The boardwalk is changed in that familiar twilight way: the day people vanished and the night people materializing, stepping out from doorways. It’s only seven, but some of these women must be hookers, in all that mesh. Is it possible that Ocean Vista has gone even further downhill than it had when I was a kid? The promises of night in this town feel attractive in a way they shouldn’t, not to me, not anymore. It’s too easy to imagine myself younger, childless, unencumbered. I need to get out of here. A group of girls around Carrie’s age passes us, licking ice-cream cones and laughing. Carrie looks at them hungrily. “Are we coming back out here tonight?” she asks.
We are not, but I don’t want Carrie to see how urgently I need to leave this place, or she will fight me just to fight me. I hurry us across the boards. “I think we’ll see what Kandy and her kids are up for.”
“She has kids? This fucking sucks.”
“Watch it,” I tell her, and immediately regret this approach. Carrie didn’t curse at all before this year. It’s not the words themselves that I disapprove of, but her tiresome need for emphasis.
We pass a storefront selling Italian sausages and pizza by the slice, with a white pasteboard menu sign. Daniel is transfixed by the grill cook, who throws a shower of onion onto the hot black griddle. From the corner of my eye, I see a bench where I sat with my mother countless times, right at the top of the boardwalk ramp. I can picture her there, knitting, her legs thrust out and crossed at the ankle, her lips in their resting smile. I can feel the press of her calf against my shoulder as I play with a plastic truck on the boards. It hurts impossibly much to feel the warmth of her skin and then recall myself to the present and know that she died, and that I left her long before.
I realize I am standing still.
I turn to Daniel, but he is not where I expect him to be. I thought he was at my elbow, watching the man at the grill. I look up and down the boardwalk. The tall iron street lamps blink on helpfully. Vacationers throng past. I force my eyes into a slower panoramic sweep; maybe I am not being thorough. Mothers bend down to their children. Small black birds land skittering across the boards. I look for the salmon man, but I don’t see him. Daniel is nowhere.
“Carrie?” I say. “Do you see your brother?”
She is texting. I rip the phone out of her hands, and she makes an affronted face. “What the fuck? He’s—Oh.”
We both yell his name a few times, but I can feel it: He is hiding somewhere, he doesn’t want to be found. People follow us with their eyes as they walk past. Although we are evidently having a problem, it doesn’t concern them.
Please not this. I have managed, I have corralled, I have done passably to convey my children from Texas to New York, from one life to the next, despite everything. Not this, not here. I look at the cell phone in my palm and see that I am gripping it white-knuckled. Carrie’s half-composed text says this: on rd w freakshow miss u will—
“Is that what you call your brother?” I snap at her. She stares at me with a rabbitty fear. “Freakshow? Do you think that is helpful? Who the hell is Will?”
“No, Mom, will, like, will call you soon. I was texting Alana.”
I thrust Carrie’s phone in the beach bag. Alana. It will be good for Carrie to find new friends in New York, less princessy. I should send her to wilderness camp or something. Drop her off unwilling and pick her up improved.
“Should we split up?” Carrie offers weakly. “To look for him?”
“No. You stick by me.” We walk down the boardwalk, close to the storefronts, scanning the crowds for Daniel, his lime-green swim trunks, his gray T-shirt, his thick brown curls. Of course I would lose him here; this is where I lose people. My past is leaching into my present, and even in the midst of this panic, I feel a sensation of walking a few steps behind myself.
Carrie is dawdling. What is she doing, doesn’t she care? “Come on,” I snap at her. She stands up, and I see she was tying her shoelace.
“Shouldn’t we call the police?” she asks.
“Maybe. No. Not yet.” Just the thought of having to deal with the police. And how stupid I would feel if, as I suspect, Daniel is crouched behind a bench watching us. We didn’t believe him, and now we are being punished. He will come back when he feels we have received his message. But there was that salmon man with the boat.
I cup my hands over my mouth and yell, “Daniel, we’re sorry!” A few passing faces turn to us, puzzled. Daniels, maybe, but not our Daniel. Carrie slumps at my side, almost as tall as I am, her narrow shoulders round, her chest caved in. “Daniel,” she calls halfheartedly, and it is her voice that gives me a moment of terrific clarity—my daughter calling out for my son who is lost.
