Beach Read

ON FRIDAY, WE drove to Dave’s house for the second part of the interview. The first had been so thorough Gus hadn’t planned to have a second, but Dave had called him that morning. After thinking it over, his mother had things to say about New Eden.

The house was a small split-level, probably built in the late sixties, and it smelled like someone had been chain-smoking inside it ever since. Despite that, and its shabby decor, it was extremely tidy: blankets folded on couch arms, potted plants in a neat line by the door, pots hanging from hooks on the wall, and the sink scrubbed to sparkling.

Dave Schmidt had to be right around our age, give or take a few years, but Julie-Ann Schmidt looked a good ten years older than my mother. She was tiny, her face round and soft with wrinkles. I wondered if it was a lifetime of being treated as if she were sweet, because of her figure and face, that had given her the almost toothy handshake she offered.

She lived there with Dave. “I own the house, but he makes the payments.” She guffawed at that and patted his back. “He’s a good boy.” I watched Gus’s eyes narrow, appraising the situation. I thought he might be looking for hints of violence somewhere in their interactions, but Dave was mostly hunched and smiling in embarrassment. “He was always a good boy. And you should hear him on the piano.”

“Can I get you anything to drink?” Dave hurried to ask.

“Water would be great,” I answered, more to give Dave an excuse to hide than because I was actually thirsty. As he disappeared into the kitchen, I ambled around the living room, studying all the walnut picture frames mounted to the wall. It was like Dave had been frozen at about eight years old, in a V-neck sweater vest and dull green T-shirt. His father was in most of the shots, but even in the ones he didn’t inhabit, it was easy to imagine he’d been behind the camera, snapping the tiny smiling woman and the baby on her hip, the toddler holding her hand, the gawky child sticking his tongue out next to the gorilla exhibit at the zoo.

Dave’s dad had been lanky and brown-haired with bushy eyebrows and a receding chin. Dave looked just like him.

“So I understand you had more to say,” Gus began. “Things you thought Dave couldn’t offer.”

“Of course I do.” Julie-Ann took a seat on the blue plaid love seat, and Gus and I perched beside each other on the roughly woven tan couch. “I’ve got a well-rounded look. Dave only saw what we let him, and then when we left like we did—well, I’m afraid his opinion of the place probably swung from one extreme to the other.”

Gus and I looked at each other. I leaned forward, trying to keep an open, friendly posture to combat her defensive one. “He seemed pretty fair, actually.”

Julie-Ann pulled a cigarette pack off the table and lit up, then offered us the box. Gus took one, and I knew it was more to put her at ease than because he truly wanted one, which made me smile. Even though what we wrote and said we believed was so different, I’d started to feel like I was capable of knowing Gus, reading him, better than anyone else I’d ever met. Because every day we spent together, this peculiar feeling was growing in me: You are like me.

Julie-Ann lit the cigarette for him, then sat back, cross-legged. “They weren’t bad people,” she said. “Not most of them. And I couldn’t let you go thinking they were. Sometimes—sometimes good, or at least decent, people do bad things. And sometimes they actually believe they’re doing what’s right.”

“And you don’t think that’s just an excuse?” Gus asked. “You don’t believe in any kind of internal moral compass.”

The way he said it made it seem as if he himself did believe in such a thing, which would’ve surprised me a few weeks ago, but now made perfect sense.

“Maybe you start out with that,” she said, “But if you do, it gets shaped as you age. How are you supposed to believe right’s right and wrong’s wrong if everyone around you says the opposite? You’re supposed to think you’re smarter than all of them?”

Dave returned with three water glasses balanced between his hands and passed them out one by one. Julie-Ann seemed reluctant to go on with her son in the room, but neither she nor Gus suggested he leave. Probably because Dave was approximately thirty years old and paying for the house we were in.

“A lot of these people,” Julie-Ann went on, “didn’t have much. I don’t just mean money, although that was true too. There were a lot of orphans. People estranged from their families. People who’d lost spouses and children. At first, New Eden made me feel like … like the reason everything had gone wrong in my life up to that point was that I hadn’t been living quite right. It was like they had the answers, and everyone seemed so happy, fulfilled. And after a lifetime of wanting—sometimes not even wanting anything specific but just wanting, feeling like the world wasn’t big enough or bright enough—well, I felt like I was finally pushing back the curtain.

