Lawless (3 page)

“Rachel!” Katy screams.

She rushes across the lawn, leaps over my mom’s small rose bushes, and stumbles toward me. One of her sandals nearly slips off her foot, flinging her forward, but she recovers and barrels toward me without hesitation.

It’s not until the last second that she slows enough to not knock me to the ground, but her hug is still bruising. It’s crushing in its ferocity, pinning my crutches to my sides and making my ribs shriek in protest.

I could not care less.

“Oh my God, I’m so glad you’re okay,” she gushes in my ear.

I laugh, resting my head on her shoulder and leaning against her. I let her carry the weight she’s stolen from my crutches and she takes it gladly. She knocks me down and holds me up all in one motion that’s everything I didn’t know I needed. I didn’t know how scared I was until being home, until being with Katy, made me feel safe again.

She pulls back, her face stretching with a smile that looks like it hurts. “You can walk on it already?”

“The bone and my muscles are fine. I just have to worry about my stitches for a while. I have to be careful not to tear them so the skin has a chance to heal.”

She looks down at my leg, at the stark white bandages showing under my running shorts, and shakes her head in amazement. “I can’t believe it. I had a nightmare about it last night.”

“You saw the shark?”

“Just the fin. Xavier saw it and asked, ‘Is that what I think it is?’, then Lawson was screaming at you and we all ran to the shore to call you in. You were so far out – I’m glad Law was there. He and his board were closer than the beach.”

“Yeah, I’m lucky he was there.”

“And hey,” Katy says, nudging me playfully with her elbow, “if you’ve gotta be saved by a guy, might as well be a Daniel boy, right? At least they’re pretty.”

I smile encouragingly. “Yeah. They definitely are.”

I’m worried she’ll say more about it. That she’ll break the promise she made to herself, that she’ll say his name. That the floodgates will open and the world will be awash in her tears all over again. She’s come a long way in the last year. She’s stronger now. Smarter. I wanted to think she was moving on because I was leaving and I knew I wouldn’t be here to help her, but now I’m not so sure. Thanks to the shark and Lawson and the fog that’s lifting, I’m seeing things more clearly and when I look at Katy I see the pain. I see the doubt and the confusion, the longing. The hurt. It’s never gone away. She just got really good at hiding it.

“You wanna lay on your bed, eat junk food, and watch a
Teen Mom
marathon?” she asks me suddenly.

“Dude,” I say with dramatic relief, “you read my mind.”

Snickers minis. Cheddar popcorn. Vanilla Coke.

This is how you recover from a shark attack.

This is how you heal a broken heart.

***

I fall asleep two episodes in.

Thanks, Percocet. Now I’m narcoleptic.

I wake up to find Katy gone and dinner on the table. It’s still light outside, it will be until after nine o’clock, but I’m already thinking of my pajamas and getting back into bed. I want to sleep until the heat dissipates and wake up to roam around in the cool evening breeze rolling in off the ocean. The old air conditioner on the side of the house crapped out at the end of last summer and we suffered through the heat, saying we’d get it fixed before the season came back around again, but we never did.

We bought my plane ticket to Boston instead.

It’s on my mind as I sit sweating at the table, watching my mom’s blond hair stick to the nape of her neck. Dad grabs the front of his shirt every few minutes, pulling it away from his body and fanning the hot, stale air inside. Neither of them says a word. Neither of them will ever complain, and that’s the part that kills me the most.

“I got an e-mail back from the law firm in Boston,” I finally speak up.

Dad glances quickly at Mom. “Oh yeah?” he asks me. “What’d they say?”

“They can’t hold my job for me until the fall. They need someone now. They already called in their second choice.”

“That was fast,” he grumbles.

I shrug. “It’s not their fault. They planned on me being there today. I couldn’t follow through.”

“Yeah, but—“ Mom starts.

“It doesn’t matter,” I cut her off, knowing where she’s going. “If I was having a baby, if I was dead on the side of the road, if I was drunk in a bar or laid out with a hangover – it’s all the same to them. I didn’t show up. I lost my spot. That’s the end of it.”

“What about in the fall when you’re able to be there? Can’t you apply again then?”

“The job was for the year. June to June. The person they pulled in today, they’re staying all year. There is no job to apply for in the fall.”

“It just seems so unfair.”

“Life isn’t fair,” Dad says, speaking around a cheek full of pasta. His eyes are on his fork as he skewers more tubes coated in bright red sauce. “She can’t work there this summer so she can’t work there at all. We’ll have to figure something else out.”

“We’ll buy you another plane ticket in the fall,” Mom assures me.

I drop my arm to the table with a
thump
. “How? With what money?”

“We’ll use the credit card.”

“That’s how you bought the first one. It’s why we’re all sweating balls in here instead of running the AC.”

Mom sighs. “I don’t ask a lot of you two, but can we at least not talk about sweaty balls at the dinner table?”

Dad lifts another forkful of pasta into his mouth. “Your mom is right, Rachel. Have some manners.”

“While we’re talking about manners, Rich, maybe you could stop talking with your mouth full.”

“We gave you sweaty balls, honey. Don’t get greedy.”

“I never agreed to give up sweaty balls,” I remind them.

Mom groans. “I’m ashamed to know you both.”

“I was thinking about trying to get a job here.”

The both pause, Dad with his fork venturing toward his mouth again and Mom with her hand fanning the back of her neck.

“Where exactly?” Mom asks slowly.

“I don’t know. Somewhere close.”

“It’d have to be,” Dad says as though it’s obvious. As though he’s arguing with me rather than agreeing with me.

“What would you do?” Mom asks.

I shrug. “I don’t know. Anything.”

“Rachel, you can’t do
anything
.”

