Take Me To The Beach

by K. L. Grayson, Karina Halle, A. L. Jackson, Marni Mann, Monica Murphy, Devney Perry, Kristen Proby, Rachel Van Dyken

  “Yes, I know the film. Hitchcock’s Rebecca,” she says. Her eyes are kind as usual, but coaxing, wanting me to get back on track. “But we’re talking about your dream. You mentioned it at the beginning of the session.”

  I take in a deep breath and relax against the chair, stealing a glimpse at Frodo, her Cavalier King Charles Spaniel that acts like the resident therapy pet. “It was nothing.”

  “All dreams are something. You know this. Now, what do you remember about it?”

  “It was one of those dreams where I remembered it so well upon waking but now I don’t remember it at all. Just the feeling.”

  “Are you still writing in your dream journal?”

  “No.” Honestly, I stopped doing that years ago.

  “What was the feeling it gave you?”

  “Hopelessness. Bleakness. Despair. I remember just this emptiness, a void where there was no light or color, and I think I was lost in it. I think I was looking for someone. Maybe my mother. Who knows?”

  I shudder. Even though in the dream I knew I was in a dream, there was the fear that I wouldn’t be able to escape. Then when I woke up, the feeling never went away. I still haven’t escaped. It didn’t let me.

  She nods. “Do you think it was her? Perhaps your father. You get different feelings from each of them.”

  I start stroking Frodo’s ears. “I think with my dad, it’s usually anger. Like I’ll wake up angry. My mother, I’m usually sad.”

  “And what was your mood that day?”

  “It was last night or this morning I had the dream,” I tell her. “And today I’ve just been…blah all day. You know? Like scooped out and sad. But it’s that terrible form of sadness. Like a sickness that clings to your bones and your heart and you can’t shake it. That kind of sad. I’m infected.”

  “You know you’re going to get days like that. You know that grief doesn’t go away—it just manifests itself differently and becomes easier to manage. There will always be steps backward. The best thing you can do is call me, and you did that.”

  “Yeah,” I say absently. Even heading out into the garden and working with bees didn’t do me any good. Usually, watching them go about their day, working for the greater good of the hive, being so efficient and cooperative and selfless, put things into perspective for me. How these tiny creatures are capable of so much, more than most of us are beginning to understand.

  But I couldn’t find the peace they usually bring me. So even though I hadn’t been in to see Dr. Bader for a long time, I made the call, and she was able to fit me in.

  “Are you going through any changes right now?” she asks. “Anything in your life out of the ordinary? Stresses that have popped up?”

  I shake my head. “Not really.” I don’t want to bring up the whole dating Laz thing, not before we actually go out on a date. We’re supposed to go on our first one tonight. “I did tell Laz, my friend, about the fact that I’m more or less a virgin.”

  “Oh, good,” she says. “And how did that go?”

  “Pretty good. I guess. He was amazed.”

  “But supportive, I’m assuming?”

  “Yes. Very supportive. He’s a…he’s one of the good guys, you know?”

  “I do. I always enjoy hearing you talk about him.”

  I swear I’m detecting something…knowing in her tone. Then again, she is a therapist. Everything that comes out of her mouth is knowing.

  “And how did it make you feel, to tell him?”

  “Good. After I realized he wasn’t really judging me or making me feel like a freak, yeah. Good. It was a huge relief.”

  “Does it make a difference that he’s a man? Were you more worried about telling him, than say, your friend Naomi?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  But fuck, I know it did worry me. With Naomi and Jane, they didn’t care, they sort of made it their mission to try and find me the right guy to lose my virginity to. Yet another reason why Jane was against Laz and I ever being together. They both gave up after a point and left me to my own devices, but I never felt like I couldn’t tell them.

  With Laz, though, I never wanted to bring it up. I’d rather he go on thinking I am normal like the rest of them. And, I mean, I know I’m not normal. I’m talking about dreams and my dead mother and drunken father with my therapist. I’ll probably need another refill of Ativan after this, something I was trying to wean myself off of.

