I went to Baker Beach every morning. It was the one closest to home, and I tried to be back when Lila woke up. I was bored, and going to Baker was something to do. IT was beginning to seem like a stupid longing.
I’d bring a peanut butter sandwich and a water bottle, and I’d stretch out on my towel and read The Deepest Dark by R. W. Wright, where a psycho from the past punishes/kills every girl who drops her pants or opens her legs. I accidentally ripped a page. I wiped my dirty peanut butter fingers on another. I opened the cover as far as it would go and I bent it back.
I started to recognize the nudists. I gave them names. There was Chet, the old guy in the Dodgers cap, and Bill Sr., who had the long scar near his heart. There was also Quentin William III, who read British mysteries and ate those white round water crackers with bits of cheese he brought wrapped up in cellophane. And my favorite—Agatha. I really liked when she wore her sun hat. This seemed both ironic and stylish, since the rest of her was bare as a deflated balloon. She often had a City Lights book bag over one shoulder, where she’d put the good shells she found. Once, she had a friend along, who left only her shorts on, as if she were going one step at a time into the nudist waters. Every time I saw her, Agatha was her full, old self.
There were also a lot of the same non-nudists. A mom and her two boys. A group of teens who smoked pot and then left. But I never saw the boy with the journal again.
Not at Baker, anyway.
Those days began like this: I’d get on my bike. I’d roll it out the gate and fling one leg over.
And next door, the construction guy would stop whatever he was doing and watch. The other men kept sawing and hammering, hauling and drilling. But not him. He made a point of walking to the edge of wherever he was to catch my eye. He was a big guy, with big arms, wide shoulders, sandy-brown hair, and he’d just stand there and cock his head to one side, grinning. Or he’d shake it, like I was too much for his eyes to handle. And when he did this, I’d feel a slow burn crawl up my thighs and through my stomach and into some empty space in my chest. I didn’t know if the burn was pride or desire or shame or powerlessness. I just felt the heat of it, and the way it rattled me. It was telling me to be afraid or to be fearless, only I couldn’t tell which.
Sixteen was different. Or that summer was different. Or maybe I just started noticing. You know, men looking. It’s strange to talk about. Girls can’t even talk about these things to each other without someone saying or thinking, Hey, she’s not that hot, or Wow, she sure thinks she’s special, or Why’d she keep walking past when she knew what was going to happen? It’s bragging or we’re blamed for it, and how messed up is that?
Whatever, because this is a part of the truth I’m supposed to tell, the way I felt the eyes. And I felt those eyes in particular, his, the ones belonging to the man who worked next door. Some days, before I left the house, I’d hear that endless hammering, the sawing, and I’d think about the staring, and the way the house was just the bones of the structure without the skin of the walls, and I’d peek out the window to see if he was there, so I could leave without being seen. I tried to go the other way, up a different street and over, until I reached a dead end. Sometimes, I’d wear something new, something white that showed off my tan skin, and I’d think, Go ahead and look. Have at it. In order to be where I wanted to be, I had to go past him first. That was the thing, wasn’t it? Wherever you wanted to go, you had to go past him.
It was like he thought I was his. Like I was a vase or a glass that he could admire or drink from or shatter, whatever he decided. I didn’t get a say because vases don’t talk and glass only reflects. I didn’t know what to do about it. It seemed like it was just part of what you dealt with. Lila did. Cora did. Edwina did, in her day. I’m sure even our beautiful great-grandmother who fled during the earthquake did. That old mansion next door and all its history had been torn down. Something new was going up. But he was still the one holding the hammer.
Maybe ten days or so after my birthday, I was done with Baker. I was over it, going there just so I could hurry home to Lila. I felt pissed about it. Ever since my birthday, Lila had been in a mood. It was summer, and I was there so we could do stuff together, but even when she got up, she’d lie around, saying she didn’t feel well. I tried to get her to go out for lunch, shopping, the gym, anything, but it was, “Baby, I’m just exhausted.”
“What happened to Jake?” I asked.
“He’s being an ass.”
It was frustrating. Maddening. She’d asked me to be nice to him, and he’d given me those flowers, and she’d been so happy about him when I came that I kind of wanted him back, honestly. I was ready to give him a chance, if she’d only snap out of it. But she watched cooking shows for hours on end and had long closed-door talks with Louise, her “crisis manager.”
God.
Every time I called Meredith (Seven more weeks! Six and a half more weeks!), I heard about all the fun they were having—bonfires, parties, swimming. I pictured eyes glittery from the light of a fire, beer in a cup, slick skin against slick skin underwater. I wanted it all so bad, my chest hurt with longing, but I was stuck in that house.
I got online and spent the birthday money my father sent me. It had arrived a week late. It’s hard to remember stuff like that—the day a daughter was born—especially when you’d wanted a son (according to Lila) and you were busy vacationing in Cabo. The enclosed photo showed him on a beach I’d never been to, with some friends I’d never met, wearing clothes I’d never seen, and holding the hand of his new girlfriend, who apparently had a kid that lived with them now. I bought some expensive new bathing suits and beach towels and other stuff I didn’t even want.
