Chapter 8 Lindy #2
The only halfway clear sign that he was even interested was the way he kept showing up on the steps of Innisfree, wanting her to come for a walk or to the beach, wanting to talk with her about everything.
He asked her to tell him all about Central Park and the Upper West Side and the natural history museum.
(It was nearly inconceivable to Lindy that he had never been to New York; even more inconceivable was that his principal reaction to her tales of its marvels seemed to be suspicion.) He told her how his second-biggest dream, after running the four-minute mile, was to attend Brown University to study philosophy and epistemology, which he said meant “the nature of knowledge. What do we know and how do we know we know it?” He said his biggest hero was Henry David Thoreau.
“Life in the woods, the citizen’s responsibility to resist evil, all that.
” He also declared that, if he’d been of age to be drafted for Vietnam, he definitely would’ve moved to Canada.
Lindy could all but hear her mother saying the words too idealistic for his own good, but Lindy found that she admired idealism.
However, with David always caught up in pondering lofty notions, she realized that, if she ever wanted him to kiss her, she
was going to have to nudge things along.
So, one night in late June, as sunset painted the sky over at the beach—they had the place to themselves, this time—she tucked
her hair behind her ear, cocked her head, and said, “I’ve been wondering if you’re ever going to kiss me.”
He laughed and teased her. “Yeah, well, I’ve been wondering if that would be a good idea.”
“I think it might be,” she said, giving her voice an optimistic lilt.
“I guess that settles it,” he said, but he just sat there smiling softly at her, his arms looped around drawn-up knees. The
water lapped gently at the bunchy swirls of seaweed that lined the low-tide shore. The smell of old salt was in the air.
“Well?” she said, after a moment.
“Oh. Now, you think?”
She scoffed and looked away. “Never mind.” She watched a cormorant dive, the silver water ripple.
And then his hand was on her elbow, and she turned toward him, still miffed, but he was close, leaning in, smiling a little, and then his lips touched hers.
They were soft and warm in a way that felt surprising.
And it wasn’t that she’d never been kissed before, but it had never made her feel like this: at home in her own body in a way she’d never been.
As if her heart had finally settled into her own chest.
When he pulled back, he said, “It’s about time you kissed me.”
“It’s about time you kissed me,” she retorted, and then they smiled and kissed each other again.
On Summerland Cove Point, people said that to leave it was to “go back to the world.” This had always seemed true to Lindy
before, but now Summerland Cove Point was the world.
On the Fourth of July—Mr. Kauffman had finally arrived—David invited her to join his family for the community lobster bake
at the clubhouse. Plastic gingham tablecloths draped the picnic tables that filled the small room, which was noisy with a
hundred conversations. On each table stood rolls of paper towels to use as napkins. Lindy, behind David in the long line,
spotted Greta up ahead serving the corn, using tongs to place the steamed cobs on everyone’s trays as they passed. After serving
Marjorie and Thorndike Westfield with a scowl on her face, though both Marjorie and Thorndike had smiled at her in a friendly
way, Greta nodded as she served David, then, uncharacteristically, gave Lindy a wink as she dropped a piece of corn onto her
tray. (Lindy’s dad must’ve mixed her a couple of martinis earlier, back at home.) “Don’t stay out too late, sweetie,” Greta
whispered then, quietly enough that no one else would hear, but Lindy still shook her head, embarrassed, and moved quickly
on past—only to encounter her father serving the lobsters.
One thing about The Cove: You couldn’t go anywhere without your parents seeing you or at least knowing exactly what you were
doing, because, if they didn’t see you themselves, someone else would tell them where you’d been. Fortunately, her father
simply said hello to David and served him a lobster, then made a show of trying to find Lindy the biggest one. “They’re all
the same size, Dad,” she objected. His search was holding up the line, and David was waiting. Tom finally selected one and
set it on her tray—he, too, gave her a wink—and David led her over to where his family sat.
