The Spill
A short story by
Robyn Schneider
Cassidy Roth had been lying awake on top of her too-warm blankets for the past hour, thinking about the stain on the entryway carpet, when she heard the crunch of a car rolling up to the garage.
It was the third day of summer vacation, and her family’s second night at the beach house in Narragansett, where they always went. The only unusual part about that particular summer, and that particular evening, was that it marked the first time Dr. and Mrs. Roth had agreed to leave Cassidy alone in the beach house. The Roths were three doors down, attending a party at the neighbors’, and earlier that day the topic of “leaving Cassie by herself” had nearly blossomed into a thorny debate, but Cassidy had calmly sworn that she wouldn’t burn down or blow up the summer rental and besides, she was almost fifteen.
Cassidy sat up in bed, listening to the emptiness of someone removing a key from their ignition. She didn’t think her parents had taken the car. In fact, she knew they hadn’t.
The plaid curtains in her third-floor room were dusty, but she pushed them aside, trying not to cough. A small sedan sat in the driveway, driver’s-side door open, parked behind her parents’ Volvo. In the lamplight that spilled across the one-lane road (“Beach access, Dead end”) was her brother, in a pair of blue hospital scrubs, pacing back and forth.
Cassidy ran down the stairs, taking them three at a time and then forgetting how many there were, stumbling at the bottom. A small sliver of wood lodged itself in her heel and she cursed under her breath but didn’t stop running.
The carpet in the entryway was still damp where Mom had tried to sponge up the spill earlier, and Cassidy squelched through it, throwing open the door.
“Ezra,” she yelled, launching herself at him.
“Jeez, Cass, be quiet,” Ezra whispered, wrapping her in a tight bear-hug that smelled curiously like the salted breeze blowing off the water, but more human somehow, and sour. Cassidy would learn later that night—or, later that morning, if you are one of those people who considers midnight to be the next day—that the smell never came out, that it was the embalming fluid used on medical school cadavers.
“Mom and Dad aren’t home,” Cassidy said, pulling away, her nose wrinkled. “And anyway, they didn’t say that you were coming.”
Ezra sighed with what might have been relief and smiled his boyish grin, his dark eyes looking anything but boyish.
“Surprise.”
“How long are you staying?” Cassidy wanted to know. She crossed her arms over her thin Dalton School
T-shirt, wishing she’d worn a bra.
“We’ll see.” Ezra ruffled her hair and started toward the front door.
“Ezz?”
“Hmmm?”
“The door. You forgot to—oh, never mind.”
Cassidy closed the car door for him. Then she realized something.
“So where’s your stuff? I mean, didn’t you bring anything with you?”
Ezra shook his head slightly, hand on the doorknob.
“No. I must’ve…forgot.”
“D’ya at least have a toothbrush? Some normal clothes?”
“I’m not planning to stay very…I mean, I’ll borrow Dad’s.”
“Ewww, his toothbrush? Or his pants, which are like five sizes too big for you, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“No, just one of his spare toupees should work nicely.”
They laughed then, a brother and sister duet, chuckling at memories of their father’s absurd pride in having retained a full head of hair well into his fifties. “Toupee or not toupee, that is the question,” he would joke, rubbing his graying curls while he frowned at the morning crossword.
And as they laughed, Cassidy tried to convince herself that Ezra was okay, that he’d just come down for a spontaneous visit, and nothing at all was wrong. But Cassidy had never been a strong liar.
“You want a T-shirt or something?” Cassidy offered, not bothering to lock the front door behind them. It was a gate-guarded community, and anyway, she didn’t remember if her parents had taken a key.
“Nothing too girly,” Ezra cautioned, following her up the stairs. “So how’s school?”
“Duh, it’s summer. Since Thursday. I’m a sophomore now.”
“You’re all grown up.”
“Mom and Dad left me alone tonight,” she bragged, and then realized that it made her sound about twelve.
“Overprotective Olivia,” Ezra said, and even in the dark, even through the heavy breathing that stair-climbing often inspired, Cassidy could hear the scorn in his voice.
“Why do you call them that?”
“It’s hard to explain. At some point they stopped seeming like parents and started seeming like people. I hate calling people by their titles.”
“Says the future doctor.”
