The Goodbye Summer

by Sarah Van Name

  “Now,” she’d say. “What’s scaring you?”

  If there was a ghost waiting under the mattress, we’d lift the bed skirt together and touch the floor and the wood of the bed frame. If there was a ghoul outside the window, we’d put our hands on the windowpanes. If I feared a murderer bursting out of the closet, she would part my jeans and dresses so I could touch my fingers to the painted wall behind them.

  “When you have a nightmare, it all feels real. But it isn’t real,” she said to me those nights. “When you touch something, you know it’s real. You know it’s only what it is. Your window’s just a window. There’s nothing there.”

  I lie down and try to go back to sleep, but my heart is beating too fast, and I see the firelight every time I close my eyes. I am shivering.

  So, foolish as I feel, I get up and turn on my lamp. I touch the wall beside me, solid and smooth. I walk to the laundry room, next to my room, where the dryer is bumping against the wall like a stranger knocking on a door. I touch it. It is warm beneath my palms. I turn it off and the thumping trembles, quiets, stops.

  I open the window in my room as wide as it can go and stick my body out into the night. The air is like the water left over after you make pasta: hot and sticky and rich. I start sweating on contact with it. I touch my own arms and my T-shirt and my bare legs. My skin is warm as ever, blood flowing safely beneath.

  I leave the window open and climb back into bed. The ghostly blue light of my phone takes away all the firelight from behind my eyes. I text Jake, but he’s asleep, of course, and doesn’t reply. He always swears that he’ll leave his phone on loud so it wakes him up, but it doesn’t. I try not to text him at night anyway. I want him to get a good night’s sleep.

  I fall asleep to the sound of frogs and crickets, the humidity drifting through conditioned air to my body. In the last moments before unconsciousness, I reach out to touch Jake—but he is not there, and so I do not know if he is real.

  Chapter 3

  The next day, Toby wanders into the gift shop and jumps up to sit on the counter, nudging over a bucket of shiny pencils. They clatter and roll on the floor like pick-up sticks.

  “Hey, Caroline,” he says, adjusting his skinny ass on the countertop.

  “Toby, what the fuck? Clean those up,” I protest. “Jenny’s gonna be pissed.” I put down my phone. Jake and I were texting about places, and I’m making a concerted effort to keep the discussion away from the Northeast. I suggested the Pacific Northwest. Seattle, maybe. I read something online about how it’s not so expensive if you live in the suburbs, and you can go hiking and white-water rafting in the summer.

  Toby leaps off the counter like he’s making an Olympic dismount and starts gathering the pencils. “One thing you gotta know about Jenny,” he says, “is that it’s best to leave her to her. She has her own deal.”

  “Her deal is watching TV.”

  “She won’t mess with you if you don’t mess with her,” he says, straightening up.

  I look toward Jenny’s door. It’s closed and quiet, like usual. “But she’s my boss. Asking questions isn’t messing with her.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Toby says. “The best thing to do here is whatever you want. Jenny’s better at it than anyone. She’s been here almost as long as I have, so at this point, she’s probably the aquarium’s second best employee.” He looks at me expectantly, waiting. I roll my eyes.

  “And you’re number one?” I say.

  “Indeed I am.” He grins, and I feel a flutter in my stomach. Jake sometimes talks about Toby’s girlfriends: there are too many to keep track of. I can see why.

  “Anyway, Caroline, I came here with a purpose,” he says. He places the container of pencils back on the counter. My phone buzzes underneath it. I glance down. San Diego? We could swim in the ocean.

  “Yes?” I say. San Diego. God, that’d be amazing. I’ve never been to California.

  “Yes. Now, you get a lunch break, correct?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “At what time?”

  “One.”

  “For an hour?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you usually stay here and don’t take a break and don’t eat anything, right?”

  “Well, I bring my lunch.”

  “Whatever. My cousin Jake instructed me to take care of you when you got this job, and thus far I feel I have not fulfilled my duty.”

