The Leading Edge of Now

by Marci Lyn Curtis

  She had toweled her flaming-red hair partially dry, and it was sticking up in curly tufts all over her head. Her cheeks were covered in angry ruddy patches.

  “Look,” I said, trying to keep my voice even, trying to keep myself from sounding as hysterical as I felt, “Owen and I are —” I stopped abruptly, because what was I going to say, even? I had no idea what Owen and I were right now. I cleared my throat. This was the moment I should tell Janna the truth about my feelings for Owen. I knew that. But there was no way I’d do it with Owen listening. So instead I said, “I like hanging out with Owen.”

  She just stared at me for a heartbeat. A drop of water dangled off one of her curls and then fell to the carpet, producing a round, dark blotch. “You like hanging out with Owen,” she repeated.

  I folded my arms over my chest. “Yeah. I mean — yeah.”

  “Fine,” she said evenly.

  “Fine?”

  “Fine. Hang out with him, then.”

  It wasn’t fine, though. She didn’t like sharing me with Owen. And even though I tried to divide my time equally between them, and even though I did my best to make Janna feel at ease, she turned reserved, polite, as though I were a parent or a teacher rather than a best friend. She never turned her full-force animosity or jealousy on me, not exactly. Our friendship just fizzled, like I’d thrown a bucket of water on a fire: the coals were still there, but they’d stopped glowing. They were cold.

  Seven

  I’ve cracked a little the past couple of years. From the stress, I’m guessing.

  Like, refusing to speak to my new foster parents for weeks on end, and playing my violin till my fingers bled, and — best sit down for this one — hiding three stolen wallets in the bottom of my suitcase.

  Yeah.

  I’ve developed some interesting tics.

  Okay, so mostly one particular tic. Pickpocketing.

  Probably a clever, self-respecting criminal would’ve just pocketed the cash and ditched the wallets in a Dumpster. But then a clever, self-respecting criminal wouldn’t gift all the money to a particular Tampa business on the corner of Second and Twentieth, either, so I suppose I’m neither clever nor self-respecting.

  In foster care, I always hid the wallets under my mattress. Not possible at Rusty’s, where my futon mattress rests on a wooden rack that would be best described as a barbecue grill. So that morning I transfer all my clothes to my bedroom desk — the closest thing I have to a dresser — tucking the wallets underneath a stack of T-shirts.

  I stand in the shower until the water runs cold, and then quietly towel off and dress, wholly unnerved by the too-silent house. Memories are like land mines that I step on everywhere I turn. Outside the bathroom window is the old, dilapidated swing set that I had totally forgotten about, both swings still wound tightly around the poles on each side, where they’ve been ever since the sixth grade when Janna became obsessed with whether she could swing high enough to flip herself clear over the top.

  Furthermore, it’s nearly impossible to walk down the hallway without a quick glance at the other spare room, where I always used to sleep. It’s still covered floor to ceiling in posters of Europe, from back when I went through one of those I-want- to-travel phases and Rusty permitted me to tweak the decor. The nightstand is still peppered with the lucky sand dollars Dad gave me, the dresser is still home to an off-white lamp, and the bed, well, it still dons a familiar blue quilt.

  Those things mean nothing, I tell myself every time I walk past. Still, my hands clench into fists, nails biting into my palms, as blurry images crowd my mind, packed so tightly it seems like they might split my skull. Old wounds, for sure, but they still stab as sharply as ever, so I spend a good hour wandering from the living room to the kitchen, and then back to the living room. The place feels flimsy and rickety, like it might topple into a heap if I lean the wrong way. When I was younger, Rusty and I used to pile into his truck practically every summer morning, making the ten-mile trek to a roadside diner, where we’d eat waffles topped with whipped cream and strawberries. Or else he’d sneak me into the bar during his shift at work, and I’d sit in the unused back office in front of a boxy, old-school TV, eating microwave popcorn and watching the sort of R-rated movies that Dad would never approve of.

  Now, though, Rusty is nowhere to be found.

