The Shore, page 19
CHAPTER TWENTY
Margot
Go straight to bed, Margot’s college friend Tracy texted her from San Francisco. Tracy’s mom had scheduled hip surgery this week, and Tracy had to be there to help her. She couldn’t get away for the funeral, but she’d already sent Margot a ticket to SFO for October. I’m ok, in bed with a book, Margot texted back, a lie. But the zipper on her dress was stuck, so instead of dimming the lights and slipping into her pajamas she left the bright overhead light on and lay on top of the bed in her dress and scrolled and scrolled through the years-old posts on Brian’s Facebook page: the worst way to spend the last hours of this long good-bye.
She blurred past the last year and slipped into a sickening daze when she should have been forty-five minutes into an Ambien-induced sleep. This was not Nora’s magic, subversive journey through time in The Girl with the Long Shadow, to gain insight and wisdom, but a self-inflicted sabotage of any hope she would end this day in anything but a state of wide-awake despair.
She clicked on a new tab and wrote a post for the GBM Wives:
I’ve been on Facebook, which was designed by soulless coders who only understand the compulsive properties of human nature. I’m just floating along through this algorithm I’ve leaned into, ladies.
Look, here he is in a group shot with a beer in his hand, I’m leaning into that, and here we finished a 5K together, that one got a lot of likes, which are good, you want as many of those as you can get. Then you can also lean into looking at other people’s pictures, like the ones from last week, four perfectly nice people at Disney World, two old college friends doing CrossFit, well they’re unfriended now, whoops that was Brian’s account I was signed into, will they think he is a ghost now, a ghost who wastes time unfriending people on Facebook?
She was numbed out by the volume of words and years that streamed by in minutes, clicking through too fast to feel anything. She fell asleep this way, eventually, with the light on and her dress on and the laptop open.
She thought her GBM Wives post was funny and wry when she wrote it, but when she read it the next morning, she recognized an acerbic anger in it that she knew would settle in permanently if she didn’t resist it. When she read it with coffee instead of cabernet, she saw a sarcastic disengagement that she defaulted to, because to be honest, it sometimes worked.
Unfriending and ranting and scrolling for hours served her in the moment, to distract and deliver cheap nostalgia, to sidestep what she really needed to do next; and while she knew it would be easy to do this every day, she also knew that it would never give her or the girls what they really needed.
It took her three hours and four deleted drafts to type her next post, and every attempt felt awkward and incomplete. She couldn’t articulate a single thought without worrying more that she wasn’t getting them all down at once.
She remembered the first day after the hurricane that she saw all their destroyed houses, and how she’d packed up one box of books, a tote bag of the girls’ clothes, and one photo album from a shelf in their own bungalow. She’d stepped over their splintered screen door to slide the stuff into their car. Brian had grabbed a drill and a checkbook. They’d looked at their ridiculous, random pile of possessions in the backseat as they drove back over the bridge. When it was too much, you had to choose one thing, anything, to start with.
Margot wrote:
Brian’s parts of our stories contradicted mine or made them real. I already don’t trust myself to tell them all.
I always start the story of our first daughter’s birth by saying how it lasted twelve hours, but Brian would say, “Kid had her umbilical cord wrapped around her like a parachute harness when she came out! Margot was a champ, she was so loopy on the drugs afterward she asked everyone their favorite cocktails while they stitched her up.”
I always say, “Yeah, Evy came pretty quick, though,” and that was Brian’s cue to say, “Margot had a five-minute supercontraction on the couch that pushed the baby almost all the way out. I saw the kid’s head and we had one wild drive to the hospital before Evy decided to deliver herself about a minute after we got off the elevator!”
It’s like we traded off riding shotgun, pointing out the landmarks the other person missed, detouring, taking a better route.
What happened now, to the broken cadence of their how-we-met trivia, to the wry asides to their how-we-met-again monologue? Was she supposed to interrupt herself now and play both parts, or avoid introducing anyone new to the back catalogue of family stories?
He had been the one who called the town to get them to leave the tennis court lights on, so she could stay out there another hour. But she was staying out late whacking a tennis ball to no one two years after the hurricane because he had hurt her. She could try to write her next post about that.
Margot scooped up the dress she’d worn to the funeral off the chair. She’d finally figured out a way to peel it off without unzipping it, yanking it straight up over her head and pulling in one elbow at a time. Crumpled under her Spanx and wedged into the seam of the chair cushion, she found one of Brian’s old Post-its, with the word ember scribbled on it.
Ember was the last glow in the dark after the riot of flames. Ember didn’t demand you do anything else but sit with it and watch until it was gone. Ember still emitted warmth for an hour.
Ember said, Don’t leave me alone. In the embers you stay and huddle closer together as the heat sinks into the ground. When ember went away it wasn’t all at once, but gradual, until it was safe to sleep or to leave.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Liz
“Carl made everyone sign this card Diane made? Or maybe it’s more of a book?” It was midmorning on Sumner Avenue, two days after her dad’s funeral. Gabe handed Liz a huge handmade card held together by ribbons and silver twine, with hot-glued bead-encrusted clouds, a brown felt cross, and a pocket with a prayer card and a laminated Psalm 23 inside on the front. He shrugged, helpless at its ridiculousness, but required to deliver it.
