by Phoebe Fox
My heart slammed into my ribs, and bubbles erupted from my mouth as I squealed, the high-pitched sound probably confusing whales for miles. I reached for the ring—gold, with a center diamond flanked by smaller ones, brilliant and sparkling in the light, even underwater.
His hand reached for mine and he took the ring from me, then swam away, back toward Jesus’s huge feet. As I watched, he paddled with his hands until he rested on the sand, one leg bent behind him, the other kneeling on the sea floor. He held the ring up in an echo of Christ’s position, raising his shoulders in a questioning shrug.
I nodded furiously, tears steaming my mask and collecting in the bottom of it.
A wet tongue on my cheek from the passenger seat yanked me out of the memory I’d avoided for years, and I wiped away a trail of Jake slime. “Thanks, buddy,” I said, tangling my fingers in the ruff of fur at his neck. I hadn’t wanted to face Michael alone.
This was the exact wrong time to be thinking of that day, I thought as we drove toward Bowditch Point. I didn’t need to be feeling vulnerable. But like trying not to think of a pink elephant, the harder I worked to avoid the memory, the more it took over my mind.
I’d eagerly held out my left hand, and Michael reached to drop the ring onto my third finger—only to fumble it.
As it tumbled in graceful slow motion he reached for it, but his hand closed only on water. He flipped to follow its path downward, the ring visible only in flashes as it glinted each time it turned over and caught the light, but his repeated flailings toward it yielded nothing. Michael was spinning in a panicked circle, searching the water around and below him for the ring, but from where I floated above him I could see where it landed and came to rest at Jesus’s feet.
I finned slowly down to the base of the statue to retrieve it, laying a hand on Michael’s arm as I passed to signal that I had it. But he was intent, still thrashing around so frantically he didn’t seem to register what I was doing as I swam by.
Which was undoubtedly why, as I calmly headed toward the ring, my hand outstretched, he plowed into my field of vision in the mask like the Man from Atlantis, darting ahead of me, his adrenaline-fueled kicks creating powerful eddies in the water.
One of which caught the ring and swept it off the pedestal and down to the sand below.
Bubbles funneled up from my mouthpiece again as I shouted, but it was too late—the ring had disappeared.
There ensued a good panicked fifteen-minute session of the two of us combing every inch of sand around the pedestal, patting it, sifting through it, sending so many particles of it flowering up around us that the water seemed viscous and dull. Until finally Michael held his arm up in triumph, the ring clutched so firmly in his clawed hand that I could see his whitened knuckles. The sparkling sunlight off its brilliant gold and diamonds seemed to glitter like a disco ball, drawing me to it like a moth to flame.
Or a barracuda to anything shiny, I amended, as a long dark threatening shape hove into view from behind Christ.
I’d dived enough to know that barracuda attacks on humans were rare, yet even so, seeing the four-foot long fish with its bristling prehistoric teeth stalled my heartbeat for several long seconds. He’d come to a halt about five feet behind Michael’s oblivious figure and was just hovering there, his horrifying mouth open as if he were smiling—or ready to take a bite of Michael’s fist, still clutching the shiny ring.
If Michael saw it he might panic again, and thrashing was only going to stir the barracuda up. Slowly, smiling reassuringly, I eased closer to him, until I was near enough to close my hand over his—over the glittering prize the barracuda was so fascinated by—and pulled the ring into my own clenched fist to hide it. Still smiling like the village idiot and nodding, I gently tugged Michael’s hand and headed toward the surface, until we finally made it back to shore. When I opened my hand, the ring had left a circular indentation in my palm above four half-moons from where my nails had dug in, in my kung fu grip.
For months afterward he’d loved to tell the story of our underwater engagement, making a joke of the near loss of the ring and his heroic treasure hunt for it—all part of the lore of us that he created.
I always smiled along as he regaled everyone he met with the tale, and never revealed my interpretation of the true moral of the story: Despite his good intentions, Michael never thought things all the way through—case in point, a four-thousand-dollar engagement ring nearly lost at sea in his ill-thought-out romantic gesture.
Or his asking me to marry him when he clearly hadn’t been ready for that.
Or, I thought, my anger rekindling as my tires crunched into the Bowditch Point parking lot and I caught sight of his achingly familiar figure, his coming back here and opening up a can of worms I’d long since sealed.
Michael stood from the picnic table he’d been slouched over and waved as soon as I stepped out of my car, but I didn’t bother to wave back. I went around and opened the passenger door for Jake.
Why had Michael come back here, anyway? I brooded, stalling by letting Jake pee on every weed in the gravel lot at the tip of Estero Island. To clear his conscience? And what could he possibly say that would make me feel any better about the worst thing I’d ever experienced? I’m sorry, I freaked out? That seemed obvious. I’d met someone else? My heart twisted at that one—it had entered my mind more than once that maybe Michael had been cheating on me and left me for her. But I’d made peace even with that. There was nothing I could do about that if it had happened, and it said more about Michael than it did about me.
It wasn’t you; it was me?
That one caused a bigger pang in my chest, but not because of Michael. Those were the words I’d said to Ben after I’d stupidly slept with Chip Santana.
