Locust Shells

THERE IS A NEW GIRL WORKING at the pool this summer, Ernestine, and even before Gerard lets out a low whistle at the sight of her swan dive, even before Miles has fetched this girl’s first Diet Pepsi, Helen knows that she has been dethroned. Or rather, she realizes, for the first time, that last summer she reigned.

Ernestine. The name belies her beauty, or not beauty exactly but something even more alluring. Sex appeal is the term, Helen guesses, that most men would use. She is straight-hipped as a boy, but voluptuous on top, and has a flat-footed slap to her walk that she manages to make charming.

“Please, just call me Ernie,” she tells Helen when they are introduced this first day of June. “You know, as in Bert and Ernie of Sesame Street.”

Helen nods and says to call her Helen, “You know, as in of Troy.”

Ernie looks perplexed, then smiles widely, dimples denting evenly into both her cheeks. “Well, I hope you don’t start any wars this summer.”

Helen blushes, embarrassed that Ernie’s gotten her vain joke, and begins to fidget with the whistle hung around her neck. “Gerard wants me to train you,” she tells her.

“Great!” this girl exclaims, and Helen wonders how she’ll make it through the day.

THERE IS LITTLE to show her. Helen goes over the different kinds of lotion that they sell. “Try not to let new people buy the SPF two oil,” she advises. “They come back to blame you when they burn.”

“What do you use?” Ernie asks.

“Sunblock. Fifteen or thirty. It depends. How about you?”

“Just baby oil.”

So that’s how she’s managed to be this perfect, creamy nutmeg, Helen thinks, when she herself is still pinkish white with winter, a faint shorts tan striped across her legs from the last month of Phys Ed. She wishes, for a moment, that she didn’t worry about burns and cancer and future wrinkles, that she didn’t have a father who insisted she protect herself against this enemy, the sun. Simply to exist in the present moment, that’s the ability this new girl exudes, and it creates a jealousy in Helen, a momentary wish to be someone different.

Ernie and Miles take the first shifts up in the chair. Helen waits her turn beneath the red umbrella, sitting on a long-legged stool on the opposite side of the lectern from Gerard.

“So, how’s your mother?” he asks. His face, as usual, is unreadable behind mirrored glasses.

“She’s all right, I guess,” Helen says, though in fact, just this morning she found her mother alone in the backyard, staring at the oleander trees as if they were speaking, as if meaning were written on their leaves. “I’m ready to go,” Helen told her.

“Your father’s going to take you.”

“Okay,” she said, then asked, “Are you sick?”

“No, just thinking, that’s all.”

“Well,” Gerard says now, after a thoughtful sip of his soda, “please give her my regards.”

HER OWN STINT in the chair is oppressive. She has forgotten how boring this can be, especially when only two people are in the pool. Every hour and a half they rotate, so that Helen now sits in Miles’s former chair, Miles sits where Ernie sat, and Ernie lounges cozily beside Gerard, laughing now at something he’s just said. Is he preying on her mother too?

It’s only 10:00 A.M., but already the day feels fragile, about to crumble at the edges. Helen is acutely aware that she is too tall, composed of too many angles folded awkwardly into this white fiberglass chair; she feels prudish in her black one-piece next to Ernie’s yellow string bikini, and even her hair feels too long, scratching wetly at her shoulder blades, compared with Ernie’s short dark layers, dipping over her Ray-Bans in a sexy peekaboo. It doesn’t help that Leo is out of town visiting his sister in Denver for the month. He provides a daily dose of praise that she didn’t realize until now is somewhat necessary to her confidence.

Helen reminds herself that she is here to do a job, to save people who are drowning, not for some unspoken beauty contest, some battle of the teenage girls. Besides, Ernie seems nice and fairly smart. Maybe she should try to become her friend. But at day’s end, when Miles walks Ernie to her car, tossing only a brotherly wave in Helen’s direction, she realizes that she hates this girl and that she hates herself for hating her.

HELEN’S MOTHER takes her to the Dunes on her second day of work and walks inside the courtyard with her to “see how it looks this year.” Gerard waves from his lectern—it’s as if he never leaves that spot—and they cross the pool deck into the shade of his umbrella, where Helen begins to strip down to her swimsuit, trying both to listen and not to listen, watching them for a moment and then turning to the pool.

She does a back dive off the side of the deep end, then swivels around and begins to swim. After five laps she stops in the shallow end and stands to stretch her arms, interlocking them in front and pulling forward, crooking first one elbow behind her head and tugging down, then the other. Her mother is still here, sitting in the chair beside Gerard, one white linen—panted leg crossed and swinging, her black sunglasses giving her the glamour of an aging star, silver necklace sparking in the sun as she throws back her head and laughs. Why is it that Gerard never manages an amusing line when Helen’s in his presence?

