The Last Romantics

And so I relented. I let Joe place me into the water, stomach down. His hands buoyed me up, and I kicked my legs, circled my arms. I didn’t swim that day or the next, but it happened soon, that perfect moment when my body stopped being mere weight and became like the water itself: fluid, joyful, effortless. It was Joe who made this happen, Joe who clapped the loudest as I swam from bank to bank.

Over the course of that summer, Caroline and I developed a game. Inside the gray house, we rarely played together, but outside at the pond the rules shifted, expectations changed. She and I would scour the brook for water-rough pieces of broken glass or other strange treasures. The rocky bottom was full of odd detritus, perhaps castoffs from the old furniture mill or wayward bits from the town dump. Once we found a large silver spoon, then a crusty broken bicycle chain, then a small green bottle. We would arrange these treasures carefully and make up elaborate stories about their provenance and the lengths to which their previous owners would go to reclaim them. Before the Pause, Noni raised us on fairy tales and fantastic stories. Princesses and queens, mothers and trolls, a dashing prince, salvation, and a perfect everlasting love. The pond offered the perfect backdrop for magical possibility.

For weeks Caroline and I discussed the owner of the spoon, a wily queen from a distant, frozen place who became angry at her daughter and threw the spoon at the poor girl. The daughter ducked, and the spoon sailed over her defenseless head, across nations, oceans, time, and landed here in our brook.

“And then the daughter disappeared,” Caroline said solemnly. “The queen believes the girl’s spirit is hidden inside the spoon. She searches, but she can’t find it. The queen vows to search forever. Until her dying day.”

We gazed into the tarnished silver of the great spoon’s bowl and saw the barest dull reflection of our own faces staring back.

* * *

IT WAS THE second summer of the Pause when our game ended. This was when we first met Nathan Duffy. One morning we tramped down the hill and heard splashing, giggles, whoops. We emerged from the woods to see a gaggle of kids, each brown from the sun and shaggy-haired, different heights and genders but all variations on the same essential theme. Nathan was one of six siblings, looked after during the summers by their babysitter, Angela, who long ago had come to the pond when she was a kid. Now Angela spread out a flowered king sheet and sat smack in the middle with a crossword as the Duffy siblings swam, played, ate, and fought around her. Nathan was middle of the pack—two older brothers, three younger sisters—and the quietest. I hadn’t even noticed him until later that day when he appeared beside our blanket.

Nathan crouched on his haunches in the grass and asked Caroline about her book.

“Is that Nancy Drew?” he said. “Do you read the Hardy Boys, too? I like The Tower Treasure best.” It was overcast that day, a dull, heavy sky. Thunder was coming, rain too.

Caroline lifted her eyes from the book and studied Nathan. They were both long-legged and skinny, both dirty blond, both bronzed and squint-eyed in the sun. Nathan wore gold glasses that matched his hair. His gaze was careful and serious.

During the Pause, Caroline was the one who missed our parents the most. She cried easily, silently, at the kitchen table while we ate breakfast or later in the living room when we played Monopoly, even if she was winning. Her bad dreams raged for nights, then subsided, then took hold again without any apparent pattern or cause. She’d awake screaming and crying, and none of us could comfort her, not even Renee.

Now she coolly returned Nathan’s gaze and shrugged her shoulders. “Hardy Boys are okay,” she replied. “But Nancy is braver.”

Nathan tilted his head, considering. With his long, careful fingers, he picked at the edge of our quilt and at a collection of small, warm pebbles I had gathered and placed on a leaf.

“Wanna swim?” he said suddenly. He moved quick as a darting minnow, jumping away from us, running along the bank, from one side of the pond to the other, in and out of the water, atop the dam (although it was slippery and Angela yelled at him to come off), up a tree and down. At last he returned to Caroline. He shook his wet head at her, and she angrily slammed her book shut and stalked off to sit on the sand. But she looked back at him. I saw the glance, her interest in this pale, quick boy clear on her face.

It wasn’t long before we learned all about Nathan. He had a mother named Jeanette, a father named Cyrus, and five siblings who became known to us as a single unit: DouglasTerryMaddyEmilyJen. We called them the Goats, because their last name was Duffy, which reminded us of the Billy Goats Gruff from the fairy tale, and also because there was something goatlike about them, with their long, curious faces and all that shaggy hair. Each of them appeared strong-willed, utterly confident, fighting loudly with the others over questions of Eggo preparation and volcanic eruptions and Michael Jackson song lyrics.

