The Guest, page 8
After a while, the sun wasn’t directly overhead and Alex could sit on the sand by her bag and try to appear content with her own company, soothed by the sound of the waves and the air vibrating with charged ions, and she even swam, knowing her bag would be fine.
A violent yelp, a splash—Alex glanced over at the source, a group of boys roughhousing in the waves. One of the boys lit up with a sudden smile. He was smiling at her, his hair a blond cap of curls. Alex smiled back—was this an avenue, a useful possibility? Some college boy? She floated for a while, pretending to be lost in her thoughts. At the same time, she was keeping track of the blond boy out of the corner of her eye, alert for any opening, but when he finally emerged onto the sand, it was to join a faction of adults with heads bent over their chubby paperbacks.
Alex sat with her bag and let the sun dry her body. She wished she had a towel. The lenses of her sunglasses were dirty but she could still study the scene: women in leggings power-walking along the waterline. Kids with their slim hips and rash guards running into the waves, shrieking in delight when they got knocked over. The group of adults carrying on a slow-motion conversation. The blond boy’s eyes were closed, like he was absorbing the sun. When the air got softer, the adults made rumblings to leave. They started to pack up their chairs and shake out their towels, finished the last of their water bottles and tied back their wet hair.
* * *
—
Alex fell asleep—briefly, but by the time she woke up it seemed like a different day—the sun low, the beach emptying. The adults were gone but the teenagers had stayed behind. They pulled on hooded sweatshirts. They threw a neon football back and forth with shocking vigor. Soon more teenagers joined them, all boys. There was a paper bag of beers that were promptly unloaded into a cooler, the boys setting up some paddle game that required a miniature net.
How much longer could Alex lie here without seeming out of place?
One of the boys had noticed her, a certain intensity aimed in her direction that she pretended not to acknowledge. It wasn’t the blond one—some other kid with a concave chest.
She started to sit up, to fuss with her bag, when she saw the kid was approaching. He stopped at an anxious distance.
“Do you want a beer?” he said.
Alex decided to keep her sunglasses on. To take her time responding. Slowness worked just as well. “Excuse me?”
The boy had a little rat face, pinched. “I said, do you want a beer,” he said, “because we, like, have some.”
He was more confident than he should have been with a face like that.
Alex considered the boy.
Sometimes it was best to just say yes, to see how far something could go. It would either be a good choice or a bad choice, no way to know yet.
“Sure,” Alex said. “Okay.”
“Cool,” the boy said, betraying only the slightest surprise. “Very cool.”
* * *
—
The rat-faced boy opened a beer for Alex with overly exaggerated effort, as if it required great strength.
“Salud,” he said, handing the bottle over. Still fairly cold.
A few of the boys gathered around a tiny grill. A guy ripped open a plastic pack of hot dogs with his teeth, then stabbed at the package with a penknife. He squeezed out the hot dogs, and the wet tubes plopped one by one onto the grate. Alex sat on an empty towel. The boy on the towel next to hers made himself small, and seemed to avoid looking at Alex out of politeness. It was the boy who had been playing in the waves, his blond hair now mostly dry.
“You look familiar,” Alex said, a stupid thing to say, though the thing was he did seem familiar, from somewhere else entirely: his clean face, curly hair like a Valentine cherub. The track pants he had pushed up his calves.
“Oh yeah?” His jaw was a little soft, puffy, and his eyes were at half-mast. Stoned? Tired from the sun?
“I don’t know,” Alex said. “I think so.”
The boy smiled at Alex, a shy smile that exposed the braces on his bottom teeth, and then it clicked.
“Oh,” Alex said, “right. That party.”
“Huh?”
“Helen,” Alex said, “I don’t know her last name. That big house on the beach.”
“Mrs. R?” The boy furrowed his brow in a slow, amiable way. “You know Theo?”
Alex waved her hand. “Nothing,” she said, “never mind, I just feel like I saw you.”
Was the boy blushing? He took a drink from his beer, then pulled absently at the strings of his sweatshirt hood. His mouth was so pink, babyish, which made it somehow sexual.
“You’re not old enough to drink,” Alex said, “are you?”
His blush deepened. “I’m nineteen.”
Alex would have guessed younger. She took a sip. “How old do you think I am?”
“I dunno.” The boy laughed. “Twenty-four? Twenty-five?”
For a moment, Alex considered lying. But his face was so mild.
“Twenty-two,” she said. With one hand, Alex was digging a hole in the sand, burying her fingers in the coolness underneath. “So old, right?”
“Nah,” the boy said, as if she’d been seriously asking. “That’s not old.”
“Hey.” The rat-faced boy clapped him on the back. “Can we have your keys? We left the vape in your car.”
The boy tossed his friend a key.
“Thanks, man.” The friend wagged his eyebrows like Alex wouldn’t be able to see.
Together Alex and the boy watched him veer to the parking lot and unlock a boxy Range Rover.
“That’s your car?”