There is a gentle splash behind her, and she turns to find Ernie, waist high in the pool, doing stretches similar to her own. “Who’s that lady?” Ernie whispers. “Gerard’s girlfriend?”

“No.” Helen frowns at her. “It’s my mother.”

“Oh, sorry.” She shrugs an apology, then dives under and swims away.

Gerard’s girlfriend! What an awful thought. Though as she continues to stretch and watch them, she can see why Ernie made this mistake. They both look so happy sitting there together. She has not seen her mother laugh like this in months. And Gerard, Gerard is practically transformed. His mirrored shades are raised, and his face is animated—almost intelligent—as he listens to her mother talk.

Last summer her mother told Helen that her voice changes when she talks to Leo, becomes softer and airy, happier, and Helen began to think of this voice as her true one, the one she uses in her mind to talk to herself. Somehow, Leo has drawn it out into open air. She wonders now if another person could alter more than just your voice, could change your entire being, make your better self, your most you you rise to the surface.

But the idea that her mother and Gerard might be able to do this for each other is repellent and irritates Helen so much that when her mother waves good-bye to her, Helen pretends not to notice and ducks back underwater.

HELEN AND ERNIE take the first shifts in the chair today. Miles sweeps the deck for a while, then grabs a bottle of oil from the lectern and climbs Ernie’s chair to rub some into her shoulders. Helen recalls his doing that to her last summer and how awkward she felt, whereas Ernie strikes her as completely at ease with his attention, laughing and leaning into his hands, while still managing to keep her eyes on the pool. Helen can’t figure out why Miles seems so much more appealing to her this year, why she now wishes he’d cross the deck and climb the chair to talk to her. His hair’s a little shaggier, giving him a slight rock star quality, and there’s an extra dose of confidence to his walk, garnered, she supposes, from completing yet another year of college. Or maybe, she decides, it’s simply that he’s no longer interested in her. The idea depresses her—how can she be so predictable?—and she looks away from Miles and Ernie back to the pool, where one lone woman floats beneath her on a raft. It’s too early in the summer for the pool to fill up, too early in the summer for disaster to occur.

Later, under Gerard’s umbrella, drinking from a water bottle, she tries to decide if she misses Leo. She thought this month of separation would be difficult. Last summer his time away at music camp had been excruciating, but now she feels none of last year’s dark yearning for his presence. In fact, she hardly misses him at all. He calls her every two nights from Denver, but his voice is small and far away, distant in her ear as an echo. What she does miss, she decides, is being touched every day. Funny how a person can grow so used to that, she thinks, how a person can miss the contact, though not necessarily the conversation, of another human being so acutely after only a week has passed.

She turns to watch Gerard pore over the schedule, brow crumpled up in thought.

“Here,” Helen says, reaching out her hand to him. “Let me do it.”

He looks up and smiles. A very nice smile, Helen begrudgingly admits. “Okay, little miss bossy. Give it a shot.” He slides the schedule across to her, and she fills it in for the next two weeks, trying to make sure that Miles and Ernie never have the same days off.

“So,” Gerard asks her as she writes, “what’s your mother like? I can’t quite get a read on her character.”

Her stomach flutters at this question, and she tries to determine how exactly to answer. Should she make up something distasteful, so he’ll lose interest? “She’s weird,” Helen says, without looking up.

He laughs at this. “Weird, huh? I don’t see that side of her, but that’s good to know. I like weird.”

She slides back the completed schedule, takes a breath, and asks, “Why are you so interested anyway?”

He shrugs, palms up. “Just trying to get to know my employees a little better.” He reaches across to pinch her cheek, and she flinches at his touch.

“Helen!” she hears Miles shout from the chair. “Get up here, please. I’m sweating to death.”

She takes a final sip of water, then goes to relieve him from the heat.

HER MOTHER PICKS her up at five but doesn’t come inside. Helen finds her sitting in the parking lot, gazing through the windshield of her Honda at the wall of the hotel. Inside the car, pop music floats around, innocuous and drab, but when Helen reaches to change the station as she often does, her mother grabs her hand. “Wait. This is my favorite song.”

“It is?” Helen listens to the synthesizers, a man’s voice coating the notes with words she can’t decipher, something, as usual, about love.

Her mother taps long fingers absently against the steering wheel, still looking at the wall.

“Can we go now or what?” Helen wants to know.

Her mother shifts into reverse, then turns to her and says, “Quit being such a snot.”

Helen begins to protest, then decides against it and says, “Sorry.”

“Everything, Helen, is not about you.”

“I never said it was.”

Her mother pulls out into the traffic of the Strip, just missing the tail end of a group of big, blond, German-looking tourists. “It’s your whole attitude.”

“What did I do?”

“Just think a little before you act. All right? That’s all I’m asking you to do. Just to think a little bit.”