“Exactly. Sometimes you need the escape.”
Cassidy wasn’t used to conversations like this, to veering off into the abstract and making hazy, self-analytical pronouncements. Her friends still shared stories about their pets and traded anecdotes back and forth, waiting for their turn to speak rather than really listening. They spent their allowance on frozen custard from Zabar’s and Sephora lip gloss. Occasionally, although they did not admit to this publicly, they still tuned in to programs on the Disney Channel.
But they were all growing up, and sometimes Cassidy found herself the subject of derisive, cliquish laughter when she suggested they go thrift shopping instead of browsing through Barneys, when she got caught with a song on her iPod from some Brooklyn indie band her friends had never heard on the top 40, or when she didn’t agree with her friends’ pronouncements of who in their class was “lame.”
Cassidy was turning into someone, and she didn’t know who, but she was curious to find out. Being part of the crowd no longer appealed to her. And although she’d never had an abstract conversation before, she wasn’t against it, she was just new to the concept.
Cassidy opened a drawer and flung a T-shirt at her brother. “It should fit. I was at a concert and they only had one size left.”
Ezra turned his back on her in the moonlight and pulled off his scrub top, his shoulders pale and taut.
“What’s with the beard?” Cassidy asked. “You didn’t have it at Christmas.”
“Hair grows.”
Ezra yanked his head through the shirt, his hair haphazard.
“Well, duh,” Cassidy said.
“It makes me look older.”
“It makes you look like a douche.”
“Take that back.” Ezra grinned.
Cassidy knew what was coming.
“No. It makes you look like one of those guys on the Q Train wearing girls’ jeans and Wayfarers.”
“You’re asking for it.”
Ezra launched himself at Cassidy and they rolled onto her bed. He tickled her and she laugh-screamed, pleading with him to stop but not really meaning it.
“Um, maybe I should put on a bra,” Cassidy said, rolling to the side and realizing that she might be too old to play like that with her brother.
Ezra swung his feet over the side of the bed. He picked up his scrub top from where it had crumpled into a nest on the floral area rug, and began to fold it.
“Why do your clothes smell like that?” Cassidy asked, tugging on a school sweatshirt over her top instead.
“Nah,” Ezra shook his head. “It’ll just freak you out.”
He hesitated and finally placed his shirt on top of her dresser.
“No it won’t,” Cassidy pleaded.
“Well, the smell doesn’t come out. It’s from Gross Anatomy.”
“What’s that?”
“Dissection.”
“You mean dead bodies?”
For some reason, this made Ezra wince.
“Cadavers,” he clarified. “They’ve been embalmed.”
“And the smell?”
“Embalming fluid,” he said.
“Oh, ewww.”
“I warned you.”
“Warn me harder next time.”
“My dear girl, I would be charm and enchanted to oblige.”
Cassidy snorted. It was a reference to Fitzgerald, she knew. She’d read Gatsby in Honors English that year and hadn’t “gotten” it. When she told Ezra that she didn’t see what was so special about his favorite writer, he’d spent two days during Christmas break trying to convert her with his earlier works, and in the end gave up, making Cassidy promise to give Fitzgerald a try another year.
Ezra had been an English lit major at Yale, and Cassidy remembered him more solidly from his college years, coming home one weekend each month with dirty laundry and staying out until all hours with his old high school friends who had gone to Columbia and NYU. Straight A’s in science and English, barely having to do any work at all.
He’d been charming back then. The perfect older brother, with an actor’s expressive face, an alarming appetite, and a repertoire of funny anecdotes, some of which were too sophisticated or too dirty for her to understand until much later.
But the one thing she understood, then, as she tugged on the sweatshirt, was that her brother had changed. He was unhappy.
Cassidy was about to ask him about it, but her foot twinged as she stepped, and she remembered her splinter.
“Ow,” she said softly.
“What?” Ezra reached out, catching her arm.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t be embarrassed to tell me,” he said, suddenly professional. “I might be able to help.”
“I’m not embarrassed,” Cassidy retorted, holding her foot out toward him. “Splinter.”
“Hmmm. Sit here, let me see.”
Cassidy sat. Ezra knelt on the floor, squeezing the sole of her foot until he found the splinter.
“Right there,” he said. “Ya have any tweezers?”
