Before My Eyes (7 page)

“Peter! Do you need help, sweetie?” shouts Trish. “If you need another hand, you have to ask!”

He's grunting, carrying twice as much as he should be, helping me out, really. Ever since he found out that I hurt my back playing soccer, he's offered to load up the water bottles and ice from the back. I could lift if I had to, but Peter gets me out of the extra work.

“Max, I'll take care of Peter,” says Trish. I guess today she's decided that she's in charge. “You take care of Daisy.”

I hate Daisy. That's what we call the soft serve ice cream machine. Trish is much better with it. I'm not mechanical. Her pours are neater. Boxes of a thick, milky substance have to be dumped into the back of Daisy several times a day, and somehow, it comes out as ice cream. But Trish knows the tricks to Daisy—when she's empty, how much to pour in so the ice cream is creamy and smooth and doesn't melt before the kids leave the Shack, which only means that they'll come back crying.

“You guys are my best friends,” says Peter to nobody. He tends to talk to the floor, or to the walls. He has issues with eye contact.

“We're not,” I say, lifting a stack of water bottles out of his arms instead of dealing with the ice cream machine. I also hate having Trish order me around, even though I've got to admit, she's good at it. “After tomorrow, I'm never going to see you again. And can you deal with Daisy, Trish? She hates me.”

“Why am I loved by those who shouldn't love me?” Trish asks in her over-the-top philosophical way. But she goes to the ice cream machine. The insides smell sour.

“Now what's your problem, sweetie?” She's speaking to the machine.

“We're going to see you,” Peter says to me. He spins toward Trish for confirmation, knocking over the cartons of swirl mix. They crash to the floor. Lucky they weren't opened yet, or the day would be totally ruined. “Aren't we going to see Max?”

Trish picks up the boxes for Daisy with ease. She could probably bench-press more than I could, too. “He just means that he's going back to school—and so are you.”

“But we can be friends even if we are in different schools. Can't we, Max?”

I shift the water bottles down to the ground. There is no answer for this. I don't want to answer. I don't want to be friends with him or Trish. I want to erase this summer.

“Can't we, Max?”

How do you tell someone like Pete that these kinds of friendships don't last, that they weren't made to last more than the summer even in the best of circumstances, and these certainly haven't been the best. That some friends aren't meant to be, except in stories, or books. You miss a penalty shot and no one wants to talk to you, and maybe you don't want to talk to them, either. You want your own oblivion, and they don't understand. You don't answer their texts or even answer the messages of the one or two who venture to call. None of this has much to do with Peter, but you know you won't be friends with him past tomorrow. I close my eyes. I want to be inside my own head, nowhere else.

“Didn't we have a great summer together, Max? We'll still be friends after it's over, won't we?”

You won't answer his messages or take his calls. You will never see him again. But I hear myself saying into the dead space between us, “Yup, Peter. We'll be friends.”

Claire

Friday, 11:00
A.M.

“Izzy. Let's go. Now. I'm ready to go. We have to get out of here. Let's move it. Let's go.”

Focus on getting out the door. Lock the door. Get in the minivan and drive away as if you're never coming back.

On the ride to the beach, Izzy, in the backseat, asks, “Can I open the window, Claire?”

“No,” I say automatically.

“I want to taste the ocean.”

“You can't taste the ocean.”

“I can. My lips can lick the air.”

I know my mother and father hate me to drive Izzy around with the windows open, even if she is mashed into her too-small toddler safety seat with her seat belt across her six-year-old chest. But I love the image of her “licking the air,” and so I say, “Yes, go ahead. But stay in your seat.”

I unlock the window and she zips it down. She shifts to the edge of the seat. Her hair swoops behind her. She laughs. Her mouth open, she licks the air.

I smell the ocean before I see it—like a hot burst in my mouth. The sky is bluer here. I always think the beach should be farther than it is, that it should be a long trip, because when I was Izzy's age it always felt that way. I forget sometimes that we live on an island and that water, the Long Island Sound to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, surrounds us. Unlucky cars slow down to pay the tolls. Those cars go off to the right, to Jones Beach, the state beach. I head the other way, toward our town beach. The parking lot here is less crowded than the others down Ocean Parkway. I flash our town pass.

