by Kelly Harms
It hits me that it’s time I scaled those cliffs. I size them up.
Sure enough, there’s a sort of staircase of rock that has been knocked into the cliff wall to my right. You have to really be looking for it, but once you see it there’s no question that humans put it there. It kind of curls back and forth and looks just treacherous enough to be fun, so I sit down with my butt on the edge of the grass and scoot myself down to the first real “stair” of rock.
From there the stairs are closer together, and I get about fifteen feet down with no problem whatsoever, using my butt-scoot technique whenever necessary. Now the house is out of sight and it’s just me and the cliffs and a bunch of seabirds who are squawking like mad on the rock about twenty feet away, feathers flying as they try to get their beaks on a small pile of something interesting. After about twenty minutes, I get to a rock-stair so steep I’m going to have to get down on my belly and lower myself down backward. Past it is a gradual slope that layers right into the water—I am definitely near the home stretch. The ledge gives me pause, but now that I’m this close, I want to go all the way. I want to put my feet in the ocean water to see what saltwater feels like and if it’s cold like the Mississippi or warm like Lake Okoboji. I get down on all fours and then lie on my tummy and sort of slither as slowly as I can down the edge to the next tier of rock, using my hands and arms outstretched to drag against the smooth rock and slow the fall down. I end up on my ass, but it’s with dignity and only minor abrasions. When I stand up, I pump my arms up and down like Rocky and listen for the roar of the crowd.
The rest of the way to the water is a cinch. Once the rock truly levels out, I leave my shoes, a pair of sneaks I’ve had since forever, up as high as I can and wander a little closer to the spot where the puny waves meet the rock.
Ten seconds later I’m drenched head to toe. Turns out ocean waves can be all kinds of different sizes. And apparently no one has informed the Atlantic Ocean that it is the middle of June. The water is extremely refreshing and I am shivering everywhere. My goose bumps are shivering. I’m having my own private wet T-shirt contest out here and definitely winning in the Nipple Division. It is time to retreat.
Only, my shoes have apparently decided to go surfing. The rock where I had left them high and dry now glistens from a fresh bath. Gah. At least I still have my pants, moist though they may now be. It seems I am learning my lesson one item of clothing at a time.
Shoeless, I make my way back over the sloping rocks until I’m finally well out of the reach of the waves and then take my time picking over the steeper and steeper steps until I’m almost crawling on all fours. Then I reach the big drop off that slowed me down coming here.
Only now gravity isn’t on my side. It’s just a big wall now, and, though I can definitely get my hands over the top, I can’t seem to find anything to grab on to up there. If I could, I could probably get my feet under me and walk myself up high enough to throw my body weight over the ledge. But all I feel is smooth stone in every direction within reach. I’m going to have to go around it somehow, but there don’t seem to be that many safe-looking options once I leave the makeshift stairway.
Well, shit. I might have seen this coming. I sit down for a while on the lower step to have a little think about what to do next, then lie down flat on the smooth rock and listen to the ocean. It occurs to me that I’m not smelling the salt and sea as much anymore—finally my nose has gotten accustomed to the briny air, I guess. Too bad; I like that smell. I inhale big through my nose and still manage to get a little whiff of seawater, but mostly I smell the metallic odor of wet rock, like the way old silverware tastes when you are licking it clean of ice cream. I see a few fishies splashing around in the distance and then disappearing into the sparkling waves, and the fishing birds are circling the water again and again in this hypnotizing pattern, and the sun feels so warm on my wet skin that I think about a little nap. Nothing better to do, is there? When I wake up, refreshed, surely I’ll figure out a way up from here.
I close my eyes and fall into a weird dream about swimming pools and birch trees.
After a while, one of the trees starts shouting at me. “Hey, hey you!”
In my dream, I tell the tree to leave me alone, but he keeps shouting. “Are you okay?” Finally I wake up. When I see who’s really doing the shouting I nearly roll off my rock ledge. It’s a scuba diver, fully outfitted in head-to-toe neoprene, stomping around on the rocks below with those ridiculous pink flippers divers wear. His head is nothing but goggles, snorkel, and bright blond hair. It’s a regular Jacques Cousteau.