“Bathroom. In the travel case.”
He went to find them and returned with a bandaid, also from the travel case. The bandaid featured little Disney characters that no doubt her mom had found charming.
“So, there’s a meteor shower tonight,” Cassidy said, wincing as she felt the sting of the tweezers bite into her heel.
“When?” Ezra asked absently, concentrating on the splinter.
“Oh, um, midnight. I didn’t think I’d be up that late.”
“Got it.”
“Thanks.”
Ezra applied the bandaid.
“We could watch it, if you want,” Cassidy said. “From the beach. Like old times.”
Ezra looked up at her and didn’t say anything for a long time.
“What?” Cassidy asked.
“You had a good childhood, right, Cass?”
Cassidy shrugged. “I never thought about it. I guess.”
“And you like Olivia and David?”
“You mean Mom and Dad?” Cassidy corrected. “Sure. I mean, they’re too overprotective and everything, but they’re okay. Like, this afternoon, I walked to the ice cream stand by myself. You know the one. And I got this blueberry cone. The second I walked in the door, the cone went splat all over the carpet. Mom went nuts. She kept wailing about the cleaning deposit and pouring club soda onto the spot and lecturing me on being careful. But Dad was great. He calmed Mom down and told me that the stain was the exact shape of a human heart.”
“Dad would say that,” Ezra said, snorting. Their father was a cardiologist.
“Why don’t you like him?” Cassidy asked, running a finger over the edge of her bandaid.
It was a daring question, and she hadn’t realized, but now it was out, expanding dangerously.
“I have my reasons. A meteor shower sounds like fun, Cass. Bring your iPod. We can turn it up all the way. I’m going to see if Dad has a sweatshirt.”
When Ezra reappeared, wearing Dad’s extra-large Patagonia fleece zip up, he stopped in the doorway.
“When do you think they’ll be back?” he asked.
“From the Fairchilds’ party? I don’t know. I got the impression it was one of those drunk things that could go on all night.”
“Come on, Cass. Let’s not miss the meteor shower.”
She followed him down the stairs. Ezra stopped inside the front door.
“This the stain?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Well, I don’t think it looks anything like a heart. It’s more like a—a–”
“—Four leaf clover?” Cassidy suggested.
“Exactly,” Ezra said, flinging open the door, and she couldn’t tell if he meant it.
The night air was cool, with a salt tang, but Cassidy was warm enough inside her sweatshirt.
Ezra switched on a flashlight.
“Where’d you get that?” Cassidy asked.
“David and Olivia’s room. Come on.”
Cassidy’s bare feet crunched over the gravel as she followed her brother down the sloping drive and onto the main road that led to the beach. The streetlamp in front of their house was lit, but the next wasn’t, and the flashlight created unfamiliar shadows and shapes out of a beach raft on someone’s lawn, a weathervane, a hokey cow-shaped mailbox.
Just beyond the turn for the beach was Maude and Bill Fairchild’s place, three stories of floor-to-ceiling glass, a renovation out of synch with the understated clapboard elegance of the neighborhood.
The house was a lightbulb, glowing from within, showing scenes of middle-aged partygoers. Their property had been enclosed with a gate since last summer, but the gate was useless, flung open to accommodate the dozen-or-so cars of couples who had driven to the party.
“I can’t believe Mom and Dad would go to something like that,” Cassidy commented as they turned onto the footpath that led to the beach.
“It’s ostentatious as hell,” Ezra agreed. “You know Mom, too polite to refuse an invitation.”
“But they’re enjoying themselves,” Cassidy argued. “Why else would they stay so long?”
“Oh God, you’re probably right,” Ezra said, picking his way along the footpath. “Next thing you know they’ll move into that horrible high rise someone erected in the West Nineties.”
Cassidy laughed. “And Mom will go to the salon every week for scheduled blowouts and manicures.”
“And Dad will drive out to New Jersey on weekends to play golf with a new set of designer clubs.”
Ezra unlatched the gate and held it open for Cassidy.
They were both smiling at the ridiculous image of their down-to-earth Upper West Side parents putting on nouveau riche airs.
The sand was cold on Cassidy’s bare feet, and some of it got wedged under her bandaid, loosening the flaps until, halfway to the lifeguard stand, the bandaid was given up for lost amongst the mica-flecked sand grains.
