The Invaders (19 page)

“Why haven't you ever come to see me?” I asked.

Pauline stared at me blankly and said, “What do you mean?”

“You're always up on me, but when I needed someone after the accident, you were MIA,” I said.

“It's summer,” Pauline said.

“What does that even mean?”

“It means, like, no one wants to be sad in the summer,” she said.

“Are you fucking serious?”

“I'm high, shut up. Don't get all heavy on me.”

“It would have meant something, that's all.”

She started touching me again and said, “I'll visit you now.”

“It's too late.”

I lay back on the sand and said, “Cover me.”

“What?” Pauline asked, confused.

“Erase me off the face of the earth,” I said.

“You're so dramatic,” she said, laughing

“Do me one solid, will you? Be useful.”

“How much?” she asked.

“All of me,” I said.

I closed my eyes and waited for her to make me disappear.

“Teddy. This is fucking weird.”

“Please.”

I said please over and over again.

JEFFREY HAD COME BACK
and moved his things into the guest room in the middle of the night. I walked by the room and saw him bending over his suitcase.

“Are you leaving again?” I asked. “You just got home.”

“They need me.”

He turned and looked at me, then sat down on the edge of the bed. “Teddy's getting better, it looks like.”

“The doctor said it's still a long road,” I said.

“But he can do more for himself.”

“He can.”

“I want to continue our conversation,” Jeffrey said. “I can help you get on your feet somewhere. Get you set up until you can handle things on your own.”

“Somewhere like where? I live here.”

“I mean an apartment,” he said. “I can't go over this again.” He had finally found someone to excite him again. I suspected there were
new, younger retail girls who appealed to him, who he could woo with his cluelessness about neckties.

“Whoever she is, she thinks of you as an old man,” I said and watched his face fall. I knew which cruelties still worked on him.

“Think about options while I'm gone,” he said, getting up and zipping his suitcase.

“Don't I have a say in how things play out? How my life is supposed to go? Look at me when I'm talking to you.” He wouldn't.

“I can't change how I feel.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Sometimes you try and try and it's not enough. Wanting it is not enough. Just like love isn't enough. When are you going to learn that, Cheryl? I don't want to do this to you. This isn't fun for me.”

“Then don't,” I said simply.

He couldn't even look at me when he said, “I have to go.”

I stood in the guest room after he left, numb for a long time. Buzzing with grief.

Jeffrey had probably found another woman, or
women
, on his business trips. As long as they weren't in the neighborhood, no one would really find out, and it allowed me to stay in denial. All the men had someone. The ones who didn't would pick up someone new once their wives had an untimely passing, usually from cancer or something else tragic and ordinary. Men couldn't be alone, so how could I expect Jeffrey to feel loneliness on the road and not crave attention? He liked blondes, buxom ones with big teeth. Would his son be any different? Doubtful. Someone else would have to take care of him now. I hoped a divorcée would pick him up and care for him along with the rest of her children. Someone motherly.

I went into the bedroom and pulled the scraps from the bedside drawer and dialed one number after another. No one picked up. They were all at the clambake. I could hear the deejay playing music by the
pool all the way over here. I gave up after five numbers, unsoothed.

I thought about hotel bars. The upscale ones, with single women, working women on business trips. Families at home that they never saw. Wearing slim-skirted business suits. Or perhaps Jeffrey was meeting locals. Sad packs of women looking for businessmen to take them upstairs, away from baby bottles and babysitters and teething children. They wanted something other than infants nibbling at their chafed skin. He was probably with someone like my mother. I didn't think he'd pick someone like me again. The outlet girl with no obligation to go home to anyone, always convenient and willing. I was always curious about Jeffrey's approach to women. Did he go up to them or did they make the initial approach? Did he play shy or did they? Who else did he promise to pamper?

I slipped my hand into my underwear and imagined Jeffrey talking to a toothy blonde. Asking her name, taking her up to his room. Probably a room with dark wood cabinets with brass handles, the air conditioner turned to 64 degrees, and turn-down service with the television turned on to the channel that played music on a loop and flashed soothing images. He probably asked her if she wanted a drink from the minibar. He would ask her to take off her clothes while he folded his pants neatly over the seat back of a chair. Was she nervous about being with a stranger? Maybe. Maybe not.

