The Tenderness of Thieves (8 page)

“I said—politely of course—no, thank you. That the sand on the floor was symbolic of summer in this house and was a welcome guest until after Labor Day.”

“And they said?”

My mother shifted the hem so she could put in another pin. “Nothing really. Just an ‘Oh’ and a ‘Hmmm.’ Both of which were judge-y.”

“Speaking of judge-y,” I said. The chiffon was silky along the tops of my feet. “Missy is sweet and she means well, but she basically told me to get out of town because life would be better elsewhere. Or at least the boys would. Oh, and she said you are a genius. That part was okay.”

“She’s a nice girl. Awfully young to be getting married, though.” My mother glanced at me warily. Accusingly even.

I gave her a wary look right back. “Who said
I
was getting married?”

“Actually,” she said, shifting the dress from her lap to the worktable. “No one has. Not a single person has spoken to me about my daughter hanging out with Handel Davies over the last few days.”

“So?”

My mother looked at me pointedly. “Jane.”

I lowered my eyes. Purple fabric swam across my vision. “What?”

“The lack of gossip likely means you haven’t seen him since the night you two went out.”

“I thought you weren’t interested,” I said. “You never asked me about it.”

“Of course I’m interested! I just didn’t want to pry.”

I crossed my legs, lifting them out of the chiffon. “Fine.” Settled some more into the chair. “Handel and I had a nice time. Better than nice.”

My mother was trying not to smile. “Nice? Nice and a Davies boy don’t seem to go together.”

“You sound like Michaela.”

“Michaela doesn’t like him?”

“She’s just watching out for me. Like everyone else these days,” I added, studying my hands and laying them in my lap. Trying not to fidget. “I liked hanging out with Handel. We clicked, or I thought we did. But I haven’t heard from him since.”

My mother swiveled her way toward me in the chair, moving fabric as she went. “Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry.” She put a hand on my arm.

“I’m fine. We’re probably not right for each other, anyway. And it’s not like I need any complications this summer.” I looked up, and my mother was right there, so close. Her eyes matching my own. My throat grew tight. “I need everything to be simple. You know?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “I do.” She leaned forward and brushed the hair away from my face. “There’s something else I’ve wanted to talk to you about.”

“What?”

“I think it’s time,” she began. Stopped. Took a breath and began again. “I think it would be good if we went to visit your father. You haven’t been since the funeral.”

Immediately, my head swung side to side,
no no no no.

“It might be good for you. For both of us.”

“I can’t I can’t I can’t,” I said on repeat. “I’m not ready,” I tried, but what little voice I had left was gone.

“Okay. All right. But soon, Jane. I want us to go soon. You can’t avoid it forever.”

I nodded, though I wasn’t agreeing. Deep breaths. I needed to get out into the air. Out of this room so full of fabric I might suffocate. But my mother wasn’t done yet. Not done with me. She slid open the drawer of her desk. Removed a small white box.

Held it out to me. “I wanted you to have this,” she said. “Take it.” She placed it on my lap.

I lifted the lid.

Inside was a thin gold chain, at the end of which was a tiny mosaic heart. All shades of ocean and sky. Just like the one I’d lost—just like it, but different, too. This one had a pale sliver of green running through the center. Tears pressed into my eyes. “It’s beautiful,” I told her. “Thank you, Mom.”

“Let me help you put it on,” she whispered. Her voice was hoarse.

I got up, almost tripping over the fabric on the floor. Set the box aside. “Not now,” I said. “Maybe another time.”

My mother blinked. She was nodding. “Okay.”

“I’m going to go out for a while,” I said, glad I was still wearing my bathing suit underneath my clothes, thinking a swim might be in store for me tonight. Before my mother could say anything else, I grabbed my flip-flops and was gone from the house, staring up at the sky as it turned the red color of the evening.

• • •

I started to walk. Walk and walk and walk.