Lindy soon found herself sitting crammed between David and Kate, joking with both of them as they all fought over the elbow room needed to crack open the lobsters’ claws and tails, dipping the sweet meat into melted butter, gnawing corn off the cob.
And yet, the entire family seemed to acknowledge that Lindy was there as David’s guest, not Kate’s. To her surprise, they
even seemed happy about it. Lindy kept catching Mr. and Mrs. Kauffman shooting warm looks at her across the table.
Just as Lindy was finishing up her last bite of coleslaw, with David distracted by Josh on his other side, Kate nudged her
and said in a tone so low that no one else would hear, “I think you make him happy. That’s good.” Lindy looked at her old
friend quizzically, trying to discern why Kate would say such a thing. Most mysteriously of all, Kate had said it with an
air of bowing out, of leaving David to the better person. But Kate was already talking to her parents.
Lindy looked across at Mr. and Mrs. Kauffman then, wondering if what David had said—how they didn’t like each other very much,
and it was by design that they spent the majority of their summers apart—was true. It was hard to imagine that it could be, not just based on how happy they seemed now, surrounded by their children, but also because Lindy’s parents were just
the opposite. Tom always came up to The Cove as soon as he possibly could after turning in his grades for the semester, and
Greta always said that the only reason she liked having a week or two on her own with Lindy at the start and end of summer
was that it made reuniting with him that much sweeter. “Ewww, Mom!” Lindy would predictably say, though secretly she couldn’t
help being pleased to know that her parents’ love was solid, and even though, more secretly than that, she sometimes thought
they were so caught up in loving each other that they nearly forgot she was part of the family, too.
Later, David’s family stayed back at the beach to wait for the fireworks, while Lindy and David walked out to the end of the point, making their way across the striated rocks that jutted out into the ocean.
The sky was softening into evanescent bands of pink and orange.
Gentle waves rolled in, and a gull swooped past, screeching.
Lindy, preoccupied with trying to think how to share her thoughts with David, finally ventured, “What do you think—”
David tugged her hand, interrupting, and gestured to where they were standing. A question. She nodded, and they sat down close
together on a cool, sharp rock. He draped his arm across her shoulders. “What do I think what?” he said.
She swallowed. The sky was darkening now to vivid shades of coral and purple. She knew it was a strange and bold question
to ask, but they’d already talked about so much, and she had to know. “What do you think love looks like?”
He smiled as if he thought the question was strange indeed. “A better question might be: Does love exist? Is love a thing
we can know exists?”
She got frustrated then. Why couldn’t he ever just be a normal boy? “Oh, stop it with your epistem-whatever. Look around you.”
Lindy gestured widely to the clusters of people—families, groups of friends—gathered on the rocks under the painted sky, then
back to the row of three cottages across the tip of the point and the two columns of cottages behind that lining the road
on the flat cove side and all the way up the hill on the ocean side. “Look at this place. These families. Lucky us! We’re
part of this.”
“You are. Your family’s been here for generations. Mine’s only been coming a few summers.”
She frowned. She wanted to say, For how smart you are, you’re really a fool.
His eyes were very dark in the dusky light. She wanted to say, Can’t you see that all you have to do is decide to make all this yours?
But she couldn’t seem to make her voice work, so she just leaned in and kissed him briefly, then angled toward him, pressing her nose into his neck.
He leaned his head on hers and pulled her closer, seeming pleased to hold her.
The clean scent of his skin mixed with the salt-and-seaweed smell of the air somehow made her frustration dissolve, and a feeling of hope began seeping through.
Gulls swooped and keened overhead. His T-shirt had ridden up slightly in back, and she hooked her thumb inside the back waistband of his jeans.
On the opposite side of the cove, someone set off a firework, and it whooshed into the sky, and she looked up in time to see
it explode in a red bloom in the twilight. She and David met eyes and grinned. He kissed her, then she pulled back to look
into his eyes, wanting to dive inside them. Mine, she thought. I’m going to make you see.