by Alexis Bass
“You didn’t know who I was and you split yourself open for me.”
“Reckless,” I remind him.
“Brave,” he says. He gives back my hand, and I wish he’d take it again.
“All for nothing, right?”
“Not for nothing.”
“It was only a poker game.” And this was only a boat ride and our kiss at the half-built house was nothing and the fight he had with the Duvals was about his dead mother. He touches his cheek, where the bruise has started to fade and is a shadow around his eye, as the lie settles around us.
“Sometimes I really don’t know how I live with myself,” he says quietly.
There’s a pit in my stomach; I hope he’s not talking about me, the two of us, together alone when we shouldn’t be. I let my eyes fall shut for a second, blinding myself briefly to all the beauty in front of me—the night sky, Edison.
He slides down even farther in his seat, even closer to me. I let my head lean against his shoulder and feel his cheek lightly press against my temple.
And then, because I’m really being brave, I tell him, “I wish things were different.”
“Me, too,” he says. He turns his head so it is no longer leaned against me. He’s quiet. I lift my head off his shoulder, sensing the shift. We should’ve taken back all our secrets, but instead, we’ve given ourselves even more to hide.
I think of what Sepp said to me at the clambake about honesty and faking it and if I believed Edison and Chelsea were truly in love.
“Are you in love with her?” I don’t know if asking him is brave or if it’s only selfish.
He leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees. “Don’t.”
“Why did you bring me out here—along for this?”
“Because I knew you’d like it,” he says, his voice turning dark. “But you didn’t have to come.” The guilt is getting to him, coming out as anger, directed right at me. As he continues, I’m growing furious myself at the way he’s shifting the blame. “You didn’t have to meet me to return my phone; you didn’t have to help me on the island.”
“Excuse me, I thought I was saving you!” I yell, my fury compounding back at him.
“You are!” he says in a sudden outburst.
He rubs his hands over his face and leans back.
He didn’t say, You did. He said, You are.
What I want to tell him is that maybe he’s saving me, too. In the simplest and smallest ways, like pushing me off the dock before I could explode on Chelsea for things that weren’t her fault, for taking me out here, knowing I’d like it, that I’d need it. But maybe he pushed me off the dock to save Chelsea from the awful things I was about to say; maybe he took me out here because he knew I’d say yes. He would never invite Chelsea to do something so risky like this. She would be full of warnings; she would care about being safe. He brought me on a precarious boat ride because he knew I’d like it, that I might even shout, “Faster, faster!” I plunged into the ocean because I was afraid of it. And he came in after me.
“And now,” he begins, shaking his head before he continues. “Now we have to stop, okay?”
He grabs his wet shorts from where they are hanging against the edge of the boat, and even though he slides them on under his blanket, I still avert my eyes.
He stands up and walks to the front of the boat, like he’s going to drive us back as fast we drove out here.
“I know you came to the half-built house the night I found out who you were. I know you waited for me.”
I watch his shoulder tense before he turns around. He looks at his feet, like he is ashamed.
“I don’t expect you to be with me the way you are with her,” I say, remembering what I wanted that night at the half-built house after I’d boldly kissed him. I’d wanted mystery and excitement, but I’d also wanted him to myself and a secret for myself. “After this summer, I go back to Arizona, you go back to England, which is where you really want to be anyway, right?”
When you fully exist in the moment with someone, you don’t have to worry about the next day or even the next hour and definitely not the next year, I’m thinking. But I want him to admit what he feels for me.
“The thing about Chelsea—” He stops for a second, like he knows probably nothing he can say will do justice to the ways he’s betrayed her—how we’ve both betrayed her. “I want to be with her.” He turns back again, leaning forward against the steering wheel. “I don’t have a choice,” he says. He doesn’t look at me when he continues. “Chelsea has met my mother. If I end up with someone else, they won’t ever know that part of my life. And that doesn’t feel like a future I’d be able to live with. I can’t even fathom it.”
