Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (29 page)

She meant to be purposeful throughout the day, but in the after noon she found herself reading a detective novel on the beach. Her

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mission was large and ominous, but you couldn't spend much of the day on it. She'd visited both real-estate offices and entered the listing for the house by ten in the morning. Life-altering events fit into a disproportionately small amount of time. Like death, for instance. Or changing a friend into a lover.

"Hi, Alice."

She looked up to see Gabriel Cohen. He sat on her towel with her. In less than a minute, it was bunched up and sandy.

"How's it going?" she asked. His dark blond hair fell in perfect silk strings over his forehead. He was bigger. His limbs were longer and leaner. You could see knees, elbows, and knuckles emerging from his cloud of babyness. Sometimes she wished adults continued to grow and change physically at the rate that children did, just to remind you how dramatic the effect of time. When you couldn't see it, you could fool yourself into thinking it wasn't happening.

"I made a swimming pool."

"Oh?"

"Down there." He pointed to a clawed-up patch of sand near the water.

"Helen helped me."

"Who's Helen?"

"Some kid," he said. "Did you bring any snacks?"

Alice laughed. Once his babysitter, always his babysitter. "No. I have snacks at my house, though. Do you want me to get you something?"

"Okay." She got up, and he followed her.

"Do you want to come?" she asked.

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"Okay."

"Where's your mother? Go tell her."

He ran down the beach to his mother, who was sitting under an umbrella. Mrs. Cohen looked up and waved, and Alice saw the look she saw everywhere. Mrs. Cohen was mindful of their tragedy. She knew, just as everyone here knew. She wanted not to confront the fact, as she knew it without having been told directly. She wanted to look and seem the right way in respect to Alice 's status. Alice turned her eyes, with some relief, to Gabriel, who just wanted her snacks.

Gabriel raced back with a smaller blond girl on his tail. "Can Helen come?" he asked.

"Sure," she said, figuring Mrs. Cohen's blessing was good enough for the two of them. Helen had small, fat thighs that brushed together when she walked. She had a severely bobbed haircut, a yellow one-piece bathing suit, and a tiny cupid's mouth.

The two of them were coated in sand like two sugar donuts, and Alice had the fleeting thought that she should wash them off before she brought them into the kitchen, but she didn't bother with it. She thought of the joke her mother used to make when they'd cooked up a feast in the kitchen, dirtying every pot and pan. "Let's just sell the place," her mother would say, as though she were Marie Antoinette.

"Crackers or apples or . . . cheese?" Alice asked, looking through the cabinets and into the refrigerator. Kind neighbors had left trays of sweet things, but Alice figured she would give them something healthy if she could get away with it.

Helen looked to Gabriel. "Crackers," he answered.

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"Crackers," Helen answered, too. Alice could see that Helen didn't want to make a wrong move. She was younger, and thus had to earn her way. Gabriel would as easily banish her as keep her on.

"How's your brother?" Alice asked.

"He went to corkball," Gabriel said, shooting most of the cracker out with his answer.

"Gosh. Is he old enough for that already?"

"He is seven," Gabriel said, almost reverently. He looked to Helen to see if she 'd absorbed the fact that he had a seven-year-old brother.

"How old are you?" Alice asked Helen.

"Four."

"Well, I'm five and a quarter," Gabriel countered, as if to add perspective.

"I know that, because you were four last summer," Alice said, and Gabriel looked slightly defeated to have to be reminded of that.

"I'm four," Helen mentioned again with a little more pride.

They went out to the deck to finish the pile of crackers.

"Do you live here?" Helen asked. Alice could hear the sand granules crunching in her small molars. She saw how sandy Helen's hands were. She should have washed them.

"I do. Where do you live?"

Helen turned around and pointed with a sandy finger to Paul's house. "Right there."

