by Meg Haston
“Did I ever tell you I thought about college and dental school?” She smiles a little, and the skin around her eyes crinkles like tissue paper.
“What, like, you were gonna be a dentist?” I say, surprised.
For the first time in weeks, she’s looking directly at me. “I don’t know. Maybe it was stupid.” Her face goes slack again.
“No. Mom. No. That’s what you wanted to do?” I ask.
“I thought about it. My boss said he thought I was smart enough.” The storm clouds in her eyes vanish. “It was nice. To hear that somebody smart thinks you’re smart, too.”
“Yeah. Sure.” Suddenly, I wish my dad had said those words to her. Maybe everything in the universe would be different if he had. “I think you’re smart, Mom. I do.”
But my words are feathery, and they don’t land.
“But college is expensive, and we were getting by okay, and time just passed faster than I thought it would.” Her face says My whole life would have been different.
I want to tell her how sorry I am.
“I don’t want you to feel like . . .” I’m digging for the words, stumbling over them, not saying anything right. “I want you to be happy.”
“Do you know what I want for you, Wil?” She clenches my hands so tightly, I wince. “Ten years from now, twenty or thirty years from now, I hope you want exactly the kind of life that you want right now.” Her voice calcifies. “Look at me.”
Her eyes are deep, clear pools, and I can see straight down to the sandy bottom.
“But if there ever comes a time that you need a different kind of life, I want you to be able to go after it. I don’t want anything to get in your way. I will die before I let anything get in your way, do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” I rasp.
I hadn’t realized. I thought she wanted me to go to college for appearance’s sake. I thought it was about telling Mrs. Wilkerson where I’d gotten in. Or about being Just As Good As everyone else’s sons.
“Good.”
There’s a force in her that’s stronger than anything I’ve ever felt before. Stronger than gravity or storm winds. Even in her screaming moments, in her thick, sharp, silences, she’s never felt this way to me. I wonder who my mother really is. I wonder if I have never seen her before today.
We both jump when the kitchen door slams. Mom clears her throat and I can tell: we feel the same way.
“That you, Wilson?” she says, not loud enough for him to hear. She’s disappeared again. I hate him for doing this to her.
“Dad,” I say louder. “Is. That. You?”
“Who the hell else would it be?” His voice is runny as he stumbles into the kitchen. “You ladies having tea?” He laughs, like he thinks it’s the most hilarious thing anyone has ever said.
“I came back to work on the skiff.” My hand finds its way to my mother’s arm. “Where were you?”
“None of your damn business.” He wipes his meaty mouth with the back of his hand. “Yours, either,” he tosses at my mother. His giant ogre body throws a shadow over the table. He doesn’t notice the photographs.
“She didn’t ask,” I mutter. “Besides, I think it’s pretty obvious where you’ve been.”
“Wil,” Mom murmurs. “Don’t be stupid.”
“What?” Dad takes a step toward us, then a step back. “What did you say to me?” If he could focus, he’d be glaring at me. But his head is bobbing like a buoy on rough waters.
“Nothing.” I stare directly at him. He doesn’t scare me. I won’t let him.
“Nothing,” he spits back. “That’s . . . right, nothing.”
My stomach surges. I swallow bile. The sight of him is literally making me sick.
“Lunch ready?” Dad’s buoy-head sways in Mom’s direction.
“You should sober up first,” she tells the table.
His nostrils flare. He’s a bull, ready to fight.
“Don’t you tell me what I should goddamned do first, Henney.” He snorts. He lists toward her, but I won’t let him touch her. Not this time. She’s tired. She needs to rest. Can’t he see that? Can’t he see us?
“You’re drunk, Dad.” I shove back my chair and stand face-to-face with him. I am almost as big as he is. Almost. I could take him on a good day. “Go sleep it off or something. Leave her alone.”
The air has left my body before I realize it. I’m on the floor before I realize it, staring up at a white ceiling, my chest throbbing.