The beach was deserted, a moonlit stretch of stomped-on sand castles and wet crust encircling the low tide. A child’s drug-store flip flop stuck straight out of the sand near the rubble of an enormous fortress, the kind with a moat and everything.
Privately, Cassidy thought the beach was better at night. The leathery-tan ladies with gold necklaces and floppy straw hats didn’t congregate in folding-chair circles, reading paperback romance novels at night. You were never wet and hungry, smelling someone else’s barbecue without a dollar fifty in your tote for a boardwalk hot dog at night.
There were just endless stars and the ruins of that day’s civilization, empty lotion bottles and forgotten shoes, squelched castles and miles of lonely, empty waterfront.
This specific beach, private to that specific gate-guarded community, was at the southernmost point of the bay, cupped by the magnificent cliff-houses in the north and ending in a small, rock-dotted islet. Far across the water, on a clear night, were the lights of Block Island, and it was a clear night.
“No clouds,” Ezra said, tilting his head back as he clomped toward the lifeguard stand in his royal blue Crocs.
“Perfect for a meteor shower,” Cassidy agreed.
Ezra reached the lifeguard station first, and as Cassidy watched him climb, it occurred to her that lifeguards and medical students weren’t really that different.
“I don’t need your help,” Cassidy protested, swatting Ezra’s hand away and climbing the whitewashed slats up to the platform where her brother waited.
“I know,” he said, clicking the flashlight on and off, on and off. “Morse code.”
“What’re you saying?”
On-off, on-off, on-off.
“Help me.”
Ezra stared solemnly out across the water, as though he honestly believed that someone would respond to his call.
“You’re supposed to say S.O.S.” Cassidy told him, and a beat too late, she realized that maybe he knew you were supposed to say S.O.S.
“You have your iPod?”
“Sure.”
Cassidy pulled it out.
“Want to listen to the Smiths?” he suggested.
Cassidy circled her finger on the click wheel, turning up the volume and selecting the artist from her list. Faintly, against the roar of the ocean and their chorused breathing and the night-chirping of insects, the music began to play.
“I don’t see any meteors yet,” Cassidy said, snuggling against her brother’s shoulder.
The borrowed fleece smelled like Dad.
“They’ll come. It’s not all at once, remember?”
“You smell like Dad,” Cassidy said.
Ezra stiffened.
“Don’t say that.”
“Why?”
“Just don’t.
“But why?”
“Shhh, I think I saw one.”
“Where?”
“In the sky, doofus.”
Ezra chucked her playfully in the elastic of her ponytail.
“You suck,” Cassidy grumbled, sitting up and criss-crossing her legs.
She brushed some sand off the lifeguard station and stared at the sky for a long while.
“I don’t see any,” Cassidy said.
“Just wait. It’s always slow in the beginning.”
The iPod began to play a new song, and one of the crashing waves synched up with a beat, making Cassidy smile.
“There!” Ezra said.
“I saw it too!”
For the next fifteen minutes, they stared silently up at the cloud-clear, coffee-black sky, which swam with grains of stars that sometimes streaked westward, away from the milky gibbous moon.
“Can I ask you a question?” Cassidy said, finally breaking the silence.
“Okay, shoot.”
“Why’re you here?”
Ezra sighed, staring out to sea, at the far away lights of Block Island.
“I came to see you, kiddo.”
“Don’t call me that. And no, you didn’t, Ezra. You came in the middle of the night. Without calling. Without clothes. What’s going on?”
“Nothing. Don’t worry.”
His response was automatic, and it made Cassidy furious. She wasn’t a little kid anymore. She could handle the truth.
“Well, too late,” Cassidy said, rubbing her finger along the click-pad of her iPod, turning the volume up and down, up and down. S.O.S. “I’m already worried. Something’s wrong, and you’re unhappy and what I don’t get is why you won’t just tell me.”
“Because you’re a—”
“—I’m not a kid.”
“You really want to know?” Ezra asked, his voice deepening as he forgot to control the volume. “Smell me, Cass. Go on. The smell never comes out.”
“You told me that already.”
