September Girls (23 page)

“I fucking can’t believe you. The rest of it I can believe—I don’t know how, but I can. But you. I thought you were different.”

She looked at me as if I’d said something she didn’t understand. “Sam,” she said.

“None of this was real. You were just using me.”

“No,” she said. “Okay, maybe at first, but—”

“Look, I get it.”

I got it.

Look, the fact of the existence of life on Earth is basically unbelievable if you think about it for two seconds. You might actually call it a miracle if you get off on that sort of thing. Because what are the chances?

The fact is that if our homey, temperate, generous little planet spun just a little bit closer to the sun, we’d all be cooked. Even a tiny bit farther into space and we’d be freezing our asses to death.

And that’s just one factor—the easiest one to conceptualize. It’s not even taking into account the chemical unlikeliness of Earth’s unique preponderance of oxygen, water, and whatever else allows us to survive here. (Look, I don’t know the details, but I did actually read all this somewhere.)

The point is that you can’t think about it too long; it will boggle your mind. How are we even here? At the very least it’s an astonishing statistical fluke. At most—well, some people use it to make a case for the existence of God.

I don’t believe God exists. Life found Earth only because of the sheer vastness of the universe; with an infinity of planets floating around out there at various distances from various stars it had to happen somewhere, right? And so here we are because here we are and that’s just that, and in fact it’s not such a big thing after all. It’s basically just luck.

As I looked at DeeDee sitting on the beach, her elbows on her knees and her chin on her fists, her floral dress flapping a little in the wind, it occurred to me that this was also love’s trick. This notion that you are somehow special: that it could only have been you and her, in this place, at this moment, in this exact way. If Mom hadn’t left, if Dad hadn’t quit his job. If I hadn’t wandered into that party.

What if the earth were the tiniest bit closer to the sun—just one? Instead of knowing each other, DeeDee and I would have been burned to a crisp before we even had a chance to be born.

At first, one assumes destiny has had a part in lining up all these what-ifs, all with the particular purpose of bringing you to her at the exact moment that she needed a light on the pier outside the Fisherman’s Net. One begins to believe in God.

But that’s all just fake. This is not actually how it all happened.

The actual actualness of it was both much more complicated and, at the same time, the fucking simplest thing in the world. DeeDee hadn’t even needed a light. She already had one. She just came out there because she could smell me. Or who cares? It didn’t matter who was standing there on the pier. I could have been anyone.

I was not special. They needed a virgin and a virgin appeared, the same way another one would appear after me and another after him. I wondered if these same scenes were playing themselves out elsewhere on the beach at this moment. Other virgins, other DeeDees, but still pretty much the same.

I could have been anyone and she could have been any of them.

We had never been anything. In a way it was a relief. I shrugged at her—her face in her hands, now—and I gathered my clothes as quickly as I could and turned and walked for home, the beach returning to me with every step I took.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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TWENTY-TWO

THE RED FLAGS were up on the beach and the lifeguard chairs were abandoned, tipped into the sand. The water was dull and choppy, whitecaps dotting the surface, the horizon obscured by giant gray clouds. This had happened quickly—just an hour earlier it had been sunny and clear, and as I’d walked down the beach away from DeeDee, the breeze had become restless in a way that pricked the hairs on the back of my neck. A storm was on its way.

At the beach near our cottage, a crowd of people had gathered on the shore to watch a clutch of surfers in the water. There was something about their weightless speed that implied motionlessness, a state of suspense, as they hung there in the curled bellies of towering waves and careened toward the shore in smooth, jigsawed lines.

Every one of them wiped out before making it to the sand. And then they’d pop up from the water, unfazed, and paddle back out to repeat failure.

When I reached the beach road, I found it gridlocked with cars pointed for the causeway, an endless line of them sitting in the muggy heat, honking and spewing exhaust and going nowhere, bare feet dangling from passenger windows, fingers drumming on doors. They were all headed away.

