Beach read

28

Nine Months Later

“READY?” GUS SAID.

I clutched the advance copy of The Great Family Marconi against my chest. I suspected I would never be ready. Not for this book and not for him. Handing it over to the world was going to feel like falling headfirst out of an airplane, and I could only hope that something below decided to rise up and catch me. I asked Gus, “Are you?”

His head tilted as he considered. He had just finished the line edits phase of editing his book, so his manuscript was held together by binder clips, rather than the cheapo paperback binding used for the advance copies, which would arrive any day now.

In the end, my book had sold three weeks before his, but his had sold for a little more money, and both of us had decided to ditch the pen names. We’d written books we were proud of, and even if they were different from what we usually did, they were still ours.

It was strange not to see the little sun over waves, Sandy Lowe’s logo, on the spine where it had been for all my other books. But I knew my next book, Curmudgeon, was going to have it, and that felt good.

Curmudgeon, my readers would love. I loved it too. No more or less than I loved Family Marconi. But perhaps I felt more protective of the Marconis than I did my other protagonists, because I didn’t know how they’d be judged.

Anya had insisted that anyone who didn’t want to swaddle the Marconis in the softest silk and hand-feed them grapes is just swine with no need for pearls. Don’t you worry. Of course, she’d said that when forwarding the first trade review this morning, which had been largely positive apart from describing the cast as “unwieldy” and Eleanor herself as “rather shrill.”

“I think I am,” Gus answered and handed his stack of pages to me. He had no reason to worry, and I told myself I didn’t either. In the past year, I’d read both of his books, and he’d already read all three of mine, and so far, each other’s writing hadn’t left either of us repulsed by the other.

In fact, reading The Revelatories had felt a bit like swimming through Gus’s mind. It was heartbreaking and beautiful but very, very fu

I passed him my book and he gri

“It’s a good day,” Gus said. Sometimes he said that, usually when we were in the middle of something mundane, like loading the dishwasher or dusting the front room of his house in our nasty cleaning clothes. Since selling Dad’s house in February, I’d spent a lot of time in the beach house next door, but Gus came to my apartment in town too. It was over the music store, and during the day, while we were working in my breakfast nook, we could hear stray college students stopping by to test out drum sets they could never have fit in their dorms. Even when it bothered us, it was something we shared.

Truthfully, sometimes Gus and I liked to be grumps together.

At night, after the shop closed, the owners, a middle-aged brother and sister with matching bone gauges in their ears, always turned their music up—Dylan or Neil Young and Crazy Horse or the Rolling Stones—and sat on their back stoop, smoking one shared joint. Gus and I would sit on my tiny balcony above them and let the smells and sounds float up to us. “It’s a good day,” he’d say, or if he’d accidentally shut the balcony door with it locked again, he’d say something like, “What a fucking day.”

And then he’d climb down the fire escape to the weed-smoking siblings and ask if he could cut through the store to the second stairwell inside the building, and they’d say, “Sure, man,” and a minute later, he’d appear behind me with a fresh beer in hand.

Sometimes I missed the kitchen in the old house, that hand-painted white and blue tile, but these past few weeks as summer began anew, I’d heard the clamor and laughter of the six-person family that was staying in it, and I imagined they appreciated the touch as much as I ever had. Maybe someday, one of the four kids would describe those careful designs to his own children, a piece of memory that managed to stay bright as everything else grew vague and fuzzy.

“It is a good day,” I agreed. Tomorrow was the a

“I just want to sit on the beach and read,” he’d said, so that had been our plan for the last two weeks. We would finally swap our latest books and read them outside.

I was, of course, surprised he’d suggested it. While we both loved the view, I’d seen in the last year that Gus wasn’t lying about how little time he spent on the beach. He thought it was too crowded during the day, and at night, it was too cold to swim anyway. We’d spent much more time down there in January and February, walking out along the frozen waves, holding our arms out as we stood on the edge of the world, squinting into the dying light, our jackets rippling.

The lake froze so far out that we could even walk on it past the lighthouse my father had once ridden his tricycle into. And what was more, the water froze so high and the snow piled on top of it such that we could walk right up to the top of the lighthouse, stand on it like it was part of some lost civilization underneath us, Gus’s arm hooked around my neck as he hummed, It’s June in January, because I’m in love.

