Black Tide, page 4
There’s another picture in the room. This one is on the window sill, facing his desk. The picture is of a woman standing at the edge of the ocean at sunset. She’s radiant, laughing, the water splashing around her ankles, the wind blowing her sun-singed hair. It’s the same color as those strands in the comb.
I step up to the desk and look out the window. I’ve seen Mike in this same spot, on my walks. Lost in thought. Working on whatever his next thing is, I suppose.
My eyes drop to his laptop. Also coated in dust, but streaked recently by fingers. The lid isn’t closed all the way, as though he left in a hurry and didn’t quite push down hard enough. I don’t know why I do it—with all the other discoveries I’m making this morning, this should be the least of my concerns—but I carefully lift the lid with my index finger, as if it might be booby-trapped and start spewing poison gas. It’s probably password protected at the least; Mike hadn’t seemed too terribly concerned by my threat to sneak in and read about his next project.
The screen wakes up. It’s plugged into the wall, but running on battery, confirming that there’s an outage. Maybe that’s what Mike is away checking on. There’s no password prompt, no log-in. Just a word processor, open to a blank page. The document isn’t even titled. Well, that’s anticlimactic. Is he having a bit of a creative block? That would explain why he didn’t want to talk about it. I have the urge to start hitting Undo, out of spite, just to see if he’d been writing something, but right then there’s movement outside the window, and I slap the lid shut.
It’s Mike. Dressed in blue jeans and a flannel shirt on top of a plain gray tee, walking up the narrow beach path. He’s carrying a bright red bucket. From the way he’s struggling, it must weigh a hundred pounds. What did he do, go clamming? And what business does he have looking so normal? So not hungover, guilty, miserable? I just spun off the road and crashed through the side of his perfect little life—why does he look fine?
I stride from the room to put a proper damper on his day.
4
BETH
Mike stops when he sees me standing on the deck, my arms crossed and hips angled in that don’t even think of it way women are born knowing. For a moment, he looks ready to bolt, as if he completely forgot I was still in the house and thinks it’s Mrs. Mike standing before him, I know what you did last night in her stance and murder in her eyes. He shakes it off and breaks into an uncertain grin, like he’s still not sure I’m really here.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he pants. His energy is infuriating. But before I have a chance to knock that stupid grin into the sand, something comes streaking out of the grass behind him, a flash of gold and big brown eyes and slobbery pink tongue.
“Jake!” I scream. Oh shit the dog how did I forget about the dog it’s over everything is ruined you did it again just like always what is the matter with you
I drop to my knees and Jake crashes into me with the force of a tsunami, knocking me backward and drenching me with kisses. I’m about to cry. I’m not going to cry. I cannot believe I forgot this poor dog. I literally had one job to do. I’m going to cry.
“Everything is fine,” Mike reassures me, still looking around as if he’s not completely convinced of that. “The house is all in one piece. He got on the bed, and the couch, but nothing a good vacuuming won’t fix. He’s also been fed and went on a nice long walk with me.”
“You … when?” I gape at him.
Mike’s eyes drop to the ground at his feet. “I couldn’t sleep. There was a meteor shower last night. I went outside to watch and I heard him barking. I thought maybe he was upset, being alone, so I brought him over. He slept in the office. He’s a good boy.”
I can tell that isn’t the whole truth, no surprise there, but it does account for why Mike wasn’t around to save me from dying in my sleep. From being eaten by cloud jellyfish. Weren’t there meteors in my dream too? I feel like I remember that. Reality and dreamland briefly bleeding together, it must have been.
“You should have woken me up. I would have gone and got him,” I say. Except I did wake up. And then I went right back to sleep. Because I am literally the worst. Mike looks up at me strangely, and I wait for him to point this fact out too.
“I actually thought you had gone back,” he says instead.
“What do you mean?” I string the words together carefully, as if I’m under cross-examination. I thought I had last night’s weirdness all sorted out, and now here’s Mike, trying to poke holes in my story.
