The Leading Edge of Now

by Marci Lyn Curtis

  Shaking my head to clear it, I slip outside to the front porch, where it feels maybe one-fiftieth cooler than it did in the house. The wooden porch slats are warm and familiar under my bare feet as I curl my palms around the banister and lean forward, turning my face to the sky. For what feels like the first time since I set foot in New Harbor, I exhale.

  Dad and I used to come here for long weekends and holidays, and I’ve spent most of my summers in New Harbor, Dad remaining at home during the week to work and then making the fifty-five-mile drive south to Rusty’s for the weekends. Rusty’s neighborhood stretches up the beach, on the land side of a skinny one-lane road that faces the ocean. It’s on a point, actually, where New Harbor proper ends and where undeveloped land takes over, dissolving the asphalt into bumpy dirt roads. The houses here are ancient beach cottages, Rusty’s at the very end of the street, where everything peters out abruptly into seagrass, sand dunes and craggy trees that are whitewashed from their proximity to the ocean.

  Tonight, the sounds are all waves sweeping ashore and breezes flapping at distant wind socks and wind chimes tinkling. Out of habit, I look past the Simons’ house next door, past the long string of lifeguard towers studding the beach, to the dark silhouette of the McAllisters’ house, about a mile away.

  Janna McAllister used to be my best friend here in New Harbor. More often than not, she’d be waiting on the steps of Rusty’s front porch when I arrived — her knees pointing in together and her chin propped on the heel of her palm — ready to haul me off to the beach. We’d lie on the sand here for hours, swapping stories and eyeballing lifeguards and acting like complete idiots. She took a ridiculous amount of pleasure in teasing me about my dislike of swimming in the ocean. “C’mon, Fruit Cup, get in already!” she’d bellow, knee-deep in the waves, looking ridiculous in her wild smile and her bright-yellow throwback swimsuit, her flaming curls waving around her head like she was conducting some sort of antigravity experiment.

  Janna was one of the biggest reasons why I loved New Harbor. I spent so much time at her house that her parents automatically set an extra place for me at the dinner table whenever I was in town. I had my own pillow in Janna’s room, my own shampoo in the bathroom, my favorite granola bars in the pantry.

  And I had Owen.

  Janna grumbled and carried on and generally acted put out when she discovered I’d been crushing on her older brother. “Why does it have to be Owen?” she moaned. “He’s going to break your heart. Or else you’ll break his. And it’ll be our friendship that suffers because of it.” At the time, I thought she was being dramatic. But the thing is, she was right.

  I rest against the railing and close my eyes. I knew that coming here would unearth all sorts of nasty memories. And just standing here, I’m hit with a multilayered emotion that’s heartache and shame and panic, my past suddenly so close I can sense it brushing against the tiny hairs on the back of my neck. Slightly unnerved, I spin around to head back inside, stumbling a little in the entryway and giving just that fraction of a second that Lenny needs to shoot outside. I lunge at him, missing his tail as he dashes across the porch. Paws skidding on the wood, he darts off into the night.

  Crap.

  I consider leaving him out here. Creeping around in the dark after a homicidal cat isn’t my idea of fun. But it was my fault that Lenny escaped, so I feel a sense of duty to retrieve him.

  Okay, fine: I don’t want to wake Rusty to tell him the cat ran away.

  I don’t want to talk to Rusty at all, actually.

  And so, cursing under my breath, I creep barefoot down the porch steps and wince my way across the gravel driveway into the dark, shadowy area between Rusty’s and the Simons’, where cats that shouldn’t be house pets lure seventeen-year-old idiots to their death. It’s silent and eerie and creepy as hell, but I’m committed now, so I keep going, praying that I find the cat quickly and that my jugular remains intact.

  I hear a sound — not a loud sound, just a little crash-thump — and I flinch and jerk to a stop. “Lenny?” I yell-whisper, my nerves completely on edge.

  This was a really bad idea.

  Another thump, followed by a crunching sound.

  I hum a few bars of Bach’s Violin Partita no. 2. I imagine my sunflowers. I wrap a protective hand around my throat. I step forward, tripping on my own fat feet and pitching headlong into somebody.

