by Sarah Ockler
Matt, please don’ t think badly about Frankie’s contest. It’s just a silly game. It’s so Frankie, you know?
No, I guess you wouldn’ t. You’ d kill her if you did!
She just misses you. We all do. I’ ll look out for her, though. I promise.
Please watch over us tomorrow, and for the next few weeks while we’re away. You’ ll be in my thoughts the whole time, like always.
I’m going to find some red sea glass for you.
I miss you more than you could ever know.
Love,
Anna
I trace my fingers over his name on the letter and close my eyes, imagining that when we get to California, he’s there waiting for us, smiling with his apple hair and blue beach glass necklace.
seven
“See you in a few weeks.” Mom hugs me goodbye in the Perinos’ driveway. “Call us every few days and don’t forget to send postcards.”
“I will. And I won’t.”
“Remember what I said about sunblock and always swimming where the lifeguard can see and hear you,” Dad says. “The ocean can be dangerous, especially during vacation season when the beaches are crowded.”
“Dad, we covered this already. Besides, you hate vacations,” I tease. “How do you know what the beaches are like?”
“We don’t hate vacations,” he says. “In fact, Mom and I were just talking about planning our own family vacation for next summer.”
In my sixteen-year history as an Official Member of This Family, we’ve never taken a real vacation. In a perfect storm of stupid ailments, Dad’s afraid of flying, Mom can’t stomach long car rides, and both of them have issues with nonchlorinated water. Sure, we’ve covered the local circuit — Amish country, the zoo, Oak Ridge State Park — anything listed in the New York State guidebook and less than two hours’ drive. But no exciting, life-altering experiences to write about in those school essays in the fall. No exotic destination from which I could send postcards.
Dear Frankie and Matt,
Here we are at… the zoo!
We didn’ t even have to stand in “ lion.” The monkeys miss you.
Love, your world-traveling neighbor, Anna
“Sure, Dad,” I say, smiling. “Sounds fun.” I give him and Mom one more round of hugs before settling in next to Frankie in the backseat. After a few more words to Red and Jayne about taking care of the Perinos’ plants, house, and mail while we’re away, Mom and Dad finally let us leave.
I watch out the back window as my parents wave from the yard and get smaller and smaller as we zoom up the street. In less than half a day, I’ll be getting off a plane two thousand miles farther than either of them will ever go. I consider their strange antitraveling afflictions for just a minute before realizing that I’ve never been on an airplane and could very well be cursed with the same fear of flying that keeps Dad’s feet planted on the ground.
“Don’t even worry,” Frankie says when I confess my concerns. She’s in full makeup, perfect hair, cute drawstring traveling pants, and a plain pink T-shirt. “It’s safer than driving.”
I look at her eyebrow and feel a twinge of pain in my wrist — the phantoms of old injuries. She doesn’t notice.
The sun is just peeking above the horizon as Red pulls onto the highway. He alternates between scanning the morning talk radio for news and weather and trying to engage Jayne in conversation. She’s been kind of far away all morning — nodding and smiling, polite but preoccupied. I follow Frankie’s lead and continue our conversation as though we’re any other normal family taking any other normal vacation.
Frankie tells me about the itinerary: how long the flight to San Francisco takes, what we do when we land, the drive to Zanzibar, where we eat lunch, what time we should get to the house.
It’s barely six in the morning and I already feel like we’ve been traveling all day.
At the airport, we check in, drop off our luggage, and follow the signs to the security checkpoint.
“I can’t believe I’m sixteen years old and I’ve never been past security at the airport,” I say as I take off my shoes and set them on the conveyor belt next to Frankie’s. “I’m so sheltered.”
“First time through the X-ray machine, first time on a plane, first time in California… I’m sensing a theme here, Anna. You know, first times?” Frankie wiggles her eyebrows and steps through the machine. If Red and Jayne weren’t already through the checkpoint waiting for us on the other side, I’d grab my shoe from the conveyor belt and maim her with it right here.
