Chronicles of New York

By Mary Morris

After it happened, Brian took her to Moldavi’s on Long Island for the weekend. They’d gone there before whenever something special occurred in their lives – a promotion, a birthday, a spat that needed to be resolved. When Brian’s band got a gig in Atlantic City, they’d splurged on the spa package worth every bit of the five hundred a night. So they went again to recover now.

And they needed to recover. For the past two weeks they’d hardly slept. Especially Brian. Even with pills and booze he’d scarcely closed his eyes. That past summer he’d taken a temp job in Lower Manhattan and was on a coffee break when it happened. “Life turns on a coffee break,” he said for days afterward. That day when he finally got home, Jenna kept saying, “I didn’t know where you were. I didn’t know what happened to you.” As he held her, shards of glass cut into her flesh. She’d winced in pain. She never told him about the glass.

He had gotten them one of the most expensive rooms, a bungalow really, the kind with the little deck and pathway that leads right to the shore. Because the room was so far from the main house, they purchased some supplies. Chips, a few beers, two bottles of coke. Jenna held one of them up in the palm of her hand as if she was practicing for a circus act. “Coke in bottles,” she said. “How quaint.” They settled into their room, putting the drinks into the mini-fridge. They unpacked, tucked everything away. Then they headed out to the beach. It was a cold, breezy weekend, cooler than one expects in early fall, but still they walked the shore. They walked for miles, it seemed, with the wind at their backs, just carrying them along. But then they had to turn around.

Jenna struggled, thinking she couldn’t walk back. She fought the wind, as sand pummeled her skin. At one point Brian had to drag her. We must look like refugees, he thought, coming across the barren sand. When they finally reached the inn, exhausted, gasping for breath, grit between their teeth. Jenna saw the beach chairs, the bungee boards right in front of their bungalow.

A family with two teenage boys had arrived at the room next door. They were carrying dress bags from their car into the room. “Oh, they must be going to a wedding,” Jenna said.

“I’m sure they won’t bother us.”

“They’re boys. They’re going to stay up all night,” Jenna said. “They’re going to drive me nuts.” She didn’t think she could handle any noise. She didn’t know that this family had come to recover as well. That it was a funeral, not a wedding, they were coming to attend. The father was a fireman and he’d attended twenty-eight funerals so far. Jenna would only learn this the next day as the fireman and his family were leaving.

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This entry was posted by Willow on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 4:11 pm. It is filed under Guest Contributors and has these tags: daily life, fiction, insomnia, Long Island, Lower Manhattan, manhattan, new york city, office, restaurant, tourism, vacation, violence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.