Body Surfing (15 page)

Mrs. Edwards presses her lips together and then lets out a small explosion of air. "I do not understand why I, her mother, wasn't told. And I don't understand something else. Why"--she snatches the note from Sydney--"why does Julie thank Sydney? Thank her for what?"

"I think for the--" Sydney begins, and then she has a thought. "Did the police go into Julie's room?" she asks.

"They did."

But they might not have known what to look for. She rises from the table. "I'll be right back," she says.

She leaves the kitchen and heads up the stairs. The door to Julie's room is open. Sydney steps inside and scans the contents.

Light-headed, she reaches behind herself for the bed and sits at its edge. For the first time, she feels the full blow of Julie's disappearance. She wraps her arms around her stomach.

Images of Julie laughing in the front seat of a car entangle themselves with recent memories of Jeff laughing on the floor of the gazebo. At the urgency, the absurdity of passion, now fulfilled. A grown man and woman fumbling through wet clothes to make each other naked. She remembers Jeff's cheekbone pressed hard into hers. Something he said into her neck that she couldn't quite hear. The exquisite tenderness with which he covered her. As he pulled her close to him, her slicker released a rivulet of water that ran down her neck and along her collarbone. She shivered. Her feet were cold. She could feel the rain on her bare skin. She brought them up and tucked them between Jeff's thighs. He reached down with his hand and held them there.

"This should have been such a happy night," Jeff says from the doorway.

Sydney tries to smile.

He joins Sydney on the bed, the weight of the two bodies making a deep V in the soft mattress. "It was impetuous what I did," he says. "Even careless. But I felt very certain."

Sydney nods.

"What do you feel now?" he asks, and Sydney can hear the tiny hitch in his breath. Is he nervous about her answer?

She takes his hand so that he will understand that she is still with him. "I feel sad," she says. "Julie's really gone."

"How do you know?"

"She's taken the canvases. She's taken the paints."

Jeff turns his head in the direction of the corner where the easel should be. She can feel his sigh in his shoulders.

She releases his hand and walks to the window. Through the glass, she sees a sunny afternoon, Julie standing in the water. Sydney snags the thing that was in Julie's note, the thing that flitted across her brain.

I'M OK.

A young woman in a wet suit catching a wave.

"What is it?" Jeff asks.

"I think I know who Julie ran off with," Sydney says.

"Who is he?" Jeff asks from the bed.

"It might not be a he," Sydney says, turning.

A greenish sheen on the surface. The water thick and jellied. Overhead, yellow clouds trap the heat. Sydney waits through a succession of waves, picking the tallest one. Her timing is off. She cannot get her rhythm.

Tonight and tomorrow, guests will arrive at the beach house. There will be a caterer, a girl named Harriet from the village who does "this sort of thing," though surely there cannot be enough weddings in the village and in the beach houses, Sydney thinks, to keep a caterer in business. Harriet must cook for cocktail parties as well, the ones at which spouses sometimes do not speak to each other.

The weekend weather will be iffy, the word batted around like a badminton birdie. Sydney hears it from the upstairs hallway, from the kitchen. Beyond that, no one is willing to say.

If the weather is simply iffy, the wedding will be held on the porch. If worse, the ceremony will take place in the living room, the furniture temporarily removed. It is to be a small affair, family and close friends only. The phrase makes Sydney uncomfortable, reminding her of a funeral.

Sydney's parents will arrive separately. The wedding will be conducted by a minister from Needham who has happily accepted the best guest room upstairs. Sydney's friends Emily and Becky will come tomorrow. Jeff will be better represented by Ivers and Sahir and Peter and Frank, an excess of groomsmen.

Sydney calculates that there will be eleven tonight at dinner. Technically a rehearsal dinner, though the rehearsal itself will take all of ten minutes. The wedding not paid for, as is customary, by Sydney's parents, who, in any case, might not have agreed on a venue. Instead, both the wedding and the rehearsal dinner will be underwritten by Mr. and Mrs. Edwards and organized by Mrs. Edwards, who has made it clear, by a series of clever suggestions and a Rolodex of service personnel, that she can handle all the annoying little details.