“I’m not crippled,” I insist sharply.

“No one said you are, but you are hurt. You’ve been out of the hospital for one day. Give yourself time to heal.”

“I don’t have time!” I bite loudly, my patience evaporating in the oven we’re living in. “I needed that job to make money to survive off of during the school year. Now I need to spend the summer trying to save up for another plane ticket on top of money for living expenses at school. I’ll have to find another job during the school year in Boston, but I can’t do anything about that yet. All I can do is take care of things here and that means getting a job.”

“We’ll buy your plane ticket for you. You don’t have to kill yourself trying to make up that money.”

“No. No more. Don’t spend any more money on me. Spend it on yourselves for once.”

I stand from the table, forgetting my leg and stumbling as it can’t support my weight when I ask it to. I fall forward, sending the entire table rocking. Mom’s iced tea spills. Dad’s fork falls to his plate with a dissonant clatter.

All eyes are on me and I feel myself flushing with embarrassment and anger. With the heat of the house and the thickness of the air in my lungs.

I grab my crutches from the wall behind me and I hurry out of the room as fast as I can.

They let me go without a word.

I meant to go into the front yard. To get outside and see if I can taste the ocean on the air, but I can’t. The world is still, the branches on the trees hanging low and tired. Lazy. Stagnant.

I pull my keys from my pocket and fumble my way into my car, kicking the AC on high immediately. When I go to the push the brake to kick it into reverse I whimper. I nearly cry out at the scalding pain the movement rushes through my thigh, but still I do it. I release it blissfully, gently tap the gas, and back out of the driveway before my parents can stop me. I’m on painkillers and I can barely use my right leg – I should not be driving. But I can’t stay in the house another minute. Two days ago I was nearly brought to tears over the thought of leaving it. Now I’m dying inside having to stay.

I have no fucking clue what’s wrong with me.

I start using my left leg to drive. It’s weird and I have to focus hard to do it, but it helps. It makes it easier and luckily Isla Azul is not a big town. Six blocks gets me on the main strip. A quarter mile to the south lands me in the Frosty Freeze drive-thru getting my hands on a strawberry milkshake. Whatever that shark cost me in blood, I’m going to gain it back in fat, and then some.

Where to go next leaves me stumped. I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to be inside the Frosty Freeze, or even in the parking lot where people can see me. Everyone in town knows about what happened. Everyone will want to talk about it. I just want to eat my ice cream in silence, think about what a colossal mess my life is, and listen to some whiny music.

I find myself at the ocean, but it feels more like the ocean found me. Like it was waiting for me. Like it knew I was hiding from it before I did, but now that I’m here I know; I want nothing to do with it.

I don’t even roll down my windows like I used to. I was looking for the smell of it on the air earlier but now that I know I can find it, I don’t want it. Just sitting in this parking lot looking out over the lonely stretch of empty sand leading down into the dark horizon has me shivering, goosebumps popping up over every inch of my skin. My leg aches like it’s on fire. Like it remembers.

Knock, knock!

I scream, jumping about a foot in the air as my heart explodes in my chest. Someone’s knocking on my window. Some soulless piece of shit who just scared an already freaked out girl out of her mind and looks an awful lot like a soaking wet Lawson Daniel.

“You okay?” he asks, his green eyes eerily dark.

I roll down my window, my skin still popping and prickling with adrenaline. “You scared the hell out of me,” I accuse breathlessly.

He smiles. “Sorry. I thought you saw me walking up from the beach.”

“No. I was kind of zoned out.”

I look at him,
really
look at him, and see that he’s in the same swim trunks he was in the last time I saw him. No shirt this time. Just his chest, sculpted and smooth with a thin peppering of golden brown hair that gets lost in the color of his skin.

I frown when I see the board under his arm. “You were surfing?”

“Yeah. It’s too hot to be doing anything else.”

“Out here? After what happened?” I ask incredulously.

He stands up straight, taking his face out of my window and replacing it with his abs. His six pack, glistening abs.

He’s doing this on purpose.

I shove my door open and force him to step back. He watches me stumble out of my car but he never asks if I’m alright or makes a move to help me. That right there, it takes a little of the fire out of my veins. It restores some small measure of my pride.

He’s doing
that
on purpose too.

I knock my door closed and lean back against it, blissfully relieving my leg of any strain. I nod to this surfboard tucked under his arm. It’s blue and yellow. Not the white that I remember. “Same beach, same shorts, but a different board at least?”

He nods his head and turns his back, moving across the parking lot toward a black Subaru Outback. It looks brand new and since I’ve never known Lawson to have a job, I’m guessing his dad bought it for him. The Daniel family is the wealthiest in Isla Azul, though that’s not saying much. They’d barely be upper middle class in any big city in California, but compared to the rest of us they’re the Rockefellers. Alan Daniel has owned a boat dealership in Santa Barbara since before I was born. It’s almost a half hour away but he grew up in Isla Azul and apparently he never plans to leave. It’s a common mentality here. Contagious even.

Lawson lays the board on the rack across the car’s roof, snags a water bottle out of the back, and saunters slowly toward me. His feet are bare. They probably are most of the time. The hot sand, the rough coral – they don’t mean anything to him anymore. They’re as comfortable as carpet on his tempered Hobbit’s feet.

“I retired Layla,” he tells me before taking a sip of his water.

“Your board’s name was Layla?”

“Yep. She was one of my favorites, but she’s done. I hung her up for good.”

“Hung her where?”

“Should you be out driving?” he asks, gesturing to my car behind me and neatly changing the subject. “You got out of the hospital today, right? I don’t think you’re even supposed to be walking on that leg. Definitely shouldn’t be driving.”