“I was getting my answers. It was like this great big scientific equation they’d solved. And you know what? To an extent, it worked. At least for a while. You followed their rules, did their rituals, wore their clothes, and ate their food and it was like the whole world was starting to light up from within. Nothing felt mundane. There were prayers for everything—while you were going to the bathroom, while you were showering, paying bills. For the first time, I felt grateful to be alive.

“That’s what they could do for you. So then when the punishments started, when you began to slip up and fail, it felt like there was a giant hand on the bathtub plug, just waiting to yank it up and rip it all away from you. And my husband … He was a good man. He was a good, lost man.” Her gaze skittered toward Dave and she took a slow puff.

“He was going to be an architect. Build sports stadiums and skyscrapers. He loved to draw and he was damn good at it. And then we got pregnant in high school, and he knew all that had to go. We had to be practical. And he never once complained.” Again her eyes gestured toward her son. “Of course he didn’t. We were lucky. Blessed. But sometimes when life throws a wrench in your plans … I don’t know how to explain it, but I just had this sense when we were there. Like … like my husband was clinging to whatever he could grab hold of. Like being right mattered less than being … okay.”

I thought about my father and Sonya. About my mom staying with him, even knowing what he’d done. Her insistence that she’d thought it was over.

Well, why did it ever start? I’d demanded in the car before she had taken up her mantra: I can’t talk about it; I won’t talk about it.

But the truth was, I had a good guess right away.

In the seventh grade, my parents had separated. Briefly—just a couple of months—but he’d gone as far as to stay with some friends of theirs while he and Mom waited to see if they could work things out. I didn’t know the whole story. They’d never gotten to that screaming-match level most of my friends’ divorced parents had reached, but even at thirteen, I had seen the change in my mother. A sudden wistfulness, a proclivity for staring out windows, escaping to bathrooms and returning with puffy eyes.

The night before Dad moved out, I’d cracked my bedroom door and listened to their voices carrying up from the kitchen. “I don’t know,” Mom kept saying tearfully. “I don’t know, I just feel like it’s over.”

“Our marriage?” Dad had asked after a long pause.

“My life,” she’d told him. “I’m nothing but your wife. January’s mother. I’m nothing else, and I don’t think you can imagine how that feels. To be forty-two and feel like you’ve done everything you’re going to do.”

I hadn’t been able to wrap my mind around it then, and obviously Dad hadn’t either, because the next morning they’d explained everything to me while the three of us sat in a row on the edge of my bed and then I’d watched his car pull away with one suitcase in its back seat.

I’d believed life as I knew it was over.

Then, suddenly, Dad was back in the house: proof that nothing was unfixable! That love could conquer any challenge, that life would always, always work out. So when he and Mom sat me down to tell me about her diagnosis, and everything else in our lives changed, I knew it wouldn’t be permanent. This was just another plot twist in our story.

After that, the two of them seemed more in love than ever. There was more dancing. More hand-holding. More romantic weekend getaways. More of Dad saying things like, “Your mother has been a lot of people in the twenty years I’ve known her, and I’ve had a chance to fall in love with every single one of them, Janie. That’s the key to marriage. You have to keep falling in love with every new version of each other, and it’s the best feeling in the whole world.”

Their love, I had thought, had transcended time, midlife crises, cancer, all of it.

But that separation had happened, and when I’d yelled at my mother that day, I’d wondered. If those three months were when it had begun. When Dad and Sonya had reconnected. If, when he’d found her, he’d just needed to believe everything could be okay again. If, when Mom had taken him back afterward, she’d just needed to pretend it already was okay.

Julie-Ann shook her head slightly when her gaze settled on mine.

“Does that make sense?” she asked. “I just needed to be okay, and I could do the wrong thing if it had the right end.”

I thought about Jacques and our determination to have a beautiful life, my desperation to end up with someone Mom had known and loved. I thought about my mother’s diagnosis and my father’s infidelity, and the story I’d been telling myself since age twelve to keep from being terrified about what might really happen. I thought about the romance novels I’d devoured when the cancer came back and I lost my shot at grad school and thought my life was falling apart again. The nights spent writing until the sun came up and my back hurt from needing to pee but not wanting to stop working because nothing felt more important than the book, than giving these fictional lovers the ending they deserved, giving my readers the ending they deserved.

People clinging to whatever steadfast thing they could find?

Yes. Yes, that made sense. It made perfect sense.

When we left that night, I texted my mother, something I hadn’t done much of in months: I love you. Even if you can never talk about him again, I’ll always love you, Mom. But I hope you can.

Twenty minutes later she responded: Me too, Janie. All of it.

