Lemon Reef

by Robin Silverman

  *

  As I exited the terminal and started toward the baggage claim, I saw Katherine Dunn among the many anonymous faces awaiting arrivals. She raised her brows and smiled, surprised, it seemed, that I remembered her. I wasn’t. I would recognize Katie forever. And anyway, she looked the same. Like yesterday—the bleached-blond, sun-bronzed, I’ve-been-at-the-beach-all-day look that had worked so well for us once still clung to her (or her to it). Threadbare Levi’s hung off her slim hips. A snug-fitting tank top emphasized her full breasts, slight midriff, and wiry arms. By the time I got to the worn-in flip-flops, I half expected she was wearing a bikini under her clothes and wondered if she still got carded at bars.

  I took a breath, steadied myself, felt confused by how nervous just seeing Katie made me feel. Strange, really—the reaches of these early friendships and what insecurities they can stir. I was no longer an adult, married, considering having a child of my own. I was no longer a commissioner responsible for life-altering decisions. I was twelve, and beautiful, blond Katie Dunn was my hero, my sense of myself rising and falling on the whimsy of her approval. One important difference between the then and the now, however, was that I had learned how not to let such vulnerability show. It was even easier once I remembered how angry I had been at her and why.

  Moving with intentional casualness, I slung my backpack over my shoulder, walked to a few feet away, and lifted my chin in her direction. “Hey.”

  “Hey. How are you?” She smiled slightly. She wasn’t at all surprised to find me there, and I realized in that moment that she had been waiting for me.

  “What are you doing here?”

  She nodded, as if she were asking herself the same question.

  Friends since the third grade, Katie Dunn, Gail Samuels, and I had attended the same elementary, middle, and high schools. We played soccer together and traveled to tournaments every summer with the team. We knew each other’s families, slept over at each other’s houses, and did our homework together over the phone on weeknights. I was Katie’s best friend and she trusted me, counted on me more than she did anyone else. Still, in high school, when Katie found out that Del and I were lovers, she got mad at me over it and made things worse by talking about it with other people. High school hadn’t been easy for either one of us. She was giving guys blow jobs to get rides home from the beach and waking up at the bottom of empty pools without a clue how she’d gotten there. I was expected to show unqualified support and keep her confidences as if I’d sworn in blood. But my being in love with Del was something Katie did not feel the least bit obliged to try to understand. She didn’t take the relationship seriously, and she neither protected me from nor helped me with the judgments of others or my pain around the loss. I had never forgiven her for that.

  “Norma called me. She said you were coming home to go to Del’s funeral.” Katie laughed a little, shrugged sheepishly. “What can I say? She’s worried about you. She didn’t say it directly, but I think she’s hoping Gail and I will look out for you around Del’s family.” Katie’s face fixed curiously as she mumbled, “Not sure who’s gonna look after me and Gail.”

  In the background fresh coffee was brewing. The expanding aroma pushed aside the otherwise sterile smell of recirculated air and synthetic carpet. Magazines and newspapers lining the coffee-stand shelves hurled headlines of Bush’s lead in the primaries as the Republican nominee. On the other side of the dense glass walls, nimbus clouds gathered, and the August Miami air was thick with moisture. The atmosphere was daunting—a huge, invisible, saturated sponge. I began walking to the baggage claim, signs in both English and Spanish pointing the way.

  Katie fell in gracefully beside me. She held her wallet and keys in her hand, and her sunglasses were propped strategically on her head, serving simultaneously as an adornment and an incidental hair band. “You look great. You’ve lost weight?” She was referring to the thirty pounds I’d gained after Del and I broke up. “I don’t think I’ve seen you this thin since tenth grade.”

  “I lost it a long time ago.”

  “Well, we haven’t hung out since high school. I hear about you from Gail, but I should have called you or something.”

  “I haven’t been back much.”

  “No, I know. Norma tells us your visits to Miami are basically layovers on your way to other places.”

  I laughed appreciatively at my mother’s pithiness. I hadn’t thought of it quite that way, but it was true. My body was stiff from the flight, and my backpack felt heavier than usual. As I rotated it to my other shoulder, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the glass wall. My light hair fell in crescents to my shoulders. My face was thinner, my cheeks more hollow. Seeing us side by side, I was surprised to realize at five foot six, I was almost as tall as Katie. She’d always been a lot taller than me. My jeans were bundled loosely at my waist and straight at my ankles, and I was wearing a fitted T-shirt with a long-sleeve button-down open over it. Although I characteristically looked younger than I felt, in that moment, it seemed unusually so. I looked as young, I thought, as Katie did.

  “Seems like you talk to my mother more than I do.”

  “She comes into the deli where we work. And she knows I’m always glad for news about you.” She said this lovingly, and with a tinge of sadness.

  When I heard her regret, I stopped and waited.

