Chapter Eighteen
One week turns into two and then three, and by the time the rent check comes from West Hollywood, it’s been almost a month since I’ve been at the beach. A full four weeks of waking up at the ocean. Of dinners with my family. Of Stone and I falling back in a surf rhythm.
Most mornings we meet down on the sand before the sun is up. If one of us doesn’t show, the other will paddle out, and sometimes we find each other on the water.
I’m not back where I used to be, and I wouldn’t say surfing is like riding a bike, not exactly, but there’s a particular memory even if it isn’t necessarily a muscle one.
It’s a mental memory, maybe even an energetic memory.
The more I’m out on the water the more I begin to understand it, to anticipate it, to fall in line with it.
It feels so good to be back in its good graces.
Respect her and she’ll reward you, I remember my dad saying about the ocean. It’s true.
Leo is busy in New York, and phone time is hard to come by.
It’s been over a week since I’ve heard his voice, and I miss it, I miss him.
I knew when I married him he wasn’t great with his cell, but living apart right now I feel his shortcoming in this area much more acutely.
I try him when I wake up, but he’s already setting up for the day, and by the end of their shoot day I know he’s absolutely beat.
If he calls and I miss him, he’s usually asleep by the time I try him back.
This morning I call him at five, hoping to get a quick pickup, but instead I get his voicemail. I hang up, resigned, and then go out on dawn patrol. Stone isn’t on the sand, and I paddle out alone, until I reach Kai, who is holding down the lineup without Bert.
The conditions aren’t great—a lot of chop from crosswinds. And the waves aren’t breaking cleanly. Kai gives up after a few sets. I follow suit.
I drag my board onto the sand and sit down next to it. I drape my forearms on my knees and look out over the water. The sun has risen, but the day is still new, quiet and sleepy.
When I think about having a child I often think about mornings here.
It started far before I had gotten back in the water, before this month.
For the past few years, really, I’d think about putting the baby on the board and pushing her into the spray.
I’d think about dunking her head under and watching her eyes blink open, her mouth peel into a curl of salted smile.
I’d think about watching her fall in love with the water, just like I did.
It was as if I knew she would return me here, to this place I had long since left.
Leo and I were married here, right on the deck at sunset.
It was beautiful and casual. I wore a white silk slip dress, and we decorated the house with wildflowers and roses from the garden.
I wore a wreath of gardenias in my hair that yellowed by the time we said “I do” but smelled like heaven all night.
The beach was also the place we got engaged.
Leo had planned a dinner for us in Hollywood, at a hotel called the Cara that has a beautiful outdoor restaurant situated around a pool.
And then I got food poisoning. We had eaten some ill-advised supermarket sushi for lunch at the beach.
Leo was fine, but I was, mysteriously, not.
I’ve always had a strong stomach and can count on one hand how many times I’ve been sick—including frat parties in college. This time was poison.
After waves and waves of nausea—and hours of my life—it was finally over, and so was the day. I was lying on the bathroom floor when Leo brought me in another round of some Gatorade ice chips.
“I’m sorry about dinner,” I said. Even the word dinner made my stomach turn, but I knew what he was going to do—trying to do—and I felt bad about ruining his plan. I didn’t have the wherewithal to try to hide that from him.
“What could be more romantic than cold, hard ceramic tile?” he said.
I picked up my head. He knelt down on both knees. He tucked some hair behind my ear.
“What do you think?” he asked. “Should I do it?”
Up until that point I wasn’t sure that he was aware that I knew, and I felt a rush of adrenaline that made me sit straight up. This is really happening.
“It would be a very good story,” I said.
He smiled. He took my hand.
“Lauren Sylvester Novak.”
“That’s not my middle name.”
“Shh,” he said. “Let me have this one.”
I squeezed his hand. We looked at each other. I felt all at once perfectly still. Like the volume had just been turned down on the whole rest of the world.
“I love you. I have loved you since you took me into your world and made me feel like I was—am—worthy of being here. I’ve never had this. The way you care about me. There’s nothing I won’t do for you.”
I started to cry. He already was.
“Will you marry me?”
I never even got the yes out. I never answered him. We were just hugging and kissing, falling into each other in a mix of devotion and dehydration.