When he finally does look at me, I give him a single nod. If I talk, my voice will give out. There’s nothing to say to this. It doesn’t matter if Chelsea is better for him, or if he wants me more, or if I understand something about him that no one has in a long time, or that he understands me. He chose her for a reason. This is something I’ll never be able to give him.
“We should go back,” I say.
“Before the sun comes up,” he agrees. “Before anyone notices we were gone.”
But Sepp is there when we get back to the dock, sitting on the deck of the Duvals’ yacht, under a dim light, wrapped in a coat and blanket, drinking out of a mug, which he salutes to us as we come in.
“It’s fine; you don’t have to worry about him,” Edison tells me. Maybe because Sepp already knows; maybe because Edison has a lie ready to tell him. Maybe because Edison’s secrets live with Sepp and Sepp is good for them.
I sneak back into Chelsea’s and my room, changing into dry clothes and putting my wet clothes in a separate compartment of my overnight bag. I crawl into bed and close my eyes and wish for sleep to come swiftly. But it doesn’t.
I wake up in the morning to a blue sky and a breakfast buffet, everyone smiling like it’s a new fresh day.
It doesn’t matter, I think, if what he has with Chelsea is forced or if he’s hiding a part of himself from her that he lets me see. It’s the same as Sepp and Kath, how he keeps the best parts of himself for her, because she’s worth it. For Edison, I am mostly the person he wishes he’d never met.
As we load our bags into the boat and get ready to head back to our reality at the New Brown beach house, I try to pretend that what I’m feeling, this pit deep inside of me, isn’t heartbreak.
Chapter 32
Chelsea and I spend most of the rest of the afternoon, after we get back from the Smiths’ island, out on our beach shared with other families staying on this side of the cove. It’s scarier on this side. George and Trisha don’t let Phoebe play in the bare sand; they put down a blanket. They don’t carry her into the water with them either, too scared of rogue splashes because this side of the cove is prone to hasty boat activity.
There’s a tiredness about Chelsea, and I can’t decide if it’s a sadness of sorts, maybe left over from overhearing Edison’s argument with the Duvals, or if she simply wishes that after Edison dropped us off, he didn’t go rushing back to the Duval estate. She wears her heart on her sleeve—and her discontentment. The two of us are lying with our heads at opposite ends of a large tube we found in the garage and pumped up with a bike pump, our bodies parallel.
She’s very quiet as she stares up at the blue, blue sky.
“I’m waiting for Edison to tell me he loves me,” she says finally. “He’s never said it.”
Chelsea thinks I am safe. And I wish I were someone she could trust—a sister to share in her distress or at the very least sympathize with it.
“I’m waiting for him to tell me a lot of things, actually.” She crosses her arms.
“Like what?”
“That wasn’t the first time I’ve caught him fighting with Warren and Sepp. About a week after his mother died, I overheard them arguing about Edison leaving for school. I never asked him about it, but at the time, I thought the fight was because he didn’t
want to leave. But now it seems he can’t wait to go back. It almost sounded like he didn’t want to come to Cross Cove this summer at all. But that’s not what he said to me. All year, he told me how great it would be, us together here. And now he apparently hates being here? He told me not to worry and had all these reasons to explain himself. Mostly he said it was in the heat of the moment and he’s missing his mother a lot, so I can’t ask him about it again.”
“You can ask him about whatever you want.”
She is quiet for a while. “I don’t think I’m supposed to ask him. Whatever it is, I don’t think he wants me to know. If he would just tell me he loves me, it would be easier. It would be the only thing that mattered.”
I flip on my side so I’m facing her. It rocks the tube.
“Love doesn’t erase everything. It doesn’t fix everything. It doesn’t make lying okay. It doesn’t make unforgivable things forgivable.”
She stares at me, a look of pity in her eyes. “Yes, it does, Maris.”
“They’re only words,” I say, lying back down.
“But I need him to say it,” she says. “He’s everything I’ve ever wanted. And I’m not talking about the money.”