When I was finished, I pulled my hand out of my underwear and tucked it tightly in between my thighs. I squeezed as hard as possible, trying to erase my hand. I rolled to my side in a fetal position, feeling everything at once, and began to cry.

I thought I heard someone outside, rustling around in my garden, but I was too tired to get up.

I WOKE UP
in the reeds, my pants completely soaked with salt water. Pauline and everyone else were gone and high tide was in full effect.

I got up and started walking around the island. Broken glass was blinking in the sun and sand and there wasn't a single person left but me. What the fuck, Pauline? She didn't care about me. I went inside the red barn and hunted around for anything I could float on. The inside of the barn was gutted out and painted in graffiti. The wood was weather worn.

I sat down on a bench and stared out the broken window of the barn. It was all coming back to me now. My arm was hurting. I needed some painkillers, but my pockets were empty. My fucking phone was gone. This was terrible shit.

Even in low tide it would be difficult to get back to land. I'd have to wait for another party. The only other option was to try swimming with my one good arm. I wasn't even sure what time it was. I stared up at the sun, trying to figure it out, and nearly burned my eyes.

The tide was receding and I tried wading out into the water, but the bottom dropped out beneath me suddenly and I lost my footing, going under for a minute. I flailed my one good arm and it didn't do much. I tried to move my other arm, but it stayed stubbornly limp by my side. I dragged myself back to shore, paddling with one hand through the water, kicking up black mud with my shoes. The water was murky and thick as I crawled back to land. Fuck, what was I going to do?

I looked out at the sailboats on the horizon. They'd never come down here, in the marshes, in the muck. The water was glittering like I'd never seen it before, or maybe I'd just never noticed. Everything looked hyper-colored. The marsh grass was tall and green. I could even hear the chattering of the small fiddler crabs running back and forth across the sand and into their holes. I started throwing empty clam shells into the water, trying to make them skip. One fucking arm. I couldn't remember much from the car accident, just flashes in front of me and me trying to avoid them. It didn't matter anyway. I was never going to be Richard Shepard. I was never going to be my dad. I would have to learn not to be successful. I would have to stop using words like “excel.”

I threw a shell and it actually skipped. That small thing made me feel like a human being.

Then the fear that I was going to have to live at home forever with my dad and Cheryl overwhelmed me. Avoiding them both as they avoided each other? She was just getting worse. And when I'd ask her what was wrong, she'd just mutter something about nothing working.

Or worse, what if I had to stay with my father forever, alone? He'd keep telling me to get it together and I'd fucking let myself die.

I lay back and stared at the clouds. I loved doing this as a kid—looking at cloud formations, staring at butterflies—things you didn't tell anyone about. One hand could feel the sand and the other couldn't. It was the strangest thing, like part of me didn't exist anymore. I dropped sand onto my dead arm, thinking back to last night, when I'd
asked Pauline to cover me. I wanted to be gone and hidden for once, but it hadn't worked. Neither did pouring sand over my dead arm. I didn't feel a thing, not even a little bit. I thought about cutting it off, but there was nothing around to do it with.

This island hadn't always been a shithole. I used to come here with my parents when I was a kid and people would have family picnics or neighborhood parties here. Back then, the graffiti was just some names surrounded by crooked hearts cut into the wood of the barn wall with pocketknives. I sailed small boats off the muddy waters and pulled their strings to bring them back to land. I'd load the boats with angry crabs and snails and whatever else I could find and spend hours watching the crabs scurry and jump out of the miniature boats and into the water for safety. I watched my mother untuck foil-wrapped dishes of potato salad and corn while my father tried to start the rusting, slanted grill someone had installed on the island. He'd cook hot dogs for us and I'd watch them, my mother's hand on his back, rubbing it while he turned the dogs and think, I could float away and they would never notice.