“Promise me again, you're not going to tell Daddy that I brought you to the beach?” I nod my head to her, urging her to imitate me, which she readily does.

“I never told the other times. Did I?”

“I don't think you did.”

“I am not going to tell anybody, not even me,” she repeats.

I park the whale of a minivan. Across the parking lot, we hold hands, race-walk. My beach bag jostles against my shoulder. Cars shoot around us, and soon we are running, our ponytails loosening, the sea salt caught in our hair. Ahead of us is the tunnel that skims under Ocean Parkway from the parking lots to the actual oceanfront. The tunnel, short enough, is dark, damp; it's a passage to another world. On one side is endless heat, on the other the ocean breeze. On one side, pavement, on the other, sand.

When I was Izzy's age, I was scared of the tunnel. Even then, it had no lights and water dripped down the concrete sides, no matter how dry a summer. Bugs drowned in its stagnant pools. My mother would encourage me to run, meet her on the other side. She wanted me to be brave, she said. Screams would echo, my own and of other kids. All of us were sent running through the dark. Now, I plunge in with Izzy in hand. No one permits the little kids to run loose anymore. We all have bags and chairs and children in tow and somehow we hold on to it all. I'm still a little afraid of touching the walls, of the quick darkness, of the stench of urine mixed with sea and coconut sunscreen. I wonder if my mother felt fear and just hid it from me.

Izzy tugs loose, races ahead of me.

Packs of families swarm by me. Mothers pull wagons of gear with them—they are prepared not just for a day at the beach, but for a lifetime, with coolers, blankets, chairs, umbrellas, and sets of underwear and shorts and T-shirts.

I bump my bag against the shoulder of one girl striding in her black bikini and silver flip-flops toward the beach. She gives me a look that says, “How dare you touch me,” until even she sees that I'm no one, no one she needs to be worried about, and then makes a face and rolls her eyes and fixes her lipstick as if that's what the real problem is. I never understood lipstick on the beach. Hers is hot pink.

“Izzy,” I say, realizing I've lost sight of her.

She'll know to wait on the other side. She's a smart kid, starting first grade next week. Sweat stings my lips, mixes with the sea air, and I can taste salt as if I'm melting. “Izzy! Wait up!” I say as if I can see her. She's disappeared among the bare legs and portable freezers and carts packed high with supplies. I break into the sunlight.

Along the boardwalk and onto the beach, in a trick of light, people meld into other people. Girls in bikinis swim together—not really swim, they don't go in the water; but they walk in schools together, a flutter of legs. The guys in the baggy, long swim trunks crash into the water as one; they plunge into the waves headfirst, and rise, flexing their abs and running their hands over their flat, hard stomachs. I hurry along the boardwalk searching for my sister, for a little girl in pink—no, in green with frogs—and curly blond hair. She is lost. The girl in the bikini with the pink lipstick slithers past with her friends surrounding her, all of them in bikinis and lipstick.

“Izzy!”

Once when I was Izzy's age, my father brought me to the beach alone (I don't know where my mother was, since they rarely split up), but I was with him one moment and then I wasn't. I turned around and he wasn't there. Sea gulls, hundreds of them, had landed near me in too-still lines. Until then, I was going along on the beach, certain I'd find my father. But these birds had black beady eyes that didn't blink. I was sure they would snatch me up and drop me in the middle of the ocean. I would be lost and never found. I screamed, “Daddy.” And every father looked like my father: dark curly hair, muscled bodies strong enough to pick me up with one arm, a bathing suit that was blue or green and had a pattern on it like palm trees, a soft belly and a broad chest matted with lots of hair, thick enough to comb. I ran from those sea gulls certain if I ran fast enough I'd find my father. I was lost for what seemed like hours. My father swore to my mother it was only for a half hour, an hour tops that I was missing. But in that time, a half hour, an hour, I knew that the only one who could save me was me.

“Izzy!”

