Down the Shore (19 page)

“I'm in Beach Haven. Casey's in trouble.”

My mother took a long breath.

“Let me guess,” she said. “Is he in jail?”

“No,” I said. “Not yet. I'm coming home. I just wanted to let you know.”

“Tom? I need to talk to you.”

“I'm driving. Can we talk tomorrow?”

“No, you'll blow me off tomorrow, and I'm awake now.”

I heard her stand up and cross her bedroom. I wondered if someone was there with her.

“I keep thinking about this thing you said to me one night when I was running out the door, when you were a baby. I had Anna from the diner coming over to watch you. You were three, three and a half, running around in these overalls that you made me put you in every day. I told you that Anna was going to take care of you while mommy went out for a little while, and you looked up at me with this frown on your chubby little face, and you said: ‘I take care of me.' And I know how important that is to you, sweetheart, but you're not doing a very good job right now. And I'm not talking about the thing at Lawrenceville. It's not hard for me to imagine why you were doing that. I'm disappointed, but I'm more upset with myself than I am with you. It's what you saw growing up, which is my fault. I'm not wringing my hands and asking why, you know? Does that make sense?”

I heard her close and lock the bathroom door, and I was sure now that someone else was there. A guest from the party, maybe, someone I had laid eyes on at the house, someone I had served. I started my car.

“What's worrying me now, because I'm not understanding it, I guess, is how you're picking the people in your life. It's like you can't relate to anyone unless they're running from something. What are you looking for, sweetheart? It's not something I need you to tell me right now. I just want you to think about it. Is something upsetting you?”

“I don't think so,” I said.

“Is there anything you want to ask me? Anything about your dad?”

“Not really,” I said, realizing, as I said it, that it wasn't true.

“OK. Are you on 539?”

“Almost.”

“Watch out for deer,” she said. “And cops.”

•   •   •

She was up and dressed when I walked into the kitchen at 5:30 a.m., grinding fresh black pepper over a skillet of scrambled eggs with parsley and fresh pecorino. If someone had been there with her, he was gone now. She wiped her hands clean as I came through the door, opened her arms, and told me to come here. We ate together while the sun rose in another time zone and turned our sky blue with a slow leak of light.

I
woke up to the buzz of my UK phone vibrating in the pile of loose change on my bedside table. I had been back in St. Andrews for five days, and it had been exactly that long since I'd spoken to anyone besides the deliverymen from Balaka who brought me an aluminum tub of Chicken Tikka Masala once a day. I had shut myself in to do four months of reading in the week before exams. It was dark outside when I woke up on the floor, but by then it was only light for a few hours each day. My bed was covered in textbooks and notebooks, reams of paper soaked in liters of ink, and I was devouring everything from post-Keynesian economics to the poetry of Robert Burns while Clare's Adderall suppressed my appetite. I checked my watch as I grabbed blindly for my phone. 4:25 p.m.

“Hello?”

It was Casey. He had sent me an e-mail to confirm that he was coming over, but this was the first time I had heard his voice since we'd parted ways on LBI.

“Hey, Mike called me this morning and asked if he could come over with me. But if you can't take two guests, or if you can't take Mike, just say so. No hard feelings.”

“Of course Mike can come,” I said. Mike was a scratch golfer; I had been expecting this call. “Ask him if he wants to play the Old Course.”

“I'm sure he does. He was on this crazy run in Atlantic City, playing like thirty-six hours at a stretch, eating speed all day, just killing it at the tables. He wants to cool off and get healthy again. Needs a vacation worse than anyone I've seen. What's the weather like?”

“All over the place. The rain comes out of nowhere, but it doesn't snow or anything. It gets dark right after lunch right now. It's that far north.”

“You're kidding me.”

“No, it's pitch black outside,” I said, walking to the window. “We're only five hours ahead.”

“You don't get depressed?”

“You do.”

“You don't sound so hot.”

“I just woke up. I've got exams until you get here and then we've got a week off.”

“Well, keep your head out of the oven until then. I'm stoked to come over. It's a big trip for me. Thanks for doing this.”

“Get here safe,” I said.

There was a hum in my ears when I hung up, but the Adderall had a way of making words on a page feel like company, which made this isolation almost bearable. I pressed one hot cheek against the windowpane. A young couple was standing under a streetlight in the parking lot, the girl walking slow circles around the boy. He had a thin ponytail and wore combat boots that looked like buckets at the bottom of his skinny legs. She was heavy, pretty. They looked like they spent a lot of time on multiplayer video games and science fiction. As they started back toward the hall together, and I realized they must live in the building, that we were practically neighbors, possibly classmates, and yet I had never laid eyes on them before. There were so many people here I would never know.

