by Anita Shreve
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.
Sydne
y 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.”
“No!” she calls back to him.
“What’s the matter? Don’t you trust me?”
“Trust you?” she calls, laughing.
Ben turns and makes an expert dive into an oncoming wave.
She leaves her clothes in a pile. She raises her arms. The air is soft and luscious on her skin. She runs toward the ocean, gathering tremendous speed as she goes.
Acknowledgments
A novel almost never belongs solely to the author. I have had several editors for this one—some of them professionals, all of them friends. I list them here in the order in which they looked at the manuscript. John Osborn. Rick Russo. Katherine Clemans. Jennifer Rudolph Walsh. Michael Pietsch. Asya Muchnick. Celeste Cooper. Elinor Lipman. Pamela Marshall.
About the Author
Anita Shreve is the critically acclaimed author of twelve previous novels, including A Wedding in December, The Pilot’s Wife, which was a selection of Oprah’s Book Club, and The Weight of Water, which was a finalist for England’s Orange Prize. She lives in Massachusetts.