“It’s my dad’s.” The boy looked only a little embarrassed. He bit down on his bottom lip. His lips were chapped and rosy. When Alex leaned back on the towel, he glanced down at her body, then stared furiously ahead. Why did she find this sort of sweet?
“I’m Alex,” she said. “By the way.”
“Jack.”
“Jack, huh?” They were both smiling.
“Where’re you staying?”
“Just across the highway.”
He nodded. “Cool.”
She dumped the last dregs of her beer in the sand. “You want another one?”
There were three burnt hot dogs on a paper plate and a roll of paper towels beside them. She took a bite of hot dog: it tasted like charcoal, the center still cold.
Alex returned to the boy with a can of cheap beer. “It’s the last one. We can share.”
She settled herself a little closer to Jack than she had been before. He instantly sat up straighter.
“There are still some hot dogs left,” she said.
“I’m a vegetarian,” he said. “Mostly.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m trying it out. I read this book?” He checked to see if she was listening. She nodded. “Um, Siddhartha. Have you read it?”
She shrugged in a way that could mean yes, could mean no.
“It’s, like, basically about Buddha. He wasn’t a vegetarian, ’cause you were supposed to just take whatever food you were offered. ’Cause they were begging?”
He checked her attention again.
“But it made me think, like, how to cause less harm.” The boy seemed suddenly ashamed. “It’s stupid, I dunno.”
“Sounds good.”
“Yeah. It’s really good. Actually.”
“Where’s your place?” Alex said. “Out here.”
“It’s my dad’s.” He took a tea-party sip of the beer. “I mean, my dad has a place here.”
“So you’re staying with your dad?” Alex had been hoping for a house empty of parents.
“Yeah,” Jack said. “My dad and stepmom. See? The house is, like, right over there. On the pond. It’s really scummy this year.”
She followed his pointing finger to a line of trees and the faint tops of houses.
“That one that looks like a barn?” he said.
A gray gable in the distance stood out taller than the others. So it was obvious that he had everything he needed.
Jack’s phone dinged. He was instantly on the case. There was a stack of text messages on the home screen that he flipped through expertly.
“Fuck,” he said. “I gotta go.”
“You’re leaving?” She was surprised, studying her own disappointment.
“Yeah, fuck, sorry, my sister just got in. It’s, like, the one night I gotta see everyone.”
“Too bad.”
He looked unhappy to be leaving, too, his teeth trapping his bottom lip.
Alex held out the can. “You wanna finish this?”
“You keep it.”
“Are you here for a while?” she said. “Maybe I could give you my number. And you can text, you know, if something fun is happening.”
He blinked, taking this in. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah, I can do that.
“Here, put in your number,” he said, handing over his phone. “I’ll call you, then you’ll have my number, too.”
His phone background was a pixelated mandala. Alex typed in her number, the number to the phone that barely worked.
Jack pressed send. She could hear the call go straight to voicemail, the voicemail that she had never bothered to change, so it said, You have reached the voice mailbox of—and then silence, a unit of dead air. Then: Please leave a message after the tone.
“Hi,” the boy said into his phone. “It’s me, Jack. I’m sitting with you right now. And now,” he said, glancing at her face, “now you have my number.”
* * *
—
When it started getting dark, Alex knew to walk away from the parking lot, to keep walking. Along the dunes, there were houses with their lights on, but they were far from one another and far from the water. The sand was still warm with the last gasp of stored heat. She kept walking until the beach was empty. To her left: the water. On her right, the dunes, the waving grasses, the wooden walkways leading to houses. One of the houses was probably Jack’s, the family sitting down to some dinner of pesto salad and salmon and corn from one of the farm stands. The dad and the stepmom and the two children. Alex imagined Jack’s sister was older, Alex’s age.
Well, she thought, okay. Okay.
She did a round of box breathing, what that one guy had taught her—he was a corporate coach, took harried business calls while Alex zoned out in the sheets, watching CNN on mute and trying to ignore whatever gruesome leftovers were on the room service tray. He had narcolepsy, was prescribed a medication that he said was used by fighter pilots and ISIS bombers. He believed in breathwork. He listened to summaries of famous self-help books while he exercised with giant ropes. His son had died after a high school football injury—“my boy,” he called him, smiling as he showed Alex pictures. Alex had cried—at that moment, she’d felt real affection for the man. He’d pressed a fist into her solar plexus, told her to inhale deeply.
“In for four, hold for four, out for four. And hold it.”
Where was that man now?
She did another round of breathing, and then did it again. Better? Maybe.
* * *
—
By the time it was fully dark, Alex had gotten far enough away from the parking lot that there was no one out, no one in any direction. Alex passed the white skeleton of a lifeguard tower. A metallic candy wrapper snapped along the ground.
How odd the ocean was at night—strangely placid, the waves unfurling in polite afterthoughts on the sand. The houses looked strange, too, looming on the dunes with the blank eyes of their windows, the size too unbelievable, like this was a soundstage. The mist in the air, the unnatural warmth, the moonlight on the pale sand; it would make sense if none of this were real.
What seemed so peaceful, the black stretch of ocean, was frightening when she got up close. It would be easy to lose yourself. One step into the water. Another. Simple, all the questions answered.
