Twenty Boy Summer (5 page)

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 the 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

"Breeze! Breeze! Breeze!" Frankie shouts, pumping her fist up and down. She told me about their favorite restaurant tradition on our way to the airport this morning.

After we leave the main highway, Red crawls and putters through Moonlight Boulevard, Pier 7, according to the sign welcoming us to the main strip. Jammed with tourists, hot dogs, and neon bathing suits, the pier is an assault on every one of the five senses -- possibly the sixth as well.

It isn't the town itself, but the people.
Us.
Summer seems to arrive with us, as though the entire place has been asleep since last September, awakening only as taxis and rental cars line up to deposit us along the beach -- families with toddlers, college kids on break, retirees seeking to warm themselves under the California sun, and our own motley crew. Together we break upon the pier like a tidal wave as she rubs her winter-sleepy eyes, stretches, and turns on the coffee for us.

After finding a parking space on our fifth tour down the strip, we put our name in for a table at Breeze, which has a twenty-minute wait, and wander to the edge of the pier to watch the boats in the Pacific. The smell of coconut oil wafts up from the sun worshippers down below, but the sound of the waves camouflages most of their laughter and music.

"Don't worry, Anna." Red shakes his head at the undulating tangle of people below. "The beach near the house doesn't get nearly as crowded as this. The rental community has a private lease, so only the folks using the houses can be on the beach."

"Yeah, the
old
folks," Frankie whispers.

"So what do you think?" Red asks me. "Pretty amazing, huh?"

"More than I imagined," I say.

"Present location aside, I like to pretend that we're mostly cut off from the rest of the world here. It's pretty quiet, other than the surfers. And the tourists. And the vendors. And all the screaming kids." Uncle Red sighs. "Remember when this place was still kind of a secret, Jayne?"

"That was a lifetime ago." Jayne stares out over the water as Red puts his arm around her and kisses her head. It makes her smile, just a little bit. I turn away, feeling like an intruder.

"Let's go see if our table is ready," Frankie says. "Anna, they have the best piña coladas here. Wait till you try them."

"Nonalcoholic, of course," Jayne says, pulling away from Red. Frankie smiles. "Virgins. Of course."

After lunch, including two of the best piña coladas, Frankie and I get in line for ice cream at Sweet Caroline's Creamery stand next door, Ultra Quick-Skinny be damned. Jayne seems to be feeling better, but I learned soon after Matt died that even something as simple as ordering grilled cheese from a diner menu can unleash a flood of memories impossible to corral.

As Frankie and I wait in line, completely canceling out our calorie-saving nonfat muffins and combined weight loss in just a few hours, we count thirty-seven sagging, sunburned old women who don't know that they've outlived the statute of limitations on wearing bikini tops. Frankie and I make a vow to never let the other out in public like that after thirty, no matter how good we think we look. The shock of lime and tangerine spandex against the backdrop of storefronts whose deep hues have been sucked gray and pale by years of warm ocean salt reminds me that we're an inconvenience, a passing fad the town endures each summer as she welcomes, sells, feeds, and exists solely for our entertainment. I picture all the shops boarding up their windows in the fall -- the signs unplugged, the saltwater taffy spinners cleaned and stowed away -- a whole town folding up into a tent and packed on the train with the elephants and fire-eaters.

Ice-cream cones in hand, we walk around the back of the stand along the pier where we waited for our table at Breeze. As I lick a runaway line of melted cherry chocolate ripple from my hand, I become hyperaware of our surroundings. The back-and-forth ancient lull of the tide. The cry of seagulls passing overhead. The smell of salt and fish carried on the warm breeze. With each step along the old wooden planks of the pier, tiny grains of sand that hitchhiked from the beach below are pulverized under our heels. Sand that traveled millions of miles over billions of years across shifting continents and churning oceans, surviving plate tectonics, erosion, and sedimentary deposition is crushed by our new sandals.

The cosmos can be so cruel.

"Frankie, look at this sand. Isn't it amazing that --"

"Shh -- Anna, check it out. No, not
now.
Don't look yet."

"Don't look at what?" I turn my head to see.

"Guys. In the baseball hats. Over there. I said don't look! They are totally checking us out. Are my teeth okay?" She flashes a quick grin so I can confirm that all evidence of lunch and ice cream is gone.

I nod and chance a casual glance at the boys in question, waiting for my heart to skip or my palms to sweat or my tongue to become hopelessly tied. But all bodily functions remain intact. They look just like all the boys at home, only tanner.

"What's the big deal?" I ask, thinking that if this is as good as it gets, I'll be lugging around the old albatross for quite a while.

"The big deal, Anna, is that they're totally staring at us. And we aren't even done up or anything."

I look at her eyelashes and the fresh coat of glitter mascara she applied in the restroom at Breeze. "Mmm-hmm."

"I'm just saying. We've been here an hour and already there are prospects. We'll get to twenty easily. Maybe we should up it to thirty."

"
Maybe
we should introduce your new boyfriends to your parents," I say, "because here they come."

eight

Frankie immediately switches back to the Good Daughter, stowing the Seductress for a more appropriate, i.e., parent-free, time. The boys across the pier must have sensed her personality change -- or the danger of an approaching father -- as they're nowhere to be found when Red and Jayne reach us.

"Find something you like?" Red asks.

"Huh?" Frankie almost chokes on her ice cream.

"Mom and I got cookies-'n'-cream," he says, holding up his cone.