My son is lost. I’ve lost my son. When I grant my thoughts this directness, I feel as if I’ve woken up straitjacketed—that helpless, constricted terror.
The sun has ignited the orange chemical glow where the ocean meets the sky and soon there will descend a moonless dark. Sequins on a dress passing by. Little boys who are not mine licking cotton candy off their palms. If anyone can find Daniel here, it should be me. I once knew every pier, every crawl space, every alley. And it is my fault; I am the one who brought us here. Unless this is my mother’s work, and I a dangling marionette she manipulates from some high, dark balcony. Imagine: She has stolen Daniel from me to keep me here, searching, forever. This is my punishment. She wants me to know what it is to lose a child. I swallow this thought and feel ashamed. I’ve been in Ocean Vista for hours only, and already I am trying to blame her for what is wrong with me.
Carrie and I start by retracing our steps back out to the beach, where the tide has continued to rise. She jogs to the far pilings. I watch her slim running form in the twilight, her tangled hair switching back and forth with her gait. She comes back red-faced and shakes her head. We crouch in the beach grass to look into the sinister, bottle-strewn space beneath the boardwalk. The shadows extend indefinitely over mud putrid with dropped rotting things, a dead, spread-winged gull, twisted shapes of old windbreakers and wet cardboard, somebody’s bed. “Daniel!” we shout, and the wet space absorbs the sound so quickly that I start forgetting whether I’ve called out at all.
When we have exhausted the dark spaces, we remount the boardwalk and stand blinking under the street lamps. Where would I go, if I were Daniel? He would know only the options visible from this spot, unless he chose to wander, but that would be unlike him. He is purposeful and decisive. Behind us, the searched beach. Ahead, a strip of storefronts: restaurants, novelty shops, candy shops, bars, pizzerias, arcades. Ocean Vista proper is visible through the alleys and down the big central boardwalk ramp: aluminum-sided buildings looking gray in the fading light, dark trees, parked cars. Over the boardwalk shops, I can see the Ferris wheel and the new spiky spinning rides. The Ocean Spirit is gone, replaced by a metal roller coaster with corkscrew loop-the-loops. I wonder how it went—a death and a lawsuit or a simple collapse. The whole thing tumbling down like Popsicle sticks.
“Let’s check the shops,” I say to Carrie, and we dash madly from one to the next, making little bells ring as we shove open doors, elbowing to the front of order lines to ask, Have you seen a little boy? We agree to each take every other, so I find myself alone in an arcade, angling at little boys of Daniel’s build, rapt little faces lit blue and red by the flashing screens, before I realize that this is my arcade. My ears ring with beeping and gunfire and boys yelling in triumph and defeat. Here is the same old Asteroids machine, vintage now, the original operating instructions worn away by a million greasy hands and replaced by a taped-on laminated card. The lights strobe over me, and they don’t go away when I close my eyes. The noise pounds from inside my skull. My mother says, “Olivia, five more minutes.” Kandy laughs and leans on the machine, sticks her ass out.
I run out into the light and smack into Carrie. We stand, scanning, thinking. Where would I have chosen to hide? I am eigh
t, I am twelve, I am fifteen. I storm the streets with my friends. We know everyone, we know everything. Blanche runs at my heel, my sisters appear and disappear on all the benches, smiling, egging me on. The town opens up to me, the buildings hinging into cross section.
I look north. Beyond the rides is the old town—the naked concrete foundations, the empty littered lots, and, still decaying in peace, the Emerald Hotel. Through the loops and arcs of the metal coaster, the Emerald seems to loom. I see Jake leaning over me, I see Kandy laid out on a chaise, her hair like a sun. Some of the Emerald’s windows are boarded up, and some gape dark. The building calls out sadly, it invites me. I take Carrie’s hand and pull her north toward the end of the boardwalk. I half-recognize that this is a strange decision; I am now making strange decisions.
As we approach the Emerald, I look at my daughter sidelong and feel curious. How unlikely it is that this person came out of my body, how unlikely that I bore a son who is now missing. How did all this time slip past me? Who put me in charge? Here, with the ocean in my ears, it seems more reasonable to think that I am the one who is missing, making my way boldly through the dark town, accepting my first invitation into the rule-breaking world.
