by Ava Dellaira
“No,” Megan interrupted. “Something like—like how he died.”
Angie frowned but gave in. “How did you die?” She looked down at the board as the planchette began to move in circles. Was it Megan’s fingers pushing?
“Oh my god!” Megan screamed. “It’s haunted! It’s an evil spirit trying to break out!”
“He’s not evil!” Angie exclaimed. “You’re cheating!” She ran out of the room and told Megan’s mom to call her mom. She wanted to go home.
Still, that night Angie begged Marilyn for a Ouija board of her own. She begged and begged until she got one for her birthday two months later. She sat alone in her bedroom, her small body bent over the board.
“Dad?” she’d asked in a whisper. “Are you there?”
She waited in silence, but there was nothing.
“Dad? Will you talk to me?”
Thinking he was asleep, maybe, she decided to try the next day. But still, he didn’t come. Finally Angie shoved the board into the back of her closet, and did her best to shove her dad out of her mind.
* * *
But why wouldn’t Mom give me something I could see? Angie asked herself again, now lying in bed and staring down at her parents in the ocean picture. It would have helped. Angie looked like their daughter.
She opened a population clock online, watching the numbers of people on earth grow faster than the second: 7,435,678,912 … 7,435,678,914 … By the time her eyes began to shut, the population had jumped by more than 10,345—just in the single hour she’d been buried under her comforter in the adobe room on Los Alamos Avenue.
* * *
The next morning, Marilyn set a plate of scrambled eggs with buttered toast cut at a diagonal and melon sliced halfway off the rind in front of Angie.
Angie managed a bite before she heard her mom’s voice come out, wavery: “I’m sorry I got sad last night.”
“It’s okay, Mom.”
“I loved your dad, very much. I still do. But sometimes, we let ourselves forget, in order to move forward…”
Angie saw the broken-open look on her face and she knew her mom hadn’t forgotten at all, not really.
“It’s just—hard for me—to go back to that time…” Marilyn turned, staring out the window. “The first day we met…” she began, but Angie could see waves crashing in her mother’s ocean-blue eyes, sending tears to their corners. She stood up, pretending it didn’t matter.
“You can tell me later. I don’t want you to be late.”
* * *
As soon as her mom left for work, Angie went into her drawer and pulled out the manila envelope that had been underneath the photograph. Her heart pounded as she got a butter knife and took it into her room, sliding it carefully along the seal. The glue must have been worn from age, because it popped right open.
She reached in, carefully, and first pulled out a tape with a worn label, starting to peel off: FOR MISS MARI MACK, LOVE, JAMES.
She next pulled out a stack of papers and photos, at the top of which was a sheet torn from a notebook, where the words I love you were written in now-faded pen, in a boyish hand. Beneath it, an old brochure for Columbia University, starting to split at the creases. Her mom had wanted to go to Columbia? Angie had no idea.
Under the brochure was a stack of photos—black-and-white eight-by-tens that looked like they’d been printed in a darkroom. The first was of her dad, standing at the end of a pier. It was taken from far away, his arms stretched upward, his figure small against the ocean, seemingly suspended in midair.
Next an older woman stirring something on a stove, her dad watching from a doorframe. Could she be Angie’s great-grandma?
Her dad, lying on a mattress, tangled up in My Little Pony sheets. He was asleep, or looked it. Soft light streamed through the window, falling around his face, which was open, exposed.
Then, a photo of a boy, maybe eleven or twelve. He looked just like a younger version of her dad, she thought, with chubbier cheeks. Did her dad have a brother? Where was he now? Why hadn’t her mom ever told her about him? The boy sat on the front steps of an apartment building, holding a half-eaten, melting popsicle and grinning at something to the left of the camera. The steps receded behind him in a perfect line, going slowly out of focus. Only his face was sharp. She loved his face.
