Happy Place

WE SIT WITH our toes in the icy water and eat the cheese, fruit, and bread we brought from home. We doze in the sun and watch the clouds drift. Afterward we hike along the pine-needle-dusted trail in the woods, moss and ferns all glistening with dew, the ground soft and hollow.

Cleo seems to have entirely let the moment of tension go, but Sabrina’s uncommonly quiet and keeps stalling toward the back of the pack as we walk. Every time I slow down to walk with her, though, she seems to speed up and chime in on whatever conversation the others are having.

When we get back to the shore, we’re not ready to leave, so we stretch out along the red-brown rocks, watching birds dive toward the whitecaps in the distance.

“What’s one tiny thing you’ll miss about these trips?” Cleo asks.

“The Warm Cup,” Parth says. “I love walking down to get coffee while it’s still cool and gray out and the streets are empty. And Sab and I are both totally silent because we haven’t had caffeine yet, but it’s nice. At home we’re always rushing in the morning.”

“I’ll miss that too,” Kimmy says. “And sitting on the bench next to the walk-up window, petting all the dogs that come past. And all the junk shops and yard sales. Every time I come here, I end up trying to convince Cleo to rent a U-Haul to drive back.”

“A garden filled with lobster traps has a different aesthetic effect in upstate New York,” Cleo says.

“Yeah, but we could at least cover our walls with wood-burned signs that say Wicked Pissah.”

“Well, now we know what to get you for your birthday,” I say.

“Should we all get wicked pissah tattoos?” Parth jokes.

“We can do better than that,” Sabrina says.

“Giant lobsters,” Wyn puts in.

“Mermaids that look like Bratz dolls,” I suggest.

“I’ll come up with something.” Sabrina props her chin in one hand, the other fluttering through the shallow water.

“What’s something you’ll miss, Harry?” Cleo asks. “Something small.”

I say, “Seeing everyone so happy together.”

Cleo bats her hand against my leg. “Something for you.”

I think some more. “I guess . . . going to sleep.”

Parth bursts into laughter.

“I’m serious!” I cry.

“Your favorite part,” Sabrina says, “of this amazing trip I planned for us . . . is going to sleep.”

“No.” I toss a seashell shard toward the sparkling lip of the tide. “It’s going to sleep so tired, in a good way. Feeling content and exhausted and relaxed, but also excited to wake up and still be here.”

I catch Wyn’s eyes and look away. “It feels like nothing can go too wrong here. At least once you’re off Ray’s airplane.”

Sabrina grabs my hand a little too hard, then lets go on a sigh. “I’ll miss that too. Hell, I’ll even miss Ray.”

“I’ll miss Bernie’s,” Cleo says.

“Even though it gave you a phantom hangover?” Wyn asks.

“For all I know,” Cleo says, “that was the last hangover I’ll ever have. The least I can do is appreciate it.”

We get back onto the boat as the sun is beginning its descent. The water is diamond edged, the air cooling and the spray lifting off the sides of the boat positively freezing, despite the sun beating against the crowns of our heads.

At the helm, Sabrina glows. She’s where she’s meant to be, doing what she was born to do, and no matter how complicated this week has been, I now realize how worth it it all was.

Parth passes out a round of Coronas with lime wedges—and soda for Cleo—and Sabrina cranks up the radio, Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” crackling out. It feels like time has been canceled, thrown out, suspended indefinitely.

As long as we stay out here on the water, salt spray flecking our skin, nothing else exists.

Kimmy wrangles Cleo into a slow dance, and Parth and I heckle them from our benches until the combination of the setting sun and beer has me heavy eyed and yawning.

Beside me, Wyn lifts his arm in invitation, and either because everyone’s watching or because I simply want to, I curl against his side, his warm arm settling over me, his sweat and detergent and deodorant and toothpaste knitting together to cloak me in my favorite smell.

Even now, I’d buy Wyn-scented candles in bulk if I could, keep them long after the wicks had burned down, until every last vapor faded from the glass.