The day after we first met Nathan Duffy, we met Ace McAllister. Ace came crashing down the path to the pond wearing head-to-toe camouflage and holding a BB gun.

“Bang, bang, bang!” he yelled, startling us from our games and books.

“That’s Ace,” Nathan declared without emotion as Ace pretended to shoot him again and again.

Ace was short and thick in the torso, with heavy limbs and broad features. He had an abundance of dark, shiny hair that fell into his eyes. He and Nathan were not friends, but they were neighbors and only one year apart in age, and so their mothers had thrust them together since their earliest days of playground visits and birthday parties.

“Angela, gotcha!” Ace yelled, and directed his attention toward the babysitter. Angela flapped a hand at him but did not lift her eyes from her magazine. Once she’d been his babysitter, too, and brought him on summer afternoons to the pond, but she’d quit to work for the Duffys. Now Ace’s parents left him alone with a ten-dollar bill, a house key, and instructions to keep out of trouble.

Within days it became clear that Ace was the wildest of us all. He cannonballed off the dam into the pond and whooped so loudly that even Nathan’s big brother Terry told him to quiet down. Nathan was in sixth grade, Ace in fifth at a private day school in Greenwich called Pierpont Academy. We all went to public school, and the idea of Pierpont—with its uniforms and lacrosse fields—struck me as impressively mature and intellectual, but Ace went there only because his parents had money and they didn’t know what else to do with him. He boasted that he’d been kicked out of a fancy boarding school in New Hampshire, suspended at public school, and Pierpont Academy was the only place that would take him. He talked of fights won, beers drunk, cigarettes smoked. We doubted the truth of these claims but listened nonetheless to the stories. He often brought his BB gun to the pond, or a loud boom box he claimed to have stolen. He captured frogs and crickets and once a small green garter snake, keeping each for a spell in a shoe box. I suspected he longed to poke these animals, or hurt them, but he didn’t dare with us there.

When Ace learned that Joe played baseball, he began to treat him with more interest and more aggression. He began to say things like, “Look, here comes Joe DiMaaaaggio,” drawing out the ah as a croak. But there was also the slightest hint of deference, of awe. Joe was one year younger than Ace but taller, stronger, with an athlete’s calm.

Joe regarded Ace cautiously. They were friendly, but, I believed at the time, they would never be friends. Ace was an unwanted but unavoidable summer accessory, and we accepted him as we accepted the humidity and the mosquitoes, with only mild complaint.

The six of us—me and Joe, Nathan and Ace, Caroline and Renee—formed a gang of sorts. We weren’t always together, not every day, but most days we swam at the pond or played Twenty Questions on the grass or watched TV at Nathan’s house while the Goats milled around and slammed doors and talked on the phone in loud, amused voices. In the early evening, once the sun began to drop, we would play baseball at the park. We always handicapped Joe—Only your left hand! No mitt! Close your eyes!—because otherwise the games were short and humiliating. We also wanted to see what Joe could do, and so we pushed him to perform in wilder, more ridiculous scenarios. He did so gamely, laughing, always succeeding at the trials we set. Sometimes we sat in the stands and watched as Ace pitched ball after ball and Joe hit each long and high, a dreamy, lazy smile on his face. An effortless look, as though hitting the ball like that required only the smallest piece of himself.

“Your brother will be famous,” Nathan said to me one afternoon in his careful, considered way. “He’s already like a superstar.”

I don’t remember replying. I might have said, Of course. I might have simply shrugged. It seemed so self-evident, there was no need for a reply. Joe was already a superstar. Back then did he know what people expected of him? At the field the look on his face was always dreamy, his movements casual, but it must have cost him to play like that. To give us the spectacle we craved.

* * *

IN THE LAST week of the summer of 1983, Joe and Ace fought. It was because of me, or rather what had been done to me. It was about, of all things, my rabbit, Celeste.

