by Deb Caletti
“Kill it!” the second guy said.
“If this were the Bible, wouldn’t I have a slingshot?” someone else slurred. “Is this the Bible?”
“Yeah, I’m God,” said the second guy.
I sat up. I could see a form in the darkness, Jake, his head propped up on his hand.
“Big Bob,” he whispered.
“He’s in trouble,” I whispered back.
Jake swung his legs out of bed. He was wearing a pair of shorts, that was all. I could see his lean and muscled back in the moonlight. I looked at the waistband-crinkle of his shorts. I wondered if there was a mark there, an indentation on his skin, under the elastic. I followed him as he turned the door handle silently and went outside. We were both in bare feet; I had only my long T-shirt on, and the air was cool from the sea, sticky and salty, as if you could put your tongue out and taste it.
Jake walked across the asphalt toward the four guys, who stood around our truck. I held back, felt a grip of uncertainty. One Jake, four guys, a confrontation. “Hey,” he said. “Is one of you Steven?”
“Yeah.” It was a what’s-it-to-you “yeah.” Steven was tall and blond, with straight hair and a clunky nose.
“I just wanted to warn you, the police were looking for you earlier. They were here when we came. Saw you on some surveillance camera?” Jake waved toward the roof of the Sandy Beach Resort office.
“Shit. I told you not to mess with that car,” one of the other guys said.
“There’s no surveillance camera,” a male form of Aunt Sandy said. Chris or Mike obviously. But he didn’t sound so sure.
Steven flipped his middle finger in the direction of the “camera.” “Surveillance this,” he said, and cackled.
The fourth guy hooted and laughed. Pulled down his pants and bent over, showed his butt to the Sandy Beach Resort office roof.
“We got to get out of here,” Steven said. “Fuck man, they’re looking for us. Mike, shit, pull your pants up, come on. Thanks, man,” he said to Jake.
“No problem.”
“Let’s go to Carl’s for a while,” Mike said, zipping up his pants.
“It’s like 1984, man,” Steven said. “Government is watching everywhere.”
Jake and I watched as they piled into a four-door Honda Accord. A businessman’s car. A car a parent bought, with some misguided hope for the future. “Dicks,” Jake said. “You sleepy?”
“Not really,” I said. I wasn’t at all sleepy. Not even a little bit. More alert than maybe I’d ever been in my life.
Jake gestured for me to follow him. I caught up to him just past the barbecue pit on the lawn, and we walked down the prickly, wet grass toward the beach. We left behind the cottages with their yellow, humming porch lights, headed for the dark sea. We picked our way across the rocks in our bare feet, and small waves shushed in and out on the gravelly beach. Jake sat down, his back against a large driftwood log. He moved a snake of seaweed away so that I could sit too.
“You cold?” he asked.
“You must be,” I said. I wasn’t cold, not at all. I wasn’t cold, and my feet didn’t hurt, and I was happier than I’d been in maybe all of my seventeen years.
“No, I’m great,” he said.
Our arms were touching. I had pulled my T-shirt down to sit on, but our legs were touching, too. I could feel heat and energy there, where we touched. It felt so strong that it seemed I might see something when I looked down—a band of blazing light, maybe—something besides just our skin touching.
It was quiet except for crickets and the sound of the sea. And then: “It’s amazing what damage a person can do,” Jake said.
I didn’t respond. He’d been listening, too, to Frances Lee before we’d gone to bed. But he didn’t know my father. I knew more about him, didn’t I? Or was it possible that some people, with less information, can know as much, more? That without the small hindrances and details of love, they possessed clarity?
“He’s not all bad,” I said.
“Do you have to be all bad to be bad?” he said.
“Do you have to be all good to be good?” I said.
Jake thought. “I think you can be mostly good and still be good. And bad enough to be bad.” He grinned at me. White teeth in the dark, that dimple in his cheek. God, I felt like the hairs on my arms were standing on end. I didn’t feel anything like this with Daniel. Never. Nothing close. These feelings shouldn’t have been in the same country, let alone the same person.
