But Olivia is the smartest person I know. And she just rests her head on my shoulder.
“I miss her,” she whispers.
“Me too.”
When I let go, she just nods at me and goes to her room, and I put the board back in the closet. I was, undoubtedly, the loser. But I’m glad we played.
chapter twenty-nine
MAX
www.facebook.com
Max Mauro
May 20 at 8:00 p.m.
Hi, I’m having a memorial service tonight and will be doing an Instagram Live. Please tune in to pay your respects if you can. I’ll start streaming at 8:45 p.m. Rest in Peace.
Imani Jackson
Hugs. I wouldn’t miss it.
Carlos F. Santi
Prayers up, girl. You know I’m in.
Dannie Ngujo
Love you. You know I’m here if you ever need to talk.
Olivia Stephens
“Death sets a thing significant” ~ Emily Dickinson
Sometimes, when things are hard, I think of how I could have been born into a thousand different families, in a hundred different countries. I think of how I could have been born into wealth or into the kind of poverty that can’t afford shoes, and, amidst all those possibilities, I’m grateful I was born near an ocean.
When the voices in my head are loud, the ocean is louder. When my worries feel too big, the ocean is always bigger. When I meet the ocean with heartache, it gives me somewhere to drown it.
And though the ocean doesn’t take insurance, it doesn’t have to, because it’s the cheapest form of therapy you can find, free for everyone.
I’ve abandoned my shoes at the top of the beach, which is officially closed, but liberties have been taken.
The sand holds on to the day’s sun and I trudge awkwardly through the small, warm dunes until the place where the beach is packed and hard and the lapping water leaves behind froth and seaweed. The moon’s reflection bounces over the black sea and I drop my backpack onto a dry spot beside me, before kneeling to unload it.
I give myself time to get situated, only a few more minutes until I go live. Part of me would still prefer to do nothing at all, but I guess the whole point is that this isn’t about me. My mother always believed that every life moment deserves its moment. Didn’t matter if it was a first day at school, a good report card, even a business loan, she said you had to pause and give it its due, otherwise time had a way of getting too slippery. I guess that’s why she made me “cheers” with ice cream the first time I got my period, but I digress.
I have everything I need here, which isn’t much. I plan to keep it simple and from the heart. Really, it’s the best I can do given the circumstances. I walk back out toward the water and, no, this isn’t some Victorian tragedy where, because of my grief, I just keep going and let the ocean take me. It’s a normal tragedy where I shed some ugly tears as I begin to carve big, capital letters into the packed sand.
Once I’m finished, I wipe the grit from my hands and the tears from my face and retrieve my phone from the towel I’ve laid out. I reposition so that the breeze isn’t blowing strands of hair in my eyes. I don’t look like Beyoncé in a wind machine or anything, but it’s an improvement.
Signing on, I try not to freak out. “Hi, guys,” I say uncertainly into the camera as the live feed begins to play. “So, I’m, um, here at Huntington Beach.” In the bottom left-hand corner I see that people have actually begun to join. Dannie sends up a bunch of little hearts. Imani types Hiya from her new home in Kansas. And soon there are others. “Okay, wow, thanks. I—look, this won’t take long. I just thought I needed to do, you know, something. So, I guess I should start by saying a few words.”
I dig my toes deeper into the sand. For a whole two breaths, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to speak at all, but sure enough, I find my words like I’ve written them right there on the beach.
“Mr. Antinova asked us to pick out a poem that encapsulated the experience of quarantine and everything, so in light of it all, I picked this one by Emily Dickinson—thanks, Olivia—and figured I would read it to you all now. Here goes nothing.” I clear my throat.
“Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all, And sweetest in the Gale is heard, and sore must be the storm, that could abash the little Bird, that kept so many warm, I’ve heard it in the chilliest land, and on the strangest Sea, yet never in Extremity, it asked a crumb of me.”
I fold up the scrap of paper I’ve been reading from, unsure of what else to say. I take a long look at my hands and try. “If I’ve learned anything these last few weeks it’s that nothing’s a given. Nothing’s permanent. Not our dreams. Not our . . . life. And definitely, not even all this.
“Now, if you can just give me one second I’ll set up the memorial . . . thing. Hang on.” I fumble around for a hot second and the picture on the phone goes topsy-turvy. “Sorry. Here.” I prop it up on the towel against the backpack. “Everyone can see me?” There’s a smattering of thumbs-ups in the comments below. I return the gesture, but in real life.
I fiddle with the drone camera that Dannie lent me. She didn’t even make me sign over a kidney as collateral, which was nice. She did insist on giving me a thirty-minute FaceTime tutorial on how it worked and I’ll be honest, I was hardly listening.
“There’s the on switch,” I murmur. Three red lights spring out of the dark. “And, let’s see, let’s see—” I glance up.
Dannie’s comment pops up: We went over this!
“Spotlight. That’s it.” A white light flicks bright and settles. I point it away from my face.
“Hey.”
With a start I look up to see a silhouette in the beam standing at a distance.
On the live stream comments burst out of the left-hand corner:
I heard someone
Who is that?
