Summer Hours

by Amy Mason Doan

“Nice work,” he says.

  “You, too.”

  “I like your hair this length.”

  “The professional look.” I wear my hair just past my collarbone now. I can still get it into a ponytail, but just barely.

  He brushes a stray lock of hair from my cheek and tucks it behind my ear. We’re so close I can hear how his breathing has sped up a little from our task. I can see the rays of his irises, how they’re every shade of brown. Fawn and maple and tan. And gold.

  “Well. Any closer and I’ll be in the flames.” He scoots down onto his floor bed.

  I throw him extra pillows so he can prop up his bad leg. He undoes his boot, places it on the mound. He rubs his eyes, reaches up and swats at the tetherball over his head with his right hand, spreading his long fingers, revealing the hairless length of skin on the underside of his arm. “Hey, so, I don’t want you to feel guilty.”

  “But I do.” I sit on the bed above him, take off my sandals. “And not just about your foot. About this whole fiasco of a trip.”

  I curl under my velour blanket, lulled by the crackle of the fire and Eric’s soft breathing below me, the faint bump-bump-bump of the tetherball against its metal pole.

  I close my eyes, and we’re both quiet for a long time, listening to the bumps. Then it goes silent, and I think he’s out.

  I yawn, watching the lines of sun dancing in the cluttered room. The curtains behind me are closed but beams seep around the sides, lighting the framed painting on the wall above the TV. It’s a dramatic oil of the ocean, viewed from the forest above. A slash of churning turquoise water between thick trees.

  My eyelids are heavy, dropping.

  “Becc,” he whispers. “You asleep?”

  “No,” I whisper back, as if there is someone else in the room we don’t want to wake.

  “The trip hasn’t been a complete fiasco. A few stitches are worth it for Serra’s gift.”

  I’m so tired it just comes out: “You don’t have to say that. I know why you really came.”

  “What?”

  “I know why you’re really here. And it’s okay. I feel a little embarrassed about it, but it was beyond nice of you.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “What you said on the roof garden last night. About how your mom told you I’ve been having a rough time since last year, since... I know that’s the real reason you came. So you can stop pretending...”

  “You think I’m only here because I felt sorry for you?” he asks, hoarse.

  “Basically.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  I lie as still as I can.

  Eric is only a few feet below me, and I want nothing more than to come down to him, curl into his chest. Before he remembers the hundred reasons we can’t do that anymore.

  “Eric?” I whisper.

  But he’s asleep.

  55

  You and Me and the Open Road

  Saturday, 4:00 p.m.

  We have a nearly three-hour drive. I still have to get gas, clean and wrap the gift, buy a decent outfit for the ceremony tomorrow.

  I’m not showing up at Serra’s wedding, the grand gesture that was going to right all past mistakes and reunite the Three Mouseketeers, in Eric’s long nylon Adidas basketball shorts and Dodgers T-shirt.

  We eat at the hotel like we promised, and the restaurant’s World-Famous 360-Degree Log Run is something to see. It’s a trickling, toddler-height oval structure in the corner of the room, surrounding a play area. Crystal’s late husband rigged it up out of parts from a train set and a Sushi Go-Round. Kids crawl in and out of the play area through a carpeted tunnel behind my seat to watch the replica of a sawmill behind a plastic barrier, the Lincoln Logs traveling around in an endless loop.

  It is a beautiful thing to drink coffee and eat fresh buttermilk biscuits with a simulated river splashing by your elbow, but we eat quickly. We both want to get up to the Sea Whisper before sunset.

  I check the car out the restaurant’s front window again. It’s become a habit as automatic as checking that my wallet’s in my purse. The gift is there, of course, and as I stare out at it, I see not the utilitarian brown cardboard but the exotic world trapped inside. My body and mind are wrung out, soft, and there’s a freedom in being too exhausted to control my thoughts.

  Eric stirs his coffee, smiling. “What’s funny?”

