A bout a mile down on Fire Beach sat a former turtle factory that was now Stephen’s rental; things had worked out for him after all. These days the turtles were protected, were not systematically processed, but instead killed off frequently by illegal slaughter and theft of eggs from the nests (not to mention the unkind forces of nature). From the eggs that did hatch, baby turtles emerged and made a mad dash (turtle style) to the relative safety of the sea, but as seagulls attacked them on their perilous journey, only a select few actually made it.
Stephen imparted this while mixing rum and tonics; he told Alice how he rented this near-ruin of a place for next to nothing. “The industry here was sugar,” he explained, “but when the water table dried up, the families that stayed on survived by hunting sharks and turtles. From sugar to meat—quite a narrative.”
Alice nodded, imagining those turtle eggs in peril, just like the swan eggs at home right this minute hidden in the reeds, weathering the cold. While the turtles would make a beeline toward the waves, the swans would waddle straight into the marsh, their brown feathers densely tufted, their eyes fogged with sleep. She asked, “Do you stay here every year?”
Stephen nodded, with a look that implied that besides the old factory being in a dream of a spot, near the ocean but set back quite a bit, there was a more abstract reason that he liked staying here, a reason on which he didn’t elaborate. Inside was nothing but a big open space with one couch, two chairs and a table, a functional bathroom and kitchen. “It could use a paint job in here, though,” he said. “It could use any number of things.”
He put a lime in her drink and handed it over with a very winning smile.
“Thanks,” she said, not waiting a moment to take a big sip. When she’d ridden up to his door on a rickety bicycle she’d borrowed from Skinny Karen, not twenty minutes ago, she’d been startled by seeing him in the doorway—the way his face changed when she stepped into the room, undoing itself by degrees with a look she’d have to call pleasure.
Alice watched him bear down on a fat clove of garlic with the flat surface of a knife, and she stepped out into the middle of the room, where the cement floor was covered in cracked and dirty paint and the lighting was lambent and heavy with shadow. The sun had just set. Though the ocean certainly made its familiar crashing sounds, the thick brick walls kept the volume down. Due to those walls it was nearly cold inside, which made Alice feel as if she were yet again somewhere altogether different, having entered not only a new house but another country as well.
He ran his hand over his head and said, “Oh, shit, the garlic,” rubbing his eyes with the back of his sleeve. He threw the hastily chopped garlic into an already steaming oil-slicked pan and stirred it all around. Smoke rose riotously. With his broad movements came a certain heat, a sensation that was—as much as anything—unexpected. Next to him Alice felt for a brief moment how she rarely ever felt: refined. And not delicate in the way Gus teased about, not easily hurt, but rather someone worth considering carefully. When Stephen looked up at Alice, she could see for a split second what a difficult time he was having, concentrating on cooking. She wondered if he cooked regularly, if he enjoyed it, if he hated it and was trying to impress her—the latter being, of course, the more exciting if ungenerous fantasy. “Are you hungry?” he asked, while pushing fish around in a pan. He didn’t look like much of a cook, but at least he wasn’t all showy about it.
“Starved,” she replied—a lie. She didn’t know what she was doing here. While having a qualified charm, he didn’t seem like a particularly trustworthy person. He might think that because she accepted his dinner invitation, this meant she wanted to have sex. And he wasn’t even particularly attractive. Or he was attractive but she couldn’t feel attracted to him. He was too old. He was too divorced. He was too … much. And so she didn’t want any part of eating, but she was hungry for each moment before it happened, like being hopped up on too much caffeine. She’d increasingly felt this way since her father’s death, and though she’d tried to write it off to grief, to Gus, to traveling, even to too much caffeine, she was less sure now how she’d ever felt different, exactly. In order to slow her heartbeat, to keep her anxieties at large, Alice focused on the layers of peeling paint on the floors, the smell of the salt and burning oil and the way Stephen put the dinner out on the table like a fry cook on speed. “Relax,” Alice told him, followed by the crunching of an ice cube between her teeth, the suppression of a cough, a laugh.
