by Sarah Ockler
“Breeze! Breeze! Breeze!” Frankie shouts, pumping her fist up and down. She told me about their favorite restaurant tradition on our way to the airport this morning.
After we leave the main highway, Red crawls and putters through Moonlight Boulevard, Pier 7, according to the sign welcoming us to the main strip. Jammed with tourists, hot dogs, and neon bathing suits, the pier is an assault on every one of the five senses — possibly the sixth as well.
It isn’t the town itself, but the people. Us. Summer seems to arrive with us, as though the entire place has been asleep since last September, awakening only as taxis and rental cars line up to deposit us along the beach — families with toddlers, college kids on break, retirees seeking to warm themselves under the California sun, and our own motley crew. Together we break upon the pier like a tidal wave as she rubs her winter-sleepy eyes, stretches, and turns on the coffee for us.
After finding a parking space on our fifth tour down the strip, we put our name in for a table at Breeze, which has a twenty-minute wait, and wander to the edge of the pier to watch the boats in the Pacific. The smell of coconut oil wafts up from the sun worshippers down below, but the sound of the waves camouflages most of their laughter and music.
“Don’t worry, Anna.” Red shakes his head at the undulating tangle of people below. “The beach near the house doesn’t get nearly as crowded as this. The rental community has a private lease, so only the folks using the houses can be on the beach.”
“Yeah, the old folks,” Frankie whispers.
“So what do you think?” Red asks me. “Pretty amazing, huh?”
“More than I imagined,” I say.
“Present location aside, I like to pretend that we’re mostly cut off from the rest of the world here. It’s pretty quiet, other than the surfers. And the tourists. And the vendors. And all the screaming kids.” Uncle Red sighs. “Remember when this place was still kind of a secret, Jayne?”
“That was a lifetime ago.” Jayne stares out over the water as Red puts his arm around her and kisses her head. It makes her smile, just a little bit. I turn away, feeling like an intruder.
“Let’s go see if our table is ready,” Frankie says. “Anna, they have the best piña coladas here. Wait till you try them.”
“Nonalcoholic, of course,” Jayne says, pulling away from Red. Frankie smiles. “Virgins. Of course.”
After lunch, including two of the best piña coladas, Frankie and I get in line for ice cream at Sweet Caroline’s Creamery stand next door, Ultra Quick-Skinny be damned. Jayne seems to be feeling better, but I learned soon after Matt died that even something as simple as ordering grilled cheese from a diner menu can unleash a flood of memories impossible to corral.
As Frankie and I wait in line, completely canceling out our calorie-saving nonfat muffins and combined weight loss in just a few hours, we count thirty-seven sagging, sunburned old women who don’t know that they’ve outlived the statute of limitations on wearing bikini tops. Frankie and I make a vow to never let the other out in public like that after thirty, no matter how good we think we look. The shock of lime and tangerine spandex against the backdrop of storefronts whose deep hues have been sucked gray and pale by years of warm ocean salt reminds me that we’re an inconvenience, a passing fad the town endures each summer as she welcomes, sells, feeds, and exists solely for our entertainment. I picture all the shops boarding up their windows in the fall — the signs unplugged, the saltwater taffy spinners cleaned and stowed away — a whole town folding up into a tent and packed on the train with the elephants and fire-eaters.
Ice-cream cones in hand, we walk around the back of the stand along the pier where we waited for our table at Breeze. As I lick a runaway line of melted cherry chocolate ripple from my hand, I become hyperaware of our surroundings. The back-and-forth ancient lull of the tide. The cry of seagulls passing overhead. The smell of salt and fish carried on the warm breeze. With each step along the old wooden planks of the pier, tiny grains of sand that hitchhiked from the beach below are pulverized under our heels. Sand that traveled millions of miles over billions of years across shifting continents and churning oceans, surviving plate tectonics, erosion, and sedimentary deposition is crushed by our new sandals.
The cosmos can be so cruel.
