The morning after Alice walked away from Gus, the waves swelled to fifteen feet. They crashed down on Fire Beach, shaking all and damaging some of the houses built on the dunes. The open window above Stephen’s bed would have shattered over both him and Alice, had they not already been awake at four in the morning, and for quite separate reasons, each being the type of person who was quick to recognize danger.
They hurried outside to board up the windows. The night was blustery, with an overcast prune-colored sky, and as she watched Stephen disappear around the front of the odd building he liked to call home, her breathing grew faintly labored. Sand blew around her ankles in a prickly mist, and she tried to find a suggestion of even the gauntest moon. Palms lashed overhead, though not quite violently enough that she might fail to see their grace. The ocean was deafening, of course, but she ignored her surroundings in order to focus on keeping the window shut. If she was in immediate danger she wouldn’t have been too surprised, but there was also nowhere else she would rather have been. This was not entirely different from how she’d felt twelve hours previously, when she’d opened the door in the late afternoon and Stephen had been in the midst of a nap. He was under mosquito netting, sleeping on his side, and she had walked right in.
Now it was the middle of the night and he was out of sight, and Alice couldn’t see much of anything. She had no clear understanding of windstorms—about any storms on this coast, for that matter—and what did or did not count as a reasonable fear. Stephen had handed her a flashlight before they’d rushed outside, and she remembered to turn it on now, but the yellow beam clarified nothing but spinning sand.
She could keenly feel Stephen’s absence and he was anything but ghostly. He was all too substantial, a fairly hulking mass, and without him beside her there was developing— in addition to the increasingly rasping wind—an unexpected and frankly disappointing hollowness. And here came the vague feeling of dread that meant nothing other than having something to lose. Alice entertained walking away right then, escaping such inevitable damage.
But his hand was on her back. “You okay?” He was coughing and gesturing her toward the door.
“Feels like rain,” she said.
“One thing at a time.” He smiled, shaking out sand from his hair. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go inside.”
They kept the lights off, as the electricity was already waning.
He poured tall glasses of water, encouraging her to drink, as he gulped down glass after glass. She sat on the kitchen table, her sandy feet resting on his thighs.
Alice hasn’t left the turtle factory since the winds began, and now she’s finally emerged to forage for this evening. It’s the first calm afternoon and she’s biked into town with the bicycle she took from Skinny Karen in exchange for most of her clothes and the silver coil bracelet. Alice wants to cook. Alice wants to cook for Stephen tonight, as she is leaving tomorrow. She’s going home. With the bicycle basket full of provisions, she’s at the bottom of a steep dirt road, and as she looks up toward the mountains, she’s faced with a sight she’s certain must have been created by the glare, or at the very least by her profound lack of sleep, a deficiency delicious and three days old.
But when Alice’s eyes adjust to the angle and the sun, she sees that her vision is just fine. Her brother is on a motorcycle. He’s gunning the engine and he has a little boy not five years old seated in front of him, a chestnut-brown boy with shiny black hair; a boy small enough that, as he leans back, his head barely reaches Gus’s chest. Alice nearly screams out to stop him, to prevent Gus from endangering this child, when she realizes that the motorcycle isn’t running, and that without a key in the ignition the cycle is only a toy, a big, muscular, metal toy with which these two can play. Gus surrounds the child, leaning down and talking in his ear, pointing out buttons to push and switches to flick. He is laughing along with this thrilled kid; he even puts his bearded chin on top of the boy’s small head. He looks relaxed and loose, and Alice realizes she hasn’t seen this August in a very long time and that this is the version of her brother that she has always and only chosen to see. Chasing down this version has meant neglecting herself, but it has also meant neglecting who he was all this time—who her brother was in the process of becoming: someone she didn’t know as well as she thought she did, someone who based decisions on letters and stories, on a misguided responsibility.
But it is good to know that, after all, this August still exists. It’s good to know he’s still in the world, even if she can’t be included inside of it.
She hasn’t been too careful, she thought, remembering how Gus had searched in vain for the right description of his sister. But while she’s been extravagant with Gus—inflating his better qualities without realizing it half of the time—she has been sparing with herself, dwindling her details, paring herself down. She’d made the mistake of acting on the notion that after Charlotte had gone she could not afford, not at any cost, to lose him. But there was no way to control so profound a loss; she tells herself she knows this now. She knows she can’t hold on to him whether she stays or if she goes.
Alice knows that the minute she calls out to him, he’ll be different, he’ll be changed. When she calls his name, when she explains how all she wants is a proper good-bye, this very Gus—the one guiding the child’s hand to the rearview mirror, the one pointing, laughing—he’ll be gone. It will happen immediately, and Alice is sure that the child will start crying, howling; it is he who will have felt the change perhaps most acutely.
She rides toward the beach as fast as she can. Fixed in amber—in a place that is permanently late afternoon—are her brother August and a boy. They’re in the desert; they’re on a motorcycle. With the sun on their faces and the wind at their backs, they are going nowhere.