I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I figured it wasn’t a compliment. I sat still for as long as I could but his strange concentration made it hard for me to breathe.
“This beach is so big,” I said. “The water goes on forever.”
The size of it made me feel weightless and exposed. Like everything was about to turn inside out and swallow me. There was just the blood rushing in my ears and my own ribs trying to suffocate me.
“Can I move?”
Kevin looked up.
“Yeah, sorry.”
The wind made me think of that day in Greenport. Of my mother’s voice, thinned out through the wires.
“You could talk, you know. I mean while I draw.”
“About what?”
“About whatever comes into your head. I’m like a psychoanalyst, but free.”
And I did. I talked about all of it. I told this story, from beginning to end. By the end of it, I could breathe.
“You’re amazing to draw. You should come up to Hunter.”
“Hunter College?”
“It’s hard to find models for the summer classes. And it’s always hard to find guys. My teacher would be so happy. You’ll get ten bucks an hour, and guys get to keep their underwear on.”
“Wait. You mean model naked?”
“It’s not weird. They’re all artists. No one even thinks of you as a person. They’re too busy trying to get your proportions right.”
He went nuts over the picture Andre took of me in the boat and asked if he could take it away to show the drawing teacher.
“Hunter is the one with the big computing department, right?” I asked him.
Why could I tell Kevin everything, when I couldn’t tell Joan? Because he wasn’t her. There was nothing at stake, no one left to lose. When Kevin found me, I thought I was as empty as the beach we were sitting on.
I wasn’t, though. Joan was still there. I told you I should have trusted her.
I took the job at Hunter on the condition that Kevin would show me the computer department while I was there. We lied and told his drawing teacher I was eighteen. When you take your clothes off, it’s only weird for the first thirty seconds. Everyone is so serious, it starts to feel boring right away. There’s lots of time to think, though. And to practice breathing through those moments when the world closes in, when Robbie’s body comes back to me, all confused in my mind with Ray’s.
I got on a kind of little stage and they put a heater on me, even though it’s August. Everyone stood behind their easels with big pads of newsprint paper, concentrating like I was a piece of furniture. First you have to do a bunch of poses that only last ten seconds. Gestures, the teacher called them.
“Do whatever you feel like,” he said.
I sat like I was in the attic window, with my head turned toward the Harrises’ house. I stood like I was leaning against the retaining wall at the bus stop, even though there was nothing but air at my back. I could hear the slide of pencils and the scratch of charcoal. Images of me were appearing all around the room, hidden from me behind the easels. I sat on the edge of the little stage and stretched my legs out like I was talking to the quiet lady on the floating dock at low tide. I lay down like I was floating on water, and reached my arms out and up, closed my eyes and imagined Joan’s hands in mine.
“That’s great,” the teacher said. “Terrific.”
I stood up and wiped my eyes. Then I had to sit still for fifteen minutes at a time. My leg fell asleep for so long it stopped stinging even. I built a whole circuit board in my head. When it was time to stand up, the leg was useless and I almost fell over.
People wait until you’re dressed before they talk to you. Mostly, they just smile and say thank you on their way out. A few stopped to ask my name and say they hoped I’d come back. Kevin came over and put a hand on my arm. He smiled into my eyes and asked if I was okay.
“Take me to your computer,” I said.
Joan
TONIGHT, WHEN I left Daisy at his Aunt Regina’s house, I took a picture from the corner, even though it was dark and all I could see was the light glowing in the upstairs window. I have Andre’s old Instamatic in my backpack. He’s too cool for it now. He saved up and bought a twin-lens reflex that looks like something a newspaper reporter would have had in the thirties.
I don’t even know if my picture will come out. Maybe I’ll take it to Pathmark and spend a week waiting for an envelope full of nothing.