“Frankie, look at this sand. Isn’t it amazing that —”
“Shh — Anna, check it out. No, not now. Don’t look yet.”
“Don’t look at what?” I turn my head to see.
“Guys. In the baseball hats. Over there. I said don’t look! They are totally checking us out. Are my teeth okay?” She flashes a quick grin so I can confirm that all evidence of lunch and ice cream is gone.
I nod and chance a casual glance at the boys in question, waiting for my heart to skip or my palms to sweat or my tongue to become hopelessly tied. But all bodily functions remain intact. They look just like all the boys at home, only tanner.
“What’s the big deal?” I ask, thinking that if this is as good as it gets, I’ll be lugging around the old albatross for quite a while.
“The big deal, Anna, is that they’re totally staring at us. And we aren’t even done up or anything.”
I look at her eyelashes and the fresh coat of glitter mascara she applied in the restroom at Breeze. “Mmm-hmm.”
“I’m just saying. We’ve been here an hour and already there are prospects. We’ll get to twenty easily. Maybe we should up it to thirty.”
“Maybe we should introduce your new boyfriends to your parents,” I say, “because here they come.”
eight
Frankie immediately switches back to the Good Daughter, stowing the Seductress for a more appropriate, i.e., parent-free, time. The boys across the pier must have sensed her personality change — or the danger of an approaching father — as they’re nowhere to be found when Red and Jayne reach us.
“Find something you like?” Red asks.
“Huh?” Frankie almost chokes on her ice cream.
“Mom and I got cookies-’n’-cream,” he says, holding up his cone.
“Oh — right. We got cherry chocolate something.”
“So when are we heading to the house?” I jump in to prevent an awkward situation from getting much worse. Because Red and Jayne have become relatively lax in their discipline of Frankie, she’s less careful with her secrets than the laws of parent-child relations dictate. I don’t think she’d say something really awful, like, “I just lost my virginity with the foreign exchange student, please pass the salt.” But I don’t want to take any chances with our contest and risk getting sent home on the first day. How embarrassing. What would Red and Jayne think if they knew their daughter and her best friend staged a manhunt — rather, a twenty manhunt — on the family vacation?
“We have to pick up a few basics for dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow,” Red says. “Then we’ll go. House is about five miles up the hill from here.”
From the main road out of town past the grocery store, we can only see the top of the house, the roof rising like the tip of a wooden iceberg. It sits on a long ridge overlooking the ocean, not too close to the other houses nearby.
Uncle Red and Aunt Jayne are silent as we make our way along the dirt side road to the top. As we wind around a grove of palm trees and crest the hill, the house appears all at once as though it had been waiting behind the trees to jump out at us.
“Wow,” I whisper. There is nothing else I can say. The sight of it, live and up close, hushes me. It isn’t gigantic or ultramodern or anything, but it’s breathtaking to me — a fairy tale that lived in hundreds of photographs and stories finally coming to life. It’s all wood and windows top to bottom. In the bright oranges of the sun, it looks like it’s on fire, a giant glass triangle burning against the blue sky.
From the dirt road, we turn into the driveway on the north side of the house, the backyard facing west over the beach and the ocean and the wide-open sky beyond.
“Wow,” I say again. “I can’t
believe I’m here.”
“Welcome to our second favorite spot in the world.” Uncle Red cuts the engine and squeezes Aunt Jayne’s hand.
We all sit in the car for a few minutes, not saying anything.
“I’m gonna check out the view from the backyard,” I say, extracting myself from the car and the silence.
“We’ll be right behind you,” Aunt Jayne says.
I head up the gradual hill to the backyard, looking down at the silver pod of the car from the top. The three of them are frozen, afraid to move. I can’t tell if they’re talking, but Frankie is leaning between the two front seats.
For a brief moment, I miss my parents. Dad in his Parkside Realty sport coat. Mom with her coupons. Calm. Predictable. Normal. I wonder if they miss me, too, thousands of miles away in their quiet normal house where seals don’t bark and families don’t cry in the car.