4
FRIDAY NIGHT. THE Emerald Hotel is condemned, full of asbestos and rats. Whoever owns the building long ago stopped taping up the cracks in the windows and scrubbing the graffiti off the brick walls. I have never been inside. Everyone said it might collapse at any moment, and I was a practical child. Now, though, I feel invited to transform: I am a real teenager, a devil-may-care trespasser. So let the building collapse.
The Emerald is a relic of our town’s optimistic beginnings, built for a more elegant crowd than ever graced its faded, gilt-stenciled hallways. Ocean Vista was a fishing town until the early twenties, when it caught the eye of a young speculator just back from a summer on the French Riviera. He bought most of the town dirt-cheap, tore down the fisheries, and built luxurious seaside medical clinics and hotels on the European model, as well as the original boardwalk, which rotted through and was replaced long ago. His enthusiasm was just promising to pay off when the country was plunged into the Great Depression, and nobody could afford that kind of luxury. People went instead to Coney Island or Ocean City, where hot dogs and beer were cheap, and rooms could be rented by the hour. Our town benefactor went into enormous debt and disappeared. Most of his buildings stood empty until condemned, and many of the condemned, like the Emerald, still wait in financial limbo for demolition. Around them, the town grew into the thing it is now: not an American Riviera but a tasteless playground for the middle class. Most people who live in Ocean Vista work in the service industries, as nail techs, store clerks, waiters. There is a certain respect between year-rounders that does not extend to the summer people. We live in this ruin, we know the secrets, we hold the keys.
The windows are dark as I make my way through the littered crabgrass field at the rear of the hotel. I picture betrayal: empty rooms, a thick-armed groundskeeper, “gullible” written on the ceiling. I find a stairwell leading down to a basement door that stands slightly ajar. At the bottom of the stairs, wet leaves swim in muck, plastering themselves to my feet inside my sandals. Moving through the dark basement toward a fuzzy area of light, I hear noises above me—a crash and laughter, faint music cut by the slam of a door. I climb stairs, trailing my fingertips across the green-and-gilt diamonds of the wallpaper, mold blooming from the cracks. The chairs on the landings are mildewed and mouse-nested, and the brass of the lamp sconces is mottled green.
I follow the sounds up to the top floor and gather myself for a moment before I push open the double doors marked Honeymoon Suite. Inside, rooms full of kids and music—the Smiths—games of cards going on, one girl down to her bra. Gas lanterns hiss on tables and in corners. The walls glisten with paint, gunked on so thick in some places that plastic soldiers and the front halves of My Little Ponies hold fast, as if they are jumping through. The ratty boys are here, hitting a Hacky Sack back and forth with tennis rackets over a sofa where two short-haired kids of indeterminate gender are making out. This exists? Everyone else has been doing this while I festered in my little house, playing Monopoly with Mom? I pick my way through. “Get off my foot,” says someone on the ground, and snaps a leg up behind my knee so I buckle and go down.
From this closer vantage point, I notice that the floor is entirely tiled over with dirt-blackened circles of chewed gum. When I turn my head, I can see between ankles and chair legs to the corner of the room, where the colors remain undirtied: cinnamon red, ice blue, wintergreen. I snap a photo. Then there is running and laughter, and Pam is lifting me up. She smiles at me, tucks her frizzy curls behind her ears, and leads me over to a couch in the bedroom where Kandy reclines like Marie Antoinette. She is talking to, or at, Jake, who sits on the floor with his hands laced together over his knees. He acknowledges me only with a cool glance. I wonder if he is ashamed to have been outclimbed.
“Told you,” Pam says to Kandy, who sticks out her tongue.
“What?” I scan the room for my sisters. The relief I felt when I developed the pictures has dissipated. The photographs prove something, but what? That others can see them, too? People see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast. All day I have been vacillating between faith that these are my ghostly sisters presenting themselves to me, and terror that I believe this, that I have taken photographs of girls I know are dead.
Kandy rolls her head toward me. “I didn’t think you’d come. But Pam had this, like, deep feeling that you were meant to chill with us.”
