by Wendy Wunder
Lily had outlined the empty check boxes with a red Sharpie. With the same Sharpie, she had written, underlined and in caps, CAMPBELL, DO THESE!!!
The unchecked items included:
* Skinny-dip. (She lived on a lake, thought Cam. You would think she could have made this one happen.)
* Go surfing.
* Eat surf & turf. (She must have been free-associating.)
* See a volcano erupting.
* Swim with dolphins.
* Visit the Taj Mahal.
The final red box, left conspicuously and heartbreakingly blank, was Find true love.
“Shit,” Cam said, as her heart bounced off her diaphragm and did a jackknife dive into her stomach. “Oh, Lily.” Cam sighed, and she sucked in a deep breath to hold back her tears.
Asher took his carpentry pencil from behind his ear, reached over Cam’s shoulder, and checked that one off immediately.
“Asher,” Cam said.
“What? It’s true,” he said.
“I know. But . . .” She felt like she was stealing this one from Lily, and she felt for a second that she didn’t deserve it.
“She’s happy for you, Cam.”
“I know.”
Cam grabbed the pencil and checked off the volcano because she’d been to Hawaii a couple of times for hula seminars. She checked off the surf & turf because eating the lobster was close enough. She’d seen the It’s a Small World version of the Taj Mahal at Disney, and that would have to suffice. She checked it off.
“The rest we can do in one day,” Asher said.
“We can?”
“We will.”
Cam stood on the shore of the beach on the far side of the lighthouse, where she wrestled with a black heap of neoprene.
She could not figure out her wet suit. It was getting even colder in Maine as the summer stretched into August, so thankfully, Asher had built a little fire on the beach. It crackled and hissed a little and fought to stay alive in the sea breeze.
“Put it on like panty hose,” Asher called from the shore, where he had dragged her enormous foam training board. “Or just don’t wear it. Then you can check off the skinny-dipping and kill two birds.”
“I’m not surfing naked, Asher.”
“Rats,” he said.
When she finally zipped up the suit, Asher made her lie down on the board in the sand and practice snapping up to her feet a couple of times. Finally they got into the water, paddled out a bit and sat straddling their boards, rocking side by side.
“This is the part where sharks mistake us for sea turtles.”
“Asher! You know I hate sharks. Dammit!” The sea looked a dark and menacing gray all of a sudden.
“Just joking. We don’t have sharks in Maine.”
“You don’t?”
“No. Wait. What’s that?!” he pointed to something close to Cam’s leg.
“Asher! Seriously! Stop!” Cam’s eyes filled with tears for just a moment. She wasn’t feeling well, she was emotional about completing this list for Lily, and she really didn’t like sharks.
“Sorry, Cam. Really. I didn’t know you’d be so afraid. Come here,” he said, and he hugged her right there in the water. Their boards knocked into each other as they bobbed atop the ocean waves, trying not to tip over.
“Okay, lie down on your board. I’ll push you into a wave at the right time, and then you just have to stand up.”
“‘Just stand up,’ huh? I think if it were that easy there’d be more people surfing right now.” Cam scanned the stretch of sand, sea grass, and rocks in front of her. They were the only people for miles around. The town off to her left seemed small and abandoned, like one of those miniature ceramic towns people put around their Christmas trees.
“You can do it,” he said. “Allyoop.”
Cam lay down on her board, and Asher held the back of it to steady it for her. He steered her into an oncoming wave right before it was about to curl over and break. Cam pressed herself from her hands to her feet in one smooth motion like she’d seen on TV, and then . . . she did it. She was standing on water. Master of the universe. She could feel the ocean rolling and rumbling beneath her feet. It was thrilling! Who wouldn’t want to feel this?
She made it all the way to shore. A little beginner’s luck surfing miracle. Asher pumped his arms up and down in celebration as he bobbed on his board. He found a wave and stood up on his own board, cutting back and forth inside it as perfectly as Cam expected he would. He asked her to go back out and try again, but as much as she’d enjoyed riding the wave, she was exhausted. She still had a fever masked only by Advil. Just getting into that wet suit had tired her out.
“You go,” she said. “I can watch for a while.”
On the beach she peeled herself out of her wet suit, bundled up in her fleece-lined hoodie and her sister’s pink boots, and sat near the fire. She took out the notebook Izanagi had given her and unfolded Lily’s list. She checked off Go surfing and then paged through the book. At some point during her stay in Promise, she had started recording the revelatory notions that her time here had seemed to accommodate.
* Thoughts are energy, energy is matter, and matter doesn’t disappear.
* Pay attention to coincidence.
* You can choose your identity.
And a recent one: Only the present moment matters.
She sat with the present moment, watching Asher surf with the joy and concentration of a child. Surfing brought about conditions where you had no choice but to live in the present moment. You had to pay attention. Maybe that’s why people got so spiritual about it. Cam was glad Lily had it on her list.
THIRTY-FIVE
AT HOME THEY TOOK HOT SHOWERS. CAM POPPED SOME MORE ADVIL, and they rested before embarking on Asher’s plan for the rest of the evening. He said he knew of a special cove in the bay, perfect for “night swimming,” which was his euphemism for skinny-dipping.
