Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (31 page)

� 299 � Ann Brashares

They sat in a circle on the deck, the planks making lines on their legs.

Paul looked up. "Oh, my God. Look at that. The butterflies are here."

Both girls scrambled to their feet.

"Alice! Look at your trumpet vine. Have you ever seen so many?"

Alice looked up in genuine awe. There were hundreds of them, all seeming to descend at once. As the four of them watched breathlessly, the beating wings slowed and the butterflies all at once fell into butterfly repose.

The girls were jumping around, trying to see.

"Shhh, try to be quiet, so we don't scare them away," Alice whispered.

It was one of the most glorious sights he had ever seen. The orange flowers enveloped by a cloud of orange butterflies.

"They are monarchs," Paul whispered to the girls. "We only see them here once in a long time."

Paul saw how they were straining to look. It was a disadvan tage, sometimes, being under three feet tall. He picked Helen up in one arm and Bonnie in the other. He was touched by the excitement of the girls, and also by how hard they worked to keep quiet.

The butterflies took flight all at once, and he heard Alice let out a little hum at the beauty of it, all of the orange wings against the blue sky. She reached for his hand as all faces turned upward. The girls fluttered away soon after so they could tell their mother what they saw.

After that, Alice and Paul lay for a long time on the deck, sun

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tired and deeply impressionable. When he closed his eyes, he saw only wings.

At last he sat up. "I had the strangest feeling before. Not strange, really. Probably natural. Just strange to me."

"What is that?" said Alice, sitting up next to him.

"I held those little girls up, and in the time it took the butterflies to come and go, I changed from thinking of them as people I might once have been to people I could one day have. Do you think your past can change into your future that quickly?"

u

Paul slept on the old, familiar couch. He hated it, but he hated for it to be his last time, too.

He couldn't sleep. He went out to the deck. He looked at his old house. He looked for the moon. He remembered the butterflies. Could Alice sleep? He pictured her sleeping. He tiptoed up to her bedroom. Her door was open. His heart rollicked as he crept in.

Her eyes were closed. Her hair covered most of her face. Was it wrong to wake her? But he had something to tell her, and he wasn't going to do the cowardly thing again of saying it when she couldn't hear. He gently pushed some of the hair away from her face. Her eyes opened and she turned toward him.

"Hey, Alice?"

She smiled at him. "Yes?"

He kneeled on the floor at the top of her bed so his head was even with hers. He wanted to look her in the eyes, and he didn't want her to have to get up. "I have something to tell you."

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"Okay." Her eyes blinked away some of the sleep. She looked at him expectantly.

He was making it as awkward for himself as possible, but that was the point. "Hey, Alice?"

"Yes." She was being sweetly patient.

"I love you," he said. For all the millions of times he 'd felt it, how good it was to finally say aloud.

She smiled again. "I know."

"Okay," he said. "Well, good night." He walked back down the stairs to his couch and lay down on it. Maybe he could sleep now.

u

She crept downstairs before dawn. She had to laugh at the sprawl of him on the couch. He was too tall to fit on it. In her sleeping shirt and bare legs, she perched on the chair across from him and watched him sleep. He'd kicked off the thin blanket she'd found for him, so his chest and shoulders and arms were bare. One arm was turned out, and she saw the fair underside of his forearm and wrist. She saw the faint blue veins running under his skin, and she saw something else, too.

She stood up and went closer to look. She leaned down with the gradual knowing of what it was. On the inside of his arm just above his wrist, he'd gotten a small blue tattoo. It looked new, as though it was still settling, still healing, but she could see clearly that it was a picture of a dolphin.

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� 302 � The Last Summer (of You and Me)

Alice sat on the deck. She sat on a particular part of the railing where you could see past Helen and Bonnie 's house to watch the sun rise up out of the ocean. She sat there for a long time, her hands clasped, her feet dangling, the edge of the wood digging into the backs of her thighs. She waited until the sun had freed itself from the water and was fully situated in a blue-turning sky before she went back inside.

Paul had awoken. He sat on the couch, feet on the ground, with his head resting in his hands. She enjoyed the way his hair was flat on one side and stood up on the other. He looked up at her as she walked in.

She came close again. He put his arms out to her, and she slipped onto his lap. They remembered how to do that. She put her head on his shoulder and her arms around him tight. She felt the joy of being held by him again.

