The Art of Losing Yourself (28 page)

G
RACIE

I went Christmas shopping, hoping for a distraction. Maybe by the time I finished, the unease that had camped out in my stomach since Bay Breeze won state would finally take a hike. Unfortunately, I walked out of Kirby’s Antiques feeling no better than when I entered. Turned out, I was pretty awful at picking out gifts.

So far I had browsed the used bookstore, Sweeties Candy Store, some clothing boutiques, the gift shops on Dock Street, a candle store, even this random rock emporium next to the Hot Dog Hut, where I found some pretty cool mood rings and seashell necklaces, but nothing that Ben or Carmen or my mother might like. I shuffled toward one of the iron benches and took a seat.

With Christmas less than two weeks away, town square had turned into a snowless version of the North Pole, with holly strung on the streetlights and wreaths on the back of each bench, even a Christmas tree in the center of the gazebo. A lady walked past it now with her yappy dog. As someone who lived in the South her entire life, I saw white Christmases only on postcards. But this year had been colder than usual, so maybe…

“Hey, Fisher!”

I turned toward the sound of my name. Elias strolled toward me through the park with his hands tucked inside the front pockets of his corduroy jacket, his hunter-green beanie on his head. My stomach did a loop-de-loop. He was starting to matter too much. Actually, everything was starting to matter too much—our friendship, The Treasure Chest, even the short time I’d spent on the academic bowl team. Maybe this explained the nerves. The world was a lot less worrisome when I didn’t care.

“Catching some rays?”

I pointed at my face. “Does this look like the skin of a girl who can catch rays?”

He smiled. “What are you up to?”

“I was attempting to Christmas shop, but I failed miserably.”

“How does one fail at Christmas shopping?”

“Everything I saw seemed so…”

“Let me guess.” He cocked his head. “Cliché?”

“How’d you know?”

“Come on.” He nodded for me to follow him.

“Come on
where
?”

“To a place that will solve all your Christmas shopping woes.”

“I’ve been to every single place along this square and up and down Dock Street twice. I highly doubt you are going to solve my woes.”

“Have you been to the General Store?”

“Bay Breeze has a general store?”

He gave the underside of my boot a soft kick and nodded again for me to follow.

So I did, past the Christmas tree in the gazebo, to the other side of the square. “If this is true, why have I never seen it?”

“Because it’s off the beaten path.”

Why a general store would be off the beaten path was beyond me. But Elias appeared to know exactly where he was headed, and since I was out of options, I continued after him past The Barbeque Pit. “What are you doing out and about?” I asked.

“Enjoying my first Saturday of freedom.”

“No football practice.”

His grin widened. “No football practice.”

My attention dropped to his hand, which was no longer inside his pocket, but swinging casually by his side. The entire football team had not only been wearing their state championship rings but making a habit of holding their fists up toward one another in the hallways and the cafeteria while I gagged in their general direction. Some even wore two—last year’s ring on the left hand, this year’s ring on the right. Elias, however, wore neither. “So Mr. MVP, do you have a speech prepared for the big football banquet tonight?”

“I haven’t been named MVP.”

“We both know you will be.”

“Then I’ll wing it.” He stepped past the yogurt shop and led me down a side street called Franklin Way. A block later, we reached the front of a building
that looked like it came straight out of the 1800s. Elias stopped in front of the door and held out his arm like a male version of Vanna White. “Welcome to the General Store, Bay Breeze’s hidden treasure. Let this be a fair warning. Once you step inside, every other convenience store will be ruined for you for the rest of your days.”

I looked at him with heavily lidded eyes. “Are you done now?”

He opened the door to the sound of a bell jingle and waited for me to go first. Stepping inside this store was like stepping out of Dr. Emmett Brown’s DeLorean straight into the nineteenth century—all brick walls and wood plank flooring and a whole counter full of old-fashioned candy. Black licorice, jawbreakers, bubblegum cigars, Necco Wafers.

Elias gave me a nudge. “Told you.”

Indeed.

The place was even better than the hole-in-the-wall music store on Avenue D back in Apalachicola, and I spent more time in that store browsing through depreciated techno fusion CDs than I’d ever admit to anyone. I commenced wide-eyed browsing immediately.