The backyard is about the size of our school swimming pool and has six wooden steps on the far edge leading down to the beach. I know there are six of them because Matt used to tell me about how he’d run out the back door, off the deck, across the lawn, and jump down to the sand, sailing right over the steps as Aunt Jayne yelled after him about breaking his neck.
I kick off my flip-flops and walk across the wet grass to the steps, sitting on the bottom one and digging a little tunnel in the sand with my feet. It’s wet and cold under the hot surface, just like Matt said.
As the waves shush against the shore, I look out over the ocean and watch a few families scattered along the beach. In front of me, a mother stands knee-deep in the water, waving and calling for two little boys to come in for lunch.
When someone you love dies, people ask you how you’re doing, but they don’t really want to know. They seek affirmation that you’re okay, that you appreciate their concern, that life goes on and so can they. Secretly they wonder when the statute of limitations on asking expires (it’s three months, by the way. Written or unwritten, that’s about all the time it takes for people to forget the one thing that you never will).
They don’t want to know that you’ll never again eat birthday cake because you don’t want to erase the magical taste of the frosting on his lips. That you wake up every day wondering why you got to live and he didn’t. That on the first afternoon of your first real vacation, you sit in front of the ocean, face hot under the giant sun, willing him to give you a sign that he’s okay.
“There you are!”
I jump. It’s Frankie, coming down the stairs. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” I move over to make room for her on my stair and put my head on her shoulder. “I was just thinking about him.”
“Me, too.” Her eyes are red and glassy, but she’s smiling. “I think the hard part’s over. We’re officially out of the car.”
I laugh, pulling my feet out of their sand caves.
In the distance, tiny triangles — some white, some red, some rainbow — navigate along the rise and fall of a thousand saltwater peaks.
“Isn’t it amazing, Anna?” She looks out across the water. “It makes you feel kind of small, huh?”
“Yeah.” I don’t want to say too much; to break the thin glass bubble spell, my head resting on her shoulder, my oldest friend reflective and serious and still capable of being amazed.
“You know what the best part about California is?” She puts her arm around me, her Matt-bracelet cool against my shoulder. “No one knows me here. No one knows that they’re supposed to feel sorry for me.”
I think about the faces at school as we passed through the halls — eyes looking away, mouths whispering. There goes Matt’s sister. Hey, isn’t that the best friend?
“Except for you,” she says. “You’re the only one who knows the big black secret. And you’re a locked vault when it comes to keeping secrets.” She laughs, kicking at the sand with her toes.
We dust off from the sandy steps and walk out to the shore. Up close, the water churns and rolls, shifting between hazy blues and grays. As each new wave slides up to our bare feet, the tide pulls it back, lifting the water like a blowing skirt to give us a peek at the colored stones beneath.
The water is cooler than I expect. It bites at my toes until I’m used to the temperature and can no longer tell the difference between air and water on my skin. I kneel and scoop up a handful of silt and rocks, staring into my cupped palm as dark, wet sand lightens in the air.
“Where do you think it came from?” I ask, dropping my hands into the water to let the waves wash over them.
Shhh, ahhh. Shhh, ahhh.
“Lots of places, I guess,” Frankie says, crouching to pick up a smooth, plum-sized rock. “The ocean has a never-ending supply of cool stuff. In the morning, you find shells and glass, too. Check this out.” She holds the rock in front of me. “You can see bands of color from other rocks and sand that were pressed together over millions of — what are you staring at?”
I smile. “You know, Miss Perino, for someone who almost failed earth science, you sure know a lot about the oceanic ecosystem.”
“That’s not science, Anna. It’s nature. Big difference.”
I open my mouth to argue, but she’s kind of right. Science: a construct created by man to explain away all of life’s mysteries. Nature: its own creation, its own mystery, existing long before we took our first breaths and long after we take our last.
Shhh, ahhh. Shhh, ahhh.
“Frankie, thanks for bringing me here.”