  In the kitchen, I throw some grounds into the coffeemaker. Slouching against the counter while the coffee brews, I drum my fingers on the Formica and stare at the pictures that adorn the fridge. Some of the photos are familiar; they’ve been there since before I can remember. They are Rusty and Dad and me, all in different configurations and ages. But others are new, totally foreign — fishing trips, cookouts, football games. All the stuff I’ve missed.

  The message is clear: life has gone on for Rusty.

  Suddenly something enormous and barbed is swelling in my throat, and I’m finding it painful to swallow.

  Sometimes, I really feel like I was abandoned.

  This happens to be one of those sometimes.

  Doing my best to ignore the thick, sour shot of resentment, I spin away from the fridge. And just as I do, the front door flies open and I jump like crazy, sucking in my breath and banging my elbow on one of the cabinets. I whirl around and find Rusty’s mother, Eleanor, thumping her way into the house, a massive black purse looped on one forearm and a duffel bag on the other. She stops short, blinking at me for several moments, surprised.

  So Rusty didn’t tell her I was coming.

  Fine. Whatever. I wasn’t expecting a parade.

  Eleanor bumps the door shut with her hip and drops her duffel bag at her feet. “Hey, slick,” she says. Her standard greeting.

  I take a couple of steps in her direction, wondering whether I should hug her. While she’s lived with Rusty for years, we’ve never actually been close. She makes no move toward me, so I hitch to a stop, cross my arms and lean nonchalantly against the wall, directly underneath a stuffed marlin. Though I’m fairly certain that there’s no way to lean nonchalantly underneath a stuffed marlin. “Hey, Eleanor,” I say.

  She stares at me for a moment — longer than necessary, to be perfectly honest — and then, with a sideways smile, she says, “Nice to see you, kid.” And she hobbles her way to the counter to unload her purse. In her early twenties, she was an army nurse. Not a big deal these days, but back then it was sort of badass to be a woman working right in the middle of a combat zone. She didn’t last long, though; she was discharged because a bomb dropped on her barracks, causing a beam to effectively squash her lower right leg. As a result, she moves like she’s made of bulky, mismatched factory parts. “How’ve you been?” she asks, shifting her weight from foot to foot.

  “Okay, I guess,” I say, watching her. I’d forgotten how she’s always in motion. A bundle of clunky, kinetic energy.

  She jerks open the fridge door and peers inside, like maybe she thinks some elves dropped by in the middle of the night and brought some real food. I’ve already discovered that the fridge contains one Styrofoam takeout container, a dozen or so Michelobs and something that appears to have been derived from Spam. Eleanor closes the door, turns around to face me and says, “Sorry about your dad.”

  And there it is.

  This marks the first time Dad has been mentioned inside these walls since I arrived, and the air seems heavier because of it. To her credit, Eleanor does appear sorry. But the fact remains — she wasn’t sorry enough to attend Dad’s funeral.

  “Thanks,” I say. For some stupid reason, I think maybe she’ll explain Rusty’s actions — or nonactions, rather — over the past couple of years. But she just stands there and stares at me. Clearing my throat, I turn away and busy myself by finding a few stray packets of coffee creamer. When I turn back around, she’s still gawking at me like I’m a painting at a museum — Pathetic Orphan, circa 2018. The buttery morning sun shines through t
he window, backlighting her springy gray hair and making her look as though she has a halo.

  A total sham.

  “So,” I say. I’m such an artist with the English language. I should be writing Broadway plays or penning catchphrases for condom commercials.

  “So,” she says pleasantly, rocking back on her heels.

  A long moment passes when I hear nothing but the distant caw of a seagull. I glance at the clock on the microwave. Ten thirty-five. It’s going to be a long day. Clearing my throat, I pour two cups of coffee and slide one down the counter in her direction. She squints at it for a second and then hobbles her way over to pick it up, making a sour face at the steam as she takes a noisy sip. I follow suit, the coffee burning a trail all the way down to my stomach.

  She smells like cigarettes. Or else, cigarettes smell like her. I’ve never known which. She’s smoked since before I knew her, and has been racking up heart attacks for almost as long. In point of fact, under the skin in her upper chest she has a rectangular device that serves to shock her heart into working if it craps out on her. By interesting coincidence, it’s exactly the same size as her cigarette packs.

