“There are so many people here,” I said.
“This is nothing,” Lynn said. “You should have seen the show last month at House of Blues.”
“That night was unbelievable,” Josie said, laughing. “At least what I remember of it.”
Lynn sipped her drink and rolled her eyes at me.
The Endless West started abruptly, without warning or welcome—just Luke with four counts on the bass drum quickly followed by the whooping cheer of an instantly captive crowd. Then, an influx of guitar: Alex strummed a clean rhythm wrought with reverb while on bass, Gabriel picked a slow, poppy groove. And only after the other instruments had built did Cameron’s guitar begin whirling. He played lead, his fingers moving with effortless skill. Even as he harmonized with Alex’s rickety vocals, his hands flowed across the neck of his guitar. A Fender Telecaster. It wasn’t the same as my father’s, but Cameron’s sound was just as full—a perfect blend of progression and sustain. Each note reverberated, bouncing around in my rib cage until I felt the song’s movement coursing with my blood.
There’s no other way to explain. The music inhabited me, and my body responded first: a tap of my toe, a subtle twitch in my shoulder. A blaze, electric, burst across my skin. Before my brain could process the reaction, I was moving. I needed to move. The urge was primal and necessary—the only possible response to a sound so familiar that it could have come crackling out of my father’s record player, and yet so wholly characteristic of now, of the four who produced it, and of the collective moment we all shared. All around me there were voices; everyone sang along. And after a while, when I glanced up at the stage, I was surprised to find Cameron looking back, the shadow of a smile on his face.
Right then, Lynn grabbed my hand. We came together, dancing, and raised our fists in the air. I closed my eyes, let the music rush over me. Our bodies smudged into the sway and my ears rang with the melodic howl of a hundred voices, and for the first time since my father died, I felt like I was home.
Thirteen
WE STAYED UNTIL the last band finished. It was after midnight. Cameron and I lingered in the small front patio, finishing our drinks as the parking lot began to empty. Though a half hour earlier the alcohol had made me feel energetic and unstoppable, I now felt anxious. Insecure. Lynn had gone missing sometime during the final set and Josie was still inside, searching for a way to elongate the party. For the moment, we were alone.
Because I didn’t know what else to do, I checked my phone. Nothing from my mother (a good sign), but a new message from Nick: Two freeways diverge at an off-ramp / one that takes me home, and one that leads south to Orange County / but I, being only one driver, cannot take them both. . . .
I brought my hand to my mouth, smiling.
“Someone beckoning you?” Cameron asked. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from the chest pocket of his shirt and offered one to me.
I shook my head, but my cheeks had already flushed. I wondered if he could tell. “The opposite, actually, thank God. I’m not really supposed to be here right now.”
“None of us are,” he said with a shrug.
“Yeah.” I laughed. “I guess that’s true.”
“It’s a good thing that the big guy over there is completely oblivious. Without him, we’d all be banished to the parking lot. And I’ve been banished many times, so I speak from experience.”
“Quick to cause a ruckus, are we?”
“Nothing of the sort. I’m a stand-up guy.” Cameron cupped one hand around the tip of his cigarette, and with the other flicked a lighter. His face lit up in a warm yellow glow. “It’s just a little bit hard to pass for twenty-one when you’re only fifteen, sixteen, and still waiting for those final smacks of puberty. Trust me. It’s not nearly as enjoyable out here.”
I watched him inhale, his cheeks flattening. Smoke swirled into the murky black sky. “And the sound quality is really subpar,” I added.
“All bass,” he said.
“All bass,” I agreed.
We smiled at each other. I remembered the feeling from Lynn’s kitchen—a surprising lightness that emerged from the fluidity of our conversation, the soft lingering of his eyes. I held his stare. I don’t know why, but it seemed important to me then, to not look away.
A few seconds later Josie appeared. Cameron diverted his attention to a group of girls talking loudly across the parking lot.
“Well,” she said through an overzealous exhale, picking up my drink to refresh herself. “No parties tonight. That first band took off right after Saint Summer’s set, and Saint Summer said they want to record a new song tomorrow before you all head to Vegas, so they’ve decided to ruin the night for everyone.”
