Him, in a white button-down with the sleeves rolled up and elegantly wrinkled navy linen shorts. Smiling at me.
I tried to concentrate on the presentation. And my breathing.
Ten minutes later, he passed me a note on the back of a Comix-Fest map.
Guess I dragged you to the worst presentation in the building.
I smiled, looked back at the podium. There was no earthly reason for him to be there.
I scribbled illegible notes on lightweight plugins and player portability.
When I wanted to write, What are you doing here? What are you doing here? What are you doing here?
Five minutes later, he handed me the paper again. He’d made a grid of dots in blue pen.
It was the beginning of a game. Dots and Boxes. You were supposed to take turns connecting two dots, and every time you completed a square, you put your name inside. The goal was to get the most squares.
I connected two dots and passed him the paper. He drew his line and passed it back to me. We looked at his friend droning on, and tried not to draw attention, like we were in school and we’d get in trouble.
I won the first game, and dutifully recorded my miniscule Rebecca inside the box, even though my hand was sweating so much my handwriting was wobbly, and even though my mind was on repeat (what is he doing here what is this what is this well you know exactly what he’s doing here. He’s called your bluff now, Becc).
He won the next game and recorded his Cal in tiny printing. We’d won four squares each when he gently pulled my elbow. “Come on,” he whispered.
As people started lining up behind the mics, full of burning questions about lightweight plugins, we slipped out the back.
“So I guess...you were able to come down after all,” I said in the hallway.
“Yeah. Change of plans.”
“Should you wait to say hi to your friend?”
“I should.” He looked at me evenly. “What I shouldn’t do is ask you to eat lunch on the beach with me. Play hooky for an hour.”
* * *
We spread a windbreaker from his car on the sand near the amusement park in Mission Beach. Far enough from Belmont Park that the boardwalk and roller coaster noises didn’t drown out the surf, but close enough that we could hear the people screaming on the PenduLator, a ride that swung back and forth like a giant metronome, and see the cars on the Giant Dipper coaster as they creaked up to the peak. I loved that pause right at the top, before the plummet.
The windbreaker we sat on said Ironman SuperFrog 1990 on the pocket.
“What’s a SuperFrog?” I asked.
“A race I had no business entering. I did it on a dare, but I was completely unprepared. Nearly drowned and blew out my ACL on the run.” He bent his right leg to show me his knee.
I toyed with the plastic wrap on my sandwich from the conference center, staring down at the four pale pink dots around his kneecap. Chopstick surgery, they called it.
I wondered if the scarred parts felt the same as the surrounding skin.
He unwrapped his sandwich and took a big bite, swallowing politely before speaking. “So CommPlanet... It’s either turned you on to an internet career or soured you on it for good.”
“Yes.”
He laughed. “A wonderfully clever dodge. So, still stuck on the dead trees?”
“I wish I could’ve bought the Courier. Is that nuts?”
“I wouldn’t have advised it from an investment standpoint.”
“Not that I’m not grateful for the money. And it feels good to have people expecting me, someplace to go every day besides the movies or the beach.”
“She says from the sand.”
“It wasn’t my idea.”
He grinned, stared out at the water. “I am a degenerate. But here’s a secret. Your tidy orange cubicle makes this...” he waved his sandwich at the supine bodies, the wet heads bobbing in the waves “...possible. One can’t exist without the other.”
“Are you saying work is only ever...a place we escape? It only exists so we can enjoy our free time?”
“Precisely. What? You don’t agree.”
“I hope it’s not true. It can’t be true. Not if you find work you love.”
“Remarkably uncynical of you.”
The Giant Dipper was near the top, under the flags, on its final clicking ascent, and we craned our necks to watch it. Riders would be holding their breath, closing their eyes. They screamed as it whooshed down the white track, pivoting, swooping out of view.
“That’s one of the original wooden coasters,” I said.
“How reassuring.”
“They’re solid. Better than those rusty carnival rides. Have you ever seen the crews fit one of those together? I think they leave parts behind in each town. And at the Orange County Fair the operators are always methed out.”
“Stop.” He pretended to shudder. “I have a slight coaster phobia.”
“I thought you did those crazy triathlons for people who’re bored with regular triathlons?”
“Ah, but then I’m in control,” he said. “It’s funny. You never struck me as the roller-coaster type. More...”
“The watching-them-from-a-distance type?”
“Hmm.”
“I guess I am. I have been.”
I set my sandwich aside, untouched, and ran my hands in the sand, sifting it through my fingers, forming a little hill. He reached down, too, his fingers occasionally brushing against mine as we dug and scooped, playing in the silky pile.
“People resist all our attempts to make them predictable,” he said.
I looked up, but he was staring off at the roller coaster, smiling.
When he smiled, there was a little sadness in his eyes, a flicker I could only see up close. Without that I might have fled. But it felt like honesty and drew me closer.
* * *
As I headed home on PCH, I wrote a mental list:
He’s too old.
He smiles too much.
He’d lose interest the second you slept with him.
And another reason, of course. The one that was so big, stretching in every direction, it was like the infinite surface on which all of the others were only scribbles:
You can’t do this to Eric.
