by CL Walters
“Avoiding the subject or changing it.”
“I think you also possess this talent.” His perusal of me is serious, intentional, but it isn’t like he’s looking for the fear or weaknesses. It’s something else, something like an emptiness that he wants to fill as if we are kindred spirits looking for the same thing.
The levity dissipates like the smoke from the bonfire, a shift in the atmosphere between us, and now just the heat remains. The light of the fire continues to move over his features. Handsome features that they are, strong and chiseled, symmetrical. His eyes are large and framed by strong defined brows; their gaze is intense and serious now.
“You have really nice eyes.” I say. I know that it is a diversion. While I enjoy the jocularity of our shared past instead of lingering in the difficult unknown of our current present, I push. “They’re this really pretty shade of golden brown.” I reach out and touch him, trace his right eyebrow with my thumb, the rest of my fingertips threaded through his silky hair. “Strong.” I trace the outline of his face and then lay my open palm against his cheek. “You know, when I was ten, I had a giant crush on you,” I admit and then remove my hand from his skin. I’m unsettled by the quickening of my insides and my suddenly racing heart.
“Really?” Seth asks.
I nod.
Both Abbies say, what are you doing? And the truth is I can’t answer them. I don’t know. I’m afraid, grasping, and rolling with the instinct that seems to have taken over the driver’s seat. The attraction I feel for Seth is as real as the feeling of his leg against mine, and though I am terrified and mistrusting of myself, I’m needing something tonight to jump start my brokenness. I don’t know what it is, and maybe, just maybe, Seth can help me find it.
He smiles and looks down at the ground. “I did too.”
“Had a crush on you?”
He laughs. “No. On you.”
I think about my instincts and wonder if this is why they are leading me in the direction? It is so simple with Seth. Our shared past, our history, connects us, feels safe and inviting. What would make that wrong?
“Abby,” Hannah calls to me from the distance and I don’t have to comment.
“I better go see what she wants,” I say and get up walking around the fire to her. My steps are tentative and unsure in the shifting sand, just like my relationship with him. And yet, in this uncertainty, I seem to find a confidence in Seth’s interest in me. Instead of focusing on Good or Bad Abby, I let go and fall into the ease.
Hannah puts her arms around me as soon as I get to her and pulls me in to whisper in my ear. “This is Eric. The guy I was telling you about.”
“Oh,” I say and smile with her as she introduces us.
“Dance with us,” she says and moves to the music.
Eric dances near her, and I move, but feel like the third wheel. Missing the connection I was making with Seth, I look back. He’s lost in thought, his gaze on the firelight. Without weighing the decision, without thinking about the possible consequences, without worrying about how it could be perceived, I walk back to him across the sand. It is just me - us - in this moment, filling up what’s missing. Without asking, I smile, take his hand and pull him back to where everyone is dancing. Lost in the crowd, I turn to face him and let go. I don’t want to worry about this night. I don’t want to worry about what I say or don’t say. I don’t want to think about anything else but this.
The heat from the fire is a kindling to the heat between us. It sparks and crackles across my skin. My legs bump Seth’s and the music weaves her magical thread around us. Seth reaches out, and takes hold of my waist. He pulls me even closer and I wrap my arms around his neck. There is a fire burning in me. Our hips move together, our bodies touching. I look up at him, and he’s watching me. I see my feelings mirrored on his face, and I know. The insecurity, usually a constant shadow, has changed. For the moment, we’ve stepped into a different shadow together. One where we can forget the ghosts that haunt us, and just be.
16
ALONG FOR THE RIDE
Hannah is there and dragging me away again, and this time annoyance comes with me. I don’t want to leave Seth, but I follow her.
“I’m super sorry,” she says a little out of breath. “You looked like you were having a good time,” then she adds, “with your ‘just friend.’” She uses the air quotes.
I laugh. The annoyance effervesces like steam. “Sorry. I don’t know what happened.”
Her mouth thins out and her eyes become slits, “Really, Abby?”