“I know that, Chels.”
A group of Jet Skiers pass, leaving behind waves, and the water tosses us back and forth. We stay still, without the energy or the capacity to try to steady ourselves, and not caring if we topple over.
We don’t capsize. The waves temper out as quickly as they rushed us.
“I bet he’ll tell you soon.” I believe it. He isn’t going to let her down.
“I hope so,” she says.
There’s a closeness I feel for her. A longing. I want all her dreams to come true. I don’t want her to be disappointed. I don’t want to ever be the one to disappoint her. And I get the feeling she wants all my dreams to come true, too. I can’t help but wonder if it’s possible for us to be close, the way she wants—if maybe we already are. Without even really trying. Just because.
“You know what might make you feel better?”
“What?”
“Ice cream.” A sweet and simple solution, one that Chelsea will love.
“That place downtown?” She sits up on her elbows.
We paddle to shore with our hands, splashing each other as we go, laughing as we struggle to roll the tube up the shore. We bolt up the stairs of the deck, a race, excitement in our sprints. We hear the doorbell in the distance. I am hoping it’s not Edison, but I can tell by the way her eyes light up that despite everything he hasn’t told her, she’s hoping it is.
George is standing at the front door. It’s not Edison on the other side. It’s two men in suits, with badges. And while everyone is surprised that it’s me they’re here to talk to, I am not.
Chapter 33
Luke Archaletta.
He’s a bartender at a dive bar in a city a few hours north of Cross Cove. He’s twenty-eight. He’s someone’s son. And now he’s missing.
Detective Nevada and Detective Diya are sitting with George and me in the living room, sipping tea Trisha brought out with a tray of biscotti. I can tell she is nervous by the way her fingers clench around the tray as she sets it down on the coffee table. Chelsea and Trisha take Phoebe upstairs so they are out of the way, but I know they are listening.
The detectives are very kind, saying, “We’re so sorry to bother you,” acting both like they are only doing their job and also as though they think that questioning me will be meaningful to their investigation. It’s a tactic, I think. I expect the first few questions they ask will be questions they already know the answers to.
They produce a photo of Luke Archaletta. He looks younger, smiling, all clean-cut in a blazer. Except his hair is lighter, much different from the dark mop he was sporting on the island and the last time I saw him in the alleyway. I don’t say anything about the photo; I don’t react. Detective Nevada places another photo of Archaletta in front of me, this one looking much more like the man I knew to be Archaletta, hair dark and scraggly.
They ask if I’ve ever seen this man before. I say yes and listen to the sound of the leather squeaking as George shifts uncomfortably in his chair.
According to the detectives, no one knew what he was doing at Cross Cove. His father didn’t know he’d left town. And Luke Archaletta lived alone. His cell phone was found in his car, parked in its usual spot in front of his apartment, which was above the bar where he worked. The last call he placed was for somewhere called the Dragonfly Inn, located in Cross Cove on Main Street. But the owners of the inn don’t recall ever seeing him.
The detectives don’t know what he was doing in Cross Cove. But they do seem certain that he was here.
“A few witnesses saw him at the annual summer clambake,” Detective Nevada says. “According to our timeline, you were probably one of the last people to see him that we have record of.”
I know they can’t really prove that.
At my silence, Detective Diya takes a notepad out of his shirt pocket and flips through it. “We have an eyewitness who claims he saw you and the missing person talking behind the Big Scoop Ice Cream Parlor.” He stops fumbling with the pages. “Luke Archaletta isn’t his real name, but that’s the name you know, isn’t it?”
“He never told me his name.”
“So you have spoken to him?”
I try to gauge how I should appear right now. Irritated or off put or relieved. Mostly, I am curious how they knew to come here, how they found me when I’ve never vacationed here before. “Someone identified me?”
“Relax,” Detective Diya says. “It’s our job to track down people flagged by eyewitnesses.” They are both quiet then, waiting for me to continue—waiting to see if I’ll change the subject again. I wonder if this made them suspicious.
