The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  What answers do you think you will get from him?

  August? she asked her mother—that muted horizon, that irascible source of light—or Stephen?

  Her mother was still around. She was still calm in the face of foreigners, finding better places to stay. She was, however, fading.

  Alice watched the sun stroking the purple hammered into the sky like one long night of bruises. She heard her mother say, You ‘re always on the outside.

  Shh, Alice told her mother. Just be quiet and watch me. Do you think you can do that?

  And she took a matchbook from her pocket. She realized she wasn’t moving any closer to the domes as she watched the tip of the sun emerge—a rare blood orange—all the while lighting matches. She dared the flames to crawl up the blond wood, dropping them to the dirt when the fire rose too high. That’s no habit—Cady had said a million years ago, poor pretty Cady with her blond orphan’s glow—that’s a dare.

  Not five minutes after she was back in her clammy motel room, after stripping off her dusty clothing, the door shook with knocking.

  “Alice?” What she could swear was Stephen’s voice came muffled through the door.

  “Hello?” Alice said, pulling back on the shirt and pants with a hard-edged hurry. “Yes?” She opened the door with too much force, and greeted him too loudly, asking if something was wrong. He took her by the wrist and pulled her outside, closing the door behind her. “You need to see this,” he said. They hadn’t touched before that—not even to shake hands, not even by mistake.

  “What?” she half asked, half declared. She was too surprised and too unsettled to guess what he was doing. The wind had come up outside and everything felt tender. It was still very early morning. She followed him to his car, piecing together just how much time had actually passed since he’d dropped her off in the very same spot, and as he drove in silence—not angry as far as she could tell, not upset—she wondered what he was up to. He wasn’t giddy or smiling, and he was speeding. He sped through the huerta and up to the dunes, and when they exited the parked car he gestured her toward the waves, getting far ahead. He said something that melted into the wind, but she was too amazed by how the clouds overhead were blowing out their candles, spreading fat, pearly streams through the dawn.

  “Would you look!” he yelled, as if he’d been saying it all along. “Do you see it?” he shouted. “Do you?”

  It was as stupefying as it was beautiful. A whale was entirely up and out of the water, hurling itself toward the sky by what looked like sheer dint of will. The sky was a wash of faded color photographs—a boxful of sun-bleached days spilled before their eyes. The pigments were not pulsing but spreading out, easing into light and stretching out every step of each possible spectrum. Purple the color of a pontiff’s robe blossomed into lilac and burned itself down to a gunmetal rose. The whale’s tail flipped hard under its enormous gray body and it fell with a smack, straight backward and under. Just like that, and then it was gone, leaving an immense splash in its place. The air seemed to tremble as if a missile had launched instead of a leviathan, and Stephen looked like a comedic prophet with windblown hair and cartoon amazement for eyes. Alice looked from him to the sky, to the profound absence of the whale. There they were—Stephen and Alice—virtual strangers and mutually proud, as if they’d both given birth to the experience, as if it were really theirs.

  “What was that?” Alice yelled, laughing, not taking her eyes off the sea.

  “That was the largest, highest-jumping whale I’ve ever seen.”

  They made their way up the beach a little to sit on the cold sand. “That,” Alice said, “was spectacular.”

  “The timing,” he breathed. “You know, they’re also very affectionate,” he said. “They spend most of their time nuzzling up to each other.”

  “How friendly.” She pointed to the wake near the shore, where another whale’s back bobbed in the shallows, a coal-blue slope amidst the clamorous tide, rubbing itself on the sand. “Why is it doing that?”

  “It’s anyone’s guess,” he said, “but most likely it’s for pleasure.”

  Alice suddenly felt her lack of sleep. Her brother had more than likely gotten a strange woman pregnant. She still didn’t know what had happened to Cady The more she stayed here, the less she knew. She didn’t even know this man’s last name. “Why do you think it feels this way?” Alice asked.

  “What, seeing the whale?”

  “I feel almost depressed now.”

