“A car? Like, a limo car?”
It was so good to see Meredith. But it was weird, too. It had been only eight weeks, but so much had happened. Nicco felt like a fracture in the earth after a quake, the before on one side, the after on the other. Those legs in the boat before I left, the ones with the knobby knees and the child bruises, they were long and tan and wanted to be wrapped around Nicco, and I had covered the mark on my neck with a dab of concealer. When Meredith got off the plane, it was like seeing your old friend from middle school. That happy familiarity, but the distance, too. You were the same person you were then, but definitely not the same person.
“Yes but no. More like a town car. Lila didn’t want to welcome you here with some cab.” Lila would never get up that early to meet Meredith herself was more the truth.
“Cool.” It sounded casual, but she didn’t look casual. Meredith’s eyes were all excited.
I could tell Meredith liked it, the way the driver opened the door for her and took her luggage and asked if the temperature in the car was okay. She opened the bottle of water that was offered and drank. She’d been talking, talking, about Cora and how she’d gotten boy crazy, or really, Bryce crazy, because Bryce was the guy Cora had met at the softball game. And then about Hoodean, and how he had broken his wrist at Shilshole when he was trying to spike the volleyball, showing off for Sarah, which pissed Meredith off. I’d never noticed it before, but maybe she liked Hoodean, who’d always seemed like a brother to me.
She stopped talking, though, as we got out of the airport area and into the city. I felt kind of shy with her. Her neck was craned, and she kept looking at me to see if I was seeing the same things she was. It was fun, though, to take in where you live through the eyes of someone who’d never seen it.
And when we drove through the pillars into Sea Cliff, I saw her taking it all in even more. She actually grabbed my arm, like this was a new thing happening to both of us.
“Whoa,” she said. “This is really nice. I mean really.”
Meredith had met Lila only one other time, when Lila came to my ninth-grade graduation. Just one time, even after all the years we’d known each other. Lila didn’t usually fly out to see me; I flew to her. And that day on the lawn of Academy of Arts and Sciences, Lila was in full Lila mode, dressed entirely in ivory with only a green silk scarf as color. Big sunglasses. Vibrations coming off her, you know, of importance. Very un-Seattle. It was like bringing the Hope Diamond into Zales. Even if she just sat there, she’d be utterly large and shining.
Ellen and Paul, Meredith’s parents, were there too, of course. They all shook hands and stood in an awkward circle. Edwina and Ellen gave us these bouquets wrapped in cellophane that they’d gotten at the grocery store, but Lila set a lei of orchids around my neck. There was talk about how proud everyone was, but then the conversation stalled, and Lila took my elbow and said we had to be going.
Now, Meredith was coming to our house, and I hoped we wouldn’t have a repeat of the uncomfortable Nicco and Lila meeting. It was a Saturday morning, and no one was working at the construction site next door. It was quiet over there—no hammers pounding, no saws screaming and then going silent. It wasn’t quiet at our place, though. Max had heard the unfamiliar car, and when we opened the front gate, he went crazy. “Yikes,” Meredith said.
“It’s okay. He always does that. Don’t be afraid. He also barks at the neighbor’s recycling bins.” I was rolling Meredith’s little roller bag up the walk, and she had her other bag slung over her shoulder. “Max!” I called. “It’s me!”
“I’m nervous,” Meredith said.
“He’s really a sweetheart.”
“No, I mean your mom. I don’t usually hang out with movie stars.”
She never did that kind of thing at home. She never got all weird about Lila. At Academy, I was myself, and none of my friends ever even mentioned her. At least, not the famous parts. She was my annoying mother who called when it was inconvenient and kept me on the phone when I wanted to get off. I thought they’d forgotten about the rest, but maybe they never really had. Of course, this was different, Meredith coming to stay in our house. Lila would be real to her, not a story I told.
Max jumped on Meredith with excitement, and he was all we could deal with at first. And then he calmed down, and Meredith set her bag on the floor and looked at the White Room in astonishment.
“Holy shit,” she whispered. Meredith hardly ever swore. She walked straight to the windows. The view pulled you in like that. “This is incredible. The bridge is right there.”
It was a strange combination, feeling self-conscious but wanting to show off, too. I opened the doors to the back patio and walked out so she’d follow. The fog had already lifted, and the ocean was also showing off. Seeing it through Meredith’s eyes—it looked magnificent.
“Down there, that’s China Beach. Anytime you want to go down there, feel free.”
“Look at those stairs. That is so cool. Like a maze.” She moved her hand back and forth, indicating the switchbacks. “Wow.”
“Sometimes the fog is here all day and it’s not as awesome. It gets depressing.”
“I can’t imagine being depressed here. You’re never going to want to come home.”