I’d had to buy a bigger coat. One that looked like a sleeping bag with arms. A fur-lined hood and rings of down-stuffed Gore-Tex all the way to my ankles, and still I sometimes had to layer sweatshirts and long-sleeved T-shirts under it.

But the sun—fuck, the sun was brilliant on those winter days, glancing off every crystal edge sharper than when it had first hit. It was like being on another planet, just Gus and me, closer to a star than we’d ever been. Our faces would go so numb we couldn’t feel the snot dripping down them, and when we got back inside, our fingers would be purple (gloves or no) and our cheeks would be flushed, and we’d flick on the gas fireplace and collapse onto the couch, shivering and chattering and too numb to undress and tangle up beneath blankets with any semblance of grace.

“January, January,” Gus would sing, his teeth clacking from the cold. “Even if there aren’t any snowflakes, we’ll have January all year long.”

I had never liked winter before, but now I understood. Sitting on a blanket on the sand tonight was nice, but we were sharing the sparkling waves with three dozen other people. It was a different kind of beauty, hearing shrieks and squeals rise between the crashing of water on shore, more like those nights I’d sat out in my parents’ backyard listening to the neighbor kids chasing fireflies. I was glad Gus was giving it all a try.

We read for a couple of hours, then staggered home in the dark. I slept at his house that night, and when I woke, he was already out of bed, the burble of the coffeepot coming from the kitchen.

We went back to the beach that afternoon and sat side by side, reading each other’s books again. I wondered what he would think of the ending to mine, whether it would feel too contrived to him or if he’d be disappointed I hadn’t truly committed to an unhappy ending.

But his book was shorter and I finished first, with a burst of laughter that made him look up, startled, from the page. “What?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I’ll tell you when you’re done.”

I lay on the sand and stared up into the lavender sky. The sun had started setting and we’d long since eaten our snacks. My stomach growled. I stifled another laugh.

Gus’s new book, tentatively titled The Cup Is Already Broken, was nothing close to a rom-com, although it did have a strong romantic thread woven into the plot and had come extremely close to a happy ending.

The protagonist, Travis, had left the cult with all the evidence he needed. He’d even talked Doris into leaving with him. They were happy, extremely happy, but for no more than a page or two before the world-ending meteor the prophet had been predicting hit the Earth.

The world hadn’t ended. In fact, Travis and Doris were the only two human casualties. It had missed the compound and hit the woods just off the road the two were traveling on. It hadn’t even been the meteor to kill them—it had been the distraction of it, Travis’s eyes skirting off the road he’d worked so hard to get onto.

The right tire had run off the shoulder, and when he’d cranked it back too hard, he’d hit a semitruck that was flying past in the other direction. Come to a screaming halt, crumpled like a stomped-on can.

I closed my eyes against the dusky sky and swallowed my laughter down. I didn’t know why I couldn’t stop, but soon the feeling hardened in my belly and I realized I wasn’t laughing. I was crying. I felt both defeated and understood.

Angry that these characters had deserved better than they’d gotten and somehow comforted by their experience. Yes, I thought. That is how life feels too often. Like you’re doing everything you can to survive only to be sabotaged by something beyond your control, maybe even some darker part of yourself.

Sometimes, it was your body. Your cells turning into poison and fighting against you. Or chronic pain sprouting up your neck and wrapping around the outsides of your scalp until it felt like fingernails sinking into your brain.

Sometimes, it was lust or heartbreak or loneliness or fear driving you off the road toward something you’d spent months or years avoiding. Actively fighting against.

At least the last thing they’d seen, the meteor streaming toward Earth, had distracted them because of its beauty. They hadn’t been afraid. They’d been mesmerized. Maybe that was all you could hope for in life.

I didn’t know how long I’d been lying there, tears trickling quietly down my cheeks, but I felt a rough thumb catch one and opened my eyes to Gus’s gentle face. The sky had darkened to a brutal blue. Seeing that color on someone’s skin would make your stomach turn. It was gorgeous in this context. Strange how things could be repellent in some situations and incredible in others.

“Hey,” he said tenderly. “What’s wrong?”

I sat up and wiped my face dry. “So much for your happy ending,” I said.

Gus’s brow furrowed. “It was a happy ending.”

“For who?”

“For them,” he said. “They were happy. They had no regrets. They’d won. And they didn’t even have to see it coming. For all we know, they live in that moment forever, happy like that. Together and free.”