He frowns, as though this is something I shouldn’t have to ask. “I looked in on you,” he says, almost as if he’s trying to convince himself of this. “I was going to ask if you wanted to bring Jake over. You weren’t in bed. I went next door and knocked, since he was still barking, but you weren’t there either. When I came back, there you were, snoring away.” He stares at me expectantly, waiting for me to clear this up in a way that makes perfect sense.
“I was probably in the bathroom,” I say. I’m more concerned about the fact that Mike was able to waltz in and get Jake, meaning I left the house unlocked too.
“Hey,” Mike says, following my train of thought. “Don’t kick yourself. We had a lot to drink and got carried away. But it all worked out. Jake’s fine, the house is still in one piece, and my lips are sealed.”
“Yeah, speaking of keeping secrets,” I say, brushing sand off my shorts and reassuming my stance, anger renewed. Mike goes rigid. He already knows what I’m about to say. They always do. If his jaw wasn’t better attached, it would have dropped right off onto the ground. I fight off the image of Jake grabbing it and running away. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
He looks behind him, toward the beach, as if calculating the quickest method of escape, then back at me, his lips parted and trembling just slightly. He doesn’t know how much I know, or what I plan to do with it. But I don’t feel like waiting on him to figure it out.
“Are you married?” I ask, point-blank. He goes slack with relief, which is not the reaction I was expecting at all. What did he think I was talking about?
“No. I’m not,” he says.
“Then whose stuff is that inside?”
“What I mean is, I used to be married. I’m not anymore.”
“Yeah, heard that one before. Usually right before somebody comes home sooner than expected. A good laugh all around does not often follow.”
He slumps down into one of the chairs by the cold firepit. The sight of those charred logs, the black, dead embers, makes me wish we could rewind to last night. To that hour or two around the fire, watching the sunset. How could he find sunsets melancholy, anyway? Sunsets are when the magic happens. Morning, now that’s a bummer. Case in point.
He takes a deep sigh, thinking over his confession. As if I’m the one who’s going to be hurt by it. Although this time I might be. Obviously, I’m not some puritanical girl who’s going to go home and shower in holy water—surprising, I know—but I have to spend another week next door. If Mrs. Mike comes back and learns what happened, she might decide to tell my employers. I can already see the review: Homewrecker screwed the neighbor and forgot the dog, zero stars, do not hire, if seen call the police.
“She left,” Mike says flatly. “A year ago. Walked out that door right there and never came back. I’m sorry for not telling you. But you don’t have to worry about there being any drama. Any more than this, that is.”
I can’t tell if I believe him or not. I want to ask him why, what did he do, was there somebody else like me, was he pulling his dick out during casting sessions? But I have other questions. Namely: “And you just … kept all her stuff exactly the way she left it?”
“Yes.”
“That’s weird, man. And probably unhealthy. A year? And her dirty underwear is still in the clothes hamper?”
He nods sheepishly. “I know.”
“Were you hoping she’d come back or something? Pick up right where she left off?”
“No.” Mike makes a choked sound that might be either a suppressed laugh or a sob. He nudges one of the rusty hot dog forks with his shoe. “I keep meaning to clean up, move on. It’s easy to avoid doing the things you need to do out here. Especially when there’s no one around to light a fire under you.” He gestures at the empty, lonesome dunes. I guess I get that. There have been times this week where I’ve felt like I may as well have been on Mars. “Again, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. It just didn’t seem … relevant.”
“At least not until after you’d fucked me,” I say. I’m expecting him to retreat even further into himself, to become that husk I saw sitting here last night, drinking alone with his back to the sunset. Instead, he looks up at me, his eyes sharper and clearer than I’ve seen them.
“So you told me everything there is to know about Beth, then? Didn’t leave anything out so as not to spoil the mood?”
Normally, I would take this opportunity to thank him for looking after Jake, and for the champagne, and go back across that fence and make certain he never saw me again. I don’t need this. I’m not the one who imploded his life. It isn’t too often I crash into a house that’s already been burned to the ground, and that makes it easier than ever to walk away.