•   •   •

When my exams were finished, when I had written my last frantic essay in the pages of a flimsy sky-blue notebook, I took the long way back to Andrew Melville, walking by the water, smoking and massaging the back of my neck where it felt like my vertebrae had been glued together. I checked my watch, hoping there would be time to strip my filthy sheets and clean my room, but there was no time for that now. Mike and Casey had landed in Edinburgh two hours earlier, and taken the train to Leuchars, where I had told them I would meet them with a cab.

It was misty enough that the taxi driver had to use his wipers to get us to the station. The train had just pulled out when we arrived, and Mike and Casey were making their way across the elevated walkway that crossed the tracks from the northbound side. They had never left America before. I was starting to think that people should just stay where they were from.

“What the fuck is this weather?” Mike asked as he bounded down the stairs.

“Par for the course,” I said. “Hey, Case.”

“Hey, bro,” he said. “Thanks for having us.”

“Can you believe that fucking hunk of metal just flew across an ocean?” Mike asked.

“He asked everyone sitting around us that,” Casey said, laughing. “You should have seen the looks on their faces.”

“Do you know what those things weigh?” Mike asked. “How do they not just fall out of the sky?”

“I've wondered that myself,” the cab driver said.

“Right?” Mike said. “Fucking miracle if you ask me.”

Mike sat up front and peppered the driver with questions about the food, the weather, the venereal cleanliness of the local females, turning to me to repeat anything he thought to be of note, as if I didn't live here, or didn't speak the language.

“Bro, what's the name of the hotel?” Mike asked Casey.

“The St. Andrews Bay,” Casey said.

“You heard of that spot?” Mike asked the driver. “Nice place? Dive?”

“Best in town,” the driver said.

I turned to Casey.

“Why did you get a hotel?”

“The three of us in your dorm room? I'm on vacation, buddy. Don't worry about me.”

I could see the town in the distance as we turned into the circular drive of the St. Andrews Bay Hotel, a solitary, U-shaped fortress that stood guard over a private golf course. I had never heard of this place. A helicopter dropped out of the sky and alighted somewhere behind the building, delivering guests.

Under the soaring ceiling of the lobby, Casey put down Mike's Am Ex for incidentals, and explained that he'd be paying cash. The hotel was newer and more luxurious than the one on the Old Course, with thicker carpeting and modern furniture upholstered in plaid. I lay on a queen-sized bed in their two-bedroom suite, watching a National Geographic special on a Russian supermax prison where the convicts were forced to walk bent over at the waist anytime they left their cells. Mike walked out of the bathroom, soaking wet and stark naked.

“Son of a bitch,” he said to Casey, who was counting British pounds from a teller's envelope and laying them in stacks on the bedside table. “I left my entire fucking Dopp kit in New Jersey. Do you have any Old Spice?”

“Just stay out of my vitamins,” Casey said, pointing to his open duffel without looking up.

An hour later, we were polishing off a round of beers and sandwiches at the North Point Café, two tables from where I had eaten lunch with Clare's parents. Mike sat facing the big front window, and glanced up from his plate to examine every passerby. He turned to me suddenly, arugula hanging from the corner of his mouth.

“You never said they had waves here.”

“There's nothing rideable,” I said. “It's a bay.”

“So guys just walk around like that for kicks?”

I turned in time to see a pedestrian on Market Street wearing a fleece vest over a full wetsuit and carrying a battered surfboard under his arm. We stared at each other and stood up as one man. Casey glanced down at the bill and tossed cash on the table as Mike and I scrambled for the door. The surfer was waiting for a traffic light as we spilled into the street.

“You've never seen this?” Casey asked as we jogged east.

I shook my head. Mike slowed as we caught our mark, and fell into step beside him.

“Hey, man,” he said. “We saw you walk by the restaurant back there. Are there waves here?”

“Not always,” the man said in a Welsh accent. “It's breaking today, though.”

“Where?” I asked.

“East Sands. Just up the way. Are you on holiday?”

“He goes to school here,” Mike said. “At least he says he does. We're his boys from back home.”

We were passing the crumbling ruins of St. Andrews Cathedral and the graveyard that had been swallowing the dead since the 1100s—places I had seen in pictures but never bothered to seek out. I heard the surf as we started up a short, steep hill at the east end of town, and I was telling myself that this was impossible even as we crested the hill and found ourselves looking down at a crescent-shaped beach. I counted three peaks in fifteen seconds, three sandbars that were causing the waist-high swell to break.

“How the fuck did you miss this one?” Mike asked.

I could think of several reasons, none of them good. We followed our guide to a cluster of surfers, one of whom had just come in.

“How was it?” Mike asked him.

“Really nice, mate. Best it's been in months. The tide's just pushing in.”

Mike introduced us all by name.

