Chapter 3
Nate had been trying to talk all three May sisters into letting him teach them to surf for as long as they all had been coming to Coronado, but this was the first time any of them had agreed to go with him.
It wasn’t that Emily wanted to learn to surf, really.
It was more that Nate had looked so forlorn as he’d sat out on Grandma Vera’s porch with the three of them last night, as he’d told them the devastating news about his mom.
Emily didn’t know much about cancer. But she knew stage four was really bad.
And she knew that Nate was likely about to become what she and Nora and Julia had been almost their whole lives: motherless.
Nate didn’t have any siblings, his father had always been out of the picture, and as far as she knew, Nate didn’t have a grandmother like Vera either.
Nate would become both motherless and all alone.
Nora had sat on the porch swing, silently crying. Julia had tried to put her hand on Nate’s shoulder to comfort him, but he’d brushed her off. And Emily had found herself suddenly standing up and saying the only thing that came into her head, which was, strangely: “Teach me to surf this week.”
Julia had raised her eyebrows. Nora had paused crying for a moment to ask Emily if she was joking, and Nate had only said, “Okay, meet me on the beach at six a.m. tomorrow.”
Emily slipped out of the house now and shivered as she stepped into the gray extremely early morning.
Growing up, she had always been fascinated with the fine line between life and death.
She sometimes contemplated things such as whether or not van Gogh had shot himself in a wheat field or why Sylvia Plath put her head inside that oven.
She had convinced herself that somehow death could be understood this way, by studying artists who had made a choice.
Unlike what had happened to her mother, who’d died unexpectedly and in the least poetic way possible.
And unlike what was happening to Nate’s mother now.
But no matter how many poems she read or how many tragedies she explored, she could never quite understand the unfairness of a mother dying too young. And she knew she had no real answers for Nate, no way to comfort him at all, other than spending time with him while he did something he loved.
Still, as she was walking down the beach that morning, she found herself wishing she’d just given Nate her copy of The Bell Jar rather than volunteering for this ridiculous endeavor. Surfing?! What the hell had she gotten herself into?
“Hey, Em.” Nate was standing by the edge of the water, and he paused from pulling on his wet suit to wave to her.
“This is so cool that you’re finally going surfing with me.
I’m so pumped. Are you pumped?” He looked and sounded more like himself this morning than he had last night, when he’d been fighting back tears on Grandma Vera’s porch.
Emily nodded and bit her lip. If she opened her mouth, she would a hundred percent be backing out.
And Nate would be back to wallowing alone in the ocean over the shitty hand he’d just been dealt.
Nate wasn’t quite her brother, but he wasn’t quite not her brother either.
She felt this strange, sudden urge to make sure he was okay.
So she swallowed back her doubts and echoed his word: “Pumped.”
Nate finished zipping himself into his wet suit, then picked up another one from where it was resting on top of his board and handed it to her.
She eyed it skeptically. It looked small, like something tiny Nora would fit into. Emily’s dad referred to her as big-boned, which truly wasn’t a euphemism. She wasn’t overweight, just not at all petite like both her sisters. “I don’t know if that will fit me,” she said.
“Sure it will. You just kind of have to squeeze yourself into it.”
Well, this sounded like a delightful activity. “Great,” Emily said, as she forced one leg through the tight opening, jumping to try to get it up her body. Though she knew they were still asleep, she irrationally felt Nora and Julia watching from the porch and laughing at her right now.
She finally squeezed herself all the way into the wet suit, Nate zipped her up, and then she could barely breathe. “Is it supposed to feel this tight?” she asked.
“Come on.” Nate ignored her question and gestured for her to follow him into the surf.
The water felt like ice as it shocked the soles of her feet, but then the suit numbed it as she waded in.
She walked in a little farther, but she couldn’t keep up with Nate.
The wet suit made it hard to walk; it was more like moving through mud than water.
Waist-deep, she felt like she was a thousand pounds, trudging through quicksand. “Nate!” she screamed. “I can’t do this!”
He registered what she said and turned to wade back toward her.
“Do you know what I like about surfing?” he said when he reached her. “I have to focus only on my body, one moment at a time. Staying upright on the board. Keeping my center of gravity. There’s nothing else. There can’t be anything else.”