Though they have insisted that Sydney call them Mark and Anna now, she cannot think of them as anything but Mr. and Mrs. Edwards.

"There won't be any yarmulkes or anything," Mrs. Edwards announced early on to Jeff, thereby decisively settling the Jewish question. Not acceptable.

"Don't be ridiculous," Jeff said.

Sydney spots an exceptionally tall wave in the distance. She knows she ought to retreat, let the surge catch her on the backs of her knees, push her hard into the sand. Or she could take her chances diving headfirst into its face, aiming low to miss its rolling power. Sydney glances to her left and right. No one else in the water today, which, in any case, looks unappealing and filthy.

The wave advances. Sydney can hear its anger. She turns her back and waits. The trick always is to catch the crest.

A wild recklessness, perhaps even anger of her own, makes her raise her arms and put her hands together. A fierce undertow nearly buckles her legs. A beach, a cottage, and a seawall are all before her, but she sees nothing. It is as though she hears with her eyes.

She cannot hesitate. Her timing has to be perfect.

The wave upon her, Sydney leaps. Too late, she understands that she has miscalculated. The wave hits her square in the back, and the water slams her face against the sand. Sydney tries to stand and can't. There is no ocean floor.

With little breath left to hold, Sydney lets the wave take her. The water, indifferent, dumps her sideways onto the beach, rolling her down the steep slope as it recedes. She is a toy, a plaything.

Spent, Sydney cannot outrun the following wave, and she is again submerged in water. She digs her fingers into the sand. She gasps for air and is hit from behind. She lets the fourth wave push her forward on her belly. She crawls out onto the sand, beyond the reach of the worst of it. When she rubs the stinging salt from her eyes, a man she knows is standing with a towel.

Jeff wraps her in bubble-gum pink, gently rocking her from side to side. He nestles his chin at the side of her neck.

"You're a goddess," he says.

"I'm off my timing today. It's not working."

"It's nerves," he says.

"You think so?"

He slips his hand into the hip band of her bikini. The old tank suit is gone. Jeff insisted.

Mr. Edwards, frantic at the disappearance of his daughter, put up homemade posters at the lobster pound and the general store. Within an hour, a young woman with a French Canadian accent called. "I saw the girl on the poster," she said. "She was at a party with Helene."

"Helene who?" Mr. Edwards asked, his breath tight.

"She surfs. I think she lives in Montreal."

Mr. Edwards staged a sit-in at the Portsmouth police station, persuading the authorities to bring their considerable technological expertise to bear upon the suspected kidnapping--note notwithstanding. Helene Lapierre, who had crossed the border on the night in question, was remembered by a border guard for her exceptional smile as well as her comment that she'd spent her vacation surfing on the coast of New Hampshire. She was tracked down and briefly questioned, the need for further interrogation unnecessary, as Julie Edwards, focused, intent, and clearly unharmed, was painting pears in a corner at the time of the unexpected arrival of the Canadian police. Julie, apparently surprised by the fuss, said readily, "Oh, I'll call," and went immediately to the telephone.

There were tears, the father's contagious. Within minutes, Julie was reduced to sobs. "Let me speak to Sydney," Julie said through ragged breath.

Sydney took the phone.

"They want to come, but I think it should be you," Julie said. "I want you to see Helene's apartment. And meet Helene."

How like Julie, Sydney thought, to rearrange the priorities.

A short family meeting was held and a decision made.

"Sydney and Jeff will go to Montreal," Mr. Edwards said. "Julie will respond to Sydney best, but I don't want her to have to travel alone."

Jeff readily nodded his assent.

Ben was absent from the family meeting, having left for Boston within hours of the fight with his brother.

Sydney had to guess at Mr. Edwards's reasoning: were he or Jeff to go alone to Montreal, Julie's autonomy, not to mention Helene's physical safety, might be in jeopardy.

