“I’d like to learn to golf,” Christopher said, speaking directly to Phil.
“I’d be happy to give you some pointers,” Phil said.
“That’s a great idea,” Harry chimed in. “Why don’t the guys play golf, and the ladies can treat themselves to a spa day? I know that’s something you wanted to do before the wedding anyway, Kathy. Then we can all meet up for dinner.”
Phil looked at Olive questioningly. Her mom scrutinized Christopher with a furrowed brow. The ocean sucked in a deep breath and then spit it back out.
“Sounds good to me,” Olive said. On their first day last year—their first day of three excruciating days in limbo before the wedding—they had milled aimlessly around the resort without a plan. They finally settled in at one of the pools. A few hours later, Christopher and Verona had left to play tennis, and then Olive had lingered on awkwardly with her mom and Harry, until she’d come up with an excuse that she needed to get out of the sun and would take a short nap before dinner. Instead, she’d walked to the busiest bar at the resort, where she’d be less conspicuous, and drunk Bahama Mamas.
“It’s settled then,” Harry said, draping his arm around his fiancée.
However, their plans changed abruptly the next morning when Verona came to breakfast alone.
“Christopher went to breakfast early. He said he really wanted to try some watersports first, and he’d meet up with you guys for golf later.” She said this in a voice that let them know she did not condone his behavior. Olive guessed they’d probably had an argument about it.
“We don’t have to golf. I’d like to check out what kinds of watersports they have, too,” Phil said.
Olive stepped on his sandaled foot under the table. “No. He’ll meet up with you later. Go golf. Have fun.” She turned to her mom. “Would you mind if I took a rain check on the spa day? You know I’m not that into having my face shellacked with different creams and getting my cuticles pushed back. I think I’d like to join Christopher.” She knew she was letting her mom down, but she’d let Christopher down, too. And she needed to fix that first before she could make anything else better.
The Watersports Center stood at the far edge of the resort property. It was a small wooden outbuilding with a blacktopped apron leading down to the sand. The shutters were closed tightly with a sign listing its hours. Presumably it hadn’t opened for the day yet. Christopher sat on a large rock facing the ocean.
“It’s nothing against Phil,” he said when he saw her. “I’d be happy to play golf with Phil. I’m sorry to leave him with Harry, but there’s no way I’m spending a whole day with that pompous jerk. It’s useless trying to convince me.”
“I didn’t come here to try to convince you. I came here to rent a kayak.”
Almost as if on command, two young men in red polo shirts and swim trunks appeared to unlock the shed. They outfitted Olive and Christopher with puffy red life jackets and signed out to them a yellow two-seater kayak and two double-ended paddles.
“I’ve never kayaked before,” Christopher said as he dragged the kayak to the water’s edge.
“Neither have I,” she said. “But I’ve canoed before, and it can’t be much different, can it?”
“I’ve never even canoed. I was planning on renting something more motorized. Like a Jet-Ski.”
“You’re so lazy. Why don’t you sit in the front, then?”
“No. You sit in the front.” Christopher stepped into the boat and tried to sit on the back seat. He almost fell out.
“The person in back steers. If you’re in the back, we’ll go in circles.”
They paddled hesitantly along the shoreline, never straying more than ten feet from land, the kayak listing first to the left, then the right, as Christopher got the hang of it. The only sound was the splash of their paddles churning the water. It was ten o’clock, and no one else was on the water. They passed the roped-off swimming area where a few pairs of heads bobbed in the ocean; other people lay like strips of bacon frying on the beach.
“Was Mom upset that we’re not joining in the festivities?” he asked at last.
She suddenly realized that he thought she had joined him in his strike today. “What do you think? This is supposed to be a family trip, but instead Mom and Harry are off spending time with our significant others instead of us.”
“This isn’t a family trip. This is Mom getting remarried. I don’t get you. You seem so resigned to this.”
“Christopher,” she started, but then found herself at a loss for words. She’d had a year longer than him to process this. She wanted to tell him it would get easier with time, especially once he saw how happy Harry made their mom. Well, maybe that made it harder at first, but eventually, it became possible to witness her radiance and accept that the cause of it wasn’t their dad. She wanted to tell Christopher what Sherry had said about the library reading three years ago and see what he made of it, but she didn’t want to add more fuel to his fire of loathing for Harry. She wondered how he’d been able to suppress his anger last year. Had she been so terribly effective at venting it for him?
“I guess I am resigned to this. This is Mom’s life, not ours,” she finally said.
Christopher snorted, but his shoulders relaxed slightly. They passed the resort property line—a pile of rocks and a chain-link fence on shore—and entered the public beach.
“What bugs you the most about Harry?” she asked.
“I could give you a top ten list. Besides him touching Mom all the time? The way he finishes her sentences. Like she’s too dumb to complete her own thoughts.”
“He does that with everyone, though. Not just Mom.”
“Well, then, he thinks he’s smarter than all of us.”