In the last photo, her dad was lying on a couch. His chest was bare and his legs, which looked skinny in the picture, tumbled out of basketball shorts, capped by sneakers that hung over the edge of the armrest. The same boy—now she was sure it was his brother—tugged on his foot, trying to pull off the shoe. They were both looking at the camera, as if surprised by it.
Though Marilyn didn’t appear in a single photograph, it felt to Angie as if she were looking at her, backward, through a lens. These photos were her mom’s way of seeing the world; Angie fell in love with the version of her hidden behind the camera.
If it weren’t for her, Angie wondered, might her mom have recovered from losing her dad? She might have gone to Columbia University. Angie wondered if her mom would have become a photographer, with her pictures hanging in galleries in LA and New York City. Or a photographer for magazines. One who travels around the world, capturing moments, feeling alive. If she hadn’t tied herself to me, Angie thought, maybe she would have become who she was meant to be.
Clouds gather in the wide-open sky ahead, casting shadows on the land. When the first chords of James Vincent McMorrow singing “Cavalier” come on, Angie looks over at Sam, his skin glowing in the light of the midday sun. She wants to reach out and touch him. She wants to reach through time—to pull the boy she knew to her, to be the girl she was with him.
“Is this the CD I gave you?” she finally says aloud.
“Yeah.”
For a moment it seems as if the conversation will end there, but Angie pushes ahead. “Why’d you put it on?”
“I don’t know. Want me to shut it off?”
“No.”
So the song plays through their silence—I remember my first love … A freight train passes alongside the highway, soft, dusty shades of blue, red, and brown swaying over the landscape. She feels unhinged.
“I know this is weird, but we have another eight hours to LA and then, well, more than a week in which you’re planning to let me stay at your cousin’s. So I—I feel like we have to talk to each other, eventually.”
Sam doesn’t take his eyes from the road, but finally he speaks in a voice that bites: “I’m sitting in a car with the only girl I’ve ever been in love with, a year after she decided she didn’t love me back. I’m sorry I don’t know what to say. A long time ago I promised you I’d be there for you, no matter what. I’m someone who keeps my promises, for better or worse, so here we are. But if there’s gonna be any talking, that’s on you.”
He’s right. Angie knows he is. She wants the words—any words—that could break the silence that’s now heavier than the distant, dark clouds, but they flee from her, leaving only shortness of breath, an awareness of her shortcomings.
“I’m sorry. I’m fucked up, Sam.”
“Everyone’s ‘fucked up,’ Angie. That doesn’t mean anything.”
The road continues to roll away behind them, to stretch out ahead, uncertain. On the horizon, streaks of rain evaporate in the desert air before they can reach the ground. Angie doesn’t want to think of the last night, a year ago, that she spent at Sam’s apartment. But she can’t help it.
* * *
The evening Sam returned from LA, a week after his sixteenth birthday, Angie went to meet him at his dad’s apartment. Mr. Stone was out on a date, so Sam and Angie had the house to themselves. Sam’s skin had tanned, his brown hair streaked with sun. He brought Angie shells collected from the beach. She held them to her nose and smelled them, wanting to imagine the ocean where her parents were in the picture.
“What does it look like?” she asked Sam.
“Endless,” he said. “But it’s not so much the way it looks a
s the way it feels. You can get high off it.”
Angie smiled, trying to imagine it.
He pulled her to him, both of them tumbling onto his bed. “I missed you,” he said.
“I missed you too.”
“Come here.”
“I’m here!”
He squeezed her tighter. “No, closer!”
He kissed her neck, her mouth, smiling between kisses. Angie and Sam had never had sex; he’d pester her about it and she’d throw pillows at him, telling him it was off-limits, no way, not yet. Instead they would do everything else they could think to do, perpetually amazed by the discovery of their own bodies and each other’s.
But tonight, as she felt Sam’s breath on her neck, his skinny chest pressed against hers, it wasn’t enough. She needed something big enough to make her forget there was anything outside of this room with its vintage Rolling Stones poster, its milk crate of records, its Virgin of Guadalupe throw tacked to the wall, its never-made bed. She needed the world to be as beautiful as it was in her mom’s photographs.
