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 symboclass="underline" 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.