“I’m fine. Just stuck is all,” I call down to Jacques. “You don’t know how to get up from here, do you?”
“What?” he shouts. “Come on down here, I can’t hear for the waves.”
Grumble. I am going to lose all the ground I covered. But I scramble back toward the shore anyway. Maybe this guy can go get me a ladder after he gets done hunting for the elusive giant squid or whatever.
When I’m close enough to see blue eyes behind the neon yellow goggles, I repeat, “I’m fine. I’m just stuck—can’t get back up to my house.”
Jacques looks up at the cliff and then back at me. “You came down here that way?” he asks, incredulous.
“Is there some other way I should know about? Besides, there’s practically a staircase leading down. Until that one spot.” I gesture to where I was napping before and he nods.
“No kidding. Must have been there since the Indians. That would explain the huge leap in the middle. Probably a step washed away over the last thousand years or something. Cool. I thought I had this place figured out, but I never knew about that. And you only got here, what, a week ago?”
I nod, feeling a little intimidated by the network of gossip going on out here. “I guess the house giveaway was pretty big news?” I fish.
“Well, maybe. But I only knew because I had to come in the day after they made the announcement to spruce up the yard a little and turn on the pool. I’m the groundskeeper there. Or I was.”
“No kidding! So you know how to get me back up there?”
Jacques looks from me to the huge wall of cliffs between me and the house, and when I follow his eyes even I can’t believe I made it down here without severe head trauma. “Well…” he says, and then there’s a long pause. “Sure. Can you swim?” He looks me up and down and sees the state of my clothes, which aren’t dripping anymore at least, and adds. “Or did you just learn the hard way about tides?”
“I can swim,” I say. I lived in a Y off and on from ages seven to ten. I swim like a dolphin. “But yes on the tides. They don’t have those where I come from.”
“Where’s that?” he asks.
I think about saying Iowa but rule that out for sheer lack of glamour. “Texas,” I tell him. “The landlocked part.” How that is more glamorous, I cannot say.
Jacques tilts his head at me and peels off his goggles, revealing a pretty, sun-tanned face with two lighter circles around his eyes like a raccoon’s. “You don’t have an accent.”
Oh great, Jacques is also a detective. “Okay, not Texas,” I concede. “But someplace without an ocean. I thought the waves were less, um … wavy. That’s how my shoes ended up in Davy Jones’s locker out there.” I gesture grandly to the vast water.
Jacques laughs and then surprises me by unzipping the miles and miles of neoprene that cover him and peeling off the wet suit, starting at his shoulders and working down until the whole shirt part is hanging around his waist.
“Humminah humminah humminah!” I say, as I watch him expose first one tawny muscled arm and then another, followed by a stunning swimmer’s chest. “Keep going!” I am kidding, but also not. Thank you, Jesus, for putting this extremely interesting man in my ocean.
Jacques laughs harder. “Well, you’re giving quite a show yourself, Miss Wading-in-the-Ocean-in-a-White-T-Shirt.” He gestures to my boobs, and sure enough, my little size As are giving an eyeful. I immediately cross my
arms in front of me.
“Eyes up, buddy!” I tell him. But I am thinking: take off your pants.
“Yes, ma’am. Here,” and then as if I have direct dialed heaven, he starts working at the legs of his wetsuit. Yes! I watch as he gets one leg out, then sigh with disappointment when it becomes clear he’s got a pair of swim trunks under his suit. Bummer. He peels the other leg out but I am losing interest fast. Then he foists the whole drippy mess over to me. “Put this on.”
“Um?” I say, as I hold the heavy suit at arm’s length. “Why?”
“We can swim over to the inlet back there,” he points to the left, “and walk up the hill from there—there’s a put-in for boats. As impressed as I am by your mountain-goat-style descent, there’s no way up from here that doesn’t involve at least a mild concussion.”