Sam’s that beautiful, she thought, looking at him naked on his comforter that smelled like dusk, beside the lava lamp his dad had given him for his twelfth birthday. She stared into his specked green eyes, glinting in the dark, and said, “Let’s do it. I’m ready.”
“You’re sure?” Sam asked.
Angie laughed. “Hurry before I change my mind.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Sam grinned back. He pulled a single condom—handed out in health class—from inside his dresser drawer. She knew where it would be; he’d often joked with her that he was saving it for just this occasion, reminding her that whenever she was ready, so was he.
There was the fumble of getting it on, the uncertain mechanics. What might have been awkward made them laugh. They knew each other’s bodies so well by now, had been naked together countless times.
Still.
Sex was different.
After it was over, Angie felt wide open—like her borders had been taken down, and anything could get in.
“I love you,” Sam whispered. He spooned her from behind, his long legs wrapping around hers, his breath warm on her back. And she felt it too—I love you—spreading open in her body like a web of cracks through her heart, like a bird’s wings, like something newborn. She wondered if this was how Sam’s parents once felt, before they got divorced, if this was how her mom used to feel with her dad.
Suddenly Angie wanted to get out. Out of his house and back to a room where she could close the door, where she could be alone, just a drop in the ocean.
Angie turned to face him, but she couldn’t—she couldn’t say it out loud. She made herself smile, trying to make a joke of it. “How many people, of the seven billion in the world, do you think have ever said that to each other?”
“Probably all of them,” Sam replied. “It’s human.”
“Yeah.” She turned to the window. The light from the streetlamp spilled in around the edges of the curtains. “How many do you think had happy endings?”
Sam paused a moment. “Endings aren’t happy.” He propped himself up on his elbow. “Even if you fell in love and got married and had kids who grew up into good kids, and in your old age you still made love and finished each other’s sentences and went to Europe together and drank red wine looking out at the Eiffel Tower, one of you, most likely, is gonna die first. And the other is gonna be left heartbroken. Loss is a fact of life. You can’t avoid it.”
“Yeah, but it’s not the same,” she said. “It’s not the same as losing someone when you’re—just starting out. Before you got to live your life.”
“But then maybe you recover. Maybe there’s someone else.”
“There’s not,” she said quickly, hotly, without thinking. “Not for my mom.”
Sam inched his body away from hers. “Oh.”
Suddenly there were hot tears in her eyes. She rested her head on the pillow, facing away, willing herself not to cry.
She felt Sam’s stillness beside her. “But don’t you think,” she heard him say eventually, his voice gentle, “that if your dad were here, I mean, if he could talk to you, don’t you think he’d tell you that love’s worth it, for however long it lasts? That he’d want you to let yourself feel that?”
“I have no idea what he’d want,” she said. “I don’t know him.”
Sam was quiet.
“I’m sorry. I should go.” The words felt like a mouthful of stones.
“Let me walk you.” He sat up, looking for his shirt.
“No, I’ll be fine.”
“Okay,” he said, and lay back down. The kaleidoscope of his eyes had stopped turning, and in stillness, the need in them was piercing.
She got dressed in the dark, the silence in the room heavy as water, pulling her under.
Sam held out his sweatshirt, offering it to her. “It’s cold out.”
She took it, though something about the gesture felt heartbreakingly final. It smelled like him. He rolled over, pulling the covers tightly around him, and he seemed like a little boy then. She wanted to tuck him in, to stay with him, to stroke his head and make him laugh, but instead she closed his bedroom door quietly behind her, and let herself out.