He hit me, I realize, the thought coming from far away. I roll onto my side, curled into myself like a baby, and watch his work boots storm through the kitchen, rattling the glasses and my insides again.
“Wil.” Mom kneels down next to me, strokes my hot, embarrassed face with her hands. “Honey. Wil.” She bends over me and kisses my forehead and my cheeks, and I pretend to push her away.
“I’m okay.” I force the words out, don’t meet her eyes.
“He didn’t mean it, Wil. He’s drunk. He didn’t mean it.” Her voice is grainy.
I roll onto my back. From here, I can see the words carved into the kitchen table. We will go together, over the waters of time. I close my eyes and I let my mother stroke my hair. I’m not in pain. The worst of it is the surprise. Even when I knew who he was, what he could do, the truth is that I never thought he would do it to me.
BRIDGE
Spring, Senior Year
I woke up this morning with secrets under my tongue. The awful truth about Wilson; the long hug between Wil and me last night in the street in front of Buck’s house. The secrets make the world seem upside down and backward. I don’t know what to make of either of them. They seem so giant and unmanageable that it’s safest to hold on to them until I understand them better. Lock them up where no one can see them, even Leigh. And especially not my mother.
Somehow I make it through the school day without saying a word. Wil and I avoid each other’s glances, and I try not to wonder what that means. By the time I jam the key in the lock at home, my bones are tired of holding me upright. War sounds leak through the thin windows and the front door. Men killing men; boots on the ground.
“Micah. Turn it down,” I bellow as I push through the front door. I let my keys and bag drop, then step over them. The air inside is sticky and still.
He stays hunched over his video game controller.
“Micah.”
The volume dips. He keeps his gaze fixed on the screen.
“What are you doing home so early?” I fall onto the couch next to him. “No big plans with the girlfriend?” I don’t mean to say it. It just slips out.
His forehead creases. “She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Oh. So what I saw the other day was just a hookup, then. Classy.”
“Screw you.” He turns the volume up again. On the screen, a cartoon soldier is being split in two.
I dive for the remote and mute the sound. “Come on. Turn it off. I had a weird night last night, and if I sit here in front of the television, I’ll just obsess over it.” I’ll wonder about Wil, about whether he felt what I felt when we hugged. Was he was just looking for someone familiar, or were we becoming something entirely new altogether?
“Me too, kind of.” Micah tosses the controller to the other side of the couch. “What kind of weird?”
It’s the first time he’s asked me a real question in I can’t remember how long.
“I guess . . . some stuff came up about Wil’s dad last night. Stuff that made me sad to think about. So I tried not to.” I twist my hair into a knot at the nape of my neck, so tightly it gives me a headache.
“At least Wil had a dad for a little while.” Micah kicks at the coffee table.
“Micah.”
“I’m serious, Bridge. Wouldn’t you take a not-so-great dad over one who was never there in the first place?” When he turns to look at me, his face looks little boyish in the afternoon light.
I shrug. “I don’t know.”
But I’ve felt the
way Micah feels before. Once in middle school, Wil and Wilson and I had been working in the shop. When Wil went in for water, Wilson stopped sweeping long enough to ask me, “So what about your dad?”
He’d said it just like that, no extras.
I’d tightened the ridged plastic cap on the varnish can so hard my fingertips burned. “What about him?”
“You ever talk to him?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know where he is, really. Neither does Mom. She’d tell me.” For as long as I could remember, I’d gone through Mom’s drawers, her calendar, her phone, desperate for a clue about my dad. Nothing. I didn’t even care about the big questions: why he’d left, where he was, whether he had a real family now. It was the little things that interested me. Did he think the first sip of a Coke Slurpee was the best, or the last? (The last, because there was nothing more to look forward to, so you appreciated it more.) Did roller coasters make him sick? Did he ride them anyway, because he wanted to be the kind of person who loved roller coasters?
Wilson leaned his broom in the corner and sat on the workshop floor next to me. The concrete was clean and cool, and in the background, the stereo played James Taylor. The sunlight filtered through the walls and left a design on the floor. I’m having a dad moment, I thought, even though I’d had plenty of dad moments with Wilson before. And I was so intensely jealous of Wil. What’s he done, I thought, to deserve this?