  “It’s been three days,” I say.

  He ignores me and continues. “So,” he says, “most days at one, I, like you, have my lunch break. As does the better half of the camp counselors, because they eat in shifts so the kids aren’t left alone. Today we are ordering pizza. Normally I would be first out the door, but Liz is sick today, so I’m leading her half-hour tour at one. I think you should come on the tour and then eat lunch with me and half the counselors.”

  “But I’ve already been on a tour. I had to when I got the job.”

  “Ah, but who led your tour?”

  “Um…” I try to remember. “Mary?”

  “Sure. Mary may be a cougar, but her tours lack a certain pizzazz. You’ve not yet had the full Tobias Markham Aquarium Tour Experience.” He winks. “It’s a whole different ball game.”

  “But who will run the store?”

  “Jenny, obviously. You’re legally required to have a break.”

  “I don’t know if she’ll be okay with that. She never actually runs it. She works in her office.”

  “Caroline.” He shakes his head. “You’ve only been here a couple days. The time to set a precedent is now. You gotta stand up to her.”

  “I thought you said I had to leave her alone.”

  “Well, you know. It’s a balance.” He starts walking away, backward. “Come out to the lobby at one, we’ll do the tour, eat some pizza, whatever. See you then?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I say, because there seems to be no other option. My phone buzzes again as he walks away, strolling through the lobby, aquarium doors swinging open and shut behind him. San Diego, baby, Jake says, and I text back simply: yes.

  Three hours later, I knock on Jenny’s door.

  “Come in,” she calls from within. I open it. She peeks out from behind her computer. “Yes?”

  “I was thinking I’d take my lunch break now?” I say, my voice turning into a question, though I don’t mean it to. She looks at me skeptically and says nothing. “For an hour, right? At least I thought that was what you said when you hired me…”

  She sighs. “Yeah, okay. Are you gonna take it at one from now on?”

  “I was thinking so, yeah.”

  “Okay. Just make sure the sign on the door says we’re closed and you’ll be back at two.”

  “You aren’t going to take over the register for me?”

  She looks at me blankly. “I have things to do.”

  “Got it,” I say, although I have no idea what those things are. I close her office door behind me. At the door to the shop, I turn the OPEN sign to CLOSED and hang the little vinyl clock sign underneath it, pushing the hands to 2:00.

  “I will,” I say, stepping out of the doorway so she can come through to my usual spot behind the cash register.

  Then I hustle out of the shop to join the group that has gathered in the middle of the lobby. Some of them see my aquarium shirt and ask me when the tour is starting, or whether they’ll get to see the great white shark. I tell them one o’clock and our shark is on loan to an aquarium in Maryland, but I just work in the gift shop and the tour guide will be here soon. They turn away, disgruntled. We get the shark thing a lot; Jenny prepared me for that question. The shark is a lie. We have never had a shark.

  Toby strolls out of the double doors at one exactly. The crowd quiets.

  “Welcome!” he yells. “To this, the second aquarium tour of June the twelfth,
one o’clock on this glorious summer afternoon, the most thrilling, the most heart-pounding, the very best tour of the watery underworld you shall ever…” He leans down to a bemused five-year-old and cuts his voice to a whisper, “experience.”

  The five-year-old puts his thumb in his mouth.

  I slowly pull my phone out of my pocket.

  I’m about to go on a tour with toby

  hahahahah

  oh man

  what?

  They’re ridiculous

  one time I went on one

  I was drunk it was great

  ok well I’m sober

  still gonna be great

  gotta go someone wants to know where the hummus is

  After a prolonged staring contest with the child, Toby straightens up and claps. “All right, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s go. This way, please, follow me.” He turns toward the swinging doors, and the crowd follows. Some of the mothers are murmuring to each other. I put my phone in my pocket and stay in the back. One small girl looks up at me with round brown eyes.

  “I know,” I say to her quietly. “He’s a lot.”

