Chapter Sixteen
“Hey,” he says when I answer the door. His hand is suspended, fist closed. “I’m actually not sure I’ve ever knocked before.”
I’m wearing a blue-and-gray-striped knit sweater over a white sundress that I realized too late looks like a nightgown. It’s warm out, but the ocean breeze is starting to cool everything down.
“Come in,” I say. “I don’t think the house looks that much different.”
It’s true—neither Marcella nor Sylvia has done much redecorating in the past decade.
Stone steps inside gingerly, like he’s entering a dimension where the floor is just a little bit breakable. “Place looks great,” he says.
“Stone, honey.” Marcella comes into the entryway and gives him a hug. He hands her over the wine.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” my mother says to him, then to me: “Your dad’s out back. Go ahead and I’ll open this.”
She taps the wine with her index finger.
Stone follows me through the kitchen. Sylvia is making fish in parchment. Something white—maybe cod or branzino—with grape tomatoes, olive oil, lemon slices, and olives.
Stone comes up behind her and grabs her gently around the waist. She smiles into him.
“Hello there,” Sylvia says. “Still single?”
“Why, you know anyone?”
Sylvia looks him up and down. “Me.”
Stone laughs. His laugh was always loud, open, unapologetic. He laughs like someone who has never worked in an office before. “You’re too good for me, and you know it.”
Sylvia pins the parchment with a toothpick. “I’d settle.”
I see Dad through the glass, and he waves us outside. Stone holds the slider open for me.
There’s a bottle of red open on the railing and two small water glasses. I gesture to Stone, he nods, and I pour.
Dad offers Stone his hand from the chair, shakes it. “How you been?”
“Not bad,” Stone says. “Happy to be back in the water.”
“I hear you’re here under hard circumstances.” He gestures with his head in the direction of Stone’s home. “I’m sorry. We’re thinking about Bonnie over here.”
Stone nods, sips. “Yeah, thank you.”
The truth is, I’m not sure Dad ever really liked Stone. Part of it I think was that Stone was rich and Dad was not. Or Stone was a better surfer. Or he didn’t like the way Jeff treated the beach like company stock. But part of it was that Stone always struck my dad as living too easily.
“You want a life where you can feel the road underneath you,” Dad used to tell me. “You want a life with some traction.”
I wonder, now, watching the two of them together, if Stone ever knew. We didn’t talk about it—we were too young then. I’d have told him flippantly, a joke—You know my dad thinks you’re spoiled—or not at all. I chose not at all.
Marcella comes out with the white wine. “Oh, you started.” She sets the bottle down on the coffee table. It clinks against the glass.
I feel a pang of irritation—she’s the one who told us to come out.
“Thanks so much for having me,” Stone says. “It’s really nice to see you guys. It’s nice to be back here.”
I consider our graying deck, the splintered wood on the banister. Still the best view on Broad Beach.
Stone looks my mom in the eye. I am reminded of his eye contact, the way he used to look at me, hold my gaze.
I was fifteen when Stone and I first kissed, sixteen when we had sex for the first time.
In so many ways Stone was not only my first love but also my orientation to men in general.
He was the placeholder. For years afterward, whenever I’d meet a new man I’d compare him to Stone.
How he stood, how he talked, how he kissed.
I could see if the guy was right for me by judging how closely he aligned with Stone.
Leo was the first man I met whose metric had nothing to do with Stone. I couldn’t have measured them on the same scale—it would have been like weighing air and fire.
“I think we’re about ready to eat,” Marcella says.
Stone rubs his hands together in a way that makes it seem like he hasn’t had a home-cooked meal in quite some time. “Starving,” he says. “I’ve missed Sylvia’s cooking.”
We file inside. Mom has set the table, and Sylvia is putting down the salad. Dark leaves of spinach curled underneath piles of shaved Parmesan.
“White fish—Mediterranean style—salad, and some rice,” Sylvia says. She takes a seat, starts helping herself. “Everyone eat.”
Stone holds my chair out for me, and I sit. He follows down next to me.
“I hear great things about the Ranch,” Dad says. “Still haven’t been to check it out, though. Damn it’s pricey.”
“I’m happy to hook you up,” Stone says. “Any time.”
“I do OK on the real ocean.”
Stone just smiles. “Of course,” he says.
Stone was always a humble person, but he also knew the way he appeared to other people. He was aware that every girl at Malibu High wanted him, and he’d remind me of it, sometimes, in ways he thought were subtle but weren’t.