  “It’s so dopey.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I was thinking about how satisfying it would be to split open Serra’s piece and...liberate the creatures. So they could float around on the play table, whoosh down that slope over there. We could make them little ponchos out of plastic bags.” I can see it so vividly: little furred replicas of our younger selves cruising around.

  “They totally deserve it. They’ve been trapped in Plexigas for a decade. But you don’t believe in log-ride ponchos,” he says. “You said so every single time we went to Disneyland and waited in line at Splash Mountain. You said that they take all the fun out of it and should be outlawed.”

  We hold each other’s gaze for a few seconds, and I know he’s remembering those long days at Disneyland on school field trips, or with Serra. Once, just the two of us had gone. It was a late-August day before senior year, and a work friend of my mom’s had given us discount passes. That time we’d stayed until the park closed at eleven, riding a whipping, many-armed attraction in Tomorrowland at least five times. Hip to hip in the dark, sliding back and forth in our car, helpless against its centrifugal force, laughing hysterically. We’d stepped off the ride shaky each time, linking arms so we wouldn’t fall, running dizzily right back into the line. His face splashed in colored lights.

  I clear my throat. “I remember.”

  He fiddles with our coffeepot lid, his voice good-natured. “I think we may be slightly punchy.”

  I match his playful tone—“Slightly? I think I passed punchy last night around one.”

  “Here, have the last of the coffee.” He pours me the last inch and I down it.

  “So do you think Serra’s nervous?”

  “She’d have to be, with the wedding...” he checks his watch “...a little less than twenty-four hours from now.”

  “But she’s happy, I can hear it in her voice. He’s a good guy.”

  “Yeah, they came to New York two years ago.” With a note of finality, nodding. “He is a good guy.” He pauses, then continues, his expression less serious. “Have you come close to...you know?”

  I smile. “Walking the plank? No. You?”

  He shakes his head. “Not really. A few years ago, I was dating this chef and she and I talked about it once, but...”

  I carefully tune my expression to the appropriate, midrange level of curiosity. I freeze it there, waiting, for what feels like ages.

  As if I don’t have to concentrate on breathing.

  But he’s not looking at me anymore. He’s staring at the play table.

  I glance down to what’s caught his eye. A spot in the trickling water jammed with Lincoln Logs. “What is it?”

  He stands, rolls up his right sleeve. Dunks his arm into the play river like he’s Tom Hanks fishing bare-handed in Cast Away. Pulls his dripping arm from the water and holds up his catch: one of Serra’s metallic-blue hinges.

  “What the...” I grab my purse from the floor and root through it. Wallet, keys, journal...

  The bag of hinges is gone.

  56

  Island

  Saturday, 4:40 p.m.

  Just south of the Oregon border

  The log-run incident cost us an hour, and we only recovered two more hinges. Just enough to connect the last panel of the gift.

  Some kid had crawled past my unzipped hobo purse, spied the bag of shiny bright goodness in it, and given the hinges a merry
ride. We found one stuck in a clump of plastic trees and one jammed under a slide near the miniature sawmill.

  We tried to give Crystal cash to make up for disturbing her dining room, but she wouldn’t take it. Instead, she gave us a huge white bag of biscuits for the road. We are calling the biscuits power pellets. Like the coveted magic pills from old video games, which gave your character temporary superpowers if chomped. Something to fuel us on our homestretch to the wedding.

  “Want the last one?” Eric asks, hanging over his crutch, rooting in the bag. We’re in the parking lot of a lighthouse, outside a sprawling beach town called Gull City, walking to the public restroom fifty feet ahead.

  “Let’s split it.”

  “I don’t know. You’re dragging.” But he breaks the last biscuit in two, lobs my half at me. I catch it one-handed.

  As we make our way to the low cinder-block building, chewing the last of our power pellets, a Cub Scout troop swarms us, dueling with plastic lighthouse models, small versions of the real one two hundred yards away, down a long, rocky causeway. It’s a red-and-white beauty, a giant’s peppermint stick. Eric gets stuck behind them in the restroom line.

