Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (30 page)

She was trying to understand his mood. Was he angry? Was he sorry? Was he forgiving? Was this a postmortem? Would she have her whole life to look back on the things they said today and know that it was the final episode?

The way he looked at her, there was something behind his eyes. Some flickering, questioning part of him that wanted to reach out and make contact, she thought. It came and it went. He had a ques tion, but he couldn't ask it.

"A year ago today, I came to find you and you weren't there," he said as they walked.

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Alice nodded. She remembered it for a different reason, too.

"I waited at your house. I went to the Cohens' to see if you were still working. I tried the yacht club, the courts, the fields, the beach. I couldn't find you, and I couldn't find Riley. I sat in your kitchen alone for hours. I just waited."

She knew something of waiting. It might have been the first time it was him and not her. "That's where I found you when I got back," she said.

He nodded.

"Do you know where I was?" A part of her was still scared of having responsibility for a secret.

"I think so. Now I do."

"Riley didn't want you to know. I couldn't tell you."

"I know."

The sympathy she had compressed and boxed away, but it started to leak out. It was sympathy for him, for being shut off without an explanation. It was sympathy for them, her and Paul, because they loved each other. Trickiest of all to feel, perhaps, was sympathy for herself, for a year of hardship, loss, and atonement. She had thought she could help. She thought she could make it bet ter, but she hadn't.

They walked past Lonelyville, past the shacks and bungalows at odd angles. Of all the towns, this was the one that seemed to stay the same.

He reached out and held her hand. It seemed so strange at first, to be touched by him. It summoned a thousand other times, each of them signifying a different thing.

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"We didn't make her sick," he said. "I know it felt like that, but we didn't."

She gripped his hand hard without meaning to. She could hardly see to walk. She swallowed and tried to talk. "It felt like that."

"Alice, I know." He turned to her and took her other hand. He sat her on the sand and put both arms around her. He held her and patted her. He brushed her hair from her face and wiped her tears like she was his baby. She felt the solidness of his body enveloping hers, and she let him. He tended to her tears, even though he had his own.

"I felt like we left her. We betrayed her."

He nodded on her head. "I know."

"We were punished for it."

Paul nodded again. She felt the stubble of his chin on her scalp. There was a long quiet except for the waves and the occasional shout of a swimmer. "Who do you think punished us?" he asked slowly, not like he already knew the answer. "Was it Riley?"

Alice sat up, displacing his head. "No, no. It wasn't her."

Paul had a thoughtful look on his features. "How do you know?"

"Because she loved us. It scared her a little, she told me once. But she said she always knew."

"Then who wanted to punish us?"

Alice pushed her hair behind her ears. "I don't know. God. Fate. Me. Maybe we punished ourselves."

They sat for a while, watching the water. She leaned her shoul der against his. A dog went by without a leash and so did an all-ter rain ambulance. She thought of Riley cursing at the cars on the beach. You couldn't really curse at an ambulance.

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Paul stood up first and reached out for her hand to pull her up next to him.

"You're allowed to grow up," he said.

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They resumed walking at Lonelyville, but Alice didn't open her mouth again until they were past the jetties at Ocean Beach and she got in a talking mood. Of all the things she had to tell him, it was odd to her what came out.

"So often this summer I keep thinking: I know I'm holding back. I know I'm waiting. I know I'm afraid to go forward. But I don't know how to get there from here."

He was quiet, so she kept going. "Sometimes I see it as a tricky mountain pass between two valleys. Other times, it's like perilous straits connecting two lands. Partly it's the fear of the trip itself, I think, but partly it's the fear that I won't be able to get back. I'll turn around and the clouds will have settled over the mountaintop. Or the waters will have risen and shifted, and there will be no way home."

Paul nodded. He took her hand again, which she discovered she appreciated.

"But that's not even the real fear."

He gave her an odd smile. Short on mirth but affectionate. "What's the real fear?"

"The real fear is that I won't want to go home."

u

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"They put the house on the market, you know," she told him some where east of Seaview. She hadn't been eager to tell him that.

His face was incredulous. "Your house? Here?"

"Yes. I'm supposed to be here helping to show it and settle it, but it's been pretty slow. In a month, one person has come to see it, and she left without looking at the upstairs. She asked whether you could tear it down and build a bigger house on the lot."

Paul looked as though his whiskers itched. "I don't understand why they're selling it."

"Well." She tipped her head. "You sold yours."

"But your house is different. It's really worth something."

"Tell that to the realtor," Alice said.

"Realtors never know what things are worth."

Alice dragged her toes behind her in the sand, making a linked chain of footsteps.

"Are your folks serious, do you think?" Paul asked.

"They don't want to be here without Riley," Alice explained. "You must see that."

"But this place was her life. It's a way to keep her near, I would think."

Alice considered the days and nights she'd spent here. Riley's absence was acute, and her presence even more so. "I think I think so, too." She shrugged. "But what a choice. You surround yourself with your pain or you avoid it and let it find you when you are try ing to do other things."

"Are those the only alternatives?"

Alice shrugged. "Can you think of others?"

"Can't you just keep going?"

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Alice thought about that as they passed Ocean Bay Park. She'd considered the fact that she never walked into any of these places, only past them.

"Anyway, the woman who looked at it put in an offer for the tear-down, as she called it, and my parents said no. They said they don't want anyone tearing it down, but the realtor said there's really nothing you can do. She said anyone who would buy the place would probably tear it down."

Paul shook his head. "Every year you come back and a few more are gone."

"I'm almost glad Riley isn't around to see it happen," Alice said.

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At the Point O'Woods beach, Paul thought of a story to tell her.

