The Last Romantics(81)

“You are always taking advantage, always using me,” Caroline continued. “Using us, me and Renee, for money or meals at fancy restaurants or help with whatever. And Joe. You used Joe, too. Why don’t you have your own life? Why are you never in a relationship? Why do you always say you hate your job but never look for another one? You’re the youngest, sure, Fiona, but you’re thirty years old! Nothing is serious for you. Everything is a game. And why did you pretend you knew what was going on with Joe? Why did you lie to me that day before his party? Why did you say he was okay? That he didn’t need help? Maybe Renee and I . . . maybe we could have helped him. Maybe—”

Caroline stopped speaking. She shook her head and looked at me through the rain.

“Caro, I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought—”

“What did you think, Fiona? What? That the detective was cute? That he might fuck you?”

“No.” I knew that Caroline was upset; she was angry, she didn’t know what she was saying. “I thought he could help us.”

“That ridiculous man?”

“I thought it would be okay.”

“It’s not okay. It will never be okay.”

The rain had infiltrated my coat and spread steadily across my shoulders and down my back. I felt it as a stain, a mold. “Caroline—” I said, and stopped.

Caroline shook her head one last time and then turned and walked very quickly along the sidewalk away from me. Within a block she hailed a cab and ducked inside.

I stood on the wet pavement, thinking that perhaps Caroline would return. We had arrived here together; her car was parked outside my apartment building—but no. My sister was gone.

*

I did not see or speak to Caroline for another five years. My calls and e-mails went unreturned. Nor did I speak to Renee, not really. She remained busy, traveling, always out of phone range or forgetful or uninterested, and I made no special effort to reach her. It was Noni who kept me informed about my sisters. Renee and Jonathan were in India, Venezuela, Zaire. Jonathan’s work appeared frequently in home-design magazines. Madonna had ordered a chair; Robert De Niro a twelve-foot-long dining table. Caroline isn’t doing well; Nathan is working so hard; the kids are great. Noni provided information in a straightforward way, withholding any advice or judgment, reporting the facts of my sisters’ movements and moods as though discussing the weather. I took the information in the same way. I did not respond with emotion or questions, only an acceptance of these facts.

During this period I considered myself an emotional vagrant. I did not reside in a specific place over which I might exert control—repaint the kitchen, say, or knock down a wall—but in a relentless state that remained absolutely the same regardless of what I did, where I traveled. I did not live in Queens, New York, with a rotating cast of underemployed roommates. Caroline did not live in Connecticut with her family and pets. Renee was not treating patients in Chiapas while a subletter watered her plants and gathered the mail in New York. Each of us occupied the same boundless space of a world without our brother. Each of us gazed at the same horizon that would never appear closer or farther away, that merely underlined the enormity of our solitude. Friends and family milled around us, and yet each of us stood in that space alone. It was as though the care we had shown each other as children had been revealed as faulty, flawed, riddled with holes. Now we avoided any interaction that reminded us of what we once had assumed ourselves to be.

I continued to search for Luna. In a way we all did. Even Renee. We searched for Luna as we searched for ourselves, the people we were forced to become.





Chapter 14




One Saturday I took the train from Long Island City, switched at Court Square, and rode the subway to Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. I exited to the quiet bustle of early-morning Bedford Avenue. The last big storm had hit two weeks before, and icy piles of gray snow remained in front of unused doorways, marking the sides of abandoned cars. It was cold, a dry, brittle cold that stung my lips and made my eyes water. The year was 2008, two years after Joe’s accident, a year since I’d last spoken to either of my sisters. The Iraq War dragged on, presidential candidates won and lost in state primary elections, but I barely read the news anymore. World events, even climate change, were happening elsewhere.

I often walked the city. On weekends or afternoons when I left work early, for hours, in all weather. At the beginning I used these walks ostensibly to look for Luna Hernandez. After the fight with Caroline, I gave up searching in any methodical, focused way. I used what was close to hand, what was free, what I could do myself. Perhaps Luna had come to New York, I thought. So many did. Why not her?

The walks, too, were part of my new project. After Joe’s accident I wrote nothing at all—not a blog post, not a poem, not a line—but after my fight with Caroline I began again. She was right: I did nothing of value, I cared deeply for nothing, no partner, no profession. Friends came and went; men, too, with the frequency of trains, loud and heavy, leaving behind only a blessed silence. And so, slowly, cautiously, I began to write again, not as a poet or a woman but as a sort of record keeper. A witness. The only thing I thought about was my brother, but putting words to paper about him was impossible. Too raw, too hurtful. And so I wrote around him. I began to record in detail the last world that existed when Joe was still alive. The last meal I’d eaten, the last book I’d read, the last pair of shoes worn, the last earrings. Soon it became a tic, almost an obsession, to document all these final occurrences. There were so many of them. Once you begin to precisely identify every action and event, every building, every tree from a particular moment in time, they become countless, they stretch on and on. And so it was with the Lasts.