Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (7 page)

People like Alice, and possibly Paul, got overfond of sleep dur ing adolescence, but Riley did not. She respected it no more now than she had in nursery school. A magical beach, an orange moon, a chance to see a dolphin always trumped it.

Alice remembered the time Riley had dragged her out of bed in the early dawn to see dolphins. When Alice had finally stumbled onto the beach, all signs of the finned, arcing backs were gone.

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"I'm sorry," Riley had said, uncharacteristically solicitous.

"That's okay, I'm happy to be up early," Alice replied.

"No, I mean about you missing the dolphins," Riley said solemnly.

Now a groggy Paul appeared on the beach, exposed in his boxer shorts and nearness to sleep.

"Hey, kid, it's your beach," he called to Alice, a look of joy building on his face.

Alice waded into a shallow tide pool and sat in the middle, sur rounded by the full, bright moon. She shivered and broke it up, and then she tried to be very still as it gathered around her again like an inner tube.

Paul and Riley sat at the edge with their feet in the water.

"I'm in the moon," Alice said beatifically.

Paul gave the water a kick, and the bright droplets splashed and rained down.

"Look at the ocean," Riley said. It was storming the beach, seemingly put out by the fact that it had left part of itself on the land and eager to take it back. But the moon had other ideas.

"The tide is going out," Paul said.

"We should swim," Riley suggested.

Alice feared this would happen. She was ashamed of the fact that she'd never really loved swimming in the ocean at night. She didn't want them to know.

"Hey. Let's." Of course, Riley was already on her feet and halfway down to the surf.

Alice was happy in her tide pool. But as she watched them pulling off T-shirts and wading in, out seeped the old fear, the

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younger-sister fear, that they would leave her out if she couldn't keep up. It was a fear more basic than that of sharks and wrenching currents and all the unnameable mysteries of the ocean at night, though it did not exclude them.

She saw their heads bobbing. Riley was telling Paul something funny. She stood to follow them, pushed by the dread that if they got too far ahead, she would lose her place with them.

Riley and Paul raced over the seams and junctures of life, and she always got stuck on them. Should she take off her shirt? She wasn't wearing a bathing suit or even a bra. She'd be swimming in her underwear. But otherwise she would have nothing dry to put on when she got out. Riley didn't care and Paul probably wouldn't notice her either way, but her doubts seeded other doubts. Most people here were so easygoing about casting off their clothes and jumping into the ocean, but Alice cared too much about every thing. Could she rush back to the house and get her suit on? Did she have a dry suit? She pictured the ball of suits she 'd left on top of the machine. Had her mother done laundry?

There were Paul and Riley, radiant in a calm sea, faces turned up to the stars, and her mind was with the laundry.

Some people have no magic, Riley used to say.

Alice cast off her shirt and dove in. She tried to catch up, but they were already off in the direction of the lighthouse. She swam after them, her normally neat strokes seized by insecurity. Effort lessness was not one of their things she could hope to match. She heard the dark water in her ears, felt the volume of it under and around her, felt her heart smashing along in time with her kicks and her pulls.

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She made for the lighthouse, swimming out past the surf, but she felt herself pulled from her path. She struggled against the tide carrying her back into the beach.

She kicked harder. She drew rough breaths. When she looked up again, she realized she was making almost no progress. And with the sweep of the beam from the lighthouse, she also realized that Riley and Paul were no longer in the water but on the sand. They weren't wrestling the tide but simply walking along the beach toward home.

She came in after them, fighting to catch her breath several yards behind them. She hurried along, covering her chest with her arms, feeling the cross she wore on a chain around her neck tap ping against her sternum.

She recognized that unlike her, Riley had some kind of suit on, and Alice felt doubly self-conscious. Riley always clothed herself with the idea that there might be a swim involved, whereas for Alice it came as a revelation for which she was never prepared. Paul's back was bare and his boxers hung drenched. She studied his back, a man's back, gracefully shaped by nature plus all the years of outswimming everyone.

Riley was several inches shorter than Paul, but her stride was long. Her shoulders were wide and her hips were as slim as a boy's. There was no nonsense in the way she shook out her wet hair.

With agitated strides, Alice caught up to their easy ones. She joined them, full of doubt and attention. She wanted Paul to notice her, and she also wanted to find her T-shirt and put it on as quickly as possible. She wanted to submerge herself up to her neck in the moon, just revel in her Alice tide pool and allow herself to think

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thoughts about Paul that gave her an anxious pleasure and a calm sort of pain.

She knew the fear of being left behind. But she was also afraid of getting ahead.

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Alice came to keep him company the next day while he worked on his paper. He was surprised at first, and unsure of what to expect. He was thrown by the way he had seen her the night before, so much of her shivering in the moonlight. He was thrown further by how his body had responded to the sight of her body. He was ashamed now, in that morning-after way, of all the pleasures that his sleeping mind had come up with.

He was suddenly concerned that she would recover from their post-haircut amnesia, and he stood on the verge of telling her to get lost, ready to rebuff her questions as to what he was writing or why. So prepared was he, in fact, that he was almost disappointed when the questions didn't come. Instead, she yawned like a cat and settled on the top of his unmade bed, facing away from him to look out the window at the ocean.

"No more Alice beach," she murmured.

"It never lasts long," he said.

She looked over her shoulder at him, stricken.

"But it comes back."

"I guess."

He returned to his notes, or made it seem so. He thought of her last night on the beach, arms crossed over her breasts. Now on his

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very bed where he'd had his dreams, she lay. There were her same arms, her same back, but less provocative now that they were cov ered by a faded brown cotton shirt.

Sunshine came in the window. She rolled over to watch him. She looked so beautiful, it was hard to look away.

