Body Surfing (30 page)

It was impetuous what I did, she remembers Jeff saying to her in Julie's bedroom the night the girl went missing. Even careless.

Sydney stands and glances once more around the room, trying to remember herself before there was a Jeff or a Ben or a Mr. Edwards or a Julie. She can see only the faintest of images, barely substantial: a young woman, twenty-nine, living from day to day, suspended between a life she was trying to recover from and a life she could not then have imagined. The images fade even as Sydney watches. The room falls very dark, and she shuts the door behind her.

When she turns, she sees Mrs. Edwards standing in the upstairs hallway. The woman has a cardboard carton in her arms. "Are you lost?" she asks.

Interesting question, Sydney thinks.

"Mark wanted you to have this," the woman says. She holds her arms out, indicating Sydney should take the box from her. Sydney is surprised by its weight. On the top of the box, in black marker, are written instructions: This box to Sydney Sklar.

"I was going to have it shipped to your address," Mrs. Edwards says, "but since you're here. . ." She pauses. "Before he died, while he was still able, Mark packed up a few things and made notes as to where they should go. I don't know what's in here," she adds, her tone implying and I don't want to, either.

"Thank you," Sydney says to the woman, who is even now brushing her scant hair off her forehead.

"I don't suppose you'll be here long," Mrs. Edwards says.

"No. I was just going."

"Well. . .," Mrs. Edwards says, seemingly at a loss for words. She gives an odd wave of her hand. "Safe trip!" she adds--a woman seeing off an acquaintance about to head to distant lands.

Sydney carries the box into the dining room, where there is not much light but less likelihood of someone walking in on her. With a breath for courage, she opens the carton.

There are dozens of upright manila files. Sydney sees the name Beecher on one and knows immediately what the box contains. Mr. Edwards has given her the history of the house.

She closes the flap of the box, as if protecting it. That the man, knowing he would die soon, put his files into this carton and wrote her name on it is almost more than she can bear. Did he understand that his wife would sell the house? Did he think that someone might come in and tear it down, destroying all that history? Did he believe that, of all of them, Sydney would be its most appreciative trustee?

She cries until it is all out of her: the longing for the family, her grief for Mr. Edwards, her anger at Jeff. She cries until she gets the hiccups, and then a headache.

Sydney fetches her clothes from the drying rack and puts them on where she is standing. She folds the navy velour sweat suit into a neat package. Through the front windows, she spots Ben sitting on the porch. With the box under her arm, she opens the door.

"Hey," he says. "I wondered where you were."

"I'm leaving now. Would you mind giving me a ride back to my car?"

"What's that?" he asks, pointing to the box.

"It's. . ." Sydney opens her mouth, but cannot answer him. Wisely, Ben doesn't press her. Perhaps he can see that she is in some distress.

"Sit here a minute," he says.

Sydney sets the box on a teak chair and joins Ben on the top step. The air is warm, suggesting a tropical climate. Sydney has to remind herself that it's mid-September in New Hampshire.

"Your clothes are dry?" he asks.

"A little damp."

"You want a beer?"

"I have a two-hour drive."

"A cup of coffee?"

"No, I'm okay."

Actually, she would like to lie down. She wishes she had an excuse to sleep in the house tonight, to slip out early tomorrow morning. But she will not do that. "It smells like the sea tonight," she says.

"East wind."

"It's nice," she says. "What will you do now?"

"I'll work on the cottage until it gets too cold. There's a fireplace there, but the house isn't insulated. Then I'll return to the city, commute back and forth when there's a stretch of good days in the forecast. By November, the cottage will be uninhabitable. And then I guess I'll have to think about the rest of my life."

An insouciant statement, suggesting risk and bravado. Knowing Ben, however, Sydney guesses he'll have a scheme or two up his sleeve. She doubts Ben would cut himself off completely. Doesn't he have to make a living?

"You'll go to Julie's show?" he asks.

"Yes, definitely."

A gull, brazen, lands on the boardwalk. As if rebuffed, it turns and faces away from them.

"You've never liked me," Ben says suddenly. "Right from the get-go, there was an almost visceral dislike. I've never understood why."

Stunned by the boldness of his statement, Sydney can feel the color rising in her face. How can she answer the man? Does he not remember?

"Ben," she says, wishing he hadn't done this. The day, while sometimes sad, has been relatively free of tension between them.

"There was something, wasn't there?" he asks. "I could feel it."

"This is. . ."

"Is it just me? Just who I am?"

"I wish you wouldn't bring this up."

"There was something."

"Oh, Ben," she says, "it was that night."

Ben narrows his eyes and frowns. "What night?"

"The night we went surfing."

In the light that spills from the front room of the house, she can see that he is trying to remember. She searches his face for some sign of dissembling. He shakes his head, still staring at her. His eyes have not shifted from hers, as if he wanted to read the answer in them. "I'm sorry," he says. "The night we went surfing?"

"Yes."

"Did I say something rude to you? If I did--"

"No."

He seems baffled. Maybe he truly doesn't know, she thinks. Maybe he is not pretending. "The hand?" she suggests.

Ben tilts his head--a question.

"In the water?"

In her embarrassment, she is inarticulate. She must get this over with. "When you slid under me and touched me?" she adds quickly.

Ben studies her. "Honest to god, Sydney, I have no idea what you're talking about."

"It wasn't you?" Sydney asks, sitting forward. "Ben, seriously, listen to me. Did you or did you not touch me all along my body while we were in the water that night?" She tries to make the question businesslike, without accusation.

