by Alexis Bass
When it’s all ready, we pass around the food. We talk over the sound of chewing and silverware clanging against plates and Phoebe’s shrieking with her small baby voice. The food is delicious. It’s better because we made it. I wonder if this is what it’s like all the time, being a part of the New Browns, and if I’ll ever get used to it, if I’ll ever forget how different it is from the life I’ve had with George before.
When our plates are nearly empty, we talk about our dreams.
“Paris,” Chelsea says. “I want to stand in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower and stare up at it, straining to see the top, craning my neck, almost falling over backward—being so startled at its size … that’s what I dream about. Seeing this thing that’s so overwhelmingly large and marvelous.”
When she describes it like that, it becomes my dream, too.
“I’ll take you sometime,” Edison says, reaching for her hand, his voice as soft as a pillow. Just like that, he’s hijacked the dream.
“I’d like to go to Paris,” Trisha pipes up.
“Then you’ll come, too!” Edison beams a smile at her.
“And after Paris,” Trisha says, “how about we head farther east? I dream of Dubai—”
“You’re certainly not going without me,” George says, a twinkle in his eye. “And while we’re moving east: Thailand, we must go to Thailand.”
“Ah yes—I dream of those beaches.” Edison lifts his glass of iced tea and clinks it with George’s glass of red wine.
“And then to Australia!” There are stars in Chelsea’s eyes, fireworks in her voice.
“Ah yes, ah!” George is so excited he’s been reduced to sighs. “And for all this travel, I wish for a sabbatical.”
The near rhyme makes us all crack up with easy, what-the-hell laughter, triggered by anything, like a trap waiting to be set off by the wind. Even Phoebe is squealing wildly, trying to keep up. Can I stay here like this, having fun with them, even with Edison’s hand on the back of her chair, even though I can’t stop being mad at George, even as Chelsea lives in some kind of make-believe world where no one was left behind when she got her wish for the perfect dad?
“What do you wish for, Maris?” I feel George’s hand on my shoulder; it tenses the moment the question mark is final, and lingers, nervous and unsure, clutching to keep me in the moment, make sure I know that things are going well and if I pop out of this picture of perfection, the colors will swirl together and everything will turn brown. He’s afraid of my wishes, I think. And he’s right to be.
Edison moves in his chair, making a loud creaking sound, and I stare at him. He really is beautiful.
“I wish for no more rain the rest of our vacation,” I say.
George exhales, Trisha smiles, and Chelsea is nodding in agreement.
“But where do you want to go?” Chelsea asks. “You’re the only one who didn’t name a place.” My eyes are magnets to Edison’s. He didn’t pick a place either. He’s only the wish-granter, a genie, and the New Brown Family is lucky enough to possess the lamp. They think he must have no use for wishes.
“If you could go anywhere…,” Trish encourages.
“To the moon,” I say, thinking of that night on the lot with the half-built house and how the sky was so stunning and vast.
“Make it Mars,” Edison says, and everyone’s silence turns into crisp laughter.
Chelsea’s cheeks turn pink, flushed from being held in a smile for so long. I wish I could look at George and see a hero instead of a disappointment. I wish I’d met Edison’s mother. I want to be the one he feels forever connected to for knowing his past. I even want those too-short designer dresses he buys for her. I want everything Chelsea has.
We get up to put our dishes away, and after starting the dishwasher, Chelsea pulls Edison out on the screened porch. I can hear the faint sounds of laughter, then silence. In the quiet, I know they must be kissing.
It’s different this time, the way I’m feeling. This isn’t just obsession. It’s madness. It’s hopelessness. It’s corroding me. Jealousy is a sickness, but this feels rotting. I excuse myself and walk quickly upstairs, pushing open the window to my bedroom, closing my eyes against the breeze. It makes me miss Trevor and the way we both owed each other nothing because we were bound together by our selfishness. A sadness settles over me knowing I could never go back to that now, that it would never be satisfying again. The same way I can’t go back to telling myself that George wanted to be happy with my mother and me, now that I’ve see how George acts with the New Browns, how easy it is for him to be thoughtful and the kind of father I always dreamed he would be.
I don’t know how much time has passed when they start calling for me. The pie is ready to serve.
The New Browns are divvying out slices, laughing about who gets the biggest piece and how much whipped cream to use. They start to reminisce. They go on and on about something I wasn’t there for, something I won’t, can’t, will never understand. All these precious pieces of their lives that thrive without me. I’m quiet this time when I join them, and I stay that way as we eat dessert.
Edison does catch me alone, like I’d hoped he would, when it’s the two of us in the house, the last ones outside to see the fireworks, his hands full of extra chairs, mine carrying the sodas. I don’t know what to say to him or if there’s anything worth saying. I protected him, and maybe he won’t know; maybe he shouldn’t. Maybe he does, and is that somehow worse, after he’d said I should stop?
“Chelsea told me about the detectives,” he says, his eyes looking out the window, watching the New Browns as they walk to the beach. I feel panic rise in my chest, because maybe he’ll think that I told them the truth; maybe he’ll be mad. But then he says, “Thank you.”
