Chapter 5
JOEL
In college, Joel had wanted Shay the moment she opened her mouth.
They had a Regency-era literature class together in a room that creaked every time you so much as coughed.
It was in Smith Hall: warm light, blond wooden floors.
Shay sat in the back, her thick hair penny bright in the afternoon sun, and spoke sparingly, and then only to disagree with someone.
She can be such a bitch, a classmate mumbled to Joel after being eviscerated for their reading of Persuasion, but Joel made no noise of assent.
Before everything, he’d admired Shay’s indifference to others’ emotions.
It went hand in hand with her confidence, which lit her from within.
He thought of what it would feel like to peel the sticker off, and his thumb twitched.
“Excuse me.” He coughed. “Class is in five minutes.”
Her eyes opened, narrowing on his tall form. “I know.”
“I’m sorry, I thought you were asleep,” he said as she rose, scratching a piece of grass loose from her skin. There were thatched pink indentations on her arms.
“I’d never miss class. I went when I had pneumonia last month.”
“Freshman year, I went to History of the Novel with a burst appendix.”
She laughed, the sound like a shaft of sunlight. “Well, you should also know that girls don’t fall asleep in public places. Especially not alone. Could you see up my dress?”
“No.” He took a step back as if that would absolve him of the fact that he had indeed made the attempt.
She stared at him for a moment, taking in his plaid button-up and short hair, the leather shoulder bag that had belonged to his uncle, the only other person in Joel’s family who appeared to read anything more than stock reports.
The bag’s seams were worn white with use, his mother always insisting on replacing it, but Joel liked its age, and he knew, somehow, that Shay did too.
His Adam’s apple felt hot and swollen. It was difficult to swallow.
“I know you,” she said.
“Well, yeah, we’re in the same class.”
“You slept with Rose.”
“Is that any of your business?”
He said it without thinking, his voice unexpectedly harsh from his dry throat.
He opened his mouth to apologize—yes, he had, but it had meant nothing for either of them, both dressing minutes after he came, wiping himself clean on his own underwear just so he wouldn’t have to ask her for a tissue—but Shay just smiled, as if she could already sense his regret.
Like they were somehow already past the point of having to make amends, to say anything aloud.
“It is, though, somehow,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
That day, she sat next to him in class. When the teacher asked him about Wentworth’s letter, he couldn’t even remember his own name.
In the hotel, he struggled to fall asleep. They’d gone to bed early. Carmen had passed out immediately after they had sex, her breathing steady as a metronome.
They had dinner at one of the island’s two restaurants, both of which were known for their blue crab, though one also served Italian food.
They opted for the other, sitting on wooden benches at a table on the pier, and were brought a tin pailful of crabs, surprised by their color: when boiled, their shells burned coral red.
They cracked them open with their hands, their fingers slick with butter and vinegar, and laughed at the mess they made.
He didn’t recognize anyone else at the restaurant, and for that he was grateful, able for a moment to focus only on the lapping of water against the pier and how the sun cast everything in gold as it dipped beneath the horizon.
He’d told Carmen once, in Central Park, that a group of finches was called a charm, so she often asked him the names for flocks of birds.
This evening’s answer was a siege of herons for the trio dipping their beaks into the marsh.
She held his hand, something he couldn’t ever remember her doing in the city.
He stiffened a bit at the gesture, and hoped she couldn’t feel it.
This was what he’d wanted before they left—for them to cement their commitment to each other, for her traveling with him to feel inevitable.
Carmen had not pressed him, but he could feel questions forming and had been surprised by how ready he was to answer them.
Yes, he would spend the holidays with her family.
Yes, they should move in together. Since fleeing his parents’ cold, rigid home, he’d told himself he didn’t need a family, but he wanted Carmen.
He shifted on the mattress. Outside their hotel room, footsteps sounded out against the hallway floor.
“I heard some of them were invited,” a man’s voice said.
“There’s no way Judy and Mort would have allowed that,” a woman responded.
“How would they know? Girl gives them a list. What’re they going to do, have a private investigator look into everyone?”
“Have you met Mort?”
Their laughter was muffled by the click of a closed door.
He knew what they were discussing, and the possibility of someone from Synanon being on the island quickened his pulse, his muscles tensing for a fight, though it seemed impossible—Shay had left them four months ago.
He thought of the building she’d lived in on Riverside, the man positioned at the door like a soldier, how he’d grinned at Joel with his small gray teeth.
Joel had wanted to knock them loose from his mouth.
He rolled to his other side, sleep now even more out of reach, like a distant stop on the subway when his own car had juddered to a halt.