I know the answer now: absolutely nothing. Wil has always been a good person, decent. There is nothing he could have done to deserve the father he was dealt. The anger I couldn’t see back then.
I shake my head to clear the memory and muss Micah’s hair. “Hey. Let’s go do something this afternoon. Just you and me. Hang out like we used to.”
“Before you got judge-y as hell?” He raises an eyebrow.
“Before you started dry-humping older women.”
He makes a gagging sound and promises to hang out with me if I stop using the phrase dry-humping.
“We still have a couple of good beach hours left.” I tug at my knotted hair and let it fall. “Or we could play Putt-Putt.”
“Putt-Putt?” Micah frowns at the screen. “What are we, seventh graders going on a second date?” Then his face lights up. “You know what we haven’t done in a while? Don’t laugh.”
I know before he says it. “I won’t, I swear.”
“Eleanor and Alastair,” he says, looking sheepish and pumped at the same time.
“Eleanor and Alastair!” I shriek. “Ten minutes.”
Eleanor and Alastair was a game we made up when I was in fourth grade and Micah was in first, and we’d just moved to the beach from Alabama. Mom had just started the job at the resort, and her boss said that we could use the pool and go to the snack bar now and then if we didn’t bother the real guests. Everything was so rich there: creamy marble and frozen lemonades so cold they made your brain burn and towels a person could lose herself in. And then there was Micah and me, pinching our toes over the edge of the infinity pool, awkward and out of place in our pilled swimsuits and our new Florida sunburns. So we pretended that we belonged with the kids on vacation. We decided to come up with names for ourselves, the fanciest names we could think of. I came up with Eleanor. Micah picked Alastair, and I still have no idea where he got that name. Eleanor and Alastair swam all day long, like they owned the world. They drank as many frozen lemonades as they wanted, and they never felt out of place. Eleanor and Alastair belonged everywhere.
The lobby at the resort is one of my favorite spots in the whole resort, second only to the pool. The floor is made of miles of white marble streaked with gray, and there are orchids on nearly every surface. At the front desk, Mom is giving a tight smile to a blowhard in a suit and Birkenstocks.
“It’s not a difficult question,” he says through his nose. “How is it possible to pay these outrageous rates and not have access to an in-room masseuse?” He draws his question out slowly, like she doesn’t speak English.
I elbow Micah in the gut when he tries to make Mom laugh by crossing his eyes and sticking out his tongue.
“I just don’t have an answer for you sir.” Mom sighs. “But I’d be happy to suggest the gentleman’s club about a mile down Atlantic.”
The guy gives up and stalks off.
“No in-room masseuse?” I gasp. “How is it possible?”
“Because we’re not a whorehouse, jackass,” my mom says, her voice low. Then her brow furrows. “You guys okay? You didn’t burn down the house or anything, did you?”
Micah tries on his perfect little angel voice. “It’s just been a while since we stopped by to tell our mother what a beautiful, caring—”
“Eleanor and Alastair?” Mom holds up a finger and answers the phone.
Micah and I give her a wave and skate through the all-white, marble-floored lobby on foam flip-flops. The pool is just on the other side of the glass walls: a saltwater infinity pool that spans the length of the hotel and looks over the ocean. The pool area is almost empty. We sling our bags on the good lounge chairs, the ones with the best view of the ocean and the umbrellas, and I peel off my cover-up and take a running leap. Micah is airborne behind me. If I could freeze us here, I would.
The water is refreshing and the crisp blue moves through me. I dive all the way down, run my fingers over the beautiful blue-glass tiles at the bottom. I torpedo to the surface and catch Micah doing a somersault in the deep end.
“Alastair, darling, is this not simply the most divine resort you’ve ever been to? Including that peach of a place in St. Tropez?”
“Magnificent, Eleanor.” Micah tips his nose to the sky. “Although I must say, the European girls do know how to party.”