“We've met before,” the surfer said to me, unstrapping his ankle leash. He had bright blue eyes, a deep cleft in his chin, and a nose that was jagged on the bridge from a bad break, the kind of face that stays with you.

“You're mates with Damien and Jules,” he said in response to my blank look, as if this were the logical explanation for my forgetting. It was such an obvious dismissal that Casey laughed to break the tension. The surfer turned to Mike.

“I'm Wells,” he said.

The two of them began discussing tides and takeoff spots.

“How did you not hear about this?” Casey asked as we watched someone pull into a closeout and disappear in the whitewater. Mike was taking off his clothes.

“Bro, really?” Casey asked.

“My boy Wells here is loaning me his suit,” Mike said. “I'm getting out there.”

“For fuck's sake,” Casey said. “Don't take the man's suit.”

“It's no trouble,” Wells said. “I'm ready for dry clothes. I'd like to watch my mates a bit.”

“One ride, bro,” Mike said. “One good ride. ‘Yeah, I surfed in Scotland.' Who's gonna believe that back home? Where's a fucking camera when you need one.”

Mike dropped his jeans, and stood there, in the January air, wearing only his white boxer briefs and the ink under his skin. Wells tossed him the suit, and once Mike had wrestled into it, he strapped on the leash—something that he never did in Jersey—and jogged into the shore break with the board under his arm. Casey and I sat down in the sand.

“What happened with the cops?” I asked, unable to contain myself any longer.

“I was outta there by noon. Fucking Rob. I don't know how he does it. This guy I used to cut lawns with was in for a DUI. We made a night of it.”

“How's Melissa?”

“She's taking the whole thing like a fucking champ. It was really hard for her, the stuff I was doing. She never cared about the money. She said that before, I just wasn't hearing her. I was waiting til I got here to tell you this, but Rob set me up with something.”

“At the restaurants?”

“No,” Casey said. “Not this time. It's a job in Mexico. We're moving in a month.”

“Are you joking?”

“This guy Rob knows is investing in some new hotel in Playa del Carmen, like an hour south of Cancún. They got this roof deck with a club they want me to manage. They're giving me a little piece of equity to make sure I stick around.”

“Mexico?”

“What, you're the only person who can set up in another country for a while? Melissa's gonna do some PR and events for the hotel, that kind of thing.”

The blithe conversion of a career in cocaine to a management gig in an emerging market, a partnership, a piece of equity. It felt like my whole life up to that point had been a series of miscalculations. Casey smacked my shoulder with the back of his hand, and pointed toward the water.

“Here he goes,” he said.

Mike was scratching for a wave that had slipped by everyone sitting on the biggest peak. He caught it, popped up, and walked down the length of the board. With the toes of his left foot wrapped around the nose, he did a quick half pirouette and brought his feet together, riding backward with his ankles hanging off the board in midair and his arms extended. People on the beach were pointing at him, telling friends to watch. The wave closed out and Mike dove behind the rumbling whitewater, which swallowed him and then the board. His hand surfaced before his head, and he was holding up a finger as he spit out salt water to speak.

“One more!” he yelled to us.

•   •   •

We were back at the hotel when Casey finally asked how Clare was holding up. Mike was in the shower again, “defrosting,” as he put it, with the bathroom door open so that he could still hear us and be heard. I said I hadn't seen Clare in a while.

“Really?” Casey said. “Why not?”

“Get him over here!” Mike called.

I shot Clare a text with the invitation and the room number, hoping that he wouldn't answer. Casey called Melissa while I stretched out on the bed again and wondered how everyone would feel about staying here tonight, ordering room service and pay-per-view. I had told Casey about Kelsey before I knew she had a boyfriend. There would be that to explain, and putting Jules and Damien and Mike in one room seemed like a terrible idea. The front desk called to say we had a visitor.

“Hey, buddy,” Casey said as he opened the door. “Good to see you.”

Mike stepped out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist this time.

“Dude, tell me you knew that there's a break here. Is Tom just asleep at the wheel?”

Clare looked at me.

“Jesus Christ, put the straw down once in a while. People surf here. You didn't know that either?”

“Did you guys go surfing?” Clare asked.

“I did,” Mike said. “I dropped in on Prince what's his face.”

“You're kidding me,” I said.

I had seen someone in the lineup who looked vaguely like William, but William didn't strike me as a surfer, and lookalikes were obviously not out of the question.

“Oh shit. Did I forget to tell you that?” Mike said. “He's not bad, actually. He was pretty cool about me stealing his wave.”

“His bodyguards should be here any minute to cavity search you before they throw you out of the country.”

“Bro, sign me up,” Mike said. “I've paid good money to have someone put a finger in my ass, and they didn't even have a sexy accent.”