  We walk through the swinging doors, and my eyes have to adjust. The gift shop is normally flooded with sharp summer sunlight, and I’ve gotten used to squinting at anyone walking in from the lobby. The aquarium is dark and cool. The carpet underneath my feet is blue, and it seems damp. The little brown-eyed girl hugs her mom’s calf.

  We’re in a tunnel, both walls long and curved, made of thick glass. The water inside is fluorescent and murkier than it should be. Our cleaning crews aren’t on top of their game. A large sea turtle glides silently through the soft, cloudy blue, moving close to the glass and then drifting up to where the air and water meet. In the far back of the tank, another shelled form drifts aimlessly back and forth.

  “Now,” Toby begins, with a sweep of his arm, “these are our leatherback turtles, Banjo and the Admiral. The Admiral is the one you saw diving in front of us. Banjo’s in the back there. These are actually the very first animals this aquarium acquired more than fifty years ago. They were already adults when we got them, so there’s every chance they might be up to three hundred years old.”

  “I thought the oldest turtle in the world was only like a hundred and twenty,” one man says, furrowing his brow.

  “Common misconception,” Toby says with a straight face. “Liberal media, et cetera.”

  The children ignore his words. They press close to the glass and gaze upward, where the Admiral’s pale belly is just barely visible from his floating position near the surface.

  “How many of you have found a turtle in your backyard?” Toby asks. One child turns around and raises his hand tentatively.

  “Right,” Toby says, “well, did you ever see it tuck its head into its shell? Like this?” Toby shrugs his shoulders up around his ears. It’s a little freaky how high he can make them go. I wonder if he’s practiced.

  The kid stares at him blankly. The others are still looking up at the Admiral and whispering.

  “Well, so, if you did see a turtle in your backyard, it would probably be able to tuck its head in. Like turtles in cartoons. But leatherback turtles—hey, let’s please not tap on the glass, they don’t like that—leatherbacks can’t do that. They can do some other pretty cool stuff, though. Like migrate hundreds of miles between nesting grounds to find the right place to raise their kids. That would be like your mom moving to Alaska to have you!”

  A few moms are standing in a line in the back. Their arms are folded. None of them laugh.

  “Okay, not a crowd-pleaser. Here’s a good one: leatherbacks can stay underwater for as long as five hours, and they can actually slow down their heart rate to conserve oxygen. How long can you guys stay underwater? Do any of you know? Do you want to all try to hold our breaths now?”

  He sucks in a deep breath and holds it, his cheeks puffed out. No one else follows suit.

  A few of the kids turn around. “I can count to fifteen,” one of them says.

  “I got to twenty once,” says another.

  Toby exhales dramatically. “That’s pretty great. I can’t do that,” he says. “But the leatherback’s got you beat. Another weird thing is that if they’re left alone for too long, their shells actually become translucent—that’s another word for clear—so you can see right through them. But it’s much healthier to have a hard, green shell, like you see these turtles have. That’s why the aquarium has always kept Banjo and the Admiral together, so they don’t get lonely and their shells stay healthy.”

  The Admiral has drifted away, and now all the kids turn to face Toby.

  “Why do they get clear?” one girl asks.

  “I’ve never heard of that,” her mom says.

  “It’s actually to make them easier to see in the water,” Toby says. “They absorb more light so other leatherbacks can see them from farther away and realize that they’re alone. It’s basically a mechanism to make friends.”

  “So…it’s a mating thing?” one mom says.

  “You could say that,” Toby says, raising his eyebrows slightly.

  “I’m not sure if—” the woman starts, but Toby interrupts her.

  “Let’s move on!” he exclaims brightly and starts walking into the next room. The group trails behind him.

  I run ahead to where Toby is striding forward, long arms swinging.

  “Is that really true? About how old they are? And their shells?” I whisper.

  “I mean, maybe,” he says. “Who am I to know the mysteries of turtles?”

  “So you’re lying to these people.”

