Down the Shore (22 page)

•   •   •

Through the frosted windows of the interrogation room, the shadows of planes swept across the flecked linoleum floor tiles, vanishing like water stains, the roar of the engines deadened to a crackling static. It was a clear day at sunrise, judging from the glow behind the glass. Leuchars air base was just across the street. The room contained a table and a pair of chairs—the rickety, bowlegged furnishings of a high school cafeteria—and a poster that explained the rights of government employees under Scottish law. The smell of cheap vinegar was coming from the chilled patches of sweat in the armpits of my shirt. I rolled up my sleeves, trying to look ready for whatever came next. The officer leaning on the far wall shifted his weight from one foot to the other. I touched my tongue to the fresh cut on my bottom lip.

The two of us had been alone for over an hour without speaking a word. Just above the collar of the officer's blue uniform shirt was a wisp of tattoo—some gothic script, maybe, or a tendril of some flora or fauna—inked into his pale neck. We couldn't be that far apart in age.

“Hey,” I said. “What happens now?”

He wouldn't meet my eyes.

“Really? Come on, man. No one's here. Can you please just tell me what the hell is going on?”

He gave no sign that he had heard me, but just then the door opened, and both our bodies jerked. Standing in the doorway was a woman with dyed red hair and green eyes. She looked like someone who worked in the cosmetics section of a drug store.

“They're ready,” she said to the officer.

•   •   •

There were forty-two missed calls on my phone when the woman behind the station's booking desk handed it back to me along with my Rolex, which had stopped at 6:20 a.m., and some paperwork explaining when and where to face the charges against me. I called Casey's room while I waited for a cab, and was about to leave a message when I heard the call-waiting tone, and realized he was calling me.

“Where the fuck are you?” he asked.

“At the police station. I've been here all night.”

“Did you hit a cop or something? How are you the only person who got nailed? Did you just get out?”

“Yeah, with a court date, and a possession charge. What happened to Clare?”

There was a pause. I felt him shifting gears.

“I think Clare's still in the hospital,” Casey said. “I don't know for sure. That Indian guy knew how to fight. Smashed Clare's head into the table and got some hard shots in after that. Clare was still out when they took him away.”

“How bad is it?”

“I just told you how bad it is. Clear shit coming out his nose. Awful. Plus assault charges whenever he comes to. Don't worry about him now, just get your ass to Kelsey's.”

Damien's Land Rover was parked across the street from Kelsey's flat when I climbed out of the cab. Someone tapped a horn; the car was full of people. I crossed the street as Damien rolled down the window. Mike was riding shotgun in tuxedo pants and a hooded sweatshirt, the dark makeup he'd worn for the show still smudged around his eyes. Casey sat behind him, holding a bag of frozen corn over his eye.

“Did you hear anything about Clare?” I asked.

“Get in or get out of the way,” Damien said.

I climbed into the backseat and got my first good look at Casey. A blood vessel had broken in his eye, and the blue of the iris was suspended in a sea of red, surrounded by swollen tissue that was already turning purple. A pair of Kelsey's oversized sunglasses was hanging from his collar. As we pulled away from the curb, I stared up at Kelsey's window. Her light was on. I watched for movement, shadows, anything, but there was only a cool glow from inside.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Back,” Casey said. “We'll swing by your hall and help you pack. I'll get you a ticket. Time to go home.”

“I have to be in court next week.”

“Not in Jersey you don't,” Mike said.

T
h
e week before my spring semester exams at Rutgers, I was sitting in a diner on the ground floor of a new hotel in Atlantic City. The building was a gutted and remodeled Howard Johnson's, and investors from around the state had poured money into the project, anticipating a revival of the historic, dilapidated beach town. A Philadelphia restaurateur was responsible for the restaurants and the diner was supposed to be a re-creation of the places where he'd spent late nights and early mornings in his twenties. He must have had good drugs back then, because his remembrance—waitresses whose short skirts matched the shiny plaid of the upholstered stools, a Kobe beef burger, a champagne cocktail list—had nothing to do with the chrome boxes along Route 18. It was a stylized vision of New Jersey that looked out on the real thing: the hourly motels and cash-for-gold shops that flanked Atlantic Avenue.