“About time they get that track down,” Cameron said. “Are they going back to Diego?”
“I don’t know,” she cried, and slouched against the wall.
“How long are you guys on tour for?” I asked Cameron.
“A month,” he said. “It’s nothing official. We just called in some connections with other bands, set up a bunch of scattered shows. We’re trying to expand our fan base.”
“That’s awesome.” I pushed my voice up an octave, hoping the tone would cloak my disappointment. A month may as well have been forever.
Out in the parking lot, the girls hugged and got into their cars. Only a dozen vehicles remained. As a Honda pulled out of its space and circled toward the exit, I noticed Lynn and Luke standing near the boys’ van. He disappeared back around the side as she crossed the parking lot toward us.
“What’s wrong with Josie?” she asked.
“There’s nothing to do,” Josie moaned.
“So we’ll go to Lynn’s,” Cameron said. “Your mom won’t mind if we go to your place, right?”
“She never does,” Lynn said, and unconsciously brought a hand to her face. As she wiped a thumb beneath her bottom lip where her lipstick had smeared, her eyes caught mine. For an instant her face darkened, dangerous. Embarrassment gushed through me and I turned away.
A medley of voices seeped into the night as Alex and Gabriel emerged from the bar. “We got seventy-five bucks tonight,” Alex said. “You guys want to go pick up some beer?”
“We always go to Lynn’s house,” Josie said, “or we go to my house, and we just sit there drinking and listening to records until we pass out like a bunch of fourteen-year-olds. Why don’t we do something else for a change?”
“Like what?” Gabriel asked.
“Like . . . let’s go to the beach.”
There was a pause while everyone considered it.
“I’m in,” said Lynn.
“Me too,” said Cameron.
“As long as we get beer first,” Alex said.
Josie grinned and draped her arm around Alex’s shoulders, plastering his cheek with sloppy kisses. I glanced back at Lynn. The darkness was gone. Playfully, she tilted her head toward Cameron. I shrugged.
“So it’s settled,” Josie said. “A midnight swim.”
“I don’t have a bathing suit,” Gabriel said.
Cameron laughed, patting Gabriel on the back. “At least you’re a damn good bass player.”
Lynn raised her voice, trying to reroute attention. “Not so fast. I said I’m game, but it’s not actually up to me. Tonight I’m in charge of this lovely lady, one Susannah Hayes, and, to no one’s surprise, she’s got a bit of a warrant on her head. If she feels this excursion might further her sentence, well, then, we’re going to have to decline. So.” Lynn turned to face me. I could feel all their eyes shifting but only saw hers, that perfect, pure cornflower blue, the way I imagined snow would look when washed in the filtered light of a smoke-shrouded moon. She said, “What do you think, Susie Q? Should we go?”
I said yes. Of course I did. After that night, that nickname, there was never another answer.
We took two cars—Lynn, Gabriel, Josie, and me in one, the rest in the other, tasked with finding a nearby gas station for beer. I sat in the front seat laughing
as the radio blared Pat Benatar’s “Heartbreaker” and Lynn cranked the volume up. “I love this song,” she yelled out the open window, while Gabriel and Josie began performing interpretive seat-dances, singing in high, breathy voices. And through bleary eyes, as we curved back by the bar’s entrance, I thought I saw Cody Winters standing on the patio, smoking a cigarette with one of the members of Saint Summer. It had to have been him; I knew the slick black swirl of his hair, the unconcerned shrug of his posture. But by the time I spun around to confirm, Lynn had already pulled onto the street and the bar had receded, the figures out front as indistinguishable as ghosts.
Newport Beach was maybe ten minutes away, but by the time we got there, Josie had already vomited out the back right window of Lynn’s car and passed out in a slump against the seat. No one seemed surprised or concerned; they kept the windows cracked and locked her inside.
