41
“You slept late,” is all anyone is saying to me. I did. I slept until nine o’clock and through a surfing date with Gracie. Even Jack’s up.
“How was your trip to Margaritaville?” I ask, giving him a hug.
“I don’t know how that happened,” he says. “I’m sorry. I feel like crap.”
“Want me to make you a Bloody Mary?” asks Granny.
“No, thank you,” he says.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “Mom’s margaritas are deadly. I should have warned you. Want to jump in the ocean real quick? It might help.”
“I need to get out of this sun.” Jack makes his way back out the front door and up to the garage apartment.
Since Gracie and I missed the waves, we take our surfboards out to just float around. I feel a small tilt in the Earth’s axis, a combination of mild anxiety and glee. I’d really like to talk to my mother. I need to tell someone that I made a quick trip back to myself and felt easy for a while. But if I told her exactly how open Wyatt and I were and how much we laughed, I’m afraid she’d panic. To my mom, Jack is more than a fiancé, he is the bubble wrap that she’d like me to wear.
Gracie and I are floating around when she sits up on her board and waves her arms at the shore. Her eyes are better than mine, but I can tell from the motion we’re getting in return that she’s waving at Wyatt. In minutes he’s paddling out to meet us.
“Hey,” I say, and roll onto my back so I don’t have to look at him.
“Jack’s hungover,” Gracie tells him.
“Good for him,” says Wyatt.
“He doesn’t really like being a doctor.”
“That’s too bad.”
“He doesn’t like the sun or the ocean.”
“What does he like?”
“Margaritas, I think.”
They laugh.
I am hypnotized by the feel of the salt water and the sound of its lapping against my board. The sun is prickly warm on my face, my chest, my legs. As I let my feet dangle in the water, I am aware of every inch of my body, every breeze that cools where the sun has gotten too hot. I try a thought out in my mind: Wyatt and I are going to be friends. He was the most important person in my life, and I have grieved over it forever. I took all of my pain and disillusionment from my dad’s affair and wrapped it up in that one loss. Now he is resurrected in the form of a really nice guy who is also friends with my little sister. I just have to not want to touch him. It would be like drinking nonalcoholic beer, all of the taste without the buzz. Take that, Dr. Judy.
I listen as she tells him about volunteering at the animal shelter after school so she can get a job handling dogs at the vet’s office. Those are the first few steps in her twenty-step plan to becoming a large-animal veterinarian. Wyatt’s saying that sounds like a lot more work than making up songs.
I’ve heard all about both of their dream jobs, but there’s something about hearing them tell each other. Gracie was the last straw for Wyatt; the fact of my mom’s pregnancy pushed our fragile relationship over the edge. Wyatt is before, and Grace is what came after. And if they coexist on the same plane, maybe all there really is is the now. It’s possible I’ve had too much sun.
“I want to be an art teacher,” I say in my quietest voice. I say it almost to myself.
“What?” asks Gracie. “Did she say something?”
Wyatt says, “She said she wants to be an art teacher. Sam, that’s such a no-brainer.”
I feel too exposed lying on my back and turn over. “I’m not qualified at all, but I’d really like to work with kids and help them make stuff. I always think about that when I come out here and then forget about it when I’m back in the city.”
“You’d be good at that,” says Gracie.
“You should totally do this. Like now.” Wyatt sits up, straddling his board.
“It’s not that easy. I’d have to go back to school.”
“You don’t seem that busy,” Wyatt says.
I hate myself for bringing this up. I have no idea what would have possessed me to tell them this. The sun, the water. I must have gone into some kind of fugue state. And then with a mercy only the ocean could provide, the waves start to pick up.
“Something’s happened to you,” my mother says.
“Lots of things have happened to me,” I say. “I’m thirty.”
“Okay, we don’t have to talk about it.”
We’re unloading the dishwasher, wiping the plates and glasses dry because this particular forty-year-old dishwasher no longer provides that service. “I feel better,” I say. “I talked to Wyatt.”
She clutches the mug she’s drying to her chest and leans back against the counter. “Tell me.”
“I went to see him last night. In the treehouse.” I say this last bit to the worn wooden floor. “And we talked.”
“About what?”
“Not so much about what happened. I think we’re just chalking that up to being young and not knowing how to deal. But about our lives now, I guess. Sort of the way we used to be able to talk for hours about nothing. I think I missed that.”
“Oh. So that’s nice?” She’s re-drying the dry mug. It occurs to me that my mom may have more than a little bit of PTSD about my prior Wyatt meltdown. Her life was in a free fall, and I kindly piled on the way only a teenager can.
“It was. But it’s nothing to worry about. We are going to be friends, I think. And I think I forgave him. And he forgave me. I feel like I’ve put down something heavy I was carrying.”
“And that’s it? The whole story?”
“Mostly,” I say.