9
It’s Saturday and Pete’s taken the kids to soccer. Frannie texts me: Sexy? Scooter???
Me: He said Ethan. How was I supposed to know? Won’t happen again
Frannie: Ok, good, because weird. But I’m glad you went out at all. We’ll find you someone normal
I look at my phone for a few seconds, at the word “normal.” It morphs in front of my eyes into something negative. Normal is a man walking into my kitchen and making me feel absolutely nothing. Normal is just getting through a conversation so it can be over. Normal is someone like Pete.
I get back from Phyllis’s and decide not to go to the dog park. I do not need to be hunting down a man who so quickly inspired black-hole-sized fantasies in my mind while also completely lying about who he was. I am finishing my second cup of coffee and deadheading the geraniums by my front door when his station wagon pulls into my driveway.
Ethan gets out and leaves the windows down for Brenda in the backseat. “Hey,” he says from the end of my walkway. His hands are in his pockets, and I’m a little relieved that he seems nervous. I don’t know if he’s nervous because now I know he’s Scooter, or because now he’s the one doing the stalking.
“Hi,” I say.
“I hope this is okay. My mom told me where you lived. I was going to take Brenda to Beechwood Point and wondered if you guys wanted to come.”
“My kids just left with their dad,” I say.
“Oh, okay.” But he doesn’t turn to go. “Are you and Ferris free?”
There is no reason in the world for me to go on a second excursion with this man. I am humiliated thinking about it. But he takes a hand out of his pocket and runs it through his hair in a way that makes me think, Yes. Yes to the way his hand runs through his hair. Yes to making him explain himself. Yes to getting another taste of that lighter way I feel when I’m with him. I’m in the house grabbing Ferris and a leash before I’ve had a chance to think it through any further. It’s been a week of tiny steps forward, though I now wish one of those steps would have been washing my hair this morning. I stop at the mirror by the front door and put my hair into a braid.
I get into the car and say, “So where are we going exactly?”
“The very tip of Beechwood Point.”
“Of course, you’re a local. The Fairlawns’ house?”
“To the right.”
“The Schwartzes’ house?”
“To the left.”
“There’s nothing between those houses.”
He’s smiling. “You’ll see. I owe you a really big apology, and I think I need a better setting than the front seat of my car.”
“Agreed,” I say, and look out the window.
We drive down by the water and pass the dog park and the inn. Beyond the inn is more public shoreline and then about twenty waterfront homes that end at Beechwood Point. It’s all private property. “Okay, so now that you’ve met my children, you also know I can’t get arrested, right?”
“We won’t get arrested.”
“Because we’re not breaking the law?”
“No, we’re totally breaking the law. But I’ve done this a million times. You never get arrested for break-in a million and one.”
I turn to the window and grip Ferris tighter. I have been out of my comfort zone since the day I met Ethan, and there’s a bit of excitement mixed in with my nerves.
“Not much of a rule breaker?” he asks.
“Exactly never.”
“Today’s your day.” He pulls up in front of the Schwartzes’ gray stone mansion. “We’re here.” When I don’t move, he says. “If we get caught, I’ll take the fall. I’ll say I kidnapped you.”
I roll my eyes and get out of the car. We walk our dogs past the Schwartzes’ tall hedge and black iron fence. The air is damp and thick here closer to the water, and there are no cars on the road. This part of town feels like a gothic novel, with giant old homes and a murder of crows keeping watch. I don’t know where we’re going, but I can feel the excitement that comes with taking a risk creep right up my spine. Ethan stops at the end of the Schwartzes’ fence. To the right is the Fairlawns’ house. He moves toward a wall of ivy between the two houses and turns back to me. “Through here.”
As he cuts a few of the vines with a pocketknife, I realize that we are at the Ghost Gate. Or at least that’s what we used to call it when we were kids. It’s a rusted-out gate between those two houses that leads to a sandy path. Before these vines grew in, you could see the first few yards of the path where it turns into a grove of trees. In high school, kids used to talk about what was back there, but the one kid who actually tried to find out got caught on the security cameras and was arrested. Sort of the way we’re going to be arrested today. I should turn back immediately, but I don’t.
