by Alexis Bass
Some things aren’t worth the trouble. I get it now. Trevor turned out to be one of those things that doesn’t last and shouldn’t.
I guess I should be glad for him, despite the expired fun. He is the reason I’m here and not in Phoenix. Without all this “concern” I’ve generated over the past few years, with his help, the New Browns would probably be here on their own, the way they are accustomed to vacationing. Everything for a reason. That’s what I was told by the only person who ever gave me advice worth listening to, the only person who ever spoke about life and death in a way I could understand.
I met her the last time I was on vacation with George, without my mother. I was twelve. We must not have been more than three hours from Cross Cove, but we might as well have been on another planet. We stayed at one of those extended-stay, pay-by-the-week motels, and not the nice kind that serve breakfast and have a recreation room. We were there for almost a week before my mother came, and when she saw where we were staying, the mold on the carpet, the smoke stains on the walls, the rust in the shower, they had a huge fight. If George was there for work, why didn’t the company pay for a nicer hotel? Why weren’t they paying at all? We moved to a better place down the street just a few hours after she arrived, even though George was cranky about spending the extra money.
I was actually sad to go; I’d liked being there, even if George did leave me alone a fair amount of time. George sucked up to me, since he was gone constantly, giving me handfuls of change for the vending machine at the bottom of the stairs before he left each day. I could watch as much TV as I wanted and eat as much candy as I wanted, and all I had to do was not leave the premises and promise not to go swimming in the questionably colored pool or talk to anyone. I followed all of these rules, except one.
The woman staying next to us had long silver-and-red hair and dark eye makeup and deep wrinkles. She burned incense, and the smell of fire and dying flowers came wafting out of her room whenever she opened the door. She didn’t sleep in her room. She arrived every day midmorning and left a few hours after it got dark. People came to visit her throughout the day. All kinds of people. Some of them left, squeezing her hands and kissing her cheeks, telling her, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Others cried, shook their heads, said, “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it,” and she would be the one to kiss their cheeks, take their hands.
She noticed me one day, sitting on the hot cement, eating Skittles, letting my feet dangle through the railing, staring down at the green, murky pool I wasn’t allowed to swim in.
“What’s your story?” she’d asked me.
No other adult had ever asked me that, an all-encompassing question about my life. No one had ever called it a story, like it was an adventure.
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. Then I thought of many things to say. I told her I was there with my dad, all the way from Phoenix. I told her about the time I won the spelling bee in third grade and that I would be playing soccer next season for a team called the Sun Angels.
She nodded. There was something friendly about her even if she didn’t really smile.
“What’s your story?” I asked her, being polite, but also genuinely curious.
She laughed; it was this raspy sound.
“My story doesn’t matter,” she said. “I tell the stories.”
“What do you mean?”
She was a fortune-teller, she said. She could intuit the future, see the paths people would take in life. They paid her and asked her questions, and she told them about the journey their lives would be.
“How do you know?”
She shrugged. “I know.” She said it like it was a fact, so simple and true it required no explanation.
That was good enough for me. I could hardly sleep thinking about it. The next day, after George left, I waited until I was sure the fortune-teller was alone in her room, and I presented all of the change I had been given for candy to her, asking how much of my future she could tell me.
“It’s better not to know, believe me,” she said. But she was counting the coins, making small piles on the end table.
“But every day you have so many customers.”
“Those people are desperate.”
“But … I want to know, too.” I wondered if I was just like them: desperate. But I also didn’t care and wondered how to convince her that I was desperate enough that she needed to tell me my future.
“What do you want to know?” she said, lighting a long skinny cigarette.
This astounded me, the specificity of what I was supposed to want to know about my own life, which felt like it had barely started.
“What do the others ask?”
“Many things. About job promotions. Cheating spouses. Love. Death. You name it.”
“What do they ask you about death?”
“When they will die, how they will die; when people they are close with will die; when people they hate will die.”
“And what about love?”
“Oh, everyone asks the same thing about love.”
“What?”
She gave me this flat expression, like I should know, even me, and the thing is, I think I did know. “They ask if they’ll fall in love; if there is someone out there who will love them.”
“That’s what I want to know.”
“Are you sure?” Her lips were curving up as close to a smile as she ever got, so I allowed myself to smile, too, as I watched her scoop up the change and put it in the maroon bag next to her bed. I didn’t care if asking about love made me predictable or ordinary—in that moment she was about to tell me about falling in love; she would confirm it was coming for me. Just like the movies, all those stories I’d heard. I was delighted.
I nodded, already feeling my face get hot.
“It’s going to happen to you,” she said. My stomach started to flutter. “You will fall happily and madly in love.”
“With who?”
