by Mila Gray
“I don’t have cooties,” he says.
I give him a look that says ha ha and finally pull it on. It’s too big on me, of course, but it’s so warm that I feel cocooned and, for a split second, even safe. It also smells of him, of citrus and something muskier, too, that makes me want to bury my nose in the fabric and breathe in deeply.
I don’t; instead I glance at Tristan, who is watching Cole and Kate at the water’s edge.
“Their first time seeing the ocean, huh?” he asks, nodding in Kate and Cole’s direction.
I rip my eyes from Tristan and look. The two of them are dancing in the shallows, Cole shrieking with laughter as each wave laps his feet. “Yes. Can you tell?” I ask.
He grins and sits down in the sand, and after a beat I join him. I make sure to leave a good distance between us and pull my knees up to my chest. There are a few people out and about, and I scan each and every one of them. I can’t shake the fear that my dad’s followed us here. After three years of peace, I can’t believe I’m back to living with this creeping sense of paranoia and terror. Is this what it will be like from now on? Forever? I think I might cry.
“Are you okay?” Tristan asks.
I open my mouth to tell him yes, but what comes out, much to my surprise, is “No.”
“It’s going to be okay,” he tells me.
I’ve heard that before, from the police, from lawyers, and from social workers, and even then I knew it was all lies. It might be okay for a little while, but it never ends up staying that way for long. It’s like having a fatal illness. It will only end one way. But I can’t tell him this. It’s not what he wants to hear. He wants his reassurance to make me feel better, so I just force a smile and let him think it has.
“I figured we can go have lunch,” he says, “then head back to meet Robert, the landlord.”
Why is he helping us? I’m grateful, of course, more than he knows, but I also hate the feeling that comes with it: that I owe him more than I can ever repay. I stare at the water, not knowing what to say.
“You know Will’s leaving tomorrow?” he adds.
I nod.
“He misses you.”
I pull a dubious face. Will misses me? Right, sure he does.
“I know you’re pissed at him,” Tristan goes on. “He’s told me.”
I dig my hands into the sand.
“He feels really bad, you know,” Tristan goes on, “that he wasn’t there.”
Tears prick my eyes, sharp as needles. I blink rapidly to clear them. Will was around for a lot of the bad times, but he wasn’t around for the worst of it. He joined the military as soon as he could. I was fourteen when he signed up. He left me to deal with everything by myself, and look what happened. I couldn’t protect Mom on my own.
“I’m sorry,” Tristan says, and it riles me because the last thing I want or need is his pity. “You shouldn’t have had to deal with that all by yourself. It must have been hard.”
That’s an understatement. But something catches in my chest. I think he might be the first person who’s ever recognized how hard it was.
“What you did, testifying against your dad, that was really brave.”
I shrug, unable to look at him, conflicted by wanting to reject his pity while also recognizing his sympathy means something to me. “Yeah, well, I didn’t have any other choice,” I tell him.
“Yes, you did,” Tristan argues. “And what you did took courage. Huge courage.”
“And what was the point?” I ask quietly, the tears threatening to fall again. “He did three years, and now he’s out and he wants revenge.”
Tristan draws a breath, and when he speaks there’s a growl to his voice. “He’s not going to hurt you or your mom or anyone else.”
I look sideways at him. From the way he’s staring at me, with such fierce intensity, it’s clear he wants me to believe him. I give him a faint smile—it’s all that I can manage right now. But I look away quickly, to hide the truth that I don’t believe him at all.
Suddenly, I feel a hand on mine. I look down. Tristan’s fingers lightly touch my wrist. “I’m not going to let him hurt you,” he tells me.
For several seconds, neither of us says a word. I can feel the heat of his fingers on my wrist, and his gaze holds me, refusing to let go. It’s impossible to look away. I can feel an opening in my armor, a chink that lets in light, or maybe it’s hope. And when I look into his eyes, I can feel myself being drawn into them.