She looks at me and smiles softly. Her body is here with me, her feet leaving wet imprints in the sand, but her eyes are a million years away, swimming with some prehistoric creatures as sand and stones and tiny bones press together and grind apart, nature moving slowly onward, unaffected by the insignificant comings and goings of human life. I suddenly feel very small, smaller and less important than the grains of sand under our feet, and I’m simultaneously comforted and humbled.
“Here, keep it.” Frankie smiles again, pressing her striped stone into my hand. “It’s the first official souvenir from the A.B.S.E.”
We walk up and down the shore for another half hour, stopping every few feet to scoop up an empty shell or a square of green glass. My fingers and toes pucker and my hair blows into my eyes and mouth, but I want to spend the whole trip out here, with the ocean replenishing her treasures like an old shopkeeper as I sleep alongside her in the sand.
Frankie is still quiet, digging in the sand for her own treasures. The last time she was on this beach, she was helping Matt unearth glass for his jewelry creations. They were throwing each other in the water. Making dinner plans. Talking about how you could ride a wave all the way to shore with just your body if you caught it right.
Sometimes I think if she knew about Matt and me, it would bring us closer. If I could just make her understand how much I cared about him, she’d let me into the exclusive club where all the members have a right to be irrevocably sad. Instead, I’m an intruder. I look into the windows and see them crying, but I’m on the outside in the dark, and they can’t see me.
“Frankie, can I ask you something?”
“What?”
“Do you remember my birthday party last year? When I turned fifteen?” I ignore the sound of Matt’s voice whispering over the waves. Shhh. It’s our secret, Anna. You promised.
“Sure, I guess.” She rinses her hands and wipes them on her hips. “Hey, you ready to head back up? We can unpack and set up our room. Hopefully Mom and Dad are done unloading the car.”
“Okay.” I throw a handful of stones into the water and watch them fall like rain.
“So what were you gonna say about your birthday?” She smiles, and I don’t want her to stop.
“Oh, never mind.” I grab her hand. “I forget.”
I don’t say anything about him.
I just swallow hard.
Nod and smile.
One foot in front of the other.
I’m fine, thanks for not asking.
As I cross in
to the house from the deck, sand grinds beneath my bare feet, making a soft, scratching sound against the floor. I try not to track it inside, but Frankie assures me that sand on the floor is just part of the Zanzibar experience.
“It’s like a moving decorative accent,” Jayne says. “You know, bring a little outside in.”
“Hon, you’re not allowed to redecorate on vacation,” Red says. “We didn’t pack your fabric swatches and paint chips.”
“Don’t you worry.” She laughs. “I’ll find a way, if the mood strikes.”
There is no sign of emotional tumult — no mascara-stained cheeks, no slammed doors, no long sighs or faraway faces. They’ve already put all of our bags in their appropriate rooms, unpacked their own luggage, opened all the windows, and confirmed that we have enough towels, dishes, and other essentials. Whatever ghosts of memory tried to hit them as they walked through the front door rushed right on outside, down the street, and out of sight, for Red and Jayne are the perfect eight-by-ten glossy of normal.
I allow myself a tiny sliver of hope that maybe this vacation is exactly what the family needs. Then, another ray of possibility sneaks into my thoughts. If the California sunshine can fix them, maybe, just maybe, it can fix me and Frankie, too.
I hold my breath as Aunt Jayne sets the table for dinner, knowing that if the slightest feather falls on this thin mist of peace, everything will shatter. Sometimes I think we all feel guilty for being happy, and as soon as we catch ourselves acting like everything is okay, someone remembers it’s not.
Tonight, when Frankie sits at the table and innocently knocks over her glass of Diet Coke, Aunt Jayne starts to cry, and the translucent veil of general okayness evaporates to reveal the honest, ugly parts underneath.
nine
“It’s okay, Mom,” Frankie says, jumping up to grab a sponge. “I got it.”
“We haven’t even been in this house one night and already you’re making a mess!” She grabs the sponge from Frankie’s hand and kneels below the table, blotting spilled soda with one hand and her tears with the other.