“Oh, we should totally play that song,” said Cam.
“Of course,” said Asher. He would take her there in the boat after the sun went down.
The rest of the family was playing bocce on the lawn: Perry and Izanagi versus Nana and Alicia. Cam sat on the picnic table to watch for a while. She was cheering for the old-lady team. She didn’t need to, though, because those two were ringers, and they had the situation under control. Asher joined her.
Cam looked over to the beach. The familiar purple and orange stripes behind the lighthouse seemed to hang there forever before they would let darkness fall.
“Can’t we go now?” she asked after Asher got back from judging a close call on the bocce court. She was anxious to finish the list.
“No, it has to be dark,” he said.
“I don’t think anyone will see me.”
“That’s not why it has to be dark.”
“Then why?”
“Patience, Campbell.”
The boat’s deep-throated engine rumbled through the black dark of the bay. As they got closer to their destination, Asher put on R.E.M., and the wake behind the boat started to glow and sparkle as if someone had put a spotlight underneath the water. He anchored the boat near the moonlit sandbar.
It had to be dark, it turned out, because he had taken her to a bioluminescent cove, where the water glowed magically in fluorescent, neon-colored sparks. Cam had heard of this before. The glowing was caused by ancient single-cell organisms that were neither plant nor animal. They were the beginnings of life. The inhabitants of the original primordial soup. The only place where electricity and water could coexist. It was science and it was magic and it was absolutely unbelievable.
When Cam looked down, she could see trails of glitter through the water. Tiny blue fish darted back and forth through the dinoflagellates, the magical glowing algae.
“Ladies first, madame,” Asher said. “Hop in.”
Cam skinny-dipped the wimpy way. First she eased into the water with her bathing suit on. The water was warm. She slid around in it, wi
ggling off her suit and throwing it back up to Asher in the boat. He caught it and stripped down before doing a naked cannonball. The splash lit up the sky like liquid fireworks.
It was shallow enough for Asher to stand, so he held Cam and kissed her as she wrapped her legs around him. The glitterlike pixie dust swirled around them when they moved. It was like swimming inside a star. She used her finger to paint a stripe of glow-in-the-dark water down his nose. He painted her face and her neck and her chest. They kissed and then swam to the sandbar where they made slippery, cosmic, half-here-and-half-in-some-world-beyond love.
“That wasn’t on the list,” said Cam.
“I was improvising.”
“Good work.” Cam was sprawled on the beach like a mermaid.
“I want to be with you forever,” Asher said as he looked down at her. Her hair, now wavy and long, spun around her head like silky seaweed in the sand.
“This is forever.” She stretched her arms up over her head and yawned contentedly.
“Don’t get all metaphysical on me, Ass Whisperer.” Asher smiled with the gorgeous dimple side of his mouth.
“No. This moment.” Cam looped her hands around the back of his neck. “The present moment can be chopped into infinitely smaller present moments. This moment is forever. And it is all that matters.”
They both heard a swoosh, which was eerie because they were alone in the dark in the middle of the ocean.
“Look!” he said, and they sat up on the beach.
Two lavender blue dolphins leapt from the sea simultaneously, creating an arc of sparkling gold water in the air behind them.
“They come here all the time,” Asher said. “It’s like a playground for them.”
“Aren’t they colorblind?”
“They must be able to see the light, I guess. Is this close enough to swimming with them, or do you want me to go get one for you?”
“I don’t think you’re going to have to,” said Cam. The dolphins jumped again, a little closer to the sandbar and the boat. They were curious about Cam and Asher and wanted to play.
Cam stood and waded in up to her waist, still naked, like Brooke Shields in The Blue Lagoon. She watched a fin come closer to her. “Asher!” she said shakily. “You need to stand next to me. This is a little too sharklike.”
“They’re definitely not sharks, Cam.”
Asher stood next to her with his arm around her waist. Cam stuck her hand out, and the dolphin slid up against it like an enormous purring cat at feeding time. Its skin was slippery to the touch.
“Grab onto his fin,” Asher said. “He’ll give you a ride.”
She held on to either side of the fin, and the dolphin, all muscle, all power, took off.
Cam shrieked. “I hope you’re watching this, Lily,” she said, and she let the dolphin pull her about ten yards before letting go. She didn’t want to be dragged into the oblivion of the deep sea.
As she swam back to Asher, she hoped for a sign, some validation that Lily’s life was made complete. She had gotten used to everlasting sunsets, nighttime rainbows and flamingos flying through the snow. Some small part of her had changed its mind about the probability of miracles. She had almost come to expect them.
She waited for something, a light in the distance, a tidal wave, something grand and definitive. But there would be no sky-splitting miracles tonight. She thought she felt the soft tickling wisp of a butterfly kiss on her cheek and then a chilling breeze, and she took this to mean that Lily had officially moved on.
Asher’s face grew sterner as he drove closer to the dock. Cam tried to tickle him. “I see your lips curling,” she said, trying to get him to smile. His mood confused her. He slammed things around as he prepared to dock the boat, and finally she saw it. She looked toward shore, at the big red-and-white SMITTY’S LOBSTER POUND sign, and she saw a thin blonde sitting on top of a stack of lobster traps with her legs crossed, swinging her front leg back and forth, waiting for the boat to return.