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Breakfast was no longer a solitary affair. Now that Helen had seen the proximity of Alice 's house and the number of snacks therein, she not only came herself but brought her sister, Bonnie, who was only two. They might have brought Henry, their brother, they explained, but he was only seven months old and couldn't walk yet. Toward the end of breakfast, their mother arrived and introduced herself as Emily.

"I hope they are not disturbing you," Emily said. She had the little brother under one arm and a pleasantly harried look in her khaki shorts and bathing-suit top.

"No. Not at all," Alice replied. She, Helen, and Bonnie had each eaten a bowl of Cheerios while sitting on the deck, though Bonnie had spilled hers halfway through. "I'm happy for the company."

"Are you here alone?" Emily asked.

Alice was surprisingly happy for a direct and uncomplicated question. Everyone she knew here avoided questions altogether. "Yes. For now. My parents usually come on weekends, but I'm not sure they are going to be out this summer."

"That's too bad," Emily said. "Well, I'm happy to meet you. I look forward to being neighbors."

Alice looked at her wistfully. Emily had her falling-down mom ponytail and the look of a purposeful life. Alice tried to remember her predisposition toward hostility. Why didn't she like this per son? She couldn't even remember.

"Come on, girls," Emily said.

"We're staying with Alice," Helen said.

"Honey. Alice has her own things to do," Emily said.

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No, she didn't. Alice suddenly didn't want Helen or Bonnie to go. Bonnie could spill every single thing in the house if she liked. Alice would help her. "They can stay," she said to Emily. "Really, I like having them. I'll bring them home before lunch."

Emily cast her a grateful look as she went back out to the board walk.

Alice cut up a watermelon and taught them how to spit the seeds off the side of the deck. "We 'll have a forest of watermelons!" Helen proclaimed.

Alice got out her old crayons and drew an underseascape with them. They purposefully made all the creatures very friendly, even the ones with fangs. Alice drew a dolphin.

She found her old collection of picture books and read them her favorite William Steig and Dr. Seuss books. They watched the hum mingbirds float around the orange trumpet flowers. She held Bonnie up so she could see, enjoying the feel of her little pellet body.

"Okay, thing one and thing two," she said to them. "It's time to go home."

When they complained, she thought of an enticement. "Follow me and I'll show you something important," she said.

She showed them out the back way, and crept with them along the phragmite path right to their back door. "This is a secret short cut," she said to them in a voice just above a whisper. "This is the way my best friend used to come to see me and my sister."

The following morning, she was just getting out her bowl and cereal box, perching on the deck, enjoying the morning sun, when the two little blond heads appeared through the reeds of the secret path. Life goes on, she thought.

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For a month, Alice read and entertained her tiny flock. Not only Helen and Bonnie came but Gabriel and others, too. She liked to teach them things, she realized. She taught them how to catch crabs, how to dig for sand fleas, how to boogie board. You couldn't let these traditions be lost. She taught them how to kill a silverfish and how to improve hand speed for slapping a mosquito dead.

She taught Helen, Gabriel, and another five-year-old named Bo how to ride two-wheelers. She taught Bonnie how to ride a tri cycle. After that, she taught them all how to do it no-handed. Those who can't do teach, she thought.

She started to see beauty in this place again. Not beauty in the beautiful things, necessarily, but beauty in the ordinary things, like the rows of telephone poles along Main Walk and the way the sun glinted off the draping cables. She appreciated the ways the trees arched over the walks that ran perpendicular from the ocean to the bay, and how when you stood with the ocean at your back, you looked straight through a green tunnel to a circle of blue bay at the other end. She noticed how quickly the reeds grew through the cracks between the boards underfoot and how, in a single season, the new orange planks weathered into matching gray.

One day she stood on the beach before a storm, and the water swept so far out from the shore that she could see the foundation and the hearth from an old house that had long since washed away.

Sometimes she watched her little flock and she felt like warning them, Be careful, you little ones. This place had a way of grabbing

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you and holding you. You could spend the rest of your life longing for a single idealized moment that may not have even happened.