“Let some things be a surprise. Trust me. You’ll meet who you’re supposed to meet. They’ll take you by surprise, and you will be a surprise to them, too. You’ll do anything for this person. And they will do anything for you. You’ll know, this is it, because it will feel so intense that you’ll wonder how you ever lived before this person. You will do whatever it takes to be with them.”
This sounded so enchanting. A love so great it would make me happy and mad. And I wouldn’t be alone. There would be two of us in the adventure together. I couldn’t wait.
A couple of nights later, my mother arrived, and she and George fought. I went outside to get away from it. The fortune-teller came out of her room and stood beside me.
“Those are your parents yelling? They are very loud. Don’t they know we can all hear them?” I liked that she didn’t dance around topics; she was straight and honest with me. She smelled like stale cigarette smoke and too much liquor, but I didn’t care. I was glad she was there.
“They always fight.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Love is the best and worst thing that ever happens to a person. Sometimes the worst wins. You’ll get to leave them one day at least.”
This made me sad, and I started tearing up. I didn’t want to leave them. I wanted us to all be together; why was it so hard for them to be together?
“One day, that won’t make you cry,” she said. “You’ll be okay with leaving them. You’ll be ready.”
“I guess.”
“It’s true,” she said.
“How do you know when people are going to die?” I asked her, something I wanted to know ever since I’d listened in on a few of her sessions the day before. She told one woman her father’s cancer was going to go away. She told another she needed to get her liver checked before it was too late.
“I just do,” she said.
“You know when I’m going to die?”
She looked down at the pool and didn’t say anything for a while.
“I don’t know when anyone is going to di
e,” she said. “But it’s something we all do.”
This confused me. “You lie to all those people?”
She took her time answering me. “Most people only want to be told what they already know. And for the privilege of my services, people make appointments. I have time to look them up. Some people show so much of themselves on the internet. And I’ve lived in this town a long time; I sometimes have a mutual acquaintance with a client that can tell me what I need to know so I’ll know what I need to say. Arrests are public record. Deaths are always documented. And I have a friend working at the hospital who will send me medical records if I offer the right price. And everyone has a price, never forget that.”
“It sounds sneaky.” This broke my heart because if she lied to those people about dying, maybe she also lied to me about falling in love—happily and madly, the way I’d always dreamed.
“Everyone hears what they want to hear, no matter what I say.” She flicked ash from her cigarette and watched the white flakes drift to the cement. “It’s not all bullshit. People live in two worlds, one where they convince themselves to feel how they think they’re supposed to feel and one where they are honest about their feelings.” She turned to me like she wanted to make sure I was listening. “Every person we come into contact with plays a role in our future, if we let them, and I am no different—just someone else they’ve elected to alter their path. Coincidences are fate made obvious, but no one ever takes the time to notice. Everything for a reason, everything for a reason.”
I heard every word she said; she knew the power she had and she didn’t care. “I don’t think anyone wants you to tell them they’re about to die unless they really are.”
“We are all going to die someday. It could be tomorrow. It could be in ten years. It could be in fifty years.” She studied me and I wondered what she saw, looking at me the careful way she was. “You probably won’t even make it to your eighteenth birthday.”
“But you don’t know for sure,” I said. My chest felt heavy, and I felt so tired all of a sudden. “You can never know.”
She put her hand on my shoulder. “That’s right,” she said. “You should remember that, too. Life is short. And it can be very deceiving. Never forget.”
She stayed next to me leaning against the railing, until my parents made me come inside to pack my things. Even though she could tell I was mad at her, I liked that she didn’t leave me to sit there alone.
When we left that night, her door was shut, and she was probably already gone. I didn’t get to say goodbye. I never got to say thank you.
I think about what she said all the time. So maybe she was a con artist, but as the years go by, more and more of what she said to me makes sense, about the lies she tells, how little they matter in the grand scheme of things. Because we are all going to die— that much is true.
And as I lie in bed, the house finally getting quiet, my room darker than I’m used to with no streetlight right outside my bedroom window and no sound of cars or neighbors slamming their doors, not even crickets, I think how lucky I am to be out of Phoenix for the summer. That getting in trouble with Trevor had really gotten me in over my head. That not being happily and madly in love with him was a blessing and a warning. I came out here knowing that I wasn’t going to let George or the New Browns stop me from turning this into the best summer of my life, and I’m not going to give up now, even when loneliness strikes me so hard that my chest feels hollow and my legs start to itch. Because you never know.
Chapter 4
I spend the next morning lying in bed listening to the New Brown Family move through the house, gathering in the kitchen, chatting about where they want to take the boat today and what strange and lovely dreams they had last night. They’re so at ease. They have a groove, like they’ve spent a million mornings together, like they belong together. Deep down I know: they do.