Are you about to be murdered? Blink twice if you need help!
“Jonah?” I squint to see the shadowy figure, illuminated only by the floodlights in the distant parking lot. He steps just a foot closer so that I can see him. Here. In person.
“Yeah, hi, I didn’t mean to freak you out. I just—I thought there was someone else who should be here.”
A great poufy ball of black fur bounds across the beach, kicking up sand. “How did you—what—” I can’t finish my sentence because Chester’s tongue is lapping at my face and I’m basically French kissing a dog and I like it. Chester looks like his old self again and I see why—he’s once again sporting a bow tie. He stands up on his hind legs and shakes his ears. His tail wags madly. I press my forehead to his and feel his wet snout nose against my throat. “Jonah!” I shriek like a girl at a boy band concert, but who cares?
“I was able to negotiate Kate and my dad into letting me get a dog since I’m going to be around this summer after all.” His voice is slightly muffled behind the mask and I notice the gloves. “I think Kate was thinking I’d choose something small and fluffy like a teacup Pomeranian, but considering she didn’t specify . . .” He shrugs. “I learned that from you.”
“Verbal contracts are binding, I hear.” I smile, and when I do, I feel a full body ache, but it’s good, like stretching and—
“Think you could send that thing over here?” Jonah’s hair flops to one side. Something’s different about him. He seems more at ease.
Chester curls up on the towel because he is fancy, obviously. I pick up the drone and, using the remote controller, manage to fly it at least close enough to Jonah that he reaches out and catches it. He pulls something out of his back pocket—a sheet of paper maybe—and waving it for me, he proceeds to tie it onto the side of the drone.
“Incoming.” He gently lifts it up and I bring it back for a smooth landing on the towel. Chester lifts his head
, only mildly interested and ultimately unimpressed by twenty-first-century developments in technology.
“What is this?” I crouch down beside it, and when I turn the paper over I see that it’s not a paper at all, but a photograph. A young woman with brown hair stands in front of the Pont des Arts. She looks like Anne Hathaway’s character in The Devil Wears Prada, only this young woman isn’t playing Andy Sachs; she’s real. On the back, someone’s scribbled in old cursive: Esprit Brillants, Sorbonne, Paris, 1993. “Oh” is what I can manage as I study the picture more closely. This is why Jonah wanted to go to Paris so badly. This is why he needed that scholarship. His mother did it twenty-seven years before him.
“I’m . . . sorry for your loss,” I say. This is a memorial service after all.
“I’m sorry for your loss too,” he echoes.
I give a small shake of my head. Jonah lifts his chin and looks at the stars.
“Right.” I take up my phone again, more uncertainly. “Well, here it goes.” I link the drone camera feed to show on the live stream and then carefully, I lift off.
Up, up, up, the drone rises like it’s floating, like it’s a modern-day sky lantern, bright and glowing in the night. I check my phone screen. Not yet, not yet, and then there they are. The words on the beach.
ARLO OXLEY (1936–2020)
“You will be missed,” I say because it’s true. For most of my life I’ve either been missing someone or worried about missing someone. I take a deep breath. “Arlo was there when I needed someone to talk to more than I even knew that I did. For a brief time, Arlo was a constant, and anybody that knows me knows I love consistency. He was funny when I needed a laugh or at least a good story. He was big-hearted in the way that I wish I was. His presence will be so missed.”
Slowly, I bring the drone back to earth. I turn the live stream back on me. “So, okay—wow, a lot of comments here. Sorry I missed them, how—”
I begin to read through the scroll of comments rising from the edge of the screen.
Dannie Ngujo: Oh my god, this is so romantic
Carlos F. Santi: That’s my boy! It’s like a movie!
Olivia Stephens: Officially I want to puke. Unofficially . . .
Rick Hutton: :) <3 ;)
Imani Jackson: Tell him you LOVE him already
Imani Jackson: Seriously, what are you waiting for?
Dannie Ngujo: OMG, mayday! Mayday! Use your words, Max!
Ernest Robbins: That was beautiful. But remember, not everyone receives the gift of a second chance.
Dannie Ngujo: You guys!
Winter Robbins made it and he’s right. If he can forgive the man he loved for abandoning him in his time of need, then what am I waiting for?
I start to say something, but the second I do, I realize that Jonah’s gone. His footprints next to Chester’s leave a small path in the sand. Behind me, the tide’s begun to crawl, nipping at the tail end of the words written on the beach.
I falter, unsure of what I’m supposed to do here. “Thanks, everyone, for coming. Good night.” A wave crashes in again.
chapter thirty
JONAH
I wake to a gentle kiss on the lips. Soft. Wet. Hairy.
“Chester!” I sputter, wiping my mouth. “A little personal space, please?”
He obediently backs off the bed and sits down, staring up at me with a very expressive look that says: “It’s like ten, dude, can I go grab a pee?” Groaning, I throw the covers off and scratch him behind his ear, muttering vague apologies because we are roomies now and I’m the only one with an opposable thumb. With great power . . .
“Let’s go, boy.”