I’d meant them—I hadn’t been ready for what Ben had been offering me at the time. But I could see now how hollow and useless they must have sounded to him.
Ben had been all the things I’d ever hoped for in a partner…and I hadn’t been ready for it because of what the man still standing beside the picnic table, hands by his sides and patiently waiting, had done to me two years ago.
No, there was nothing that Michael could say that I needed to hear anymore. And I wasn’t going to help him salve his conscience by letting him apologize and wheedle and excuse his actions. All I needed, I realized as Jake took a really impressive poo in the grass bordering Estero Boulevard, was to tell Michael how I felt. What I thought of him and what he had done.
I unrolled a baggie from the holder on Jake’s leash and leaned over with it to pick up his mess. The most eloquent possible statement of my feelings would be to bring it over to Michael’s table and leave it in his lap.
But my days of unbalanced broad gestures—another grim legacy of the Michael fallout—were finally behind me. I’d simply say what I needed to say and leave.
Jake didn’t seem to pick up on my state of mind, nearly pulling my arm from the socket as we neared Michael in his efforts to offer him his most unreserved affection.
“Hey, big guy! Well, you’re not so vicious after all, are you?” Michael said, car-washing the dog’s huge head as Jake buried it in the vee of his legs.
“I gave him his stand-down command,” I lied stiffly. “No need for a lawsuit.”
“What’s his name?”
“Spike.” I pulled Jake back harder than I needed to.
Michael looked up at me with the grass-colored eyes I’d gazed adoringly into so many times.
“Thank you for coming, Brook,” he said softly. “It’s more than I deserve.”
“I’m not staying. I just came to tell you some things.”
“None of it can be worse than what I’ve said to myself. But first will you let me tell you one thing?” he asked. “Not because I need it for my own peace of mind…although I do. But because you deserve to hear it. P
lease?”
I had loved this man so deeply that there were times it actually physically hurt my chest. He stood in front of me now with a nakedly pleading expression, those verdant eyes I knew so well meeting mine directly, intensely. Whatever had happened between us at the end, what we once shared was real.
“Fine,” I clipped out. “I’ll listen.” I took a seat on the bench across the nicked wooden table from him, pulling Jake in close beside me, and Michael settled onto his bench.
We sat in silence for a long moment, just looking at each other in a gaze that went on long enough to become painfully intimate. But he did not look away, and neither did I.
Finally he nodded once, cleared his throat, and then he spoke.
“Walking out on you was the best thing I ever did.”
six
For a moment I sat there, sure I’d misheard him.
But within a flash the words sank in, and brought up a surge of rage so strong and long-held I shook with it. He’d conned me into letting him talk first so he could gloat? I shot to my feet.
“You repulsive son of a bitch,” I said, my voice trembling with fury. “How dare you say that to me.” I shoved my way out from where I was sandwiched between the table and bench, Jake scrambling out of my path, and rounded the end to stand over Michael like an avenging Fury. “I may not have been perfect, and I may have done a lot of things wrong. But I loved you. I gave you everything I could, and maybe it wasn’t enough for you, but that was the best I had at the time. And you weren’t perfect either, you selfish piece of garbage.”
Michael was leaning back from my unmasked venom, his eyes stricken, but the words were fountaining out of me like pea soup out of Linda Blair, and I couldn’t stop.
“But I loved you for who you were, imperfections and all, because people are flawed,” I bit out. “We’re messy, and we can be assholes, but you know what? We grow. And love means growing with someone, encouraging every little seedling and nurturing that and cheering it on, not stomping out the first tendrils because they aren’t perfectly formed. Love is a living thing, not stagnant. And you were a shallow child who couldn’t see that, wasn’t willing to trust it—and didn’t have the courage to tell me that you couldn’t handle it.”
My chest felt as if it were on fire, and I didn’t realize I was starved for oxygen until I finally sucked in a breath.
“So you come here,” I said, fury still throbbing under the words, “and make all this effort to talk to me not even as some kind of bandage to your conscience—but to let me know how unaffected you are by what you did to me—to us? How grateful you are for it?” I pinned him with a gaze I hoped was filled with all the contempt I could muster. Michael’s hands clutched the lip of the table so hard the skin had whitened, but he made no move to leave or to defend himself. One tiny point in his favor.
“You may have hurt me, Michael,” I went on. “You broke my heart so badly I didn’t think I’d ever get over it. But I have. And you did me a favor, because I’m glad I felt all of that for you—even if it was a lie. It taught me that I’m alive, and I’m human, and I can be vulnerable. And I wasn’t foolish to love you, even though everything about your love was phony. It taught me how to really love someone, and someday I’ll find someone worthy of that.” My heartbeat stuttered as a picture of Ben flitted into my head, but I pushed it away. “I feel nothing for you anymore but pity. You’ll never even know what love is.”
I had nothing left to say to him. I stood there breathing heavily, Jake’s warm head pressing into my thigh as if in solidarity. My rage was gone, evaporated as if it had never been, except for an exhaustion left behind, and an inexplicable lightness so complete I thought I might just float up and away from him and be gone.
As if a burden I hadn’t realized I was still carrying had lifted.
