Play of Light

by Debra Doxer

  My phone vibrated on the table; it was a text from Nate. After reading it, I felt a mixture of relief and dread.

  “What’s up?” Tessa asked.

  “Nate can’t make it for lunch. But he wants to come by the house tomorrow. To talk.” I put air quotes around the last two words.

  Tessa sat back and folded her arms. “Maybe you should break up with him. Hearing from your boyfriend should not put that expression on your face. If you two already have issues, the long-distance thing is never going to work. Besides, you won’t be boyfriendless for long. I mean, look at you.”

  Tessa was right about one thing. Hearing from my boyfriend should give me a thrill, not put a knot in my stomach. As for not being boyfriendless, that wasn’t really my concern, and her reference to my looks didn’t resonate. Deep down I knew I wasn’t the awkward girl with the wild red hair anymore, but most of the time I still felt like her.

  I’d “grown into my looks,” as my mother would say. Here in Michigan, I’d never been called “carrot top” or asked if I’d stuck my finger in a light socket. My hair darkened as I got older, and the keratin straightening I had done every few months tamed the curls. My hair flowed in long thick waves over my shoulders now.

  But when I looked in the mirror, my jaw was still too square and my light green eyes were too big. The scar that cut across my cheek marred my otherwise smooth pale skin. Nate told me I was beautiful, and I believed he meant it, but I’d accepted the fact that I wasn’t beautiful long ago when the one boy I wanted didn’t want me back.

  When the downpour diminished to a drizzle, Tessa and I decided we could start walking home without getting soaked. “You know,” she said as we stepped outside. “The need to tell you every little thing about my day won’t go away just because you’re gone. Prepare to be texted.”

  A lump formed in my throat. I would miss this girl like crazy.

  “And you’d better respond, missy.” She pointed a finger at me.

  “You know I will.”

  “I’ll tell Derrick you said good-bye, even though you didn’t. You heartless wench. Breaking two hearts in one week.”

  I was queasy at the thought of seeing Nate tomorrow and what I planned to say to him. The other heart in question was more easily mended. “We need to find Derrick a girlfriend.”

  She cringed. “Who would date him? He chews with his mouth open and picks his nose in public.”

  “Okay, I didn’t need to know that.”

  We still had two more days to hang out before I was leaving, but Tessa pulled me into a hug and said, “I hope you have a good trip home, Sarah. You look like you need it.”

  Then she walked away, surprising me with how perceptive she was.

  I woke up before my alarm clock sounded. It was still dark and far too early to get out of bed. So I closed my eyes and just lay there pretending I was in another room, my old bedroom in my old house, and my dad would be coming in to wake me soon. Back then, I never got up before my alarm. I slept through it and then I slept some more, until Dad coaxed me out from under the covers with his unusual tactics. He used music. Annoying music.

  My dad loved music, but his tastes were stuck in the decade of bell-bottoms and unshaved armpits. He was hardly old enough to drive when most of that music came out, but he still knew every song written up until 1979. Then the eighties hit with hair bands and synthesizers, and he was done. For him, The Wall by Pink Floyd was the last great album ever produced. Since then, there’d been nothing but noise, he used to say.

  Since I couldn’t stand music from the seventies, and the eighties was one of my favorite musical decades, I was appalled by his lack of taste. I mean, talk about a decade filled with diversity. There was Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, Duran Duran, and Depeche Mode, to name a few. I made it my mission to change his mind by playing “Living on a Prayer” and “Hungry Like the Wolf” endlessly, until he practically begged me to stop.

  It soon became a game, finding music that drove the other one crazy, a game Dad won when he dug up a song that made my teeth grate. He deserved bonus points because the song had my name in it, and he began playing it every morning as a way to get me out of bed. Mom used to joke she needed a crowbar to pry me off the mattress. But Dad went so far as to stand in my room and sing along with the song he’d found. Then he got my mom and my sister, Emma, into the act.

