I woke up and took another codeine.
I made myself a bag of ice. Pressed it to my face.
It was five days before I asked my parents to bring me to the doctor. Harris believed that complaining isn’t the behavior of a strong-minded person. “It adds nothing to the company you keep,” he often said. “？‘Never complain, never explain.’ Benjamin Disraeli said that. Prime minister of England.”
When I mentioned the pain, to Luda and Tipper, I was lighthearted. “Oh, this one side is just giving me a little trouble,” I said. “Maybe we should have it checked out.” I didn’t tell Harris at all.
By the time the doctor saw me, the infection was severe.
Harris told me I was a fool to have ignored an obvious problem. “Take care of things when they need taking care of,” he reminded me. “Don’t wait. Those are words to live by.”
The infection rampaged through my system for eight more weeks. Antibiotics, different antibiotics, a second doctor, a third, a second surgery, painkillers and more painkillers. Ice. Towels. Butterscotch pudding.
Then it was over. My jaw was healed. The wires removed. Regular braces installed. The swelling was down.
My face in the mirror was foreign to me. I was paler than I’d ever been. Thinner than was natural. But mostly, it was my chin. It was now set forward, giving me a strong line along the jaw to my ears. My teeth hit one another at unfamiliar spots, too sensitive for nuts or cucumber, too weak to chew a pork chop, but lined up.
I would turn my profile to the mirror and touch my face, wondering what future this bit of artificial bone had bought me. Would some beautiful boy want to touch me? Would he listen to me? Want to understand me? I hungered to be seen as unique and worthy. I wanted it in that desperate way that someone who has never been kissed wants it— vague but passionate,
muddled with fantasies of kisses I’ve seen in movies, mixed up with stories from my mother about dances and corsages and my father’s multiple proposals.
I longed for love,
and I had a pretty urgent interest in sex, but I also wanted to be seen
and heard
and recognized,
truly, by another person.
That’s where I stood, when I first met Pfeff. I think he saw that in me.
* * *
—
I WAS BACK at school in May and finished out the semester as best I could. I returned to softball, where I had always been a strong hitter and a credit to the family. We won our league championship that season. I stepped back into my group of friends. I worked hard in pre-calc and chemistry, doing extra hours in the library to get up to speed.
But I was not well. I found myself thinking obsessively about stories I read in the newspapers—stories of men dying from AIDS, this new health crisis. And flooding in Brownsville, Texas; families whose homes were drowned. Photographs in the paper: a man in a bed, his weight down to nothing. Protestors on the cobblestone streets of New York City. A family in a rubber raft, with two dogs. A woman waist-deep in water, standing in her kitchen.
I’d think of these images—
people dying, a city drowning— instead of thinking about Rosemary, dying, drowning.
They let me hurt without looking at my own life. If I didn’t think about them, I’d have never stopped thinking about her.
Codeine helped dull these obsessive thoughts. I’d been prescribed it by several different doctors, so there was a seemingly endless supply of little brown bottles in my drawer. The school nurse gave me more, with permission of my parents, when I said my teeth were aching.
At night, I took the pills to sleep. And sometimes, night came early.
Like, before supper.
Like, before lunch.
PART THREE
The Black Pearls
7.
OUR ISLAND IS quite a ways off the coast of Massachusetts. The water is a deep, dark blue. Sometimes there are great white sharks off the shore. Beach roses flourish here. The island is covered with them. And though the shoreline is rocky, we have two sweet inlets edged with patches of white sand.
At first, this land belonged to Indigenous people. It was taken away from them by settlers from Europe. Nobody knows when, but it must have happened.
In 1926, my great-grandfather bought the island and built a single home on the south shore. His son inherited it—and when he died in 1972, my father and his brother Dean inherited it. And they had plans.
The Sinclair brothers demolished the home their grandfather had built. They leveled the land, where needed. They carted in sand for the island’s beaches. They consulted with architects and built three houses—one for each brother, plus a guesthouse. The homes were traditional Cape Cod style: steep roofs, wood shingles, shutters on the windows, big porches.