Jeff and Sydney drove to White River Junction, just across the border from New Hampshire in Vermont. From there, they took the train to Montreal. The circumstances of the journey--the sense of mission, the rhythmic clacking of the rails, the fast receding lights in the distance--created an odd and wildly inappropriate sense of honeymoon.

So, too, did their physical proximity, Sydney unable to bear, even for insanely short periods of time (such as when Jeff stood in line at the cafe car to purchase boxed lunches) his absence. It was as though she had, since the night on the beach, entered an altered state, simple facts and a clear head entirely irrelevant.

Jeff seemed to share her physical need. They sat hip to hip, thigh to thigh, Jeff touching her constantly, dozing on her shoulder, running his fingers up and down her back and under her hair, a surprisingly intimate gesture that sent Sydney into a nearly hypnotic swoon.

"Your skin is delicious," Jeff whispered into her ear, causing a shiver all along her spine.

Each imagined Julie's Helene, neither of them getting it right. Sydney pictured, having all too briefly seen the real thing, a wiry athletic woman with slick black hair. Jeff imagined-- surely a male fantasy, Sydney thought--a lipstick lesbian with blond curls, an image in which he persisted in believing even when presented with Sydney's meager evidence to the contrary.

Jeff remained in their hotel room while Sydney took a taxi to the address given. Helene, who met Sydney at the door of her fifth-floor walk-up in the old quarter of the city, was neither a lipstick lesbian nor dark-haired, but rather a petite woman with light brown hair and distinctly European features (the wet suit had elongated; the water darkened). Julie hopped off her stool in the corner and embraced Sydney with ferocity. Not the ferocity of the relieved, Sydney thought, but rather that of the newly liberated.

Helene, mindful of the sensitivities, did not touch Julie during the visit--no caresses, no gestures of possessiveness--but did allow Julie, in her exuberance, to embrace her from time to time as she managed tea from a spartan kitchen, an indication of household discipline that held throughout the small apartment, even to the simple bathroom with the good accoutrements: the Frette towels, the marble pedestal sink, the cut-glass dispenser of remarkably effective hand cream.

The most extraordinary feature of the otherwise modest flat was an expanse of windows on the street side. They were set above dark-paneled wainscoting and had sixteen leaded-glass panes per window. In certain lights (Sydney visited often), she felt transported to seventeenth-century Holland, as if, turning her head, she might find Julie, with her Dutch-beauty face, in layered robes, embroidery hoop in hand.

"I'm sorry, Sydney. I'm so sorry. I should have told you. I just thought. . ." Julie stumbled through her apology, heartfelt and contrite.

"It's okay," Sydney said. "I understand. I do. It's just that the way you did it was frightening for your parents. For all of us."

"But you'd all have stopped me!" Julie protested, nailing her defense.

Sydney summoned Jeff from the hotel room. When he appeared in Helene's apartment, Sydney had the unnerving sense of being on a double date.

While Sydney had been restrained but polite with Helene (not wanting to precipitate a crisis that wasn't warranted), Jeff was harsh. He demanded to know how Helene could have persuaded Julie to leave her home and family, and it was only after a lengthy discussion over tea and excellent pastries, Helene's accented English and the Vermeer windows lending a distinctly foreign note to the occasion, that Jeff could be persuaded that Julie had begged to go to Montreal.

Jeff called home with the news. Though Mr. Edwards, understandably, could hardly be expected to view the bulletin as welcome (he missed his beautiful daughter and would be lonely, Sydney suspected, not to mention the fact that Julie would be dropping out of school), a compromise was agreed to.

Julie would return to the beach house the following weekend with Helene and Jeff and Sydney. A civilized detente would be the goal.

Julie's passport was mailed so that she could legally cross the border. (One could cross the border into Canada without a passport, Sydney learned, but one could not get back into the States.) Jeff and Sydney spent the week--Jeff's vacation week--not at the beach house, where all was suspended chaos, but rather in Montreal, in the small hotel room with its two exceptionally narrow iron beds.