“For real. I promise. I guess I wasn’t seeing things clearly.”
“I told you.”
“You did,” I say.
“I needed to talk to you. First: Eric asked to take me home.” She smiles a gigantic smile, squeezes her eyes shut while holding my hands and jumping up and down.
“That’s awesome. You said yes?”
“I did. I hope that’s okay?”
“Of course.”
“Okay. Second, I overheard Marley and Jessica - Sara minions - talking about you. I couldn’t actually hear what they said, but I caught your name and their tone. I tried moving a bit closer and heard something about Sara ‘taking care of what’s hers’ or something stupid like that. They were interrupted by guys, did some flirtatious giggling and decided to go to a party in town that’s ‘more lit.’” Two finger air quotes that time was a new record for Hannah.
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“I’m sure. I thought you should know.”
“You should get back to Eric,” I say.
“You’re okay?”
“Yeah. I promise. Call me tomorrow okay. I want to hear about the ride home.”
Hannah gives me a hug, “Okay, but you sure you don’t want me to ride home with you tonight? I can.” I turn her around and push her gently until she’s walking back to where Eric is standing. She looks back at me and I wave. I don’t want her to worry. This is totally my problem.
In the moment I wonder if the universe is conspiring against me? It’s as if I can’t stray from the Good Abby rules and when I do, exposure becomes a distinct possibility. I walk away from the bonfire into the darkness lured by the call of the surf breaking against the shore. Sara’s friends might have been gossiping, possibly saying nothing. But that gut instinct, the one I’m not so sure is calibrated properly is telling me that it isn’t nothing. I feel it like the sand shifts under my feet and the ocean rolls in from the deep.
I’d messed up somehow and replay the last several weeks in my mind. I’d made a wrong move on this social chessboard, and strangely, it has nothing to do with Gabe. It is because of my relationship with Seth, the one who should be the safe choice. It’s because of Sara jealousy, a dangerous concoction that is completely out of my hands. How unfair is that?
The rules should have worked, Good Abby says.
“What could I have done any differently?” I murmur into the night, as if making the sound will change things.
Nothing, Bad Abby says. We did everything by the rules. Your plan backfired, she throws the accusation at Good Abby.
She was right. I had followed the plan. I had played by every rule in the social safety handbook, crossed every t and dotted every i. It hadn’t mattered. Nothing would. And if that’s the case, shouldn’t I just live the way I want to? Damned be the consequences?
“Abby.” A voice, barely audible in the wind and against the backdrop of the sea, reaches me from the dark. I look back over toward the bonfire, now a bright backdrop, but far enough away that I can’t make out any detail. “Abby!” The voice is clearer now and I know it is Seth. He’s followed me into the dark.
“I’m over here,” I call.
“I can’t see you.”
I see his shadow now. “I see you. Follow my voice.” I sit down in the sand facing the ocean and wait for him. It isn’t a moment when he finally sees me and smiles.
“There you are,” he says.
I hold out my hand
to him. He takes it and sits down next to me in the dark. We sit in companionable silence for a time, our hands in the sand, sometimes brushing up against one another. Despite the violence of the surf and the fears in my heart, Seth’s presence relieves me.
“I think you have a secret,” he says eventually. He bumps my shoulder lightly with his.
I snicker, a strange laugh that isn’t gilt by the joy of earlier in the night. “I don’t think you’re telling me everything either. That’s the thing though, right? We all have our secrets.”
Silence returns for a while. I could tell him, but I don’t. I keep it close, still afraid, still ashamed. I take his hand, though, and hold it, cherishing the warmth from him that seeps into me. Instead of facing the dark past, I think about the happy one and say, “I love the ocean. When I was little, my grandfather - Poppa Charlie - took me out into the waves and taught me how to surf. I remember being terrified of it, that great big ocean with its current and loud crashing nalu. But Poppa told me that there wasn’t anything to fear. There was only faith in the water. Faith that each wave would bring a gift.”