I catch my reflection in a pair of mirrored sunglasses. I look like I'm falling apart, hair out of my ponytail, beach bag overflowing. He tilts his head, seeing me, watching me watch myself. In the reflection of his sunglasses, I'm all wide brown eyes. I'm distorted, elongated; but he doesn't turn his head or take off the glasses, and I wonder if he's looking for someone, too. He has a shaved head and a cold grin.

Then, from behind him, Izzy appears. She races toward me: giggling, dashing to my side, and jabbing her hand back into my own. “Slow poke,” she cries out.

“Don't do that again.”

“Do what?”

“Run away from me.”

“I'm right here,” she says. “Anyways, I'm not afraid.”

“I'm not afraid, either,” I say, though I am angry at the fear welling inside me. I take a deep breath. The heavyset, bald guy trains his mirrored sunglasses on us. I look down toward Izzy. I've seen enough of my distorted image.

“Yes, you are, Claire,” says Izzy. “You're always afraid something is going to happen. To me.”

I exhale. We're here. It's going to be a blistering day. I am not afraid.

The girl in the black bikini and silver flip-flops slides by with her friends. She winks at Izzy and ignores me. She's barely raising her legs, more gliding along the wood and sand. Strangers are always attracted to Izzy, commenting on her heart-shaped face, her quick smile, her blond curls, how happy and precocious and adorable she is.

“Someday I want a bathing suit like that,” says Izzy, pulling toward the other teenagers. “Why don't you ever wear a bathing suit like that, Claire?”

“I like the frogs on your bathing suit more,” I say to her, tickling her tummy to make her laugh, which she does.

“Beach,” says Izzy.

And I wish I were a kid again. I don't want to be the responsible one anymore.

“Beach,” she repeats, as if trying to be reasonable.

I am waiting for the day to end, and the day after that, and for school to start and end, and for the day when I go off to college and leave you, though you will always be my little sister and I will never really leave you. I need to go. I need to know if there will ever be one person, that's all I really need, one guy who will look at me and understand me. And kiss me. I have to add that. I'm probably the only seventeen-year-old in North or South Lakeshore who hasn't been kissed in a way that says you're the only one I'm thinking of, looking at, seeing.

“Come on, Claire. You're just thinking too much. You're going to hurt your brain.”

“That's what Mommy always said—or says. She's still going to say that, isn't she. I still think too much.”

“If your head wasn't screwed on you'd lose that too, Claire.”

My mother used to say that, too. And Izzy is repeating it with the exact exasperated tone as our mother. She's also tugging on my arm. I force myself to focus on her. “Did you ever lose your head, Claire?

“Not yet.”

“Why'd she say that?”

“I was a daydreamer.”

“Aren't you still?”

I don't have time to dream in the day. I'm shaking my head. I'm not a daydreamer anymore. I'm practical. I get things done.

“Can we hurry up?” she's saying in her grown-up six-year-old voice. She shakes my arm.

Why do I feel like turning around and going home? Going into my room, locking the door? Anything could happen here. We are too exposed. “Stand still,” I say to my sister and spray more sunscreen on her from top to bottom, emptying the can.

“If we don't hurry up, we're going to miss the ocean, Claire.”

She looks at me, smiling, pleading. There's no other adult to tell her—or me—what to do. I look around as if to double-check that my father—or mother—aren't suddenly appearing. We are alone, and I realize, free,
free:
unfettered, unburdened, unleashed, I think, running through synonyms at top speed, for at least today.

“What are you waiting for, Izzy?” I say, kidding her, dashing along the boardwalk without her, squinting into the sun, resolved to have a last day at the beach that will sustain me through the winter.

I expect her to follow me. But she stands there, alone, looking panicked into the blinding sun, as if I am going to leave her. “Izzy, come on. Let's go,” I say, and her thin legs scamper to me. She entwines her fingers through mine. She swings our arms together. I am never going to have a moment alone again, am I? We walk, our hands locked, toward the far end of the boardwalk.

The Atlantic Ocean stretches before us, miles to the east and miles to the west. At the far end to the east is beach, ocean, and more ocean, and at the far end of the western horizon is New York City with its skyscrapers and bridges in miniature, like a model, against the blue-blue skies. Before us is the chance to be lost in ourselves.