“Shit,” Asher said.
It was “Marlene,” according to the personalized license plate on her Mustang. She was the woman, too old for her mother to have used the Land’s End catalog as a baby-naming book, who was with Asher in his Jeep that night.
Asher didn’t look at Cam as he deboated with his head down and his hands in his pockets like a guilty little boy about to get scolded. He walked toward Marlene, and Cam’s hands went numb. Finally, he turned back to Cam and said, “I’m sorry. Just give me one second, ’kay?”
Cam’s skin burned in humiliation, in sadness, in the recognition that there was no righteous place in reality for their love.
She climbed into Cumulus and turned on the heat, trying to melt the chill in her bones. Five minutes later, Marlene was still talking animatedly from the driver’s seat of the Mustang while Asher sat silently with his head down. This was going to be a while.
Cam pulled out of the driveway of the marina and willed herself to blend into the mist. Invisible, invincible, and alone.
THIRTY-SIX
CAM WOKE UP WITH AN EVEN WORSE FEVER. HER THROAT HURT, HER right side ached, and her stomach felt like it was filled with cement. She knew she should probably get to the hospital, but she also knew that if she went in, this time, she would never come out.
She was barely able to get down the stairs and into the kitchen, where Perry sat at the island reading a book.
“I thought you were with Asher,” Perry said as Cam opened the fridge and looked around inside for something that wouldn’t make her throw up.
“No.”
“Why aren’t you with Asher?”
“I don’t need to be with him 24-7, Perry.”
“Are you guys breaking up?”
“God! Perry. No, okay. I’m just having a glass of orange juice, which I can do very well on my own without Asher.”
Just then Asher came into the kitchen, grabbed Cam from behind, and dipped her. “No, you can’t,” he said. “You need me to pour you some orange juice.”
“Actually, I don’t,” she said, completely deadpan.
“Brrrr. That’s cold, Cam Chowda,” Asher said, looking seriously into her face. He still had her in a dip.
“I told you I didn’t like the Cam Chowda thing,” she mumbled, and she wriggled free.
Asher righted himself. “I am in the dog house, no? Le château de bow-wow.”
“No. You just have to know that I don’t need you in the way you love to be needed.” Cam opened a cabinet and poured herself a bowl of cereal that she had no intention of eating.
Perry took her book into the living room.
“You seemed to need me yesterday.”
“No. I’m not the kind of person who needs people,” she said, reaching in the fridge for some milk.
“Campbell,” Asher said after taking a deep breath, “I have a past with her, all right? But she was just a temporary fling. A placeholder for the real thing. You are the real thing.” He stood, taking hold of her hand and stroking her palm with the tip of his rough index finger.
Cam pulled her hand away. “That’s nice. I’m glad I’m the real thing. Isn’t that an ad for Coke? ”
Asher moved toward her again, but she pushed him away.
“Just be honest with yourself, okay, Asher? Just admit that there’s a strong chance that you’re going to waste away in this stupid town getting the life sucked out of you by the likes of that woman, who will take whatever you give her and keep asking for more unless you grow some balls and get the courage to create your own life.”
“Cam.”
“You won’t, though, will you? You will never leave your precious big-fish-in-little-pond status. You’re a coward. You could be somebody. You could have a future, and you’re too afraid to try. What a waste,” Cam said as she threw the milk back into the fridge and slammed the door. Her hands were shaking, and she cried, hot, angry, feverish tears.
Asher took a step away from her, like she might take a swing at him. “I like
it here, Campbell. I have everything I need. Why would I want to be anywhere else?”
“Because most people want things, Asher,” she said to the fridge door. “They want something, and they go after it. It’s not okay to wait for your life to happen to you.”
“I thought you said I should reside in the present moment.”
“That was me. I should reside in the present moment. But you should plan your future because you effing have one.”
“You have one, too. Have you sent those forms back to Harvard?”
Cam turned and looked at him. “We’re not talking about me, Asher, but of course I did. Come September I leave here, and I never look back. How could you think this was more than a summer fling?”
“I don’t know, maybe because you told me you loved me. Or maybe you didn’t. You said it in Samoan, so I have no idea what you said.”
“I’m sure I’m not the first girl who’s told you that.”
“At least the other ones meant it.”
She leaned down onto the counter with her head down and listened as he walked away and slammed the front door behind him. She knew she had to push him away, but she’d never felt heavier. The force of gravity pulled so strongly on her body, she thought she might get sucked through the floor.
Cam had cried herself to sleep and was woken up by the sound of the wind whistling through the windows of the widow’s walk. For the first time since they’d moved to Promise two months ago, clouds gathered in the sky. Gray clouds that seemed to be moving at warp speed, like in one of those nature documentaries where they dramatically speed up the weather. One big raindrop finally splatted against her east-facing window, and it was like the keystone drop that, once loosened, let all the other ones fall behind it. The rain began to pelt the windows like shrapnel.