  Katie pressed her lips together and stared at the ground, as if thinking about what to say next. “I’ve missed you, Jen Jen.” Both she and Gail called me that sometimes, and hearing her say it reminded me of how close I had been to her once. “I know you’ve been mad at me for a long time. I’m sorry I wasn’t more there for you.” Her blue eyes fixed on me from under long lashes, the earnestness of her apology making it seem as if we’d had the fight yesterday, as if nothing more important had happened in the last fifteen years. “Truth is, I didn’t know how to help you. I didn’t understand how deep it was between you and Del. I didn’t get the problem until it was too late. You always knew how to be there for me. But I didn’t know how to be there for you.”

  Appreciating her now, I felt foolish for my grudge. For some reason, Katie had always been someone I loved for her effort more than for any result. No matter how disappointing she was, I had the sense she was doing her best, and I just forgave her. Except over what happened with Del; her disregard for my feelings about Del, the way she gossiped about us along with everyone else, was a deal breaker. Del had felt betrayed by me; I had felt betrayed by Katie. Del had cut me off; I had cut Katie off. Was this all not just adolescent-girl drama? Could I have expected us at fifteen to have behaved any differently than we did, to have known any better? I stared at her now, having missed her more than I realized, and felt as if I’d been too hard on her.

  “Maybe I wasn’t so easy to help.”

  “Well, that’s true!” We were turning to walk again. “You could read rejection into anything.” And as if citing the definitive authority on the matter, Katie said, “Del was just saying that about you.”

  “Del?” I balked. “Del made rejection her art form.” Then: “What do you mean, Del was just saying that? When did you last see her?”

  “Oh,” she said. Silence. Katie strained to sound nonchalant. “We hung out sometimes.”

  The air left my lungs, my chest caved in, and I felt my most basic assumptions shatter. Synchronously, like a once-practiced dance the moves of which you’re surprised to find you still remember, Katie took hold of my elbow to steady me. My inability to hide my sense of betrayal and anguish compelled Katie to abandon the casual tone and begin explaining.

  “She started waitressing at the deli right after Gail did. We got to know each other again. It was no big deal, Jen, really. We only saw her a little. I swear. It was no big deal.”

  I knew Gail, who was a teller at a bank, had taken a weekend job at the deli to make some extra money to help pay off her new car.

  “Gail didn’t tell me Del worked there,” I said, my chest feeling as if
a demolition ball had just dealt it a first major blow. We arrived at the baggage conveyor belt and stood side by side, waiting for my suitcase to appear.

  She focused her attention on the bags going by. “Nobody wanted to tell you.”

  Second blow. This one made my legs a little wobbly. I was beginning to realize this trip would test my hard-earned steel infrastructure in ways I could never have anticipated. The crushing feeling was accompanied by the thought of Del seeming so far away all these years—gone from our lives. No news of her, no idea where to find her, no sense she would want to be found. Now I was being told she’d been right next door, and I was the only one who didn’t know it.

  “What you’re saying is my two best friends were hanging out with Del and didn’t tell me.”

  I saw the slight twist in Katie’s face, as I said “best friends.” Saying it had surprised me as well. But strangely, I knew it was true. In my current life, I had Madison, and I had many close colleagues, and I had people I hung out with—but friends? Like this? Like Del, Katie, Gail? I was embarrassed to admit it, but no. When Gail had visited me in California a few weeks before, she had said growing up we were like the kids in the Peanuts comic strip, raising ourselves and each other. The adults in our lives had been nothing but whiny EKG lines for voices, coming at us from offstage. It was true. We had been responsible for each other. I was there now, with Katie, on our way to Gail’s, concerned that Del’s daughter needed help, because we still felt responsible for each other.

  She squeezed my elbow reassuringly. “You were doing so well, Jenna. You were with somebody else—finally. You were happy.”

  I knew Katie was trying to be supportive. Still, I felt alone and embarrassed at the idea of people handling me and devastated in realizing yet again, yet again the decision to see Del or not had been made for me. I fought my rage, trying to hang in there, forcing myself to notice how hard Katie was trying, telling myself she and Gail didn’t know Del would die, that I would never have another chance to…To what? There were things I wanted to say to Del, but I didn’t know what they were or why I hadn’t tried to find her before now if what I’d wanted to tell her was so important.

  “We thought if we told you we were back in touch with Del, you’d want to get back in touch with her, too.”

  “So what if I did?” I spotted my bag and grabbed it off the belt, then turned and began walking away without concern for whether Katie was following me. Over my shoulder I said, “It was not your decision to make.”

  “She wasn’t in such good shape, Jenna.” Katie caught up to me, and we walked without speaking for a while. “Del asked us not to tell you.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know why. Maybe she was embarrassed about how things had turned out for her.”

  *

  Heading outdoors to the airport curb was like entering a steam room filled with car-exhaust fumes. Bags disappeared into a slammed trunk, car doors closed, and we were moving forward, but were we really? Katie followed signs for I-95 North—I-95 North, the signifier that for the first twenty years of my life had marked my way home. The tires turned on the car next to us. They seemed to be getting somewhere, but were we? Should I trust this? Was there any traction left to be had on this highway home? It was like a freak attack of claustrophobia, my impulse to bust open the car window and climb out of it, to take some control over the feeling of backward motion or no motion at all. I was desperate for something to happen, some way to counter the static: the static of Miami gray; the static of idling planes and cars; the static of thick windows and recirculated air; the static of time loops, ash-colored corpses, and tires that only appeared to be turning.