  And Laz knows all that stuff about me. It took a while for us both to open up to each other about our pasts, but eventually it all came out. I was involved in a horrific car crash when I was fourteen, my father driving drunk, my mother dying on impact. Laz had his father (also a drunk) walk out on him when he was fourteen. He was sent off to boarding school (this was in England), and when he came out, his mother had remarried and was living in the States. Nothing bonds people faster than a shared resentment over their fathers.

  “Well,” Susan goes on, bringing my focus back to her, “I can certainly see why you might have a dream like that. This admission to Laz might be freeing but it also leaves you vulnerable. And you know when you get vulnerable, your defenses go up. But you have to look at vulnerability as a strength, Marina, not a weakness. There isn’t bleakness or despair in it, there’s hope. Take solace in that and in the fact that this might bring you and Laz closer.”

  I don’t know why those last few words cause my stomach to flip, but they do. “We are pretty close already. I’m not sure how much closer we can get,” I say rather feebly.

  Or maybe it’s that I’m about to find out.

  After the therapy session, I’m feeling a little bit better. The sticky fragments of the dream are wearing off and I’m starting to feel more whole than hollow. It’s funny how that can sneak up on me sometimes, even without a bleak dream to kick it all off. Some days, I just carry this immeasurable sadness inside, one that makes me feel like everything soft and warm and good inside of me has been removed, scooped out. I know it’s all connected to my parents, but lately I’ve been wondering if it’s more about my father than my mother.

  Fourteen is an awful age to lose anybody, let alone your mother, who at the time, was my best friend. In some ways, she still is. I talk to her often, usually right before I go to sleep, or when I’m working the hives. If I see something beautiful, like a sunset or perfectly built comb on the hive frames, something I know she’d appreciate, I tell her about it. It’s more my heart speaking out to her than anything I’m thinking, but the feeling is still there. It’s communication on another level, something I call heartspeak.

  I was close with my father too, before the accident. I knew he drank too much, but the image I had back then of someone having a “problem” was the deadbeat drunk, the one who would hit his family or run down the street in their underwear with a bottle of whisky in hand or lose their jobs. My father was always able to keep his drinking under control. He managed to have a great job as a financial consultant. Sure, some days he would work late in the city (our house was in the hills of Ramona, about a forty-minute drive from San Diego) and he’d come home in the middle of the night, but…it was just life. I didn’t know any better. My parents were great to me, they seemed happy, therefore I was happy.

  But eventually the lies caught up to us. We went to my father’s Christmas party, and he drove my mother and I home drunk. We went off the windy highway that takes you through the hills.

  I still can’t remember all the details of the crash and I don’t want to. I remember the swerve, the headlights on a tree, the car tilting down at an unnatural angle, the glass shattering. When I woke up, I was in the hospital with a broken arm, collarbone, concussion. My mother was dead. My father was arrested for drinking and driving.

  The house was sold, my mother’s hives destroyed. I had to move in with my Aunt Margaret in Irvine, who was already a single mother to her two young kids. I had to go to a new high school. I became even more withdrawn than before. I had no friends. The only thing I had,
the only thing that distracted me, was studying, so I threw myself into school.

  Then, after I graduated from university, my father was out of prison and I began the tenuous task of repairing my relationship with him. I still love him because he’s my father, but I basically have to take care of him now. Rehab never seems to work for long and he’s a full-fledged alcoholic, drinking himself to death before getting sober and doing it all over again, an unending cycle.

  Sometimes I have that horrible, shameful, terrible thought that I want him to die. Sometimes I’m so full of rage at him for driving drunk, for killing my mother, for nearly killing me, that I don’t know what to do with myself. It eats me up inside. It makes me hate myself just as much as I hate him.

  But I don’t hate him because I love him. I hate the world.

  I stare at myself in my mirror, leaning over the sink, my fingers clenching the porcelain edges. I have to remind myself to breathe, to not let these thoughts wrap me up.

  Think about Laz. Put on your makeup and think about Laz. Concentrate on him, on tonight.