  “I like to spice things up. Keep ’em engaged with the material,” he says, and then he turns around and raises his arms in a dramatic V. “The rainbow fish,” he proclaims. “Peaceful schooling fish, which means, like you, they gather in big groups called schools. But unlike you guys, they stay in schools during the summer!”

  The kids giggle at this one. I walk closer to the edge of the tank and put my hand on the glass, lukewarm and dry. It’s marked with thousands of tiny handprints around the height of my thighs. Inside, the rainbow fish dart by so quickly that I can’t distinguish one from another. They are too fast and tiny, like individual sparks of a firework that someone exploded in the water.

  The children follow the school back and forth as they whirl around the tank, jump to touch the glass where the fish just were. For every lap they take, one trips on the uneven carpet, but apparently, falling such a short distance isn’t even painful. They immediately get up and keep running—back and forth, one school chasing another.

  While they run, Toby tells us there are more than seventy species of rainbow fish, and the more males you keep together, the more colorful they get. To show off for the ladies, he says while winking at one of the younger mothers, who blushes and frowns simultaneously. In fact, he says, there’s one documented case of a school of rainbow fish, composed almost entirely of males, which never stopped changing color, but constantly shifted through all the tones of the rainbow.

  As we move on to the next hall, I’m not sure which of these things are true, if any. My hand feels greasy where it touched the glass. I look back once before we pass through the door and see the school whip toward the left side of the tank in one coordinated motion, like dancers.

  We walk through a few more fish tanks and the alligator’s area. The kids can barely see the alligator, so small and bumpy that he blends in with the rocks where he’s sleeping. Toby tells a story about how the alligator, as a baby, attacked an aquarium staff member and lost. His pride was so hurt that he’d never grown any bigger.

  “That’s a lesson to you. Don’t get in a fight, and if you do and you lose, don’t be a sore loser,” Toby says. The kids are getting antsy, and their parents are checking their phones.

  Toby leads us into the next ro
om, and I actually gasp because this room’s tank is resplendent with jellyfish. It looks like hundreds of them, but it can’t be; I know we don’t have facilities big enough. The water is a little cleaner here and still that crazed, false blue.

  The jellyfish float up and down, sideways and diagonally, propelling themselves with muscle contractions I don’t understand. They bump into each other and bounce away. When I took the introduction tour last week, the jellyfish tank was being cleaned. I’ve never seen them before. We don’t sell much jellyfish paraphernalia at the store.

  These are not like the animals I used to see in National Geographic TV shows and picture books when I was little. Not the Portuguese man o’ war, with its long trailing tentacles, or the sinister jellies with yard-wide tops that descend into rainbows of color. These jellyfish are small and unintimidating. Their white bodies blue from the water, their edges pale pink and brown like they’ve been burned.

  Toby comes over to me and says quietly, “I’m about to take ’em to the touch tank. Usually it’s only about three minutes before someone pokes something sharp and starts crying, so the tour should be over soon and we can grab some lunch.”

  “I think I’m gonna stay here until you’re done,” I say.

  “Are you okay?” he asks. “I know my tour sucks, but it’s never been bad enough to actually make people ill.”

  “I’m good,” I tell him. “I think it’s the water. Everyone looks kinda sickly.”

  “Yeah.” He glances at his tour group, who are mostly playing freeze tag. “Time to go.”

  He herds them through to the horseshoes and starfish, and I sit on the floor. I watch the jellyfish swim gracefully across the tank, float into the distance and back again. They move from corner to meaningless corner like they’re tracing the edges of their world. I run my hand along the line where the glass meets the wall. It is straight and cool. On the floor beneath it, there’s a little pile of dust and a green rubber band from someone’s braces.

  I don’t know how long I sit there. Until the jellyfish look like the snowflakes, whirling and twisting into nothingness.

  “Caroline,” Toby says loudly, making me turn fast. “Lunch? Pizza? Yeah?”