“You live in that gray house, right?” Ace asked me one afternoon. We’d been at the pond all day, and my skin was itchy and sticky from swimming and drying in the sun and swimming again. I felt slightly bored, definitely hungry, wondering what Renee would make us for dinner and whether the book I’d dropped accidentally into the water would dry in time for me to finish it tonight. I was six years old, chubby, pink-faced, and never without a book in hand. Recently I had started to keep lists of words in the black-and-white composition notebooks Renee used for school. They were not poems, not yet, merely catalogs of my feelings and sensations, things I had seen, events that had transpired.

Green, gold, fish, water, sun, grass, sisters, brother, swimming, free, warm, soft.

Ace looked at me now with intense interest. “The gray house?” he prodded.

I looked up from my notebook and nodded.

“Do you have a pet rabbit?”

I put down my pencil and closed the book. “She ran away,” I explained, “to be with her brothers and sisters.”

Ace began to laugh, great big peals. He held his stomach for effect and rolled over onto his back.

“Run away?” he said. “She didn’t run away. I took that rabbit.”

“But why?” I asked. I wasn’t angry yet, only confused.

“She was a mighty fine rabbit. Mighty. Fine.” Ace licked his lips with a slurping sound.

“Oh, stop it, Ace,” Nathan called. He was swimming, treading water as he listened. “Don’t tease Fiona.”

“I’m not teasing! I’m just telling the truth! ‘Don’t tease the girls, Ace. Don’t tell lies. Be a good boy like me.’” The last he said in a mocking, high voice. Nathan didn’t respond. He ducked his head beneath the water.

“You didn’t,” I said to Ace. “You did not.”

“I didn’t eat her, no. I’m just kidding. What I did was I took her over to the railroad tracks, down the other side of the hill, and played with her a little. I just left her there. On the tracks, I mean.”

Brown freckles marked the high point of Ace’s cheeks. They seemed to darken as he spoke.

“I tried to tie her to the track, put a rope around her leg,” he said. “I mean, so I could go back for her, bring her back to your house, but I think she must have gotten away. There was only a little bit of fur when I went to find her. Just a teeny scrap.”

My face grew hot, a pressure rose behind my eyes. I believed that Ace was lying, that he wanted to see me cry, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. But I couldn’t help myself. I remembered Celeste and her clean fur, her twitching triangular nose.

Soft, lovely, new, alone.

Joe saw me crying. “What did you do to her?” he called across the grass to Ace. Joe’s voice was sharp. He was playing solitaire, the cards spread in front of him, half a deck still in his hands.

I wanted to say, I’m fine, Joe, but the words wouldn’t come. The humid air moved thickly through my lungs. And then Ace answered for me. He repeated everything he’d told me about Celeste and the train tracks. Joe’s face went still as Ace spoke. I remembered how Joe had loved the rabbit, too.

“You’re lying,” he said to Ace.

“I’m not,” Ace answered. Now everyone was listening. Renee had stayed home that day to bake a pie from the raspberries that grew like weeds in the alley behind our house, but the rest of us were there: me, Caroline, Nathan, and two of the Goats. At the pond the lack of parental oversight made us wild in one way but conservative in another. We did not swear or fight with one another. We avoided conflict. Only Ace seemed intent on something more destructive. This would be true his entire life.

Ace was shorter than Joe, but heavier and thicker. He played no sports; he seemed to exist only on cans of Orange Crush and cellophane packages of Hostess doughnuts he would eat in three bites, powdered sugar ghosting his mouth.

“What are you going to do?” Ace said. “Huh, Joe? Big strong Joe?”

We watched Joe: he was very tan, which made his eyes more blue and his hair more gold than brown. All the swimming and hiking up and down the hill had melted away his baby fat. You could see in Joe now the beginning of his broad, muscular shoulders, the athlete’s chest and stomach that years later he would rub with baby oil as a lifeguard at the Bexley rec center’s pool, surrounded always by a cadre of high-school girls who looked like women.

But today he was still a boy. At his eyebrow one slender muscle twitched.

Joe did what I remembered instantly Noni doing from before the Pause, before our father’s death, when she was still our mother and engaged in the task of taking care of us. Joe counted down.

“If you don’t take it back in five seconds,” Joe said, “you’ll be sorry.” He swallowed and flicked his cowlick back from his eyes. “Five. Four. Three. Two—”

Before Joe could finish, Ace turned and ran. His legs carried him up away from the bank and around to the slippery top of the dam where the water rushed over concrete gummed with green algae. He pranced along the top. “Come and get me, Joe,” he said.

