Chapter 25
25
NOW
THE FRENCH FRIES WENT IN first. Dad forced Taz to sit in the rocky throne next to the firepit, then nearly cried from laughter at how uncomfortable he looked. Glasses drained quickly. Once the fries started coming off the fire, they looked too good to resist. Karma was the first to sneak one from inside their nest of greasy paper towels. Its skin crackled between her teeth. She groaned. Her eyes rolled back in her head. Caleb dug in and took a handful. So did Taz. He arranged them on a small paper plate and passed them to Helene. Mom fed one to Speedy and giggled.
Clarence fried. He seemed to be having fun—real fun, I mean. Relaxed, effortless. Not the aggressive happiness he normally put on. When he finished all the potatoes, he switched to fish. His cheeks glowed pink in the firelight as he dunked fillet after fillet into a bowl of batter—once, twice, three times, a generous coating—then transferred them into the vat of bubbling oil. He moved from bowl to boil as quickly as he could, but batter still drizzled from the bottom, dripping first onto the ground and then into the hot oil, droplets crisping almost instantly into free-floating flakes that bubbled up and gathered to one side like a school of fish.
Karma fetched another bottle of champagne from the coolers and refilled everyone’s glasses. “Who wants to give the first toast?” she asked. “Clare?”
“Mine is too good,” Clarence said. “Nobody will be able to follow.”
“How noble of you. Dad?”
“Oldest never goes first.”
She sighed. “Fine. Youngest first, then. Boose?”
The fillets bobbed about in the oil.
“Um.”
Caleb stepped in, as usual. Always the leader. “I’ll go first.”
The circle shifted.
“Taron Beck,” began our patriarch. “Taron Samuel Augustus Caesar Tasmanian Devil Beck.”
“Whoop, whoop !” cheered Wendy.
“He hasn’t even said anything yet,” said Karma.
I hadn’t considered the possibility that I might need to give a toast. I thought back to Karma’s wedding, tried to remember the rehearsal dinner, whether I’d spoken. Mostly I remembered sending ugly selfies to Manuel under the table. If I had spoken, surely it was no big deal. Surely I’d gone in with a memory or two on hand, gassed up, needy as always for the approval of everyone at the table.
Not this year. This year I had nothing.
“You okay?” whispered Manuel, laying one hand on my knee to keep it from bouncing. I looked down. I hadn’t noticed it start.
“Yeah,” I said, unable to take my eyes off his hand resting on my leg. “Yeah, fine.” I stood abruptly. “Gonna get some more champagne.”
I walked over to the cooler and fished out an unopened bottle. Propped it up on my hip and tried to twist off the cork. In the fryer, the trout crisped to a perfect gold. Clarence dipped in his slotted spoon and scooped out a few strips. Hot oil dripped to the ground. I started to refill my glass but stopped. Thought for a moment. Decided to take the entire bottle.
Caleb finished his toast, and Mom went next. Or tried to—before speaking even a word, she burst into tears.
Karma looked at me and rolled her eyes.
As we listened, freshly fried fish made its way around the circle. We each took a fillet. Mine was small and chubby, like a chicken nugget. Manuel’s looked like a lopsided map of Florida. We clinked them together like goblets. Our prizes. Deep-fried evidence of something wonderful. We both took hearty bites.
The toasts moved clockwise, just like the stories at birthday dinners. I knew I should think of what to say, but instead, Manuel and I pretended to make our fish fight like swords. It was ridiculous how wonderful it felt. How completely natural.
“So,” Karma asked Helene after she’d had enough champagne, “have we scared you off yet?”
Helene glanced at Taz and smiled. “Not at all.”
“Tell us,” Mom said, leaning forward. “What’s one thing we don’t know about you?”
“Oh. That’s easy,” she replied. “I can see spirits.”
The way she said it—there was no showmanship or embarrassment. No theatrics of revelation. She spoke as if she were reciting a trait as obvious and uninteresting as the color of her hair.
I perked up. “You do?”
