Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (10 page)

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Paul appeared at the yacht club the following night. His grown-up face was a strange one to see in this caramel-lit place, amid the knotty pine and the faux-yachtish paraphernalia. He didn't sit at one of her tables, but he arranged himself at the bar so that she passed him on every trip to the kitchen and helplessly offered him the opportunity to tease her about the sailor hat.

He was too familiar to her to make her nervous, but his presence there provoked something similar. Maybe it was because he was drinking red wine. Maybe it was because Riley was still sick in her bed. Maybe it was because he drank glass after glass and ate only goldfish crackers and popcorn from the bowls on either side of him at the bar.

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And as her shift drew to a close and he stayed on, she was fearful of what the night might bring. She trusted that if Riley were there, they would stay firm on this island, but Riley wasn't, which left her afraid of where they might go.

It reminded her of the time, years before, when he'd drunk red wine, nearly a whole bottle of it. She was fifteen, and she'd fol lowed him to the beach because she'd felt worried about him. His mother had been at the house with her boyfriend at the time, and Paul had seemed reckless and angry. More than usual. At first he'd avoided Alice, and then he'd told her to go away.

"I'm not bothering anyone," Alice had said, and sat down at the edge of the surf. "Anyway, it's not your beach."

Eventually, he 'd come to sit next to her. She wondered if he had been crying. They sat there in silence and darkness with no moon at all for a long time. For hours it seemed to her. And when she got tired, she 'd lain back on the sand and he 'd put his head on her stomach. She 'd been startled by it, but she hadn't pushed him away.

He was drunk and tired and sad and a little bit sick. She could imagine even now the heavy, warm feeling of his head lifting and falling with her breath. "You are the only good thing in the world," he'd said to her.

"I don't want to be the only good thing in the world," she'd answered at last, but her words floated upward and she suspected he was already asleep.

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What was he waiting for? Why was he doing this? What had he in mind? He wouldn't let his mind spool forward. He wouldn't be dishonest with himself. He would, apparently, be evasive.

Alice, in her sailor hat, was killing him.

She made a meager waitress, but not out of vanity or ennui like the other two. She was as diligent and generous as ever. Her mis takes favored other people.

He was getting into trouble here. He should go home immedi ately and erase some more of his paper.

And yet he stayed. He ordered another glass of wine. The cute girl behind the bar refilled his popcorn bowl for about the fiftieth time. She was too young to know who he was.

Alice had one table left in her section, and they didn't look like lingerers. The kitchen was closing while the bar filled up. That was the rhythm of the place. First the families with the kids came and went, then the older couples whose kids didn't eat dinner with them anymore. Once they'd gone, the third wave arrived--those same grown kids stealing their parents' chit books and drinking at the bar until all hours. He 'd been in the first category and he 'd been in the third. It was hard to imagine he would ever be in the second.

But Alice. What would she be? Not a lawyer, please. Did she have a boyfriend in her regular life? Was the so-called Jonathan playing that role? Did she want to get married? Did she want to have children?

He didn't believe she had a boyfriend. He would somehow know if she did. Not that it was his business.

He remembered the hard time he 'd given her when she was six teen and seventeen. She'd dress up for a yacht-club dance or wear

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makeup to a party on the beach and he'd tease her and torment her for it. He'd wanted her to think she looked silly or ungainly, but it was the pure opposite of the truth, and that's what made him do it. He'd pretended he was doing her a service, keeping her head size in check.

He'd been ruthless about the boys who hung around her. He saw only their worst intentions, because he also saw them in him self. He'd tried to dignify it as something other than jealousy. He'd never tried to kiss her.

He saw Alice glance at him as she cashed out for the evening. What was he thinking? Would he let her go home? That's what he should do. Let her go home and let himself do the same.

He thought of his house waiting. The gleaming kitchen no one ever cooked in. The perfectly posed couches where no one sat.

There was one room in the house that had any real character, any life, he might have said. The room with the stuff and clutter, the old LPs, posters, and photographs, the endearingly terrible shag carpet, and the chair you'd actually want to sit on, was the room that housed his father's old things. It had escaped the sterili zation process because no one could bear to move it or touch it. It remained the altar to his father that nobody visited. It was enough that it was there.

If Paul wore ink on the soles of his feet, you would see a simple pattern to his use of the house. There would be the path from the back door up the back steps and into his bedroom, and a path into the bathroom. That would be it, and even that was too much. He would rather have slept at Alice and Riley's as he used to do, but he was twenty-four years old, and a sleepover was hard to rationalize.

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How strange that he'd slept on both Alice's and Riley's bedroom floors literally thousands of times. Longer ago, he'd slept in their beds, too, even though Riley kicked and Alice had night mares.

How could you think about a girl whose bed you'd slept in until you got an Adam's apple? And the thing was, he hated the onset of puberty most urgently because it made him know he had to sleep on the floor, or worse, on the couch. Later, he'd thought to hate it because it gave him an ever-strengthening desire to sleep in Alice's bed, but for reasons he felt ashamed of. And the stronger that desire, the more he knew he could not do it.

You couldn't slip from one kind of sleepover to the other. You couldn't. You had to go away for a while. Maybe even years.

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"I guess I'm going home," she said to him, a question in her eyes. Were you waiting for me? What were you doing this whole time?

She'd hung up her apron. She'd ditched the shoes. She'd cleared her tips. She'd washed her hands and face in the bathroom. She'd put something on her lips, if he wasn't mistaken.

And what had he done? He was such a bastard, the way he pur posefully ignored her questions. He gave her expectations and then he pretended not to notice them.

"Okay," he said. "See you later."

"Okay," she said. He saw her hesitate. Just go, he wanted to tell her. He was perversely proud of her when she walked out the door of the yacht club. He saw her sailor hat wadded up in her hands.