She nodded. But the wet suit felt so constricting, her body felt so heavy, all she wanted to do was get out, of the water, of the wet suit.
Get out of this ridiculous idea that she was somehow helping Nate by being here.
The truth was, his mom was still going to die, he was still going to be devastated, whether she learned to surf or not.
“I know the Trouble Trio only gets one week a year by the water, but I was so happy when one of you wanted to finally learn why I love it so much.” He grinned and pushed his surfboard gently toward her. “We can start slow, Em,” he said. “Right here, where it’s shallow and you’re comfortable.”
Emily wasn’t in the least bit comfortable, but still she thought, I should give him this. I should let him have this.
“Okay,” she finally said. “Show me how to get up on this thing.”
An hour later, Emily was sore and feeling irritable when she trudged back up the beach, having finally managed to squeeze herself back out of the wet suit.
She found Grandma Vera sitting out on the porch swing, still in her nightgown, her hair in curlers, sipping from her red Coronado Playhouse coffee mug.
“Looks like you had an adventure, ma chérie.” Grandma Vera was newly prone to slipping into French, as she was rehearsing to audition for a role at the playhouse next month.
Nora had giggled about it last night during s’mores, as chocolate had become chocolat.
But now Emily barely noticed as she walked up the porch steps and plopped down next to Grandma Vera on the swing, exhausted.
Trying to stand up on that surfboard was the most physically demanding thing she’d ever done, and she was pretty sure her shins would be black and blue for the entire summer after all the times she fell and smacked them.
And then when Nate had said Should we try again tomorrow?
before he’d paddled back out into the water, she hadn’t had it in her to tell him no.
“I let Nate try and teach me to surf. I was very bad at it,” Emily said.
Grandma Vera laughed, and she reached up and tousled Emily’s damp, salty ponytail. “Well, I never took you for a surfer. A tortured artist, yes. But you’re not really the hang-ten type.”
“I was trying to cheer him up. His mom might die,” Emily said softly.
Grandma Vera nodded. “It doesn’t sound good.”
“I was only three when Mom died,” Emily said. “I can barely remember her. But… her death is still everywhere. All around me. All the time. I just feel… I feel… so bad for him.”
Grandma Vera leaned over and kissed the top of her head. “You’re a good egg, Emily May. You hide behind that hard exterior shell, but underneath it, you’re the sweetest, kindest young woman. You just have to remember to try surfing more often.”
Emily grimaced. “Ugh, no. Never again.”
“Metaphorically speaking, of course,” Grandma Vera chuckled. “You have a beautiful heart. Keep being bold and meeting others where they are, like you did this morning.”
Beautiful heart her ass. She was stupid, that’s what she was. Julia and Nora weren’t out there this morning. They were both still soundly and comfortably asleep. And they would both probably figure out normal ways to console Nate this week.
Emily tried to stand and then she groaned as every single muscle in her body ached. “I’m so sore. I’m going to go take a long soak in a hot bath.”
Grandma Vera reached for her hand, squeezed it, and then she smiled. “I have some pain patches that might help too. Grab some on your way in, why don’t you, honey?” She paused for a moment, gave Emily a long, hard look. Then she said, “Top-left drawer of the dining room armoire.”
Emily limped inside the house to the dining room.
Julia had played tennis all through high school and Nora, who had done dance since she was little, would be auditioning for the ninth-grade pom line when they returned to Chicago next week.
But Emily had always been the unathletic sister.
She’d seen her sisters with pain patches from time to time, but the concept of them, and any kind of athletically oriented pain in general, were foreign to her.
And so when she opened the top-left armoire drawer and saw a stack of what looked like letters, she thought it was just weird packaging, at first. But then she picked the top letter up. She saw the recent postmark. The return address. Santa Monica?
“Oops. I meant bottom left!” Grandma Vera’s voice floated in from the distance, but Emily barely registered what it was saying.
Her hands shook, and she threw the letter back into the drawer, shutting it quickly.
She took a step back, suddenly feeling like she was back in the water, in the tight wet suit, and the world was heavy and impossible. Mud.