  “Oomf,” the Somebody says in a low, masculine grunt.

  Now, I’m not sure of the verbal protocol for barreling headlong into someone in the middle of the night while chasing a maniacal cat, but I’m relatively sure that it isn’t “Holy shit! I didn’t know anyone was here!” I jerk backward, causing a motion light on the edge of the neighbor’s house to click on. And there, wearing a University of Florida T-shirt, a pair of earbuds and an expression of absolute shock, is Owen McAllister.

  Four

  There’s a moment when I do not breathe, when my heart rate goes volcanic, when the distance to Rusty’s house seems so wide and so impassable that it will take me hours to scramble back.

  Owen is staring at me, eyebrows crashed together like he’s trying to solve a particularly difficult crossword puzzle. It’s an expression I know well, seeing as how I’ve spent half a lifetime watching him stand in the garage, gazing at his projects as though he were unraveling the greatest mysteries of the universe.

  I want to turn around and run.

  I want to slap him.

  I want to burst into tears.

  What I do, though, is stare at him. He looks the same now, only different. While his dusty-blond hair has been cut short, his eyes are the same — still clear emerald green, big and serious, with lashes as long as palm fronds. He’s probably grown a full two inches since I last saw him, and he’s broader across the chest. On his right forearm is the small diagonal scar he got back in the third grade, when he tried to build a birdhouse for an endangered owl. I always considered that scar one of the things that made Owen Owen. But now it looks misplaced, inappropriate. I have to resist the urge to try to scratch it off. I close my eyes, like maybe I can erase his presence that easily. But he smells so familiar — like sawdust and coffee and soap — that this particular action only makes him more real.

  I open my eyes again.

  Owen plucks the headphones out of his ears. “Grace,” he says slowly, like he’s trying to remember how my name is pronounced.

  Now would be the proper time to speak. But I’m pretty sure that my mouth has been blown apart and then reattached backward and inside out, a couple of miles north of my vocal cords. So I just continue to look at him.

  A few decades pass.

  I want to ask Owen what he’s doing here in the middle of the night, and I want to ask why his hair is so freaking short, and I want to ask why he annihilated me two years ago, and I want to ask question after question after question, but then I open my mouth and all that comes out is “Owen.” Still, that one word sends a storm of images crashing into me. Owen at seven. Owen at ten. Owen at thirteen. Owen at fifteen.

  Owen at sixteen.

  It’s the last one that makes my chest feel like it’s caving in.

  I clear my throat. It sounds like an old, brittle floorboard, creaking under bare feet. “You’re here,” I say, which is quite possibly the stupidest thing I could’ve said to him. Twenty-some-odd months of dreaming about getting even, and now all I can do is state the obvious.

  He opens his mouth slowly, carefully, like I’m a small animal he doesn’t want to spook away, and he says, “Yeah.” Just the one word, but even so, I can hear his almost-accent — like he went to Australia for an extended vacation, staying just long enough for the language to coat his tongue. When I was little, I was forever trying to get within earshot of him. He was an anomaly, after all, not just by the way he spoke, but also by his unruly hair and his quiet demeanor. So naturally, I fell for him.

 
And naturally, it ended in tragedy.

  I can’t seem to find any words. They all took a train to somewhere safe. Finally I raise my chin and stare him down, doing my best to give him a smirk that tells him he didn’t even hurt me the last time I saw him, and I say, “Why are you here, Owen?”

  He twists the toe of his sneaker into the trunk of a palm. “Why am I here?” This is Owen, when he gets nervous. He answers questions with questions. I used to think it was adorable. Now, though, not so much.

  “Why are you here, Owen?” I say, sort of snottily, swooping my arm across the neighborhood like it’s all my property or something.

  He winces. Not his face but his posture, just a tiny change in the line of his shoulders and the arc of his back, something that a normal person wouldn’t even notice. He folds his arms across his chest, only to unfold them and jam his hands in his pockets, only to haul them back out and gesture with his thumb to the house behind him. “I live here.”