At a particularly cold gust, I turn my face into his chest to hide from the chill, let myself breathe him in and feel the rush of dopamine it brings.

I’ve only drunk half my beer, but I feel very nearly intoxicated. His hand slides from my stomach to my hip and lightly squeezes, and my breath rushes out against his neck, a coil of heat dropping from my low belly to the point between my thighs.

“This would be the song for our first dance,” Kimmy says dreamily to Cleo, “if we ever got married.”

If we ever got married.

My muscles go taut. I feel Wyn’s heart speed, his hand slackening against me. Ahead, the harbor draws closer, and with it, reality.

Through laughter, Cleo says, “Based on what, Kimmy?”

“This magical moment we’re having!” Kimmy says. “Do we need a better reason?”

“I guess not,” Cleo allows. “Since this wedding is entirely hypothetical, why don’t we have Bruce Springsteen play the reception?”

“You really don’t want to get married?” Parth asks her, clearly unconvinced.

“Cleo has conflicting feelings about the institution of marriage,” Kimmy says, “and I don’t care that much either way as long as we’re in it for the long haul. But I think a wedding could be fun. It’s just a big-ass expensive party. No offense.”

I sit up, pulling away and keeping my eyes fixed on a gaggle of circling gulls.

“No, you’re right,” Parth says. “It’s an excuse for the best party you’ll ever throw, with everyone you love in one place.”

“All six of us,” Wyn says.

Sabrina shrugs, steering us nearer to the harbor. “That’s how it was with my parents, and it was perfect.”

“I didn’t realize you were there,” I say. I know a decent amount about her parents’ relationship, but mostly concerning the end of it. Like my own parents, hers were barely together when Sabrina’s mother got pregnant. Unlike my own parents, once their initial happiness faded, they quickly divorced.

Sabrina’s mom was a wreck after that, largely because Mr. Armas wasted no time before marrying a Norwegian model. Sabrina quickly became her mom’s confidante, support system, and therapist all in one, until the former Mrs. Armas started dating herself.

From what I could tell, Sabrina’s summers in Knott’s Harbor were the lone bright spot in a lonely childhood, the only place either of her parents truly had time for her.

“I was four when they got married,” she says. “We were here for the summer, and we’d driven down the coast a bit.” A sliver of her perfect white smile appears, as if even after everything, this memory has been guarded deep in her heart, where nothing could mar it.

“There’s this big farm,” she says. “And it has a chapel, down a trail in the woods. I mean, maybe chapel isn’t the right word. It’s outside, looks out toward the coast. You can see the water through the trees. Anyway, it was a random Tuesday, and my parents decided they were going to get married. So they found a priest, and it was him, them, and me, out in the woods. For all I know, that guy wasn’t even a real priest. He could’ve been a very somber stripper Dad found in the Yellow Pages. But whatever. We were happy. For three years, anyway.”

She lets out a half-formed Sabrina cackle, and Parth joins her at the wheel, winding an arm around her waist.

“Have you two figured out your perfect wedding yet?” Cleo asks me, and my pulse spikes from the guilt.

But Wyn says easily, “The courthouse.”

“No way.” Kimmy shakes her head. “You’re too much of a romantic. You have some perfect time and place picked out. Probably the exact minute you first told Harry you loved her, in a field full of her favorite flower.”

“Nah,” Wyn says. “Maybe I used to think there’d be a perfect time or place. But now I think, if you really want to be with someone, you don’t wait for things to be perfect.” His eyes come to mine. “I would have married Harriet at a drive-through chapel in Vegas the day after I proposed, if she wanted.”

His eyes look dark in the dying daylight, the kind of gaze that falls like a heavy curtain, shutting out everything else.

Would have. The past tense of it slices through me.

“Then shit,” Parth says, “what’s stopping you? I’ll find you an Elvis online today. We can have this whole thing taken care of in forty-five minutes. Back-to-back weddings.”

Wyn casts his eyes back to the dock. “Because. That’s not what she wants.”

You, you, you, my heart cries.

We pull into the harbor.