ON SATURDAY WE walked down to the beach. “It’s not very creative,” I said as we picked our way over the root-laden path. Gus opened his mouth to reply and I cut him off. “Don’t you dare make a joke about my genre of choice being unoriginal.”

“I was going to say it’s stupid we haven’t come down here more,” Gus answered.

“I assumed you’d gotten sick of it, I guess.”

Gus shook his head. “I’ve barely used this beach.”

“Seriously?”

“Root,” he warned as I looked up at him, and I stepped carefully over it. “I’m not the world’s biggest beach guy.”

“Well, of course not,” I said. “If you were, you’d be wearing a T-shirt or a hat that advertised that.”

“Exactly,” he agreed. “Anyway, I actually prefer this beach in winter.”

“Really? Because in winter, I’d just prefer to be dead.”

Gus’s laugh rattled in his throat. He stepped off the wooded path onto the sand and offered me a hand as I hopped off the slight ledge. “It’s amazing. Have you ever seen it?”

I shook my head. “When I was at U of M, I pretty much stayed at U of M. I didn’t do much exploring.”

Gus nodded. “After Pete and Maggie moved here, I’d visit them for my winter break. They’d buy my plane or bus tickets as presents, and I’d come for the holidays.”

“I’m guessing your dad didn’t mind.” A sudden burst of anger at the thought of Gus as a kid, alone, unwanted, had forced the words out of me before I could stop. I glanced cautiously at him. His jaw was clenched a bit, but otherwise his face was impassive.

He shook his head. We’d fallen into step along the water and he looked sidelong at me, then back to the sand. “You don’t have to worry about bringing him up. It wasn’t that bad.”

“Gus.” I stopped and faced him. “Just the fact that you have to say it means it was way worse than it should’ve been.”

He hesitated a second, then started walking again. “It wasn’t like that,” he said. “After my mom died, I could’ve gotten out. Pete wanted me to come live with her and Maggie. She was always trying to get me to—to talk about the fights he and I would get into, so she could get custody, but I chose not to. He had all this heart medication. Daily pills. He’d only take them if I asked him, like, three times, but God forbid I asked a fourth. He’d pick a fight. An actual fight. Sometimes I thought …” He trailed off. “I wondered if he wanted me to kill him. Or like, get himself so worked up his heart would give out. I dropped out of school to work so we could afford his prescriptions, but when I was out, he stopped doing anything for himself. Eating, bathing. I could barely keep him alive. Maybe he thought that would be my punishment.”

“Your punishment?” I choked out. “For what?”

Gus shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe being on her side all the time.”

“Your mom’s?”

He nodded. “I think he felt like it was Us against Him. It was Us against Him. He’d blame her for everything that went wrong—dumb shit, like, she’d forget to put gas in the car one night and he’d realize he needed to stop for it on his way to work, so he’d be late. Or she’d throw away a receipt he wanted to keep, dump leftovers out of the fridge a few hours before he finally decided he wanted them.

“He was bad with me too, but it was a little more random. If the phone rang and woke him up, he’d hit me, or if he had plans to go out but had to cancel for snow, he’d knock me around to burn off his anger. I was always looking for the secret code, the rules I could follow so he wouldn’t freak out. That’s how you keep yourself safe, you know? You pay attention to how the world works. But there was no secret code for him. It was like our actions were entirely detached from his reactions to us. He acted like I was this lazy, selfish brat and like my mom thought she was a queen. Like she treated his money like toilet paper. She was constantly apologizing for nothing, and then when he’d really hurt her, or me, he’d apologize. Back off for a few days.

“Even with all that, I think losing her broke whatever was left in him. I don’t know.” He paused, thinking. “Maybe it wasn’t love. Maybe treating her like shit made him feel like he had power. He didn’t have that with me as I got older.”

“Making you keep him alive was the only way left to manipulate you,” I said.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe. But if I’d left, he would’ve died sooner.”

“And you think that would’ve been your fault?”

“It doesn’t matter whose fault it would’ve been. He would’ve been dead, and I would’ve known I could’ve stopped it. Plus, she didn’t leave. How could I, knowing it wasn’t what she would have wanted?”

“You don’t know that,” I said. “You were a kid.”

“Pete likes to say I was never a kid.”

“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Don’t act like I’m pitiful,” he said. “It’s in the past. It’s over.”

“You know what your problem is?” I asked, and this time when I stopped, he did too.

“I’m aware of several, yes.”