“She’ll be fine,” Lynn assured me. “She always is.” So we pilfered her trunk for whatever we could find to stave off the cold, wrapped ourselves in Mexican blankets and fuzzy coats she’d gotten from the costume shop, and, leaving Josie to dream, headed down toward the water.
I thought that would have been the pinnacle of the evening—laughing about how silly Luke looked in Lynn’s leopard-print jacket, how the emerald sequined sweater really brought out Cameron’s eyes. We would drink to the soundtrack of the ocean until all our cans were empty, and then we would go home. But halfway through her second beer Lynn stood up, shook off her coat, and unzipped the back of her black dress.
“You’re seriously going in?” I asked, rubbing my bumpy arms. The chill had punctured my skin, even beneath a thick white sweater.
Lynn’s eyebrows rose as a challenge. “What?” she said as she shook the dress from her hips, dropping it to the sand. “You scared?”
“Of course not,” I said, and began unlacing my shoes. I wanted to say that this was nothing—that I had learned to swim in the sea. I wanted to tell her how my father used to cannonball me into the Pacific and leave me tumbling beneath the plow of waves until finally the crest cleared and I broke through the surface, gasping and victorious. But that wasn’t exactly the truth.
I’d learned to swim the same way as all the other kids: through weekly lessons at a high school with college-age instructors who gave me stickers and Tootsie Pops after each session. But, in a way, the story of the Pacific wasn’t all lies, either. It was a game we had played, my father and I. He’d stand me on his shoulders and launch me toward the surf. I’d tuck myself into a ball, whirling around beneath the white water until I finally floated up. Even in winter, when the temperature dropped, we’d still race down from the shore to see who could dive under first. So who was to say that this wasn’t my truth?
A seagull squawked somewhere above us, and when I tilted my chin up, I noticed the distinct outline of Orion winking down from the moon-bright sky. I pulled my shirt over my head and said, “I learned to swim in the ocean.”
“I learned at the high school,” Gabriel said, already undressing. “Pool was probably full of piss.”
And then he took off running.
“Last one in has to clean up Josie’s puke,” he yelled over his shoulder. The rest of the boys flung off their clothes and chased after him.
For a moment, I didn’t move. My head spun as their bodies blended into the black rumbling ocean, their voices stifled aside the swell of the waves. They crashed, and then there was static, like an amp before that first chord has been struck. In that instant, all I can remember seeing is her—the exposed skin of her back radiant beneath the twinkling sliver of moon, the vibrant red of her hair swirling around her head. And I thought that I had finally found her. The sea witch was here, right in front of me.
Sometimes, all you can do is make connections, charge half-naked into the freezing ocean and let the water pinch you a thousand times, enough to know you’re crazy but not enough to make you stop because even though the hurt is so immense that it shocks every single muscle into near-paralysis, you know that the pain means something else entirely. You know that you’re alive. And sometimes, when a boy who seems so kind and perfect reaches for you, his fingers curling around the curve of your waist, and glides you toward him through the salty foam, even if you aren’t quite sure that it’s the right thing, if you don’t know him that well and don’t know what any of it means, whether it’s a promise or an instinct, you just open your mouth and say hello. Your hands rise up to grip the soft hairs that twist behind his ears. Hello, you say as you taste him. Hello, you say, and let the ocean determine everything else.
Fourteen
THE FOLLOWING WEEK the boys left for tour and the days of my new life rolled forward. The holiday break quickly approached, and without warning, another Southern California winter showed its strength. It was sharp and surprising as always, punctuated by ruthless winds and a cold that rolled down from the snow-spangled cusp of Mount Baldy. Under the veil of darkness the chill spread—yet that was always the strangest part. Our winters seemed to only exist during nightfall; somehow, the days remained bathed in warmth. And there was no snow, of course, not in our part of the state. The closest thing we had was the thin layer of ice that frosted our roofs before sunrise.
At Vivian’s insistence, we bought a Christmas tree from the pricey local Boy Scout lot. It was ten feet tall, full and fat, with branches that expanded farther than the length of my outstretched arms.