“I’m trying to decide if I can,” he said.
They ate seared tuna with garlic and sesame oil, white rice, sauteed string beans, arugula and avocado, warm braided bread. Alice kept reminding herself to ask him where he’d found all of the ingredients. The rice and string beans were overcooked, but the tuna was perfect and the bread was even better. Across the table Stephen was eating his meal with perfect ease; in fact, he was shoveling it in. He dipped bread in oil and the oil dripped on the table, on his shirt. He talked with his mouth full. Alice had barely made any progress. It was a question—as were most meetings of new company and good food—of power. Who was unself-conscious and unrestrained, who could sit still and enjoy more than one thing at a time. Alice took a bite of rice, a garlicky leaf of arugula, and was instantly full. She was losing. She put down her fork and had a long sip of wine. Wine she had no problem with. Wine she could do. “This is good,” she said. “This is really good.”
He looked as if he was going to laugh. It was the same look that kept passing across her own face, she knew, and she wondered if he was mimicking her.
“So,” she said, making a point of eating a string bean or two, “what do you, urn, do?”
“When I’m not here sitting on my ass watching whales, you mean?”
Alice nodded.
“I’m a stonemason. Or I guess you could say I have a stone-masonry business. I build walls, fireplaces—I still do some sculpture sometimes, which is what I did before I got sick of being poor, but now I make all kinds of custom pieces for rich artsy-craftsy New Englanders. I get out to northern California— they like me out there—and Seattle every now and then. My crew is a nightmare but not dull. There are twelve guys total who are in and out of each other’s rock bands and each other’s girlfriends’ beds. And getting my stone is like a second job—in the middle of the night on Manhattan piers, in vacant lots off the BQE—”
“You’re from New York?”
He nodded. “I’ve been living upstate, on the Massachusetts border, but it’s honestly getting me down, living up there.”
“Winter is pretty grim anywhere,” Alice said. “Not here though,” she said, and was surprised to hear herself say it, to hear what it implied.
“My ex-wife was a cat person. She moved out of the house about a year ago, taking her five cats with her, but it still smells like them no matter how hard anyone cleans. I’m going to need to move, regardless of the winters. I hate cats.”
“So do I.” Why had she said that? She wasn’t wild about cats, it was true, but what she wanted to know was why he’d married both women, who had left whom, and if he thought he was doing the right thing each time. “What I really don’t understand are birds and fish as pets,” is what she went on to say. “My brother went through a fish phase, then a bird phase for a while … they always seem out of sorts and lonely.”
He put down his fork and looked at her for a second before casually saying, “And what about you? Are you out of sorts and lonely?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean,” he said, his voice all gentle and wrong, “you seem …”
“Well?” she said tightly, her face burning.
“Who … do you mind if I ask who you followed here?”
Alice looked at this man, whom she couldn’t possibly take seriously a man who most likely cheated on his wives, bought materials for his business off the backs of trucks. A man to whom she couldn’t possibly tell the truth. “My brother,” she said.
“Your brother?”
“Yes. What?”
“No, I just thought, you know—”
“No, no one like that. I came for my brother. I followed him here—it’s a long story, and he hasn’t been particularly welcoming.”
“Are the two of you close?”
“We were. I still feel like we are. He’s … you know, he’s my brother.”
“I have a sister,” he said. “Her name is Jill. She’s an acupuncturist. I see her once every few years.”
“Do you let her stick you with needles?” Alice asked, finishing her piece of bread.
“I have, actually,” he said. “Big mistake.”
“Not close, I take it.”
He shook his head. “But we never were. Siblings are strange that way, don’t you think? Some people define themselves so clearly as a brother or a sister, and for others it’s always an afterthought. When you were kids did you spend time together willingly?”