  I’m not technically related to Eleanor — Dad and Rusty shared only the same father — but I’ve known her for so long that I feel as though I am. Which is exactly why I’m certain that she’s about to say something that would be best kept to herself.

  “Looks like maybe you’ve put on a little weight around the middle,” she says, all matter-of-factly.

  Here my self-esteem has been hovering around normal, and I’ve been waiting for a senior citizen to knock it down to negative twenty thousand.

  “Maybe a couple of pounds? I’m not really sure.” I say this warily, a red flag that she’s sticking a toe over an invisible line, if she’s actually paying attention.

  She isn’t.

  She gives me a wide, hospitable smile and then kicks off her shoes in the middle of the floor, curling her toes under till her joints crack.

  Changing the subject, I tip my head toward her duffel bag and say, “Were you on a trip?”

  She shrugs, plucks a magazine from a stack of mail strewn across the counter, studies it vaguely and then tosses it back in the pile. She’s been talking to me for all of two minutes, and she’s already fidgety. She hobbles her way out of the kitchen. “Was at the casino for a few days,” she says over her shoulder, grabbing her duffel bag and stabbing a thumb over her shoulder, toward her bedroom. “Well, I’m just gonna —”

  “I was just leaving to go for a walk,” I blurt. And before she can reply, I’m grabbing my purse. I’m shoving on my sunglasses. I’m hustling out the front door. Because if anyone in this house is going to walk away this time around, it’s going to be me.

  Eight

  I regret this decision immediately. First thing I see after I scramble down the porch steps is Janna, standing at the window in front of the McAllisters’ kitchen sink, filling a glass with water. I feel — suddenly and with mounting anxiety — like I’m about to burst into tears.

  I don’t, though. I don’t do anything, actually. I don’t call out to her. I don’t wave or try to get her attention. I just freeze right where I am, open-mouthed and idiotic, for I don’t know how long, my feet slowly sinking into Rusty’s front lawn, the sticky, humid air like a wet blanket shoved into my lungs.

  Janna looks the same, only slightly skewed in some obscure way that I can’t quite put a finger on — her hair a bit longer or her chin more angular — as though she were a supporting character in a dream I was having. Other than that, she’s still all tangly red curls and gingham dresses and quirkiness, still unconventional and adorable. Just seeing her feels throbbing and slow and painful, like a toothache.

  This is the girl whose secrets and juice boxes I used to share, the girl who talked loudly and obnoxiously through every Netflix series we ever watched. For most of our lives, we orbited together inside the same tiny universe, and yet today we are virtually strangers. I wonder whether she’s missed me like I’ve missed her. Whether she’s missed us.

  Swallowing once, I duck my head and pretty much run across the road to the beach, the shortest route to town. Everything in New Harbor that isn’t a beach is old and quaint, and what isn’t old and quaint is some version of pink. The beachfront is lined with just a handful of shops and restaurants: a general store, one of those touristy shops that sells puka necklaces and beach towels, a couple of antique stores, an ice-cream parlor, a burger joint, a pizza place and a bar.

  And that’s it.

  In other words, if you want to get to downtown New Harbor, walk straight down the beach and then turn left — into 1958.

  Even so, the stores I’ve wandered into year after year, the buses that transport tourists back and forth from hotels and beaches and outlet malls in neighboring cities, the boardwalk benches where I’ve sat and eaten ice cream with my family, the sand I’ve dug my feet into since before I could walk — all of it, everything, is as much a part of me as my own skin.

  Before I can stop it, a sort of peace settles in my chest.

  This.

  This feeling.

  Right here, right now. This sense of familiarity and history and belonging — I want to clutch it to my chest and never let it go.

  I finally feel like I’m home. Or I’m remembering what home feels like. I’m not sure which. All I know is that I can breathe again. In front of me is a long sprawl of white sand, and beyond that, the Gulf of Mexico. I stare at the ocean but don’t go any farther, not even tempted to walk down to the shore and stick a toe in the water. Because, historically, a lot of terrible things have happened in the ocean. Shark attacks, for one. Also, jellyfish stings. Drownings. Rip currents. Bacterial diseases.