  I lean against a bus shelter to wait until he emerges, his hair flopping, working his crutch with a graceful swing-hop.

  “You’ve got the hang of that,” I say. “Ready? We should get moving so we can clean up before Serra’s post-rehearsal thing.”

  “Yeah, let’s hit it. I’m dying for a hot shower.”

  “Me, too.”

  “The hotel looks amazing. I checked out the website, and it’s close to the world’s biggest natural collection of sea glass. If there’s time maybe...” He trails off, his smile falling away.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Let’s go.”

  I turn. On the bus shelter is an advertisement for a grinning realtor. Billy Greppo, Denton Realty... List with the Best! Someone has given charming Billy black devil’s horns, a curling mustache.

  And a label across his broad, shiny forehead: FRAUD!

  He wrote me a note. Let’s put it that way.

  A little welcome-to-the-family note.

  Fraud. It’s what Eric spray-painted on Cal’s boat in high school.

  I rub at the word with my thumb but the ink’s permanent. I turn back to face him.

  “Sometimes I think you plan these things,” he says dryly.

  “No.” I shake my head.

  “I should’ve written something else,” Eric says.

  “What?”

  He stares past me at the graffiti. “Thief.”

  He gives me a sad smile and walks off across the parking lot. I think he’s going to get in the convertible, maybe slam the door.

  But he swing-hops right past the car. Heads straight for the narrow pebbled-concrete causeway toward the lighthouse.

  Even when he’s a hundred feet away, surrounded by other bodies heading back and forth from the point, I know his shape. A little taller, a little thinner, a little faster, even with the crutch.

  I follow at a distance, glancing back at the convertible, hoping the gift will be okay. I should pay a scout to watch it, but the tall figure walking rapidly ahead of me across the pebbly land bridge to the lighthouse pulls me more. The matter-of-fact way he said that single, devastating word cracks my heart in two: Thief.

  When Eric rounds the lighthouse I lose him, and for a moment I imagine him running up the inner staircase. Like Kim Novak in Vertigo, climbing the spiraling bell tower in the old mission before poor, dizzy Jimmy Stewart can catch up.

  Reality is less dramatic. The lighthouse door is locked and the pointed red hands on the adjustable clock sign in the window say the next tour isn’t until tomorrow morning at 11:30.

  I find Eric standing on the grass ten feet down the steep slope from the lighthouse, leaning casually on his crutch, facing the ocean. He’s staring at a spot far out, where waves crash over a dome-shaped rock.

  I edge down the slope, feet sideways. It’s tricky enough for me to navigate; I can’t imagine how Eric managed it. I stop on his left side, well in his sight line so that I won’t startle him and make him fall.

  He raises his crutch to point at the gulls wheeling and diving over the rock. “Beautiful, aren’t they?”

  I bite back my be careful. “Yes. Do you get to the coast much, out there?”

  He sets his crutch down. “Sure. Everyone’s got places. Weekend places or summer places. Places on Long Island, in The Hamptons, Maine.”

  “That must be nice.”

  “It is. I’m thinking of getting a place. My accountant wants me to.”

  A big wave surges toward the dome-shaped rock and crashes over it in a corona of white foam. The water is sucked back to the horizon, and another wave gathers, a smaller one. There is no pattern, at least not one that I can see. Sometimes there are two big waves seconds apart, and sometimes a minute passes between them.

  “You know when my mom called you up out of the blue and asked you to coffee? After...”

  “Yes. We met at Il Fornaio—”

  “I asked her to. Pathetic, huh? As if you needed checking up on.”

  I take his hand and lace my fingers through his. “Oh, E. No. No...”

  “I was worried about you. I was furious, but...” He shakes his head, staring out at the sea.

  We stand quietly for a while. I caress his hand, my pinkie moving slowly up and down the warm valleys between his fingers.