“That drives me nuts, too. But I’ve thought about it a lot, and I don’t think he does it with malicious intent. I think he does it to show he’s really listening to us and that he’s in tune with what we’re saying. Trying to demonstrate that he understands. It still pisses me off, though.”
The shore was forested now, the beach rockier. It looked more like a park in Wisconsin than a beach in St. Lucia. A local family stood on the rocky beach; two naked children splashed each other in the shallow water.
“Let’s go out to that island,” Christopher said, pointing with his paddle.
“Are you sure? We’re already pretty far out.” Her biceps burned.
“Is the expert rower scared?” he taunted.
“This isn’t Lake Mendota, Christopher; this is the ocean. Right now we’re protected by the inlet, so the waves aren’t that bad. But once we get out there, it’s going to be a lot choppier. And you’re going to feel stupid if the resort staff has to send a boat to rescue us.”
“I’m up for a good challenge.”
She tried to remember that this was Christopher, her twenty-eight-year-old brother, a married man with a mortgage, a gifted journalist, not the stubborn twelve-year-old who’d convinced her it was perfectly safe to ride her bike off the ramp he’d built in the street in front of their house and then broken his own arm demonstrating. She considered bringing this up but then thought better of it. Kayaking out to the island was something Christopher and her dad would have done together before he had gotten sick.
She stared at her brother’s back as they paddled to the island. Under his red life vest, he wore a gray T-shirt. A large oval of sweat darkened his collar and upper back. The tendons in his neck bulged from the exertion of paddling, and the skin above his collar looked bright pink.
“Didn’t you put any sunscreen on the back of your neck?” she asked him. “You’re getting burned.”
He stopped rowing and swatted at his neck. “Dammit. Do you have any?”
“Not with me, genius.” She rested her paddle across her lap. The current pushed them farther out to sea but away from the island. It felt very symbolic of her
year.
“Well, I guess we’d better head back, then,” he said.
“That’s it? A little sunburn and you’re ready to give up?” The waves rocked the kayak.
“You said it was dangerous.”
“Yes, but, Christopher—” The island beckoned to her from the horizon. She’d become charmed by the idea of reaching it, and besides, she didn’t want to come this far just to turn back around, defeated.
Christopher had always been the changeable, flighty one. He’d given up in fast succession a variety of activities in his childhood—soccer, guitar lessons, sketching, fishing. In college, he’d changed his major five times before settling on computer science. Then after graduating and securing a good position doing tech support for a prominent investing company in Milwaukee, he’d quit his job, moved back to Madison, married Verona, and started submitting articles to online newspapers about same-sex marriage, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and violence against women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
“It’s the principle of the thing,” she continued. “We’re over three-fourths of the way there. Do you want to give up now?”
“God, Olive. Can’t you let a guy save a little face? My arms feel like jelly.” He stabbed his paddle back into the water and shoved off, but without Olive paddling behind him, he wasn’t making much progress. “That’s the problem with you: You’re so goddamn stubborn. You don’t know when to say when.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. That’s what Dad used to say about you. He said I was too fickle and that you didn’t know when to say when.”
“Dad said that? Give me an example.”
“I really don’t know what he meant. When to say that you’ve had enough? When to say you’ve made a mistake? Can you please help me paddle so we can get this over with?”
“No. I don’t want to go to the island anymore.”
“Fine. Then let’s turn around. Let’s just do something so we don’t drift out to sea.”
Olive dipped her paddle back into the water and, with just a few quick, flat strokes, had the kayak facing the shore. The resort and strip of white sand beach looked very far away, small enough to fit in her hand.
As much as she wanted to write off what Christopher had said as a misinterpretation of what her dad had meant, she couldn’t help remembering an instance when he had said something similar to her. Her first year of nursing school she had been so stressed out and unhappy that her dad had suggested it might not be the right career path for her after all.
“If I give up now, just because it’s hard, I’ll never know if it’s right for me,” she had said.
“You’re exactly right, Olive Oyl,” her dad had said. “But if you find out somewhere down the line that it’s not what you want, there’s no shame in changing your mind. Sometimes I think your brother’s flip-flopping made too much of an impression on you. I don’t want you to stick with something just to prove you can. I happen to know from experience that it will only make you miserable. Don’t be afraid to say, ‘You know what? I screwed up. I’m going to try this again.’”
At the time, his speech hadn’t made much of an impression on her because she had felt so sure about nursing. She had known all along that it was her calling, so to speak; she had never doubted that. Especially after his battle with leukemia, it had seemed only fitting to devote herself to caring for critically ill patients. But now she realized that it wasn’t just careers that he had been talking about; he had been referring to all of life’s major decisions.
Was he right? Was she someone who didn’t know when to say when? All of last year’s wrong turns and her inability to put on the brakes and turn around seemed to suggest it. Even though she had still loved Phil, she had stumbled blindly ahead without him, because it was far easier than admitting she had made a major mistake and fighting to win him back.
She and Christopher established a rhythm; the kayak slowly but steadily glided back to shore. Overhead the sun beat down on them. Drops of cool water speckled her face and arms with each circuit of the paddle.