  I watched the golf-ball-sized soccer ball hanging in a net from the rearview mirror. I hadn’t seen one since high school when we all had them. It was one of those identity objects like a keychain or a charm for a bracelet, an item one displays to mark a hobby or a favorite sport, or, for Katie, a period in time. A newspaper article about Del lay on the seat next to me, noticeable only because her picture was included. The article itself was short and buried in articles about the Republican primaries, which had begun to heat up in Florida. Del’s hair was full to her shoulders, her eyes were still, with pupils dark and round like the heads of iron nails. What once were subtle laugh lines now were herringboned wrinkles in sprawls around her pronounced eye sockets, cradled by shadowed crescents. She looked at the camera, but her familiar aversion to posing for pictures came through in her expression of capitulation and her typical sarcastic smile.

  The headline: “Local woman dies on Lemon Reef.” I held the paper in my hand and stared at her image. The article about Del was based on Talon’s report to the police. He said that while diving on Lemon Reef, Del suddenly started scrambling to get to the surface. Then she went limp. Del was reportedly too heavy for Talon to pull onto the boat, so he left her body on the swimming ramp extending off the back of the boat and swam to the shore for help. Her body, he said, must have slipped back into the water. She was found seven hours later, a quarter mile southeast of the Sand Dollar Motel on Collins Avenue. Her drifting body apparently had gotten caught on a metal chain attached to debris thirty feet below the surface.

  The Sand Dollar Motel referred to in the article was the same motel that my parents had owned and run throughout my childhood. Del and I spent the summer before tenth grade going there to sunbathe and swim. Lemon Reef was located a hundred yards from the shore of the Sand Dollar, and we dove on it every day that summer.

  I put the paper down and watched the signs overhead, the veinal interstate and everything around it a wash of gray. The radio station Katie was listening to was called Golden Oldies. The song playing on the radio was “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas. I had landed in a circuitry of both familiar and unfamiliar currents, vaguely and aversively recognizable to me. I twisted through them, my vision corrupted by the glare reflecting from the tinted car window. I eyed the flat, dreary landscape and remembered how all I had wanted from the time I was fourteen years old was to leave this place.

  *

  “Where would you go?” Del had asked.

  It was the middle of the night. I was sleeping over, as I often did on weekends. We lay on her bed atop the covers, the rest of the house dark and quiet. The window above us was open, amplifying the sound of a car engine revving and people across the street arguing in Spanish.

  “California,” I said. “San Francisco, probably.”

  “Why?”

  I pulled a pillow over my head to hide.

  She giggled, followed me under. “Why are you embarrassed?” Bringing her face closer to mine, “Tell me,” she said. “I tell you everything.”

  “They do sex-change operations there.”

  Del was surprised. “Why would you want one?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She just waited, resting her head on the pillow, her lifted brows and slight smile conveying a benign, thoughtful interest. I felt her light breathing on my ear, smelled her toothpaste-tinged breath and freshly shampooed hair. Suddenly risking it was easier than not.

  “Then I could marry you.”

  She hesitated, as if not sure she’d heard me correctly. Then she said, “I’m never getting married,” the implications of my confession falling to the wayside.

  I just nodded, eager to have the subject change if she so preferred. A few moments passed during which I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I certainly wasn’t going to repeat myself.

  Then Del got up, walked over to her bedroom door, and locked it. I watched disbelievingly, my heart beating staccato, as Del climbed back onto the bed and straddled my body.

  “I kinda thought you felt that way about me,” she said. “But I wasn’t sure.”

  I lay there looking up at her, my hands in surrender position, my stomach getting whiplash. “Is that weird?”

  “I don’t know.” Her eyes were set firmly on me, her fingers folded in with mine. “I’m a really good kisser. Do you
want to see?”

  It was all I had wanted for months, and at the same time had not for one moment allowed myself to consider a real possibility. I simply couldn’t believe it was happening. It was November of our ninth-grade year. I had just turned fourteen, and I had never been kissed before. My stomach in plummets and halts, I managed to push out of my throat a sound something like uh-huh.

  Del pulled her near-dry hair to one side and pressed her lips against my lips—one soft, dry kiss. Then she waited a moment to check my reaction, seemed pleased by my apparently stunned expression. She kissed me again. This time her tongue skirted mine. I came undone, my hands tightening around hers, my breath quickening, my belly lifting, my panties dampening to soaked. More soft, slow kisses, more of her tongue to mine. Then our lips were tenderly opening and closing, tips to full tongues engaging, disengaging, reengaging. She spread her legs out behind her, pressed her full body against mine, and amped up the intensity.

  We continued this way more and less intently, intermittently exchanging commentary. Advice from her about how much tongue to use—with examples, homework that was due, recent school gossip, angst over an approaching school performance, recent dreams and what they might mean. My head was propped up by a pillow against the headboard; Del was on her side next to me.

  “What’s the furthest you’ve gone with someone?” I asked.

  Del hesitated, glanced upward and to the side as if she were thinking about it. Then she said, “I feel funny talking about what I did with somebody else.”