7. Imogen
Imogen
The coast is built to remind you exactly how broke you are.
It’s low and made out of glass and cedar, hung over a private beach like the architect dared gravity to do anything about it.
A quarter mile down the headland the construction site sprawls across the bluff, cranes cut against a gray sky, the distant clang of men hammering together one more thing with Ashton’s name on the deed.
The whole place smells like salt and cold rope.
Luke has his face mashed to the car window before the tires stop turning, and for a kid who hides in closets, the open water seems to undo a knot in him, his shoulders dropping the instant the wind hits us.
I get maybe four minutes of that before Ashton hands me a sheet of paper.
“House rules,” he says. “For the duration.”
I unfold it. Printed, naturally, because the man can’t let an idea out of his head until it’s been through a laser printer and given a header. It runs two pages.
“You wrote me a syllabus.”
“Lola formatted it.”
“So she knows. Good. I’d hate for her to find out at the same time I break one.
” I turn to the second page and start reading out loud, because it’s the only sane response.
“Quiet hours after eight. Reasonable. Meals at set times. Tyrannical, but reasonable.” Then I hit the part about us and have to stop walking. “Oh, this is art.”
He doesn’t ask which part. He already knows which part.
There’s a whole numbered section governing me and him.
Approved topics in front of Luke: the schedule, the lessons, the ocean, the boy’s progress.
Forbidden topics, no exceptions: the divorce, his mother, the length of the arrangement.
And then the masterpiece, the line I’m going to have framed: Personal conversation between the tutor and Mr. Fraser should remain limited to matters concerning Luke.
“Limited to matters concerning Luke,” I read, savoring it. “So if I’m choking on a grape, I have to gesture in a way that’s relevant to his education.”
“If you’re choking, I’ll handle it. That’s covered under the safety provision.”
“There’s a safety provision.” I flip the page over, and God help me, there is. “There’s a numbered safety provision. Mr. Fraser. Do you sleep, or do you just go into standby and recharge off the printer?”
The corner of his mouth twitches, but I saw it go, and that’s the problem developing in real time, because a man who’s only controlling is a man I can roll my eyes at from a safe distance.
A man who’s controlling and quietly, drily aware of how absurd he’s being, who writes two pages of rules as a joke he refuses to crack a smile at, is a problem with no provision on either page.
“You can mention weather,” he offers, like a concession at a negotiation.
“Just weather? Out of everything in the known universe, I get weather? Just like that? No permission slip?”
“No permission slip.”
“I want that in writing. Addendum to page two.”
“It’s implied.”
“Nothing in this document is implied. Everything in this document has a number next to it.” I hold it up. “Weather gets a number or it doesn’t count.”
He takes the pages back, pulls a pen from his jacket pocket, and writes something at the bottom of page two. Hands it back. I look down.
Section 4.1: Weather.
“There,” he says.
I stare at it for a second. “You’re unbelievable.”
“You asked.”
“Fair warning, I’m going to abuse that privilege. I’m going to discuss weather at you constantly.”
“I’d expect nothing less.” Then a man in a hard hat appears at the door with a clipboard and a problem, and Ashton goes to be the version of himself that owns headlands.
“I like sunny weather,” Luke says from down by my elbow, where he’s been crouched the whole time, lining up shells he collected on the walk from the car. “Not too sunny. Where you can still wear a sweater if you want.”
“That’s a very specific weather,” I tell him.
“It’s the best one.” He says it like the matter is closed, which, for him, it is.
We drag our bags inside, and the rental just swallows them, my one duffel looking apologetic next to all that cedar and glass.
I get Luke’s stuff into his room while he stands in the doorway running the operation, telling me which drawer each thing goes in like he’s signing off on a building permit.
“Here’s the deal,” I say, dropping a stack of his shirts in. “We unpack now, beach after. Tide’s going out. We go down and bother whatever the ocean left on the rocks.”
He’s gone before I get the rest out, already halfway to the door.
The tide pools rescue the rest of the day.
Low tide pulls the water back and Luke turns into a different kid out there, sleeves shoved to his elbows, hunched over a pool delivering a lecture on hermit crabs to a hermit crab that did not request one.
I’m half watching him, half watching the surf work at the rocks below, when he says it out of the blue, eyes down on a starfish he’s decided is his.
“My mom doesn’t like the beach. She says the sand gets in everything and wrecks it.”
I keep my voice the same tone as his. “Yeah? You’re a fan, though.”
“I love it.” He nudges the starfish, which doesn’t care for it much. “She never came. Not even before everything. Just Dad. He builds terrible sandcastles. They always fall over, but he keeps doing it.”
