Amanda Ward - Close Your Eyes

My house was underwater. I swam across the lawn and floated upstairs. There were terrible noises coming from my parents’ room. I saw bad things – it is a blank now, a black hole of memory – and I fled the house, back to Alex.

When I woke, my father and brother were sitting on either side of me on the floor of the tree house, tearing into cinnamon buns. My father often took us to the Holt bakery for pastries – this morning he had risen early and gone himself, he said. He held the bag open for me, and I selected a bun, took a bite sweet with frosting.

We finished our breakfast and walked to the house to get our swimsuits. I was rummaging in my room for my red one-piece when I heard an awful sound – a cry like a screeching cat.

There was a long carpeted stairway in the house on Ocean Avenue. I was halfway up the steps when Alex slammed my parents’ bedroom door behind him and rushed to me, grabbing my shoulders.

‘Turn around,’ said Alex. His face was white as milk.

‘What—’

‘Turn around!’ he screamed.

I fought, straining to find out what had happened, but Alex was stronger. He grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me back outside. I asked him what was going on, and he said, ‘Shut up. Just shut up! Just shut up!’

I was dizzy and too hot. I clutched my bathing suit in my fist.

A police car arrived – flashing red lights and sirens. An ambulance followed. Brawny, stone-faced men rushed inside our house. When they came back out, they were no longer in a hurry. They bore a heavy stretcher.

My father emerged on the lawn with two policemen. I heard him shouting about his children, Find my children. The men put my father in a patrol car, shut the door, and drove away. Alex and I waited to see what would happen next.

Book One

AUGUST 2010

Chapter 1

‘A road trip,’ said Alex, sounding hopeful for the first time in a long time. ‘To see Gramma. We can visit her and then go to the beach. We can rent a cottage in Galveston. We can rent a condo.’

‘A condo?’ I said, clamping the phone to my ear with my shoulder as I gathered tomatoes in the produce aisle.

‘I have some news, Lauren. Can you get away this weekend, so we can talk?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s a hundred and ten degrees. I have three open houses on Sunday. What do you mean, news?’

‘Well, at least you have your priorities in order.’ My brother sounded like he was pouting. I remembered the way he would hide under the kitchen table when our parents fought, refusing to come out.

I placed tomatoes on the scale, printing out the price and pressing it to a plastic bag. It was August in Austin, and the cost of tomatoes was rising with the temperatures. ‘Oh, Alex, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Just tell me the news. Is it good news?’

‘I get it,’ said Alex. ‘Mr. Cheapskate won’t let you out of his sight?’

I shut off my phone and stowed it in my handbag. I picked out a bunch of bananas, just a bit green, then gathered organic baby spinach, fresh thyme, and new potatoes. In the meat department, I asked for lamb and a pound of ground chuck. I passed the lobster tank, grabbed a six-pack of Lone Star and a bottle of cheap white. I tossed two boxes of strawberry granola and a pint of Mexican vanilla ice cream into the cart. Cheddar cheese, skim milk, bagels, baguette, warm tortillas, chocolate-chunk cookies. I was shopping for a family of five, it seemed, though it was just Gerry and me in the one-bedroom rental. I smiled when I thought of Gerry: the slight curl in his auburn hair, his broad shoulders. Gerry had been a wrestler in high school and still had a rangy, stocky build. He was my height, and when we swayed in the kitchen to a slow tune on the radio, we fit together like wooden jigsaw pieces. Like Illinois, nestled next to Missouri in my old puzzle of the United States.

By the register, I grabbed a lemon soda and a bouquet of tulips. I paid with my MasterCard, my shock at the total assuaged by the knowledge that I was earning a hell of a lot of airline miles. Besides, what was money for if not sumptuous evenings with your boyfriend? By the time Gerry finished work – or ‘work,’ as he labored for himself, and what he was doing in the shed in his sweatpants was nothing I recognized as taxing or taxable – I would likely be curled in bed, asleep, but hope sprang eternal, and romance (I believed) was about faith and expensive groceries.