We make our way to the backyard, and Chester runs off to do his business behind some boxwood because he is nothing if not a gentleman. I didn’t know Arlo Oxley well, but he definitely knew how to train a dog. Olivia fawns over him. Even David Copperfield likes Chester, and that cat hates everybody.
It took a while to convince Kate . . . she kept saying we didn’t need “any new additions.” But let’s be honest . . . I was going to save Chester one way or another. If I had to snatch him from the shelter and live a life together on the rails with a bindle, I totally would have done it. A) I have always wanted a dog. B) He wears a bow tie. C) I knew Max needed something good.
I take a breath in the morning sunlight, and then notice Olivia sprawled out on a lawn chair with a book. I park myself on the one beside her. The house has fallen back into a quiet routine. Dad arrived home safe and sound, finally, and we had a little barbecue and a little tearing up and a game of Settlers, which he now claims he will never play again out of fear for his life. And so we now have two new members of the Stephens Family Bubble, and both are chipper fellows and make for easy additions.
I haven’t spoken to him yet about Kate. But I will. At the very least, he probably deserves to know why I was so vehemently anti for so long, if he hasn’t worked that out already. Kate thinks he has and just hasn’t wanted to address it. She says he needs to. She’s going to give him a nudge.
And I figure I’ll just keep trying this new thing where I actually face the uncomfortable things in my life and see what happens.
I feel like I’m busier than ever. School and self-tutored French and all the usual stuff, but Olivia and I have also been mining bitcoin and making vases and working on our mini-winery and I guess I am doing a puzzle too. It’s coming along. Still getting panic attacks and insomnia and those great space-outs where I float around in the ether for a while. But I think rebuilding yourself takes time. I think, unfortunately, there is no great big fix. It takes a lot of pieces, and a lot of patience, and they don’t always fit together the first time around.
“Have you been reading?” Olivia asks, her eyes fixed on the book.
Oh yeah. We also have a book club. She really is tireless.
“Yes?”
“Hmm. I have already prepared a few discussion topics. We meet tomorrow.”
“I’ll be ready,” I grumble.
Olivia lowers the book. She’s wearing a white tee and khaki shorts; her aquamarine bathrobe still makes appearances, but it’s no longer petrified, and her hair has been conditioned and combed out of sentience. She was the better actor. I was the better costume designer. But it turns out we both had some pieces missing. We’re working on it together these days, and to be honest, it’s a lot easier. Olivia was right. Obviously.
“I’ve been thinking about Max,” she says, eyeing me over the top of the flap.
“That makes two of us.”
“You heard the news, I presume?” she asks quietly.
I nod. “Dannie told me yesterday. You spoke to Max?”
“She called me last night.”
“Lucky you,” I say, sighing. “Honestly, I was so relieved, I almost ran over to Max’s to hug them both.”
“And then you remembered that your sister would have killed you.”
“Precisely. And that Max doesn’t want to see me anyway.”
Olivia is quiet for a moment, and then turns to a page she has earmarked and reads: “But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.”
“I really wish you didn’t choose Love in the Time of Cholera.”
“It was thematically relevant.”
“So are you saying I’m deluded? Or that Max is feigning indifference to hide the torments of love? Or both?”
“Just a quote I enjoyed,” she says absently. “I already gave you my advice, if you recall.”
“The whole heart-numbing isolation thing?”
She goes back to her book. “Oh, the heartache you would have avoided.”
“So your whole book report is basically: Don’t love in the time of cholera.”
“No. It’s that love is, unfortunately, an inevitable pain in the ass. Cholera, as it turned out, had very little to do with it.”
I close my eyes, feeling the midday heat on my cheeks. “I look forward to the diagrams.” Then I open them again, frowning as I look at her hand. “Are you wearing a ring?”
It’s on her right hand, but definitely on the ring finger. Olivia never wears jewelry.
“No,” she says, not looking up from her book. But her ears go just a bit pink.
“Is that a promise ring?” I ask incredulously, trying to grab at it. “Oh my god. Does Delaware actually exist?!”
“Of course not!” Olivia says, snatching her arm away. She pauses. “Her name is Nya.”
“So your whole lecture was hypocritical? And why did you make up a different name?”
“Dramatic effect. And it wasn’t hypocritical . . . she is far away. Well, in San Diego. And she bought me this ring online and had it delivered, and I gave it the requisite time before opening it. We are simply, well, promising to try and resume things as soon as the world allows.”
Her ears are bright pink now.
I grin, squeezing her arm. “I’m happy for you, Olivia.”
She tries to look disdainful, but I catch a twitch at the corner of her mouth.
“It was nice what you did with Chester and showing up there and everything,” Olivia says after a moment. “I know she appreciated it.”
I glance at her. “You’re almost done, right?”
“Last few pages.”
“Does it work out? Do they . . . get together eventually?”
“Oh, my dear, cheating little brother. Go finish the book.”
Carlos F. Santi: I broke up with Marcus today
Jonah: the guy you were computer dating?
Carlos F. Santi: yeah
Hello (From Here) Page 24