“Every time?”
“Every single time. I told him he needs a bucket but he says real sandcastles don’t use buckets.” He looks up at me. “That’s not even true. Buckets are basically the whole point.”
“I’ll back you up on that.”
“Thank you.” He goes back to the starfish, satisfied.
It’s the first time he’s let his mother into a sentence without slamming every door in the house, so I don’t lunge at it.
I find him a better poking stick and ask whether the big crab or the small crab is going to win the territory war, and he tells me, in detail, with all the side facts I didn’t ask for, and the whole thing drifts past us gentle as the tide creeping back up the sand.
By the time the tide turns us back toward the house, Luke’s pockets are heavy with shells and one disappointed hermit crab he’s been talked out of keeping.
Ashton’s on the deck with his sleeves rolled, the hard hat and the clipboard long gone, and he watches us come up the path with his arms crossed, his eyes going over Luke head to foot before the kid’s even close enough to reach, checking him for damage like the beach might have taken a piece.
“How was it?” he asks, and his eyes are on his son, checking, but the question lands on me.
“Good. He found a starfish and named it Lori. We’ve adopted it emotionally, but not legally.”
“She moved,” Luke reports, pushing past both of us toward the door. “I saw it.”
“Lori’s her own woman,” I call after him.
“She really is,” he agrees, and disappears inside.
Ashton watches the door swing shut behind him. “Anything else I should know?”
There it is. The opening. I could tell him his son said talked about his mother without falling apart, that something cracked open a little out there on the rocks, and that it might matter.
“Nothing new,” I say instead. “He’s a good student. You should be proud.”
And it’s true, and it’s also a lie by what it leaves out. I tell myself the omission is the rule of job because his mother’s a forbidden topic. It’s right there on page two, in print, with a number next to it. I’m just following the rules.
Dinner is pizza, because Ashton’s been swallowed by the construction site since we got back, a problem with a permit or a pour or whatever it is that keeps a man in a hard hat past dark.
So it’s me and Luke and a delivery box at the table built for a family of eight, the two of us looking very small at one end of it, which somehow makes the pizza taste better.
“Did you know octopuses have three hearts?” he says, halfway through his third slice.
“I did not know that.”
“Two of them stop when it swims. So swimming’s exhausting. That’s why they mostly walk on the bottom instead.”
“So they crawl to keep their hearts going.”
“Yeah.” He nods.
“Honestly? Relatable. I’d crawl everywhere too if the other option was my heart stopping.”
He laughs so hard he nearly loses a bite of pizza, like it’s the funniest thing anyone’s said in the history of the world, and for a second the giant table doesn’t feel so big.
I get him down around eight, the way the rules require, lights low, door cracked exactly the width he likes. He goes under fast, worn out by salt air and crabs, and I stand in his doorway a second longer than I need to, watching a kid sleep like sleep is a safe place for once.
Then I go to bed in a room across an unfamiliar hall, and I’m out before I can do anything stupid with the quiet.
It’s three in the morning when the scream goes through the house, high and ragged and all Luke, a child halfway down a nightmare with nothing at the bottom of it to catch him.
I’m out of the bed and into the hall before my eyes are properly open, moving on the part of me that’s been half listening for that sound since the first afternoon I knelt on his father’s floor.
Ashton’s door swings open in the same breath.
We slam into each other in the black hallway at full speed, my shoulder into his chest, his hands snapping up to grab my arms before either of us can stop it, and the air goes out of both of us in one shared rush.
He’s wearing boxers and a generous interpretation of the word coverage.
I’ve got a sleep shirt, underwear, and no other resources.
Wherever we’re pressed together it’s skin to skin, my hands splayed flat on his bare chest where I caught my fall, his fingers wrapped all the way around my arms, his heart going under my palm exactly as fast as mine is.
Neither of us steps back. For one suspended second the hallway shrinks to the heat coming off his body, the weight of his hands, the breath I can feel moving between his mouth and mine, both of us panting like we ran a distance, which we did, just not at each other on purpose.
His hands tighten on my arms a fraction, like they’ve reached a decision the rest of him hasn’t signed off on. I feel that single degree of pressure everywhere I have nerve endings.
“Hi,” I say, because apparently that’s what I’ve got.
“Hi,” he says back, and his voice is wrecked from sleep.
Then Luke screams again, and we rip apart hard enough to stagger, already turning for his door, every bit of the last ten seconds shoved somewhere we’ve both agreed to ignore.