It had a little bit of everything—food (a lot of local sauces and spices), soaps, cookware, gardening tools, kerosene lamps, and a random variety of novelty toys. I held up a Magic Eight Ball. In fourth grade, I had a friend who bought one at a garage sale. We used to sit on her bed after school and ask the toy random, silly questions until her mother discovered it and threw the ball in the trash. Her daughter would not play with toys that encouraged fortunetelling, she had said. “I can’t believe they have these!”

Elias stepped behind me. “What is it?”

“You don’t know what a Magic Eight Ball is?”

“I know what an eight ball is, but I’ve never seen one this big and I wasn’t aware that some were magical.”

I rolled my eyes. “Is Elias Banks completely lame for not knowing what you are?” I shook the ball, then flipped it over. A luminescent blue triangle with the words
Signs point to yes
floated in the display. I let out a burst of laughter and showed it to him.

He narrowed his eyes at me, then leaned over my shoulder. “Am I totally awesome for showing Gracie Fisher this General Store?”

I shook, then flipped. A new blue triangle appeared in the display:
Ask again later
.

“What kind of bogus answer is that?” He took the ball from my hand and gave it a rattle.

I held up an Erector set. “What do you think—a good gift for Ben?”

“I loved those as a kid. I think my mom sold my old one in a garage sale.”

“Nerd.”

Grinning, he returned the Magic Eight Ball to the shelf.

I wandered down the aisle with Elias close behind, passing Lincoln Logs, a Radio Flyer wagon, Etch A Sketches, Hula-Hoops. The place was like a labyrinth of eccentricity. I had officially found my happy place. I turned down a new aisle and continued my roaming.

“How about these?” Elias said, holding up a tin. “Everybody loves moon pies.”

“Add some RC Cola and you have yourself some esculent perfection.”

“Esculent?”

“Edible.”

Elias shook his head. “Malik is rubbing off on you.”

Indeed he was. I’d spent three after-school practices with him checking out the academic bowl team, and already my vocabulary had improved. I even downloaded a dictionary app on my phone so I could look up definitions of words as soon as he said them. I liked predicting how many words I would have to look up beforehand. It had become a fun game.

I stopped in front of a selection of teas. “What are your plans for Christmas?”

“My mom and I will go to church on Christmas Eve.”

I pulled the lid off a canister and inhaled the scent of mint and rosemary. “And?”

“And that’s it. She has to work Christmas Day, so we don’t really get a chance to plan anything fancy. Pastor Zeke and his wife head to Alabama to spend the holiday with one of their daughters.”

“You and your mom should come to The Treasure Chest after church.” The invitation popped out before I could suck it back in. It turned my cheeks warm. I couldn’t believe I just invited Elias and his mother to our family
Christmas gathering. He had to think I was weird. Or desperate. Or who knows what. “I mean, if you wanted to stop by, you could. But there’s no pressure or anything.”

“Christmas at The Treasure Chest with you?” He came beside me and smelled the tea too. “That doesn’t sound half bad.”

C
ARMEN

I drove to The Treasure Chest at nine thirty on a Saturday night without a valid reason as to why. After tonight’s football banquet, I changed into comfy pants, popped a bag of kettle corn, and plunked myself on the couch to watch some Netflix when the motel’s neon sign came into my head and refused to leave. My brain decided that I needed to make sure the sign worked tonight. Not tomorrow afternoon after church, but now. My stubborn, illogical desire to ruin a perfectly fine night of vegetating on the couch made absolutely no sense.

Until I turned into the pitch-black parking lot and discovered a familiar vehicle parked in the beam of my headlights—a rusty maroon Mirage Mitsubishi. Gracie was here, and although we’d reached an odd truce over Thanksgiving, suspicious thoughts jumped to the forefront of my mind. Like maybe she came out here to drink and smoke weed and plot her next goat-nabbing adventure.

Gravel crunched beneath my tires as I parked beside her car. I stepped outside to the rhythmic swoosh of waves crashing against the shore and brought my hand to my forehead, as if doing so might help me see through the night. I had never given Gracie a key, so unless she broke in again, she wasn’t inside. And since we had new windows installed, the act of breaking in should have been more difficult than it had been back in August.

I spotted her in the light of the moon, which was muted but not obstructed by the clouds overhead. She lay back on a paint-chipped Adirondack chair on the pool deck, its empty twin beside her. There were another six in the pool shed. I’d been wanting to purchase two more, spray-paint them bright colors, and place one outside of each room on the ground level. But with Christmas closing in and a million things left to do, I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I made my way through the courtyard. If Gracie heard me coming, she didn’t turn to look. She kept her gaze pinned on the sky above, her fingers wrapped around a can of RC Cola.