Joe didn’t go to the top of the dam. None of us did. Renee told us it was too dangerous, we could fall, and we believed her. We all watched Ace jump on one leg, then the other, taunting Joe, daring him. Ace’s feet were wrapped in silver as the water rushed over them.

“Come on, Joe,” he said. “You pussy.”

And then Ace slipped. One foot dropped over the far side of the dam. He landed heavily on a knee, which cracked with a sickening sound just before he slid off. For an instant Ace’s hands hung grasping onto the lip, water pushing into his face, but the force of it was too strong and the hands disappeared.

This happened so quickly that we barely registered his absence. Ace was there on the dam, and then he was gone. The still, hot air remained the same, the sound of rushing water, the buzz of a sapphire-blue dragonfly that started and stopped across the surface of the pond. It seemed possible that Ace would return, pop up again, that the thrust of those seconds would unfurl and bring us back to the start. But of course that can never happen.

Ace fell, and no one spoke, and then Joe ran up the path and into the woods surrounding the pond and down the hill on the other side. I heard the crash of underbrush, the thud of his feet. The drop on the other side of the dam was the distance of a three-story building to the ground. The pool into which the water fell was dark, rocky along the edges, and who knew how deep? The pool swiftly became a thin, roiling stream bordered by thick undergrowth and tall, shaggy trees. For us the pond marked the edge of our world. Beyond the pond, below the dam, stretched an unknown wilderness.

Joe called for Ace, his voice growing weaker as he traveled farther into the woods. Nathan began to follow Joe, and I stood, ready to join them, but Nathan told me harshly to sit down. “Joe and I can do it,” he said. “Girls stay here.” And then he, too, was gone, bounding into the brush.

Five hours after Ace fell from the dam, Joe stepped through the door of the gray house. He was sweaty, feet muddy, face and hands scratched from branches and brambles. Ace was fine, he told us, fished from the stream by Joe about half a mile from the pond. He’d swallowed some water, Joe said, and had been struggling when Joe found him.

“Was he drowned?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” Joe said. “He puked up half the pond once I pulled him out.” Joe was smiling, but his face was tight and nervous.

Ace’s ankle had twisted in the fall, the knee was grazed raw and swollen, but he was able to walk with Joe and Nathan half carrying him back up to the road and to his house. Only Ace’s mother had been home, Joe reported, a woman none of us had ever met. She was tall and skinny, and she didn’t look like Ace one bit. She was sitting on a flowered couch and smoking a cigarette when they pushed open the front door. Ace’s house looked shiny on the inside, and Joe had been afraid to touch anything or even to place his feet on the pale carpet and so they’d hovered half in, half out of the door, holding Ace.

Ace’s mother blew smoke from her nostrils like a dragon before asking, “What happened this time?”

Joe and Nathan deposited Ace onto the couch and then waited as Ace’s mother poked and prodded at the ankle.

“Just a sprain,” she declared, and gave Ace a bag of frozen peas and the TV remote control. She pulled two crisp dollar bills from her wallet, handed one to Joe, one to Nathan, and said, “Thank you for bringing him home. Run along now.” So they did.

It was another week before we saw Ace again. One morning he returned to the pond with a slight limp, his left ankle wrapped in a putty-colored bandage, the laces of his left sneaker loose. He sat beside me on a towel.

“Mom says I can’t go swimming for another week,” Ace told me. He pulled a deck of cards from his pocket. “Rummy?” he asked.

Soon it became clear that Ace had changed. The challenge that he’d worn like a badge was gone. The bite of aggression between Ace and Joe evaporated. In its place was a new, cautious friendship. Joe treated Ace with kindness and some pity, almost as though he were a much younger child. Ace followed Joe, he courted him with a sort of stifled awe. Finally Ace understood, I thought, that Joe was special.

This continued for the rest of the summer, until we arrived back at our different schools, each of us locked in our own grade and class and routine. Sometimes during the winter, I’d catch a glimpse of Ace at the grocery store with his mother or gliding through town in the blue BMW his father drove, sleek and shiny as a slow-moving bullet. Always Ace looked small and shrunken beside his parents, who were both tall, graceful people. Later I understood how every day Ace disappointed his parents simply because of who he was: unambitious, easily distracted, petty-minded. Even then I recognized the signs of that disappointment: the way his mother did not look directly at her son. The way his father walked a pace in front. I found myself feeling sorry for Ace. I found myself unable to recall the Ace that once had seemed like a threat.