The beach made me brave, the night did. His skin lying against mine did too. “Are you speaking from experience? Bad enough to be bad?”
Jake laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Hmm,” I said.
“Me? Can’t even take two cookies instead of one without a guilty conscience.”
“No way,” I said. It sounded like me. Just like me.
“I think you’ve been making assumptions about me,” he said.
“Wild women and parties,” I joked, but didn’t joke. “Or is that, wild parties and women?”
“I’m not sure who you’re describing. Maybe a couple of friends of mine.” He laughed, but I could tell he meant it.
“Tell me then. What I should know,” I said.
“I wore a dress shirt once to a wedding when I was six and never did again. Music makes me feel alive. I can’t watch anyone drink the milk from their cereal bowl—”
“I hate that too.”
“I don’t know why, it makes my stomach…Bleh. I was voted ‘nicest boy’ in junior high, don’t laugh. ‘Most likely to join a commune’ in high school, though I still am not quite sure what they meant by that. I like to go fishing but don’t like to catch the fish, and can’t stand public displays of cheery, all-in-fun humiliation—anything involving me wearing a costume, no way. I wear my Hawaiian shirt on the inside. Your turn.”
He sounded kind. He sounded shy. He sounded like the Daniel I thought Daniel might be but wasn’t. Nothing like I guessed he’d be. “Okay,” I said. I thought for a moment. “I love the smell of a new eraser, those pink ones. I once ate half a can of Play-Doh, when I was three. I love Tator Tots and hate Christmas carols.”
“‘Jingle Bells’?”
“Hate. Nicest? Everyone says I’m too nice. My niceness is almost a bad habit. Someone could hit me and I’d worry they’d hurt their hand.”
Jake laughed. “Oh man.”
“I know,” I said. “And math. I love it. Especially the Fibonacci series, the golden ratio…”
“Sound like fantasy books,” Jake said.
“No…How do you explain? They’re math sequences, sort of, equations discovered long ago, that have been found in nature and art and all kinds of places.”
“They don’t have anything to do with those awful story problems, right? ‘Uncle Ted is on a train going twelve thousand miles for sixty-five minutes. If he travels for three more hours, what did he have for breakfast?’”
I laughed. “No. Just a series of numbers, a pattern, that appears in nature all the time. A weird amount of all the time. An it-can’t-be-an-accident all the time. The number of flower petals in all varieties of flowers will be a Fibonacci number. Those little sections in the spirals of pinecones and pineapples and sunflowers—a Fibonacci number. Shells. Even the numbers in DNA.”
“That’s amazing.”
“And the golden ratio—it’s an equation, a proportion, that’s seen everywhere. The solar system, the pyramids, Renaissance art, the rise and fall of the stock market, and the growth of populations. The human body. It’s almost eerie.”
“Some kind of proof of the God-nature-universe mystery, maybe. Discovery of some truth.”
“Exactly—that’s exactly what I like about it.” I felt so pleased, my insides glowed. “There can be a mystery, but then there’s good reason behind it. Evidence for belief.”
Jake reached down into the sand. “Look,” he said. He set a shell in his open palm, traced the spiral with the tip of his finger. He
handed it to me. “Memories of the Sandy Beach Resort and the search for truth.”
I took the shell, held it tight in my hand. I could have kissed him then, I wanted to. He was so close; his lips were so near mine. The skin of his shoulder was against my own.
“Look at you, now you are cold,” he said. He was right—I hadn’t even noticed. Goose bumps ran up and down my arms. I hadn’t noticed, but he had. He stood. Held his hand out to help me up. I took it, stood too.
“I’ve been hurt by girls. I’m not really hot to have it happen again,” he said.
“I get that,” I said. But I wasn’t sure I got that. I didn’t know exactly what he was telling me. I wished I had Aunt Annie around to ask.
We made our way back to the cottage. On the porch, under the yellow light, Jake whispered my name. “Quinn? The thing you most need to know about me? You’re not the only one looking for something true,” he said.