“Yes, well, no need for details, Alistair.”
We swim until we’re wrinkled, and then I order frozen lemonades while Micah sets up our towels. The lemonade is fresh and blended with vanilla ice cream. I take a too-long sip, and my tongue shrinks at the taste of sour.
When we’re staring at the water, Micah says: “Hey.”
“What’s up?”
He squints at the water. “I wanted to say sorry? For the whole thing with Emilie the other day. We shouldn’t have—I’m just sorry.”
“Look at you, with your mature apologies.” I grin.
“I’m serious, Bridge. That was a douchebag move.”
“Just make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
He doesn’t say anything for a while. Then: “I don’t know if we’re together, still, actually.”
I tread carefully. “What do you mean?”
“I heard this rumor about Emilie Simpson.”
“What kind of rumor?”
“I heard she was hanging out with some college guy. With a scorpion tattoo.” He blinks pool water out of his eyes. “You haven’t heard anything like that, have you?”
I shake my head. “Just because people are saying it doesn’t make it true.”
“Doesn’t make it a lie, either.” His jaw pulses.
“That’s also true,” I concede.
He sighs and shrinks into the chair. Crosses his arms over his chest as if he just squeezes hard enough, he can keep her out of his heart. “It’s not like we said we were exclusive or anything. Maybe she’s been looking for someone better this whole time.”
My heart shrinks. “Micah.”
“I like her,” he blurts. “I know you don’t think she’s that great, but she’s really funny, Bridge. She is. You’d get it if you got to know her. And I’m, like—”
“You’re, like, this awesome guy,” I insist, sitting up.
His face is splotchy with red. “My dad left for someone better than us. Your dad, too, probably.”
“That has nothing to do with us,” I say fiercely. “And if Emilie Simpson is hanging out with a college guy, that’s on her. That’s not on you.”
“Yeah.” He flips onto his back and stares up at the sky. “Maybe I’ll text her later and if she texts back right a
way—”
I groan. “You are so. Fifteen.”
“Whatever.”
“Hey. Micah.” I sit up. I wait until I know he sees me, until we’re so still that I can see the tiniest flecks of light buzzing in his eyes. “You. Deserve. Good things.”
He looks at me, and he is thirsty to believe it. But then his eyes glaze over and he says he’s tired. We’re too old for games like this, he says, and we should just go home. I get it. It’s easier that way. But he’s breaking my heart in a whole new way.
BRIDGE
Spring, Senior Year
MICAH heads home after we swim. I decide to shower at the resort, under a gushing waterfall faucet, because resort water feels like velvet. The shower is tiled with mother of pearl, and the shampoo here makes my scalp tingle. I watch shampoo lather circle the drain and disappear. Then I wrap myself in a fluffy resort robe and blow-dry my hair. I change into a fresh pair of jeans and a tank top, and I slip on the MAMA P’S cap. Wearing it makes me feel closer to Wil.
In the lobby, I pilfer sea salt caramel chocolates at the front desk.
“What are your dinner plans?” Mom murmurs, scanning her computer screen. “I think there’s some cash in my purse, if you guys want pizza.”
I shrug. “I’ll probably just grab some takeout from Nina’s.” And sit on the couch and wonder what it all means and why Wil hasn’t called or texted or sent a carrier pigeon with a note explaining how he’s feeling about this and me.
The phone bleats and Mom lifts the receiver. “Front desk, this is Christine.” She lifts her eyebrows and twirls her finger, motioning for me to turn around. In the center of the lobby, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that matches his eyes, is Wil. Without warning, my body is warm and soft, made of melting wax. As awful as last night was, I want to hug him that way again.
“Hey,” I say carefully.
“Hey,” he says. His Adam’s apple bobs in his throat. “We should talk.”
“Yeah. Okay.” For a boy I used to know inside out, he is unreadable. His eyes are cast down but his body is loose, relaxed. He takes a few steps and swats the bill of my hat. My body floods with relief.