While the other employees signed the card (So sorry –CJ and Really sorry –Nicole), Gabe said, Carl had brought him into his office, shoved him into a chair, and said, “She still your girlfriend? What kind of piece of shit doesn’t at least show up to—”
“I’m sorry,” Liz said, interrupting him. She pressed her face against his shirt, and she forced two big sobs back into her body before she pulled away and wiped her face with a beach towel. “I just wanted a different kind of summer.”
“Hey,” he said. He pulled her back toward him. “I know.” She thought, Hey, don’t say you know. Hey, have you ever had to really take care of someone? Hey, what have you already lost?
She wouldn’t understand for a long time the unsubtle signals people would give to show you what they had already lost: the girls who would excuse themselves at weddings during the toasts, the mothers who would post colored ribbons on social media around the same time each year, the brothers who would organize huge 5K teams for a particular cause or a cure with the fervor and coordination of army generals.
She rearranged the display umbrellas, then took a deep breath before she tried to go ahead with her plan: offer a quick apology, and then break up with him. Be the one to do it so he wouldn’t have to be the jerk who dumps the girl with the surprise dead dad. Recite her practiced lines. “Uh, anyway, I had a really really great time with you this summer but it’s probably, you know, for the best if we don’t… see each other? Anymore.”
She wanted to escape to the backlit boardwalk with him for a little longer, to have a few more nights in their alternate reality. But she also wanted to choose what he knew about her and who she was when she was with him, and that was impossible now. She definitely did not want to endure some awkward slow fade from him. So she told what she thought was one last lie and waited for him to say, Hey, no, but okay, if that’s what you really want then sure.
Before this summer, lies did not come easy to Liz. She always blurted out hurried confessions: I wrote that field trip permission slip myself and signed my mom’s name. It had always felt better to face the small punishment than to feel the hollowing out of her stomach whenever she lied.
But she felt no shame for this preemptive breakup, or for the weeks of keeping her dying dad from him. What kind of bullshit rule required you to reveal the worst thing that had recently happened to you? What kind of guy wouldn’t be grateful for the chance to skip spending the end of summer watching a girl ugly-crying on the sky ride?
Adults got to go to dive bars and cheat on each other in booze-fueled one-night stands, and what did teenage girls get, anyway? What were they required to give? He wasn’t entitled to her whole it’s-rough-all-over-Ponyboy story if it felt so much better for her not to give it to him. If they kept hanging out, then she had to.
“Wait, was that just you trying to dump me?” Gabe asked. “Were you gonna give a quick half-assed speech and then hope I went away?”
What was happening here? This was not the plan. She would say it again, a different way, the way she did when customers said the umbrellas were too expensive or they wanted a refund.
“Well, I am, I am sorry,” she said. “Not half-assed. Actually sorry. For lying, and everything. But yeah, that was, I mean what I’m saying is, that you know it is probably better if we stop seeing each other. You know, so it’s not weird.”
She counted out the cash in her fanny pack and checked her watch, even though she knew what time it was because there was a giant clock behind his head.
“I’m a dollar short,” she said. “Can you tell Carl I’m a dollar short? When you see him? I would, but you’re gonna go right by his office.”
He looked at her with his head cocked to the side, like he was about to say something but changed his mind. But he didn’t leave yet. Why?
Did she need to say this three ways? Four? It was over because she said it was over. There were other things she could say that would be mean enough to make him accept the terms of her little speech: You can just go find another underage girl to fuck. I wouldn’t want to bother you with anything besides getting drunk and talking about your band and, like, the one single philosophy class you attended before you dropped out of the third-worst state school in Jersey.
But instead she said, “I have to get back to work.” When he slung his backpack over his shoulder and walked up the ramp to the boardwalk, he didn’t look back. She dragged another umbrella across the beach.
An hour later, the ocean was at high tide, churning up seaweed and clamshells across the beach, dumping a little girl in a ruffled pink swimsuit onto the shore to rub the salt out of her eyes and then go careening right back in. In the humid wind, the sunblock and sweat stung Liz’s eyes.
“You got ice cream here?” a guy in a jogging suit and backward baseball cap asked her. She pointed to the sign without saying a word: SUN & SHADE UMBRELLA RENTALS in big yellow letters. “You’re a cute one,” he said, still standing there like he expected either an ice cream cone to materialize or for her to say, “Thanks, let’s go get a room at the Topsider.”
She planted twelve more umbrellas. Three different customers insisted on planting their own, even though she told them she was supposed to. The easiest thing on their egos was to let them do it, then come back and say you were adjusting it for wind and do it right.
It was good to be so busy, good to be alone between customers and reciting her lines about prices and deposits when they showed up. Evy and Margot were both working today too, Margot on E&E stuff, and Evy at Sal’s. Liz glanced down at the group text thread with her mom and sister, but it was empty today. There was nothing to say to each other in the next seven hours of their work dipping apples in caramel, dragging umbrellas around, and sending emails, was there?