"You should go, Alice. I need to work." He felt irritated at her, and it was obvious in his voice. I can't work with you here. I can't make any of my thoughts go the way I want.

She looked hurt as she left. Her eyes were shiny, and he felt guilty.

And even after she was gone, he didn't think about Kant. He thought about Alice. One thing that made her so beautiful was her colors: her reddish gold hair, her green-yellow eyes, her pinkish freckles, her black eyelashes. She comes in colors everywhere. She combs her hair. She's like a rainbow. When she was tiny and he car ried her around, he thought she was the best possible person to look at.

For some reason he thought of the cross she wore. He'd forgot ten about that until he saw her last night, otherwise bare. It reminded him, guiltily, of how fervent she'd been in her faith when she was small and the times he 'd tried to talk her out of it.

He remembered lying with her one night. She was probably about eight and he was eleven, and he was fleeing his house in the customary way and for the usual reasons. She couldn't fall asleep, and when he crawled under the covers he found a rosary in her hands. It made him mad for some reason, and he told her there was no such thing as God.

"Is there a devil?" she had asked.

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They were quiet for a long time, and he assumed she'd long since fallen asleep when he heard her stirring again. He remem bered her little face, full of shiny-eyed pondering. "Well, is there such thing as Jesus?" she 'd asked.

He'd laughed at her meanly. "Alice. You can't have the one without the other."

Looking back, it was the thing in his life that shamed him the most: the times he was purposefully, calculatingly mean to Alice. It was those moments, and there had been many of them, that indi cated to him that he was not a good person. He got mad at her for many things, but it was always really for the same thing: that she possessed his love and he couldn't seem to get it back.

She didn't deserve it, which was to say she deserved better.

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In past summers when the beach was calm, Riley sometimes let him sit beside her up in the chair. The following day, Paul was inex pressibly gratified when she scooted over to make room for him.

"What's up with you?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know."

Paul tried to relax and make his face go into the normal shapes, but it wasn't easy. He felt strain in every muscle. You couldn't be artificial around Riley, but sometimes you couldn't be honest, either.

He felt guilty toward Alice, but that was by no means the worst of what he felt. He wished guilt were the principal emotion,

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because that would mean he had the upper hand, and he did not. He only pretended.

It was a strange way to love a person.

What was the matter with him? Why couldn't he just get over her? Or at least be nice to her. He'd done this for too long, alter nating between loving her and punishing her for being loved.

"Trevor spotted a shark out there this morning."

Well, one reason was sitting next to him, bouncing her legs. Paul nodded. "Did he really? What kind?" He tried to work up enthusiasm. Sharks had been a sacred fascination of theirs. Not like dolphins for Riley, but still big.

"Probably a nurse shark."

He nodded. "Not big, though." The fantasy was always a big shark. He always drew back from his fantasies.

"Not so small, actually."

"Huh."

He was glad to be near her, because Riley was a touchstone. For him and for Alice, too, he knew. Her outlook was simple, and when you looked at the world through her eyes, you could see it simply, too. Like those Magic Eye pictures. You looked and you looked and suddenly, almost miraculously, the random chaos of all the flat little shapes turned into a three-dimensional picture. But then you blinked or you looked away and it was lost.

Riley had certainty. She was how she was, and while the rest of the world teased and shifted around her, she stood firm. He had once thought he could be like that, too. She discarded whole chunks of life that obsessed other people. She didn't torture people she loved, nor did she hunger for them. She kept it simple. She trusted what she had.

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She thought he was still like that. She didn't realize how far he had drifted. He was always grateful that Riley could not see into his brain.

"Do you remember our deep-sea fishing trip on Crawford's boat?" he asked.

"Which one?"

"The first trip. I think we were twelve, when you caught the tiger shark?"

She looked eager, but not necessarily because of remembering. "Was it a tiger shark?"

"You don't remember that?"

"Tell me. I'll try to remember."

"It was flipping around like crazy on deck. Remember? Craw ford was shouting at us. The shark was bigger than you were. It freaked him out."

"What happened?" she asked. She loved this kind of story.

"You found a ball-peen hammer below deck, and you smacked that poor shark in the side of the head."

"That worked, right?" she asked.

"Like a charm," he said. "Don't you remember?"

He could tell that she didn't. It was an odd thing about her that she loved these stories, she loved her own acts of derring-do, but she couldn't remember them very well. She 'd had so many of them.

He looked at her feet, her braided anklet she'd had since before she was a teenager. Her same bathing suit. Her same hair tucked behind her ears in the same old way.

That episode with the tiger shark was in the past for him-- thrilling, but never to be repeated. It represented a particular time,

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a particular feeling. He marked it as he passed it; that was the way he recorded it. But in some sense he knew Riley had not passed it by. She was still there.

"We should go again," she said. "Crawford still does the deep- sea trips."

And though Paul heartily agreed, he felt sad about it. He couldn't do it again. If he did, he would arrive as a different per son, only playing at their old way, and he hated to disappoint her.

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God Made Alice for Alice

A lice nearly fell over when she saw her sister in bed the fol

lowing morning. "What are you doing?"

"My throat hurts."

Alice went to sit on Riley's bed. Her sister was wrapped up in her old quilt of primary colors that had grown fragile with age. She could hardly think of another time that Riley stayed indoors while the sun shone. She put her hand on Riley's arm and then on her forehead. "You're hot."

"Thanks."

"I can't believe you are in bed." Riley had no respect for illness, especially her own. She 'd swim in an icy September ocean, get a head cold, and do the same thing the next day.

"Well." Alice could see that that one syllable took effort.

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"Have you taken anything yet? I'll get you an Advil and some juice," Alice proposed.

"Juice would be good," Riley said.

Riley never took anything. Alice suspected she didn't like swal lowing pills.