Chapter Sixteen #2
I gesture to my sweater, already on. “You take it,” I say.
He loops his arms through the sleeves—it’s small on him, but not by much.
“Come on,” he says. He cuffs his pants at the ankle, and we take the steps down to the ocean. The sand is wet and dense, and there isn’t much beach. The tide is high, just a sliver remains to walk down.
I know before he holds out his hand where we’re going to go.
The Greek. A dilapidated, crumbling, splinter-filled house that has never been sold or occupied.
At least not in the twenty years since we first went there.
It’s about half a football field down the beach, sandwiched between a blue-and-white beach house owned by the founders of that popular diaper company and the rocks.
Everyone on Broad Beach knew that’s where kids went to party. Parents liked it because at least we were close by and accessible. If it was past midnight, they knew where to find us. But for us—we thought we were pulling off something major.
The house was already named long before Stone and I ever entered high school. The Greek, after a frat house, a meeting place, somewhere with sticky, beer-stained floors and broken glass windows. It had all of those things.
There were old, wooden steps up to the back deck that didn’t quite reach the shore. Even when we were kids we’d have to leap up onto the first one and climb from there. It made the whole thing feel even more special, isolated—you had to work to get there.
“Wow,” I say when we reach it. “It looks even worse, if that’s possible.”
Stone laughs lightly beside me.
“You think teenagers still come here?”
“Not anymore,” he says. “They just party in their houses now. Parents are cooler. Or they care less than they used to.”
I remember Bonnie offering us wine with dinner. If you’re going to drink I’d rather you do it here.
“Yours didn’t,” I say.
I can’t see Stone’s face as he hops up onto the first step and offers me his hand. “Watch the wood,” he says. He points to where it’s splintered.
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” I push off the sand, and then grip his hand to steady myself.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” I say truthfully. “I don’t know how to talk about Bonnie.”
We climb the remaining stairs, and then we’re on the deck. It’s black and green with mold and white with age. The spots sing out, iridescent in the dark night.
“We don’t have to,” Stone says. “Seriously, I’d rather not tonight. There’s plenty else to say.”
I look through the broken glass windows inside. There’s no furniture—there never was. Although at one point a kid brought an old abandoned mattress over. That’s long since decomposed.
Moss grows over the countertops and the floorboards.
“We’re probably better off outside,” I say. “I care more about asbestos than I used to.”
“I really can’t say the same.”
Stone holds my gaze for a moment. It’s dark out here, but the moon is near full, and its reflection off the water offers just enough light to see everything I need to.
I take a seat at the edge of the deck and dangle my feet off the side. Stone folds himself down beside me.
I’m thinking, now, about my twenty-third birthday.
How he’d taken me to Duke’s on the water for fish tacos and then blindfolded me in the car.
He’d driven me back to this house, but before we got there we pulled into the parking lot at the Trancas shopping center.
It’s where we had gone in high school when we needed somewhere we could be alone together.
When our busy houses were bustling and the doors to both our bedrooms had to be open.
I remember the way the leather of his back seat felt against my skin, how he lay my body over the arm rest. I remember the windows fogging to a tilt, the beads of sweat on his forehead, the way he’d drawn slow and lazy circles until I was breaking.
For years I couldn’t drive by that corner of PCH without a sting of memories.
Our parking lot. Sometimes it felt like we were still there.
I remember, now, how much I used to want.
How impossible it felt to be apart from him, even for a day.
How I’d lose whole nights to not even his body but the idea of it.
How I’d fall asleep imagining his mouth on mine.
For years after—past thirty, even, if I’m honest—whenever I couldn’t sleep I’d think of us in bed together.
I’d imagine his arms around me, and I’d drift off.
Stone elbows me lightly, interrupting the memory. “So how are you?” he says. “Really?”
I think about the question. How am I? Really? The IVF bills, the hovering of infertility, the job that has long since plateaued. But it feels cruel, somehow, to say it out loud. Although to him or to me or to Leo, I’m not sure.
“Fine,” I say. “You know.”
“I don’t,” he says. “That’s why I’m asking.”
“Life,” I say. I shrug. “It gets more complicated, doesn’t it?”
Stone appears to really consider this. “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe we make it more complicated.”
I think about Bonnie. “But look at what’s happening in your family.”
“What’s happening is very real. But real and complicated are not the same thing.” He sits up and brushes his palms against each other. “Actually, I’d argue that impending death makes everything really simple.”
It’s the first time we’ve said it: death. The reality of why he’s here. An inevitability.
“It’s the biggest thing there is,” I say.
I remember that night like a trauma. How after my mother and grandmother told me about what had happened to my father I’d gone to Stone’s. We had just gotten together, but we were fifteen. We didn’t need help figuring out how to blur the lines between friend and more. Our bodies knew for us.
“What happened?” he’d asked me. He was wearing a striped shirt and board shorts. He was always in board shorts back then. Always slightly wet from the water.
I hadn’t told him. I hadn’t known how. But I had folded to him in the way you can only do when you’re very young—when you believe other people have the power to save you, to make the world whole again.
He had wrapped his arms around me in response to the question I hadn’t answered.
And it was enough. Somehow, then, it was enough.
Stone doesn’t say anything right away, now. He just keeps looking at me.
“I don’t know,” he says, either to save himself or me. “But there are times when I think about it, and I wonder if I fucked it all up.”
I feel my heartbeat begin to drum. Thump thump thump. “What?”
“I moved, why did I move? I missed a decade with Bonnie, with the ocean.” He looks up at me, and I silently ask him not to say it. He doesn’t. Instead, he just shakes his head. “There are so many things I’d do differently.”
I think about how easy it would be, to turn back the clock. To go back to twenty-five. To tell him not to go. To demand it. Would it make a difference?
It wasn’t what I wanted then, was it?
“You’re happy,” he says. “I’m not.”
“I can’t have a baby.”
The words tumble out. Whether they’re to make him feel better or because they are the truth, I don’t know.
I’ve avoided putting our “situation” into such concise verbiage.
There is a multibillion-dollar industry around fertility that tells you to Speak It Into Existence that tells you your Words Have Power and Nothing Is Impossible.
It says Pay Us and you’ll get knocked up, and then when you don’t, it says You’re Just Too Stressed—here, relax, have some lavender.
Have you tried these herbs? That’ll be twenty thousand, please.
And don’t forget: It’s all up to you. Which really means: It’s all your fault.
On the rotted wood deck of the Greek, Stone takes my hand. We sit that way, side by side, listening to the waves of the ocean as if the water has the answers.