At first I had no direction, then I realized I’d walked so far I’d crossed into the next town. I doubled back, and soon found myself heading to the only place I wanted to be when I was hoping to forget. The beach. The smell of the ocean air, briny with salt and sea life, always calmed me. There was something about the sound the waves made, the constancy of them, their broken rhythm, that could knit me together again when I was afraid things were coming apart. Even the pungent smell on the wharf where the fishermen brought in their catch was soothing. My whole life had been spent coming down to this place with my mother and father when I was small, and on my own when I’d gotten old enough to do things by myself or with friends. It’s where I always went when I wanted to think, even in the winter. The ocean provided the sound track to some of the most important moments I could remember. The best ones.

I passed the row of fancy bars and restaurants at the edge of town that catered to the city people that summered here, the ones who built big houses where they could have ocean views and catered parties on wide rolling lawns and park SUVs in long driveways. Where they didn’t have to interact with the locals. These were people who typically never set foot on the town beach because they paid to go the private club far enough away from the wharf that the fishing boats going out for the day and coming back would never mar their view of the sea.

They had their own little world over here.

I passed the Ocean Club, with its big wooden deck looking out over the water and its glittering dining room, and the Pump House next door, all glass and minimalist white, its parking lot packed with BMWs. They looked like they belonged to another place, another town where bars like Charlie O’s and O’Malley’s Pub couldn’t exist just down the road. The owners didn’t even employ locals during the summer. They hired out-of-town kids looking for a quick buck or whose parents thought it would be “good for them” to find out what it was like to work for a change. No one would tell you that outright if you applied—that they didn’t hire local kids to bus and wait tables—but everyone knew the deal and stopped applying for jobs on this strip of oceanfront long ago. There was almost an unspoken agreement between townies and the city people not to mingle, even though we all lived right next door to one another.

I stopped in front of Christie’s, a martini bar that boasted drinks out over the ocean and quaint twinkle lights on the deck, watching as a tall, elegantly dressed woman emerged from a sleek Mercedes, handing her keys to a valet who would whisk it off to some unseen parking place. She had a white leather clutch under one arm and was dressed in a short, tight white dress and four-inch heels. Everything about her said rich and glamorous as she tottered toward the entrance.

“Hey, it’s you.”

The Mercedes pulled up in front of me with the valet I’d seen taking the woman’s keys in the driver’s seat. He was the same boy from the beach the other day, the one with the dog named Eric and the lacrosse stick. I was surprised to find out he had a job. He grinned at me with those perfect teeth, his crisp white short-sleeved shirt bright against his skin.

Okay, so he was good-looking.

I searched my brain for his name. “Miles, right?”

“So I
did
make an impression,” he said over the soft purr of the car.

“Are you always this cheesy?” I tried to be annoyed, but I couldn’t suppress a laugh. He was so different from the boys I was used to, so polite, all smooth lines and big winning smiles. His behavior was almost excusable. Almost.

“Nah, I’m just confident.”

“Oh, oh-kay.” I started on my way again.

He gunned the engine lightly. “Can I give you a ride somewhere?”

“In some other lady’s car? No, thanks.”

He looked at me strangely. “Don’t worry. She won’t care.”

“Really, no,” I said. “I like to walk.”

“Too bad.”

I didn’t slow down. “Not for me.”

He kept pace with me, the car nearly silent. “What if I came to pick you up one evening in a car of my very own?”

“Is it an SUV?”

“Why? Does that affect your answer?”

“Maybe.”

The car rolled alongside me, the gravel in the road kicking and popping underneath the tires. “Maybe what? Maybe you’ll hang out if it’s an SUV? Or maybe you
won’t
hang out if it’s an SUV? Or is the maybe more about just the general question of whether you’ll hang out with me?”

I laughed again, but didn’t stop. Just shrugged.

“You could come to one of my lacrosse games. I’m really good,” he added, with only a little irony.

“Seriously?”

“What? The girls where I’m from
love
lacrosse games.”

I glanced his way. He looked so relaxed driving that fancy car. Like he belonged in a Mercedes. Like he’d never belong around here. “Yeah, well, you’re obviously not at home anymore.”

“Come on, girl! Give me something,” he pleaded.