As soon as she stepped into the night, the sob that had been building in her chest came pouring out. The stars that are other suns with invisible planets, light-years away, looked down at her indifferently. She ran the whole way down Sam’s block and onto the next and the next, pulling his sweatshirt against her body. She told herself, I’m one in more than seven billion—other people have felt worse pain, are feeling it now. Get it together, she told herself. Stop it, stop crying. But she couldn’t. How many of the seven billion alive today had never known their fathers? She imagined her ghost dad, his footsteps trailing behind hers, and she wondered if Sam was right, if he’d tell her it’s better to love and lose—if he could honestly say her mom was better off for having loved and lost him, for having had her, than she would have been without either of them. She wondered if he’d be the type to tell her to tighten up and shake it off, like she tells herself, or if he’d be the type to hug her and start to cry, like her mom would, or if he’d be the type to make a joke. She hoped he’d be the type to make a joke, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t know what he’d tell her, because her ghost dad had no voice. He only had a face. And a few shaded lines of personality: likes for Chinese food and the ocean—who doesn’t like those things? An interest in history and the body of a runner. (At least she knew he’d be able to keep up with her, sprinting through the neighborhood.)
When she turned onto her block, she paused, made herself take deep breaths. She didn’t want her mom to see how upset she was when she walked in.
“Baby! Is that you?” Marilyn called from the other room when she heard the door.
“Yeah, one sec, I have to pee!” Angie went into the bathroom and ran the tap, put eye drops in her red eyes, smoothed her bun.
She found Marilyn on the couch with a little bowl of popcorn, watching Grey’s Anatomy. Angie gave her mom a hug and sank down beside her.
“How was your night?” Marilyn asked.
“Good,” Angie lied as she rested her head against her mom’s shoulder, like a little girl. She was suddenly so tired.
She didn’t move, didn’t meet her mom’s eyes, when she asked, moments later, “Did my dad have any brothers or sisters?”
She’d vowed not to ask any more questions, but she had to know if the boy in the photo was alive. Angie couldn’t see Marilyn’s face, couldn’t see if tears were starting to run down her cheeks. She didn’t want to know. But it took her mom a long moment to reply.
“Yes, a younger brother. Justin. He was really special…”
Finally, as if sensing Angie’s question, Marilyn said softly, “He was in the car with your dad that night.”
Another sixty-three miles without a word between Angie and Sam, and then in the middle of Christine and the Queens singing “S
aint Claude” on the birthday CD, Sam makes a sudden exit off the highway.
“I’m hungry. Let’s get some food.”
They drive by a Dairy Queen and a Denny’s before he pulls up to Joe and Aggie’s Cafe, a pink-painted building decorated with an old Coke logo, a portrait of a man in a sombrero, and a large map of Route 66.
Inside, a single waitress presides over the empty restaurant decked out in Southwestern memorabilia. She waves her hand to indicate “sit wherever,” and saunters over to their booth in the corner. Sam orders a carne asada burrito (Angie knew he would, knows it’s his favorite). Angie gets tacos.
And then there’s nowhere else to look but at each other. Angie feels for her photo in its envelope inside her purse. After a moment, she pulls it out and hands it to Sam. It seems the only thing to do, the only truth she can offer to break the silence between them.
“I found it last year, on the night of your birthday dinner.”
Sam stares at the photo. “You have your mom’s widow’s peak, and her chin. Your dad’s mouth, and his cheekbones.”
Angie unconsciously raises her hand to her face.
“They look happy,” Sam adds. The matter-of-fact longing in his voice tells Angie he understands: the shadow of what her parents once were, of what’s been lost, stretches ahead of her as if it were her own shadow.
“They do,” she says.
“They’re at Venice Beach. I recognize it. My cousin always takes me there.”
Though Angie had envisioned all the other people on the beach with her parents that day, she also imagined it to be somehow secret—almost as if it were in another dimension.
“Can we go?” she asks quietly. “When we get to LA?”
“Yeah,” Sam replies. “Sure.” And the waitress arrives with their food. Angie hadn’t realized until just this moment that she’s starving.
Sam and Angie’s official breakup was uneventful. After the night she lost her virginity she’d avoided him for days, wishing she could find a way to go back to the time when they were easy with each other, when he made her feel safe.