Alice nodded. “Willingly,” she said, “yeah. Our father worked all the time, and our mother … she was often somewhere far away without any of us.”
“She went away a lot?”
“You could say that. She was more of an escape artist. But she couched it in all sorts of valiant reasons. There was always some opportunity in a warm climate during cold weather, and somehow these opportunities rarely made themselves available during school-sanctioned vacations.”
She might not have been able to eat much but she sure could talk; she was on a roll. The time Charlotte told them the wrong flight information, and her father, her brother, and Alice camped out in the airport overnight. The Israeli flamenco dancer whom Charlotte brought to live with them for two weeks who cried every night in her sleep. The night her father was honored at the Pierre Hotel, and the speaker—a beloved dean of studies at a prominent university—forgot every one of his notes and tried to be cute about it, and how Charlotte icily humiliated the dean before the stunned and tweedy crowd.
“She was unbelievable,” Alice said, still awed, despite herself, at her mother’s command of the crowd, how her rudeness was indeed remembered as righteous when Alice, years later, overheard the story being told by a colleague of her father’s.
Stephen nodded, and she was suddenly embarrassed that she’d felt such a need to explain. Her father was fond of a certain expression: Never complain, never explain—always said as a joke, but Alice knew that in a way he meant it. He admired those who lived life without making too much of it. His stories were of old men he met at various conferences and tennis courts, men who got up day after day, attended to their work, their properly. Stoicism was commended; analysis was not. How else could he have lived with her mother, a person who felt entitled not to explain a day of her life?
“Your brother—he didn’t hurt you or anything, did he?”
“How do you mean? Like, is he violent?” she asked. She shook her head with appropriate vehemence.
“He just wants you to leave him alone?”
She nodded, difficult as it was—and it was difficult, admitting the mundane truth.
“Well, maybe you should,” Stephen said.
“Right,” she said, “of course. You know, that had never occurred to me, thanks.”
“You’re a pretty angry person,” he said. “Do you know that?”
She looked at him. He was a big man who’d exhausted himself cooking a meal; he had callused hands and flat blue eyes that were the color of a five-in-the-morning sky, nothing too drastic about them. “Yes,” she said, “I do.”
“Well, I have my moments too,” he said. “So you can just go ahead and be angry and not pretend otherwise.”
“That sounds fair,” she said, surprised by her own laughter.
“I have to tell you, I’m less angry by the minute,” he said. “You are very good company. Do you know that? You’re easy to be with.”
“You make me sound like a dog.”
“A dog is very far from what I mean to say.”
“Well, thank you,” she said awkwardly. “Thanks.”
“Are both your parents dead?”
She nodded.
Just when Alice began to wonder if he would ever simply react, Stephen looked up into the light and sneezed. It was a funny sneeze, a loud one. He seemed, if anything, guileless.
“Bless you,” Alice said, and as she looked at Stephen across the long-since-untouched food, across the two uneven candles burning away, she couldn’t help thinking of how he looked like a man who’d had a beard at many points in his life. She couldn’t stop the image of how, sitting across from him—her frizzy hair, her gauzy shirt, and her sun-freckled face—the two of them might have been the beachy kind of couple of which Alice hardly ever thought she’d be a part. Lazy people, scandalously mellow. He’d grow herbs and she’d smoke them. They’d have adorable towheaded children doomed to do nothing but surf and fish and end up managing restaurants with names like Cafe Ole! But change the focus ever slightly and they are exciting—these people sitting in an abandoned turtle factory— they are exciting, private, and impossible to pin down. Her hair is streaked gold from days in the sun; she’s an exotic cook, a poet, a goddess of domestic sex. He is fearless, patient; he is forever capable of having a good time.