The security screener takes a few extra minutes to scan Frankie with the handheld wand before waving me through.
“Too bad,” I say, grabbing my shoes and bag off the belt. “I think I packed the wrong bathing suit. You know, the yellow one. With the flowers.”
“You better not be serious.” She looks aghast.
“I guess we’ll find out when we get to the beach.”
“Find out what?” Red asks as we reunite. “Nothing,” Frankie says. “Where’s Mom?”
“Restroom.” Red nods toward the blue-and-white sign down the hall.
“Again?” Frankie asks. It’s Jayne’s fourth trip to the bathroom since we checked in. “Is she okay?”
“She’s fine, girls. Just a few nerves before the trip, that’s all.” Uncle Red sticks his hands in his pockets and looks back toward the bathrooms. “Just a few nerves.”
Frankie slings her backpack over one shoulder. “Can me and Anna go ahead to the food court? It’s right up there.”
“Sure, hon. We’ll catch up in a minute.”
Frankie and I find a Jack’s Java and order frozen green tea smoothies and nonfat blueberry muffins, the least we can do to maintain our combined two-and-a-half-pound loss on the all-but-abandoned Ultra Quick-Skinny diet.
“I can’t believe the airport has a dry cleaners and a Jack’s Java,” I say, slurping my smoothie. Though I’ve traveled to the airport with Mom and Dad to pick up and drop off relatives, I’ve never been this far inside. Above the sound of the overhead announcements and final boarding calls to exotic destinations, parents scold their kids, people shout into cell phones, and friends reminisce about their vacations before boarding the planes that will carry them home. It’s like a secret underground world — a constant flux of arrivals and departures, reunions and breakups, hellos and goodbyes, befores and afters.
“They have everything here — even a spa,” Frankie tells me. “You could totally live in the airport.”
“Didn’t they make a movie about that?”
“If they didn’t, they should. Come to think of it, we should.” Frankie digs her camera out of her bag and gets into her interviewer voice.
“A.B.S.E., day one. Departure. Anna Reiley, first-time visitor to the airport, sips her smoothie while awaiting her flight to California. The air is charged with excitement as Reiley snarfs down the last few crumbs of her nonfat muffin. Tell us, Miss Reiley, how does it feel to finally see the inner workings of the airport?”
“Well, Francesca, I am admittedly full of trepidation, never having been in the airport before, as you know. Yet I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell the viewers how excited I am to travel with the renowned Francesca Perino and her adoring parents. I just can’t thank them enough. And thank you, Francesca. And I’d like to thank my own parents for agreeing to send me to the airport, and the Academy for believing that I’d make it to the airport when no one else did. Thank you. Thank you all. Please, no more questions.”
“No, thank you, Miss Reiley.” Frankie turns the camera on herself. “This is Frankie P, live from the airport, signing off.”
“You’re a freak.”
“I’d be all full of trepilation and reminisce if I didn’t agree.”
“Trepidation and remiss.”
“Yeah, them, too.”
Red and Jayne collect us in front of Jack’s, order two large house blends to go, and lead us down to the gate. After a few sips of the strong coffee, J
ayne seems a little better. She even laughs when Frankie and I show her our mock interview.
We still have an hour before boarding, so Frankie and I pass the time by writing stories in the back of my journal about the other waiting-area passengers. We get through Duane Durstein — pervy, wife-cheating insurance salesman; Gloria Masterson of the Boston Mastersons (old money), who long ago snubbed her family when they refused to accept her love of show poodles; and Mickey, a six-year-old with gigantic floppy ears who refuses to listen to his frazzled mother. Actually, that part isn’t made up — the boy’s mother calls him Mickey, too. Before we can move on to the woman in the crocheted American flag sweater, the counter attendant calls our row.
“That’s us,” says Red. “You girls ready?”
I smile. I am so ready.