“Should I wake Maris?” Chelsea asks.
“Better let her sleep,” George replies.
I come down a while later and intrude. Chelsea offers me coffee—You drink coffee, don’t you? Trisha is making eggs—How do you take yours? George is silent because George doesn’t know the answers either.
Phoebe reaches for me from her high chair as I pass by with my coffee. She smiles at me, mouth open, and looks me right in the face, like she understands that there’s no reason to be afraid. She grasps for me with one chubby baby arm, wiggling all her fingers. I tentatively hold my hand out to her, and she grabs my pointer finger and squeezes it with all the force of her tiny hand. She’s stronger than she looks, and she smiles like she knows it. I smile back at her as she makes an indecipherable noise, half giggle, half exclamation. The need to bond with her is alarmingly urgent—I want to pick her up and hug her; I want to feel her grasping hands pinch into my skin. The New Brown Family is smiling, too, but their stares are unwavering. They are watching. They are cautious. It doesn’t matter that Phoebe is my half sister, too; I am still not to be trusted.
“We’re taking the boat out today,” George says.
“You’ll come, won’t you?” Chelsea asks, the hopefulness already slipping from her face as she waits for my answer. She is used to the Maris at her mom and George’s wedding, who left right after they cut the cake to catch the red-eye back to Phoenix, and the Maris who spent Christmas Eve hiding out in the New Brown Family guest room, talking to her boyfriend on the phone with the door locked.
“Of course,” I say with a smile. “Sounds like fun.”
Forty minutes later, I find myself riding out of the cove on the New Brown Family’s summer rental boat named Vienna.
The ocean is beautiful, blue and transparent. It glistens against the sun. It’s inviting even. I like it all the more as we’re soaring above it, bumping over the waves, getting sprayed with their mist. George drives us in line with a herd of other boats also leaving their homes in the bay.
Our destination is a place called Honeycomb Island, a mass of white sand with a forest center. George announces that it’s rife with hiking trails, though by the time we anchor the boat and unload all of our stuff, mostly all Phoebe’s things, and find a spot on the beach and have lunch next to all the other families scattered across the sand, it’s clear none of the New Browns are ambitious enough to go for a hike.
Two hours of sunning myself while Chelsea and George stand in the water tossing a Frisbee, and Trisha and Phoebe splash in the tide and cheer them on, is about all I can take of the sight of George and the new loves of his life. We—his former family—were never this happy. He was never this thrilled to be with us. We weren’t the ones he wanted to be with, and we could feel it deep in our hearts.
“I’m going to go exploring,” I declare, sliding on my flip-flops and slipping my gray sundress on over my swimming suit.
“Okay—” Trisha looks up at me, unable to move from where she’s kneeling in the sand because if she lets go of Phoebe, Phoebe will charge into the ocean. “I guess that’s okay.”
“You want me to go with you?” George calls. He glances at Chelsea. “We could all go.” But Chelsea’s smile is reluctant.
“Come play with us!” Chelsea shouts. “This game isn’t as lame as I thought it’d be.” George replies to this by splashing Chelsea. She shrieks with laughter and Trisha laughs, too, like she thinks this is the funniest thing she’s ever seen. Even Phoebe, who is supposed to at least half be on my side, is clapping.
The New Browns want to stay here, in the same spot, when there is a whole island to explore. They don’t care that we have no surprises coming for us on this beach, that this is it for the afternoon, for the day, maybe for their entire damn summer.
“No, it’s okay,” I say. “I’ll be right back.”
“Be careful!” Tricia says.
“Don’t go too far!” George says instead of “Don’t ruin the summer for us.”
I whirl around to give them one last wave, but another session of the New Brown Family bonding has begun and they’re not e
ven watching me as I move off the sand, into the beach grass, before disappearing into a forest of tall skinny trees with thick branches crisscrossing.
What’s the saying? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And so: If I’m not missed, was I ever really here?
Chapter 5
The farther into the island I get, the larger the rocks are, the thicker the trees are, the broader their trunks; the older trees are lying down, and there is moss on the hard-dirt ground, and soon, above me, there’s a canopy of leaves, a tangle of snaking branches, and my feet are gliding over wet earth. There are a few signs announcing trailheads. I ignore them.
I keep wandering my own unbeaten path until I can’t hear anything, no conversations in the distance, except the faint sound of the ocean barreling into the shore.
There’s a break in the quiet, a twig snapping. Then another. And another. And I know I am not alone anymore.
I step behind a tree, my eyes scanning the area in front of me for signs of movement. I didn’t consider wild animals when I decided to roam off on my own. I also didn’t consider that someone else might be out here, off the path.