I stop a moment thinking about my Poppa. He would have told me that in that moment I was caught in a rip-current. Stop fighting it, little one, he’d have said. Sometimes you have to swim sideways. I wonder if I am fighting this thing with Seth? Or is it something else?
I look at Seth, who’s staring out at sea pondering his own universe, one that I can’t know. I wonder about his secrets. Would they make me feel differently about him? And I realize they wouldn’t, but I can’t know him and how he’d feel about mine. “Sometimes,” I continue. Seth looks at me. “The waves hurt. They knock us down and drag us under.” I look away. “Poppa taught me to roll with it, to relax and flow with it, allow it to take me where it needed to and I would be okay. The minute I fought a wave, the harder the journey would be, and that if I fought, the nalu might decide it needed to keep me.” I squeeze his hand. “Sometimes the waves allow us to catch them. We ride, the ocean and I, together. Sometimes it’s a partnership and sometimes it’s as the conqueror. It’s always the wave’s choice, because I - we - are just along for the ride.”
“Wisdom,” Seth says. His thumb strokes my hand, a calming repetition.
“My poppa was a wise man.” I lean my head on his shoulder. “I miss him.” It seems like the first time I have ever voiced this aloud. He was everything to me, for years. My babysitter when I was small, my playmate, my mentor, my guide. I think about his connection and understanding to a world I’m trying to find, and wish I could talk to him again. I think about his skin, his smile, the Hawaiian wisdom emanating from his soul as if everything I am, was or ever will be was wrapped up in his world too. My throat stings as I swallow the tears threatening to fall.
The comfortable silence returns. I just roll with it, relax into it and flow with it where ever it takes me. I realize that I have spent so much time fighting against the current, that I have been drowning. It isn’t a wonder that the ocean of the universe has been greedy. I haven’t let go.
“So, what is this? This moment? You and me?” Seth asks. “Are the waves pounding us? Or are we just catching a ride?”
I lift my head from his shoulder and look at him, resting my chin where my temple had been. “That’s a good question.” I smile.
In the dark, it is difficult to make out the details of Seth’s features, but I can feel him looking at me. The sparkle of his eyes in the moonlight and the outline of his face. I wait for him to respond, but he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he leans in and touches my lips with his. It is all that he needs to say, I realize. My chest tightens and then explodes as if it were a supernova creating a new galaxy. He turns toward me wrapping his free hand around the back of my neck. I adjust, letting go of his hand and wrapping my arms around him.
I don’t know where I end, where he begins. I float into the magnificence of the moment, and the kiss. Until I see Gabe’s tentative smile in my mind’s eye, and my conscious thoughts return with confusion and rationality. I end the kiss, dismissing Gabe from my mind and breathe more than say, “We should get back. My curfew.”
“Oh yeah, that.” Seth stands and helps me up taking my hand.
I take it.
He pulls me up from the sand, wraps his arms around me and kisses my forehead, holding me close. We stay that way for a little while, staring up at the stars saying nothing, just floating in the expansive space of the moment. I decide that thinking about Gabe while kissing Seth is just my subconscious guilt for how I’d treated him, and maybe Seth’s earlier comments. Being in Seth’s arms feels good and comfortable. I sense he wants to say something, but he doesn’t and instead says, “Let’s get you home on time.”
He brushes sand from my hair and laughs when we realize how much sand there is. “Is any of it still on the beach?” he jokes.
We take turns brushing the sand we can find, an opportunity to keep touching one another, cracking jokes, and laughing.
Walking up from the bonfire and driving through Cantos to Seth’s isn’t as awkward as I fear. Instead, it is almost as if things are easier. It’s as if the tension of a stormy sea violently pummeling everything around it, the insecurity and the fear, has calmed into the sea the morning after, calm and serene.
But there’s always another storm, Bad Abby reminds me. So don’t get too comfortable.
“I can walk the rest of the way,” Seth says when I drive Brutus into his neighborhood.
“I can take you all the way,” I say.
“That’s okay. Stop. Here.”