Leo is a simple man. He likes good food and easy music and a stretch of uninterrupted time to putter around the house. He gave me a ruby-and-diamond band that was a little bit too big and took us forever to get resized. I loved it.
Afterward we went downstairs and told my parents.
“I thought you were going to do it at dinner?” my mother said.
“Things don’t always go according to plan,” Leo said, and the ease with which he said it, the way he embodied it, made me love him even more.
“Welcome to the family,” my dad said. “I’ve been waiting a long time to get a little solidarity.”
Sylvia simply took us both in her arms. “Couldn’t be happier,” she said. “Now, Leo, I have a sink that is leaking and no one around here is handy.”
Leo looped his arm through Sylvia’s and followed her into the kitchen. My mother went to chill some prosecco.
“So there we go,” Dad said. He stood next to me as we watched Leo crouch down under the sink, trade Sylvia a screwdriver for a wrench.
“Yeah,” I said. “There we go.”
Marcella closed the refrigerator. “Do you need some paper towels?”
I felt all at once a very particular sadness that I couldn’t quite identify until sometime later. For Leo my parents were in their third act. They were my parents. They were aging. They forgot things, were weaker in their bodies, didn’t always understand the rhythm of modern life.
They weren’t the nimble, athletic people I had known as a child.
Dave didn’t run the beach anymore; Marcella didn’t plan spontaneous weekends away.
They were set in their life, dug in, and I felt a pang of grief that Leo wouldn’t share my memories.
That in twenty years I wouldn’t be able to roll over, look into his eyes, and say “Remember when Dad…”
There is a particular loneliness to being an only child. I never felt it as acutely as I did the day I decided to marry.
Leo wasn’t close with his family, and I knew for him that there was no inherent or assumed responsibility.
He had left home quite young, so had his siblings, and had been on his own from that point onward.
He was used to being a one-man show, and I wondered how he would deal with the fact that I wasn’t.
Now, I put my board away and hop in the shower.
I’m supposed to go with Marcella to see Bonnie today, but Stone asked us to check in first on how she is.
I’ve seen her only once in the month since my first visit, and it’s like she’s being erased before my eyes.
Stone says he thinks the end is near, but she keeps holding on.
I know how much Marcella wants to go today. I told Stone we’d call after eight.
I turn the water to a cold blast at the end and then step out, and as I’m toweling off I hear some commotion downstairs. I slip my robe around me and walk down to find Dad fumbling on the deck with his board. He’s trying to flip it over, but he’s having a hard time lifting it.
I watch him for a moment, caught between the desire to rush out and help him and the need to observe him to see what, exactly, age is doing to him.
And as I watch him I have a feeling of perversion, something close to disgust, that creeps into the corners.
Because he’s Dave Novak, lifelong surfer, bulldog of a dad. And right now, he can’t lift his board.
I am used to worrying about him, but I have very little practice with the worry being founded. It was all theoretical, wasn’t it? A hidden heart condition, a deadly crash—neither of which we could actually see. But now, here, his limitations are on display.
He spots me before I make myself known. I see it dawn on him, this witnessing, and then he sighs, and lifts his hand in a wave. I open the door and go outside.
“How long?” I ask him.
He exhales. “Don’t be so dramatic. Sometimes the old girl is heavier than she used to be.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“What is there to say? I’m getting older.”
“Does Mom know?”
“That I’m seventy-three? Yes, I think she does.”
Dad smiles a big, goofy grin, and I feel my arms begin to slacken where they’re crossed. It’s funny how the first response to fear is often anger.
“Come on,” he says, “sit down with me.”
Dad gestures to the edge of the deck. I sit. So does he.
“I’ve started getting a little angina,” he says. Casually, so casually. Like he’s remarking on the surf conditions.
I turn to look at him but say nothing.
“Nothing significant. Just a little short of breath lately. I knew it would happen sooner or later.”
“How long has it been going on?”
“Oh, who knows. You get older, things present. Nothing is a big deal.”
“What does the doctor say?”
Dad exhales. “For a man my age, I’m doing great. Doctor says I could live another twenty years.”
Twenty years. It’s a long time. It isn’t enough.
“One of the bypasses closed,” he says quietly, almost so I can’t hear him. “But they don’t want to do anything about it. Not yet.”
I feel my stomach descend down into my feet. “Did you tell Mom?”