The new tarp we purchased to cover the empty pool rustled in the breeze as I stopped beside her. “What are you doing here?”

“Listening to the ocean.”

“Do you come here often at night to listen to the ocean?”

She shrugged, then took a slurp of her Coke. “I like it here. It’s a good place to be alone. To think.”

I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I’d done more thinking out here over the past three months than I’d done over the past three years. Something about the mixture of solitude and sweat and dirt and painfully sweet memories stirred up more thoughts of me and Ben and the turns life had taken than I knew what to do with. “Are you thinking about anything in particular?”

The breeze fluttered wisps of hair around Gracie’s face. She peeled a few strands away. “I invited Elias and his mom to Christmas Eve today.”

“Elias, as in Eli Banks, Ben’s receiver?”

“That’s the one.”

I eased onto the chair beside her, sitting sideways to face Gracie as she reclined. “You two are friends?”

“I’m not sure what we are.”

Curiosity begged me to pry, but fear of doing or saying something that would bring back the sullen, closed-off Gracie kept that curiosity in check. Getting unstuck from the mud on Thanksgiving may have hurdled us over a giant barricade, but I wasn’t really sure what to do on this side of it. Every step I took came with extreme caution, lest it be the wrong one. “Well, Aunt Ingrid would say the more the merrier. Especially for Christmas.”

Gracie took another sip of her RC Cola. “Do you think she’ll remember me?”

“Ingrid?”

She nodded.

“It depends on what kind of day she’s having.” I hoped with every last ounce of hope I had that come Christmas Eve, Ingrid would be having a Gin Rummy 500 day. I wasn’t brave enough to hope for Hearts. “If she’s having a good day, then of course she will remember you.”

Gracie’s lips turned into a Mona Lisa smile. Just noticeable enough to soften her into someone younger and prettier than the scowling teenager I was used to living with.

“Is that all you were thinking about?” I asked. “Two extra guests for Christmas?”

“Sorta.” She fiddled with the tab on her can, bending it up, down, up, down until it popped off with a clink.

I slid my hands between my knees, unsure if I should push or not. “How’s the academic bowl team?”

“All right.”

“Think you’ll stick with it?”

“I probably won’t make the final cut. They’re pretty intense about making it to nationals.”

“You shouldn’t underestimate yourself.”

Gracie flicked the tab from her thumb. It launched into the air and landed on the pool tarp. “Why did you come out here?”

“I wanted to check the sign. Make sure it’s working.” I looked toward the familiar shadowed marker growing up tall from the parking lot—barely visible through the dark. “It used to be one of my favorite things about this place when I was little. Seeing the neon lights when Dad I drove along the highway meant we were finally here.”

Gracie sat up from her reclined position. She brought her knee to her chest and wrapped her arm around her shin.

“Aunt Ingrid used to tell me and my cousins that Neil Armstrong saw it all the way from the moon.” I smiled at the memory.

“She told me that too.”

“She did?”

“She also told me that there was a real pirate’s treasure chest buried somewhere in the courtyard.” Gracie set her chin on top of her kneecap and gazed out toward the ocean.

Another wave crashed.

Not so far away, hotel lights off Navarre Beach twinkled like superficial stars.

“Gracie, why did you come to The Treasure Chest?”

“I already told you.”

“I don’t mean tonight. I mean when you left Apalachicola.” Of all the places she could have come, why here? I’d asked the question before, but Gracie
never answered. At least not seriously. Maybe tonight, in the absence of hostility, with memories surrounding us on all sides, she’d answer honestly.

“I don’t know.” Gracie lifted her chin off her knee. “Life was easier here. Not so heavy. Mom was always on her best behavior. And it was nice having somebody looking after me.”

“You mean Ingrid?”

“Yeah.”

The answer broke my heart. Gracie was right—what she said over Thanksgiving. I didn’t know what it was like. Sure, I had grown up with Mom’s dysfunction, but I never had to bear the full brunt of it. That had landed on Dad’s shoulders, even if he did sweep her problems under the rug. Nobody had borne anything for Gracie. Certainly not me.

“And you always seemed happy here,” she said. “At least that’s how I remember it.”

“I was.”