Ethan pushes the gate open just wide enough for us to get through, and I grab his arm. “Again, single mom. Not really up for prison time.”
“We’ll be fine.” He’s looking down at me and it feels like he’s daring me to follow him. Daring me to do something incredibly reckless that might end up wonderful. I notice I’m still holding on to his arm and quickly let go.
“Seriously. Look. There are two security cameras, one on each side.” I wave at them for good measure. “Let’s just get out of here.”
“I really want you to come with me. My big apology isn’t going to land right if you’re not there.” His tone is light, but his eyes are pleading with me. “Would it make you feel better to know that when I was sixteen, I reoriented those security cameras so that they miss the exact spot where we’re standing?”
“You did not.”
“Look at them.” And I do. They’re trained on the edges of the gate.
“No one’s ever noticed?”
“Well, no one’s ever moved them back. See? I’m a problem solver. Come on.”
We push through the gate and close it behind us and let the dogs run ahead down the path. We turn into a row of maple trees that touch branches overhead so that the path is darker but speckled in sunlight. I stop and look up at the canopy. I want to spin around in that space. I want to lie down in the path and be speckled myself. I turn and he is watching me, a smile on his face.
“It’s amazing,” I say.
As we walk through the leafy tunnel of green, the water appears in the distance. Our dogs race ahead and then back. I thought I’d seen every corner of Beechwood, like I’d worn this place out until it was threadbare. I know every street, and I know most of the people. I have never seen this patch of heaven before.
When we emerge from the trees, we are at the water. There’s a small crescent of beach maybe twenty feet wide, covered in white sand and shells. We are enclosed on both sides by tall beach grasses. The sky is a dark July blue, and ahead of us is a perfect view of the Manhattan skyline.
“Wow,” I say. Because, wow. “This is beautiful. I’ve never seen it from here. I knew the city was right there, but I’ve never…wow.”
I turn to him and he’s watching me take this in. “Yes, beautiful,” he says.
We sit down at the center of the crescent of beach, and I feel like we are two pearls in the center of an oyster. We are close enough to the lapping waves that I can feel the cool air off the water on my legs, but we’re not close enough to get wet. The sun is warm on my face, and the only sounds I hear are gulls, the waves, and the splashing of dog feet.
“Did you and your friends hang out here in high school?” I ask.
“I usually came by myself.”
I still can’t picture this man being an awkward teenager. “And what did you do?”
He nods at the skyline in the distance. “I daydreamed about getting out of here. So escape fantasies mostly.”
“I had those too.” He turns to me as if he wants to hear my escape fantasies. “I just wanted to go and become my own person.” I needed to go out and see who I was separate from my mom. I wanted to know I could take care of myself.
“You were always your own person, Ali.” He’s looking out at the water and then turns back to me. “I remember one Halloween you and your friends came into the diner for late-night pancakes. Your friends were a sexy nurse, a sexy vampire, a sexy cat, and you were a pumpkin. Do you remember that?”
“I do.”
“Not a sexy pumpkin either. Like a big orange one with a black toothy grin. I just remember thinking you were the coolest girl ever.”
I love hearing this. I love that I was once that person and that someone remembers. I want to tell him about how my mom convinced the tailor at the dry cleaner’s downstairs to let her use his sewing machine for that pumpkin, but I don’t. I’m not good at mentioning my mom casually—my voice always breaks.
“So was the city what you hoped?” he asks.
“Yep. I went and got a grown-up job and everything. Accounting. It was like organizing someone’s mudroom times a thousand. I loved it.”
“Why’d you come back?”
“It’s kind of a long story. I was dating Pete for about a year and got pregnant, so we got married. I kind of panicked because Greer was born prematurely, and I quit my job. And then I had Iris a year later. I thought coming back here might make my life easier, with my mom here to help.”