  “Everything tends to feel a little small afterward, doesn’t it?”

  “But it’s not like we did anything. At least I didn’t. You, at least, came and got me. I just happened to see a whale.”

  He smiled. His teeth were a bit yellowed—evidence of what Alice guessed was a vice or two. But with his smile, she realized, came an axis tilting, a cranky gear that settled into place. “You feel lucky,” he said.

  “Exactly. That and the shock of it, the surprise.”

  “I knew you’d feel this way. How did I know that?”

  Alice shrugged.

  “I feel old,” he said, reaching out suddenly for the sleeve of her sweater and taking a loose thread between his fingers. “Next to you, of course, I am.”

  “No, I’ve always looked older,” Alice said, and in a burst of self-consciousness, she rushed to speak up. “I’m getting sun-spots, wrinkles, I’m telling you.”

  “You?” he said, and then his eyes saw past her, as if seeing into another place. “No,” he said, shaking his head, “anyone who looks at you and sees that… well, they’re not seeing.”

  “I’m thirty-one,” she blurted.

  He pulled back, looking her over with a clearly appreciative eye. “You’ll always look like this. I can tell,” he said, and turned away before shrugging. He picked up a piece of dried chartreuse seaweed. He held it carefully in his callused hands, turning it over and over until it fell away.

  She could barely breathe. “Thank you,” she said, the way her mother taught her to say it, not followed up by any jokes or denials.

  “How did your father die?” he asked, and she was both irritated and relieved at the shift in conversation.

  Don’t go all maudlin now, she could hear her mother say.

  “Cancer?” she said flippantly. “Heartbreak?”

  “Your mother went first?”

  Alice heard the familiar line come out of her mouth: “My mother died in a fire when I was sixteen.”

  “Where?” he asked. His hand shielded his eyes from the sun, casting a dark, hard shadow.

  “Home,” Alice said, watching him closely. “At home.”

  Stephen put his hand on her back—a rock atop paper, no more, no less. The waves beat on the shore, the day was heating up, and at first she thought she was imagining it, that it was the wind or simply her own tired mind, but Stephen’s fingers curled out of a fist. They undid themselves in the manner of his long-winded physicality, and they pressed into her back— his palm strong enough to hold her, should she want to let go, should she want to just close her eyes and fall. But she didn’t fall. She didn’t move at all. Before she spoke again, before he did either, she wanted to pay attention. She sat almost primly and enjoyed this heady quiet, replete with possibility. Alice knew she had always been too self-conscious, that Gus was often right about that, but she also knew that sometimes there was great value in knowing that life was composed of moments that turned without fanfare, as quickly and quietly as milk.

  She turned to him, and when she looked into Stephen’s eyes she realized she was no longer able to look at anything else. The same ocean was churning away, and it would, Alice knew, keep on long after both of them were gone. But even the ocean seemed less authentic than his eyes right in front of her, which were more tired than she had noticed before, the blue undercut by ash. She was holding on to the back of his neck, not so much holding on as she was trying to pull him apart and see what she could find. Alice bowed her head and when she looked up she said
, “I need to go.”

  He nodded—less, it seemed, in agreement than as an acknowledgment that she was speaking—and Alice placed his hands on the sides of her face, blocking off her ears; as if the mere touch of his hands could raze her old thoughts and offer up a taste of the freedom she needed so badly. When she kissed him she felt fog burning off, the high-pitched whoosh of altitude and the terror of not knowing which direction was up and which direction was down and even if it mattered anymore. This was not her first kiss; this was most likely not even her two hundredth. She would kiss almost anyone—she was seminotorious for it at certain points in her life. A kiss could always be counted on to take her right out of herself. When she kissed Stephen she was set in motion, but now she was running backward, scanning the past for a bearable future— searching while skimming fingers through rough water off the side of a big white boat. She closed her eyes and saw a tropical bird flying through suburban skies. She saw an ordinary hand—Charlotte’s hand—those pale, bitten fingers resting squarely on her father’s chest. Alice felt the drafty corridor and the long-familiar shadows of a cold moon passing through tall windows. She eyed the empty place settings of her Thanksgiving meal—the lilac butterflies, the ivory-handled knives— waiting for her mother, waiting for her brother, waiting for this kiss, even as it was happening.