And I took my pastels to China Beach or I read outside. Sun, warm, heat—restlessness. Lotion on legs, tan skin, the great feeling of sea air, with nowhere to put it. I finished The Deepest Dark and tried to go on to She’s So Cold but couldn’t finish. Suddenly, I badly wanted the loose girls, the easy girls, the sluts, the forward ones, the ones who made the first move and were hungry and who needed things, to stay alive, but they never did. One day, I stuck my gum in the cover and never opened it again.
I felt empty and anxious. And alone. I was missing out on everything a summer could bring. That house, even with all its large windows, felt gloomy. Those enormous paintings of women stared from the walls every day. I’d get the mail, and there were more bills. Lila never looked at them. They stacked up like a tippy building on uneven ground. The dread just waited, the ghost floated around, and my anxiety spiked whenever she tossed another envelope to the pile or poured a drink too early in the evening.
I finally decided to go hang out at Ocean Beach and walk around Lands End, just past it. If Lila woke up and I wasn’t there, too bad. Maybe I’d stay the whole day. Maybe she’d have to wonder where I was for once.
“I’m sorry to leave you in this house of doom all day,” I said to Max.
He looked sad.
Then I had a great idea.
“Forget that. You’re going to get depressed if I don’t get you out of here. You’ll catch it like the flu, bud. Come on.”
I called the car service number that Lila had given me. When the car arrived and I went outside, I tried not to glance next door. But I heard the pounding. I felt the eyes.
“Ocean Beach,” I told the driver.
“The dog, too?”
“Yep.”
The driver sighed.
Max rode in the seat like a proper gentleman. “Don’t let him make you feel bad,” I said to Max after I signed the bill and we got out. “I’m sure you’re way more polite than a lot of people.”
I’d been out that way before, when Lila took me over Christmas break. I loved everything about it—the big, wide sand of Ocean Beach, the mysterious and beautiful Lands End, the ruins of the old Sutro Baths. The baths used to be this enormous labyrinth of saltwater swimming pools, filled by the tides. Back in the 1930s, the pools had slides and trampolines and trapezes, but now only their cement outlines were left. There was a cave down there too, where the waves rushed in so hard, the roar was an explosion. And then there was the Cliff House—the big white restaurant perched on the bluff. It had been there forever, all different styles over the years. Long ago, it was even this amazing eight-story Victorian mansion. It burned down twice, and was once destroyed when a ship carrying dynamite crashed on the rocks, but they just kept rebuilding it again and again.
The minute I stepped from the car, I felt better than I had in ten days. I could breathe out there, and I had a friend with me. We took the sandy stairs, and Max ran down them like he was a newly freed prisoner escaping his old life. He sniffed and peed on tall stuff. He raced to the beach, dying to do every awesome dog thing, like splashing in the water and chasing seagulls, rolling in gross beach junk and sniffing the butts of all the other dogs. His joy made me feel joy.
It made me realize how lonely I’d been. How that house felt seriously haunted, even if the only ghost was the one I’d brought with me.
After we’d been at the beach awhile, I clipped Max’s leash to his collar. “Wait till you see what’s next,” I said.
We walked to Lands End, and I took him out by the crumbling walls of the ruins, where the old baths were filled with disgusting, algae-thick water, which he of course wanted to go in.
“Yuck. Stay on task,” I told him. “It’s worth it, I promise.” We hiked around the rocks, which were kind of slippery and hard to navigate, but he didn’t seem to mind.
Then we arrived. The little cave. I waited until the people ahead of us left, so we could be in it alone. Inside, you could see through a rocky corridor and out an open end, where the waves crashed. When a wave broke, there was a boom that sounded like the earth breaking in half.
“Wow, huh?” I shouted. Max just stared toward the open end of the cave, as if taking in the majesties of our universe.
“All right. I knew you’d love that. Shall we go?” We headed back to Ocean Beach. I removed the cereal bowl I’d brought in my backpack and filled it from my water bottle. Apparently, butt-sniffing and taking in the majesties of our universe makes you pretty thirsty. Max lapped for a good long while. When he stopped, water dripped from his chin.
“Now that’s what I call beautiful,” a guy said.
I wheeled around to face the voice. I thought it was another pervy man, but I was shocked to see the boy with the journal. Stunned. It was him, the same guy, and how was this possible? It seemed like one of those coincidences that happen only in the movies. It had to be fate, right? Maybe this was IT, magically happening. Well, actually, seeing him out there was pretty much a guarantee, but I didn’t know that yet.
He was wearing dark pants and a white shirt, an outfit way, way too hot and dressy for that summer day. A uniform, I realized. A waiter’s uniform.
“Really beautiful,” he said.
But he didn’t mean me. He knelt down and looked Max right in the eyes and scruffed his big, thick neck.
It was the first thing I learned about Nicco Ricci.
He was not the kind of guy who’d turn his head at every attractive female. Who’d leer and remark and gawk. But, man, he couldn’t keep his eyes off dogs.