“That wasn’t that long of a story,” he says.
I smile at the water. “I guess not.”
He rests his forearms on his knees and watches the water. My forearms are on my knees in the same way, and if I leaned a bit to the left our shoulders would be touching. There’s heat coming off him now and I imagine I can feel the blond hair on his arms brushing up against my skin. The distance between us feels like nothing, a whisper.
He’s quiet for a second as a gull swoops down and plucks something off the beach and flies away. A large sailboat passes in the distance and momentarily breaks the skyline.
“I wanted to kiss you,” he says. “Thursday night, and at the skate park, and at the dog park. And a million times before that, actually.”
“Oh?” It comes out high-pitched. I am taken aback by what he’s said and how easily he’s said it.
He laughs. “Don’t be weird about it, I’m trying to apologize. I was a little bit obsessed with you when I was a teenager. And when I ran into you and you looked at me like I wasn’t Scooter, it felt really good. I should have told you before we went out, but it just kept getting better and better. It felt so easy.”
“It was very easy,” I say to the water.
“It was maybe the first time I’ve ever really felt like myself here. Which is something, because I lived in Beechwood for eighteen years. Every time I come home I have this sort of uneasy feeling that there’s something I need to apologize for, but I forget what it is. But with you, I felt good. I didn’t want to break the spell. But I couldn’t kiss you while I was lying.” He turns back to the water. “I planned to get your number from Frannie on Friday morning and come clean, but I chickened out. And then there you were at dinner.”
I replay that night in my head, but with him telling me he was Scooter as we sat on the boat. I probably would have kissed him anyway.
“Okay, Scooter,” I say. “I forgive you.”
“Thank you,” he says. We look back out at the city and we’re quiet for a while.
“So what were you hoping to escape from?” I ask.
“People calling me Scooter, I guess.” He turns to me and his eyes search my face. “And yet here we are.”
“I’ve seen you skateboard—the name suits you.”
“That’s not why they call me that.” He looks back at the water and waits a bit before he spills it. “They call me Scooter because I never learned to crawl.”
I laugh. “Cliffy did that for a while. He’d sit and kind of scoot on his butt toward what he wanted. Eventually he figured it out.”
“Well I didn’t, apparently. I just scooted until I walked. And my grandparents thought it was hilarious, so the nickname stuck. A person’s got to get out of a town where he’s named for his first missed milestone. Kind of gives the place a weird vibe.” He stretches his legs out in front of him and leans back on his elbows. “But mostly the same reasons. I wanted to find out who I was, get a real job. Find a woman.”
“And did you do it?”
“Eventually. All but the woman. It’s easy to find a woman, nearly impossible to find the woman.”
“I always wanted someone to think of me that way, that I was the one,” I say.
“Come on, Ali. I’m pretty sure every guy at Beechwood High thought you were the one.”
“Not even close.”
“Maybe it was just me,” he says, and looks back at the water.
My face goes hot and I pull my knees closer to my chest. I’m sure I’ve misheard him, and now I don’t know what to say.
He goes on like he’s said nothing. “You got married, you must have felt like you were the one then.”
“Not really. I think Pete liked the idea of me. He liked me at work. He liked me in a suit being good at things and then on the weekend doing power-couple activities. But life’s not a day job and planned activities. It gets messy.”
“So messy,” he says, and the warmth and fun leave his face. I want it back. “Is that why you’re divorcing him?”
I don’t answer. I don’t want to tell him that in all those miserable years, it never occurred to me to divorce him. I just kept regrouping and shifting gears every time things got worse. I sort of thought we’d just muddle through like that forever.
“I’m divorcing him because he’s divorcing me,” I say, finally. “It’s the first decision he’s made in a long time that I’ve really respected.”
“I say you let Ferris pick the next guy.” It’s an adorable thing to say, and he’s said it lightly, like it’s a joke. But all I can think is: Okay. He smiles and I want to reach up and run my fingers over the creases of his eyes. I want to touch the sharp corner of his jaw.