“Sure,” she said.
Something fluttered in my stomach. “How long have you been able to see them?”
“For as long as I’ve had eyes, I guess.”
“What do they look like? Do they talk to you?”
“No, no. It’s not like that.”
I leaned closer. I didn’t mean to ask so many questions, but they kept coming, as if I had no control over my own voice. “Are they dangerous? Or nice?”
“Neither,” said Helene. “They’re not interested in us. They only hang around certain places because they have unfinished business there.”
Shelly said, “The theaters where you dance must be crawling with them.”
Helene nodded sagely. “That’s true. Lots of unresolved grudges in the dance business.”
I was still going. “Have you seen any here? On the island?”
“Geez, Boose.” Karma snorted. “Chill out. Let someone else have a turn interrogating the new girl. Besides”—she twirled her champagne flute—“since when did you become so interested in the spirit world?”
I looked down. Felt my face heat up. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“It’s okay,” said Helene.
When I looked back up, she was watching me. The edges of her mouth turned up in a soft smile, but behind her eyes was something else. An unspoken recognition. A confirmation of what I’d known all along.
I waited for him, for the familiar sensation that Henry’s ashes were right there, right below the rock where I sat. But before he could arrive, Karma’s voice pulled me away.
“So, Eliot,” she said, “tell us about the dating scene in New York.”
Oh God.
“Yes, yes,” said my mother, clapping excitedly. “You haven’t said a thing about boys since you got here.”
I could feel Manuel breathing next to me. “That’s because there’s nothing to tell.”
“Nothing?” Mom pretended to pout, but I saw her eyes dart hopefully to the boy next to me.
“Nope.”
“No boyfriend? Nobody special? Never?”
I tried to grin. “Ouch, Mom.”
Not only had I not dated a single person since leaving Chicago, I hadn’t even tried. Hadn’t downloaded any dating apps. Hadn’t drunkenly made out with someone at a bar. And I only thought about sex—like, the physical act of sex, which I’d never actually experienced—approximately once every three months.
Things weren’t looking good for me in the romance department.
“You know what’s funny?” said Caleb through a mouthful of fish. “I always thought you and Manny would end up together.”
Manuel and I stiffened at exactly the same moment.
“So did I!” Clarence raised his glass so quickly a bit of champagne sloshed over the side.
“I mean,” said Karma, raising one eyebrow suggestively, “you two did always disappear into the woods for hours at a time.”
Everyone laughed.
Including Manuel and me. We forced our laughter so hard we almost choked.
The group went back to general chatter. An uncomfortable silence settled over my best friend and me. I looked out at the water, pretending to care about the slight ripples along its surface.
After a moment, I felt something on my cheek. I jumped. Looked over. Manuel had reached up and plucked a flake of crisp gold from the corner of my mouth. He held it out to me on the tip of his finger like a stray eyelash.
“Make a wish,” he said.
—
AFTER DINNER, THE GROUP MIGRATED to the couches in Sunny Sunday, telling misty-eyed stories over glasses of red wine. Rather than join in, Manuel turned to me and said, “Speedy told me we’re due for a meteor shower tonight.”
“Oh, I bet he did.” I snorted loudly. “How long did he spend describing the exact degree at which the rocks will be entering the atmosphere?”
“Not long. Just the better part of an hour.”
I laughed.
“Should we go check it out?”
The sun had set decisively, taking every cloud over Southern Ontario along with it. I peered up. The night sky shone bright and clear.
“Yeah, okay.”
Neither of us asked which direction we were headed. As kids, we always stargazed from the floating dock. It stuck straight out into the lake, affording the most sweeping view of the sky. We carried our champagne glasses out to the end and set them carefully on the slatted wood. Then we stretched out onto our backs.
The sky over Cradle Island is not the sky over Brooklyn. It’s not the sky over Chicago. It’s not even the sky over rural Illinois, far from the pollution of city lights. It’s something else. It’s a sky untouched by industry—no automobiles or cell towers or tractors or grids filled with a town’s worth of electricity.