I looked at him one last time. He was almost charming in his exasperation. “I did give you something. I gave you a maybe,” I said, then turned left, cutting across someone’s lawn so he couldn’t follow.

As my steps took me farther away, I could hear him idling there, waiting to see if I’d turn around, and my spirits lifted just a little bit. The rest of the way to the beach, I marveled at how the attention of a boy, even one that didn’t interest me much, could be so wonderfully distracting, how it could cover over the cracks and dips of painful memories even if only for a little while. And I wondered, too, as I walked, how all those years before I’d managed to live without it.

T
HE TOWN BEACH WAS
empty that evening, save a group of boys swimming way down at one end and a couple enjoying the view over the water, high up in a lifeguard chair. His arm around her shoulder. She leaning into him.

And me. There was me.

Alone on the sand.

I walked up and down the big curving C of beach. The breeze was slight, a soft whisper all around. I pulled off my T-shirt and considered going for a swim. I didn’t have a towel, but I didn’t much care, either. The air was hot and humid. The ocean ran across my toes again and again, bringing with it tiny shells and an occasional patch of stringy seaweed rolling by. It called to me. Finally, when I felt like I couldn’t hold out any longer, I stepped out of my shorts, dropped my T-shirt on top of them, used my flip-flops to anchor everything so it wouldn’t blow away, and headed straight into the water, confident and sure, not stopping for waves as they rushed toward me or when the cool temperature raised goose bumps all over my skin.

When I was waist-high, I dove in.

The beach, swimming, everything around me was magic. It could heal all things. Protect me from danger. I lay on my back, floating, eyes on the darkening blue above, the water lapping gently at my skin, soaking my hair. I gave in to the sea, letting it bob me around, buoy my body toward the shore with the tide. I don’t know how long I stayed that way, but by the time I got out and headed up the stairs to the boardwalk, it was late. The rest of the light had disappeared from the sky. I slipped my shorts on and shoved the end of my T-shirt into the pocket of my shorts. I didn’t want it to get wet. I knew what happened when a girl wearing a bikini went swimming and immediately threw on a shirt afterward, and how long those embarrassing spots took to dry. My legs were caked with sand all the way to my shins, but I didn’t bother to wash my feet at the spout on the boardwalk. There was something satisfying about the way the sand would fall away, little by little, like shedding tiny, glittery scales as my skin dried and I got closer to home. My hair was heavy and wet, sending little rivers of water running down my arms and stomach and back. It felt good in the warm night air. I crossed the small parking lot, passing two old, battered station wagons, surfboards attached to racks on top, and started up the street toward the wharf, still barefoot. I could do that without catching stares—walk barefoot in summer, between the beach and my destination. Everyone could in our town.

Another perk of living in this place, I’d always thought.

With my flip-flops swinging in one hand, I combed my fingers through my hair with the other, trying to untangle it. The air was so thick with heat it was already starting to dry. I went around the bend, the wharf now in sight.

And with it, Handel Davies.

He stood on the corner in front of Levinson’s, in the glow of the streetlamp, smoking a cigarette. Staring out to the water, his expression serious, like something was on his mind, and it wasn’t something good. He wasn’t alone. Another boy, big, stocky, whose name I thought was Mac, stood next to him, also taking drags of a cigarette. All muscle and brawn. Two more boys I knew by sight, but whose names I couldn’t remember, were leaning against the wall nearby. One of them was tall and wiry, the look on his face unfriendly. Everything about his features twisted so as to seem angry, hair buzzed short on the bottom and longer on the top, all wrong, only highlighting his lack of bulk and his air of menace. The other was short, rectangular, and expressionless, like he was auditioning for the role of bodyguard. My mind searched for their names again but came up with nothing. I wondered if they’d been at the party that night in the dunes. It had been too dark for me to see their faces clearly.

Instinctively, my eyes went to their boots but came up with nothing.