Before I know it, I’m buckled tight next to Frankie in row fourteen, window seat, listening attentively to crewmember instructions and following along with the passenger safety information card conveniently located in my seatback pocket. Everything is new to me — bathrooms at thirty thousand feet, free snacks, male flight attendants. I’m an utter child with wide eyes and matching dopey grin, just released from the jungle by the wolves that raised me.
I reach into my bag for my journal so I can write about everything I see on the plane and realize with a sudden panic that my bag isn’t as crowded as it should be.
“Oh, no!” My pulse starts pounding in my veins.
“Anna, what’s wrong?” Frankie asks. “Nervous?”
“I left my journal on the counter when I handed them my ticket!”
“Are you sure?” Frankie pokes around my bag to confirm.
“Yes! I remember setting it down to pull the ticket out of my purse!” I’m practically in tears.
“Don’t worry, we’re still at the gate.” Frankie presses the call button. “They can probably get it for you.”
“Frankie, I can’t lose it!” Passengers in neighboring rows look on with mild interest as I start to hyperventilate. I’m crawling out of my skin! How can everyone be so calm about this?
“Everything okay?” A perky flight attendant in a navy blue suit — Darcy, according to her name tag — appears at the end of our row.
“Did anyone turn in a purple notebook?” Frankie asks. “She left it on the counter when we boarded.”
“Let me check on that for you,” Darcy says, smile firmly in place.
“It’s okay, Anna. Breathe.” Frankie pats my hand.
After what feels like three days, perky Darcy returns to our row, notebook in hand.
“Is this it?” she asks. “One of the passengers gave it to Meg up front.”
“Yes!” I reach over Frankie and the nameless passenger in the aisle seat, practically snatching the journal from Darcy’s manicured hands. “Thank you so much,” I say, flipping through the pages to make sure nothing has been torn, eaten, spilled upon, or otherwise damaged during our brief but painful separation.
“Better now?” Frankie asks. “Yes. You have no idea.”
“I do. I’d freak out like that if I lost my movies.” She smiles and plugs herself into her iPod for the Helicopter Pilot double-live we downloaded last night.
I turn to the window, keeping the journal on my lap. There’s no way I’m letting it out of my sight now.
Midway through the flight, I peel my face from the window-pane and realize I haven’t felt any of the fear-of-flight symptoms Dad warned me about — nausea, clammy hands and feet, racing heart, white knuckles, generally making an ass of oneself (other than when I lost my journal, which was a freak accident and thankfully over quickly). I watch the whole country go by — rivers, lakes, mountains that look like ripples in the ground, and the yellow-and-green patchwork quilts of Middle America.
“Look, Anna, there’s the Golden Gate Bridge.” Frankie leans over my lap to point out a huge orange bridge stretching on forever. Beyond that is the Pacific Ocean, dotted with strips of foamy white-caps and the soft, colored triangles of sailboats.
I love the flying and the sights so much that if we had to turn around and go home right now, it would still feel like a complete vacation.
It’s almost one when we finally get off the plane, though it’s only ten in California. After we find our bags, we pick up our rental car and head down the Pacific Coastal Highway. In less than two hours, we’ll be in Zanzibar Bay — gateway to the A.B.S.E.
Just like on the plane, Frankie lets me have the seat with the best view. I open the window and watch the ocean — a never-ending streak of bright blue and green. The mood in the car is a juxtaposition of excitement and sadness, alternating in waves of smiles and laughter as Frankie’s family points out various sites and jokes at my bewilderment at the foreignness of it all, followed by silence — the unspoken melancholy pushing into the spaces Matt left behind.
Though I’d sat with them through sessions with the school counselor, through Frankie freak-outs in the living room, through awkward family meals and holidays where no one talked and all I could hear was the clinking of forks against plates, riding in the car with the Perinos as scenes sail along the highway triggering memory after memory after invisible, unsaid memory is the hardest thing I’ve done since Matt’s funeral.