He stood up from his chair, and when he did he looked as though his body were unraveling, as if those careless arms and barrel chest somehow weren’t completely familiar to him. He was a healthy, flush-faced guy, but something about him suggested injury. Alice was so ridiculously certain of this—her certainly verged on arrogance—and she was deep into that kind of abstracted thinking when her heart quit its song and dance routine and her face began to cool down. There was a sense of acceptance when he came over to where she stayed seated in her chair. He knelt down as if he had something to tell her, bone-crackingly slow and deliberate. But there was, of course, nothing whatsoever to say. They were going to kiss. He was going to kiss her. She smelled salt and sweat and cotton, the bitter note of garlic on his fingers worn away by limes.
“I should take you back,” he said.
Alice almost choked. “Oh,” she said loudly. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
“For?”
“I’ve been talking and talking and I’ve overstayed my welcome,” she said, her face burning from shame.
He shook his head. “You must be tired, though.”
“You’re right,” Alice said. She felt about as tired as a stock jock pumped full of coffee hitting the trading floor. She rose from her chair, clearing her plate, and he watched her. “What?” she asked.
“Just leave it,” he said, his voice deflated, as if how she’d picked up her dish and brought it to the sink had suddenly broken his heart. She felt herself now enacting her brother’s version of Alice-as-delicate-flower. She had been, after all, the type of young girl who read books on blindness, scarlet fever, who preferred playing Hospital to the Bionic Woman. She still admitted to closing her eyes when she went running now and then, just to see how long she could last. She ran the water briefly over her empty wineglass, turned around from the sink, and he was right there. They stood looking at each other for two silent seconds, and those two seconds were enough.
“I’ll drive you,” he said, and he seemed … she didn’t know what he seemed. Blood rushed to the top of her head, and as Alice felt the sugar rush of all the world’s dime-store candy, the room—with its absurdly sepulchral quality—it softened; it moved.
When he pulled up in front of the miserable motel, neither of them made an attempt to get out. There was something in the car with them, some debilitating seriousness, suddenly, and Alice couldn’t take it any longer. “Thank you,” she said, opening the door, “for dinner.”
“Oh,” he said, as if she’d spoken prematurely. “Oh, well, okay then. I hope you’re surviving here.” He gestured in that same loose way, as if he was unsure what to do with the gesturing hand.
“I am.” Her door was ajar and the car was beeping, sounding as impatient as Alice felt.
“Don’t go yet,” he said. He asked.
She closed the door. They watched a middle-aged couple proceed to the doorway and enter in silence, looking plastered. They watched how, from inside the proprietress’s apartment above the market, the glow of a television flickered and changed. “What?” Alice asked, irritated but reeled in.
“I don’t know,” he said, looking at her.
“Well …” she said, and again she felt that sudden rush of laughter. “Let me know if you find out,” she said, and, maintaining a half smile, Alice opened the door again and, after inelegantly retrieving the bicycle from the backseat, said goodnight. Her back was turned but she could hear that he hadn’t yet driven away. Once in her room she changed, brushed her hair punishingly and drank a bottle of water, all the while jumping at the slightest sounds after she heard Stephen’s car drive off. She tried to sleep and couldn’t sleep, and when the sky lightened slightly outside the window and she heard trucks barreling by, when an army of dogs began howling at the roosters, Alice rose from the bed and slipped out of her room, out of the sleeping motel.
The streets were still dark when she set out riding. The darkness was unsettling and seemed to last forever, but when she crested the hill, growing closer to the domes, there was no more bluish moonlight, no more night at all. The day was coming, tawny and dry, but she’d stared so long in the distance that the dawn came infuriatingly slowly—finally separating the ocean and the atmosphere—as if the horizon were being sketched in by a meticulous and competitive draftsman. The sky was soft and nearly vacant—the belly of a pigeon, her mother, a dove.
What answers do you think you will get from him?
August? she asked her mother—that muted horizon, that irascible source of light—or Stephen?
Her mother was still around. She was still calm in the face of foreigners, finding better places to stay. She was, however, fading.
Alice watched the sun stroking the purple hammered into the sky like one long night of bruises. She heard her mother say, You ‘re always on the outside.