She ate the bag of cheese cubes and flower-shaped fruit left over from the post-funeral buffet and peed in the ocean while holding her fanny pack of cash above her head between customers. Carl finally came by to give her a real bathroom break and brought her a St. Christopher medal, which she shoved in the front pocket of her backpack.
She never stopped moving, and so the idea of her dad saying Go get ’em, kid! at the last curve of the track with his hands up like Rocky, and the idea of her dad driving with the windows open saying We’re going on a mission to make the ordinary upkeep of all the E&E houses seem so important, never found even a second to slip through. Even when it got slow, she shoved the trash into bags to make room for more trash tomorrow so she wouldn’t think of Uncle Pete, alone on the deck after the funeral doing a cheers with his beer into the air to no one.
Margot
She chose a cream-colored shift dress and a bright scarf to wear to the meeting with her realtor friend Deborah Ellsworth. Deborah had sold them plenty of E&E houses over the years, and connected them with Carol and her Victorian back when they were starting out, and now she would help Margot sell every last one of those houses.
Margot reapplied red lipstick after she finished her LaCroix. Deborah wore a golf shirt and shorts. She had sunburned cheeks and short white-gray hair, and she was not sentimental.
Let Deborah Ellsworth listen to buyers criticize the paint colors or kitchen layouts so they could get a better deal; let Deborah break the news that there was no way Margot was fixing anything broken in these E&E houses before she sold them.
Margot’s left hand still felt unbalanced. She traced a dry smooth ring of skin where her wedding band and emerald engagement ring had been. She knew if she didn’t take them off today, then she would wear them much longer than she wanted to. It was the same with this appointment with Deborah; it didn’t have to be today, and it absolutely had to be today.
While Deborah Ellsworth excused herself to gather some documents, Margot browsed real estate listings in Galesta, Pennsylvania, on her phone, a place she’d discovered when she Googled “best small towns in America.” It sounded like the next best thing to shoving yourself through the TV screen to live inside an idyllic movie set. A few Hallmark movies had actually been filmed there.
I think this is the one, she posted to the GBM Wives, along with a link. The house was a Craftsman style with a wide front porch, a neat square of grass in the front yard, and a bright-red door. She imagined it in the fall, when children in Elsa and Captain America costumes would meet Margot on the porch. She would sit on the swing and sip hot cider, handing out candy. In the winter, snow would settle into white drifts, her breath would freeze into clouds, and the air would smell like pine and soil. Every spring: that sudden relief and joy she remembered from living somewhere landlocked in college, when March finally blew gusty across the farms and the crocuses burst through the brown, cold earth, when the April mud teemed with its slowly warming life emerging from the thaw, when the rivers rose after the snowmelt and washed away the final hunks of ice along their banks.
Galesta had a small high school and grocery store, a cobblestone Main Street with coffee shops and candle shops whose doors jingled with little bells when you walked in. There was a small college nearby, and its website listed plays, music, and lectures open to the community. It was five hours west, far enough from Seaside, and pictures of the annual Pumpkin Festival and parade were full of grinning strangers.
In Galesta, she and the girls could make fires, they could go to the football games on Friday night and to the café where the waitress would know their order by heart. Margot could buy white bedspreads and white dishes. She could substitute-teach until she was ready to apply for a full-time position, showing up every day to a room full of new faces, following the handwritten directions left by their real teacher, and adapting to whatever subject and grade level she was assigned to. Something new every day.
Yes, they would miss that softening air when you drove over the bridge into Seaside, but they would feel a new lightening in their hearts when they crossed a state line.
Margot peeked in to see Deborah halfway through copying a stack of papers, and she opened her own laptop. After the link to the house, Margot wrote to the GBM Wives:
I will say to my daughters, I know this is so sudden, but couldn’t it also be beautiful?
Evy could be voted homecoming queen and ride through town in a red pickup truck. Liz could get a job at the diner on weekends, join the track team again and run along the river.
I want to reclaim a version of myself when I believed I was making a series of choices I had a say in, when I was sure that I was in charge of the path I was plotting.
If I stay in Seaside, I will lose the tiny grain of myself buried under the layers of the life I built with Brian, I WILL lose this window of time and space opening a little between this anesthetized aftermath and the approaching pain—I know it’s coming.
I took off my ring today.
If not right away, then when? I’m leaving tomorrow to buy this house.
Deborah returned to the office with a calendar, with a list of comps, with many documents and ideas about how to make them both a bunch of money. Margot half-listened, nodding along, until Deborah said, “I’m excited to sell that Victorian property!”
Margot imagined the shiny-Audi-driving bankers who had rented it signing the mortgage between their other meetings, imagined the house empty on the weekends when those bankers were somewhere else. She imagined them forgetting to water the red geraniums.
Margot said, “Let’s talk about those C and J Street properties, Deb.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Liz
The wind switched to cooler blasts from off the Atlantic. A faraway storm could move in and pick up speed; a static bright-blue sky could turn black in a minute and throw down bolts of lightning before you could take shelter.