The Girls were the only ones not leaving. They couldn’t leave, I knew now. They were walking on the side of the road looking both preoccupied and unburdened. Their eyes were cloudy and their hair was frizzier and more tangled than usual, bunching at their skulls like strange, futuristic hats.

They seemed as fidgety as the people in the cars, touching the sides of their faces and biting their nails as they wandered along in the sharp, yellow grass. When I’d try to catch their gazes, they’d just smile nervously and look away like they were sharing a dark joke among themselves.

The little grocery store on the beach road was crowded with people, the shelves half-empty, the lines winding through the aisles. Everyone was chattering with an inflection of cheerful mania, but the checkout girls were untouched by the excitement, going through their motions with slow and liquid languor, pausing to stretch their necks to the left and then the right, rolling their shoulders in between ringing up items, blinking long and hard, and taking slow, deep breaths every few seconds. I’d stopped to get a Gatorade but quickly decided it was a lost cause and retreated.

I missed DeeDee already.

At home, everyone was on the porch: Jeff, Dad, even Mom. When I spotted them from the street, the three of them standing there all casual and summery—Jeff smoking, Mom with her glass of wine, and Dad’s bald head bobbing here and there—I had an unsettling double-take feeling. There was something off about the tableau they created, something about their unguarded postures and the easiness of their movements that was both familiar and very odd.

Everything looked right, but at the same time I had this feeling it wasn’t. I looked harder as I got closer. Jeff was sitting precariously on the guardrail, a cigarette dangling from his mouth and his shoulder slumped toward Mom, his face pointing to the ocean. Mom was gesticulating madly with her glass of wine, looking back and forth from Jeff to Dad, who appeared from a middle distance to be puttering and paying no attention. They all looked absolutely normal.

That was it, of course. It was just the fact that they were together at all, bored and natural and just whatever. For the first time in I don’t know how long, they looked like a family.

Then again, it wasn’t normal, not exactly. If we were going by the standards of truly normal, or at least the old version of normal, Jeff would not be smoking in front of them, Mom would not have been drinking a glass of wine at noon, and Dad would have been wearing at least some form of shirt. But still. There they were. They were waiting for me to complete the picture.

“We’ve decided to stay,” my father said, grinning, when I’d climbed the steps to the porch.

“Where would we be going?” I said.

“Evacuation,” Mom said. “There’s a hurricane on the way.”

“We’d be going home, Tiger,” Dad said. “But we’re not. We’re not the types to throw in the towel like that. If there’s a storm, we’ll weather it.”

Where is home?
I wanted to ask.

My brother puffed on his cigarette and didn’t say anything. I could sense him trying to catch my eye, but I avoided meeting his gaze.

He knew. I could tell. He had known all along. I couldn’t look at his face.

“So why are we staying?” I looked from Dad to Mom. “If we’re supposed to leave?” Everyone just sort of shrugged. “Are we all going to die?” I asked.

“Pfft,” my mom whistled, waving me off. “People make such a big deal about death. It’s just a
passage.”
She put an arm around Dad’s shoulder and he pulled her close, kissing her on the cheek.

“Anyway, we’re not going to die,” Dad said.

“I vote to leave,” I said. The sooner we left, the sooner we could forget everything that had happened here. But no one answered me.

I hadn’t been paying as much attention to Mom and Dad as I probably should have since the night of their epic dance at Ursula’s. It was partly that I had been wrapped up in DeeDee and partly that I just didn’t want to think about it very hard because it was gross, not to mention confusing. Now, though, seeing them all hugged up on each other, Mom giggling as Dad whispered impishly in her ear, I had no choice but to wonder what was going on with them. (I did manage to refrain from speculating on what Dad was whispering.)

When Mom reacted to Dad by pulling out of his grip and slapping him on the butt, I accidentally looked over at Jeff. He ashed over the deck and looked back at me like,
don’t fucking ask me.

Overhead, the sky was closing in. I went inside.

I was lying in bed on top of the quilt a few minutes later, not doing anything except trying to ignore the blare of the hurricane coverage from the television in the other room—trying not to think at all, really—when Jeff came in. He stood in the doorway for a second before flopping on the other bed without a word. I didn’t say hello, but continued to stare at the ceiling.