I stopped walking. Unsure whether to go right on by or make a quick left. Duck behind Mr. Morgan’s cobbler shop and cut through the alleyway behind it. Handel hadn’t seen me yet. None of those boys had. They were all staring out at the water, saying nothing, some unspoken pact to avoid conversation.

But I couldn’t put off meeting Handel forever.

I decided to go straight.

My feet took me forward, still barefoot, shins still caked with sand, though not as much as before. My hair was drier now, but still wet enough that the ends sent tiny streams down my skin, and my bathing suit top was too damp to put on my shirt just yet. When I got close, close enough that my footsteps slapping the sidewalk were audible, Handel turned his head, and with Handel, so did all the others. Michaela’s warnings about him pounded my insides like waves crashing into the beach. It was one thing to gush and dream about a handsome bad boy paying me attention, and another to come face-to-face with one of the reasons he got that reputation in the first place.

Handel didn’t smile when he saw me. All he said was, “Jane.”

Before I could answer, I heard my name again, this time from across the street, and I turned.

It was Seamus. Seamus and Tammy. Together.

If I wasn’t so unnerved by Handel, seeing those two hanging out would have made me happy. I would have better registered how great it was that Seamus was hanging out with one of my friends. But I couldn’t. Not now. I was all about Handel.

“Hey,” Tammy said once they reached me. She held a cup in her hand, and a spoon. Ice cream from Nana’s down the block. Southern Apple Pie, her favorite. Tammy always ordered the same thing. She glanced at Handel, then at me. I could tell it was going to challenge her to be nice if I introduced them.

“I was just out for ice cream and I ran into Seamus,” she said, which explained why she was with him.

Seamus seemed nervous, but the flustered kind. Like possibility was just around the corner, like this could very well be his chance with Tammy. “I was headed home from Slovenska’s.” He looked down at my feet. “Been down at the beach tonight?”

“Yeah. I went for a walk.”

Tammy’s ice cream was melting. “It’s late, Jane. You didn’t have to go alone.” She didn’t say
shouldn’t,
but it was implied.

Handel stood there next to me. Waiting.

“It’s fine,” I said. “Everything’s fine. Um, Tammy and Seamus, this is Handel. Handel, these are my friends Tammy and Seamus,” I said, finally introducing everyone.

“Nice to meet you,” Seamus said, putting out his hand, his face open and friendly, as always.

“You too,” Handel said, and they shook.

I waited for Tammy to say something, anything, but she was studying her ice cream, pushing the pie dough bits around. I nudged her with my hip, and she gave me a begrudging look that said
fine.

“Hi, Handel,” she said, no offer of her hand.

Handel didn’t seem offended. “Nice to meet you.”

My eyes were pleading, first at Tammy, then at Seamus, who seemed to understand since he suddenly said to Tammy, “We should go.”

“Should we?” she asked, eyebrows raised, watching me for confirmation. I nodded, ever so slightly. “Oh, all right. Bye, Jane. See you tomorrow at the beach. Bye . . . Handel.”

Seamus hurried the two of them away, but Tammy lagged. It wasn’t until they turned the corner and disappeared from view that Handel and I spoke again.

Well, I spoke.

“I had a nice time the other night after we left the party,” I said. “I thought you did, too.”

Handel’s shoulders tensed, or maybe they already were. He didn’t offer to introduce me to his friends. Instead, he gestured that I follow him. We walked a little ways down the block, just out of earshot if we kept our voices low. “I did,” he said.

Boldness blossomed in me. It always seemed to when I was around Handel. “Then what’s your problem?” I asked.

“I’m not sure I’m good for you.”

“Why is that?”

Handel wouldn’t look at me. Not at first. Then he did, but it was like he was trying to tell me something with his eyes instead of his words. “My life is complicated.”

“This doesn’t have to be complicated,” I said, tossing my hair in that way I knew the boys found fascinating, the thick damp locks falling along my right shoulder.

