Chapter 13
CHAPTER 13
T HERE ARE A HUNDRED GOOD PLACES TO BUY A BATH ing suit in Los Angeles. Four of them are within a mile of my house. I have several in my middle dresser drawer that I like and that would be better than anything currently on offer at Sundries in Oak Shore. This is a business trip, to New York. Nothing in those words indicated that I’d need a bathing suit.
Dan knows the girl who works there. Her name is Taylor, and she’s in her twenties. Early twenties, I’d guess. She brightens when she sees him and touches his forearm unnecessarily. “It’s sort of late in the season,” she tells us. “And we don’t really restock. Let me pull what we have in your size.”
She busies herself at the racks, and I swear to God she just pulled a yellow one-piece with strawberries on it. It looks like a bathing suit for a very tall five-year-old. “Has anyone seen Jack Quinlan in town this week?” I ask.
“Karen from the pharmacy said he was in buying Tylenol yesterday, but he left immediately in a Mercedes G- wagon. He hasn’t been hanging around.”
I practice again in my head: Hi, Jack, I’m Jane Jackson. “Jump-Start Love Song”? Yeah, right. Good times. Listen, I need you to write a song for me.
I am trying not to feel hopeless as I head to the tiny dressing room with an armful of bathing suits, even though my pitch is lame and Dan and his lemony hands think I’m going to get fired. The strawberries become more appealing as I sort through the ruffles and eyelets. One even has a little skirt. I settle on the quietest one, a royal blue one-piece with pale blue polka dots. I am a hundred percent sure Eleanor Roosevelt had this exact same suit.
I rip off the tag and put my shorts and T-shirt back on. I buy a straw hat and a bag of peanut M I think this is a thing that happens to primates.
I fidget with the bottom of my shorts and try to mold my back into the sand beneath me. I am not stripping down to my polka-dotted bathing suit. The other thing I’m not doing is relaxing. I know about relaxing because I live in the world, but it is not a thing I seem capable of. On the days I don’t run, worrying is my cardio.
I steal a look at Dan, and he is dead to the world, barely a breath rising in his chest. I don’t know how he does it. I take a deep breath. The waves crash in a regular rhythm and a breeze blows off the water. I concentrate on the soft touch of the air as it moves up my shins and along my body. I pull my phone out of my bag and check my work email. Nothing.
“Do you hear it?” The sound of his voice startles me. “The ocean?”
“No, the quiet,” he says. “Nothing makes me appreciate the quiet like coming home.” He turns his head to me and squints against the sun, one eye open. “They’re really loud.” I laugh. “I like them. They’re all so good-natured.”
“Mostly,” he says. “For entertainment in my family, we just bust on each other and argue. About sports, about music. We once argued about asparagus for an entire meal.”
“Asparagus.” I turn my head toward him, and our faces are no more than six inches apart. I don’t know when I’ve seen him this close, the way his eyelashes seem even darker than his hair. The way his upper lip bows at the top.
“It was very heated,” he says. “Good source of vitamin E versus makes your pee smell. It was a whole thing.”
“So this is where you learned to be a pain in the ass?”
He smiles at me. “Yes.” The back of his hand shades his eyes, but I can see the playfulness there.
I look back to the sky.
“I’m an only child,” I say after a while. “And my dad died when I was five. It was very quiet.” I don’t know if it’s my discomfort with the quiet that’s made me say this. I don’t know if it’s the whole Jack Quinlan thing or all this Pop Rocks talk, but I am feeling unusually unmasked, digging up the old ghosts and tossing them out there. My eyes are closed against the sun, but I can feel him looking at me.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “About your dad.”
“It’s fine,” I say.
“It’s not fine,” Dan says. “I mean, your dad being dead can’t be fine.” He turns onto his stomach and rests his chin on his hands.
I turn my head and find his eyes right there. “It’s a long story,” I say. It’s not really even that long. It’s a sentence. But it’s something I’ve never said to anyone besides Clem. Not even to my mom. Sometimes the simplest facts are the most painful ones. They’re the ones that cut to the essence of who we are.
His eyes are intensely focused, and this is the difference between Dan and his brothers. They let things roll right over them, and Dan doesn’t miss a thing. It’s almost like he could pull that sentence right out of me.
I hold his gaze for a few beats before I actually feel myself weakening. There’s power in his quiet; it makes room for something. But I’ve said way too much on this topic already, so I say, right into his eyes, “You totally listen to folk music on a gramophone.”
He laughs, and I feel better. “Yes, obviously.”
“It must be so weird to have all those brothers who look so much like you.”
“I even have an identical twin,” he says. He smooths the sand between us with his hand.
“Well, yes. Even weirder.”
He doesn’t say anything more and I want him to. So I go on. “Do you like that, coming home to people so much like you?”
He looks at me, and there’s something in his eyes; it’s a vulnerable something. “Sometimes when I’m here with all of them, I worry I’ll get swallowed up. Like I’ll forget who I am.”