  17

  The base of the domes—the potential lobby where guests would check in and pick up keys—was a poured-concrete foundation with walls stunted at the height of Alice’s shoulders. Sitting within the walls during the late morning felt like playing hide-and-go-seek—waiting with excitement for her brother to come claim her. She’d always preferred hiding to seeking because it came with the thrill of being found. During one game, when she couldn’t have been more than six or seven, she was the seeker, and when she couldn’t find Gus she’d begun to panic, thinking he’d disappeared. I need you to come out now, was what she’d said, her voice quavering with tears. This was according to her brother’s story—a story told and retold. / need you to come out.

  It was hot and Alice drank a can of Coke, absorbing the sug- ary jolt that steeled her against the kicked-up dust settling on her sticky skin. A sense of calm had taken over. She was remembering how—if she was honest with herself—her father never seemed to expect Gus to come home to them. He had shrugged and nodded, nodded and shrugged. She couldn’t imagine what on Earth her father had written in that letter. Don’t you care? she’d nearly cried out, when he’d turned into a sick old man without a visit from his son, but she had done everything in her power not to excite him. She had been good about it, keeping everything—all the questions and frustrations, all those lonely clocked-in hours—she’d been good at keeping things contained.

  So when she heard footsteps in the gravelly dirt, not one set but two, not a quiet whistling but a male and female dialogue, Alice kept her head below the walls and listened.

  “But don’t you want to contact her?” Gus asked.

  Silence.

  “Maybe she’ll give you some money, at the very least.”

  “Yeah, and maybe she’ll tell me I’m a slut like your mother,” Erika said. “Maybe she’ll tell me I’m a stupid slut.”

  Feet planted in the gravel. Cars passed by, ocean far away— all the sounds were no more than disruption. She wanted to hear every word. She wanted to hear them breathe.

  “Okay” Gus said, “but if you don’t tell your mother? Prepare yourself for when she shows up in a few months and just see what she does then. You think that’ll be better? Besides, I want to talk with her again.”

  “I do not care if she respects me.”

  “Yes, you do. Erika,” he said, “you do.”

  Alice felt her stomach lurch as she saw herself stand and make herself known repeatedly in her mind. There they stood, right on the other side of these walls, and yet a world away. The minute Alice stood and confronted him, she knew she would never go back. She would never again possess such nagging nostalgia, for truth would become too important. She needed to know why he was hiding from her and why he seemed so troubled, but more than anything she needed to know what had happened in Oaxaca and what had brought him here.

  There was silence, and Alice imagined that Gus and Erika were kissing; she stared at gray cement and pictured his hand through that dark mess of hair, her fingers pulling at his T-shirt like taffy—conveying a misleading playfulness that no doubt made him feel free.

  She counted to ten and still she was seated. She counted to five and she gripped the Coke can until her fingers ached. Then she stood up.

  They weren’t kissing. They weren’t even looking at each other, and yet they looked oddly comfortable in their obvious standoff. “Alice,” Erika said—noticing her before Gus did— which was not, Alice couldn’t help thinking, a promising start.

  “You need to talk to me,” Alice said to her brother, in a voice so understated, so serious, that Gus merely nodded. Although after he nodded, he looked up at the hot blue sky as if to say, Enough.

  Erika stayed where she was, with her hand twisting a strand of hair around a bitten finger. She smiled at Alice, revealing sharp little teeth, and it made Alice terribly uneasy, like being in a dream where all the colors were off and the people she thought she knew all went by different names.

  Alice looked at her brother, who said with surprising diplomacy, “Erika, please. Can we finish this later?”