“The tide is really low right now. We could walk all the way to Baker Beach, which you usually can’t do. Want to go?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll show you to your room and stuff.”
“Okay. But where’s your mom? It’s like we’re all alone in this huge place.”
I wanted to say, Welcome to my life, because that’s how I always felt. Instead, I just said, “Sleeping? She doesn’t like to wake up before noon, at the earliest.”
“Whoa. That’s so late! My mom did that, like, once in her life, when she took a pain pill after her dental surgery.”
We bump-rolled Meredith’s bag up the stairs as Max sped ahead. Meredith stopped at the landing and looked up at that huge poster of Lila in Nefarious.
“Nice to see your mother’s crotch every time you go up and down,” I said, and we both cracked up. It felt like the old Meredith and me.
But then Meredith said, “We watched it once.”
“You did? You never said.”
“My dad got all embarrassed at that part. He left the room to find us some sodas.”
I lived in two different worlds. And right then, I felt like a visitor in both of them.
“Your room. Your bathroom. Wi-Fi password: ‘Nefarious.’ Is this okay?”
“Okay? I’ve never even seen a house like this before, let alone stayed in one.”
We left Max at home until Meredith could get more used to him. He scared her a little. Meredith and I raced each other down the orange stucco stairwell to the beach, wearing our bathing suits, me carrying the beach bag. It was colder than it looked, and I could see goose bumps rise up along Meredith’s arms.
“Want my sweatshirt?” I asked.
“I’m good!”
“I usually find a big rock to lay behind so I can sunbathe out of the wind.”
We walked the stretch of shoreline to Baker, where I promised Meredith that she’d get the best photos. She stopped along the way to look at the starfish and anemones, which you could see because of the low tide. At Baker, we rolled out our towels, and she told me more about Cora and Bryce, how Bryce’s family had this boat docked at Shilshole, and how they’d go there alone. Meredith was shocked at this. Cora was going to get into trouble. Cora was going too far. I wondered if Bryce was going to get into trouble. I wondered if he was going too far. I hoped the concealer on my neck wasn’t too obvious in the sun. I tried to tell her about Nicco, how he was more than just a casual friend. We were supposed to all go out together on Monday night. I guess I wanted to warn her. I would have gone to an empty boat with him in two seconds.
“Nicco’s bringing his friend Carlos.”
Meredith made a face.
“Don’t look like that. He sounds really nice. It seemed better than it just being the three of us.”
Then we dropped the subject. We replayed the shocking ending of The Night Dweller, and I pretended I still loved R. W. Wright. We laughed about the time Ivy Reese caught a crab during a race and flew out of the boat. Caught a crab—when you put the oar in the water at the wrong time, which can shoot you up and out like a cannonball. We talked about how we should do something big next year to celebrate our seventeenth birthdays, like run a half marathon or do a polar plunge.
The sun was shining, and kids were playing on the beach, and my best friend was sitting next to me on a towel, so there was no real reason for the feeling I had as we were talking about crossing finish lines and dashing into icy cold waters. It was the strongest feeling, empty and deep as a newly dug grave, and dark as one too. The ghost—she stood beside that grave and shook her head. All of the stuff we were talking about doing next year—none of that was going to happen. None of it. The feeling passed over me, a cloud over the sun, and then the sun was out again.
We were laughing about something, I don’t even remember what, and Meredith was drinking sparkling water out of the bottle and I was putting lotion on my legs, when this guy came up to ask us for directions to Golden Gate Park. He was maybe, I don’t know, thirty, with that kind of straight haircut that makes you look like a newsman. Blue shorts, shirt off, to make sure we saw that he worked out. By the way he was looking at us, I knew he didn’t really care about Golden Gate Park.
“No idea,” I said.
“You tourists, too?”
“No idea,” I said again. Meredith crossed her legs and folded her arms over her chest.
“Wow. Wouldn’t kill you to be friendly,” he said, before turning away and walking off, pissed.
“Ew.” Meredith grimaced. And then, “Oh, God! Don’t look!”
Which of course made me look. It was just old Chet in his Dodgers cap, strolling down the beach in all his glory. As the summer had gone on, he’d been getting tanner and tanner. He was brown as a handful of… well, I was going to say nuts.
“That’s just Chet,” I said.
“You know him?”
“Well, not know-know. Familiar with. He’s here all the time. He’s harmless.”
“You said you saw nudists, but wow.” Her face was beet red.
“I tried to take pictures once to send to you guys.”
“Syd,” she said. She sounded like Ellen.
It was pretty clear that only I had gone from my regular legs in the boat that day to these legs now, stretched before me, legs that made a guy stop and look, legs that belonged to someone who wanted things. Only I had moved from the place where you’re separate from the bigger world, to the place where you aren’t.
“Let’s go back,” Meredith said.
But there was really no going back, was there?