  “Nobody stole me, Eric.”

  He turns to me.

  “You said he was a thief. But he didn’t steal me. I chose to be with him.”

  “Why?”

  It’s the question I’ve wanted to answer for him for ten years.

  “I met him at the right time.”

  He shakes his head again, looks back at the rock. “It can’t be that simple.”

  “It’s not simple. It sounds like it is, but it’s not. But I can’t explain it any other way. I met him at the exact moment I was trying to break away from who everyone else thought I was supposed to be.”

  I think back to myself at twenty, scared that who I would become had already been decided—by my suffocating need to please, collecting my awards and approval.

  Rebecca consistently delivers stellar work.

  I’ve rarely come across such an outstanding, reliable young woman...

  Rebecca is a joy to have on the committee.

  Rebecca is such a cheerful and dependable editor.

  Attendance: 100%. Wow!!!

  “And I wanted...”

  They thought they knew exactly who I was, because I’d done such a good job of pretending I knew. When I didn’t have a clue.

  Such stellar work. If you weren’t vigilant, words like that controlled you. Kept you from seeing yourself.

  Like what we did at Newzly. People searched for answers to important questions, and we lured them toward what was easier and simpler in the moment. Until they forgot what they’d been searching for, or even that they’d been searching at all.

  “I was allowed to be someone different with him. To try out another version of myself. And I needed to figure out who I was. Instead of letting everyone decide for me.”

  He offers the faintest of nods.

  “So I can’t be sorry it happened.” I touch his elbow. “But I’ll always be sorry that I hurt you. And that I lied.”

  5:40 p.m.

  We make it back up to the top of the hill without further injury.

  Our problem is not boot traction or balance, but timing.

  It’s always timing with us.

  The lighthouse is now on an island. The center of the concrete causeway is submerged under a good foot and a half of water. While we were taking in the ocean, the tide washed in and surrounded us.

  The causeway
is still manageable. There’s a family, two men and a little girl of about eight, sloshing through the water back to their car, yelling, and laughing. One dad carries the girl on his shoulders over the deep part.

  “There should be a sign,” Eric says.

  “There is, look.” We’d walked right past it: Caution! Causeway May Be Impassable at High Tide.

  “We’d better run for it.”

  “Get on my back.”

  “What? No way.”

  “The doctor said you can’t get your stitches wet. You want jungle rot or gangrene or whatever?”

  “I’ll hop.”

  “You’ll fall.”

  “I’ll find a plastic bag.” He looks around wildly for a trash can.

  “It’s getting deeper, climb on.” I stand in front of him, bend my knees.

  “I weigh fifteen pounds more than—” I back into him, reaching behind me for his legs so he has no choice but to hop onto me and, good God, he is heavy. I carried him around often in his pool and the pool at Serra’s, in chicken fights, but without water I can barely lift him. He’s an awkward burden, long limbed and unsure what to do with his crutch; instead of wrapping himself around me properly he drapes one arm around my neck, leaning back, his right hand holding the crutch clear of my body like he’s jousting. I can barely balance us, and though the shorts I borrowed from him are slipping, I can’t yank them up.

  I slog through cold water, trying not to splash Eric’s Velcro boot.

  “Becc, I’m sliding. And squashing you. Seriously, put me down, this isn’t going to end well. Becc? What’s a little jungle rot—”

  “It’s. Fine.” I can barely grunt it out; Eric’s weight is compressing my diaphragm. I wish I could ask him to check that my shorts are in place and I’m not accidentally mooning passing boats or the lighthouse keeper; the wet hem is weighing the fabric down, and maybe I’m paranoid but below the band of warmth where Eric’s body circles mine, I feel a cool breeze.

  A man in a red windbreaker is coming toward us, crossing the causeway ten yards ahead. He’s wearing rubber waders and an official-looking neon-yellow windbreaker, and he takes his time on the flooded section. Unfazed.

  And clearly entertained by our frantic piggyback.