The white noise of the ocean surrounds us, and it’s an active sort of quiet. It reminds me of the quiet in an airplane, that loud hum that shifts your brain waves.
“I have no idea who I am,” I say. It comes out more solemn than I intended, as if it was something that should be said in a church. I don’t know where this thought came from, but I do know this is something I’ve never said out loud. I grew up pretending—for the camera and even for my mom. I’ve never stopped.
“What does that mean?”
I turn onto my side to face him, propping my head up on a hand. “I grew up in a costume and reading from a script. That’s not a metaphor, as you know. And every once in a while I sort of saw something underneath all of that, and I thought that might be who I was.” I scrunch up my face. I don’t know why I’m telling him this.
“And you liked it?”
“I did, I think.” For a second, I thought I was beautiful and important. “But then a bunch of stuff happened and I decided maybe chasing that girl down wasn’t worth it. It seemed easier to just come up with a better costume and show up as the kind of person the world liked.”
He doesn’t even blink. “I hope we read the same script, Jane. It’s all about being brave enough to be your full broken self. You need True Story more than anyone.” He turns back to the sun. I feel the truth of those words in my heart, though I don’t have an adequate reply.
We listen to the waves for a while, and I try to get comfortable with the silence. I just overshared and there’s something seeping out of me now that I’ve said that thing to Dan. I know it’s the script that has these old feelings brushing up against the surface. I look at him with his eyes closed and the hint of a smile still on his lips, and I’m glad I’m not currently working on Star Crossed. I’m glad there’s a chance that True Story might be my first movie. The quiet complexity of it is like Dan himself, authentic and weirdly under my skin.
“Aidan, can you come help us?” There’s a twelve-year- old boy casting a shadow over Dan.
“I’m his brother Danny,” Dan says.
“Wow, weird,” the kid says. “I’m Tucker. My parents know him.”
“What do you want help with?” I ask.
“We’re digging a pit for a big tug-of-war, losers get wet. But my friends aren’t here yet and I just have a bunch of little kids helping and it’s taking forever.” He holds up his shovel.
“Sure,” Dan says and gets up. From where I’m still lying, I am now looking up the length of his legs; they’re legs you’d see at the Olympics or on a drawing of the human muscular system at the doctor’s office. I need to stop looking at his legs, so I get up too.
I follow Dan and Tucker over to the hole in progress. Dan jumps in and holds out a hand for me. I was going to jump in too, but I take his hand anyway. And there’s that feeling again; I am definitely a monkey starved for touch. The hole is filled with eight-year-old kids and too-big shovels, and I love the squishy feel of the wet sand under my feet. I pick up a shovel and start digging. This hole feels like another world with no wind and a distant threat of waves crashing. Each time I toss a shovel full of heavy, wet sand out of the hole, I see the waves coming closer. The first one to hit trickles cool water up to our shins, and everyone screams. It’s exciting, digging deeper and deeper and knowing what’s coming.
“We’re going to get soaked,” Dan says, looking at my legs.
“We’ll be fine, get back to work,” I say just as the big wave comes and crashes over our heads. The hole is deep enough now that the water settles at Dan’s shoulders. The surprise of the ice-cold water has me disoriented, but not as much as the feel of his arm around my waist.
“Okay?” he asks. He wipes water from his eyes with his free hand, and his hair is briefly neat, slicked back against his head. The rectangular shape of his eyes seems exaggerated, and I have the thought that I would cast him as a vampire. The kind that wouldn’t kill you but might break the bed.
“I’m soaked,” I say, still close. He picks a strand of seaweed out of my hair and lets go of me.
The kids scramble out of the hole, and Tucker says, “You two against us.” Which is how it came to be that I am soaking wet on one side of a giant hole with the Atlantic Ocean to my left, pressed in close to Dan Finnegan behind me, pulling at a thick rope with all my might against a bunch of little kids. The newness of this fills every part of me—as the screams and laughter fill my ears, I realize I did not play like this as a kid. And as the back of my thighs rub up against the front of Dan’s, I realize the lemony hand on my tingly lips was just a warm-up. Dan’s head is right over my shoulder, and his arms are around mine as we pull. I can feel the strain in my shoulders, but not as intensely as I feel the brush of his stubble on my cheek. “Ready?” he says.
“Yes,” I say because that’s the only word my body knows right now.
He gives a giant tug, and we fall backward into the sand. All the little kids land in the hole. We’re side by side on our backs, recently wet and now covered in sand.
“We won,” he says, breathless.
“Feels good,” I say. We look at the sky for a bit, catching our breath, the hot sand warming our backs. “I don’t know how I’ll ever get all this sand off.”
Dan gets up and leads me into the ocean. “This is the only way,” he says.
He dives under a wave and then peels off his T-shirt. He does it in a functional way and dunks it again and again in the ocean to get the sand off. But I see it in slow motion, like he’s a vampire who’s also a firefighter, and he’s just left the burning building.
He mistakes my stunned expression for confusion about the de-sanding process. “Come on,” he says. “It’s like laundry.”
