by Barbara Hall
“No, thanks.”
He glanced at his watch and said, “Is it over? I mean, the juice date.”
I thought about it. I probably needed to get home. But I was worried I had not left enough of an impression on him. I hadn’t proven I was more than a spoiled private school girl.
“The juice portion of the date might be over,” I said. “But I want to take you somewhere.”
“Where? Back to the cemetery?”
“No. Much better. But it depends on how game you are,” I said.
“Oh, I’m game. I’m nothing but game.”
“When do you have to be home?”
“Whenever I get there. Mom doesn’t get back till ten tonight. She’s got the late shift.”
“Then I have an idea.”
Because I did. It was a crazy idea, but sometimes the crazier the idea, the better.
That’s what my mom would have told me.
It was time to have a backbone.
Maybe I was weird and superficial and confused, but the least I could do was have some courage. I could be brave. Like her.
• 2 •
We rode the bus down to Ocean Boulevard and took the long stairs down the Palisades bluff and the long bridge across Pacific Coast Highway. The sun was low over the water and the beach was empty.
The swell was big. I could tell that from the parking lot. The waves were at least twice as high as when Jen and I were out there. That scared me for a moment, but it was too late to lose my nerve. Besides, I figured, more room to stand up and ride. Weren’t the big waves supposed to be good?
“The beach,” Mick said. “Very romantic move. Are we getting in the water? Because it looks pretty cold.”
“Watch this.”
I grabbed his hand and led him over to a stand that rented boards and wet suits.
“I’ll take that board there,” I said, pointing. “What is that, an eight-point-oh? That’ll do. And a wet suit.”
The guy took my money and looked at Mick.
“How about you, dude?”
“I’m not actually a dude. I’m very land-based. I’ll be a spectator.”
“Are you sure?” I asked him. “Because I can teach you. I learned in a day.”
“Not for beginners out there today,” said the surfer dude.
“Yeah, I’ll play it safe,” Mick said. “But I want to see you.”
“You know what you’re doing, right?” the dude asked me.
“Yeah. Absolutely.”
I had to change in the public bathroom because I hadn’t been smart enough to bring a bathing suit. Well, smart didn’t come into it. I was being impulsive and I wasn’t used to living that way.
I stared into the mirror and my face was white with fear.
What the hell was I doing?
But the idea of getting into the water and standing on it made my stomach calm down. Mick was going to see the new me, the person I had every intention of being from now on. Not spoiled, not scared, someone who knew how to live, enough to make up for my mother and the red-haired girl down the well. I was going to make it count.
Mick said I looked hot in the wet suit and I just laughed and hoisted the board on my hip and chattered nervously as we walked toward the water.
“My dad says it’s one of the true curiosities of Los Angeles that the community willingly turns the most valuable real estate over to the homeless. He says you’d never find people sleeping on the beach in Martha’s Vineyard. Bag ladies or drug dealers in the Hamptons. That’s not how it goes other places.”
“It’s good,” Mick said. “The rich people are willing to share.”
“My dad says it’s because they are afraid of the sun.”
“Yeah, probably. They’re afraid of most things.” Then he added, “Not you.”
There were only a half dozen surfers out there. The good ones. The shortboarders. The guys who didn’t put on a wet suit until January.
Jen was nowhere in sight.
In fact, there wasn’t a girl in sight.
Except me. Standing there next to Mick, who might have been one of those afraid-of-the-beach people from the way he was responding to his surroundings.
We were in Santa Monica next to the pier, where the surf was usually on the small side, even if there was a swell in. But not today.
It was a shore break, which meant the waves formed and then delivered themselves directly onto the beach. Not like a point break, where the waves form far out in the water at an angle and are often slow and deliberate. A shore break is always harder because you have to paddle directly into the big white water, and the wave closes out faster, giving you less time to stand up. The advantage to the shore break was that the waves were smaller. But not today.
“Whoa,” he said. “Are the waves always this big?”
“No. There’s a swell.”
“You’re really going in?”
“I’ll be fine,” I told him, with no evidence to support it.
He stood there in his jeans and sneakers and his fatigue jacket, smiling.
The sun was starting its slow descent over the ocean. I knew I only had a few minutes to get this thing done.
While I was contemplating that, he stepped closer to me and leaned his head to one side. It looked like he was going to ask me a question but instead he put his lips right next to mine and I wasn’t sure what he was doing and then I realized he was going to kiss me.
I jumped back as if I had been burned.
It wasn’t graceful.
He straightened up and just stared at me. He blushed a little, but otherwise he was waiting for me to explain.
“I can’t.”
That was all I could say.
“Okay” was his response.
“It’s not you, it’s me.”
“Okay. I just felt like doing that. I took a chance. It’s really okay.”
“I like you, Mick.”
“But not like that. I get it.”
“No, like that. Exactly like that. I just…can’t.”
He waited.
I had no idea what to say. Maybe I have a secret. Maybe I’m related to a criminal. Maybe my mother wasn’t who I thought she was and I’ve never done a courageous thing in my life. Yet.