“How long are you staying?” I ask.
“I was going to leave tomorrow, but now with the whole Florida thing I don’t know. I need to clean out that house in order to sell it, and that could take all summer.”
He’s going to be here all summer, my mother says. Not that I needed that clarification. I heard him say it in my stomach before it actually hit my ears. This man with the shoulders and the hands and the steady gaze is going to be here all summer.
“And I don’t know what your schedule is like, but I’d like to see you. Maybe try for a second date?”
“I’m not sure,” I say.
“About what? It’s a second date, you don’t need to be sure about me yet.”
I smile at him and look back at the water. “You’re not a person for me to date. You live in another state, you’ve already told me you’re unreliable. Also, you’re Scooter.”
“Remember when I said I’d meet you at seven and then I showed up at seven? Maybe I’m totally reliable when it comes to you.”
We’re looking at each other, and I feel like I could watch him watching me all day. Maybe I could go on another date. “I’ll think about it,” I say.
“Fair enough. And, in the meantime, if you have time, I really do need help with the house. I could use an organizing expert.”
“Sure, I can help you.”
“Okay, name your price, because I’m sort of desperate.”
“I can’t charge you,” I say as a text comes in on my phone. It’s Pete: Back in 10. Lost the scrimmage, had pizza.
And maybe it’s the sight of Pete’s name on my phone, maybe it’s the word “pizza,” but the spell is broken. I am cast from this secret paradise Ethan’s created for me. “I’m sorry, can you get me home?”
Pete’s car is in the driveway when we get back to the house. He still has a key so I didn’t really need to race home. I’m a little disoriented. I feel like I walked through a wormhole and then back again. I grab Ferris from the backseat and hop out of the car.
“Thanks for the field trip,” I say.
“It was fun.”
I don’t want to close the door.
“Let’s start over,” he says. “Can I call you tomorrow?”
I look over my shoulder at my house. “I have my kids.”
“Of course,” he says. “Then you can call me.” He pulls out his phone and waits for me to give him my number. I do and he texts me, while I’m still standing right there: Call me.
“Where were you?” Pete asks as if it’s any of his business.
“Walking the dog,” I say, hanging up the leash. “How was it?”
“We lost,” Iris says. “The refs were totally blind.”
“Also, we were awful,” says Greer.
“Both things are true,” says Pete. He picks Cliffy up to give him a hug and kisses Greer and Iris on the tops of their heads. It’s poignant every time, this act of saying goodbye to people you used to live with. There was always a heaviness after I’d spent a day with my dad, like we were family but not as much as we used to be.
“Thanks for lunch,” Iris says.
“Yeah, thanks, Dad,” says Greer.
I see this register on his face. He is not a person they used to thank. Food and essentials just happened, like they were their birthright. “Of course,” he says. “See you guys Tuesday night. We’ve got to work on our offense.”
The air is strange when he’s left. Everyone’s quiet and we could really use a dose of Fancy. I try to imagine just what she’d do to change the energy. “Well,” she’d say, and clap her hands together. “I know just what we should do.” And we’d all lean in, waiting to hear what kind of fun she was about to hatch.
I work with what I have. “I was going to grill chicken tonight, but what if we turn it into a picnic and eat at the beach?”
“Let’s ride our bikes,” says Cliffy.
“We should make cookies,” says Iris.
Greer’s looking at her phone. “What?” she asks when we’re all looking at her.
“A picnic tonight, at the beach,” says Cliffy.
“Fine,” she says.
Cliffy’s in the hall closet pulling out an already-sandy bucket and shovel. This is the same closet where we hang our good coats. “I’m going to find a horseshoe crab,” he says.
“You’re not bringing it home,” says Iris. “They stink.”
I take the butter out for the cookies and turn on the oven. I know they’re going to argue about this for a while, but at least no one’s thinking about Pete anymore.