  For the first time since I arrived in New Harbor, I look next door, at the unfamiliar yellow Jeep parked crookedly in the driveway, at the large potted plants dotting the front porch. “You moved in with the Simons?”

  Owen shifts his weight. “No. I mean, the Simons moved out? And then, um, we moved in.” He glances over his shoulder at his house, almost like he’s checking to make sure it’s still there, and then he says, “Mrs. Simon is expecting a baby, and I guess they needed more space?”

  You’ve got to be kidding me. Owen and Janna, right here in the same cozy acre of New Harbor. My resolve implodes. “What the hell?” I basically yell, triggering a dog to start barking somewhere in the distance. “You moved here? Right next to my uncle?”

  “We had to foreclose on the house,” Owen explains quickly, his ears tinged red. “We couldn’t afford it. All the medical bills from the accident —” He stops. Inhales. If he thinks he’s going to make me feel sorry for him because life handed him his ass, he’s mistaken. I’ve been holding my own ass for nearly two years, and it has never been heavier than it is at this exact moment. “We were able to rent this one cheap,” he goes on finally, in a high voice, a strange voice, almost a bleat. And then he clears his throat and shifts his weight, glancing at Rusty’s driveway. “Where’s your dad’s car? Did you come by yourself?”

  I blink at him, shocked. He doesn’t know about Dad? Rusty hasn’t bothered to mention Dad’s death to the McAllisters? I don’t know why this comes as a surprise. Rusty is Rusty: a smile on his face and nobody to worry about except himself. Besides, Rusty has never been one to offer personal information, particularly when it’s embarrassing or reflects badly on him. Particularly when he knows he’d have to answer the questions that would likely follow, like Where is Grace living? and Why isn’t she here with you? And beyond that, it isn’t as though Dad was ever close with anyone else in town besides Rusty. Dad wasn’t very social, and other than casual conversation at picnics or gatherings, he didn’t really spend time talking to anyone here besides us. He came here for family, and that was it.

  Still.

  It’s sad that Rusty is the only one here who knew Dad died.

  I turn toward Owen, look him in the eye and square my shoulders. “Yes, I came by myself, because after Labor Day weekend a couple of years ago? That weekend?” He opens his mouth to say something, but I start talking faster and faster, my words like miniature knives, aimed right at him, one after the other. “Well. A few weeks after that, Dad had a heart attack, so I ended up spending a month in the hospital at his bedside, while he barely clung to life, during which Uncle Rusty basically fell off the face of the earth, where he stayed, mind you, even after Dad died, so I ended up in the foster system until Rusty finally decided to man-up and sign the guardianship papers.” I hold my arms out, like I’m on exhibit, feeling vaguely psychotic. “And so here I am.”

  Well. That’s out there now.

  It sounds a lot more pathetic when I say it out loud.

  Owen just stares at me for a moment, like he’s waiting for me to say Kidding! And when I don’t, his expression slowly collapses. He opens his mouth, closes it, and then he opens it again and says, “Your dad died, and Rusty was …?”

  I can feel all the loose ends in my life tangling around my ankles like seaweed, threatening to pull me under. “MIA,” I supply. Something loud is roaring in my ears. I speak over it, my voice rising several octaves as I go on. “Yeah. I mean, you know Uncle Rusty: late to his own funeral.” I laugh, an awkward creation that sounds more like a cough.

  Owen scrubs a hand back and forth over his buzzed-off hair. The silence condenses. “Look, I’m really sorry …” he says finally, his voice trailing off. He takes in a breath, his shoulders sagging. I’m not about to make this easy for him, not after everything, so I don’t speak. I just stare him down as he goes on. “About all of it. Your dad. Your uncle.” He turns to look at me. “Us,” he says, his eyes so green that I can almost trip and plunge right into them, and for a second I do. I feel like time has rewound and it’s the summer before sophomore year, just before everything went sideways.

  But then Owen takes a step in my direction, his hand reaching for me, and everything comes slamming right back. I scramble away from him, and his arm drops to his side. He says, “Grace? I’m not sure where you stand with us, but —”

  “You should know exactly where I stand!” I holler. The cat slinks past me, and I scoop him up in one hasty motion. “Who are you, even?”

