We Fell Apart: A We Were Liars Novel(72)

“Since now.”

“Okay, fine, if it has to happen.”

“Yah, it does,” says Meer. “You know I like cute names for things.”

I pat his hair. “I think after breakfast burritos we’ll feel a little tiny bit better. Like a microscopic bit. But it’ll be something. Okay?”

“Okay, Pookie,” says my brother. “We have a plan.”



* * *



—

We’re at the North Road Café. I know I have to do something with the letter Kingsley wrote to Meer. The whole car ride, it’s like a grenade in my backpack.

I excuse myself to the bathroom and take it out.

I love you but you do not deserve it, Kingsley wrote.

I couldn’t see it before. I was so caught up in my own ideas about our father, my own need to be validated by him. I saw only Kingsley’s feeling of betrayal, his imprisonment.

But Holland had a point. The drawing of little Meer is beautiful, but Kingsley’s words are hateful.

Meer should never read them.

A Kingsley Cello sketch is worth something like six thousand dollars, and maybe Meer would want to see it no matter how cruel the words are.

But Kingsley is dead.

And Meer feels terrible already.

This is my chance to disrupt the cycle of parental rejection, the tiny bit that I can. Our father’s hateful words won’t hurt my brother.

In that dank restroom covered with graffiti and with an empty plastic bottle of cheap hand soap balanced precariously on the small, stained sink, I rip the paper into a thousand pieces and flush it down the toilet.





66


We order burritos and super-large coffee drinks. We wait for the food in bone-tired silence, staring at a bulletin board that lists island events and babysitting services, yoga offerings and pony rides. When our order comes up, we carry everything to a picnic table on the lawn.

The day is bright. Tourists and summer people clutter the café porch and parking lot.

It feels like we live in a different world than they do. Like we’re moving more slowly, weighed down by sadness, conscious that this strange summer is coming to an end for all of us.

We douse the burritos in hot sauce. Our hands become sticky. Our napkins get used up.

None of the boys brought a phone. They’re so used to being without. But I have mine in the pocket of my backpack and there’s still a bit of charge.

I pull it out and read about Kingsley’s death in several different news outlets. There’s lots of coverage, but all the articles seem based on the same press release, maybe issued by Gabe’s office or Kingsley’s gallery. There is no mention of him in relation to the Sinclair family, and no mention of his real childhood.

I’m surprised that no journalist has tried to dig up the truth about Kingsley. But Meer shrugs. “He had people he paid to keep his address scrubbed off the internet, his details out of archives or whatever. I think he burned his birth certificate. His biography is in his paintings, that’s what he always said.”

The obituaries don’t say how he died, either. They do say that Kingsley is survived by his longtime partner, June Sugawara, and by their son, Vermeer Sugawara. There is no mention of Tatum, no mention of Brock. No mention of me.

Articles say that the value of Kingsley Cello paintings is expected to skyrocket. Instagram floods with posts featuring Persephone Escapes the Underworld and several other well-known paintings. RIP the greatest artist of the twenty-first century. His art = my heart. And so on.

I close the apps I’ve been looking at and lean against Tatum, who is intent on his burrito. “It feels like the rest of the world knows our business,” I say. “But at the same time, they don’t know anything at all.”

“That’s how it always is with famous people,” says Brock.

The four of us say the things people probably always say when someone dies. “I can’t believe he’s gone.” “What do we do now?” “He was just here. I saw him yesterday.” “I wish I’d had longer with him.”

None of it is adequate, but we say it all anyway.

Brock tells a story about how Kingsley made a painting of the woman who owns this one fish market in Menemsha. When he tried to give her the painting of her surrounded by dead fish with open eyes, she told him he was a weirdo and not to shop there anymore.

Tatum remembers Kingsley coming to “band night” at the high school, and since June wasn’t there to push high-nutrient food choices, Kingsley filled his pockets with Oreos from the refreshments table. He ate them quietly throughout the show, putting an entire one in his mouth at a time and talking to no one.

Meer tells about a time when he was four and Kingsley had been away for nearly a month. He came back with an enormous stuffed elephant, squishy and bigger than Meer himself. “More like a beanbag than an actual elephant,” Meer explains. “I named it Laxative, which was a word I’d just learned that I thought sounded cool.”

“You did not have an elephant named Laxative,” I say.

“I did. She was Lax for short. It’s a cool word,” says Meer.

“That’s true,” says Tatum. “I’ve met Laxative.”

“Then where is he now?” asks Brock.

“It was a girl elephant,” says Meer. “And she’s dead.”