I thought I would be afraid of this, too—of him knowing what I did for him, even when he’d told me not to, even when he’d told me the reason he’d picked Chelsea and the reason he wanted to stop having any more secrets between us. But right now, I feel light with relief, a surge of hope because maybe he knows now that there are things he can trust with me that he can’t trust with anyone else. Suddenly, I don’t care about how big my lie really is, if he knows where Archaletta is or what happened to him.
The fireworks are starting, and Chelsea is waving at us from the sand.
I want him to understand that I am safe, that I can hold all his secrets and that I want to.
“There wasn’t any poker game,” I tell him so he’ll know that there are things I already figured out about him, that he can’t lie to me anyway.
He bows his head and adjusts the chairs in his hands; he opens the door but he doesn’t move to go through it.
“Meet me tonight,” he says, and the door falls closed behind him and he’s walking quickly down the stairs and through the brush.
On the beach, we set up the chairs, but no one sits in them. The New Browns are too elated from the evening, ripe with delight. Even Phoebe insists on kicking her legs as George bounces her up and down.
We spend the next fifteen minutes standing in the rough sand, staring at the colorful explosions in the sky.
Chapter 35
The half-built house is dark when I arrive a little before midnight, but the front door is ajar. When I walk in, I see light coming from around the corner. He has two lanterns set up, one on the floor, one on the counter in the kitchen, where it juts out to form a breakfast bar. A few of those small white use-in-case-of-emergency candles are scattered on the counter, dripping wax onto the granite.
Edison is leaning forward, peeling the dried wax from the counter.
“You’re going to tell me the truth?” I ask. “The reason I lied? The truth about what happened on the island?”
He takes a large breath and stands up straight when I walk over to the opposite side of the counter.
I wait to see if he’ll be honest with me at last.
“They weren’t supposed to know I was there,” he says. “I was there because I was spying on the
m. They weren’t supposed to see me. That’s why my boat was hidden.”
“Who are they?”
“I don’t know.” He continues quickly, knowing that answer wouldn’t be enough. “I mean, I didn’t know who they were that day on the island. There were people making threats, so I asked to meet them. I was only trying to see who they were. But they saw me and…” He pauses to catch his breath. “Luckily, you did, too.”
I have more questions; does he know what happened to Luke Archaletta, does he know he was a criminal; what was he saying to threaten Edison—a protective nature is suddenly conjured in me as I remember how he could barely walk, barely talk. But across the counter, Edison is looking at me like he’s grateful, like he’s about to say something else, something more meaningful than thank you, because now he is finally admitting the danger he was in on the island. He doesn’t say anything, but he moves slowly from around the counter, toward me. My heart starts to race as he gets closer. “You take a lot of risks,” he says. “That day on the island, jumping into the ocean that night. Why is this?”
He’s close enough to touch now, and I don’t remember the last time I wanted someone this intensely, if I ever have. “You’re one to talk.” All I can think about is how badly I want this gap between us to disappear.
“Okay, sure.” He smiles. “But it seems different for you. It’s like you go looking for it.”
Every time he says something that makes it evident he can see through me, I feel all at once vulnerable and exposed, but in a way that doesn’t make me feel ashamed. I want him to see more, to see all of it, all of me. “I’m afraid of regret,” I say.
“That’s all?”
“What do you mean, that’s all?” I hold my breath. He’s so close that when I look up at him, I have to lift my chin slightly to see his eyes.
“But it goes both ways,” he says. “You can regret doing something as much as you can regret doing nothing.”
I meet his eyes and watch as his gaze travels down to my lips.
“Not in my experience,” I say.
He puts his hands on my face and studies me. I grip his sides, the only way to hold myself up, because I know his kiss is coming, and I can already tell this is the kind of kiss you can never be ready for.
It’s not like the first time his lips were against mine, brief and sudden, surprising and sneaky—this kiss has been caged up, screaming at us for days, begging to be let out, and now it floods us. My hands travel to his hair, and his find their way around my waist.
“This makes things complicated,” he says quietly, not letting go of me.
But I’m shaking my head. “Things were already complicated,” I say, really thinking, Things were worse before, when you kept me out. I lean forward and put my mouth against his, and he must be able to feel the urgency in my lips because he kisses me back the same way—like the world is ending, like we’ll be dead tomorrow, like this is all we’ll ever have.
It’s not the right thing to do, kissing him like this when he still belongs to Chelsea. But it feels like the only thing we can do, as though us being together like this is our sole inevitability.
We leave when the candles have burned out. He walks me to the street, giving me one last kiss before I go. I turn to him and say, “Hey, Edison, who threatened you?” There were people making threats, was all he said.
He smiles at me like I haven’t even caught him off guard, but maybe he likes that I tried. “No one.”
My whole body hums as I walk back to the New Browns’ beach house.
That day at the fortune-teller’s room, when I listened from the other side of the bathroom door, I heard her talking to a woman who thought she was dying. “There are red dots on my legs,” the woman said. “It has to mean something.” The fortune-teller didn’t ask to see her legs; she didn’t ask if the woman had been to the doctor—she was supposed to know these things after all. She waited a long time before she responded, but when she finally did, her voice was firm. “Do whatever it takes to feel completely alive,” she said. And that was all the woman needed to know; so that was the end of the session.