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He loved her for being so beautiful, and he hated her for it. He loved how she put shiny stuff on her lips for him, and he also reviled her for it. He wanted her to walk home alone, and he wanted to run after her and grab her up before she could take another step.

Let me love you, but don't love me back. Do love me and let me hate you for a while. Let me feel like I have some control, because I know I never do.

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She told herself she wasn't hoping when she walked onto the beach that night. She felt angry at him in a familiar way, but she could assemble no case against him. What kind of lawyer would she be?

Why did he make her feel this way? She couldn't retrace the moves that left her here. Why did she continue to want him, regardless? Why did she spend so much time trying to understand what he felt? Talk about a waste. That was the true waste.

She sat on the sand, just out of reach of the finger waves. She felt moisture creeping from the sand into her pants, but she didn't really care.

The moon was a sliver. As old as she was, Alice didn't see the moon as round. She saw it as the shape of the light, no matter that she knew better.

She lay back and rested her head in her hands. Her bed would be sandy tonight if she didn't take a shower. She stared upward and felt frustrated at the murk of constellations. She secretly suspected that all those people who claimed to see them were making it up.

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When the moon got lost in a cloud, Paul showed up. Or perhaps it was the red wine that showed up.

She was too tired and he was too drunk to make a show of sur prise. He went ahead and sat close by.

"Nice watching the waitress in action," he said.

She didn't feel like parsing his words, weighing the sarcasm against the affection.

"I hate that job," she said.

"I like it."

"You don't do it."

"I like watching you," he said.

"Better a waitress than a lawyer, you'd probably say."

"I would."

"Well. I think I stink at either," she said.

He sighed. "You try, though."

It sounded to her like an insult, but he said it nicely, so she let it go.

"Alice."

"What."

"Nothing."

She closed her eyes. She heard his breathing. A wave made it as far as her toe. The tide was coming, but she was too tired to move. It seemed okay to be swallowed up.

He lay back beside her. She liked him there, but she didn't turn her head to look at him.

When she was nearly asleep, she sensed him moving beside her, and then she felt his head on her stomach. This was what she wanted, wasn't it? He let the weight of it settle on her gradually, asking permission in his way.

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Was he giving in to her or getting ready to torture her some more? Maybe both.

She felt a sad longing for her sleep as it ebbed away. It was just like him to wait until she'd given up. She felt the sad acceleration of her heart, a misbehaving organ if ever there was one. She knew he could hear it, too.

She felt the weight of his head as she had years before. Heads were heavy. She breathed it up and down. She freed a hand from under her head and let it rest on his ear, his forehead, his cheek. She wasn't sure if he wanted more from her or if he wanted less.

Maybe it was both. Maybe it was always both.

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When Riley's afternoon shift had ended at six, Adam Pryce had the idea of doing a sunset run to the obelisk with a couple of the other guards.

"Are you up to it, Riley?" he'd asked.

If she hadn't been before, she was then. She was feeling almost completely better from her sore throat.

When she got back from the run, it was nearly dark and the house was empty. Alice was working at the yacht club, she remem bered. She thought of going over there and giving Alice a hard time, but she was hungry and tired.

She didn't remember until it was late and she was falling asleep in her bed that she'd left her bag on the beach. She forced herself out of bed and back into clothes. She went to the top of her walk and down the dune. It was a beautiful beach, a peaceful night. The

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sky was black on blue with a sliver moon that came and went. She saw the silhouette of the lifeguard chair and tried to see the shape of her bag in the dark. But as she padded down toward the water, she saw two figures in front of her. Immediately, she was stopped by the intimacy of their position. It wasn't the first time she had come upon lovers on the beach. But there was something about these two that struck her. She walked away from them, giving them their space as she walked toward the chair on the soft, uphill sand. Her brain seemed to process slowly and unwillingly, yet it would not let go. She cast another look toward them, not quite able to help herself.

It was almost certainly Alice. She could see very little of the sec ond person, but she knew, somehow, that it was Paul.

She stopped. She didn't want to go closer, but going up the dune would only put her on higher ground, giving her a broader view of things and making her easy to see.

Her surprise was physical. She was astonished, and at the same time she knew. There were many things in life like that. You couldn't imagine it, and then it happened and you couldn't really imagine it hadn't.

She turned around and went back toward the house. She felt a distressing shift under and around her. She felt the wind blowing the loose sand, as though the world was trying to reshuffle to accommodate this discovery. Riley resisted it. She would wait until the storm settled.

Anyway, what did it mean, really? What did it necessarily have to mean? Her impulse was always the same: to protect the past. To shield the future. To keep things the same if she could.

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She tried to clamp down, to steady her heart. Not to feel or think too much. She didn't like people's secrets. She didn't want to find out things she shouldn't know.

She had once gone to the school psychologist in the beginning of fifth grade. It was her father's idea. She remembered the woman telling her about the way the mind dealt with distress. "It has an immune system of its own," she'd said. "It surrounds the offend ing element like a germ and stops its spread."

"I have no idea why you are making me do this," she'd said to her father, angrily, as soon as she came out.

"That's why I'm making you do this," he had said.

She was tired. Her legs began to ache. She stopped feeling the sand under her feet. She no longer saw the sky. She kept her eyes straight ahead as she let herself into the house and climbed the stairs to her room.

She relished her quiet, empty bed. It wasn't that she wanted what they had. But nor did she want to feel separated from them. She was happy to be alone, but she felt suddenly apart.

She closed her eyes and wished for sleep. She thought of the total time of her run that evening. She'd worn her stopwatch. She tried to divide it into nine miles, to calculate the average, to the sec ond, of each mile.