"Oh -- right. We got cherry chocolate something."

"So when are we heading to the house?" I jump in to prevent an awkward situation from getting much worse. Because Red and Jayne have become relatively lax in their discipline of Frankie, she's less careful with her secrets than the laws of parent-child relations dictate. I don't think she'd say something
really
awful, like, "I just lost my virginity with the foreign exchange student, please pass the salt." But I don't want to take any chances with our contest and risk getting sent home on the first day. How embarrassing. What would Red and Jayne think if they knew their daughter and her best friend staged a manhunt -- rather, a
twenty
manhunt -- on the family vacation?

"We have to pick up a few basics for dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow," Red says. "Then we'll go. House is about five miles up the hill from here."

From the main road out of town past the grocery store, we can only see the top of the house, the roof rising like the tip of a wooden iceberg. It sits on a long ridge overlooking the ocean, not too close to the other houses nearby.

Uncle Red and Aunt Jayne are silent as we make our way along the dirt side road to the top. As we wind around a grove of palm trees and crest the hill, the house appears all at once as though it had been waiting behind the trees to jump out at us.

"Wow," I whisper. There is nothing else I can say. The sight of it, live and up close, hushes me. It isn't gigantic or ultramodern or anything, but it's breathtaking to me -- a fairy tale that lived in hundreds of photographs and stories finally coming to life. It's all wood and windows top to bottom. In the bright oranges of the sun, it looks like it's on fire, a giant glass triangle burning against the blue sky.

From the dirt road, we turn into the driveway on the north side of the house, the backyard facing west over the beach and the ocean and the wide-open sky beyond.

"Wow," I say again. "I can't believe I'm here."

"Welcome to our second favorite spot in the world." Uncle Red cuts the engine and squeezes Aunt Jayne's hand.

We all sit in the car for a few minutes, not saying anything.

"I'm gonna check out the view from the backyard," I say, extracting myself from the car and the silence.

"We'll be right behind you," Aunt Jayne says.

I head up the gradual hill to the backyard, looking down at the silver pod of the car from the top. The three of them are frozen, afraid to move. I can't tell if they're talking, but Frankie is leaning between the two front seats.

For a brief moment, I miss my parents. Dad in his Parkside Realty sport coat. Mom with her coupons. Calm. Predictable. Normal. I wonder if they miss me, too, thousands of miles away in their quiet normal house where seals don't bark and families don't cry in the car.

The backyard is about the size of our school swimming pool and has six wooden steps on the far edge leading down to the beach. I know there are six of them because Matt used to tell me about how he'd run out the back door, off the deck, across the lawn, and jump down to the sand, sailing right over the steps as Aunt Jayne yelled after him about breaking his neck.

I kick off my flip-flops and walk across the wet grass to the steps, sitting on the bottom one and digging a little tunnel in the sand with my feet. It's wet and cold under the hot surface, just like Matt said.

As the waves shush against the shore, I look out over the ocean and watch a few families scattered along the beach. In front of me, a mother stands knee-deep in the water, waving and calling for two little boys to come in for lunch.

When someone you love dies, people ask you how you're doing, but they don't really want to know. They seek affirmation that you're okay, that you appreciate their concern, that life goes on and so can they. Secretly they wonder when the statute of limitations on asking expires (it's three months, by the way. Written or unwritten, that's about all the time it takes for people to forget the one thing that you never will).

They don't want to know that you'll never again eat birthday cake because you don't want to erase the magical taste of the frosting on his lips. That you wake up every day wondering why you got to live and he didn't. That on the first afternoon of your first real vacation, you sit in front of the ocean, face hot under the giant sun, willing him to give you a sign that he's okay.

"There you are!"

I jump. It's Frankie, coming down the stairs. "You okay?"

"Yeah." I move over to make room for her on my stair and put my head on her shoulder. "I was just thinking about him."

"Me, too." Her eyes are red and glassy, but she's smiling. "I think the hard part's over. We're officially out of the car."

I laugh, pulling my feet out of their sand caves.

In the distance, tiny triangles -- some white, some red, some rainbow -- navigate along the rise and fall of a thousand saltwater peaks.

"Isn't it amazing, Anna?" She looks out across the water. "It makes you feel kind of small, huh?"

"Yeah." I don't want to say too much; to break the thin glass bubble spell, my head resting on her shoulder, my oldest friend reflective and serious and still capable of being amazed.

"You know what the best part about California is?" She puts her arm around me, her Matt-bracelet cool against my shoulder. "No one knows me here. No one knows that they're supposed to feel sorry for me."

I think about the faces at school as we passed through the halls -- eyes looking away, mouths whispering.
There goes Matt's sister. Hey, isn't that the best friend?

"Except for you," she says. "You're the only one who knows the big black secret. And you're a locked vault when it comes to keeping secrets." She laughs, kicking at the sand with her toes.

We dust off from the sandy steps and walk out to the shore. Up close, the water churns and rolls, shifting between hazy blues and grays. As each new wave slides up to our bare feet, the tide pulls it back, lifting the water like a blowing skirt to give us a peek at the colored stones beneath.

The water is cooler than I expect. It bites at my toes until I'm used to the temperature and can no longer tell the difference between air and water on my skin. I kneel and scoop up a handful of silt and rocks, staring into my cupped palm as dark, wet sand lightens in the air.

"Where do you think it came from?" I ask, dropping my hands into the water to let the waves wash over them.