I wanted Handel to find me fascinating—so much that he couldn’t resist seeing me, even if he wasn’t good for me. Especially because he wasn’t. I was suddenly glad all I had on was my bathing suit top and shorts, that my T-shirt was still dangling from my pocket. I wanted Handel to forget I was a nice girl with a serious lack of experience with boys. I wanted to make him want me in all the ways I wasn’t supposed to, to think about doing all those things that boys did to girls who weren’t like me. I wanted to become that girl he did them to. I could feel her slipping into my body right now, taking me over.

“We don’t have enough history for it to be complicated, so don’t make it that way,” I continued. “Right now, it’s all very simple. Either you want to spend time with me, or you don’t. If you do, great. If not, then the other night will become a nice memory of the time I had with Handel Davies, who took a sudden interest in me and then a sudden disinterest.” I stopped there and wondered who this confident, sexy Jane was. I tossed my hair again—this time so it went over my other shoulder—because I’d noticed how intently Handel watched me do it the first time, pleased as his eyes traveled down my neck to my bare stomach to the place where my shorts hung low across my hips before flickering back to my face.

He smiled a little, so little it was almost imperceptible. Just a tiny curve in the left side of his mouth. “I don’t know.”

But I had him now. The way he stared told me everything.

I took the string of my bathing suit top between my fingers, twirling it, then letting it fall to my skin. “Yes,” I said, so sure of myself. “You do know.”

Then something—a shift in the air, a cough behind us—set me on edge. His friends’ eyes were on us. I could feel them. When I turned, I saw that they had moved so they could see us. They were watching Handel. And me. The skinny one with the menacing stare most of all. The way he looked at me sent that other, bolder Jane running. “What’s up with your friends?”

Handel glanced at them. Shoved his hands way down in his jeans pockets. He shrugged. Smile gone. “Ignore those guys.”

“Really?”

“If you meant it when you said you want to hang out with me, you’ll just have to endure them. They’re . . .” Handel trailed off.

I finished for him. “A bit rough around the edges?”

Handel laughed a little, the first real attempt at levity since we’d started talking. “Yeah. You know. Townies. Born, live, and die here types. Like me.”

“Like you, but not really,” I said.

“You were born here, too,” Handel said. “Grown up here, too.”

“True. I’m not ready to think about where I’m going to die yet, though.”

Handel was quiet. Pulled out a cigarette. Lit it. Took a drag. “Me neither,” he said eventually.

The eyes of those friends, I could still feel them. Watchful. No: mistrustful. Suspicious. “Maybe we’re not all the same, then.”

“I don’t know,” he said after another long drag. “When you grow up around here and you come from a family like mine, there’s something about this place that gets down deep into your bones and settles there. Makes you do things you never thought you would.”

A chill ran across my skin and made me shudder. I grabbed the T-shirt from my pocket and pulled it over my head. “What’s that supposed to mean? What things?”

The end of Handel’s cigarette was a bright, burned orange, the ashes flaking away in the slight breeze. “That’s a conversation for another day.” He glanced at his friends, then at me one more time. Took a step closer, his face close, his breath close, everything about him suddenly so close. “I want to see you again. I do.”

“So see me,” I whispered.

His eyes were intense. Big and wide and all for me. “Tomorrow night?”

I nodded, ever so slightly. “Okay. Where?”

“How about down by the lighthouse?”

“The lighthouse?” I hadn’t been out there since I was eight, maybe nine. When the girls and I used to ride our bikes all over town and didn’t care so much about lying out in the sun and talking to boys.

“I go there sometimes,” Handel went on. “When I want to get away.” He stopped short of saying
what
he wanted to get away from. “How’s eight?”

“All right,” I said, and my heart raced at this, raced at the thought of seeing him in a place so remote. I imagined his lips on my neck, kissing bare skin. His eyes kept flickering there while we talked. “I’ll see you then.”

“See you, Jane,” he whispered, then turned and walked toward his friends, who’d been watching him this whole time. Watching me. I doubled back the way I came, went down a different street. Took another route home so I didn’t have to pass by all those staring eyes.

• • •

In my room, that night, the box with the heart was waiting for me.

It sat there, white and lonely, on my bedside table.

I didn’t touch it. Wasn’t ready to. Not just yet.