“He was very drunk when he talked to me,” I say. “He came up to me out of nowhere, and I couldn’t even understand what he was trying to say to me.” A lie, but mixed in with enough of the truth that it won’t be called into question because I’m sure the other eyewitnesses noticed Archaletta swaying as he walked.
“And in the alley, at the clambake, was the only time you’d ever come into contact with the missing person?” Detective Diya taps the photo in front of me. “This man.”
I look down, hearing the sounds of Detective Nevada’s pen scribbling and of George cracking his knuckles.
I think of Edison on the island, so sure he was about to die. I think of that middle-of-the-night swim in the ocean and his speedboat that will never be fast enough. I think about his dead mother and all that she wanted for him. He told me to stop saving him. But he also admitted that I was in fact saving him.
“Yes,” I say.
The next question they ask is completely predictable. “What were you doing in the alleyway behind the ice cream parlor?”
“I was following a cat.” There’s a certain rush that comes with lying. I think a lot of people probably don’t like it—the racing heart, the sweaty palms, the fear of being caught. These are the things that made lying worth it for me. All that buildup and anticipation wondering if you’ll get away with it.
No one questions this even if they think it’s strange. The detectives leave, slipping me their cards, telling me to call them if I think of anything else, and they thank us for our time.
Chelsea and Trisha come down the stairs the second the front door closes, demanding to hear the story from George and me, despite them having heard for themselves through these thin walls.
“I thought you hated cats,” Chelsea says after we’ve rehashed it.
“No, I don’t—I don’t hate them.” Except she’s right. “Why do you think that?”
“At Christmas, you said you didn’t go near them after one scratched you when you were fourteen.”
“You remember that?”
“It was only a few months ago.” Back then, I said very few things to her. I can’t recall anything we talked about, only that I avoided
her. I wonder if George remembers the day I decided I hated cats. He was out of town when the neighbor’s cat scratched me, but he heard about it when he got home. I had an obnoxious blue bandage on, and I made him look at the red lines carved into my skin.
“I felt bad for this cat. He looked hungry.” This time, she believes me.
Chapter 34
Edison comes over for dinner that night. I listen from my room as the New Browns greet him; so much excitement. He reminisces with Chelsea about the Smiths’ island, the parasailing, the exquisite food, while George and Trisha ooh and aah at the descriptions.
It’s dusk when I finally go downstairs, the itch to see Edison getting stronger. I don’t see him. The New Browns are together in the kitchen. The windows are framing a pink sky, and the room is lit up, giving everyone’s skin an otherworldly flush. A family, smiling and laughing in the hue of the sun’s rays.
Edison emerges from the bathroom off the living room and notices me before they do. I feel embarrassed, which I didn’t expect—like he not only knows how I lied to the detectives for him but he also knows why I did it and how I feel about him. He told me to stop saving him. What if he thinks it’s pathetic, the way I can’t help it?
He breaks out a classic Edison smile and announces to the New Browns, “There she is,” and they all look up with bright faces like they are happy to see me. They beckon Edison and me into the kitchen.
George is seasoning and pounding the ground beef, shaping it, grilling it. Chelsea and Trisha are chopping and stirring and saying, “We need more salt.” George is named the official can opener. Edison and I are the taste testers. Trisha wipes the stray hairs out of her face as she leans over a stove that’s on full throttle with boiling and steaming pots. Phoebe laughs in her high chair. Edison moves around the kitchen. “This looks amazing, smells amazing!” His small talk is superficial, but it’s what they all want. He is tasting the mashed potatoes. He is seasoning the green beans. He is full of compliments and jokes. He brings up the party in Maine that the Duvals are taking us to next week, both building it up and talking it down—It’ll be epic, but these parties are way over the top; the guest list is phenomenal, but it’s so crowded—and this gets Trisha and Chelsea on a tangent wondering what they should wear. Edison promises he’ll be able to help, promises they’ll be stunning no matter what—so many promises rolling off his tongue.