September Girls (5 page)

I would often return from my walks to find Jeff in the sand on the shore near our cottage, sometimes asleep, sometimes playing some dumb-ass game on his iPhone, sometimes squinting to read a book (he was halfheartedly working his way through
Infinite Jest
, although when I asked him what it was about, all he said was, “Hell if I fuckin’ know”). Something seemed to be bothering him. I figured it had to be the lack of sex, which he’d previously made a point of indicating he was used to on a very regular basis. He had stopped bothering with his plans for getting me laid. He had himself to worry about now.

One morning I woke early, ready to go walking, only to see Jeff waiting for me at the kitchen table with an uneaten bowl of Froot Loops in front of him. The milk had turned a deep and sickening brown. He looked up at me with a woeful, cross expression.

“Hey,” I said. “You’re up early.”

Jeff scowled but at the same time pushed his thick, dark eyebrows together entreatingly. “Where do you go?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Every morning,” he said. “Every morning you’re off on some trip of your own. Where are you going?”

“Nowhere,” I said. “I mean, I just like walking. It’s not like there’s anywhere to go. In case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I’ve fucking noticed, that’s for fucking sure,” Jeff said. And then a pause. “Can I come with you?”

I didn’t answer right away. It’s hard to be alone when you’re accompanied by your older brother who never shuts up. But the look in Jeff’s eyes was bordering on pathetic. “Please?” he asked. “I’m dying here, bro. I can’t take a whole fucking summer of this. I mean, I’m lonely. Shit, man, I’m lonely as fuck. Dad . . .” He trailed off. He didn’t have to say it.

“All right,” I said. “Well let’s go, then.”

We walked to my hotel. “This is what you do every day for three hours?” Jeff asked.

“Yep,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“I just like it.”

Jeff kicked at the water. “Where do you think she is?” he asked after a while. I was surprised to hear him bring it up. I had assumed that Jeff had been oblivious to my mother’s disappearance, but it appeared that I’d been wrong.

I thought for a second before I answered him. “I think she’s gone,” I finally told him.

“Well, clearly,” he said. “But where is she? I mean
where
?”

Where was she? Where was she? “She’s in the land of women,” I said. “A place we cannot even begin to comprehend. Don’t think too hard about it; it’s like staring directly into the sun.”

“I can’t stop thinking about it,” he said. “I mean, you were
there.
You saw it all go down. All I’ve heard is stories, and I’ve barely even heard them.”

Lucky you,
I thought.

“How could she have just left?” Jeff asked. His voice sounded wounded and pathetic. “Where is this supposed Women’s Land anyway?”

“She says it’s more of a state of mind than an actual location. A state of mind that in this specific case exists somewhere near Cleveland? But look around, dude.”

Jeff and I surveyed the beach together. Everywhere we looked were girls.

“Maybe we’re there already,” I said.

“Let’s go home,” Jeff said.

“Okay,” I said. So we turned around and made our way back down the beach.

We had not spoken about the girl in the surf since the night we’d seen her. I can’t explain why except to say that, for my part, she had grown slippery in my memory. I had to fight to even think about her. Every time I tried to picture her in my mind, I ended up completely off the mark. It was like trying to pick up a droplet of mercury. Had she existed? Had we seen her? I can’t say.

We were halfway back home when we saw Dad. I recognized the way he moved before I could make out his face: the defeated shuffle, the head bobbling back and forth like he was trying to gauge the origin of a distant tune. His gray, hairy, and ever-growing paunch jiggling over the waistband of his faded and too-small swimsuit. Jeff saw him too.

“What the hell is he doing?”

I squinted to see what Jeff was talking about, and noticed that Dad was swinging a long, thin rod in front of him, back and forth, back and forth, slow and deliberate like a blind person with a cane.

When we were near enough to see better, Jeff let out a low whistle. “Holy shit. He’s gone off the deep end,” he said. “I mean he’s really fuckin’ crazy.”

“
Now
you see,” I said.

Our father had evidently bought a metal detector. He was floating along the beach, waving it around, doubling back on himself, moving in circles. He was searching for something. A pink fanny pack dangled under his belly.