I smile but don’t move. “It’s going to be too big on me.”
“Sure, but it’s stretchy. Trust me, the water is pretty cold for a girl from not-Texas, even in June,” he wiggles his eyebrows. “I’ll snorkel in front so I know where I’m going; you just stay close right behind me. If you feel overcome by waves, grab my leg or something. Do you want these?” he gestures to his silly-looking flippers.
“I think they really will be too big,” I answer, zipping my way into the cold wet suit. Just the neoprene on my skin feels like taking an ice bath, so I can’t imagine how the water would feel without it. I guess my feet will soon find out.
“Yeah, probably.” He looks at me and sees my shivering, I guess, because he stops wading into the water and stands there hip deep, shivering a little himself. “Hey look. I can swim back and get someone to come pick you up on a boat. Wouldn’t probably take more than a couple of hours. Or I can—”
I dismiss him with a flip of my hand. “Please. I’m fine. How far is the swim?”
“Not far at all. Three lengths of a pool, maybe four. We can break if you need to.”
“I won’t need to,” I tell him, and then wade into the water to my shoulders and get used to the bobbing sensation of the up-and-down waves, imitating Jacques’s relaxed arms-out posture and sticking my butt high to get my float on.
I see him smile at this, and then he waves one arm high and shouts, “Come on!” and we start swimming to the break in the waves, about sixty feet from the shore on a leftward lean. I get a snootful of saltwater at the break, then manage to cough most of it up on the smooth plane that follows and keep a close distance behind Jacques all this time. He swims well, better than me, and doesn’t look cold at all, though without this suit I know I’d be suffering. It was pretty sweet of him to give it to me. Plus I got to see his abs.
As I watch his hands dip into the water like seal fins I realize that he must have grown up here. Probably has lived on this coast his whole life. I wonder what that makes him. Extremely rich or part of a fancy old family, maybe? Since he’s mowing our lawn, I sincerely doubt it. He must be a native son, living in one of those little houses inland that I saw on the drive here, with the yards full of cars on cement blocks and rusty swing sets. I bet his family is a lot like mine was, before I gave them the old heave-ho. It makes me tingly to think we might be in a similar social stratum. I find myself suddenly wishing I was wearing lipstick.
A few minutes of swimming and I start to understand where we are heading. Though I didn’t realize it before, our house is set on a point, and around the side of it the cliffs taper off and mellow into a low easy slope to the ocean. There’s even some grass growing on the hill. But it’s farther than I’d hoped, and my nose is running like crazy, and the taste in the back of my throat is this salty-vomit flavor that I keep choking on. Jacques keeps swimming like it’s nothing, so I keep kicking away, but I’m getting that weeble-wobble in my stroke that you get as you get tired. When we’re just thirty feet from the shore I have that sinking feeling, literally, and start grabbing at his leg and sputtering and waving my arms in distress.
Jacques stops and rights his body and swims over to me, where he puts his arms underneath my body and lifts so all I have to do is just float there and recover. He hardly seems to be even moving to tread water, and I’m starting to wonder if this is one of those part-dolphin people from the Weekly World News. “How are you doing that?” I ask him after swallowing way too much seawater.
“Doing what? The water is shallow here, I’m just bouncing on my tiptoes.”
Oh my God. “What? Why am I trying to swim, then?” I wiggle out of his hold and let my feet reach for the gravely bottom, feeling like a total moron as I find the comforting surface.
“No idea. You okay? I thought maybe you were going to go be with your shoes.”
“I’m fine. Let’s go, this water is freezing.”
Jacques splashes toward shore, shouting, “Told you so!” I half walk, half swim in behind him.
* * *
Jacques’s name turns out to be John Junior. Seriously. And there is no John Senior. His mom, he tells me during the short walk back to the house, is and always has been wildly in love with the Kennedy family. I understand exactly where he’s coming from, considering my middle name is Diana. When I tell him so, he laughs and then looks at me sideways. It is the “is she for real?” look, and I get it all the time. Mostly, I am not for real, but right now I am extremely for real and want J.J. to know this thing we have in common is pure and true.