  It seems to work. I wash my face and start putting on my makeup, carefully, slowly. I have a lot of makeup, but I don’t wear much of it. There’s no point when you’re wearing a beekeeper hat a lot of the time and I usually don’t have the time to play with it. But for tonight, for Laz’s sake, I decide to make the effort.

  Only it’s not really for Laz’s sake, is it?

  It’s for Carl McNaughty.

  I burst out laughing at the thought, causing my mascara to smear under my eyes. I quickly wipe off the excess with a cotton swab.

  Honestly, I can’t believe this is actually happening. Like, what are we really going to learn about each other? How can I believe that it’s some stranger, some random Tinder date, and not my good friend? What can Laz possibly tell me about how I am on a date?

  I know it’s not going to work. That it’s completely silly and pointless. Maybe he knows it too. I think I just want an excuse to go out, to be with him and be something different to him for once.

  Careful, a small voice pops up in my head. This is all to help you with other guys, not with him. Your friend is just doing you a favor.

  I take in a deep breath and steel myself.

  A favor, a favor, a favor.

  Actually, I’m doing him a favor, too. I think.

  When I’ve finished with my makeup, blown out my frizzy hair into sleek strands, and slipped on a pair of skinny jeans and a low-cut empire waist lacy top, I’m ready.

  Except when I hear the side gate open and I know it’s him, I’m reduced to a fluttery mess. I give myself the once over in the mirror, satisfied that the bronzy smoky eye makeup is making my blue eyes pop like never before. I’m even wearing heels, three-inch stilettos that make me carry my thick thighs and butt better.

  The knock at my door makes me jump.

  I try to walk as calmly as possible over to it, heading down the two steps that separate the bedroom area from the living room and front door.

  My heel slips out from under me.

  There’s a second where I’m thinking, you can regain your balance!

  But then I’m tumbling to the floor.

  Splat.

  “Ow,” I mumble, face against the faux hardwood. I do a quick once over in my head, checking every bone and muscle for injury before I start to hoist myself up.

  Thank god Laz didn’t see that.

  “Marina!?” I hear from the other side of the door, panicked, and before I can tell him I’m okay, the door opens.

  I really need to start locking it when I’m home.

  “Jesus,” he says, crouching down beside me, hand on my back. “Are you hurt?”

  “I wasn’t until you stepped in,” I mumble, giving him a sheepish look through my hair. “And it’s only my pride.”

  “Here,” he says, grabbing my arms and pulling me up to my feet like I weigh nothing at all. Well, almost to my feet. One of the shoes is on the step.

  “Wow,” he says as he looks me over.

  “Hot mess express, right?” I say as I hobble over to the stairs and pick up my heel. On second thought, I’m putting on a pair of flats.

  “Perhaps those shoes do need some more practice. But you’re just the hot part, not the mess.”

  I give him a wry grin as I pull the other heel off my foot. I immediately feel grounded. Can I just go on the date in bare feet? I mean, it is LA.

  “Hot?” I repeat, secretly tickled pink he said that. No, tickled red. My face is hot and flushed.

  “You look…” He trails off, still looking me up and down. “Gorgeous.”

  A thrill runs through me. “Really?”

  He nods, eyes fixed on my breasts, then my lips. He swallows. “Yes. Do you always look like this on your dates?”

  “Actually, no.”

  A look of surprise comes over his eyes. “So, you did this just for me?”

  Oh fuck. I did do this just for him.

  “No,” I lie. “I did it for Carl McNaughty.”

  He grins his movie-star handsome smile and it hits my heart like an arrow. “Well, you’re in luck baby, because Carl McNaughty is here.”

  I cross my arms playfully. “I don’t know, you still look an awful lot like Lazarus Scott, Insta Poet.”

  Okay, he is a little more dressed up than usual. Slim black pants instead of jeans. Charcoal grey dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the collar undone. The leather jacket and boots stay the same. His hair is artfully messy, the kind of hair you want to run your hands through. His brows are dark and low, elegantly arched which always makes him seem moodier than he actually is. He’s taken his eyebrow ring out.