"I wondered why you seemed so frosty," Ben says. "It started that night, didn't it?"

"It wasn't you?" she asks again.

"Let me get this straight," he says. "Someone--a person-- messed with you in the water?"

Sydney nods. She waits.

Ben puts his hands on his knees and then stands. He lets out a breath. He stares at the water for what seems like a long time. He glances down at Sydney.

"That son of a bitch," he says.

Sydney bends her head and closes her eyes. The porch pitches beneath her, as if there had been a tectonic shift in geological plates. She replays the scene that night three years ago, trying to recall every detail. She remembers that the water was a vise around her ankles. Simple tasks seemed impossible, like learning to walk after a long illness. She sees the white edges of a wave, the sense of not wanting to be the first to quit. The roar of the water in her ears, the utter blackness. She had no power, none at all. The surge was a living thing. She staggered. She crawled onto dry land. She went back into the ocean. And all that time, Ben was beside her, was he not?

She felt a shape beneath her. The flesh slithered the length of her body, touching her, feeling her. She flailed and tried to force herself out of the surge, but couldn't. She had water in her mouth.

The slither along her breast, her stomach, her pubic bone, her thigh.

Fleeting and yet deliberate.

Difficult to accomplish and therefore intentional.

Ben, a shape in the dark, announcing himself. But Jeff. Where was Jeff?

Ben called for his brother, and there was no answer. Ben waited an interval and called again. How long was that interval? The timing now seems critical. A minute, two minutes? Only half a minute? Was there enough time to swim away and answer from a distance?

Ben, a man whose touch has always repulsed her, who from that night on has seemed to her something subterranean. Who always seemed to have her number.

"Ben," she says, looking up.

But Ben is already at the end of the deck, looking down over the water. Above them, a moon, a distant light, illuminates the man.

"Ben," she calls again, but the surf is too loud. He can't hear her. She watches him jog down the stairs to the beach.

The reel begins a fast rewind. Sydney sees Ben drinking from a juice carton. Was it a deliberately boorish gesture, as she once thought, or merely a holdover from exuberant teenage behavior? And the offer of a beer during that first dinner party--not predatory, but simply good manners from a genial host? Ben's closed-lipped demeanor in the bar--not the agenda of an angry man, but merely a warning? Ben refusing to attend family gatherings--not with an air of superiority and fury as Sydney had once surmised, but simply stepping aside?

Sydney thinks suddenly of the way Jeff drew his finger along her thigh. Of the shape that claimed her in the water.

She sits for a time on the steps, waiting for Ben to come back. Perhaps he is taking a walk, burning off his anger. More likely, she guesses, he wants nothing to do with her.

She cranes her neck to look back at the house, and in doing so sees the box on the teak chair. The new owners will enter the house in three, four days and have no idea at all of the life once lived within. Nothing of the Edwards family or the Beechers or the Richmonds. Nothing of the births and deaths, the promises kept, the promises broken. The fear, the terror, the joy, the love. The realization, a simple one, disturbs Sydney. How is it possible that years of a family life can be erased in the minutes between a closing and the retaking of a building? There ought to be a history written, she thinks, a small journal passed from one owner to the next. A big fight was had on this day, the journal might read, but we made it up before bed. Or, There was to be a wedding this afternoon, but the groom didn't show. Or, My father died peacefully in the front room. We are all crying.

If the new owners decide to tear down the old house to make way for a new one, a bulldozer will come in and dig up Mr. Edwards's rose garden. All those blossoms, all those species, all that care--gone in an instant. The shallow closets on the upper floor will buckle and tumble. The long front windows will shatter, and the porch will splinter into bits. This could happen in days. Two weeks from now, if she were to return to the place where she once loved Jeff and Julie and Mr. Edwards, would there be nothing but a landscape of smooth, flat dirt? Would a new foundation have been dug already?

"Sydney?"

She turns to see Ben at the foot of the steps. His feet are covered with sand. "Ben," she says at once. "I'm sorry."

He puts up a hand to stop her.

"When I think of all that time. . ."

"Don't."

"We were had," she says. "Both of us."

Ben nods. Sydney senses that he doesn't want to talk about the past, that he might not ever speak again about what his brother did or did not do to each of them.

"Are you okay?" she asks.

He shrugs. "Are you?"

She tilts her head as if to say, Maybe.

There is a long silence between them.

"So," he says.

"So," she says.

He puts his hands on his hips and nods toward the ocean. "How about it?"

Sydney stares. "How about what?"

"One last time?"

Ben can't possibly mean what she thinks he means.

"I just went down to test the water," he says. "It's warm."

"I don't. . .," she protests. "I don't have my suit."

Ben shrugs again.

Sydney gazes out toward the sea. She can barely make out the waterline. "I'll walk out onto the sand with you," she says. "But that's all."

Ben heads along the boardwalk before she can change her mind. He is already on the beach as she begins her descent. She leaves her shoes on the bottom step. She digs her toes into the cool sand. The water might be freezing despite the luxurious air.

She wraps her arms around her chest and runs toward the shoreline. Once, she turns and looks back at the house. Some of the rooms are lit; others are dark. She thinks briefly of nuns and young mothers, men who had sons, men who died. When she finds Ben again, he is a dark shape near the water's edge. He lifts his shirt over his head, unbuckles the belt of his shorts.

She stops where she is, not wanting to intrude upon his nakedness. She will have to stay on the beach now, to look out for him.

Ben high-steps over the low surf and then dives into what looks to be a monstrous wave.

He stands, wiping his face and sputtering. "Come in," he shouts. "The water's a bathtub."