It doesn’t matter though, because I can see it in my head, marked out by the four yellow corners in the viewfinder. Sodium light shining onto the crossroads, angles so perfect you could use them as a T square. The light from Daisy’s window, red and blue because he brought the lamp we got in the abandoned house with him to Queens. No map in there, though. No LEDs and hardly any wires. No creepy voice when you come in and hit the light switch. No trees in between me and his window.
Identical houses stretching down those streets in all four directions, all surrounded by nineteen kinds of darkness. I wanted a picture of the world that has Daisy in it now. The power lines are buried. There will never be spitting wires writhing around Rockaway.
When I got there this afternoon and knocked on the door, Aunt Regina opened it looking freaked out. Everyone in their neighborhood is white. She recovered quick, though.
I had the Newsday in my backpack with a dry cell battery. Is that paper one of those things people will save? When we’re all old, will people have that article describing Ray Velker’s death in their scrapbooks? Anyway, I felt like Daisy should have it. Those were my gifts, the only things I could think of: electricity and someone else’s death.
“Joan!” Aunt Regina said. “What a journey you must have had.”
“Yeah, it was pretty boring. How are you Ms. Carillo?”
“Fine, sweetie. Fine. Daisy will be so happy. Daisy!”
When I saw him at the top of the stairs, he looked three feet taller.
“Come up.”
I went past him into his room and then we just stood there, not knowing what to do. It was stifling up there, even with the window open and the sea breeze coming through.
“We can’t smoke in here. Shit, sorry. Sit down.”
I sat on the bed and he sat on the floor. He was taller, I swear.
“I brought the paper about the trial.”
“How was Massachusetts? . . . What trial?”
“I told you on the phone; it was fine. Scottie Hall. Daisy, we walked right past Ray, the day we went to look at the frozen carp. We must have.”
“Trust me, I thought about it already. Somebody said they kept him alive for fourteen hours. Jesus Christ, Joan. How the hell did we inhabit the same world as those people?”
So here’s the thing about Ray. There was some beef about the angel dust. Robbie gave it to Scottie and Scottie fronted some to Ray. Ray never paid. Guys started hassling Robbie for the money and Robbie started hassling Scottie. So that was why Scottie and them started in on Ray. Then they got really wasted and thought they could offer Ray’s pain up to their Prince of Darkness or something. They were into that shit. They cut him a lot without killing him. They took his eyes out with a spoon. They hung him up for a while and, I don’t know, chanted weird stuff or something.
They didn’t find all that out from Ray’s body. I was right; it was mostly bones and a pair of jeans by the time somebody told the cops where it was. We know the story of what they did to him because one of the kids rolled over on Scottie and the other guy. Every bitter detail was in that paper.
Daisy rested the paper down on his knees. “I don’t need this in my head,” he said.
“Crap, Daisy. I’m sorry.”
“How can we put one foot in front of the other, Joan? How are we supposed to think there’s an endgame? How are we supposed to manufacture happiness out of this?”
“Facts, I think. You have to just focus on facts.”
“These are the facts!” He waved the paper at me.
“No, those are some of the facts. There’s other ones. You and me and the laws of gravity and the orbits of the planets and the insides of cuttlefish.”
“They had cuttlefish at Woods Hole?”
“Yeah, live ones. In the tanks. I saw one make ink.”
“Do you think you’re gonna stop calling me?”
“Nah. It’s free.”
“Not for long. We should probably just pay, actually. I think I got you in enough trouble, and most of the phone fun is over. People are getting busted all over the place.”
“What are you gonna do if you can’t play with phones? Your brain will atrophy, man.”
“I’m saving up for a computer kit. Aunt Regina gives me an actual allowance.”
We both laughed. A few months ago Daisy was pawning the stereo so he could buy Cheez Whiz; now he’s saving up his allowance to take in to Radio Shack. We could smell stuffed shells baking in the kitchen. Daisy will be okay. Ms. Carillo will actually take care of him and that will drive him nuts, but he’ll stay alive until college, which is a definite plus.