“Not the whole part, I didn’t. You want to know why I haven’t driven home to visit this semester? Why I don’t call? It’s my cadaver, Cass. I opened the metal lid on the first day, with my dissection partners, and I knew who the guy was.”
“You mean the cadaver?”
“Yes, the cadaver.”
“Well, who was he?”
“Mr. Samson. 9th grade English. Stuyvesant High School, 1999. The man who made me want to be a Comp Lit major.”
Ezra shook his head and then huddled his elbows inside the overly-large sleeves of their father’s jacket.
“You’re kidding.”
“Serious as a myocardial infarction. Which is, in fact, what he died of.”
“Did you tell someone?”
“Who could I tell? I wasn’t sure at first if I was going crazy. I mean, it’s been nine years. He looked older. No, not he, the cadaver.”
Ezra stared across the water, and Cassidy stared at Ezra, and neither of them remembered that they’d come out there to watch a meteor shower.
“So what’d you do?”
“I dissected it.” Ezra’s voice was stifled with anguish. “I cut him apart. Mr. Samson, 9th grade English, Stuyvesant High School, 1999. The man who introduced me to Salinger and Fitzgerald and Faulkner.”
“Oh, God. You dissected your English teacher?”
“This afternoon, before I drove here…” Ezra’s hands shook in his lap. “…We had to use the bone saw to cut down to the brain cavity. The room smelled like hot, salted flesh, and the girls covered their noses with their arms, and bone shavings were falling everywhere, like pencil sharpener debris. I just walked out. Couldn’t do it anymore. I wound up in a coffee place near the medical center, and then I got in my car and drove. I was planning to confront Dad, but I don’t think I have the balls anymore. And now I’m here, on the beach, freaking you out.”
“You’re not freaking me out,” Cassidy lied.
“I better be,” Ezra said, shaking his head. “I fucking better be.”
Three meteors shot over the lifeguard stand, large and sparkling, but neither of them noticed.
“Jesus, Cass, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Any of it.”
“No.” Cassidy put her hand inside of his. “I’m glad you did.”
“I’m dropping out,” Ezra said.
“Because of the cadaver?”
“No. Other things. An amalgam of things, actually. I mean, I never really wanted to become a doctor.”
“You didn’t?”
“Cassidy. I majored in American Lit.”
“Oh. Right.” She’d never thought of it that way, how maybe it was a little odd that Ezra with his nose always in a book, Ezra the actor, the English major, had one day gone off to the New England Medical Center to become a doctor.
“I’m going to get my stuff from the dorms. Email the school. Say goodbye to Sarah, and the guys from Nutrition, and Dr. Mahmood,” Ezra said, mostly to himself.
“What’re you going to do after?”
“Teach for America? Figure things out. Move to Prospect Heights maybe. Remember Max? His roommate’s graduating next week, and I could stay on their futon until then.”
“Why don’t you come home?” Cassidy asked, pressing herself against his side again, trying not to breathe in the Eau d’English Teacher that faintly radiated off his scrub pants.
“Cass, I’m dropping out of medical school. I can’t just come home to Mom and Dad.”
“Why not? They’ll understand.”
“They don’t understand,” Ezra thundered, making Cassidy jump. She scooted a couple inches away from him, leaning instead against the whitewashed balustrade on the side of the lifeguard stand.
“They will.”
“No, Cass. Not they won’t. They already don’t. I told Dad at Christmas that it wasn’t for me. That I wanted to teach or something. And he told me to stick with it. That the Roths weren’t quitters. That he didn’t pay for my fancy, expensive college degree so I could be a common blue-collar babysitter. That he’d see his son drop out of medical school with a transcript full of high pass and honors the day he dropped dead.”
“I’ve never heard Dad talk like that before,” was the only thing Cassidy could think to say.
“Well, he never does it around you. You’re his baby. You spill ice cream in the goddamn entryway and he tells you that the spill is shaped like a heart.”
“So what?”
“So you need to know, Cass. Dad isn’t as great as you think. He’s a bully. He overworks his residents and scares his nurses and puts so much pressure on me that you wouldn’t believe.”
“No,” Cassidy said, her voice tiny. Suddenly she was freezing, up there on that wooden platform, in the cold night air, with the wind on the waves chilling her as it blew past.