BRIE JENKINS:
Lincoln’s mom insisted we get married in the Catholic Church, and so we did. We had to take marriage-preparation classes. I liked this idea. If we could put a checkmark next to “marriage preparation,” we could know that we were being responsible and conscientious and our marriage would succeed. The big message there was, “Love is a decision.” It wasn’t a feeling, they said, but a choice you made and stuck to. Meaning, you didn’t change your mind. No matter what. Good times and bad, sickness and health, et cetera. I liked this, too. Feelings didn’t follow a five-year plan, but a decision could.
Lincoln had a lot of sickness. Emotional variety. I read every book to try to understand him, because that’s what the magazines said to do. If you were a good wife, you tried to understand him. You listened, empathized. You let him know you were there for him and always would be. You did everything you could to solve the problem. I would have gotten an A for effort.
But a major piece of the “sickness” was that he was spoiled and just not a very nice person. He was always first in his mind. He resented my dad for having cancer, because this took time away from him. He resented my morning sickness because it meant I couldn’t make his breakfast. No amount of listening was going to change that. It’s like listening to a two-year-old. Lincoln was sort of a two-year-old in a man’s body. He left before Malcolm was born because he said he was the only one I didn’t take care of anymore.
I know now that if love is a decision, it should be stuck with not out of some sort of cement-and-chains obligation, but because the choice was a good one. A solid one. Love is a decision that should be made for the right reasons and kept for the right reasons.
I slept badly. I was trying not to worry about Mom’s messages, which meant I was worrying a lot. And I was aware, too aware, of Jake’s presence. I had placed the shell under my pillow. I dreamed of a girl in a patchwork dress at a wedding. I dreamed that I was trying to get home on a plane, trying to get to the airport, but that I wasn’t going to make the plane because I was sitting in the audience of a circus, and the show wasn’t over yet. I dreamed that I couldn’t see because I was wearing sunglasses, but when I took them off, I still couldn’t see.
I was the first one awake. I lay there for a long time, the shell in my hand, until I couldn’t stand being the only one awake any longer. I threw my pillow at Sprout.
She opened her eyes. “You’re cruisin’ for a bruisin’,” she said.
Frances Lee made coffee from one of the foil packs and picked at the frosting of the cake. “Olivia Thornton awaits, people. It’s tribal mask day. Get the lead out,” she said.
Jake brushed by me as he came out of the bathroom. “Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning.”
He folded the bed away, and we all packed up. We snitched bits of cake and brushed our teeth and then we were ready. Jake opened the door and Sprout shoved her way outside.
“Oh no,” she said from the porch.
“What?”
“Ah shit,” Jake said.
I walked out to join them. “Goddamn it,” Frances Lee said.
Big Bob looked like an enormous mummy in the back of the truck, wrapped and covered in endless loops of toilet paper.
“Hoodlums,” Jake said.
Sprout took out her cell phone and flipped it open. She aimed, and then snapped a picture.
“Abominable Snowman, with Cheeseburger,” she said.
We stopped for breakfast on the way. The same sort of pancake house in which I had first (not first) met Frances Lee. She and Jake ate one of those breakfasts that have everything—bacon and sausage, pancakes and eggs. Sprout had a strawberry waffle with a snowplowed circle of whipped cream around its edge. I had French toast, decorated with a round glop of whipped butter and an orange slice. After breakfast we called Mom again. It was time for damage control. Sprout and I stood out front, where there was a newspaper stand, a cigarette machine, and a candy dispenser filled with some sort of bumpy red nut item. Sprout pushed the buttons for Camels and Marlboros and Salems.
“Your mom’s not here,” Aunt Annie said. Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou, I thought.
“Can you just give her the message that we’re doing great?” I couldn’t believe my luck. “She called three times yesterday. I was beginning to think she couldn’t let us out of her sight for five minutes.”
“I told her the same thing. She was freaking out about your dad changing into a bathing suit when your dad hates the water. ‘He doesn’t own a bathing suit. I know he doesn’t own a bathing suit.’ She wanted to call the place you were staying, but I told her she was acting like paranoid stalker parent.”