“Look, I already did you.” Pam points to a mural that stretches across the wall where a bed once stood, the light shadow of a carved wooden headboard preserved in a black paint outline. The mural is a landscape from a dream, full of halfway logic, buildings rising from lakes that double as the eyes of a huge fish, a volcano erupting, lava spilling down a mountainside toward an impervious hovering town. Parts of the painting are clumsy and other parts exquisite. I look where Pam is pointing, at the edge of the hovering town, and there I am, rendered excellently, a tiny figure standing on top of a tiny white roller coaster, my hair dark blue and flying out wild.
“Like it?” Pam asks. She can’t know how well her welcome fits me. To be included, not only invited but included in this way, in an image. I am bowled over by this gift. Maybe it’s through Pam, but I know it comes from my sisters. The room is warm from bodies and lanterns, and I am in the picture. Kandy widens her eyes at me from the couch. “Do. You. Like. It.”
“It’s amazing,” I say, and Pam rocks back on her heels, pleased. She points herself out, right by the corner, wearing a suit of armor, holding out a gigantic paintbrush like a sword. “And Kandy,” she says, giggling, “is there.” She points toward the ceiling, where a tiny Kandy sits Indian-style in a cloud, draped in gold, with many snakey arms and an elephant’s trunk. “She wanted to be a goddess.”
“Fuck you, Pam,” says Kandy lovingly, with the intonation of “thank you.” She flicks her gaze back to me. “You’re the ninety-first on the wall, baby doll. But most of these kids are gone now.” She swings her leg down to tickle Jake’s side with her toes, red-vinyl polish on her toenails. “Show her Jake.” Jake watches as Pam pulls me across the room to the other side of the mural. Paint Jake is flying, arms out to his sides, over the ocean.
Kandy picks up a beer from the floor and swills it. “See, you can climb, but he can fly.” She smiles at me for a long moment and then scrambles down from the couch, lighting candles on the floor. “We’re going to have a séance,” she says. “For the new girl.” Through the window, I can see the lights of boats far out on the water.
Pam sits down, tugging me down next to her. “So, your mom? Is she a fake? It’s okay if she is. Most of them are.”
“No, she’s not fake,” I say. “But she’s crazy.” The word hangs in the air. I am bragging, intuiting that these kids will be imp
ressed, but once I say it out loud, it feels dirty. I’ve never called her that before.
Kandy groans. “Everybody’s crazy. Crazy how?”
I think of my mother staring into an empty crib. I think of the three crisscrossed ballet-slipper ornaments that hang in our front hall, and my sisters’ faces bobbing above the shifting surface of the ocean. “She’s a pathological liar,” I lie. “And she thinks that time travelers are controlling the government.”
“No. Way,” Kandy says. “That’s pure gold. You better get the address of your next of kin, ’cause when that shit blows, it’s gonna be messy.” She mimes a lobotomy with her index finger. “Join hands,” she says, grabbing for Jake and Pam. “Who has a question?”
Pam giggles. “I don’t think that’s how a séance works.”
The ratty boys are talking in the next room. They were with my sisters. I could ask them questions.
“Whatever,” said Kandy. “Shut up.” The Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” is playing, and some kids are dancing.
Jake stands up, gives his shoulders a little shake as if to get free of something, and wanders off. When he is out of view, Kandy flops back onto the floor and yells, “GOD!” Pam hands me a warm beer that tastes like pumpernickel bread. I drink it fast and take another.
How many of my mother’s rules am I breaking? I settle on about half. The rules have never been enumerated, but I know them very well, since, as the only living child, I have nobody else to mitigate my mother’s scrutiny of my every act. My sisters are perfectly obedient. They do not make mistakes, and they do not change. They are an impossible ideal beside which I appear to flail. I am supposed to be strong and brave and self-sufficient. I am supposed to live unencumbered by the shackles of social conformity. This is freedom. I am not to associate with, befriend, or desire persons of the male gender (this one is deeply implied, if not stated outright). I am not to stay out after ten, because that’s when such persons roam New Jersey, ruining women. I am not to dress provocatively or try to look older than I am. I am not to use substances that could make me a desirable or limber rape subject.
What I Had Before I Had You Page 4