Except, for some reason, it’s not. There’s a quiet desperation in Mike’s eyes, behind the accusation. Like a part of him is pleading for me not to go, not to leave him alone with whatever ghosts are in that house. Which is far more responsibility than I signed up for.
Jake abruptly breaks away from me and goes to Mike, nuzzling his hands until Mike relents and scratches behind his ears. Jake swishes his tail contentedly, craning his neck to look back at me, firing guilt beams from those impossible brown eyes. Like how dare I even consider prying him away from such superior scritches. What a brat.
“Fine,” I say. “The least you can do is make me breakfast when the power comes back. A clam scramble should do it.” I walk toward the bucket he left sitting in the sand.
“It’s not clams,” Mike says, standing up and following me.
“Oysters? Even better.” But it isn’t oysters either. What it looks like is a bowling ball, washed in with the tide and coated in sand and barnacles. Or one of those glass floats you can sometimes find on the beach or in overpriced coastal home décor shops. But this one isn’t the usual soft green or blue color I’m used to. It’s black as obsidian, the sheen dull, and the barnacles seem to actually be a part of it, not just aquatic hitchhikers.
I glance up at Mike. That harrowed look is gone from his eyes and he’s actually grinning, relieved to have moved on to a topic with fewer sharp edges. Although some of the barnacle things do look pretty prickly.
“What is this?” I ask.
His grin widens. “It’s a meteorite.”
I stare down into the bucket. A whine rises from Jake’s throat, and he takes a step back, ears perking up.
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah. Like I was saying, there was a major shower of them last night. I could see impacts up and down the coast, and hear them hit the water. I went out at daylight to see if any of them washed ashore. Jake helped, he homed right in on the thing like he could sense that it didn’t belong anywhere near this beach. I honestly expected it to have disintegrated, but, well, look at it!”
None of the meteors in my dream were hitting. Just disappearing halfway between the sky and the ground. Maybe my champagne-drenched brain just didn’t pick up on the sounds of them landing. Or maybe that’s what the awful screaming was about. A duet with my phone and strange rocks shrieking through the atmosphere. Who knows what the cloud jellyfish was supposed to be.
By this point, Jake has become a puddle on the ground, tail whomping furiously. When he sees me looking at him, he whines and flops onto his side, as if the weight of his distress is just too much to bear. What’s his deal? Is he just mad that not all the attention is being directed at him?
For some reason, I kneel and reach into the bucket. Never touched a space rock before, so why not? Jake is on his feet in a flash, letting out a sharp bark at the same time Mike grabs my wrist.
“Don’t,” he says, squeezing hard enough to hurt. “Don’t touch it.”
“Is it still hot?” I ask, pulling my hand away. I don’t know, this isn’t my field of expertise. But I really don’t like the alarm in Mike’s voice, as if I were about to grab hold of a live power line.
“Not exactly, but it does burn. Kind of like getting chili pepper seeds on your hands. I had to use leather gloves to pick it up.”
“It stinks too. What is that?” I can’t identify the odor. It falls somewhere between rotten eggs and dead fish on the foulness spectrum, but also like nothing I’ve ever smelled before.
Wait.
That isn’t true. I have smelled it before. I smelled it last night. In my dream. What is even going on? No way I smelled this thing from the bedroom. Unless … If as many of them were falling as Mike says, and there was a wind off the water, the smell could have wafted inside when Mike opened the door to check on me.
These explanations are becoming painfully weak. I should just tell Mike about the dream. He could probably clear things up.
“It’s pretty ripe, isn’t it?” he agrees. “Sulfur and stardust.”
Another idea comes to me. One better than reaching into a bucket and fondling an extraterrestrial object with my bare hands.
“Hey, hold on a second.” I dart back into the house and grab my camera off the kitchen table, where I’d left it last night en route to the bedroom. Dad will flip out, seeing this. Even if he won’t remember it. “Makes a pretty good picture of the day, don’t you think?”