  I point to it. “Your ring.”

  “Carl McNaughty wouldn’t wear it on a first date. He’d say it’s too nineties.”

  I bite back a smile. “Is this how you are on all first dates or is it just for me?”

  He smirks and offers me his arm. “Come on, let’s get this show on the road.”

  I stare at his arm. “You know, it’s the first date and a guy wouldn’t be offering his arm like this to a stranger.”

  He gives me a dead stare.

  “How about you go outside and start over again?” I say, pushing him toward the door.

  “Promise me you won’t fall?”

  “Shut up.”

  He goes outside and I shut the door on him and wait.

  He doesn’t knock.

  “Laz?”

  No answer.

  “Carl?”

  No answer.

  Finally, I pull the door back open.

  It’s empty.

  Please don’t tell me he’s going to jump out at me because I can’t handle jumpy scares like that.

  But then he comes sauntering around the corner from the direction of the pool.

  He does this double eyebrow waggle combined with a head nod. “You’re Marina, aren’t you?”

  Oh my god. Are we role-playing already?

  “Uh. Yeah. That’s me. And you must be Carl.” I pause. “Wait a minute, why do you get to be Carl and I have to be myself? I was supposed to have my own name, wasn’t I?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Laz says smoothly, looking over my shoulder and into the studio. “Nice place. Can I come in?”

  I give him an odd look. Is this how he is on a first date? He’s awfully pushy.

  “No,” I tell him. “Let’s just get going.” I quickly reach back in and grab my purse before locking the door behind me. “Where are we going anyway?”

  “You said on your Tinder profile that you love to laugh and you have secret aspirations to be a stand-up comic, so I thought The Comedy Store would be a great start.”

  My Tinder profile doesn’t say that. But I’m also relieved, because that means he hasn’t found my actual profile, lest that come under judgement too. I may be using a photo from five years ago when I was twenty pounds lighter.

  “Sounds great,” I tell him. Actually
, it does sound like a lot of fun. Laz and I usually do the same old things out here, and in the Valley, we don’t venture over the hills as much as we should. So even if this whole experiment doesn’t go anywhere, and I still think it won’t, this is pushing us out of our comfort zones a bit. I guess even friendships can use a little spice every now and then.

  Speaking of spice, Laz even smells different. Like cinnamon and something woodsy. It reminds me of fall in Ramona, when the weather finally cools down enough for me and my mother to slip on the sweaters and go apple picking.

  I shake that memory out of my head and concentrate on Laz.

  “You smell delicious,” I tell him.

  He glances at me over his shoulder as we round the pool and head down the side of Barbara’s house. “Thank you. I never did get a hint of what you smell like.”

  Suddenly he stops walking and I collide into his back. He turns around and leans in for a moment.

  “Are you smelling me?” I ask, meeting his eyes, just inches from mine.

  “Yes,” he says. “Is that weird?”

  “Kind of,” I tell him. And I thought I was going to be the weird one here.

  He nods and keeps walking, opening the gate and stepping through. I glance up at the window of the house briefly to see Barbara peering at me through the blinds. She doesn’t bother to hide, she just shakes her bony finger at me and I know she’s warning me to be careful. I may have mentioned my date to her the other night while we were watching Rebecca, and she may have told me it was all a horrible idea.

  “So, what do I smell like anyway?” I ask him.

  “Honey,” he says.

  I roll my eyes. “Occupational hazard, I suppose.”

  He shrugs. “I’ve always loved it.”

  “Wait a minute,” I tell him as we approach his car. “You’re not supposed to know what I do.”

  He opens the door for me. “It says so on your Tinder profile.”

  “I wouldn’t put that on my Tinder profile.”

  “Yes, it’s right below the part where you talk about your inspirations of being a comic,” he says, his eyes begging me to play along.

  This is dumb, I want to say but I bite my tongue for once and take in a deep breath, trying to get in the game.