Shit, shit, shit. I watched Sprout, Queen of Liars, over by the candy machine. She stuck her finger in and out, in and out, of the little silver door. “Tell her…” Shit. “We made him buy it. In the motel gift shop.” This sounded lame. You could feel the weird disbelief-hesitation pause that sat between Annie and me, the telltale hover that came post-lie. “For tanning purposes,” I added.
“Okeydokey,” she said. Now she sounded doubtful. “Will do.”
Change of topic, quick. “How’s everyone there?”
“Bizarro. I finally asked your grandma about all the time she’s spending on eBay, and she just stared at the bridge of my nose and said, ‘It’s none of your beeswax.’ Couldn’t even look me in the eye. And I hate when people say ‘beeswax.’ It makes me think of Kendall Greene from the fourth grade with that yellow stuff in his ears.” I could hear her shiver. “And then your mom. She’s just been sitting in the rocker by the window, listening to music. Shakes her head like she’s having some conversation with herself she just can’t believe. Ivar lays there at her feet…He still hasn’t been out.”
“Mom’s freaking needlessly,” I said. I watched Sprout turn the little silver handle of the candy dispenser. She didn’t put a quarter in but cupped her hand underneath the hole, just in case.
“No, this isn’t just you guys and your dad. She seems pleased with herself. I asked her what was up, and she just said, ‘Nothing. I already told you. Nothing.’ That kind of thing drives me crazy. She just sits and smiles and shakes her head.”
“She just sits and does nothing but listen to music and stare off?”
“You’d think she was in love, but we know that can’t be it,” Annie said.
“She probably won the lottery and won’t tell any of us,” I said.
“No kidding,” Annie agreed.
Sprout made a little excited squeal. She turned to show me some disgusting bumpy red nuts in the palm of her hand. The candy people must have done a reasonable thing and were trying to give them away. I could see Frances Lee bend her head down on the steering wheel. She did this every time she started the truck since Jake had poured the Coke in. I think she was praying to the mechanic gods. “Well, can you just tell Mom that everything is fine? She doesn’t need to keep calling.”
“Will do,” Annie said.
“How’re things with Quentin Ferrell?” I asked.
“Quentin Ferrell i
s an asshole,” Aunt Annie said.
Chapter Fourteen
“Upside down,” Jake said.
“God,” I said. I turned the map around, studied it. “It’s a straight shot south.”
“Three hours to Seattle, this I know how to do,” Frances Lee said. She went to school at the University of Washington. “We’ll be at Olivia Thornton’s house by late afternoon. I’ve got to warn you, she didn’t exactly sound thrilled about this. I think the only reason she’s letting us come by is because she wants the mask back.”
“Hey, if she’s a bitch, we’ve got a ton of TP in the back,” Jake said.
“True,” Frances Lee said. “It’s just too bad we never found Jane, age six.”
“I know it,” I said.
“But tomorrow we get to see Brie,” Sprout said. Brie and Abigail Renfrew—the last two women on our list. I didn’t want to think about Abigail Renfrew. It was one thing for Dad to betray Mom with Abigail Renfrew. It was another thing for Sprout and I to do so. Besides, thinking about Abigail Renfrew now—I was sure it would send some sort of psychic informational waves to our mother, and we’d already had one near miss. I swear, Mom had some sort of batlike radar. You couldn’t get anything past her.
I looked in the side mirror at Sprout. She had a little pad of paper and was writing intently, her head down.
“What’re you doing back there?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. She looked pleased with her own secret. Aunt Annie was right—that kind of thing does drive you crazy. When people say “nothing” when they’re obviously doing something, it makes you much more interested in finding out. Same as when a person starts to say something and thinks better of it. If you knew what the “nothing” or “never mind” was, you probably wouldn’t care less, but the not knowing made you care a great deal.
“What?” I asked. “What are you writing? Another story?”
“None of your beeswax,” she said.
I held back from leaping over the seat, grabbing up the paper, and reading it out loud, which is what I wanted to do. It was the sort of desperation-fury that came with a game of keep-away. This was how you could feel when things were held back, things you needed or just wanted.