Chapter 3

THE PAUSE COULD not go on forever. We knew this. There were dangers. We were children alone, the four of us, without protection or instruction, and while Renee played the part of quasi mother, she buckled under the weight. Unsustainable, I wrote later. Unsupportable, hazardous, perilous, unsafe.

The year that Renee turned thirteen, she grew high, round nubs on her chest and hair that went lank and greasy just days after her bath. She exuded a musty, earthy smell and was inhabited by a new atmosphere of churning activity like a spirit possessed. We had all seen the movie Poltergeist, and I thought that this was the only explanation for my sister: an otherworldly occupation.

One night Renee was late coming home. After cross-country practice, she always caught the late bus at five thirty, but it was now six fifty and dark, and still no sign of her. Joe and Caroline and I made ourselves cheese sandwiches for dinner and chewed silently on the couch, plates on our laps, watching the door. Twice Joe said he should call the school, but he hadn’t, not yet.

“What if she doesn’t come back?” Caroline said. She was ten years old and afraid of spiders, the kitchen garbage disposal, and the grrr sound Joe made only to frighten her. Nightmares still plagued Caroline and would well into her twenties.

I was undisturbed by Renee’s mysterious absence. Life without Renee was simply impossible. She made charts that listed our chores, homework, Joe’s baseball schedule, Caroline’s flute concerts, her own cross-country practices and meets. Renee ensured that we wore clean clothes to school, brushed our teeth, brushed our hair, caught the school bus, did our homework. Renee relit the pilot light on the furnace when it sputtered out. She forged Noni’s signature on checks and permission slips. She cooked spaghetti and frozen peas and pancakes from the Bisquick box. We had learned to exist without our mother, but we could not exist without Renee.

“Maybe,” Caroline said, “we should wake up Noni.” We hadn’t seen our mother today. We hadn’t seen her yesterday either.

“No,” said Joe. “I’ll go find Renee.” I saw in him the same air of responsibility, of taking charge, that he’d worn when Ace fell off the dam.

“I want to come,” I said.

Joe crouched down to look me in the eye. “Fiona, it’s better if I go alone. I’ll go faster. And you need to keep Caroline company. Keep her safe.”

I expected Caroline to dispute this, but she only nodded. “Yes, Fiona, stay with me. Please.” Caroline’s eyes were going red, her voice shook.

And so I stayed as Joe disappeared out the door, into the night. Caroline and I sat on the couch to wait. We did not talk or turn on the TV; we finished our sandwiches and listened intently for a sound, any sound, to come from Noni’s room.

Forty-five minutes passed, perhaps an hour, and at last the front door opened and Renee and Joe, both breathless and agitated, tumbled inside. Relief flooded me, a rush I had not known I was waiting for. Caroline burst into tears.

“What happened?” I asked. “Where were you?”

Renee pulled roughly at the curtains, clicked the lights off, and chased us all into the kitchen at the back of the house. Her manner was short and urgent. On her left cheek, there was a bloodied scrape, the skin swollen, and all at once, for the first time that night, I felt afraid.

“Sit down,” she ordered, and we sat at the kitchen table.

A car had been parked at the bus stop, Renee told us, a brown car with a man in the driver’s seat. An elbow out the window, sunglasses although it was dusk, the sun nearly gone.

“Baby,” he called to her. “I’ve seen you. Want a ride?”

It was a fifteen-minute walk from the bus stop to our house. Renee did not want a ride, not from this man, and she told him so, but he began to follow her, the car inching along the road. No other cars passed, and Renee felt cold and very weak.

“I didn’t think I could run fast enough,” she said. Renee, who was a natural runner, whose thighs were the circumference of my arm, who galloped along the rocky cross-country trail in meet after meet, winning medal after medal, the child of a mountain goat and a gazelle. She had never before said there was a race she couldn’t win.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she continued. “I was afraid he would follow me here, so I went down another street and then another, and then he stopped the car behind me, and I ran and hid in the Hunters’ backyard. There was a swing set with a slide—like in the yellow house, remember? I hid under the slide until I heard Joe calling for me.”