I flash back to how he held me at fourteen, in his long, skinny arms, his chest lean but solid. For a heartbeat, I wonder what it would feel like to be held by him now—and my body responds in a way that shocks me. My heart speeds up; my skin burns where his fingers still rest on my wrist. Why is he staring at me still? Why are we both staring at each other without looking away?
I drag my eyes from his, my pulse skittering. He pulls his hand away. I can’t be lured in like that by the feeling of hope that he offers. It’s a trick. A con. Even if he thinks it’s real. Hope’s cruel like that.
Cole is suddenly diving down into the sand in front of me, his jeans soaked to the knees and his face flushed, and I’m grateful for the interruption.
“You have to try it.” He grins. “The water’s freezing!”
I shake my head, looking for Kate, who is still standing down at the water’s edge, talking on her phone. “Maybe later,” I mumble. “We need to go.” I don’t know why I say it. We don’t have to go, but suddenly sitting here on the sand beside Tristan feels uncomfortable. I feel anxious, too anxious to sit.
I start to stand up, but Tristan leaps to his feet and holds his hand out to me. I pretend I haven’t seen it, but when I glance his way and see the tiny look of hurt on his face I regret it.
“I’ll take you out fishing sometime on my boat,” Tristan tells Cole as we walk up the beach.
“You have a boat?!” Cole asks.
“Well, my dad does,” Tristan answers.
“You can sail it?”
Tristan nods. “I’m in the Coast Guard.”
“What’s that?” Cole asks, screwing up his nose.
“It’s a branch of the military—the smallest one. We run search and rescue and—”
“Do you kill people?” Cole asks.
Tristan’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise, but he covers it with a laugh. “Well, most of the time I don’t need a gun, not if I’m saving people from drowning. But sometimes we’re taking down bad guys.”
“Bad guys like who?” Cole asks, his face lighting up.
Tristan nods. “People doing bad things like smuggling and drug trafficking.” He looks over at me as though to check that it’s okay for him to tell Cole the truth, but in doing so catches my shocked expression. I had no idea he was in the Coast Guard. I wonder why Will never told me, but then I remember we haven’t spoken properly in years.
“Do you get to shoot the bad guys?” Cole asks, and I poke him with my elbow.
“I have never shot anyone,” Tristan says, turning to Cole, an expression of seriousness on his face. “And I hope I never do.”
“But you have a gun and you know how to shoot it?” Cole asks.
I try to tamp down the niggling concern I have about his obsession with guns. It reminds me of the pictures he drew in his school notebook—something else I still need to deal with.
“I have a military-issue weapon, yes,” says Tristan, “but I don’t carry a gun.” He leans down closer. “I’ll tell you a secret. I don’t really like guns. That’s why I joined the Coast Guard: I wanted to help save lives, not take them. And also, I loved the sea, and I wanted to be on the water, but I also wanted to be a pilot, and this way I didn’t have to choose. I could do both.”
“You’re a pilot?” Cole asks in wonder.
“Hoping to be,” Tristan answers, grinning wide.
He’s slowed his pace to match mine so we’re walking alongside each other, and I sense him looking in my direction.
“My dad’s
a policeman,” Cole says, a note of pride in his voice.
I almost stumble. Tristan’s right there, his hand cupping my elbow, shooting me a look of concern. I nod at him to tell him I’m fine.
“Look!” Tristan says, making a rapid conversation change. “That’s where we’re going for lunch.” He points at a little café on the beachfront. “First person there gets to order three scoops of ice cream for dessert.”
That’s all the encouragement Cole needs. He’s gone like lightning, streaking toward the café.
Tristan glances my way again. “He doesn’t know?” he asks me.
I shrug. “Cole was five when they arrested him. We kept it from him as much as we could. I had to tell him Dad was going to prison, but I told him it was because he did something wrong and hurt our mom and so he had to pay for it.”
“How’d he take that?” Tristan asks.
I sigh. “I don’t know. He doesn’t ever talk about him usually. Occasionally he asks when Dad’s getting out of prison. I guess at some point I should tell him he’s been released.”
