“What about school?” said Gwen.
Danny couldn’t even begin that conversation. School felt like some irksome problem, an inconvenient symptom of a much larger disease. As if his mother’s cancer had spread to him. But of course his deformed and rapidly dividing cells had been there for a lifetime. He had them as a child, watching his siblings race away in boats and cars, going farther and farther, boarding school, college, grad school. It wasn’t until the last few years that they seemed to stay, that they seemed to want him around. Here in this house they were together in a different way. They were a family who all ate at the same table, who all slept in the same house, something he had never known as a kid. In Danny’s earliest memories Tom and Gwen were already away at college. Libby at boarding school. Holidays were short and busy. It was only here since Danny could be considered an adult, too, that they had been able to do the things that siblings were supposed to do—fight over the bathroom, argue about what music to listen to, talk in whispers behind their parents’ backs.
“We can’t let Tom sell this house.”
That was all Danny could say. That was the best he could explain it to them. He couldn’t say, “Without this house we will go back to what we were. Separate. Without this house we will just be adults in different stages of life. Without our parents.” What had seemed slow was now exponentially accelerating, the sun sinking fast, the light changing from yellow to a failing pink. Danny felt now that even his smallest movements were happening in fast forward, and it made his stomach turn. He pinched his hands between his knees to keep them still, to try to keep them alive, to slow down the blood that raced from his fingers to his heart. He wondered if he would be the second Willoughby to die of a heart attack on this porch.
“Dan, Tom can’t do anything on his own. This is our decision. No one’s going to let this house go if it isn’t what we want. We’ll just buy him out.” This was Libby, so practical, a seawall holding firm against the pressure of Tom and all his surging ideas. But even with her solid tanned hands on his knees he could not stop. The tears caught only to flow again, stuttering through him.
“Alright, Danny, tell us what’s happening,” Gwen said.
He felt like his chest was imploding, his hands were prickling with pins and needles. His arms were stretching, feeling as if they were ten feet long and limp, draped slack down the steps of the porch. Danny flexed his fingers and made fists. Gwen took his left hand in hers and began massaging it, rubbing the palm and then squeezing each joint of each finger between her thumb and forefinger. She paused at his blister and then worked around it. He wanted to run, to dive, to plunge his sleeping limbs into the ocean, to wake up. Wake up.
“What happens if we sell the house, Dan?” Gwen asked.
“Then there is no place for us.” Without this place he’d still have Gwen, maybe. Libby would slip away into her own world. Tom was already trapped in his own world, maybe he always had been. But really, Gwen was too unpredictable. If only she held onto this baby, something to keep her grounded, something to keep her near him. The baby would need a man in its life. Danny had learned from a good source; he could do it, if they would all just stop leaving things behind, stop pressing forward, no matter what washed away in their wakes—houses, babies, parents, ashes, brothers.
The wind shifted, bringing the smell of smoking briquettes up to the porch. Snippets of conversation, too—
“Everyone uses lighter fluid.”
“Everyone who wants their dinner to taste like lighter fluid.”
Lobster boats and small cruising yachts were coming into the harbor. Many were already at anchor, their captains wrapping mainsails in their cocoons around the booms. The lobstermen tied up at their moorings and rowed their tenders in smooth, wide strokes across the yellow harbor toward the dock. Dan knew they should be setting the table.
“Dan, let’s put all these decisions on hold.” Libby said. “The house. We are years away from needing to decide that. Okay?”
“Well . . .” Gwen trailed off. Libby shot her a look. “Who is gonna buy a place that’s caving in anyway?”
“And school too. College isn’t going anywhere. And we have until the eleventh of August to get our deposit back for the fall semester. So let’s wait until then to decide, and if August comes and you still aren’t sure, we can just decide that you take a semester off. Just like that. Give yourself a little more time to make up your mind.”
He didn’t even care how she knew. It was so much like their mother, who never needed telling, who absorbed all the pertinent information telepathically, broke it down and rebuilt it into solutions and options.
“There is time for whatever you need,” said Libby firmly.
“Do you want to drop out?” Gwen said this with so much surprise she didn’t sound like herself.
“Time would be good.” He said this to Libby, not wanting to look at Gwen. “I wasn’t doing so great there.” He said this to his knees, to the ends of his hair. “I slept all the time. Sometimes I would wake up and not know if it was day or night, or I would think I was back at Archer Avenue. Sometimes I would wake up crying. My roommate asked for a transfer.”
“It’s okay to miss her,” said Gwen.
And at that moment Danny felt some perfect polished floor within him—some big empty ballroom with a chandelier reflected in the gleaming wood—he felt it all collapse. It collapsed in splinters and billowing drapes. It collapsed in shards of crystal and fragments of crown molding. It collapsed under a great rush, a flood, under a river, an ocean. A luxury liner at the bottom of the sea. It had been so exhausting keeping it at bay, walled up, preserving that perfect room with however many dikes and dams and locks and quays. With his sisters in front of him, tucking his hair behind one ear, with their voices traveling over the top of his head, with some smell in the air he had been avoiding for months, he didn’t have the strength to hold it back any longer. And he saw his mother’s hands and her rings and her fingers curling around a stone and the sharp point of her wrist bone like a perfect buried jewel. And he cried without trying to stop it, without controlling his breath or hiding his flattened chin and curled lips. Then it slowed and, for the first time, stopped without his forcing it. He turned his head to one side and wiped his nose on his shoulder.
Gwen was still holding Danny’s hand, but she had stood up and was looking out at the water. She was far away. She was not used to being out of the loop; usually she knew everyone’s secrets. Had he disappointed her, too? Danny squeezed her hand. She came back from where she had been, her eyes glossy. She squeezed his hand back.