I studied my reflection in the rearview mirror. My eyes were lit from the side, strangely shadowed from the sunset. Today we hadn’t done any more than touch hands under hot sand. We hadn’t even kissed. But the thrill of the brief, hidden contact and what it promised had produced a look on my face that I’d never seen before. Equal parts excitement and disbelief.
You should look surprised.
You shouldn’t believe it.
Because it’s wrong.
But at the first stoplight I examined the girl in the rearview mirror again. And burst out laughing at our shared secret.
18
Ships Passing in the Night
July 12, 1996
6:30 p.m.
“Honey, guess what? Where are you?”
“In here!”
My mom appeared in my bedroom doorway pink with excitement, holding her overstuffed paper grocery bag. Celery leaves poking over the top shook as she burst out, “I ran into Donna Logan in the Ralph’s parking lot and she’s having a pool party tonight and she invited both of us!”
Everything about this sentence was wrong.
1. Donna Logan didn’t shop at Ralph’s. She shopped at Dominico’s Fine Gourmet or used caterers. 2. Her parties, though usually centered around the pool, had never involved actual usage of the pool. 3. My mother never got invited anywhere. 4. She never wanted to go anywhere.
She looked so eager. Flattered that Donna Logan had tossed an invitation down to her, a woman whose low brown house crouched below hers like a supplicant kneeling befor
e the pope.
You know it was a pity invite, right?
“Mom. I really don’t want to go up there. We won’t know anybody.”
“We’ll know each other! Get your suit on, it’ll be good for us! We can’t mope around here every Friday night.”
She meant me. I was the moper. Serra was in heaven at her gallery job and worked a lot of openings and benefits, so she couldn’t hang out on weekends as much as I wanted to. I had spent my summer nights alone in my bedroom, staring out the window as headlights glided down from The Heights.
Lying on my bed imagining another kiss, his hands on the small of my back. I would not be wearing a Gap sundress this time, but something elegant and backless. And his hand wouldn’t hover politely as it had in the study at the graduation party. Skin on skin, him tugging my dress down, me unbuttoning his shirt, his pants. These thoughts were so exciting I feared that they would seep through my closed bedroom door down the hall.
Evidence of my wrongness that could get me busted, like the pot smoke Maggie took great pains to conceal at school. But clearly I’d hidden my fantasies well enough; from the other side of the door, my excitement looked like depression.
My mom was in her room already, humming, opening drawers. “Wear that black one-piece bathing suit, it’s so cute on you,” she called.
“Nobody actually goes swimming at Mrs. Logan’s parties.”
“She said specifically that there would be swimming. I wouldn’t be caught dead in a suit, of course, nobody wants to see that spectacle. But you should swim. It’s so hot, it’ll feel terrific!”
“She doesn’t really want me there. I only got invited in high school because—”
“She does want you there! She adores you, she said so. How’s that gorgeous, brilliant daughter of yours? I told her how great you’re doing at school. And she said she’d invited Francine Haggermaker!”
Ah. Way to bury the lede, Mom.
“Don’t just sit there, get dressed!” She’d already changed into her hot-pink paisley-print dress and white blazer, her gold earrings, necklace, and bracelet. It was her best outfit, the one she wore whenever a friend from work had a birthday or retirement dinner at Chili’s.
The color of the dress did bring out the pretty bloom in her still-soft cheeks, but it was so ’80s. Too bright, the shoulder pads in the linen blazer too bunchy. Too many pieces of too-delicate gold jewelry. White Naturalizer flats matching the jacket. She’d placed three pink hot rollers in her hair: one on her bangs, two at her temples. When she removed them they’d frame her face in three shiny brown hair cylinders, something she always did to fancy up her no-nonsense bob.
So much effort to look so wrong.
Mrs. Logan would host her party in a simple tennis dress, hair skinned into a chic low ponytail.
“Mom, please. I don’t want to go.”
Her face fell. “But you have to. You have to. I told her you would and she’ll... They’ll... Everyone will be so disappointed!”
The Logan house was haunted. In Eric’s bedroom, faded versions of Eric and Serra and me sprawled on his floor, laughed, dug through the CDs and tapes in his music crate. Another Becc, a more innocent one, blushed in the study while her friends waited for her above.
Ghosts everywhere. Part of me wanted to burrow under my bedspread and hide from them.
“She said she’s always wanted to have a girls lunch, get to know the two of us better, isn’t that nice?”
So flattered that Mrs. Logan had confided to her in a parking lot, taking the BS lunch invite seriously.
“Please, Becc. It’s her birthday and she told me she’s a little sad about it. She said she’s had a rough year, the divorce and that...fling with that younger man and all.”
Was that what we were calling him? That younger man.
Hey, guess what? I saw that younger man a few hours ago! He’s not younger to me, of course. He has a constellation of four scars around one knee, did you know that? I think about touching them all the time. Connecting the dots. Dots and Boxes, that’s a game we played. It sounds boring but with the right person, a child’s game with pen and paper can be as exciting as a kiss...
“That’s why it’d be weird, with me working at her ex’s—”
“Oh, that’s silly, you said he’s hardly involved.”