With her legs straddling him, it was hard to conceal the state of things between his legs. She wrapped tighter around him and felt the joy of that as well.

"I'm sorry, Alice," he said, half choked and half laughing. "I can't help it. You might have to move."

"I don't want you to help it," she said. "I don't want to move."

She wasn't sure if he remembered it, but this was the last posi tion in which they'd made love more than a year before.

She lifted up so she could pull off his boxer shorts. He slipped her shirt over her head and pressed her naked self against his.

"Can we . . . right here?" he whispered, his eyes endearingly wide.

"I think we should make the best of it before they tear it

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down," she whispered back, even though there was no need to whisper.

He had the look of a man who'd gotten ahead of himself, afraid to believe the place in which he had landed. She laughed at his eagerness.

She felt him tugging at her underpants, but then he stopped.

"We don't have . . ."

She didn't want him to stop, but she knew what he meant. She appreciated that he was responsible. "Wait a minute. Just hold on." She pried herself away from him. "I think I might have one."

"You do?" He looked only half delighted by that thought.

"Yes. From before. You left them."

"I did."

She laughed again. "You used to have them coming out your ears."

"That's true, isn't it?"

"I'll be right back." She not only found a condom, but she also took the moment to lock the door to the deck in case any little girls appeared for an early breakfast.

He looked impatient for her return. He grabbed her up as soon as she'd tiptoed back into the room and with ardent determination, he finished the job of undressing her. He lay her on the couch and made love to her with a solemn face and a joyful body.

It was different this time. They'd been stripped down since last summer. She wondered if he felt that, too. Last time, they'd been hiding out in their alternate universe, like fugitives or wary seces sionists. It had been a putsch last time. Now they were with the

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world again. It was less privileged, maybe, but at least it connected them to the future.

u

He boarded the ferry with Alice. He kept thinking it was the last time for this ferry and this island, but there kept being another, so he decided to leave it open.

It was a customary good-bye boat, Labor Day in the late after noon. He tried to put himself in the mood of it, seeing all the teenagers hugging and crying.

But this time he had Alice. He held her hand, in a state of near- giddy disbelief that he would get to hold her hand all the way onto the boat and off of it, too. They'd never left the island together before. He couldn't fathom the idea, the pleasure of not having to say good-bye to her. What he most loved about this island he was taking with him. Well, he thought wistfully, one of the two. And with that thought came an ache. Not so much a pressing ache but the kind you got used to.

They climbed to the upper deck and found a seat at the back by the railing. He put his hand on Alice 's thigh. He was happy that he got to do that. He looked at the sky, simple blue, and he looked for the frail daytime moon, which he never seemed to notice anywhere but here.

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� 305 � Ann Brashares

As the ferry engine revved and the people swirled around them and Paul held her hand, Alice kept thinking about that passage from one part of life to another. She kept thinking, Is this it? Will I know if it is? Will I be ready? Will I make it across? Will I chicken out? Will I know when I'm saying good-bye? When I look back, will I still be able to see what I've left behind?

She thought she would know when it happened. But now, as she looked around, she wondered if it was really like that at all. Maybe it happened in a million different ways, when you were thinking of it and you weren't. Maybe there was no gap, no jump, no chasm. You didn't forget yourself all at once. Maybe you just looked around one time or another and you thought, Hey. And there you were.

Paul stood, and so did she as the ferryboat churned and began its laborious backing out. Alice watched the teenagers on the boat frantically waving at their friends who were shouting, screaming from where they stood at the edge of the dock.

Paul cradled Alice 's hand in both of his hands and held it to his chest. They watched as the cluster of kids who were left on the dock lifted their arms over their heads and dove in.

� 306 � Acknowledgments

With great appreciation (and some relief ) I thank the valiant Sarah McGrath as well as Geoff Kloske and Susan Petersen Kennedy for their patience, talent, and support. I thank Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, my remarkable agent and friend.

I thank my dear friend Elizabeth Schwarz for her wisdom and her guidance.

With love I acknowledge Jacob, Sam, Nate, and Susannah, and, as ever, my wonderful parents, Jane and Bill Brashares. About the Author

Ann Brashares is the author of the young adult novels The Sister hood of the Traveling Pants, The Second Summer of the Sisterhood, Girls in Pants, and Forever in Blue. This is her first novel for adults. She lives in Manhattan and spends summers on Fire Island, New York.