You’ll have to be the strong one, Anna. “You guys wanna pull over and get a better look?” Red asks after an hour on the road, changing lanes to exit at an overlook point. Ours is the only car there — a rocky patch of sand with a small parking area and picnic table.
Frankie and I walk to the edge of the cliff while Jayne pulls an assortment of airport donuts and juice boxes from a nylon cooler and sets them up on the picnic table. We lean over the wooden guardrails and drop rocks over the edge, each one shattering against the boulders below into tiny shards and dust that swirl and swoosh before dissolving into the ocean. If not for the dolomite boulders, according to the informational signpost behind us, the base of the cliff would have eroded in the ocean’s tumult thousands of years ago, and Frankie and I would not be suspended so perfectly as we are above the water.
I wrap my hands around the rail and look down. The viscous churning below makes me so dizzy that I have to close my eyes and count backward from ten to recompose. I inhale deeply, smelling and tasting the ocean’s salt on my skin and remembering how Matt had described this same feeling in so many of his postcards.
Anna, when you meet the ocean, you feel it more than you see it. If you’re lucky, that wonderment never fades, and you feel it again every time you get back here. You’ll feel it someday.
“Girls,” Jayne calls from the picnic table. “Not so close to the edge! Come back and have something to drink. We have three more weeks to enjoy the view!”
I open my eyes and tug gently on Frankie’s arm.
“Let’s go,” I say.
“Wait, Anna, do you hear it? Listen.”
“What is it?” It sounds like barking.
“Look — seals.” She points about thirty feet down the shore where a dozen or so brown lumps wriggle and play in the sand, barking like some kind of water dogs.
“Wow,” I breathe.
“I’m changing my answer.”
Anna, what’s the number one coolest thing you’ve ever seen in your life?
He asked me one night, about a week after my birthday, when we saw three shooting stars in a row behind his house. It was after midnight, and everyone was asleep but the crickets. I remember telling him about this crazy lightning storm I saw when I was ten. It was far away but I could see the rain billowing out in sails and sheets, all the dark blue-gray sky lit up in flash after flash after flash.
What’s yours?
It’s always been the ocean. But I’m thinking about changing my answer.
He didn’t say anything after that. He just looked at my eyes for a long, long time, missing all the stars above us until it was too light to see them anyway.
“What answer?” Frankie asks.
“Seals. The seals are officially th
e number one coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
She smiles, nodding. “Agreed.”
After inhaling a few powdered donuts, we pose along the rail with Jayne as Red sets up his camera and tripod for our first official trip photo. Though they’ll probably appear in the picture as indiscernible brown blobs on the distant shore, the seals seem to line up in their best group pose, just for us. Satisfied with the angle, Red sets the timer and runs to join us in front of the ocean, laughing with the seals as we wait for the click.
“That’s going to be a great one, Twinkies,” Red says. Though we long ago shed the yellow wardrobe associated with babies whose parents didn’t know what sex we’d be, Frankie and I are still inseparable. Our childhood nickname sticks.
“You okay, Anna?” Frankie whispers in front of the seals as Red and Jayne get into the car.
“I think so,” I say. “Just taking it all in.” I kick at the ground with my toes, sending a pile of detritus cascading down the rock face. A new breeze sucks moist air over the cliff and coats our arms with a silver mist.
“He’s here,” she whispers across the ocean. I take her hand and close my eyes again, steadying myself with my other hand on the rail, floating.
Another forty minutes of drive time goes by quickly. After the pit stop, both Red and Jayne show renewed energy and excitement, telling stories from their first few trips to the beach, when the kids were little. Red drives most of the time with one hand on Jayne’s knee, and once in a while, she puts her hand on top of his and smiles.
Just as I start to feel nostalgic for lunch, Frankie points out a weathered blue sign along the shoulder:
Welcome to Zanzibar Bay
Paradise lost… and found again!
Pop: 945 949