  From there on out, my days began with Hall & Oates singing “Sara Smile” along with the rest of my family. I cringed and dived under the covers each time. I would never admit that the song grew on me, and that I liked it when my family started calling me Sarah Smile. “With an h,” Emma always added, just to be clear.

  My throat tightened up at the memory. I turned onto my side. It was getting harder to breathe. I needed to stop remembering. Sarah Smile. I missed her. She’d been gone a long time now.

  When you’re young, you don’t think that everything you have can disappear in an instant. You don’t cherish your home and your family. You take them for granted. That is, until they’re gone. Then you wish you’d savored every moment before it moved on to the next, because the good things that surround you today are not guaranteed to be here tomorrow.

  Now, whenever I hear “Sara Smile,” I stop what I’m doing and listen. I can’t move until the song ends. My body feels every note and lyric like an ice-cold wave washing over me, and I remember the words Spencer once spoke as we sat on the dunes together.

  If I could swim across the ocean, I wonder if everything I’ve loved and lost would be waiting for me on the other side.

  I no longer had an ocean, but I had a lake, and I could see to the other side of it. There was nothing but brushwood.

  From the moment we arrived at my aunt’s house in Michigan five years ago, all of us broken and lost, I’d looked out over that lake and felt hollow inside. Everything was different. I was different and so were my mother and sister. Moving here hadn’t saved us like it was supposed to. It ruined us instead, each in our own way.

  My older sister, Emma, never needed an excuse to rebel, but once she had a legitimate one, she took advantage of it. A few months after we arrived, she got pregnant. Then she quit school and moved her boyfriend in with us. Mom was so emotionally wrought by then that she barely blinked at the news. Actually, she barely did anything. She hardly left the house, and she’d never made any friends here. A couple of years ago my aunt suggested that she start dating, and Mom flipped out at the very thought of it, calling us all insensitive and callous. No one dared bring it up to her again.

  As for me, I seemed to be the most well-adjusted one. I had no choice. There wasn’t room for me on the downward spiral. Someone had to help with my mother and the new baby my sister and her boyfriend couldn’t seem to deal with. Then there was the shopping and the cooking. Aunt Linda wasn’t our maid, and she had a career that kept her busy. So I pretended to be fine until the fake girl became the truth and the real me stayed bottled up inside.

  The therapist my aunt made me see when the nightmares got so bad that I couldn’t sleep anymore, said my reaction to what happened was normal. She gave me some sleeping pills and wanted me back in her office once a week. The sessions helped for a while, but when she kept pushing me to talk about that night, I stopped going. I never thought about it if I could help it, and I certainly wasn’t going to talk about it.

  Every day a freight train pounded through my head, but I pretended not to hear it. I shut down and refused to think about it. That was the only way to stop it. There was no coming to terms with what happened or learning to live with it. It had to go away completely. So I made it disappear. The problem was I made everything else go with it. Everything that was real hurt too much. I got good at fading it all to black, until poof, it was gone. Except it really wasn’t.

  The one thing I never faked was my art. Everything I was feeling poured out onto the canvas. It was my only outlet, and why I didn’t go crazy. And I knew I was good. This past spring, one of my paintings won a contest my p
rofessor had encouraged me to enter. First place was a feature in Art in America magazine, which was amazing in itself, but I was also awarded the Stanfield Art Scholarship to the Massachusetts School of Fine Arts. It was a full tuition and board scholarship to one of the top art schools in the country. But there was a problem. It was in Massachusetts.

  There was no question of my transferring there, back to the state we’d fled from five years ago. The scholarship was too good to turn down. Even my mother understood that. Besides, it was in Boston, over seventy miles from South Seaport. Mom said that as long as I didn’t go anywhere near our old town, she wasn’t happy but she was resigned to my move. I readily agreed to her terms, wanting to placate her, until something else happened.

  A few weeks after I got word of the scholarship, we got some other news. The reason we ran away in the first place no longer existed. Jackson Pierce. He was at the root of it all, and now he was dead.