  “I’m Owen,” he says, and the pain in which he says it, the defeat in his posture, the sincerity of his tone, they are boulders rolling on top of my chest.

  Jesus. What is wrong with me? I’m feeling sorry for him? After everything he’s done, I’m feeling sorry for him?

  All of a sudden I can’t get back to Rusty’s quickly enough. I take several staggering steps backward, tripping on a root and scrambling to right my balance. Then I stab an index finger at him and say, “Stay away from me.” It comes out loudly, unexpectedly, like it was a ghost trapped in my vocal cords and it’s finally flown to the light.

  I turn and bolt away, focusing solely on the ground underneath my bare feet, my breath in the thick night air, the cat squirming in my arms, my hand on Rusty’s porch railing as I glance to the side to check whether he’s still there. But he’s already gone.

  Five

  “Why didn’t you tell me the McAllisters moved next door?”

  The front door bangs shut behind me so loudly that the picture frames rattle against the walls. Lenny twists in my arms. I deposit him on the floor — just drop him in the entry with a thwump.

  “Huh? Who?” Rusty says, blinking at me, his voice thick from sleep. He gropes around for his hat, which tumbled to the floor when he sat up, and then rubs one of his eyes with his fist.

  I’m pacing, shaking my hands out. My pulse is galloping so fast that I can hardly hear. I know very well that I look unhinged, walking in anxious, barefoot lines back and forth in front of the couch, but I fear that if I stop moving, my entire life will implode. “The McAllisters,” I basically shout at Rusty, rolling my eyes. Like there has ever been more than one McAllister family in my life. “They moved next door and you didn’t bother to tell me?”

  “Right,” Rusty says, yawning. “Right. Well, I was gonna tell you, but I fell asleep.”

  I throw both hands up in the air. “You fell asleep,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady but failing.

  Rusty stretches and plunks his feet on the coffee table, crossing his legs at the ankles. “Why does it matter so much? You and Janna aren’t friends anymore, right?”

  I shrug. That’s one way to put it.

  “And a while back, I heard that you and Owen had called it quits,” he says, putting his hat back on, “that you two haven’t spoken in ages. So I figured it wouldn’t matter to you where the McAllisters moved.”

  I stop walking and fold my arms
over my chest. Rusty looks mildly confused as he waits for me to explain why I reacted so strongly. But I’m not about to tell him why Janna and I aren’t friends anymore, or why I walked away from my relationship with Owen. I pinch my forehead with my thumb and index finger. “Right. It doesn’t matter,” I say, my words coming out screechy. “I just think you should’ve mentioned it, is all.”

  He shrugs. “Fair enough. Sorry for not telling you.”

  Well. I don’t know what to say to that. It’s difficult to argue with someone once they’ve apologized. We’re quiet for a moment, and I stare out the window into the blue-black night. This move to New Harbor — what a complete disaster. How will I even sleep knowing that Owen is next door? And Rusty, he hasn’t even mentioned Dad’s death yet. “Why did you come for me, Rusty?” I say. I don’t think the words before saying them; I just say them.

  Rusty glances up at me, surprised. “I want you here.” But his answer comes too quickly. There’s no way he had time to think about it, no way his reply is anything but a canned response. I’m not looking for canned. I need honesty. Or else, a well-crafted lie. Anything that shows me he cares, at least a little.

  I’m not going to make this easy for him, not when I’ve waited so long. Birthdays and Christmases and Thanksgivings and orchestra performances — all of them with no family to speak of. “It took you nearly two years to figure that out?” I say.

  Rusty looks uncomfortable. “Look, G, after —” He stops. Takes a breath. Starts again. “I wasn’t in a good place for a while. I couldn’t have taken care of you. You deserved more than that,” he says, and for a beat, he looks so broken up about Dad’s death that I almost feel guilty for confronting him. Rusty was so much more than a brother to Dad. The two of them were virtually inseparable, even though they were so different — Dad with his kind, gentle personality, and Rusty with his charisma and contagious smile. Somehow they fitted together perfectly, best friends above anything else. I have no doubt that Dad’s death crushed Rusty.