  Etcetera.

  Shielding my eyes with my hand, I watch a fishing catamaran whiz by offshore. Back when I was in elementary school, Dad bought a cheap, broken-down fishing boat, and he and Rusty spent an entire week coaxing the motor into running. I had no idea how either of them learned to fix it, and I was pretty amazed when they put it in the river and it actually ran. When I questioned Dad about it, he told me that it was in a man’s genetic code, mending broken things, and by the time I got into high school I almost believed him. By then he’d fixed our dishwasher and changed the timing belt in his car and nursed our water heater back to health and tweaked the gears in my bicycle.

  Just then, the hum of an engine catches my attention. I turn my head to find a small, skinny boy driving down the beach in one of those lifeguard four-wheelers. I recognize him immediately as Andy Simon.

  Simon, as in: the family that used to live next to Rusty.

  Simon, as in: the family that packed up and moved across town, allowing my worst nightmare to move in.

  While the Simons lived next to Rusty for years, I’ve mostly known Andy through Janna. Andy was Janna’s Other Best Friend, the one she hung out with when I was at home in Tampa. Over the years, there was an awful lot of competitiveness between Andy and me, even though (1) he always joked about the best-friend-competition thing, and (2) he refrained from calling, texting and pestering Janna whenever I was in town, so I imagine that (3) it was probably pretty annoying when I called/texted/pestered Janna three hundred times an hour whenever they were hanging out, so I guess that (4) I was the only one competing.

  Anyhow, when I see Andy, I’m not sure whether to wave or to run in the other direction. No time to figure it out, though, because he turns and looks right at me. He gives me a bit of a shocked look and then a weird little salute, and in doing so, his passenger-side wheel grazes one of those NO DOGS, NO ALCOHOL, NO MOTORIZED VEHICLES beach signs, bending it over cockeyed. He kills the motor and leaps off, his head jerking around in all directions. His gaze finally lands on me. Every part of his face is bright red. He says, “If my boss saw me hit that sign, I’m dead.” He draws a finger across his neck, just in
case there’s any question as to the meaning.

  I say, “I doubt that —”

  “No. Seriously. He goes by the three-strikes-you’re-out rule, and I got to the third strike, like, several strikes ago. I’m on borrowed time. Tell me, the guy at the lifeguard station? The one over my left shoulder — don’t look now, for Christ’s sake — is he looking at me? Just pretend to pick something up and glance over there, please.”

  I’m an actress in my own life.

  Andy gives me a hurry-up gesture.

  I clear my throat. “Right,” I say. “Okay.” I bend down to the sand, and as I come back up, I glance toward the lifeguard stand, where a boy probably a few years older than me is staring at us, wearing a bright yellow lifeguard T-shirt and a scowl. I say, “Um.”

  “Shit.” Andy turns around and waves to his boss, thoroughly casual. “I’m totally getting fired today,” he says through his smile, without even moving his lips. “Pretend that you twisted your ankle and I jumped off the four-wheeler to help you, tragically hitting the sign in the process.” He prompts me with his eyes. “Do it, please.”

  And here’s the thing: I do. As strange as it is, this feels like the most normal exchange I’ve had since I set foot in New Harbor. I hobble toward a nearby bench and grip my leg, feigning pain as Andy kneels down and pretends to tend to it. “So you’re a lifeguard now?” I ask, glancing at his ear. The thing about Andy is that he has only about fifty percent of his left ear. Back when he was four, a dog bit off the entire bottom portion. Consequently, all of his profile pictures have literally been taken in profile.

  The two of us have always had an unspoken pact: I don’t stare at his ear and he doesn’t stare at my nose. So my eyes dart away as Andy, poking around on my ankle, says, “Yeah. But probably not for long. I’ve already been reassigned to” — he glances up and makes finger quotes — “ground duty.”

  His boss shakes his head a couple of times, spins around and then climbs back up on his tower. I say, “Your boss isn’t watching anymore.”