  “I can’t stay?” she asked Alice, audacious creature that she was.

  “Well, no,” Alice said.

  “I don’t see why not,” she said.

  “Well, you should,” Alice said, and the words weren’t her own; they were too confident and too mean. She drew a box with her foot in the dirt and made a mark in the very center. “I’d like to talk with my brother now.”

  “Don’t worry; I’ll come find you,” Gus said to Erika, who shot Alice a significant look.

  “Yes?” Alice asked, looking deep into those kohl-lined eyes.

  But Erika was already turning away, walking into the shade.

  “Let’s walk,” Gus said, and they did. They walked through the huerta, through sprinkler-fed fields of beautifully symmetrical crops. They walked past a corral of sheep, a truck where men stood drinking beers. There was the ever-present sound of roosters—first one and then an excited call and response, like lost relatives at a disaster site—and dogs, who knew how many dogs, growing noisier before dying down. A woman on a horse came up over the dunes from the beach where she’d been riding. She was fair and middle-aged and looked like she’d learned in an English saddle somewhere on the Gold Coast. “You think she’s the black sheep of her family?” Gus asked, after she passed by with a smile. “You think she married the horse trainer on her family’s ranch and stole away to Baja?”

  Alice nodded. “I think she loves it here. I think she misses them only during the holidays, when she gets unstoppable cravings for good champagne.”

  “Once you’ve had the good stuff,” he said, “it’s impossible to go back.”

  “We’re walking toward the ocean, I take it?”

  He nodded, coughed up, and spit on the ground.

  They paused in front of some abandoned construction projects. “Did you know,” Gus said, “that unless you build something here—anything—on your properly within six months of purchase, the land becomes legally unclaimed?”

  Alice barely shook her head.

  “And when a house is completed, taxes have to be paid. People scramble to build something just to claim their land, and then they tend to leave their houses technically unfinished to avoid paying taxes.”

  These houses would never be completed. They might never be claimed again. “Dad would really have loved this,” Alice said, looking around at the fine mess.

  Gus pointed to a few sheep meandering in and out of a freestanding brick doorway without a door. They were livid and sickly and it was anybody’s guess where they belonged. When he’d stopped looking at the skeletal houses
and the sheep, his eyes rested quizzically on her. When she didn’t respond, he seemed vaguely relieved. “When we first got down here, Cady and I went to this resort on the East Cape, where the water’s calm. I bet she didn’t tell you about that, huh?”

  Alice shook her head.

  “Every room had a terrace and a perfect view of the sea. We’d lie in bed and pretend we were shipwrecked. The management rang a bell three times a day for meals, and we were, for some reason, the only people there. She loved the bland food and the little hot rolls and, of course, the drinks before dinner. There was an old bartender named Juan who played a mean game of darts, and he could pour an exact ounce of anything—anything—without measuring.”

  “It sounds like a great time.”

  “It was.”

  They stepped through muddy tire tracks and onto an un-fenced lot, which was littered with cement blocks and empty bottles. Gus said, “But on the way back, after we’d had this really great couple of days, we saw a sign for a town called Santiago featuring a zoo. Both Cady and I were horrified by the idea of a zoo in the desert, but we were also really curious and we made the turnoff. There was no town at all, only two government employees manning cages and listening to Creedence Clearwater on a boom box. There was a tiger, a bear, an otter, a lion, and dozens of tropical birds. They were in boxy small cages; it was seriously hot. It was sad. I mean, I felt unreasonably sad.”

  As they were about to walk toward the base of the dunes, Alice’s calm aspect fell away. Her teeth were nearly grinding. “You know,” she said, stopping dead still at the foot of steps leading to no more than a poured-concrete foundation, “you’re telling me about poor animals in the desert, and I know my job is to feel like you’re this really sensitive person. But I have to tell you: I’m not buying it. I can’t. You have been,” she said, “outrageous. You didn’t come see him—you didn’t come see us. You wouldn’t help me. And now … what happened to Cady?”