Was she spooking herself? Just a little. She sat on a piece of driftwood at the base of a dune. Fine. Not so bad, not so terrible. Maybe even boring, sitting out here, passing the hours, and boring meant manageable, though underneath that thought was another thought, an understanding that whatever this was, whatever she was doing, it was temporary. She could not do this forever. Just until—when?
Five days until the Labor Day party. Or four? No, five days.
Far off on the horizon, she saw a flash. A police boat, a lighthouse? Fireworks? But no, there it was, again: lightning appearing in bright silence. A storm out in the middle of the ocean. A storm that was, at least, not here.
* * *
—
Even though it was overcast, Alex didn’t think she’d be able to sleep. Part of it was hunger. She’d eaten a handful of tortilla chips from the boys, plus the hot dog. Alex leaned back against the dune with her hands in her armpits, a comforting childhood habit, feeling the ruff of stubble. She took a sweater out of her bag. Groped around until she found a pair of jeans. The sand was unavoidable when she put them on: gritting against her thighs, the backs of her knees.
She couldn’t fall asleep. Her phone wouldn’t even stay on long enough for her to see what time it was. It was probably only midnight, if not earlier. Maybe it was good her phone wasn’t working. Better not to know exactly how many hours she had to get through.
Maybe staying out here was dumb. Could things really be much worse in the city? The city: she had an immediate vision of the unhappiness that would be there, waiting for her. Dom banging on the door, refusing to leave. (What door? Where exactly was she planning to stay?) That was too dramatic, Dom didn’t do things like that—well, actually, he did, he had. His hands on her throat. That time he’d stolen her phone from her purse, made her crawl on the floor to get it back.
And what would he do now, now that he was really angry? She wondered this but knew she didn’t really have to wonder.
The party was only a few days away. This was just a waiting period for Simon to cool off, a pause. Then everything would go back to the way it was.
Alex found the pill bottle in her zip purse and shook a few out into her palm. If she brought them close, she could identify which were painkillers, which were sleeping pills. She swallowed a sleeping pill dry.
She and Simon had taken Ambien and stayed awake a few weeks ago. It had been his idea, Simon learning about the possibilities of recreational use and sexual enhancement from the news coverage of a golfer’s cheating scandal. Simon had promptly fallen asleep, but only after tearing up—a rare, frightening sight, Simon’s hand pawing at his wet eyes, Simon saying, his voice slurred, how proud he was of his daughter.
“She’s a great kid,” he said. “Really. Caroline’s had a tough go.”
He had been concerned Alex was somehow recording him.
“Don’t film this,” Simon blubbered, “don’t film this.”
That had been the last thing he’d said before his eyes had closed, his head falling back on the pillow. His features had shifted as Alex looked at him, his face going fragmented.
So many of the men had been scared she was recording them, setting them up in some way. It had never occurred to her—it already felt enough like a setup. And why would she have wanted evidence, why would she have wanted to see herself, watch her body move, hear her voice gone to some unnatural, faraway pitch?
* * *
—
Alex curled around her bag, waiting to feel tired. The lightning, wherever it was, had stopped. The ocean looked still, softened by mist. It was pretty at night, she decided, and probably too few people saw it like this, the indifferent beach empty of humans. It was just itself: a stark edge.
When the headlights appeared, they were distant enough that, at first, it seemed like a pair of flashlights. She sat up. Was this a sleeping-pill phantom, an optic jitter? But no, the lights got closer, and then there was the boxy shape of a car, the headlights making two columns in the mist. A car, headed slowly along the sand, headed in her direction. The pill was working, definitely. Her brain was lagging, each thought accompanied by its own woozy aura—the car, she understood, was coming for her. Coming to collect her. It was completely clear: he had located her, Dom. It seemed very obvious and very correct. Of course it had to happen like this.
For too long, she sat, frozen, watching the lights approach. And then she told herself, very calmly, to get to her feet.
The unsteady sand was a surprise, and she shouldered her bag and stumbled through the scratchy patch of tall grass and up and over the dune. She lay down, flat on her back, and who knew if she was hidden at all, and she stayed there, breathing hard, one hand on her bag, her other hand on her heart. The lights washed over the dune, over her body, brilliant as daylight—and then the lights were gone.
* * *
—
She didn’t want to stay on the beach after that. Walking felt more difficult than it had earlier, her shoes sinking in the sand. When the houses started getting farther away from the water, separated, now, by small scrubby forests, it was easier to know what to do. She found an opening in the dunes and followed a path for a while, a series of boards laid on the ground like railroad tracks. There was sand everywhere, sand in her shoes, sand trapped in the legs of her jeans. When there were enough trees, she left the path and found a clearing. Her bag was fine as a pillow, one of her dresses laid out on the ground, packing down the dune grass. She tried to tamp the grass down more. Wasn’t that where all the ticks were supposed to be hiding, in the grass? Better not to imagine what dark specks might find her in the night, tap into her bloodstream and funnel bacteria straight to her brain.