The urgency in his voice concerns me. I turn Brutus’s wheel and drive the mustang to a stop on the shoulder. I turn off the car and then turn to look at him from my seat. “You snuck out didn’t you? That’s why you were late.”
He looks away and then back at me. “Yes.”
“He wouldn’t let you out.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Does he still hit you?” It hurts to ask him this, because I don’t want to know the answer. I wipe a few missed grains of sand from my jeans.
Seth sighs. It is a heavy sound, and then leans his head back against the headrest.
He doesn’t have to answer for me to know. “When was the last time?”
He doesn’t answer, but rolls his head to the side to look at me. I see the tears and can tell that he’s trying to hold them in.
“It was after the party. That’s why you didn’t call me.”
He nods, but it’s barely perceptible.
I reach out to him and frame his face with my hands. “Don’t let him steal you, Seth,” I say. “Don’t let him have that power over you.” Kanoa and the drama of last year flashes like a slideshow in my mind. I shake it away and hug Seth instead. I focus on holding him tight and wishing there was something I could say to make his wounded heart heal. I could tell someone, but who? And would they care? Would they listen?
“You better get home,” Seth says. “I don’t want you to miss your curfew and get thrown in the attic where I can’t see you.” He pulls the latch and pushes open the passenger door. Brutus protests with a squeal.
I let go of him and watch him get out. “Seth.”
He leans back into the car. “Yeah?”
“Thanks for tonight. It was exactly what I needed.” This is the fullest my chest has felt in a while.
He smiles and nods. “Me too,” and then he closes the door. I start Brutus and drive home. Poppa’s wisdom echoes in my thoughts, Swim sideways, Tita.
17
THE BONES OF WHO WE ARE
A knock at my bedroom door yanks me from sleep. I hear the tell-tale creak of it opening.
“Ab?” My dad says.
“It’s too early." I pull the pillow over my head.
The bed shifts under his weight as he sits down. “That’s what you get for staying out so late. Up. We got a date with Brutus.”
I roll away from him toward the wall. “I made curfew."
He chuck
les. “Barely.”
“I’m smart. I would have come home.”
“As your father, I have that obligation.”
“Really? Last I checked my dad was at work. Who are you?”
He sighs. “You’re right.”
I take the pillow off of my head and look at him.
“I’m working on making some changes around here and that’s just for me. So? Ready to work on Brutus?”
I groan, once again replacing the pillow on my head.
“Come on. Get up. We’ve only got an hour or so. Mattie has a soccer game this afternoon. He's been pulled up to varsity.”
“You’re going?” I ask, surprised. He hasn't made a game in a while. I sit up and check my father’s forehead. He mutters a profanity at me and swats my hand away. “There you are.” I smile.
He mimics my voice. “Yes. I’m going.”
“I don’t have to go too, do I?” I say it but don’t mean it. Seth’s playing!
“I thought you might want to go out of the kindness of your heart.”
“I’m not kind when it comes to Matt.” I sink back into bed and flop the covers over my head.
“We’re a family. Families support one another." He pats my hip over the covers.
“Yeah. That’s what I always thought." The bitterness in my voice is as loud as a scream.
He stands. “Come on. Get dressed. Outside in the garage in fifteen.”
I groan again.
“I’m trying here, Abby.”
“Fine.”
“You’re down to fourteen minutes.
“Get out so I can get dressed!”
Dad and I tinker on Brutus, the clank of the various tools discordant when they hit the metal of the car. I sit off to the side on a stool watching, while my dad leans into the car under the raised hood. It isn’t like I have much to contribute to this activity but my radiant personality and small hands when needed, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t savor the time with my dad (even if I pretend I don’t).
Sitting out in the garage with him reminds me when he used to go surfing with Poppa and I. It was a regular thing for a while, but then gradually changed, tapering off until he never went. It was then that things shifted for our family. I glance at my dad and realize that he is the sun. My mom is equally important. She is our earth orbiting around him. When he isn’t shining, nothing does. I don’t know if it is healthy or unhealthy. Maybe just that either-or fallacy again. Maybe symbiotic is a better description.