Ryan and I are kind of in the same position, my father had told me last night, when I was starting on the Christmas cards.

‘Why did he do that?’ I managed.

‘I don’t know.’ Claire flicked her ashes. An ember landed on her coat and she brushed it off. ‘Who knows why anyone does anything? Do you know why your mom left?’

‘My mom’s on a trip,’ I said fast.

Claire scoffed. ‘Then why did she resign from her job?’

I stared at her.

‘That’s why my mom initially came to see your dad. She called her old boss at Mandrake & Hester, to see if he could get her back her old job. And her boss goes, ‘Did you hear about Meredith? She resigned. She didn’t even leave a forwarding number.’

I took an elephant-like step back.

Claire lowered her shoulders, a look of realization passing over her face. ‘Your father didn’t tell you this?’

I concentrated hard on the yellow stitches running down the legs of Claire’s jeans. Such petite little Vs, for such a wide swathe of fabric.

Claire let out a breath. Her face softened even more. It reminded me of the expression she had two years ago, when she’d come upon me on the bus and realized she’d walked right by without noticing I was there. ‘God, Summer. I’m so sorry. But we can talk about this together. About…the stuff that’s happening to both of us. We need each other.’

I thought of the second-to-last day before my mother left. I’d gotten up in the middle of the night and found her sitting in the living room, staring at the bare Christmas tree she and my father had picked out that morning. She had a nervous look on her face, almost as if she was going to throw up. ‘Mom?’ I said weakly.

She turned to me slowly and slumped. ‘What are you doing awake?’

I just couldn’t hold it in any longer. Tears started rolling down my face. It wasn’t hard to sense something was going on with her. Admitting it, however, was something else entirely.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked. ‘What’s wrong?’

My mother looked exasperated. ‘Go back to bed, Summer.’

‘Can’t I help?’ My voice was so squeaky, so pathetic. ‘Can’t you tell me?’

‘Just go back to bed. Please.’ She didn’t get up to touch me or guide me back or give me a hug. She just sat there, wringing her hands. Two days later she was gone.

It was all there, on the surface, waiting. But I stopped it before it could escape out of me. ‘She’s away on a trip,’ I said to Claire. ‘She’ll be back.’

A long beat passed. The wind picked up, making the snow swirl. ‘Oh,’ Claire said softly. ‘Okay.’ She waited a few more moments, then turned and started walking into the center of the great lawn. Halfway across, she stopped and looked over her shoulder, pausing, maybe giving me another opportunity to say what she knew I needed to say. I stared at a fixed point on the ground, an ember from Claire’s cigarette.

When I finally lifted my head, Claire was all the way across the lawn, heading for the snow-dusted trees. The ache inside me was cruel and precise. I stood there for a while, my toes stiffening with cold. The church bell near Grand Army Plaza bonged out the hour. There was nothing to do but walk back. I creaked through the school gate and padded down the silent halls. The classrooms were full and preoccupied. I passed by my biology classroom; the new sub, the one that had taken over for Mr Rice, was showing a filmstrip. After Mr Rice had been asked to leave, it came out that the principal had had his eye on him for a while-there had been reports that Mr Rice had acted strangely in his other classes, too. The principal assured us that none of what Mr Rice taught us that last day-the invisible tethers of DNA, the certitude of science-was true. But I didn’t want to believe that. Wherever my mother was-walking on a sun-dappled beach, riding a street car in San Francisco, scampering down a rainy street in London-the tether around her was a literal one, a rip cord. Any minute now, it would stretch taut, and she’d snap back to us.

After school that day, I went home and stared at the buildings across the water for a while, thinking. Then, I sat down at my father’s cluttered mahogany desk and wrote Mr Rice a letter. I said I was sorry he had to leave our school, that I hoped he was all right. I wrote that I wanted to know a little more about those magical, unbreakable bonds of DNA he’d spoken about. How exactly did they hold family members together? I was looking for a little more scientific evidence to support this. If he could respond with articles, books, theories, I would be greatly appreciative.

At the bottom of the page, I signed the letter, Yours in Genetics, Summer Davis. When my father came home from a rare day at the lab, he noticed the envelope with Mr Rice’s name on it but no address. I’d told him a little about Mr Rice-just his theory, not what I believed. Without asking any questions, as if my father sensed something big in me had changed, he picked up the envelope and sealed it with a stamp. He knew the woman in charge of substitute teachers at Peninsula, he said. If I wanted, we could mail the letter to her-she’d know Mr Rice’s forwarding address.

It didn’t seem possible that my father could know such a person-he wasn’t involved with the school and hardly knew anyone outside of people he associated with at the lab. But I chose to believe this, too.

I watched as my father wrote out the woman’s address on the envelope. I watched his head disappear down our apartment building’s stairs, and I ran to the window and watched his head reappear on the street below. It was comforting to conjure up this image of him later, after he’d become so very different, so very damaged. I tried to remember him as he was right then, walking to that mailbox, protective and productive and strong.

PART TWO (#ulink_e9ff9736-3cb8-5bd9-8249-96a6ab38ed16)

Cobalt, Pennsylvania,

June, 1994

twenty-one-gun salute

Prologue (#ulink_7a880654-2946-5416-931a-5bbf4fef8bd7)

That winter, I would stand in front of Two World Trade and look for you. I watched people go in and out of the revolving doors, thinking you’d be among them. When you weren’t, I went down to the underground mall and brushed through the shoe stores, the Gap, Duane Reade. I kept thinking I’d find you among the ribbed V-neck sweaters, the first-aid supplies.

They’ve asked me to pinpoint pivotal times where things began to really change for me, to reconstruct my life as best I can. I remember we were at a party at the Boathouse in Central Park-a friend of yours from your new job had graduated from business school. I had gotten up to go to the bathroom, and when I was on my way back, I saw you sitting at the table, laughing, drinking, eating cold shrimp with a dainty little fork. And I suddenly realized-it didn’t matter I was gone. Maybe it was better. So I started just to walk down the park drive. It was the middle of a Saturday afternoon in May, close to the anniversary.

I stopped when I got to the zoo. Outside the gates, there was a man selling balloons in the shapes of animals. A group of kids ran for the turnstiles, sneakers squeaking. They were so, so young. I sat down on a bench, listening to their high, happy voices, and all the things I vowed so long ago not to think about suddenly throbbed inside of me, way too present. The flashing blue lights. The way Mark looked at me when I told the EMT what I knew. All those years later, and I still felt every ounce of his shock.

And then, suddenly, there you were. You were standing above me, hands on hips.

‘What are you doing?’ you asked. ‘I’ve been looking all over for you.’

‘I went for a walk,’ I said.

‘Why?’ Your face was so red.