But I knew I couldn’t let him kiss anyone but the person who was on the right path.
So I said, “I have to get in the water. I never kiss before that.”
Which was technically true. It had never been an issue before. Now, suddenly, it was a policy.
“Later, then. Something to look forward to,” he said.
“Right.”
So I attached the leash to my leg and grabbed my board and ran into the waves and away from the only thing on earth that scared me more than kissing him.
Paddling out was a bitch, but I stayed on my board out of pure pride. A couple of times I had to turtle, which I really didn’t know how to do, but I taught myself. For those of you wondering, turtling is when you actually flip over and turn upside down on your board as a wave breaks on you. Why would any sane person do that, you ask? We’re not talking about sane people. We’re talking about surfers. Surfers do it to keep from getting pummeled by the white water and to keep the board from flying out from under them and hitting another surfer. It’s never cool to ditch your board, which is everyone’s first instinct when they see a wall of crashing white water heading toward them. But it’s a serious violation of surfer etiquette and fights have been known to break out. Jen had taught me all of this. I wasn’t turtling out of any respect for my fellow surfers; I was doing it to impress Mick. But there were worse reasons to do things and certainly worse ways to learn.
After I had turtled a couple of times I felt brave. The real kind of courage that I was searching for, the kind that my mother had had and that I wanted to know more about. No, not the same kind. Just the beginning of it.
The waves were bigger than I could possibly explain and coming hard and fast. But I was determined. There was courage to be had out there
in the water and I intended to take some home with me.
I got past the break zone and the water got a little bit flat between sets, but I could see the set forming in the distance.
Waves come in sets, you see. Most people don’t know that, because they don’t have to. Waves come in groups of six or seven. And it varies, the amount of time between sets. Because it was a big day, there wasn’t much downtime between onslaughts.
I didn’t have much room to get my wits about me. I straddled my board and saw Mick standing on the shore, watching. He looked smaller from this distance but just as cute, the way he had one foot on top of the other, the one hand shading his eyes and the other shoved in his pocket, and I imagined he was nervous on my behalf. I was going to show him. By God, when I was done, he was going to see something worth kissing. And my father would see someone who could rival my mother. And I would see it, too, and then I would be on my way.
I felt the wave before I saw it. I took one quick glance over my shoulder and it was on me and I started paddling faster than I ever had before. The wave lifted me up and I was high above the horizon and I was standing up before I knew it. I had this awesome moment of exhilaration and that sense of magic you get when it seems as if you’re walking on water. I felt like I could do anything. I saw the shore moving toward me and I heard the roaring sound of the wave and I was all alone out there and I was the master of my universe. I was invincible. I had to reach for more.
So I started walking on my board. Like turtling, it was something I had never tried before. But I had seen Jen do it and I knew it was an advanced move. I took tiny steps at first and then got braver. I was getting close to the nose and I was thinking of Mick watching me, though I couldn’t look at him, could only stare at the rails on my board, and I heard the sound of my breath pounding and competing with the roar of the wave. My heart was beating so hard I thought it might break through and I wanted to cry from the excitement and the triumph of it all.
And then it happened.
I don’t know how it happened, just that it did.
I probably lost my footing. Or the wave turned or I turned. The nose of the board went down. I got all caught up in my success and forgot to stay in the moment. There are thousands of possibilities, but in hindsight, they don’t matter. What matters is that I fell.
I fell hard. It took forever and it wasn’t pretty. There was some flailing involved. My limbs felt like they didn’t belong to me anymore, as if they might separate and go shooting off in all directions. I saw my board flying away from me and I was airborne and the ocean was waiting to swallow me whole. Even in that moment between the board and the water I was thinking about how it looked to Mick and I knew how it looked. It looked ridiculous. It looked like failure.
The ocean opened its mouth and sucked me in. I turned and tumbled like socks in a dryer and I couldn’t tell up from down. I remembered Jen talking about this and some of that knowledge came back to me. The books said to relax and wait to be delivered. It said not to fight. So I didn’t fight. I just tumbled. My head hit the sand and possibly a rock. I felt dizzy and I thought I might vomit or faint. I came up briefly and then another wave crashed on me and I went down again into the murky darkness and that’s close to the last thing I remember.
The very last thing I remember, though, was everything getting still and I had a sense that it was all over one way or another. I was floating upside down and I could see the water and eventually the sky above me but I couldn’t stand up. I couldn’t because I was tied down to the bottom. I looked at my leg and saw that my leash was caught on a rock. I struggled to take my leash off but my fingers were weak and slippery and then I stopped trying and just stared at the watery sky and waited for the rest of my story.
• 3 •
My mother looked exactly the way I remembered her. But she was clearer to me and I saw some things I had forgotten. That mole on her right temple, for example, and the way her forehead wrinkled when she raised her eyebrows at me. Her eyes were greener than anything I could think of. I would say greener than the ocean, but the ocean isn’t really green except in poems. They were like rare gems, her eyes, the kind you see in jewelry stores under the case where it’s too expensive to even ask. I couldn’t stop staring into them.