But now I see the ways he has softened. His privilege isn’t something he carries around proudly anymore but something he wears. Like a leather jacket that has become supple with age.
“Well, I’d love to check it out,” Marcella says. “Maybe I’d actually get in the water if it wasn’t the real ocean. Do you temperature control?”
Stone laughs. “Just say the word and I will make it happen.”
I serve myself some fish. It’s flaky, salty, perfect. The tomatoes are sweet, the olives soft and juicy.
“This is delicious,” Stone says. “Thank you.”
Sylvia nods. “Happy to have you at the table,” she says.
I know Sylvia always liked Stone, but she loves Leo, too. If I asked Sylvia who she enjoyed more, she’d probably say something like: Why choose? Can’t I have them both?
Stone pours more wine for me. I drink much less than I used to, partially because my hangovers got exponentially worse on the other side of thirty-five and partially because for the past three years I have been maybe-pregnant.
People are always saying that you can’t be just “a little bit” pregnant, but those people have never done repetitive fertility treatment. I’m a little bit pregnant all the time.
But not today.
I take a long sip and feel my stomach get liquid and warm.
Marcella lowers her voice. “It was good to see Bonnie last week,” she says. “She looked well.”
I think about the woman we saw—curled up on the couch, barely bigger than the blanket covering her. A hot rod of anger pinches my stomach. No, actually, she does not look well.
Stone shakes his head. “She doesn’t,” he says. “But thanks for saying.”
My mom opens her mouth and then closes it again.
“Will you hand me the bread?” Sylvia says.
Stone obliges at the same time my dad reaches for the water pitcher. Their hands collide, and the water pitcher spills, pouring all over dad, before falling to the ground and shattering.
Immediately, Marcella springs into action. “Honey,” she says. “Hang on. Hold on. Don’t stand up!”
I see her run into the kitchen. She grabs one of the dish towels that are flung over the lip of the sink and runs back. She starts with his pants, flicking off dollops of water.
“Marcie, honey, I’m fine. I’m fine.”
“Hold still. Here. There could be glass.”
Dad sits there, his hands at his sides, as my mother gets on her hands and knees and begins to pick up the shards from the floor.
“Marcella, please, let me help.” Stone is out of his chair and crouching down next to her.
“Please just get a trash bag,” she tells him.
Stone looks to me and I stand, too, and we go into the kitchen.
“Under the sink,” I say.
He ducks and recovers one. We look back at the table. Sylvia, who has never once put down her fork, is eating happily. My parents are still caught in their hysteria dance. My mom bends on the floor, collecting glass shards in the palm of her hand. She looks up when Stone hands her the bag.
“Thanks.”
Stone returns to me. “When will she learn it’s just water?” he says.
I realize I’m not embarrassed, not even a little. Because Stone knows. He knows my parents, he knows their dance, the way in which they orbit each other. Once, in the eleventh grade, my mother missed volleyball playoffs because she was taking my dad to a dentist appointment.
I remember thinking there was nothing strange with this until Stone said it: “Why?”
Because that’s who my parents are; they do everything together.
Because that’s who my mom is, terrified.
And it was the worst in those early years—right after the accident, right when Stone and I got together.
He was there for the crux of it, and I was too young and shell-shocked myself to protect him from anything.
I didn’t shield him, and so he saw it all.
He saw the mess and the terror and the precarious way we were a family, defined by our reactions to one another.
My mother’s fear of losing my father, my father’s fear of upsetting her.
Tonight, standing with Stone in the kitchen, watching my mother pick up glass like it’s radioactive, like it could kill my father, like maybe, actually, it is—feels like a kind of relief I didn’t know I needed. Because he sees it, too. I’m not alone in it; he’s standing right here, witnessing.
I protect Leo, I think. And I hide it, too—my own fear, my mother’s—in ways I never thought to when I was with Stone. Here he is, seeing it all—and none of it is a surprise to him. None of it is making him turn away.
“Watch your thumb!” Marcella says.
I feel Stone’s hand on my hip. It’s gentle, brief, merely a tap. I look to him and he swipes Sylvia’s cooking wine off the counter.
“Let’s go,” he says, cocking his head toward the kitchen door.
It’s not locked, still open from our time outside, and it swings easily and without noise. In high school when we didn’t want to wake anyone, we’d sneak out through it. It was as good to us then as it is now.
Outside, the night is cold. Stone grabs a hoodie off the outdoor chair where it’s been siting since I left it last night—and hands it to me. When you live at the beach there is almost always a stray sweatshirt outside. This one is surprisingly dry.