“So,” Manuel asked, “are we finally going to talk about it?”
“Talk about what?”
He turned to face me. “You know what.”
I didn’t meet his eyes. I kept mine locked on the sky.
Unfortunately, there’s something about stargazing that loosens one’s tongue. I think it’s that talking to the stars is easier than talking to someone’s face. Flat on your back, sending words into that vast, empty blackness—it’s easy to feel that those words are of no consequence. They go nowhere. Sucked straight into the vacuum. So you speak freely, and always— always —you reveal more than you intended.
“Aren’t you…” I began, then stopped. Took a breath. “Aren’t you angry with me?”
“Angry with you? Why on Earth would I be angry with you? Just because you avoided every single one of my calls and text messages for the last three calendar years?”
“Yeah.”
“Nah.”
I turned to look at him. “What?”
He looked back up at the sky. “I mean, I was at first. At least, I think I was. I don’t know. It was right when freshman year started. I was completely overwhelmed.” He exhaled. Even though the night was hot and muggy, for some reason I expected Manuel’s breath to curl before him in a milky-white cloud. “Was I angry? I mean, I felt a lot of things. Maybe anger was one of them. I don’t know. But there was also this overwhelming excitement. Like…pure, bizarre, manic energy. Seriously. I mean, you know me. You know I’m not the most excitable person ever.”
I laughed before I could stop myself.
He smiled. “Right. But those first few months of college…I threw myself into it. All of it. I joined clubs. I went to dorm parties. I raised my hand in lecture, did every single one of my assigned readings—even after I learned no one actually does those. I thought I was having fun. I thought I was having more fun than I’d ever had in my life.”
I didn’t speak. Like a flag popping out of the ground, I thought, for the first time all evening, I need to check my email.
“But then, in October, Che and Juli came to Boston for Parents’ Weekend. They sat in on my classes and met my roommates and did all the shit I’d been doing for so long. The shit that made me ‘happy.’ But what’s the first thing they ask, before even asking how I like my classes or what concentration I’m considering?” He paused. “They ask about you. What you were up to, whether you liked U of M. And I lied. I lied straight to their faces. Told them you were crushing it, that you got a job at the school paper, that we talked every day, that you had a roommate named Alexandra and a pet fish the two of you bought together and killed within a week.” He laughed and shook his head. “I made up a whole life for you. All because I couldn’t just tell my parents that you and I weren’t speaking.” He flicked unconsciously at a loose splinter on the dock.
My hand twitched, as if it itched to grab my phone. I knew that there would be nothing important in my inbox—I knew it—but I had suddenly become overwhelmed by the sensation that there was something pressing I was supposed to be doing. Some meeting I needed to join, some slogan I needed to craft, some marketing campaign I forgot to create before I left.
“But obviously, none of it was true,” Manuel was saying. “I didn’t know anything about your life. The only reason I even knew you’d moved to New York instead of Michigan was because I texted Karma on her birthday and she said, ‘Thanks. X-O-X-O. Have you visited Boose in the Big Apple yet?’ or something like that. Imagine my shock to learn you’d skipped college without telling me.”
The splinter broke off, leaving nothing for him to pick at.
A beat of silence. Then he said, “I came to New York, you know.”
“You…” I exhaled. “What?”
“Yeah. Right after Parents’ Weekend.”
“Why didn’t you…” I stopped myself. Swallowed. I was really starting to panic now. Breath labored in and out of my lungs. It was as if the distance from my job was giving me a panic attack. Or maybe it was this conversation with Manuel. Or maybe it was this entire wedding week, I didn’t know, I couldn’t know.
“You have no idea, do you?” Manuel said.
No idea about what? I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t. I needed to stand up. I needed to go down to my parents’ cabin and check my email.
I sat up.
“Eliot?”
“It’s my friend’s birthday,” I blurted out. “My friend in New York. I completely forgot. I need to call her.”
Then, before he could protest, I struggled to my feet and slipped away.