“There might be a bigger one a mile or two up the beach. I heard it hit. Felt like an earthquake. I think it even set off the tsunami warning system. You can just hear the siren in Gearhart from here.”
“I thought that was a car alarm,” I say.
“Those were going off too,” Mike says. “It was quite a show. I bet we can find it. That would make a hell of a picture.”
I really shouldn’t. I should take Jake home and clean the dog hair off everything, then clean myself and get back into my routine of reading and daydreaming and being a good little house sitter. I went off the road last night. Not as bad as I could have, that was lucky. I shouldn’t push it.
But a change of scenery might get the claws of that awful dream out of my head. It might do us both good. I just need to make sure the door is locked this time.
“And Jake can come with us,” Mike adds, sensing my reluctance. I look down at Jake. He angles his head to stare at me with hopeful eyes.
“Okay, deal. I’ll even pack us a picnic. Do you have any orange juice?”
* * *
Mike drives a Subaru. An Outback, three or four model years out of date. That surprises me. When I think of that woman in the picture, of movie deals and beach houses, I think of a convertible and sunglasses and windblown hair, not a family wagon. Maybe she took the Porsche when she left.
We have to jump-start it. The Subaru has been sitting neglected in the garage for so long there’s a black widow living under the hood. Right by the battery, of course.
“We could just take yours,” Mike suggests grimly, waving at my Toyota.
“Do you see that thing?” I scoff. “If it goes down onto the beach, that’s where it will stay until the end of time. And I can’t exactly afford a new car right now.”
I do the jumping. Mike doesn’t know anything about cars. I leave the Subaru idling to charge the battery and go inside to make lunch and call the bosses, to assure them all is well in case they heard about the meteors striking near their home. I don’t know what time it is right now in Vietnam, but it’s no real surprise they don’t answer, so I leave a pleasantly bubbly voice mail. The power is still out, to the whole development it seems, which makes me a bit apprehensive about leaving, but Mike reassures me that it’s just part of life on the coast, with high winds—and apparently the occasional meteor shower—knocking trees into poles. It’ll probably be back on when we return and I can spend the afternoon resetting clocks.
It’s past noon by the time we’re cruising along the sand, the windows down, a salty breeze twirling my hair. I’m so ravenous I have to resist devouring both sandwiches when I open the cooler for the jug of orange juice I’d emptied a bottle of Dom into. I shake it gently and help myself to a long sip. A little hair of the dog. No offense, Jake.
“Mimosa?” I pass the jug to Mike. He takes a swig and nods his approval. “Let me see your phone,” I demand, holding out my hand. “I want to Google this meteor shower. I think finding them whole like you did is actually pretty rare. Could be a big deal, who knows?” I remember a meteor or something years ago, flying over Russia. I saw the YouTube videos, the flash and bang scaring everybody shitless, blowing out windows. They found only tiny pieces of that one, I think. Maybe that’s all Mike found. What constitutes a “tiny piece” of space rock? What is it supposed to look like? And why would it leave a lingering burn when touched and stink like it was dredged from a sewage treatment plant? So many questions.
“I don’t have a cell phone,” Mike says. I keep my hand out, waiting for the punch line, but it doesn’t arrive. Neither does his phone.
“What?” His words in that order don’t make any sense to me. “Like, you didn’t bring one, or you don’t have one at all?”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s around somewhere. But it turns out if you stop paying the bill, they stop working. Who’d have thought?” He shrugs.
“Why would you stop paying the bill? Don’t you have people you need to talk to? An agent? Studio people?” I get that he comes here to be off the grid, but this is ridiculous. Hollywood doesn’t just stop because Mike wants a breather.
“Where’s your phone?” he deflects.
I sigh and fish it out of my pocket. “I just didn’t want to drain my battery,” I tell him, annoyed. I help myself to another drink, holding the phone up to the windshield. “How is there no service at all?”