“Goodbye, Michael,” I said, and somehow the words felt almost tender. I turned to go.
“Walking out was the best thing I ever did because it woke me up to what a dipshit I was,” he called out behind me.
I stopped, then turned around, my eyes narrowed. “Say more about that.”
He stood, watching me. “It’s true. Leaving…being away from you…it showed me exactly what I’d left behind.”
“And yet you stayed gone.”
“I did,” he agreed. “Because I didn’t know how to undo it.”
“There was no way to undo what you did,” I said.
“Yeah, I knew that. Which was why I…” He stopped, stepped out from behind the picnic table, running a hand through his brown hair in a frustrated gesture I knew well. “Can we talk this out a little closer than half a football field away?” His self-mocking grin tipped one side of his lips up as he held a hand toward me, palm up. “And if you’re through with them, can I please have my balls back? That was some speech.”
“Totally deserved,” I said, fighting a traitorous quirk of my lips.
“No argument.”
I could try to convince myself all I wanted that I didn’t need to know his explanation for what he did, but the truth was, now that I was right on the verge of hearing it, it would kill me not to.
Not that I was going to let him know that. I tossed up one shoulder in an unconcerned shrug.
“Fine. If it makes you feel better to tell me. Whatever.” I swanned back over to the picnic table as if I were disinterestedly checking out the four-dollar lunch buffet at Golden Corral, Benedict Jake trotting amiably over to Michael.
I sat back down across the table from him as he sank onto the other bench. And then, for the first time since he’d come back, I really let myself look at him.
Familiarity hit me with a jolt. The arch of his eyebrows, a shade darker than his ashy brown hair, fanning out at the outside edges into little individual hairs I used to smooth down with my thumb. The raised freckle on his right cheekbone I’d run my fingers over a hundred times. The shape of his earlobes—I could still remember the feel of them on my fingertips, unexpectedly tender and soft.
There were new creases beside the meadow-green eyes I’d always loved to look at, making him look a little bit older, but not in the bad way I might have wished for. Instead they lent him a hint of depth, a gravitas he hadn’t had before.
He was watching me too, examining my face with the same intentness I was no doubt training on him. I wondered what he saw, how the last two years had etched themselves into my face.
“It’s so good to see you again,” he said quietly, and I had to steel my softening heart.
“You said you wanted me to hear you out. So talk.”
He nodded. “Right. Okay. Brook…” He looked down at the table, then back up at me, shook his head. “The truth is, I panicked.”
“No kidding.” I wasn’t interested in glib explanations.
“You were…you are…so…” He gestured in the air, as if he thought he could pluck the right word out of it, and I waited with shameful anticipation, wanting even through my simmering anger to hear his compliments, his contrition, his flowery words of flattery and regret.
“Mature.”
I sat back, crossing my arms over my chest. “Gee, thanks, Petrarch.”
The indentations beside his eyes deepened as he offered a sheepish smile. “Yeah, I know—I suck at words; you know that from the band.”
It was true. It had been one of the things that always frustrated him—Michael could write music that plucked at the deepest chords of a listener’s soul, but he was unable to finish a song without his bandmate Chris, who penned the lyrics—his words the Cyrano to the beautiful but literally dumb Christian of Michael’s melodies.
“What I wanted to say…” he went on. “You’re a grown-up and you always were. And I was…well, a musician. You had it all together, and you always knew what needed to be done—and then you got it done. It made me feel like a
kid, a stupid, irresponsible kid just drifting aimlessly through life.”
Something panged behind my ribs—a flutter of recognition…and guilt. That was how I’d thought of Michael, wasn’t it? A beautiful boy with his wild artist’s heart, and me, his island in a storm, his safe harbor, the anchor that grounded him.
Not the indispensable rock I thought I’d been for his flighty creative soul, but in the end, I’d bitterly admitted after his abandonment, the millstone that held him back, held him down.
Looking back I could see now how over and over I’d nagged—haranguing him about the bills, his late nights long after his gigs had ended as he jammed and rehearsed and partied with the band, finding a “safety net” job he’d never wanted to consider…Showing up on time for our cake tasting. The final straw that had sent Michael fleeing town—and fleeing me.
Shame rose up hot in my throat. “I never meant to make you feel like that,” I muttered. And I hadn’t meant to. But I knew now—knew all along, if I were honest—that I had done it anyway.
But Michael absolved me. “It wasn’t your fault. You were an adult wanting to have a relationship with another adult. And I wasn’t ready to grow up yet.”
“I didn’t let you be yourself,” I said to the tabletop. I wasn’t sure how I’d gone from righteous rage to apologizing. “I tried to…to shunt you into a mold that wasn’t right for you. To change you.”
“You tried to help me, Brook. I just wasn’t ready to admit I needed it.”
Finally I looked up and met his gaze, and it was steady on mine, the corners of the lips whose color and curve I’d known almost better than my own lifting slightly in a gentle smile. “I was an idiot. I freaked out and ran away like a kid because seeing how together you were all the time just made me feel like the mess I was. I hurt you…the person I loved more than anything…because I was a coward.” I was straining so hard to hear his quiet words I’d stopped breathing.