Casey sat across from me, the remnants of his eggs Benedict pushed to the center of our table, a section of the
New York Times
covering his face. He was in town for a hotel management conference that he'd asked to attend so he could pick up the last of his things on LBI and put his affairs in order. I had been thinking about Clare since we'd driven past the exit that lead to the causeway, remembering the first time I'd brought him down the shore, wondering if it was 85 degrees and sunny where he was too. I hadn't spoken to him since St. Andrews, but Mike heard from Mary that he had come through fine, and withdrawn from school to take time off, which was what he should have done in the first place. I went back to my waffles and when I looked up again, Casey was staring at me with the paper on his lap.

“What?” I said. “What's going on?”

Casey handed me the
Times
and pointed to the middle column. Michael Savage had been found dead in his hotel room in Qatar. I looked up at Casey, then back down at the page, trying to make out what was written there.

“No cause of death yet,” Casey said, looking at me.

I stood up and walked outside, feeling like my insides had evaporated. A shitty Oldsmobile rolled past, the glare of the sunlight on the windshield blinding me for an instant. I tried three matches on a cigarette and then gave up.

“You OK?” Casey called to me, holding the door for an elderly couple.

I didn't answer.

“You wanna tell me what's going on?”

I was looking out over the boardwalk to the beach, which was full of adults in beach chairs, and kids streaking along the edge of the water with buckets and boogie boards. Three children were burying a man up to his neck in sand.

“They didn't pick me up for fighting at the fashion show,” I said. “They picked me up because they figured I was holding, and they wanted something on me.”

I told Casey about the second room I had been led to, the one populated by my arresting officer, the agent who had been masquerading as a limo driver, and Professor Watkins, who apparently had long-standing ties to British intelligence and who had clearly been woken up for this. The authorities had been all over Michael Savage while he was in Scotland, but he had disappeared just before they planned to pick him up. They wanted anything that I could get them: numbers from Clare's phone, e-mails from his laptop, any information I could dig up as to his father's whereabouts without arousing his suspicion. They had offered me a free ride at St. Andrews, a clean record in the States, an introduction at whatever financial services firm I saw myself at. They told me they were trying to protect Michael Savage because he seemed to think that he could handle the people who were after him. I remembered the cop with the ponytail in Lawrenceville, the one who told me I was helping Casey by giving him up. I thought: I've heard this before.

“They told me this might happen,” I said. “I thought they just wanted me to rat him out.”

“Good,” Casey said.

“Good?”

“Good that you didn't help them. Fuck them. What were you gonna do, anyway? You're not exactly James Bond. God, they must have been desperate if they were coming to you for help. A kid who couldn't sell fucking weed in high school without getting busted? And honestly? Fuck Clare's dad. What was he thinking, messing with those people? If you don't see how that's gonna end, you're too stupid to be alive. That's natural selection.”

“He's dead,” I said, trying to understand where this hostility was coming from.

“That's what happens. That was his choice. Let's go back in and settle up.”

It must have been his last two words, because until then all I wanted was to go back inside, finish our coffee, and kill the rest of the morning watching TV in the room and pretending that none of this had ever happened. Instead, I told Casey that I had given his name to the cops.

“What?” he said.

“I told the cops about you when I got arrested. I told them that I got my stuff from you. I gave them your name. It's my fault that your house got searched and that you had to move to Mexico.”

“And you're telling me this why?”

“Because I just told you how I didn't sell Clare's dad out, but it wasn't always like that. I wanted you to know.”

“I already knew.”

“What do you mean you already knew?”

“It took me about five minutes after you left the Chegg, but I put two and two together. I didn't want to believe it, but it was a hard thing not to see. You looked more fucked up than me when Rob showed up that night.”

“How did you not slit my throat?”

“Because I would have done the same thing. I should never have helped you get set up in the first place. I knew you couldn't hack it if things went wrong. But that's not even the point. Do you honestly think I got popped because you squealed to some cops in another county about an ounce of weed? Get your head out of your ass. That's like saying a plane crashed because you had your cell phone on. Who knows why they came down on me like that. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Look how it all worked out.”