“Why’d you let it get so run-down, then?”

Wispy clouds rolled across the sky, altering the moon’s brightness like a dimming switch.

“I don’t know. It just sort of happened.” Natalie called it entropy. Nature’s predisposition toward disorder. Unless we actively fought against it, things fell into disarray. Motels and marriages alike.

Gracie traced a line between two freckles on her knee. “I came here thinking Ingrid could give me a job. And maybe I could find happiness too.”

As much as I didn’t want to, I couldn’t help but picture the scene. Gracie coming to The Treasure Chest in search of some stability, but finding an abandoned, run-down building instead. No wonder she had been so angry. “Maybe when we get this place running again, you can have that job you came for.”

Her expression was equal parts hope and caution. I knew the mixture well. “I’d like that,” she said.

“Me too.” I placed my hands on my thighs and pushed up into standing. “Should we see if the sign still works?”

“Sure.”

The two of us headed through the courtyard, into the front office. I found the power switch beneath the front desk and flipped it on. Electricity hummed
through the line. Outside the window, the sign blinked like a strobe light, then remained steady, lighting up the night like a luminescent beacon for weary travelers.

I stepped into the opened doorway and set my hand against the door frame. The sign was every bit as glorious as I remembered—a bright display of an opened treasure chest filled with yellow, blue, and pink rubies casting their glow into the dark sky above and onto the green grass below. Like a bug attracted to the light, I stepped out from the doorway, past the protection of the awning, where a cold, barely there drizzle had begun to fall, taking me back in time. To the summer Gracie and Mom hadn’t come and Ben and I had fallen in love.

The week before I returned to UVA, my last week with Ben, I had been unable to return the words he’d spoken to me on Aunt Ingrid’s couch. Not because I didn’t feel the same. In fact, I was breaking with love for him. I just didn’t see any good in confessing my feelings, not when the confession wouldn’t change our circumstances. For a few days after Ben’s declaration, he waited. He never asked or pressured, but I could see the searching in his eyes. And when the words didn’t come, he started to slip away.

The distance had already begun and we weren’t even separated yet.

The night of our good-bye, Ben hugged me. I didn’t want him to let go. Ever. I breathed in his scent and committed his warm skin to memory. My flight to Virginia was leaving early the next morning. I didn’t dare ask him to drive me to the airport. Not when making a “clean break” was my idea. Besides, he had work now. Not motel work, but work work. At Bay Breeze High School. I stood on tiptoe and buried my face in the crook of his neck, and when his arms let go of me, I swallowed the growing knot in my throat and forced my arms to release him too.

He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and looked into my eyes—one final search for what I had yet to say. When I didn’t give him what he was looking for, he gave me a kiss that came and went like virga—the kind of rain so warm and light, it evaporated before it reached the ground.

“Good-bye, Carmen.”

And just like that, he walked away.

I stood in the doorway of the front office, watching him disappear into the rain and the steam rising up from the hot cement, unable to breathe. Uncertain
I would ever be able to breathe again. I grasped the door frame with determined ferocity. We needed a clean break. It was easier this way.

Do not go after him
.

But watching him walk away from me beneath the glow of The Chest’s sign was too much. I was coming undone. I needed a breath and after almost two months of breathing in tune with him, I’d forgotten how to get one on my own. My hand let go of the door frame. I stepped out into the rain after him. “Ben!”

He stopped. And slowly, he turned around.

There was a moment—a second? an eternity?—in which neither of us moved. We stared at one another with more voltage between us than the neon sign above. And then, as though they could be contained no longer, the stifled words burst out into the night with a vehemence that came when things were pent up for too long. “I love you!”

His long, sure strides ate up the distance between us. He took hold of my waist and he kissed me like I’d never been kissed before. He lifted me off the ground, my body pressed against his. I dug my fingers into his wet hair. And when the kiss ended and my feet were back on the cement, I looked up at Ben through a sheen of tears. This time I was the one who did the searching. I wanted an answer. I wanted hope. I wanted something to hold on to. “What does this change?”

He swept wet curls off my neck. “Everything.”

“Ben…”

“Carmen, I’ll wait for you.”

I bit my lip. Shook my head. I couldn’t ask him to wait. Not when I didn’t know if I would be coming back. “You shouldn’t.”

“But I will.” Gently, he clasped my hands together and set them over his heart. “I’ll always wait for you.”