I heard.”
She took up his hand again; at a point, he didn’t know when, she’d ceased holding it. “What you heard was my mother crying because my brother has been killed in a car accident.”
As the words left her mouth, her face crumpled as if it had forgotten it had bones. Tears streamed from her clenched eyes. He reached for her because that was all he could think to do, and both their cans spilled and fell to the carpeted floor. Her chest heaved against his and he willed himself not to grow hard and was relieved to see that the effect at least for the moment followed the intent.
“Ronnie,” she sobbed. “Oh, Ronnie!”
He knew he should express some feeling, but he also knew that it would seem false because it was false, and he had so little experience on this front that any gesture was risky. Holding her, as he continued to hold her, was risky. He remembered glimpsing his mother through her half-open bedroom door when she’d come home from the hospital after Grandfather had died, and stepping carefully into her room and going right up to her and hugging her and saying, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” and how that had been the right thing to do.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” he said to Valerie.
She was sobbing and sniffling, trying to get on top of the emotion and falling right through it so that she was all emotion and nothing else. He rubbed her back in what he hoped was a brotherly way.
“My mother,” she forced out. “Will. Not. Ever. Get. Over. This.”
It was too early in his stay for him to know anyone’s story. The routine had been a leisurely but efficient breakfast, a drive to this new place or that—Race Point, his future school now just eight days away, the A&P out Shank Painter, the odd thick forest that grew just south of where the dunes ended, the little Provincetown airport—then lunch at home, time alone in his room to study English, afternoon coffee in the living room, dinner, more time alone in his room, evening television and evening coffee in the den, polite and grateful goodnight. (At the two-week language school prior to their distribution to their host families, the exchange students had been bludgeoned with the fact that the most important single phrase in New England was thank you, and he said it these days, by his count, at least twice an hour, to everything—meals, coffee, being told where the extra soap was kept, being taken along to the supermarket, being brought home from the supermarket, being irrecusably invited to go sit in the gay discotheque for seven hours practically every Friday and Saturday night, the beer occasionally slid his way, being told there was a letter from home.) All he knew was that Ronnie and Valerie were Americans by birth, that they’d been adopted, that they’d been teased in school mercilessly about it, that Valerie had absolutely zero curiosity about her birth mother but knew her to be a drunk (they’d met once), that Ronnie, while working regular hours in his father’s whale watching company, was desperate to be a deejay and travel around the States and maybe to Canada, that he really didn’t know these people and didn’t necessarily want to, that this was the longest, strangest embrace of his life.
Soon, she stopped trembling and signaled, very deftly he thought, almost like a shrug, that she was ready to release. Quickly, he opened his arms and she shifted slightly away and arched her back and looked at the floor.
“Oh. Those beers,” she said.
He moved to get something to address them.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t do anything, okay?”
She rubbed at her eyes as if she could shut off her tear ducts. She reached into the pocket of the lightweight black leather jacket she always wore and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.
“Do you mind?” she asked.
“Of course not.”
She went to the window and popped it open and lit the cigarette with her red plastic lighter and stood smoking into the fresh still air. She smiled coldly at him, shaking her head.
“I could use a beer,” she said. “Mom and Dad, I don’t know when they’ll be back, but it will be hours before she’ll want to come home, and I’m not sure what it is I should be doing.”
He stayed on the bed, nodding, remembering her instruction not to do anything.
“This will be very difficult for you,” she said.
She