“What if it hadn't?”

“Who gives a fuck about what didn't happen? You're still here. I'm still here. Leave it alone. Don't ever bring it up again. You hear me?”

This was the moment I had prayed for, certain it would never come: to have Casey absolve me and tell me it was not my fault. He was saying that now, and I felt no different. It was clear to me that I would need to look somewhere besides the people I knew if I was going to figure out how to live the rest of my life.

“Our waitress thinks we dined and ditched,” Casey said. “Let's go back inside, unless you want to explain this to the cops.”

•   •   •

There was construction all over southbound U.S. 1 the next week and the drive from Rutgers down to Princeton took me twice as long as usual. I parked behind my mother's house and pitched my cigarette into the neighbor's yard. I was stopping by to pick up my surfboard and hit the beach for a few hours after a long morning in the library. A dean in the Rutgers English department was a regular at my mother's shop, and she had talked the school into letting me enroll halfway through the first week of January classes after I showed up at Newark airport unannounced. My mother was waiting on a long line of customers when I banged through the screen door.

“Hey,” she called to me. “You back for good?”

“Just grabbing a board. I'll be back for dinner. You need anything?”

“No,” she said, drying her hands. “I'm fine. I've got everything I need.”

I drove down the shore, sticking to the back roads, obeying the various speed limits. A strong south wind was keeping people off the beach, and I found a parking spot along the boardwalk. The house on Howell and Ocean was for sale.

Back at the shop, I had gone to the fridge to make a sandwich for the road and there, between my Dean's List certificates from Lawrenceville and my acceptance letter from St. Andrews, was the article announcing that Clare's father had been found dead in his hotel room, held in place by a magnet from Conte's Pizzeria. My mother had put it there as a kind of memorial, not realizing that it belonged on our fridge alongside the records of my various accomplishments. I wondered if Kelsey was right about everyone having a fixed amount of luck and if I had used up mine in coming through this. I stripped down in the driver's seat and then sat in my car with the top half of my wetsuit bunched up around my waist, looking out over the boardwalk at the water. The ocean was a mess, a long field of crumbling slate-gray slabs. I was watching for a makeable wave, a clean line, a section that would hold up, however briefly, before crashing down. No one else was out.

On the beach, the wind kicked up a fine mist of sand that stung the tops of my bare feet. I walked as far into the shore break as I could, but then a set came through, and I started duck diving, pushing the nose of my board just under the rumbling walls of whitewater, kicking down, gasping on the other side from the cold and the force of the swell. I finally made it past the inside sandbars, and sat on my board, catching my breath. The current was sucking me south fast enough that I could track my movement against the clouds on the horizon. I turned my head and looked back at the beach to find a marker, to see where I was.

To Julie Barer for keeping the faith and making all things possible. To Allison Lorentzen for her vision and commitment, and to everyone at Viking, especially Nicholas Bromley and Shannon Twomey. To Alexander Chee for everything, but especially for helping me believe that this was something I could do. To Matthew Sharpe for strong and crucial guidance. To Jim Nelson for making my mid-twenties awesome and for teaching me to ask hard questions about my work. To Mike and Greg Hokenson for decades of unwavering support and friendship. To Nancy Hokenson for giving me a place to write time and again. To Jim Salant, friend, editor, artistic conscience. To William Boggess for stepping up and stepping in. To Eric Sullivan and Noah Kistler for company at the kitchen table. To Greg Greenberg and Daniel del Valle for those early reads. To the teachers who mattered: Elan Leibner, Mark Schoeffel, Bill Williams, Jim Adams, Martha Gracey, Paul Watkins, Aaron Kunin. To the editors who gave me a shot: Tyler Cabot, Aimee Bell, Matt Tyrnauer, Heather Halberstadt. To Jessica Agnessens for reading the cards. To the Piltin family, especially my cousin Chris, for giving me a window on the shore. To Deborah Castel for being right about so many things. To Nonna for all the love and all the food. To Philip and Margaret Parish for keeping me honest. And to Herman and Rosemary, my parents, for all of it.