By night Alice knitted a scarf for nobody. She 'd started it for Riley, and it seemed wrong, somehow, not to finish it. And then, in an odd brainstorm around the second week of August, she decided she'd make it for Emily. Even if she never got up the courage to give it to Emily, a knitter always needed to know for whom she knitted.

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From That World into This

O n the first day of September, a large and handsome face

appeared under the trumpet-vine bower. He took up sev eral times the space of her usual guests.

Alice's body froze in a strange position. Helen and Bonnie looked up at him.

"Who are you?" Helen asked, mildly put out that a fully grown stranger should interrupt their drawing.

"I'm Paul. Who are you?"

"Helen," Helen said. "I live over there." She pointed to her house.

Alice watched the realization as it overtook Paul's face. "Do you really?"

"Yes."

"How do you like it?" he asked.

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"We like to come see Alice," Helen answered. She was surprised and pleased to see the laugh she got out of Paul.

"Me too," he said.

"That's Bonnie."

"Hello, Bonnie," Paul said.

Bonnie continued scribbling blue for water.

"She's my sister."

"Wow. Lucky."

"We know a secret shortcut," Helen blurted. And then she looked at Alice, worrying she 'd said too much.

"That's okay," Alice said. "He knows it, too."

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Paul sat at the wooden table on the deck of Alice's house and watched the two little blond heads disappear into the phragmite. He could hardly look at Alice sitting there across from him, her feet on the chair, her arms wrapped around her knees, dressed in his favorite cutoff shorts and a white T-shirt that might once have been his. Her colors were coming back. The sun was turning her skin the syrupy orange-tan color that only Alice turned, finding her freckles again, lighting up the bronze and red in her hair, put ting the gold back into the green of her eyes. All the burgeoning possibility in her was practically blinding. But she doesn't even know, he thought. He could tell by her posture that she had no idea. He could tell by the fray of her fingernails.

There was a familiar feeling he knew he could feel right now. It opened in front of him like a hallway, beckoning him to walk down

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it. He could resent her for her beauty. He could feel threatened by her again. He could be threatened by the fact that Alice had already won the adoration of two little girls who now lived in his house. His path in life was not exactly original. Who could live next to Alice and not fall in love with her? And she, being so easily loved, did she really need his, too? What could she want with it? What did he have to offer?

It was a familiar urge to want to weigh her down. To demand the return of things he would not properly give. But he would not be conquered by that urge. He would sooner get up and walk down the boardwalk to the ferry and never see her again. He came back once. He came back twice. He didn't deserve another chance. He'd made a promise to himself that he was not allowed in her presence if he couldn't love her better.

He had to trust her. With her gifts, she could have taken what she wanted from the world. She could have stood up and demanded it. But she didn't take; she gave. He had to trust that even with the full knowledge of her powers, she would use them for good.

Hardest of all, he had to trust her to love him. He knew that was not a trial for Alice, who was so gifted at being loved and loving, but rather for him, who was so poor at both.

"Are you staying over tonight?" she asked him.

"I don't know," he answered. He didn't want to scare her. "I might stay with the Cooleys or the Loebs. I came over with Frank on the ferry. I gather they've got extra rooms now that the kids are gone. Have you noticed he has a lot of hair growing out of his ears?"

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She laughed. When she left off, there was silence.

"Do you want to take a walk with me?" he asked. "A long, hot, and tiring one?"

She smiled and nodded, but he could see that a question was on its way. "Why did you come?"

He thought of a few different answers: I needed to settle some business with the house. Tom Cooley's been bugging me to play in the softball tournament. I had nothing else to do and the weather was good.

"To see you," he said.

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Walking along next to Paul, Alice looked up at him. His posture was a bit straighter. He 'd finally gotten a haircut, she saw. A professional one. He looked like a proper grown-up. Like a man. And though his eyes were dark brown like his father's and his jaw was a similar shape, she thought how little Paul looked like the pictures of Robbie.