  Uncle Russ, who wasn’t really my uncle but my dad’s closest friend and the only person we spoke to from our old life, called to give Mom the news. We already knew Jackson was sick with some kind of cancer. Russ had told us that awhile ago, and it put a rare smile on Mom’s face. But Jackson had finally succumbed to it. Now he was gone. For good.

  Once I knew this, my facade began to crack. It took time for me to understand what I was feeling. It was a weakness I didn’t want to see because there was only one way to heal the fissures that were forming. I had to go back there.

  I couldn’t keep pretending to be okay. For the first time in five long years, I wanted to actually be okay. I needed some kind of closure, although I hated that word. It barely touched the truth of things. There was so much more to it. There was the betrayal that still haunted me and the way everyone turned their backs on us. No one fought for us, not even Uncle Russ. I wondered if I could face that place again and let those feelings in. But I also knew I had no choice.

  It was late afternoon. The sun was low in the sky, shining in through my window. I got up to close the shades against the glare before going back to my desk. The clouds parted about an hour ago, just as Nate knocked on my door. Now we were in my room hanging out. I was sitting at my desk downloading the fall class schedule I’d just received, and Nate was sprawled across my bed, exhausted from his workout, his blond hair resting on my pillow.

  “You’re not being fair,” he said, breaking the silence. “We’re going to be a thousand miles away from each other soon enough. Why would you want to start that separation early?”

  I stilled. When he first walked in, it seemed like he’d changed his mind about wanting to talk, but obviously he hadn’t.

  When Nate asked me out last year, he had no idea what he’d gotten himself into. He was a grade ahead of me in high school, but we’d never spoken until we were both at college together. He quickly discovered that I was a girl with issues, but to his credit, he’d stuck with me, and now he said he loved me. I said I loved him too because I wanted to, and at the time, I thought it might even be true. He was the perfect boyfriend. If I were a normal girl who knew how to have normal feelings, I was sure I would love him.

  “It’s not about fairness. It’s just something I have to do.” My chest compressed as I mentally teed up the words that would end our relationship. But then I couldn’t seem to push them out. I didn’t want to hurt him. So I kept my eyes trained on the screen, buying myself more time.

  “If this is something you have to do, why is your mom freaking out so bad?” he asked.

  Shrugging, I didn’t bother turning around. “My mom is the freak-out queen. She flips when Girl Scouts ring the bell to sell us cookies.”

  The bed creaked under his weight and soon he was kneeling beside me, his hand on my shoulder, urging me to face him. Reluctantly, I did, meeting his caring eyes with the tears gathering in my own.

  “Talk to me, Sarah,” he said softly.

  I took a breath and hovered at the edge of a cliff. “I don’t think long distance is going to be good for us.”

  Nate’s lack of a reaction surprised me. His expression didn’t change. It was as though he’d been expecting this. “The odds are against us. You’re right,” he said. “The distance will be tough, but we’ll make it work. The key is not to go too long without seeing each other. I’m coming to visit you in September. I already booked my ticket.”

  “You what?” I leaned back to look at him.

  He smiled nervously at first. Then his hands left my shoulders as the reaction I was expecting finally set in. “Try to contain your excitement,” he said flatly.

  I let out a breath. “Nate.”

  “Don’t. Don’t say anything else. I’m not stupid, Sarah. I know what you’re doing. You’re your own worst enemy. It’s like you’re afraid to be happy, like you think it’s wrong or something.”

  I opened my mouth to defend myself, but my jaw hung there because the hurt in his voice doused my conviction.

  “So, fine,” he continued. “Go back there. Do what you need to. But don’t give up on us. Not yet. That’s all I ask.”

  Nate knew me too well. That little bit of doubt I already had told me I’d need him if this trip turned out to be a disaster. If I didn’t have him, I’d have no one. So like a coward, I caved. Nodding at him, I watched his eyes close in relief. When he opened them, his gaze moved to my cheek. Nate looked at my scar often, as if it could tell him what he wanted to know about me. Things I wouldn’t tell him myself. When he’d asked, I said it came from a car accident, but I wouldn’t share the details, and I didn’t think he believed me.