Chapter 36
We go to the Duvals’ beach the next day, after Edison comes over bringing the best almond croissants and French roast coffee. There’s not a cloud in sight, and the weather is hotter than it’s been all summer. The water feels like heaven.
I like that when Edison yawns, I’m part of the reason. I like that when he leans back on the dock to let himself dry off, really relaxing, it’s because he can rest assured knowing I’ve covered for him. I like that he’ll casually brush against me as he walks to the food tray. I like that when he looks anxious and glances at me, I know it’s because he’s impatient for the next time the two of us can meet alone.
I like him with me in the shadows and everyone around us in the dark.
Chelsea is completely herself, all happiness and generosity. She is the only thing that ruins this for me. But I try to justify it. You stole George from me, I think, trying to dampen the guilt I feel every time she beams at Edison, every time she puts sunscreen on my back or reminds me that we could have inside jokes if we wanted to, bringing up the day we went parasailing as we stand with the water up to our necks in the ocean.
I swim back to shore and take out the Jet Ski again, zooming away from her as she watches with her hand against the sun. I weave around to the back side of the cove, where I am out of the way of the passing boats but can still see the whole scene happening at North Point Beach and the lighthouse. Sepp rounds the corner and pulls up beside me.
He turns off his Jet Ski so he is floating like I am.
“It’s fucking hot out,” he says, leaning over to splash his legs with water. Katherine Ellis didn’t join us on the beach today, and while Sepp didn’t get completely smashed, there’s something looser about him. He curses. If he’s not interested in something, he ignores it, politeness be damned. He’s more carefree; he’s lighter. He’s more himself.
“I don’t think you really like Kath,” I say.
“Oh no?” He laughs. “I like Kath a lot, actually,” he says, undoing his life vest and letting it fall open. He rolls his shoulders. “She’s one of the good ones.”
I groan a little at this comment, and he chuckles.
“But you’re not you when you’re around her.”
“I know—I’m better.”
“But you’re lying to yourself and to her. You don’t do what you want when she’s around. You don’t let her see you get drunk. You don’t let her see that your humor is sort of dark. You even stand differently, and you definitely talk differently.”
“You mean because I speak French?”
He laughs, and I frown, since it is very clear he is laughing at me.
“Oh, come on,” he says. “You’re projecting your feelings about Edison and Chelsea. This is very textbook, Maris, and you should be ashamed to be so transparent.”
This shocks me, and my mouth flies open, though I guess it shouldn’t since he did warn me that Edison told him everything. I kick water at him, but the splash doesn’t quite reach him.
“Don’t be mad,” he says. “There might be some things too personal for Eddy to share, but I haven’t come across anything yet.”
“So now you’re judging me—that’s great.”
“Me? Never. Glass houses, Maris. Glass houses.” He pushes his hair back from his eyes. “It does seem like it could potentially be a big mess, though.”
“It won’t.” I shake my head, maybe too quickly to really be believable. “Plus, it doesn’t matter. After the summer, I’m going back to Phoenix and he goes back to school, and he’ll keep seeing Chelsea because that’s who he wants to end up with, and everything will go back to normal.”
“Now who’s lying to herself?” He starts his Jet Ski and speeds off, tipping his head back to laugh. “And way too slow!” he shouts, turning to see if I’ve decided to chase after him. Of course I have.
The New Browns
and I return to our side of the cove midafternoon. The Duvals are having dinner downtown with friends, and sometime after they are done, Chelsea, Trisha, and I are to meet Edison and Karen at a boutique to try on dresses for the party in Maine.
The wait stretches on after we eat, too early at six, since the Duvals’ reservations probably aren’t until seven thirty, which is the time we ate dinner with them on their grotto. The TV is on, but the jokes and the laugh track are only background noise, as no one is watching it. Chelsea is constantly checking her phone. Trisha keeps reapplying her lipstick. George sighs whenever he looks at his watch.
“Should we play dominoes while we wait?” I ask. A New Brown pastime. But their hesitation tells me they are more interested in the ritual of waiting, letting their patience stretch and snap.
I go into my room and change into shorts and a tank top and my running shoes.
“Do you have time to go for a run?” Chelsea asks, glancing at her phone again.
It’s almost eight. The Duvals have probably just finished their salads, ordered their second round of drinks. The New Browns are happy to let life revolve around the Duvals, and I get it, how much fun they provide, and the money, what it can buy, what it gives us, and how it’s improved our summer. But I can’t stay inside with them anymore, waiting for Edison to summon us downtown.
“I won’t be gone long,” I say. They let me go without another word.
Chapter 37
I take a different route on my run. This time, after the hill behind the New Brown beach house, past the half-built house, past the Victorian mansion on the corner, I take the road to the left that carries me out of the residential area and toward the downtown strip. This road is lined with tall, overgrown grass and large trees on either side. There is a more direct path from the New Brown beach house to downtown, a road that is nicely paved and landscaped. But according to the map, this direction not only has less traffic, it also has a better view from the top, before the decline toward downtown.