We stayed there like that for a few minutes.

“So how pissed are you at me?” he finally said. I turned and faced him; he was on his back with his arms folded. Then he rolled over and faced me right back.

“What am I supposed to say?” I said.

“Should I have told you?”

“I mean, yes?” I said. “Obviously?”

“They made me promise,” Jeff said.

“Bros before hos?” I said. Thinking:
How could he of all people argue with that?

But he did. “Dude,” he said. “I mean, bro. Bro! You are my number one bro. Literally and figuratively. You know. But you know it’s not like that. You of all bros should know that, right?”

Me of all bros. “You should have told me,” I said.

“I know,” Jeff said. “But, you know, they’re good people. Or whatever they are. Maybe it’s rude to call them
people
, like that’s disrespecting their identity. I don’t know. The point is they’re good. They really are. After you take it all away. They’re, like, the embodiment of everything good.”

The idea that Kristle was a living vessel for the universe’s goodness was something that I couldn’t even begin to grapple with. But.

“How long have you known?” I asked. “I mean known everything.”

“Since that night,” Jeff said. “The night I found Kristle and you . . .” He trailed off.

“Sorry about that,” I said.

“Bro, I get it now. She shouldn’t have done that, but I get it. I’m definitely not mad at you or anything.”

“So that’s when she told you?”

“I mean, I sort of knew a little before that. Some of it. Or something. I just had this feeling. But that night was when Kristle told me the whole fucking fucked-up story.”

“At least she was honest with you. Why was she, exactly? Honest, I mean.”

“I guess she knew I’d understand.”

“What did she say?” I asked. “As in, what exactly?”

“I can’t really talk about it,” he said.

“Well fuck you,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Fuck all of us, I guess.”

I rolled back onto my back. Jeff didn’t say anything else but he didn’t leave either. I wasn’t actually mad at him. I was trying hard, and he certainly deserved it, but I didn’t really have the energy. But what I wanted to know was why they thought he would understand and not me?

And I know this sounds insane. I know, I know, I know it does. But there was a part of me that wanted to crawl into bed with him and just curl up at his side, the way I used to—once or twice at least—during lightning storms when I was little. Just gather my knees to my chest and bury my face in the crook of his arm.

I didn’t do that. It was just one of those things that flashed in my brain long enough for me to feel like a crazy person.

An hour later, my mother was still on the porch. The sky had turned a muddy yellow gray that faded downward into a thin line of radiant and unexpected periwinkle at the horizon. A beautiful but troubling Rothko. It wasn’t raining yet. But it was coming.

Mom, like the sky, appeared as an unexpected painting. Her bright red hair was loose, hanging in salty curls to her bare shoulders. When had it gotten so long? Her eyes in this light were a color I’d never really seen before.

“Rough day?” she said.

“How’d you know?” I asked.

“I’m a mom,” she said. “I know these things. It’s my job.”

I let out a hoot.

“Well it is,” she said. “Need someone to lend an ear? My advice might not be that bad, you know.”

“I’ll pass,” I said. I didn’t really want to talk about myself with Mom. She stared at me expectantly, which was probably a trick she had learned in some parenting book. Not that I figured she had read one of those in a while, but they used to be one of her main hobbies. Finally she was making me so nervous that I had no choice but to speak, which must be the point.

“So, like, what’s up with you and Dad? Are you back together or whatever? Are you back for good?”

I didn’t want to talk about her and Dad any more than I wanted to talk about myself, but it was the best way I could think of to change the subject.

“Oh,” she said. “If you figure it out, tell me please! I don’t know anything!” She slapped her forehead and frowned clownishly. I noticed then for the first time that she’d painted her fingernails black.

“Why did you leave?” I asked. “The real reason. Especially if you were just going to come back. Are you really back, even? Are you even my mother?” I wanted to stop but I couldn’t. “Are you going to stay?”