We walk for a few moments in silence, watching Cole as he sprints toward his ice cream reward.
“He seems …” Tristan breaks off.
“Difficult?” I answer for him.
He shakes his head. “No. I was going to say that he seems like he has a lot of energy.”
I laugh under my breath. “Yeah, he does. He’s good at sports, but in Vegas there was no park or anywhere for him to go. I think he’ll like being near the beach.”
We reach the café, and Tristan holds the door open for me. “I can take him to the park and play soccer with him if he likes. And baseball.”
I smile as I pass him, getting a hit of the same scent that’s on his sweater. “He’d love that,” I say, but he must spot something in my expression, because he stops smiling and narrows his eyes at me.
“What’s the matter?” he asks, and I realize it’s almost impossible to hide anything from him. I’m not used to that. My poker face has always been flawless, honed from years of having to hide in plain sight so as not to trigger my dad.
“Nothing,” I say, because how can I put into words everything I’m feeling: overwhelmed and embarrassed and grateful and afraid and exhausted?
He studies me for a beat before answering. “For whatever it’s worth, I think this could be a good place to call home.”
Home. I think about that, about what it means. I guess it means a place you long to come back to. A place where you feel safe and happy, a place where you want to make memories. I’ve never had that. In fact, in my entire life I’ve never felt safe, and I’ve never lived anywhere that I look back on fondly. I don’t have many memories because most things I want to forget.
Tristan pulls out a chair for me at a table near the window, and I fluster at the gesture. I’m not sure anyone has ever pulled out a chair or opened a door for me in my entire life. I’ve had a door slammed in my face and on my fingers, but never held open for me.
I sit down and Tristan sits opposite me, and for a few seconds it’s just the two of us looking out at the ocean and the endless blue sky, and it feels like this moment, this very small, insignificant moment might be something I could store in my memory.
Soon, Cole and Kate join us, and Tristan looks at me and smiles. And for the first time since we saw each other again, I don’t look away first.
TRISTAN
As Cole and Kate rush over to the ice cream counter to pick out flavors, I glance at Zoey. I’m trying not to stare too much, but it’s hard because it’s like she has magnets in her skin and I’m filled with iron ball bearings. I can’t stop studying her face, and it reminds me of being out on the water, watching the horizon, scanning for signs to predict the weather. Her eyes fall and her lips turn down when she seems the most impassive, struggling the hardest to hide the turmoil underneath. She doesn’t like people seeing her worries, I don’t think. Maybe that’s because she doesn’t like to worry her brother and sister.
All I can think about now is a memory of Zoey at age nine, her head normally buried in a book, joining Will and me watching a movie in their house. The movie was funny, though I can’t recall why, because all I remember is Zoey laughing so hard she fell off the couch.
I’d give anything to see her laugh like that again. I know that’s my thing—trying to solve and fix problems. Whether it’s an engine or someone drowning, it doesn’t matter. My sister has a habit of telling me that some things aren’t my problem to solve—but this one feels like it is. I’ve been wanting to solve this one for a long time, ever since Will came over to my house when we were thirteen with a black eye. His dad had punched him in the face after Will had stepped between him and their mom.
He made me promise not to tell anyone what had really happened, and I had to listen to him lie, even to my own parents, that he’d taken a ball to the face in a game of baseball. I hated myself for lying, but I was scared that if I told the truth I’d lose his friendship, and Will’s friendship meant more to me than almost anything else. It still does. So I covered for him and lived to regret it.