“Hey, Padre!” Jeff shouted when we were in striking distance. Dad didn’t look up; he was staring intently at the sand. “Pops!” Jeff called out. “Whatcha doin’?”

Dad waved happily and raised his sunglasses, a grin spreading across his face. “Looky what I bought!” he called. “A man’s got to make a living somehow, right?” he said. (Did I mention that our father had quit his job of twenty years on a day’s notice? All to come
here
?) “I’m already having some luck, too. Look.” He reached into his fanny pack and pulled out a pair of rusty earrings, dangling them in the air and waggling his eyebrows like he’d uncovered the Holy fucking Grail itself.

“So you’re . . .” Jeff seemed at a loss.

“Looking for buried treasure,” Dad said. “There’s gold in them thar hills! I mean this here beach. I found a book about it at the bookstore—apparently this whole beach was settled by pirates. Dollars to donuts I’ll find some of their booty if I just look hard enough.”

“Uh-huh,” Jeff said.

“Get ready to be rich beyond your wildest dreams! This little device here might just be the key to our future.” He grinned hopefully. (Or maybe it was hopelessly. I’ve noticed lately that there’s often no practical difference between the two.)

“Yo ho ho,” Jeff said. He didn’t seem to be able to muster the enthusiasm required.

I didn’t bother at all; I stared at Dad and he just shrugged and drifted down the beach without another word as his metal detector pulled him on his way. Jeff looked sidelong in my direction and dropped to the ground into a set of anxious push-ups. Whatever.

So I turned my back to him and waded into the water, deeper and deeper, ignoring the chill, hopping over the waves at my calves until I was almost up to my nuts. A swell hit me square in the chest, but I didn’t move. The waves were crashing and crashing, but I stood firm, one leg in front of the other and bent at the knee. I was solid and unwavering. Like this I blocked the ocean with my body. Then I dove right in, somersaulted into the water, and crawled along the ocean’s floor, squinting to see my hands as shadowy impressions in the muck of sand and salt. When I surfaced, everything seemed different in a way I couldn’t place. I decided to swim farther out.

I am not what you would call a strong swimmer. I mean, I know how to do it and everything—if I fell off the side of a boat in open water I probably wouldn’t die for at least a few minutes unless I was eaten by an octopus—but compared to Jeff with his wall of swim-team medals and Sebastian with his summer lifeguarding job, I basically suck.

I didn’t care. That day, for whatever reason, I was unashamed of my clumsy, amateur stroke. I just swam. I swam a lame-ass crawl out as far as my arms could carry me, over the waves, out to clear and placid ocean, beyond where my feet could touch comfortably—to a place where my toes could scrape the sand for only seconds before the water rose and carried me with it, paddling. I flailed for a while, bouncing on my toes, then floating on my back, then treading water. I knew I was out way too far. I wouldn’t even normally be able to swim the length of a swimming pool without having to catch my breath, but somehow I had made it out here, out to where Jeff appeared on the shore as just a speck among specks. (Speck-Jeff was now doing crunches, which is how I could tell him from the rest.)

The world felt light-years away. I felt light-years from myself. The feeling was nothing new.

So I stayed where I was, scrambling to tread water, hoping that if I kept afloat long enough, a mysterious current might happen on me and pull me away, not back to land, but out to some deserted island that was secret and better.

I could have drowned. I mean, I totally could have. And just like on the first night in the surf, it occurred to me that I felt something like hands grabbing at my ankles as I struggled for traction. Maybe it was a whisper in my ear, urging me not to bother.

Out there in the water, just trying to keep my head above the waves, I felt at home, or at least closer to home. I could have drowned. I could have wanted to.

I turned onto my back and floated, staring at the sky, at the clouds, the birds—which that day reminded me of fish in their arcing laziness. I thought about nothing. I let myself float. I didn’t try to swim; I didn’t try to head back for the shore. I wasn’t even trying not to drown. I was just staying afloat.

But then, out of nowhere, I started to feel something pushing me toward land. It wasn’t the water itself—not the lucky current I had been waiting for—but instead an unsettling gravity that I can’t describe, a pull emanating from a place somewhere deep below the water’s surface. I guess it was close to an
intention
: not my own, but something belonging to the ocean that was unhooking the invisible grasping hands from my body and urging me to get my ass out of there. I had the strangest feeling of my mother being nearby. Or maybe not my own mother, but a mother of some kind.