We went to the beach so we could smoke. There’s a boardwalk that stretches for miles, and no trees. And real waves, as big as the ones on Cape Cod. First we just rolled up our jeans and buried our feet in the sand.
“Teresa’s moving to South Highbone, Daisy. Her parents rented a house.”
“That’s cool. I like her. The archangel Teresa.”
“She always says how beautiful you are. That’s the word she uses. Beautiful.”
“Yeah, what she means is weird looking. She’ll love your documentaries.”
“Not everybody at Woods Hole was white, Daisy.”
“Oh.”
That was it. I guess he didn’t know what else to say.
“Listen. It mattered. There was this girl Junie whose parents moved here from Colombia, and a guy named Trevor from Maryland. We sat together in the mornings and all the white kids walked straight past us to sit somewhere else.”
“You and Teresa will have to make other friends at school. Girls, I guess.”
“So will you.” I poked him and gave him a side-eye. Does Daisy even like girls that way? I don’t know.
“Seriously, though,” Daisy said. “I can come out there sometimes, too.”
“The train takes about five million years.”
I could feel him breaking. It was like when there’s a crack in the ice on the harbor. At first you don’t know which direction it’s in. You just feel the dread inside you, and then you hear the splintering, louder and louder, coming toward you.
“We could meet in Manhattan?” he said. “By the glass jellyfish.”
“Not Manhattan; the aquarium. Actual living jellyfish and it’s a deal.”
“Yes! We should have thought of that the first time. I didn’t think about anything, Joan. I’m sorry.”
“Come on. We’re going in the water.”
“Wearing what?”
“Whatever’s under those jeans. Strip, boy.”
“Here?”
“What, you do it in front of strangers at Hunter College but not in front of your best friend?”
The sun was setting and there was hardly anyone there. Anyway, I wasn’t the one that had to live there, what did I care? I just knew I had to get him in the water. I felt like it would put him back together somehow. So we both stripped down to our underwear. I was wearing a girlie bra my mother bought me.
“Kids taught me how to bodysurf in Cape Cod. You don’t try to swim through the breakers. You wait for a wave, then dive under it and come up the other side.”
It was cold. We went into the foam and I took Daisy’s hand. He didn’t shrink back or look away. He was some new kind of Daisy already. We looked into each other’s eyes and then into the water.
“Ready.” He said it like a statement, not a question.
Daisy
I USED TO lie in the attic window, watching the Harrises’ house all day and all night. All the rooms in our house would be dark and quiet underneath me, the lights showing the distance in the darkness outside. No one looking up from the road would ever suspect a watcher in that little circle of window. That’s how I ended up seeing things I didn’t want to see and didn’t know how to talk about.
We lived our childhoods in a bowl full of weather that swirled seasons over us while we climbed the edges and grew to match our own gangly limbs. The tension before a summer thunderstorm, the hurricane that tore the world up, the ice underneath us grinding while we ran from a moving crack toward the snow under the trees. We ran around and through the whole thing, getting taller and more ourselves the whole time. Growing to fit the shapes that were already cut out for us and not even knowing it.
Joan told me the names of things, and we took them apart so we could look at the insides and figure out how they worked. Animate and inanimate, radios and piss clams, we wanted to know all of it. When we were nine, we took apart my mother’s vacuum and fixed the automatic cord retractor. By the time I started on the lighting in my house, Joan was busy diving all the time. After the sea bass we were too freaked out to kill anything bigger than a clam. We’d put live fish on the mud or in the shallows and watch for a while before we rowed out over the deep and chucked them back in.
We lived under leaves that were first neon and then velvet and later flaming and falling, but I don’t remember the branches empty until we sat in them smoking for the first time. At first it was always summer. Our legs were always bare and covered in scrapes and our pockets were full of stones and weathered glass. The scrapes healed into ghostly streaks and then there were more because we never stopped climbing into places we weren’t supposed to. We fell out of trees and slid over sharp rocks. We pulled ourselves up on the old floating dock, and the barnacles cut us open. Our blood spiraled down into the water like red smoke.