"My father was friends with a guy who lost his leg in a motor cycle accident. One time when I was very small, I guess four, because my dad was still alive, he came to the house here at the beach, and while my parents were in the other room, he showed me the place where the doctor cut off his leg."

"God. Why did he do that?" Alice asked.

"Well, I guess he was not a man who lived his life according to good judgment."

"I guess not," she said.

"So anyway, I thought about it all the time. For years after, I used to lie in my bed and worry that I would get a motorcycle and get in an accident."

"I didn't know that."

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"I hated motorcycles. I said to my mother, `I'll never get a motorcycle.' And she said, `You never know what you'll want when you are older.'

"After that, the thing that scared me was not so much the motor cycle itself but that I could turn into a person who would want one. I was scared of the idea that I could become an entirely different person, a stranger to myself."

"I can understand that."

"So when I was about nine, I wrote myself a letter. When I cleaned out the house in May, I found many things, and that was one of them."

He loved the look of amusement on her face. "What did it say?"

"I addressed it to my future self. It said, `No matter how much you might think you want a motorcycle, please don't get one.' And then I wrote in all capital letters: `REMEMBER HENDERSON'S LEG.' "

She considered this. "Did you ever want a motorcycle?"

"Never."

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"I am going back to school in the fall," Alice said on the long road of sand leading to the Sunken Forest.

"Are you?" he said. He tried to keep his face neutral. He'd already given himself a lecture on this subject. Part of loving her better was putting aside his opinions and prejudices, and letting her be a lawyer if she wanted to.

"Yes. Riley made me."

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He laughed. "Did she?"

"She caught me working at the Duane Reade on Eleventh Avenue. She said I was supposed to be the smart one. It really annoyed her."

"Well, as you've said, you have to be smart for law school." He tried to make his voice sound game.

"I'm not going to law school."

"You're not?"

"No. I applied to the School of Social Work at NYU. They were nice enough to let me apply late. I got the letter on August seventh."

"Wow. How about that. Well, congratulations." As he tried to keep his opinion about her suitability for a law career to himself, he felt similarly bound to hide his joy about this.

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"We trusted ourselves when we were younger," Alice asked thoughtfully, somewhere between the Sunken Forest and Sailor's Haven. "Didn't we?"

"Riley did," Paul said. "And we, to a lesser extent, did, too."

"We trusted Riley."

"Yes."

"We didn't trust ourselves to be adults, though. We thought we knew better then."

Paul shook his head, thinking. "The adults we had around didn't offer much promise. They offered us so many things not to do, it was hard to see what possibilities were left over."

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She looked to his face for bitterness or an expression of dis missal, but she didn't see either.

"I know about Ethan and Lia, you know."

"Yeah. Riley said she told you."

"I had no idea before."

She walked quietly along, feeling the sun on the back of her neck, the wet sand twisting under the balls of her feet, the ache of the muscles in her legs. She was struck by an idea that she liked. "You know what I think?"

"No." He squeezed her hand. "Maybe."

"I think Riley was trying to tell us that she knew we had to go that way but that she thought we'd do all right at it."

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"I see the moon," Alice pointed out when they'd reached Talis man, just before Water Island. It was there that they decided to turn around and walk west. "But the sun's still hanging on, so I guess that doesn't count."

"I think we should keep going. I think we should walk all the way to tomorrow," he said. The sun was starting its descent over the bay in a modest display. It didn't seem a night for showing off.

"We don't have any water to drink," she said. It was a warm night. She felt the damp sweat on her neck and back.

"That's a point. I have my wallet, though." It was a stigma of sorts. Only day-trippers carried their wallets.

"We can buy water in Cherry Grove."

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They did better than that. They had two martinis each and watched a transvestite floor show at The Ice Palace with a special appearance by the winner of the Mr. Fire Island Leather contest. "The featured fetish this year was fangs and biting," the bartender informed them.

"Whenever you say you go to Fire Island, this is how much fun people think you are having," Paul pointed out, once they were back on the beach.

"Little do they know," said Alice.

They were still seven miles from home, the sand was soft, the moon had the sky to itself, and they were both drunk.

"We're breeders. This is uncouth," Alice said, sinking beside him into the sand by the water.

"It's a tolerant place," Paul said. He settled her head onto his chest, holding her tight against him as they fell asleep.

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When Paul opened his eyes again, the sun was lighting up the sur face of the sea, though it remained underwater. For a moment, he had no idea where he was or how he had gotten there. And then he felt Alice.

Alice must have sensed him stir, because she opened her eyes. He loved to watch her. He felt like he had a private insight, watching her pass from that world into this. He felt like he would know her a little better each time. He liked the spot of drool on his clavicle.

"Is it tomorrow?" she whispered.

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"It is."

His body felt sore and nice as they stretched and rose and resumed their walk west, toward home. He reached for her hand. They had nowhere to be, nothing to do, no one waiting for them. The sand stretched out for miles in front of them, but the empti ness that felt like loneliness yesterday felt different today.

It was the same beach, the same ocean, the same sun. The same shirt and pants. The same girl walking alongside him. And yet some how different.

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Not Getting a Motorcycle

I t turned out someone was waiting for them. Two people, in

fact.

"We didn't have breakfast," Helen said, palms facing the sky. It was unclear as to whether it was a request, a complaint, or merely a statement of fact. "I think Bonnie's hungry."

"Oh, good. I'm starving," Alice said. "How about Cheerios?"

Helen pointed at Paul. "He's still here."

"He is, isn't he?" Alice said, on her way into the kitchen. She brought out four bowls and four spoons in one arm and a cereal box and milk carton in the other. He loved how naturally she pro vided and mothered. She'd always been that way, hadn't she? From the very beginning. He had to laugh at himself as he thought of it. He'd picked a baby for a mother.