“Your grandfather was an Eagle Scout,” Vivian told me that afternoon as she placed glitter-crusted glass balls among the boughs. “It just wouldn’t do to buy a tree from one of those hardware stores, even after all these years. Do you remember, Diane? We would drive down there together, and you always insisted on saving the biggest tree you could find.”
“Saving?” I asked. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor, unveiling fragile snowflakes from mounds of tissue. “All the trees are destined to die at that point anyway.”
“Well, yes, but your mother didn’t know that. As a child she thought that buying the tree meant that we were giving it a loving home for the season. And after Christmas, when we put it on the street with the garbage, she thought someone retrieved it, and replanted it in the forest. That secret was guarded more closely than Santa Claus. I still don’t know where you got that wild notion.”
“I guess I had a very active imagination,” my mother said flatly, picking up one of the snowflakes. She examined it for a moment before walking over to the tree. “Children believe what they want the truth to be.”
Vivian said to me, “Your mother wanted to save the world. The plants and the animals, anyway. People were not as much of a concern, but God forbid she saw a stray cat wander through the brush behind our house.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “That’s sweet.”
“If your mother had her way, this place would have been turned into a zoo long ago. But the smaller creatures didn’t fare well with coyotes, and the horses kept her busy enough, so we left it at that. Fitting,” Vivian said, and showed me a ceramic horse ornament with my mother’s name written on the side in elegant script. In my hands, it felt feathery, delicate. Much too breakable for a child.
“We never had any pets,” I said, giving the ornament to my mother, who placed it on one of the higher branches.
Vivian stepped back now, examining the tree, her progress. She removed the horse. “It doesn’t quite blend with the aesthetic,” she explained, re-hanging it around the side where it was nearly out of view. Behind her, my mother’s lips pulled taut.
“You didn’t even have a cat, then?” Vivian asked me.
“Not even a cat,” I said. My mother slipped around the back of the tree. “Or a hamster.”
“Well I find that very surprising.”
My mother covertly removed the horse ornament, hid it behind her back. “Your father was allergic,” she said.
“To cats?” I asked.
“You knew that,” she said, but I couldn’t remember. I supp
ose there was a time when I had wanted a pet, and there was also a time when I stopped asking for what I knew I wouldn’t get. In my memory, there wasn’t much more than that.
But the idea that a cat allergy had afflicted my father bothered me. It was such a small, simple ailment, the banality of it offensive somehow. He was never sick. All those illnesses my mother made up—the flu, the stomach bug, strep throat. He never had any of them. At least, I didn’t think so.
Then I remembered the pills.
“Mom?” I said, because in that instant, I had to know the truth. Headaches, he’d told me. Such awful headaches.
“Hm?” she said, glancing down at me.
I wanted his explanation to be the truth. But more than that, I needed him to be well. I needed what happened to be freak and unexplainable, because I could not have handled a clear buildup of symptoms and side effects. The possibility that his death could’ve been prevented would have destroyed me.
So I swallowed my doubt. “Never mind.”
As Vivian kneeled down to unwrap more ornaments, my mother placed the ceramic horse back in the front of the tree. For a moment she smiled at her subterfuge, but the expression quickly dimmed, a shadow of sadness crossing over her face before she turned away and reached for more snowflakes. I wondered if Vivian would notice the horse, but she didn’t. She just kept unwrapping ornaments.
“Your grandfather was an Eagle Scout,” Vivian said.
“I know,” I said. “You told me.”
“Did I?”
“How about hot chocolate?” my mother asked. “I’ll make some fresh whipped cream.”
She retreated to the kitchen and plugged in the food processor. The machine began whirring. Vivian unpacked more ornaments. I flattened and refolded the pile of tissue paper while somewhere in the background, Bing Crosby continued singing about a white Christmas that would never come.
Later, I lay in bed beneath an assortment of blankets and quilts. A chill dashed through my body, and my mind plunged into the Pacific. I’d thought about the ocean almost nightly since the Endless West’s show. Though, I suppose that when I say I thought about the ocean, what I really mean is, I thought about Cameron.
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