“My mom shared Lady Di’s penchant for bad boys,” I explain. And her habit of leaving the kiddos behind to chase after the good life, I think.
“Are you into bad boys too?” J.J. asks, and I get that thrill I get whenever a guy flirts with me. And that tingle of apprehension, too.
“Nope,” I call as I race ahead ten feet, energy pumping through me, bare feet smacking on the pavement. “I like all boys. Did you do all this gardening?”
By now I am standing at the turn from the main road to that long gravel driveway that leads to the house. J.J. picks up speed into a light jog and joins me there. There are two stands of trees flanking each side of the drive, and then at the base of the trees are flower beds curling around them grandly, welcoming all to the manor. They’re really pretty and elaborate-looking, and if he did plant them I’m impressed.
“Sort of,” says J.J.
“Sort of how?”
“The network, they brought in a celebrity landscape designer from one of their programs. Some brawny Asian dude. He drew all these maps and plans and whatnot. Then they hired a bunch of local kids, me included, to execute his plans. When it was all done, they kept me on for maintenance. “
“Well, it’s beautiful. You did a great job.”
He shrugs. “I don’t know anything about landscaping.” J.J. leans in to examine the leaves of a blue-green plant as he speaks. “I’m just the gardener.” He plucks a little black bug off the broad leaf and squishes it between his fingers.
A thought hits me. “I bet they stop paying your salary now that we’ve moved in, huh?”
Another shrug. “Last week was my final job at this house.”
“Who’s going to take care of all of this, then?” Besides the expanse of grass to mow, there’s got to be about four bazillion flowers to water and prune and whatever. Janey has put out little pots of herbs all over the place but she clearly has no interest in growing anything that she can’t cook.
“You, I guess,” J.J. says this with a smile. Somehow he already knows this is the last thing on earth that is going to happen.
“I don’t think so. I’ll talk to Janey. Maybe I can convince her to keep you on.”
“Who’s Janey?” he asks. “Your mom?”
“Hardly. She’s my … cousin. Sort of. I’m, uh, letting her stay with me in the house.” Oh, this lie isn’t going to blow up in my face in a matter of days or anything.
“And it’s just you and she up there?” He tilts his head up the long driveway.
How does one explain to a very cute guy with a great body that one has conned one’s way into living with a near stranger and
the near stranger’s great-aunt? Is there a Hallmark card for that?
“It’s Janey, me, and Janey’s super-old aunt. Her name is Midge. She’s actually pretty hilarious.” An evil thought hits me and I go for broke. “Hey, speaking of, would you be able to come in pretty early to trim the hedges around the pool one day? Like maybe around six-thirty a.m.? We’ll pay you.”
J.J. looks at me cross-eyed. “Seriously? Why so early?”
I think quick. “Because that way it would be all done and gorgeous by the time everyone is up and they’d love it so much they’d be sure to hire you permanently. Just this once?” Please, please let him say yes. I fight back the urge to cackle manically.
“Sure.” I get one more of his patented shrugs, which are growing more and more adorable. “Whatever you think.”
“Cool!” I impulsively give him a big wet hug and then a weird high five too, managing to be both overly touchy and ridiculously chummy at the same time. Whoops.
He gives me another sideways look and echoes, “Cool. I can probably come over on Thursday. I’ll see you then?”
“Of course! I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
This is a weird answer and his raised eyebrows tell me he thinks so too. “Oooooo-kay. Well, bye, then.” I watch him walk away, his still dripping wetsuit over one arm, looking both absolutely scrumptious and completely clueless. I wait until he’s round the bend and well out of sight before I check the corner of my mouth for drool.
JANEY
“However wide ranging our culinary interests, however sophisticated our palate and talents in the kitchen, we usually return home for breakfast.”
—CHERYL ALTERS JAMISON AND BILL JAMISON, A Real American Breakfast