  Feeling guilty, I let him put his arms around me and kiss me. I wanted to reassure him. Soon the cliff disappeared, and I was back on solid ground with Nate. The only problem was I couldn’t shake the feeling that I didn’t belong there.

  After Nate left, I went on Facebook and looked at the picture of a local band my old friend and former neighbor, Riley, had posted to her page a few weeks ago. I wasn’t sure how many times I’d stared at it, but I couldn’t stop myself from seeking it out at least once each day. He was in it. Spencer. At least, I thought it was him. I reread the messages Riley and I had exchanged over the past few weeks. Those messages were how this whole trip had come together, falling into place like it was meant to be.

  Once I’d made up my mind to go to South Seaport, I did something I’d wanted to do for a long time. I contacted Riley. Just that small first step of writing her a message had sent my nerves buzzing. I wasn’t sure how she would react to hearing from me out of the blue.

  My family had disappeared so quickly, with almost no good-byes. Once we were gone, even if someone wanted to find us, they couldn’t. When we moved, we’d changed our last name from Walsh to Owens, my mom’s maiden name, because everyone was paranoid back then. My e-mail said Sarah Owens, and so did my Facebook page. But Sarah Walsh missed home. She cyber-stalked people who were from South Seaport, looking them up and hungrily absorbing anything they posted, including pictures of Riley and her friends.

  In my message, I wrote:

  ME: Hi, Riley. This is Sarah Walsh. Remember me? It would be great to catch up.

  She answered few hours later.

  RILEY: Oh my God! Is it really you? Who was my celebrity crush when we were thirteen? I won’t believe it’s you if you can’t answer this.

  ME: Half the town could answer that. That’s when the first Twilight movie came out. You were Team Jacob. You lived and breathed Taylor Lautner. Hope you’ve gotten over that. You were seriously lame that year.

  RILEY: Holy shit! It’s you. And hello? Your crush was some homeless graffiti artist you saw a movie about on cable. You defined lame. How are you?

  ME: You can ask me in person in a few weeks. I’m coming for a visit. And his name was Basquiat.

  And just like that, we began messaging regularly. Soon there were e-mails and eventually texts. Riley told me she shared a two-bedroom apartment near Barnstable College where she went to school. It was one town over from S
outh Seaport. She was a hotel and food management major, planning to work at one of the many hotels on Cape Cod. I told her I was a fine arts major, and I was starting school in Boston soon but planned to visit the Cape first.

  Then she invited me to stay at her apartment. I was working up the nerve to ask Uncle Russ if I could stay with him and his girlfriend, which would have been a ten on the awkward-as-hell scale since I hadn’t seen him in years. Plus, I kind of hated how he didn’t stand up for us, even though I knew Jackson Pierce would have made him pay for it.

  I accepted her offer. Then I lit the fuse on a bomb I knew would explode in my face. I told Mom and Aunt Linda that I intended to spend two weeks in South Seaport before school started. My aunt was supportive, but Mom’s reaction met my expectations. She yelled her voice raw, first ordering me and then begging me not to go. She accused me of lying to her, of planning this all along when I heard about the scholarship. Then she called Uncle Russ and tried to convince him to talk me out of it, to tell me it was still too dangerous to go back. But he couldn’t do that.

  He told us that when Jackson Pierce fell ill, his business and the influence he held in town began to ebb along with his health. By the time he died, he wasn’t a factor anymore. Russ said that it was safe to come back. He also offered to keep an eye on me.

  After losing the argument, Mom decided to give me the silent treatment. All those years I’d spent taking care of her and everyone else added up to nothing in the face of my going back to that place.

  And there was more.

  Rippling over my feet like a shallow wave, lapping at my skin and never receding, there was Spencer. All this time I’d been worried sick about him living with his uncle, even though he wanted me to forget him. His words sliced me open that last day on the beach, and the humiliating kiss we shared nearly broke me. But over time my anger faded, and as the years passed, I decided he probably blamed himself for what happened.