Though I had finished squiring around a couple named the Gelthorps by four, dropping them at the Four Seasons for dinner and discussment (Mrs. Gelthorp had assured me she’d call in the morning with an offer on either the Tuscan-style palace in Pemberton Heights or the Provençal villa in Westlake), it was already dark as I wheeled my booty out of Central Market. I angled the cart toward my Dodge Neon. I had hoped for a glamorous convertible, but Gerry had been firm, armed with a stack of old Consumer Reports and Epinion printouts. I unlocked the car, opened the trunk, and screamed when someone tapped me on the shoulder.

‘I’m sorry,’ said my brother, panting in the cool evening.

‘How did you—’

‘You had that calm I’m buying foodstuffs tone,’ said Alex. ‘I rode my bike over.’

‘From the hospital?’

Alex nodded. He wiped his forehead. ‘I came to say I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to insult Gerry.’

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘He is Mr. Cheapskate, after all.’

‘I just think a trip would be fun. The two of us. We need to visit Gramma – and I’ll reserve the campsite, or condo, whatever. We haven’t camped since . . . since we were kids, you know? I’m feeling a bit mortal.’

My older brother filled me – always – with bafflement, irritation, and gratitude. He had never recovered, not really, from that morning. I had not made it all the way upstairs, so in some sense, I had been spared. By the time I saw my mother, she had been cleaned and made up, slipped into her favorite dress. He had taken care of me ever since. Instead of parents, I had Alex.

‘When are you thinking?’ I said.

‘How about tomorrow? We can leave first thing in the morning.’

‘Tomorrow! Can you help me with these bags?’

‘Time’s wasting, sister,’ said Alex, grabbing bags roughly and tossing them into the trunk.

‘What does that mean?’ I said. ‘Be careful – that’s wine!’

Alex placed the paper bag down gently. He turned around and held me by the shoulders. ‘Have you heard of Doctors Without Borders?’ he asked.

‘Oh, God,’ I said. ‘I have a feeling I’m not going to like this news.’

‘I applied last year,’ said Alex. ‘And I just got my assignment. I’m going to Iraq, to Baghdad.’

‘You . . . ’ I said, trailing off. I felt as if I had been sucker-punched. ‘You can’t leave.’

‘I’ll go in a few weeks,’ said Alex gently.

‘What about me?’ I said.

‘Lauren, this has nothing to do with you.’

In the Central Market parking lot, beneath the citrus frenzy banner, I began to cry. ‘I’ll be all alone,’ I said.

‘Lauren, you’re thirty-two,’ said Alex. ‘Get ahold of yourself.’

‘Go to hell.’ I threw the last bag in the car, slammed the trunk, and went around the side to the driver door, wiping my nose with my arm. I felt alarmed, woozy. I opened the door and tried to breathe evenly.

Alex ran to me and grabbed my elbow. ‘I knew you’d freak out,’ he said.

‘It’s so sudden,’ I said.

Alex hugged me, smelling of sweat and fast food. ‘Let me just lock up my bike,’ he said. ‘I’ll come over for dinner.’

Gerry and I lived in French Place, a historic neighborhood on the wrong side of the interstate. Fault lines made foundations crack and shift; while many houses looked great up top, there were problems under the surface. As opposed to Hyde Park, where professors and rich hippies lived, French Place was for the young and working-class. I loved it. Our landlord had painted the wood siding purple, which would not have been my choice – I preferred sage green – but the trim was a soothing yellow. Some people in our neighborhood went all out, with giant metal roosters or actual chickens in their yards, but we’d splurged on two lemon-colored chairs and a café table from Zinger’s Hardware and called it a day. When we had our fabulous pumpkin-carving party every year, nobody minded sitting on the steps or on one of the blankets we spread across the lawn.