I used to wonder what might have happened if I’d told my parents the truth that day. Might they have been able to do something? Could they have called the cops, or social services? Could they have helped Will and his family? But Will’s dad was a cop himself—that’s what made it so hard. And Will had told me that if I said anything the police would take his dad’s side, and if his dad found out he’d told anyone, he’d only beat him worse. I didn’t want that to happen, so I stayed quiet. I thought I was protecting him. Now I know that I wasn’t. But worse than that, I wasn’t protecting Zoey, either. If I had spoken up then, maybe none of this would have happened and they wouldn’t be where they are now, living in terror. I know that their dad hit Will, but I don’t know if he hit Zoey, and the thought that he might have makes me ill with guilt and rage. The thought of anyone hurting her …
Zoey tries to make polite conversation throughout lunch, distracting a moody Kate from worrying about the cat and Cole from worrying about his Xbox, but I can tell her mind is on other things, so I take over, running through my repertoire of jokes to keep Cole occupied.
“Two goldfish are in a tank. One says to the other, ‘Do you know how to drive this thing?’ ”
Cole laughs. Kate looks at me like I’m an alien. Zoey doesn’t even hear. She keeps glancing nervously at the door every time it opens. Her foot is tapping a slow but steady rhythm under the table, so much so that it makes me want to reach out and put a hand on her knee to help keep it still.
She’s barely eaten anything either, having ordered only a glass of water and some fries. She ate half, giving the rest to Cole, who followed my advice and ordered a bacon double cheeseburger, but I’ve barely seen Zoey eat since she snuck the protein bar I left her in the car while she thought I was asleep.
I ask her if she wants ice cream too, but she shakes her head. A flash of worry crosses her face as she watches Cole and Kate ordering at the counter, and immediately I figure it out and wonder how I could have been so stupid. She’s worried about paying. Shit. “This is on me, okay?” I tell her, just as the waitress brings the check.
“No,” she says, reaching to take the check from the waitress’s hand. “Please, you’ve done enough.”
I grab the check, and it becomes a tug-of-war. “You can get it next time,” I tell her. Reluctantly, her cheeks flaming, she lets go.
I’ve no intention of letting her pay next time, but it’s the only thing I can think of saying. I worry I’ve damaged her pride, but I know they don’t have the money, especially with everything they now need to buy in order to get back on their feet.
She lowers her head. “I’ll pay you back. I just need to get to the bank.”
I nod. “Were you working in Vegas?” I ask, trying to change the subject.
“Yes, but only part-time, in a coffee shop.” She casts a look at me, as though expecting me to be judging her neg
atively. “I was about to start community college.”
I remember how smart she was. She was in all the enrichment programs they offered at our school. I wonder if the reason she didn’t go to college was financial or because she couldn’t leave her mom to manage alone. It seems so unfair.
“There’s a great community college in San Diego,” I tell her. “You could sign up for classes there.”
She nods vaguely. “I need to get these two into school first,” she says with a sigh, looking over at Cole and Kate. “There’s so much to figure out. I need to find a job, too.”
“I think I might know of one,” I say. “My friend Kit just opened a restaurant in town.”
Zoey looks at me with undisguised hope, and I realize that what I want more than anything is to protect her like I wasn’t able to do before. It feels like nothing less than she deserves and nothing less than I owe.
ZOEY
I hate being beholden to anyone, and for some reason being beholden to Tristan is worse. I don’t want him to see me as a victim or needy or a burden. I’m worried about how we’ll cover the rent on the apartment, though I haven’t brought it up. It’s such a nice place—way better than we could ever afford.
I know it’s partly furnished, but we still have so much to buy. We don’t have bedsheets or kitchenware, and the priority is new clothes and shoes for Cole and Kate and a phone for me. Every time I try to make a mental list of all there is to do, panic and anxiety threaten to overwhelm me, making my heart race so hard I can feel it trying to hammer a pathway out of my chest.
“One thing at a time,” I hear Tristan say, and for a second I wonder if I spoke my anxiety out loud, but he’s talking to Cole, who is asking him about the Xbox Tristan has offered to lend him, and when they can go and play soccer and when they can go out on the boat.
“Who’s she texting all the time?” Tristan asks me, nodding at Kate, who, as usual, is managing to walk and text at the same time.
“Her friend Lis,” I tell Tristan. “I think she’s trying to get her to find the cat.”