She was sitting on the beach the way she used to do when she took me to watch the surfers. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and she was hugging her knees into her chest. Her hair was perfectly still and I remember thinking, there’s always a breeze at the ocean, shouldn’t her hair be blowing?
And if her hair isn’t blowing, does that mean I’m dead?
And if I’m seeing her, that should certainly mean I’m dead.
But I wasn’t afraid of being dead. I was just so happy to see her.
Then I saw myself. I was sitting next to her and I was wearing my wet suit and I wasn’t the least bit wet. My hair was dry and it wasn’t blowing either.
Then I was in my body, sitting next to her, but somehow still watching it from above. I was in both places at once.
She watched me for a moment.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “Look around.”
I looked around. The beach was empty except for us. There was no Mick and there were no surfers in the water or strollers on the sand. No birds, even. But there were waves. They were falling softly on the shore, making very little noise, and I felt free and devoid of pain. I felt calm, too, like the whole big ordeal of being me was over.
And yet I was me. I was more me than I had ever been.
She said, “What was that about, Lynnie?”
“What do you mean?”
She gestured to the ocean.
“I wanted to surf. I wanted to show Mick.” She waited for more and I tucked my head and said, “I wanted to be brave.”
“Being brave isn’t about being willing to die.”
“I wasn’t willing to die.” I put my hands to my face and I could feel my skin but it felt different. “Am I dead?”
“Well, actually, there’s no such thing. But that’s not what we want to spend our time talking about, is it?”
I shook my head.
“I think you have a few questions for me,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Go ahead.”
I wanted to go ahead but I didn’t know how.
She said, “Why don’t I start?”
I nodded.
“You want to know how I hid my secret from you all that time. You want to know why. And you want to know how I ended up so content in my life after everything I had been through.”
“Yes.”
She laughed in that special way that she had. Her laugh sounded like music.
“Well, I could tell you but it wouldn’t mean much. That is, I’m not the person to tell you.”
“Who is?”
“I think you know.”
“Daddy?”
“You have to let him in, Lynnie. You have to let him finish the job. Don’t shut him out.”
“But he’s so hard to talk to.”
“You make it hard.”
“I do? How?”
“By hanging on to me. By making me the perfect one. I wasn’t perfect.”
“You seemed perfect.”
“That’s your memory. You’ve forgotten about all the times I sent you to your room for a time-out. Or about how I forgot to pick you up from school that day? You had to wait an hour in the principal’s office and you didn’t speak to me for a week. Then there was the time I forced you to eat your peas. And the countless times I yelled at you for making a mess. Your father defended you back then, don’t you remember? She’s just a kid, Cat, he said. Kids make a mess.”
I tried hard to remember but I couldn’t.
“I made you brush your hair when you didn’t want to and I put dresses on you for fancy events and I once let you sleep in your bed after you had wet it just because I was too tired to deal with it.”
I sucked in a breath. “You didn
’t do that.”
She laughed. “No, I didn’t. But I wanted to. I did a lot of things because I felt obligated and there were nights and weekends when I resented you because I wanted to go out somewhere and dance until the sun came up. The point is, I was human. And you’ve stopped letting me be that.”
I opened my mouth to argue but nothing came out.
She said, “Meanwhile, your father has committed the sin of staying alive. Which means that he’s continued to be human. And you can’t forgive him for that. You can’t even forgive yourself for the same thing.”
“Yeah, well, I know I’m not perfect. I know I’m not even good.”
She waved a dismissive hand at me. “Don’t let that become your calling card. ‘Not as good as my mother.’ That’s your whole thing now. It’s boring.”
I felt tears welling up and I suspected I wasn’t dead, because surely there weren’t tears after death. There weren’t these feelings of sadness and regret in…I don’t know, heaven, or wherever it is that you go. In this case, the beach in Santa Monica with nobody on it but us.
The tears came and then I was hyperventilating the way a three-year-old does and my words came out in choked sobs.
“Why did I have to find out about all that stuff? And why can’t I let you be the way I remember?”
She said, “Because it’s not the truth, Lynnie. And the truth is everything.”
“Who were you?” I asked, overcoming my sobs. “You had this whole secret life.”
“Not a secret life. A private life. Do you know the difference?”
I shook my head.
“Do you want to know?”
“I think so.”
She looked at the ground and then at the sky as if she were waiting for guidance. I had a terrible feeling that she was going to disappear.
She said, “A secret life is what my father had. He couldn’t exist in the world as he was. So he had to create something that no one knew about. It was a failure of nerve and a failure of confidence. It wasn’t about private thoughts that he kept to himself. He started out with those but they became so powerful to him, he couldn’t resist. He had to live in that power because his reality was so lacking. He couldn’t speak his truth. He lived for the externals. He lived for his image. He only wanted to create an acceptable presence so he could go on indulging in his dark secrets. That’s not the solution. Whatever is darkest in you needs to be dragged out into the light. Not ignored or denied. Acknowledged and announced. Then you can stop suffering. You weren’t born to suffer.”