Shh, Alice told her mother. Just be quiet and watch me. Do you think you can do that?
And she took a matchbook from her pocket. She realized she wasn’t moving any closer to the domes as she watched the tip of the sun emerge—a rare blood orange—all the while lighting matches. She dared the flames to crawl up the blond wood, dropping them to the dirt when the fire rose too high. That’s no habit—Cady had said a million years ago, poor pretty Cady with her blond orphan’s glow—that’s a dare.
Not five minutes after she was back in her clammy motel room, after stripping off her dusty clothing, the door shook with knocking.
“Alice?” What she could swear was Stephen’s voice came muffled through the door.
“Hello?” Alice said, pulling back on the shirt and pants with a hard-edged hurry. “Yes?” She opened the door with too much force, and greeted him too loudly, asking if something was wrong. He took her by the wrist and pulled her outside, closing the door behind her. “You need to see this,” he said. They hadn’t touched before that—not even to shake hands, not even by mistake.
“What?” she half asked, half declared. She was too surprised and too unsettled to guess what he was doing. The wind had come up outside and everything felt tender. It was still very early morning. She followed him to his car, piecing together just how much time had actually passed since he’d dropped her off in the very same spot, and as he drove in silence—not angry as far as she could tell, not upset—she wondered what he was up to. He wasn’t giddy or smiling, and he was speeding. He sped through the huerta and up to the dunes, and when they exited the parked car he gestured her toward the waves, getting far ahead. He said something that melted into the wind, but she was too amazed by how the clouds overhead were blowing out their candles, spreading fat, pearly streams through the dawn.
“Would you look!” he yelled, as if he’d been saying it all along. “Do you see it?” he shouted. “Do you?”
It was as stupefying as it was beautiful. A whale was entirely up and out of the water, hurling itself toward the sky by what looked like sheer dint of will. The sky was a wash of faded color photographs—a boxful of sun-bleached days spilled before their eyes. The pigments were not pulsing but spreading out, easing into light and stretching out every step of each possible spectrum. Purple the color of a pontiff’s robe blossomed into lilac and burned itself down to a gunmetal rose. The whale’s tail flipped hard under its enormous gray body and it fell with a smack, straight backward and under. Just like that, and then it was gone, leaving an immense splash in its place. The air seemed to tremble as if a missile had launched instead of a leviathan, and Stephen looked like a comedic prophet with windblown hair and cartoon amazement for eyes. Alice looked from him to the sky, to the profound absence of the whale. There they were—Stephen and Alice—virtual strangers and mutually proud, as if they’d both given birth to the experience, as if it were really theirs.
“What was that?” Alice yelled, laughing, not taking her eyes off the sea.
“That was the largest, highest-jumping whale I’ve ever seen.”
They made their way up the beach a little to sit on the cold sand. “That,” Alice said, “was spectacular.”
“The timing,” he breathed. “You know, they’re also very affectionate,” he said. “They spend most of their time nuzzling up to each other.”
“How friendly.” She pointed to the wake near the shore, where another whale’s back bobbed in the shallows, a coal-blue slope amidst the clamorous tide, rubbing itself on the sand. “Why is it doing that?”
“It’s anyone’s guess,” he said, “but most likely it’s for pleasure.”
Alice suddenly felt her lack of sleep. Her brother had more than likely gotten a strange woman pregnant. She still didn’t know what had happened to Cady The more she stayed here, the less she knew. She didn’t even know this man’s last name. “Why do you think it feels this way?” Alice asked.
“What, seeing the whale?”
“I feel almost depressed now.”
“Everything tends to feel a little small afterward, doesn’t it?”
“But it’s not like we did anything. At least I didn’t. You, at least, came and got me. I just happened to see a whale.”
He smiled. His teeth were a bit yellowed—evidence of what Alice guessed was a vice or two. But with his smile, she realized, came an axis tilting, a cranky gear that settled into place. “You feel lucky,” he said.
