The Tenderness of Thieves

by Donna Freitas

  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.

  NINE

  THE 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.

  TEN

  “GOOD MORNING, SUNSHINE,” my mother said, a tall glass of iced coffee in front of her on the kitchen counter. She was still weary-eyed from sleep, like me, neither one of us looking at all like sunshine.

  “You look tired,” I said, going into the fridge, retrieving the pitcher of coffee we brewed each day and left there to cool so when we added the ice it wouldn’t get watered down. I poured myself a glass and dropped five big cubes into it from the freezer, along with some half-and-half that turned it the color of caramel.

  “I was up most of the night finishing Missy’s bridesmaid dresses.” She swirled the glass in circles with her hand, the ice clinking against the sides. “Why didn’t you come see me when you got home? My light was on.”

  “I was tired, I guess.”

  My mother gestured at the stool on the other side of the counter. “Sit.”

  So I did, and now we were face-to-face, elbows resting on the table, iced coffees in front of us. “What?”

  “I want to discuss the fact that you ran out of here yesterday.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  She blinked once. Twice. “We need to be able to talk about what happened. We need to talk about your father.”

  At this, I turned away. Stared at the hanging plant by the porch door, its leaves wilted from the heat, long green vines reaching toward the ground. Someone needed to water it. “It’s too hard to,” I said, my voice hoarse.

  “Jane. Look at me.”

  But I didn’t. Instead I turned my attention to the painting on the wall of an old fishing boat tied up on shore, stormy seas reaching up behind it, white caps dotting the tips of tiny waves farther out. My father had bought it at an art fair a long time ago, the kind that all beach towns seem to hold once a summer. I felt my mother’s hands close around mine, her arms stretched across the table, trying to reach me.

  “Look at me, Jane,” she said again.

  It took some effort, but I did. The subject—of that night, of my father—always snatched the breath right out of my lungs, threatening to choke me.

  “What happened isn’t your fault.”

  “But it is,” I whispered. “It is.”

  “Jane,
no—”

  “If I hadn’t stayed late, if I hadn’t fallen asleep, if I hadn’t called you back—”

  “You might be dead,” my mother finished before I could.

  “But Dad,” I croaked, unable to say anything else.

  My father. My father, who taught me how to ride a bike. My father who took me swimming even when the water was freezing. My father who loved to order pizza after his shift was over and take it down to the beach with me, still in his uniform, socks and shoes off, dinner on the sand, extra pepperoni, just the two of us. My father who was big and strong and fearless and invincible—until one day he wasn’t.

  My father who was gone.

  My mother squeezed my hands in hers. “Your father would be heartbroken to know that you’re blaming yourself. You have to stop.”

  I blinked away tears. “I can’t.”

  “It might help if you and I went to visit him.”

  A single tear escaped. It rolled down my cheek. “I’m not ready. Not yet.”

  “Just think about it. We don’t have to go today or tomorrow, but soon.”

  I dabbed my face with a napkin. “Okay.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I know you do,” I said.

  My mother’s hands slid away, returning to their place on the other side of the counter. Back around the cold glass of her iced coffee. “You have to face this. It’s been long enough.”

  I didn’t say anything. My throat was too tight.

  “You’re not alone, Jane,” she said. “We will get through this together. We will. I am your mother and I love you and I’m not going anywhere.”

  Instead of running to my room, this time I slipped from my perch and softly padded my way to the other side of the counter. I leaned into my mother, and she took me in her arms and held me tight, as tight as that night after the police brought me home and everything was over. She didn’t let go for a long, long while.

  • • •

  “I saw that guy again by the way,” I said to the girls. It was mid-day, the sun straight above and glaring. Bridget had dragged an umbrella all the way down to the beach from her family’s house and spent an hour anchoring it into the sand. We’d laughed at her, but now the four of us were huddled underneath it, desperate for shade.