Did you know that sharks can still smell blood in one part per billion? Or maybe it’s one part per million. I can’t remember which. I’d have to ask Joan.
Joan
WHEN I WAS at Woods Hole, I went to some tide pools on a rocky beach. The waves there made a sound exactly like the hurricane smashing against Daisy’s attic window. I lost my breath and had to sit down right there while the memory blotted out the starfish and the anemones. I could feel the heavy air and the pounding over our heads. If I shut my eyes I could hear Daisy, breathing underneath the sound of the waves. For a minute, it was like I could reach through all the time and distance between us, back to our childhood, back to our picture-book world.
If a little kid drew a harbor, it would be a perfect semicircle and always full of water the color of the blue crayon in a box of twelve. There would be boats with perfect white triangles for sails. But our harbor was long and skinny, with twisted fingers branching off into the trees and water that was a different color every day. We lived at the shallow end—no, that is not a metaphor—and down there the harbor was nothing but mud half the time. When the tide was out, we could see the memory of the waves in the shape of little ripples in the mud.
Every twelve hours, the water went out and took a whole world with it, all the bluefish and dogfish and eels. The clams buried themselves and the crabs did their paranoid scuttling, not happy about being in the open. When the water came back, it brought that whole invisible world back with it. That is how we grew up, exposed and then invisible, invisible and then exposed. Every twelve hours, twice a day. I guess living next to that makes you a certain kind of person.
&
WE WAITED ON the beach in Rockaway until we saw our wave coming. It rose up and curled over while we breathed out. Like we were dying or being born, our whole lives flashed between us in those five seconds. The harbor and the dogfish and the curve on Jensen Road. Eugene and the quiet lady and the falling leaves. Climbing in and out of windows and talking to each other through a piece of string. Everything turning around from summer into winter and back again, over and over while we changed and got taller and everyone around us d
isappeared one by one.
Time unraveled and we imagined Ray on top of the Ferris wheel at the firemen’s fair. We imagined him running away with the carnival, driving a painted truck through the tall grass prairie, setting up a Tilt-A-Whirl by a beach where the sun set over the water instead of rising. None of those pictures involved frozen mud or wet leaves or scalpels or spoons. None of them involved Highbone at all. We knew Ray had escaped, but not what it cost to get out. We could almost see our way out from the harbor into the darkness and the blinding light. Then the wave rose over us and we felt the weight of the crashing world.
What was there to balance it? There was us. There was each other and the weight of the love it took to let go. There was trust.
We held each other’s hands and closed our eyes so we could see Jensen Road curving past us and around the end of the harbor to Carter’s Bay. We saw the two phone booths on the shoulder and the cars parked outside the Narragansett at dinnertime, the summer people on the deck eating lobster and making deals. The street light falling from the wall across the gravel parking lot and glistening out onto the harbor. We saw our boat in the stars and the security lights shining into the dead water of the swimming pools.
We pushed all of that out of our lungs until we were empty. Then we breathed in all the light left on that beach and all the length of Long Island between us.
And we dove.
Historical Note
THE IMAGINARY ACTION of this novel takes place between the end of summer 1979 and the end of summer 1980. If you’ve read Little Wrecks, this book begins three months after that one ends, in the same town.
Daisy’s interactions with the telephone system are based on things done by hundreds of intelligent and slightly naughty young people from the 1950s to the early 1980s. The phone network was essentially a giant computer the size of America that didn’t know it was a computer. These were the first hackers. Young people built blue boxes, mapped the system, and exploited its weaknesses. Two of those people were Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. To the best of my knowledge, all of Daisy’s hacks are realistic and were still possible on Long Island up until the early 1980s. If you want to know more about the practice called phone phreaking, or just want a great story, read Phil Lapsley’s book Exploding the Phone.
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