“Exactly. That and the shock of it, the surprise.”
“I knew you’d feel this way. How did I know that?”
Alice shrugged.
“I feel old,” he said, reaching out suddenly for the sleeve of her sweater and taking a loose thread between his fingers. “Next to you, of course, I am.”
“No, I’ve always looked older,” Alice said, and in a burst of self-consciousness, she rushed to speak up. “I’m getting sun-spots, wrinkles, I’m telling you.”
“You?” he said, and then his eyes saw past her, as if seeing into another place. “No,” he said, shaking his head, “anyone who looks at you and sees that… well, they’re not seeing.”
“I’m thirty-one,” she blurted.
He pulled back, looking her over with a clearly appreciative eye. “You’ll always look like this. I can tell,” he said, and turned away before shrugging. He picked up a piece of dried chartreuse seaweed. He held it carefully in his callused hands, turning it over and over until it fell away.
She could barely breathe. “Thank you,” she said, the way her mother taught her to say it, not followed up by any jokes or denials.
“How did your father die?” he asked, and she was both irritated and relieved at the shift in conversation.
Don’t go all maudlin now, she could hear her mother say.
“Cancer?” she said flippantly. “Heartbreak?”
“Your mother went first?”
Alice heard the familiar line come out of her mouth: “My mother died in a fire when I was sixteen.”
“Where?” he asked. His hand shielded his eyes from the sun, casting a dark, hard shadow.
“Home,” Alice said, watching him closely. “At home.”
Stephen put his hand on her back—a rock atop paper, no more, no less. The waves beat on the shore, the day was heating up, and at first she thought she was imagining it, that it was the wind or simply her own tired mind, but Stephen’s fingers curled out of a fist. They undid themselves in the manner of his long-winded physicality, and they pressed into her back— his palm strong enough to hold her, should she want to let go, should she want to just close her eyes and fall. But she didn’t fall. She didn’t move at all. Before she spoke again, before he did either, she wanted to pay attention. She sat almost primly and enjoyed this heady quiet, replete with possibility. Alice knew she had always been too self-conscious, that Gus was often right about that, but she also knew that sometimes there was great value in knowing that life was composed of moments that turned without fanfare, as quickly and quietly as milk.
She turned to him, and when she looked into Stephen’s eyes she realized she was no longer able to look at anything else. The same ocean was churning away, and it would, Alice knew, keep on long after both of them were gone. But even the ocean seemed less authentic than his eyes right in front of her, which were more tired than she had noticed before, the blue undercut by ash. She was holding on to the back of his neck, not so much holding on as she was trying to pull him apart and see what she could find. Alice bowed her head and when she looked up she said, “I need to go.”
He nodded—less, it seemed, in agreement than as an acknowledgment that she was speaking—and Alice placed his hands on the sides of her face, blocking off her ears; as if the mere touch of his hands could raze her old thoughts and offer up a taste of the freedom she needed so badly. When she kissed him she felt fog burning off, the high-pitched whoosh of altitude and the terror of not knowing which direction was up and which direction was down and even if it mattered anymore. This was not her first kiss; this was most likely not even her two hundredth. She would kiss almost anyone—she was seminotorious for it at certain points in her life. A kiss could always be counted on to take her right out of herself. When she kissed Stephen she was set in motion, but now she was running backward, scanning the past for a bearable future— searching while skimming fingers through rough water off the side of a big white boat. She closed her eyes and saw a tropical bird flying through suburban skies. She saw an ordinary hand—Charlotte’s hand—those pale, bitten fingers resting squarely on her father’s chest. Alice felt the drafty corridor and the long-familiar shadows of a cold moon passing through tall windows. She eyed the empty place settings of her Thanksgiving meal—the lilac butterflies, the ivory-handled knives— waiting for her mother, waiting for her brother, waiting for this kiss, even as it was happening.