When I turned my head to find the shore, I was suddenly dazzled. The edge of the beach was so bright that I could no longer see Jeff in his calisthenics or the bologna-scarfing blanket-liers, or the umbrellas or the dunes. I couldn’t even see the sand. It was all shrouded in a blinding and otherworldly light, a veil of brightness that I knew was there for my benefit. Something was being hidden from me. But also: something was revealing itself to me in the hiding.

I felt a burning in my eye sockets and I wanted to look away, but I didn’t. Instead, I squinted, still floating on my back but half sitting up while I made a fist and held it to the slit of my eye, loosening it in the tiniest increments until I could see again, just barely. I was fairly certain that I was hallucinating—that a combination of exertion and sun and lack of oxygen had led me to a temporary insanity. But even if it was only because I had gone totally fucking insane, I couldn’t deny what I was seeing. In the dunes, I could see the indistinct but unmistakable silhouettes of what looked like hundreds of figures lined up shoulder to shoulder as far as I could see in either direction. They were nearly identical, and all perfect. They were all the same height, all of them an elegant swoop of shoulders, breasts, and hips. And they were just standing there in a line in the dunes, staring at me, shining on me, calling to me to come back in.

Feeling light-headed, I ducked under the water and when I came back up for air, everything was normal again. I could see Jeff now, more clearly than ever, almost clearly enough to make out his face even. He was sitting in the sand with someone blond and beautiful at his side. He appeared to be laughing.

And soon the waves were rising behind me and I felt stronger, and then I touched my feet to the ocean’s floor and I was stronger still, and then a huge wave was curling at my back and I threw myself into it and it swallowed me comfortably. Soon I was crawling breathless in the surf, and I stood in the warmth of the sun and pulled my drooping bathing suit back up over my bare ass. My shoulders felt broader than ever and the sun was hot and I knew that up and down the beach eyes were on me, even if I couldn’t see them anymore. I didn’t care. I liked it.

So I stumbled up onto the sand, rubbing the salt water from my eyes. When my vision was clear, the Girls were unmistakably gone—as I’d basically known they would be, because after all they were surely just my imagination in the first place. But I saw that Jeff was sitting in the sand with the waitress from the Fisherman’s Net.
Kristle.
Rhymes with “crystal.” She looked up at me and smiled as I approached. Jeff seemed not to notice.

He was too busy ogling her tits. She had her hand on his thigh but she was looking at me with a hungry glint in her eyes. When I say hungry, I mean literally, like she wanted to actually eat me.

“Dude,” Jeff said.

“Dude,” I said.

“Hey,” Kristle said. She tossed her hair and squeezed Jeff’s thigh harder. She inched her hand up toward his package without taking her burning green eyes off me.

“Kristle’s having a birthday party tomorrow,” Jeff said. “We’re totally going. I mean, even
you’re
invited.”

“Well in that case,” I said.

That night, we played Scrabble with my father with CNN blaring on the television. Jeff is the annoying kind of Scrabble player who plays a lot of obscure two-letter words that shouldn’t count but for whatever reason are considered legitimate. My father is the annoying kind of Scrabble player who takes hours with his turn and then plays deliberately misspelled words that no one has the heart to call him out on. I am the perfect Scrabble player, both serious and considerate. Obviously I lost by a lot.

There was a hole in the screen door and mosquitos were buzzing everywhere, and it was too hot because the air conditioner only worked a little bit, and that horrible woman on CNN would not shut up about some mother in Ohio who had murdered her entire family with a ball-point pen. I asked Dad to turn it off but he said he “liked the background noise,” so I went out onto the porch just to get away from the blue Paper Mate that was beckoning enticingly from the kitchen counter.

I stood on the porch in the dark, letting the salty breeze moisten my skin. The dusty cul-de-sac of rentals was quiet and the sky was foggy black, the moon obscured by clouds.

I was considering walking down to the beach alone when I started to notice strange glowing points in the distance. At first I thought they were stars, but they were too yellow and too vivid, and anyway they weren’t in the sky. Then I thought they were fireflies, but they weren’t blinking, and do they have fireflies at the beach?