She looked heartbroken, standing there in her freshly ironed, clearance-sale Royal Robbins linen jacket, holding her arms out to the side, scarecrow-style, so she wouldn’t wrinkle it. She’d never asked me to go to a party with her.
Be kind.
Be kind. Rewind.
The rewind, in her case, was that she hadn’t dated since my father died. Seventeen years. He got esophageal cancer when I was one, and though I’d stared for hours at pictures of him cradling a swaddled-up, infant me, fascinated each time that this stranger gave me my widow’s peak and long legs, I’d never felt I had a right to miss him.
My mom said, It was horribly sad but I’m perfectly content now. Her other big motto was I’m just fine on my own! She’d supported me all alone; she’d tried so hard to give me everything. Working at her soul-draining job, never complaining.
But her life seemed so lonely, so safe. As small and stuck in the past as the house.
And though I knew it was wrong, a sliver of me wanted to observe Mrs. Logan, the woman who’d intoxicated Cal. See if she really didn’t mind me working at her ex’s company.
“I’ll go for an hour.”
* * *
I floated on one of Mrs. Logan’s designer rafts in the deep end. The only other guests who’d gotten wet were two couples in the hot tub, their drinks raised high above the waterline.
My mom had found her own raft: the white-tableclothed hors d’oeuvres table in the shade, by the pool house. She clung to it, telling everyone loading up their plates that they should try the dates stuffed with goat cheese—they’re delicious! In her white coat, she looked like a caterer.
Mrs. Haggermaker was a no-show, thank god.
Mrs. Logan had been surrounded when we’d arrived so she’d only smiled at us and called to my mom, distracted, “So glad you could make it. We’ll have to have that girls lunch soon!”
The empty pleasantry thrilled my mom.
I observed Donna Logan from my raft, this woman Cal had desired enough to keep a few things at her house. She owned her own business. She was confident and undeniably beautiful. Her white halter-tank dress set off her tan tennis-toned shoulders, and blond ponytail.
Bits of her conversation floated to me over the water. She thanked people for coming, introduced them to each other, accepted compliments on her unusual sandals: wedge-heeled, indigo espadrilles with ballet straps that she’d “picked up on the street” on a recent girls trip to Capri.
“We’ll go together next time,” she said to someone. Like the promised girls lunch with my mother, I knew that this Italy trip would never happen. It was only an expedient thing to say in the moment.
Maybe this was what he’d admired—her deftness at parties.
And my awkwardness, my inexperience, were only his new kinks. He’d get bored with them, too. Probably in way less time than his fling with her.
A burly, new man lingered near Mrs. Logan, staking his claim. A dark mat of hair sprang from his forearms and the collar of his white Nike golf shirt, but he was bald inside his black visor, which ringed his shiny head like a monk’s tonsure. Was she interested? Mrs. Logan touched his elbow a few times, so it seemed she was.
She’d rebounded with Cal’s physical opposite and seemed happy. My mom had made it sound like she was devastated.
Speaker jazz, laughter, the clinks of forks on china. Except for my mom’s social flails by the buffet table behind me, it wasn’t so bad. I’d cruise around on my raft for another half hour, then slip out the side gate when nobody was watching.
The music stopped, the clinks of one fork rose above the others, purposeful, and everyone hushed. Mrs. Logan’s voice carried, sure and smooth, across the yard, and her guests gathered close until I couldn’t see her.
“I didn’t want to jinx it, because I wasn’t sure he’d actually make his flight, but...” A shuffling near her. Her voice dropped as she murmured to someone nearby, “Come over here.” Louder: “Look who’s here. My prodigal son. He only flew into John Wayne from Boston an hour ago, so he’s a little shell-shocked by the OC. We need to let him acclimate.”
Everyone laughed.
“Anyway, I couldn’t ask for a better birthday present. He’ll be mad if I get too mushy, but I’ll say one more thing. He’s only here for the night because he has a big job in Vancouver this summer, but I’m a happy girl. Yes, girl. We’ll ignore the horrid number that shall not be named.”
More laughter, aws. A few hear, hears.
I couldn’t see him. He was hidden behind a wall of polo-shirted backs.
But I felt him. A warm knot behind my breastbone that uncoiled until it was a line, living and taut, pulling me.
“Becc!” My mom, gleeful. “Becc, can’t I keep a secret? Look!”
I pretended not to hear. I let the raft spin me away from the patio and closed my eyes.
The conversations and music rose up again, just like before.
Except that warm line from me to him was still there, tugging me. I knew what Mrs. Logan would be doing now. She’d be hugging him too tight, ruffling his hair.
He’d be pulling away from her, scowling at the new, bald consort.
“Becc’s here somewhere,” Mrs. Logan would say, scanning her yard for her only other guest under thirty.
So. That was why she’d invited us. And my mom had known, assuming—why wouldn’t she?—that I’d be thrilled to see him.
He hadn’t emailed in months, not even to say he’d be in town. He’d offered me no reason to believe that he missed me. And now he was blowing through Orange Park on a one-night layover.
Summer Hours Page 12