I walked to the edge of the water, to my old miniature boat launch, and stared out at the water, trying to remember how it was to be around two people who felt that way about each other. There was a piece of plastic peeking out of the reeds and I leaned down to grab it. It was a small, mud-crusted boat with a hole in its side. I washed it in the cloudy water and tried to save it from itself. I tried to make it float, but it teetered to one side and capsized. Cheap plastic shit. When I was a kid, my boats were made of wood and looked like small-size replicas of the real things. I had my dad paint Joanne on all of my boats just so mine could match his. I'd send the fleet out onto the water and watch my mother smile at the sight of her name on all of them. We'd shout “Pirate fleet Joanne come to ransack the islands!” and my mother would hover and yell at the crabs not to jump off, to keep sailing because they had islands to pillage. I'd yell with her. I'd yell to the captain of the fiddler crabs
to stay strong, to not lose hope on his journey. It all felt so important then, because my mother made everything feel important. My father would watch us but never join in. It was our game, not his. I missed her. Things felt doomed without her. When she died, I ran to the water and threw all my ships in. I wanted them to go with her, to keep her safe. I pushed them away but the waves kept bringing them back to shore. I finally crushed them under my feet when I knew the tide wouldn't take them away from me. I hid the broken wood in the spaces between the rocks of the breakwater by our house and watched it float in the dark, trapped water.

How could I ever pretend to be brave?

I squeezed my eyes shut because I couldn't think about it anymore. Because I'd have to follow the timeline to right here and now.

I sat down and let the sun burn my skin.

IN THE MORNING
I looked around my room and thought about where I could possibly go. An apartment somewhere? I stared out the window at the water, the big expanse of sky. I wanted to remember all of it.

I opened my drawer and stared at the pile of numbers. I knew a women's mixed doubles tournament was already underway and no husbands ever went to watch, so they were alone at home or shuffling their children in front of cartoons or into sprinklers so they could have some alone time at the computer or in front of the television. I picked out a number and dialed. After the fourth ring I nearly hung up, ready to pick out another, but then I heard a click and swallowed, readying myself.

“Hello?”

When he said it,
it sounded like yellow,
and I got ready. I stopped myself for a moment. Was it Tuck? I had never heard him say hello like that before. It might have been okay.

“How are you?” I asked.

“Who's this?”

I wouldn't tell him and he said, “It's too early for telemarketers, isn't it?” And I could feel him wanting to hang up.

“You sound a little lonely,” I said.

He was silent for a while and then he started to whisper, “How would you know?”

I tried to guess whose voice it was, but nothing came to me.

“I just have a feeling, is all.”

“You don't know anything about me,” he said.

“But I want to,” I said, and I meant it. I wanted to make us feel good.

That's all he needed. I could almost hear him unzip through the phone later, when I told him how I was pressing my hand down hard in between my thighs and pretending it was his. I lay motionless as I heard him exhale abruptly, finished.

He asked me if he could see me and I said no and we hung up quickly. I crumpled up the number and flushed it down the toilet to make sure I could never call back.

I looked at my hair in the bathroom mirror and it was greasy and limp. I couldn't remember when I had washed it last, so I turned on the shower and waited for it to warm up. Teddy wasn't home, but that was fine.

The blinds were open in my bathroom and I could see into the Magrees' bedroom, our houses were that close here. I wasn't sure whose room it was, but there was a four-poster bed and paisley sheets and I figured neither of Leslie and Patrick's sons would go for that. The bed looked like any other bed, not a married couple's bed or a surface to have sex on. It was in full view of our bathroom. They could hear the toilets flushing or the shower running or someone struggling to evacuate their bowels if both our windows were open. That was a kind of intimacy I wasn't interested in having with them. So I shut the window, although it was hot and stuffy in the bathroom. The window right behind the toilet was open all the time in the warm weather. What must they have thought of us, lying in bed at night, hearing the bathroom sounds?
Why didn't we hear their sex sounds when we were in the bathroom? Their bedroom looked barren. I couldn't even tell if there was anything on the walls. Leaning in closer, I thought I could make out a Norman Rockwell print. Of course. An old sea captain or something. Not one inch of our homes lacked a beachy feel. I wanted to buy a pink flamingo to put where my flowers had been just to watch the uproar.