“Mom probably hates that stupid party at the whoever’s–”
“—The Fairchilds’.”
“Yeah, there. She’s probably sitting on a sofa right this minute, twirling the stem of her glass, sober and bored and listening to all that vapid hilarity wishing she was home in bed. But no, Dad wants to be social. Dad wants to have a good time and drink some good whiskey on his vacation, so his wife damned well better be at his side–”
“—Stop it! You don’t know that’s the truth! You don’t know!” Cassidy yelled, and the wind caught her words, tumbling them back at her in a gust.
“I do know. I called Dad last week. Told him not to pay tuition for the fall. That I wasn’t coming back. And he said that if I didn’t go back to medical school in the fall, I better not expect him to put a roof over my head.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you need to know, Cass. You need to stop worshiping him. Because he’s going to start up on you pretty damned fast, I think. Once he loses me, he’ll want to micromanage someone else’s life. And I need you to be prepared. I need you to stand up for him, and do what you want, and be who you want.”
“I don’t know who I want to be yet,” Cassidy said.
“That’s okay,” Ezra told her, his voice softening. “But when you do, make sure it’s really what you want, not what he wants. Promise?”
“Yeah, I promise.”
“I think we missed most of the meteor shower,” Ezra said, looking up. A meteor rubber-banded past. “Maybe not.”
“That’s okay. I’m cold anyway. Let’s head back.”
“I’m not staying,” Ezra said. “I can’t talk to Dad tonight. Now when he’s going to come home drunk from that party.”
“I know. But your car’s there. So you have to walk back with me.”
“True enough.”
When they climbed down off the lifeguard stand Cassidy let Ezra help her, even though she was fine by herself.
Their shadows were long and stretched across the sand, like boardwalk toffee. Ezra held the flashlight, shining the beam without clicking it.
They reached the gate to the footpath, and, still silently, slipped back through, away from the beach.
“Can I visit you?” Cassidy asked. “In Prospect Heights, at Max’s place? I could come this week. Tell Mom that
I was walking to the Museum. She never checks on that stuff. I just take the 2 Train into Brooklyn. I know how.”
“Sure. You can visit,” Ezra said. “I’d like that. We could get Souvalaki or something.”
Greek food was her favorite.
“Yum.”
“Just don’t spill it all over yourself,” Ezra cautioned. “Or Mom will know you didn’t go to the Museum.”
“I won’t spill,” Cassidy retorted. And then, “If I do, I can always say it was Shwarma from a street vendor.”
Ezra choked on his bit-back laughter as they came to the end of the footpath. “Good thinking.”
They didn’t say anything as they passed the party, still going, still silhouetted against the windowpanes, with just as many cars in the drive as before.
“Do you ever think that maybe we’ve all got some kind of a stain?” Ezra asked finally. “On the inside. That someone, somewhere spilled their shit all over us and it left an indelible mark?”
“You mean Dad. That Dad stained you.”
“Yeah. I mean, when I quit medical school, I won’t lose the memories. I’ll still know the names of all the bones and muscles. And what it smells like in the underground cadaver lab. And how to give a Neuro exam.
“But you’ll forget, eventually,” Cassidy said. “The stain will fade.”
“Even so, I’ll still know it’s there. I’ll still look for it, the way Mom will always eye the entryway carpet, remembering.”
Cassidy almost retorted, “it was just an ice cream, jeez,” but she didn’t. They were having an abstract conversation, her first. And they had reached the driveway.
“Keep the T-shirt for me,” Cassidy said.
“Sure. And can you put these back in David and Olivia’s room?”
Ezra handed her the fleece zip up and flashlight.
“I won’t tell David and Olivia that you were here,” Cassidy said.
“Call them Mom and Dad,” Ezra said.
“Why?”
“Let them think you’re a kid, just for a little longer,” Ezra said. “Even though you’re not. Especially because you’re not. Because it’s summer, and you’re in the beach house for another two weeks, and because you’re my sister.”
Cassidy gave her brother a hug and watched him climb into the sedan. The engine growled and the tires crunched over the gravel as he backed out of the drive. At the end of the block, Ezra paused at the stop sign, but instead of rolling past, he flashed his taillights at her, on-off-on-off-on-off. S.O.S.