I pull off my T-shirt and shorts and dunk them in the water. I empty my pockets of sand. I honestly cannot believe I’m wearing this bathing suit.
Dan dives under another wave, shakes out his hair, and comes toward me with that muscled chest and ridiculous stomach. My hands want to poke him to see if he’s real. “I’ll lay this all out to dry,” he says and takes my clothes. “Are you staying in?”
I need to gather my thoughts and monkey hormones, so I say, “For a minute.”
I dive under a wave. I imagine there’s a sound that goes along with it, a whoosh as I’m washed clean by the salt water. I dive under the next wave and the next, feeling the water cool my shoulders. I look out at the horizon, and I realize I have my back to Hollywood. If I had a giant’s legs, I could take big steps over to England and start new there. Maybe I’d sing in a pub and pour pints during the day, greeting the regulars and not caring what my future looked like. If I can’t get this movie made, pints are always going to need to be poured —I think this in Cormack’s voice.
The air is starting to feel cold, so I head back to our towels. Dan has placed two of Tucker’s big shovels upright in the sand to hold our drying clothes. He’s leaning back on his elbows and he’s watching me. I train my eyes on the sand and try not to envision what I look like in this bathing suit.
“I wasn’t checking you out,” he says when I’m lying face down on my towel.
“Oh yeah? Was there a very important hawk behind me?”
He laughs. “Are you funny? I’m starting to think you are.”
“Try not to be,” I say. My head is resting on my hands and I’m turned away from him.
“You don’t try that hard,” he says.
I turn my head toward him, and he’s rolled onto his stomach, chin on folded hands, a clump of hair resting like a single parenthesis over his forehead. We are very close, and I can see each of his black eyelashes, a dusting of white sand on the ridge of his left cheekbone. I want to wipe it away with my thumb. I have the sense that we are in a small space now, that the sound of the waves and the kids has been muted. He’s looking at me like I’m something he’s unsure of. His eyes run along my hairline, my jaw. They land on my eyes. My body feels hot and loose like lava. Anyone lying this close to shirtless Dan would feel this way, but it’s neither convenient nor appropriate for me at this particular time. One thing that’s abundantly clear as I scan the slope of his shoulder and the way it flows into the ridges of his back: Dan needs to put his shirt back on.
“Men don’t really like funny women, like to date,” I say.
“Not true.”
“It’s absolutely true. Name a comedian you want to sleep with.”
“I’d have to think about it.”
I have successfully broken the tension. You’re welcome.
“Don’t bother,” I say. “It’s a thing. If you want to be the leading lady, you need to be capable, thoughtful, a little vulnerable. The funny one is the sidekick. She goes stag to the dance.”
“You’ve given this a lot of thought.”
“Well, I’m Janey Jakes. So I’m kind of an expert.” I turn onto my back and let the sun warm my face.
“Janey Jakes,” he says after a while. “You were funny. I watched a few episodes on YouTube last night.”
“No, you didn’t. Please don’t do that.” My stomach drops at the thought of him watching that version of me. Of course I’d grow up to wear this bathing suit.
“It’s not every day you meet a girl and then get to stalk her all the way back to twelve.”
I turn my head toward him. “How do I erase the internet?”
He moves so that we are a bit closer. “Make the face, like oof,” he says, so I do and he laughs. The light hits his eyes and the blue deepens. “Do you really play the keyboards? I zoomed in and it looked like you did.”
“I do.”
“Sing?”
“Yes.”
I have his absolute full attention. His eyes hold me in place. “And what about Will Powers? Were he and Hailey really a couple? I mean, it felt like they were.”
“You know the show ended seventeen years ago, right?” I say. “I mean, this is gossip about kids from a lifetime ago.”
“You are so mean if you don’t tell me. Connor was Aid- an’s and my excuse to watch it. We loved it. Connor was sworn to secrecy because we were in high school and that was clearly embarrassing.” The sky lowers again and the sound of the waves goes fuzzy. I don’t know why this feels intimate, lying here talking about an old TV show, but his eyes have me trapped.
“You’re not that pretentious,” I say, and I don’t blink. “But I love my gramophone.”
I smile at his mouth, turned up just at the corner. I smooth the white sand between us. “You’re just kind of honest.” It must be Dan’s honesty that’s making me put so much of myself out there. He’s like a human invitation. I don’t know why I’ve said this, so I look away and answer his question. “Hailey and Will were never really a couple, but Will and Dougie were both madly in love with her. I was the sidekick.” He’s watching my hand as it runs over the sand, and I watch him watch.
“And you never had a boyfriend of your own?”
The truth is no, of course I didn’t have a boyfriend. Except for the twenty-four hours I convinced myself Jack Quinlan was my soulmate. “With a mouthful of braces and nachos all over my pants? No.”
“Well, you’re all grown up now, Janey Jakes, and you’re killing it.”
“How so?”
“Connor thinks you’re hot, and you came this close to going on a date with me.” I kick a little sand onto his towel as he smiles, rolls onto his back, and closes his eyes.