“You don’t know the difference between pity and sympathy,” I said. “I’m not pitying you. It makes me sad to think of you being treated like that. It makes me mad to think you didn’t have the things all kids deserve. And yeah, it makes me mad and sad that a lot of people go through the things you went through, but it’s even more upsetting because it’s you. And I know you and I like you and I want you to have a good life. That’s not pity. That’s caring about someone.”

He stared at me intently, then shook his head. “I don’t want you to think about me like that.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like an angry, broken punching bag,” he said, his face dark and tense.

“I don’t.” I took a step closer, searching for the right words. “I just think of you as Gus.”

He studied me. The corner of his mouth twitched into an unconvincing smile, then faded, leaving him looking burned-out. “I am, though,” he said quietly. “I am angry and messed up, and every time I try to get closer to you, it’s like all these warning bells go off, and I try to act like a normal person, but I can’t.”

My stomach flip-flopped. Closer to you. I glanced at the lake while I got my bearings. “I thought you understood that there’s no such thing as a normal person.”

“Maybe not,” Gus said. “But there’s still a difference between people like me and people like you, January.”

“Don’t insult me.” I looked sharply back at him. “Don’t you think I’m angry? Don’t you think I feel a little bit broken? It’s not like my life’s been perfect either.”

“I have never thought your life was perfect,” he said.

“Bullshit. You called me a fairy princess.”

He coughed out a laugh. “Because you’re the bright light! Don’t you get it?” He shook his head. “It’s not about what’s happened. It’s about how you cope with things, who you are. You’ve always been this fierce fucking light, and even when you’re at your worst, when you feel angry and broken, you still know how to be a person. How to tell people you—you love them.”

“Stop it,” I said. He started to walk away, but I grabbed him by the elbows and held him in front of me. “You’re not going to break me, Gus.”

He stilled, his lips parting and his eyes searching my face for something. His head just slightly tilted and those grooves rose from the inside corners of his brows.

I hoped that what he was understanding right then was that I saw him. That he didn’t have to do anything special, figure out a mysterious code to unlock the secret parts of him. That he just had to keep being here with me, letting me discover him bit by bit like he’d been doing with me since we met.

“I don’t need you to tell me you care about me,” I said finally. “Two nights ago you held me while I sobbed. I think I blew my nose on your shirt. I’m not asking you for anything except to return the favor in whatever underwhelming and mild equivalent of lap-weeping you need.”

He let out a long breath and leaned forward, burying his face into the side of my neck like an embarrassed kid even as his hot breath woke something up beneath my skin. My hands skimmed down the curved muscle of his arms and knotted into his rough fingers. The sun was low on the horizon, the thin blankets of clouds streaked a pale tangerine. They looked like melted Dreamsicles floating in a sea of denim blue. Gus lifted his face and looked me in the eye again, the light leaping in great licks through the gaps in the moving clouds to paint him with color.

It was an unabashed moment, a comfortable silence. The kind of thing that, if I had been writing it, I might’ve thought I could skip right over.

But I would be wrong. Because here, in this moment when nothing was happening and we’d finally run out of things to say, I knew how much I liked Gus Everett, how much he was starting to mean to me. We’d let so much out into the open over the last three days, and I knew more would bubble up over time, but for the first time in a year, I didn’t feel overstuffed with trapped emotions and bitten-back words.

I felt a little empty, a little light.

Happy. Not giddy or overjoyed, but that low, steady level of happiness that, in the best periods of life, rides underneath everything else, a buffer between you and the world you are walking over.

I was happy to be here, doing nothing with Gus, and even if it was temporary, it was enough for me to believe that someday I’d be okay again. Maybe not the exact same brand of it I’d been before Dad died—probably not—but a new kind, nearly as solid and safe.

I could feel the pain too, the low-grade ache I’d be left with if and when this thing between Gus and me imploded. I could perfectly imagine every sensation, in the pit of my stomach and the palms of my hands, the sharp pulses of loss that would remind me of how good it felt to stand here with him like this, but for once, I didn’t think letting go was the answer.

I wanted to hold on to him, and this moment, for a while.

As if in agreement, Gus squeezed my hands in his. “I do, you know,” he said. It was almost a whisper, a tender, rugged thing like Gus himself. “Care about you.”

“I do,” I told him. “Know that, I mean.”

The tangerine light glinted over his teeth when he smiled, deepening the shadows in his rarely seen dimples, and we stayed there, letting nothing happen all around us.