A half-formed thought flashed through her mind. Did her dad have something to do with her repeat year? Knowing her flaws, was he somehow watching out for her? Had he given her this second chance as a gift? It was a comforting fancy, one that restored her and gave her a new sense of purpose.
She wiped at her sweaty brow with the back of her arm, and her paddle slid overboard. She started to laugh.
“What is it?” Christopher asked sullenly. When he turned around and saw her paddle, floating already quite some distance from the kayak, he cursed. He tried to turn them around, unsuccessfully, because of his position in the front. Then he tried to paddle in reverse, succeeding only in moving them a few inches back, while the current took the light, buoyant paddle a few feet farther away.
“Give me the paddle,” she said.
“No. I don’t want you to lose this one, too.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake. I didn’t lose it on purpose. Well, at least switch places with me so you can turn us around.” She stood up. The kayak tilted dramatically to the right.
“No. We’ll tip over.”
“Fine. I’ll go get it.” She dove into the water. It felt lovely against her skin after exerting herself in the sun all morning, soothing like bathwater. She swam after the paddle, the life jacket making it hard as it kept tugging her back up to the surface. After an awkward, graceless swim, she managed to wrestle the paddle back to the kayak, where Christopher sat, shaking his head.
“You are a nut,” he said.
She felt a sudden rush of tenderness she hadn’t felt for him in a long time. He was, after all, a version of herself: a taller, more impulsive, male version with stronger convictions about the world. How could she not empathize with his stonewalling of Harry when she had done the very same thing last year? She understood, better than anyone, that it was a way of championing their father.
“Dad would’ve loved this,” she said. “You know he would’ve written about this in the Christmas letter.”
Christopher shook his head again, but she could tell he was laughing by the way his shoulders were shaking.
“This is what he would’ve wanted for us,” she continued. “For us to have fun. Be happy. All of us—Mom, too.”
He grunted noncommittally and extended his arm to help her back into the kayak. It swayed dangerously to the left, but he held it steady long enough for her to climb in. They aimed the kayak toward the now-bustling Watersports Center. A motorboat trailing a water-skier careened across the inlet. Husbands and wives helped each other into life jackets and climbed aboard Jet-Skis and kayaks. A line had formed at the wooden counter.
“I’ll put on a happy face for Mom’s sake,” Christopher said, as he stabbed his paddle into the sand to propel the kayak forward, “but I don’t like him.”
At this point, she felt that was all they could really ask of him. She herself had done much worse last year. She remembered sitting on the patio of her mom and Harry’s honeymoon bungalow, calmly pinning a gardenia in her mom’s hair and accusing her of loving Harry more than she’d loved Olive’s dad. She remembered standing in the sand beside her mom at the ceremony, refusing to listen to the vows they’d written for each other. Instead she had cast her gaze out to sea, her head throbbing from all the piña coladas she had drunk. Then afterward, she had fallen asleep on a chaise longue on the beach, and Christopher had had to help her back to her room before the tide carried her away.
She wished she could convey these struggles to her brother.
They all reconvened for dinner, this time at the Italian restaurant that required reservations and for men to wear a tie. Harry had lent Phil one of his, a black-and-maroon-striped one that clashed with Phil’s cobalt blue shirt. They seemed to be best friends now, rehashing a play-by-play of their game for everyon
e’s benefit. Olive’s mom and Verona were more reserved, with the look of women who had just engaged in a serious heart-to-heart. Verona’s nails were painted pink, and Olive’s mom’s face looked taut and shiny. Olive felt excluded. She and Christopher were the only ones sunburned.
After dinner, she and Phil decided to take a walk along the beach to watch the sun set. He wanted to change first, so she said she’d meet him near the pier. The sky was mauve, the color of heart muscle. It was only two days until the wedding now.
She slipped her strappy, high-heeled sandals off and carried them over her shoulder. In all its vastness, the ocean felt like an appropriate metaphor for the cosmos.
“Here I am again,” she said. “Do you remember me?” She dug her fingernails into the claylike sand and came up with a fistful of shells, stones, and other muck. She flung it as far as she could into the ocean and heard it plop. “I don’t know what your plans are for me, but I sure as hell hope I’m following them.”
The ocean rushed up the shore, covering her ankles in muck, returning the tiny shells and stones she had just thrown.
“Ha. That’s funny. Very funny. I should’ve known. Back to square one.” She squatted down to wash off her feet and ankles in the shallow water. When she stood up, she could see Phil hurrying toward her.
“Fancy meeting you here,” he said.
She took his hand, and they fell into stride together. “You know I appreciate what you did today for Harry, but you don’t have to go overboard or anything. We all know that ‘Professor Matheson thinks Hoobastank was a city in the Byzantine Empire.’ He’s a dud! You don’t have to pretend to like him so much.”
Phil frowned. “I’m not pretending. I do like him. He’s a really kind, well-meaning guy. I feel like I got to know him a lot better today. I think that if you only gave him the chance, you’d like him, too.”
The Repeat Year Page 19