AT HOME, Helen finds Jenny and her boyfriend, Ricky, kissing on the back patio. They separate when Helen lets the screen door of the kitchen slam, and Ricky stands to go. “Hey, Helen.” He nods, somehow managing to evoke an aura of being both cocky and shy. “Gotta go, Jen.” He bends to kiss her, his head of moussed curls barely moving in a sudden breeze. “I’ll call you later.” Jenny follows him inside to walk him to the door, and Helen sits down to wait for her return.

Ricky is sixteen, the same age as Helen, yet he seems much younger to her, much lighter and at ease. Lately Helen has begun to feel both young and old at once. The world is still composed mostly of questions, yet there is a new weight to things. She can feel certain daily lies beginning to pile up inside, growing incrementally heavier each time she tells her mother no, of course I’m not having sex, or is compelled by Leo to pledge yes, I do love you more than anything or anyone in the entire world. At day’s end she is so tired from this heaviness, so obviously altered, that her unchanged image in the bathroom mirror is a surprise.

Jenny arrives back on the patio, smiling and humming, and sits down across from Helen. “Let me ask you something,” Helen says. “Do you think Mom would ever cheat on Dad?”

Jenny laughs. “Are you crazy? No way. Never.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I don’t know. She seems too old.”

“She’s only forty-five.”

“Only.” Jenny laughs again. “That word doesn’t belong in that sentence.”

They sit for a bit, watching the oleander bushes buckle and sway in the hot breeze. Then Jenny turns to Helen and says, “Can I ask you something?”

Helen nods, and her sister continues. “How did you know when you were ready to have sex with Leo?”

Helen frowns and looks up to think. She remembers a vague yearning to learn more about the world, wanting to speed up her rate of adult knowledge intake and leap into the second realm of living. But of course those things hadn’t happened. Other than a different sort of closeness to Leo and a few mechanical facts, she was none the wiser about life. “I can’t really explain it,” she tells her sister. “A big part was that I knew we were in love.”

“I think I might be in love with Ricky, and he’s been wanting to, so …”

“Why not wait until you’re sure?” Helen blurts. “There’s no need to rush.”

Jenny sighs. “If I don’t soon, he’ll probably break up.”

Helen understands she means Ricky will end the relationship, but she is given an image of him splitting into pieces, like a puzzle undone. Helen wants to provide wise counsel, the perfect advice she herself never asked for or received, but she doesn’t know how to guide her sister, what these words of advice should be, so she asks, “You really think that you might love him?”

Jenny shrugs, her thin shoulders smooth and round as eggshells. “What the hell do I know?”

SUNDAY IS the day that Helen gets to practice driving. She’s had her license since December, but because her family owns only two cars, she usually has to ride with either her mother or her father or with Leo, who by no means will let her get behind the wheel of his precious Nova.

Sometimes Jenny or one of her parents joins her on these practice rides, but today Jenny is off with Ricky, and her mother dropped her father off at his office, then went to grocery shop, so Helen finds herself alone behind the wheel. Usually she takes a route away from the city, through town toward Sunrise Mountain, or follows Charleston out to Red Rock Canyon, but today she makes a change. Today she heads straight down Maryland Parkway past the strip malls and office buildings, past the Boulevard Mall and Sunrise Hospital, toward Gerard’s house.

She remembers his address from the party he threw last year at the end of summer, but today the house looks different. In bright sun, its stucco walls are more pockmarked than she recalls, and the rectangle of mustard-colored grass beside the driveway, where she made out with Miles in the dark, is bald in spots and appears even more scratchy than she remembers it against her legs. She parks across the street, against the curb, and steps out into the heat, looking up and down the block for a sign, something to tell her why she’s traveled here.

She finds it in seconds: the blue top of her mother’s Honda glowering at her from its parking space, partway down the block behind a convertible Volkswagen. To be certain that it’s her mother’s car, Helen walks over and looks into its windows. She hasn’t wanted it to be true, but as she cups hands around her eyes and looks inside at the familiar interior—a book in the backseat, a bottle of Evian wedged beside the parking brake, black sunglasses tucked beneath the driver’s visor—she realizes she already knew that she would find her mother here.

Gerard’s house appears deserted. Maybe, she tells herself, they’re just out somewhere for coffee. Still, she approaches the squat structure, trying to figure out what the hell to do. Should she ring the doorbell? Sit waiting on the stoop? Peer through windows? The last option strikes her as the only reasonable choice, but she pauses in the driveway, worried she’ll be seen or heard and worried, most of all, that what she’s going to do right now may change her life for good. She steps closer to the wall, into a thin alley of shade; pale cicada carcasses cling at eye level to the stucco wall, and when she pulls one off, it crumbles in her hand.

Before she can decide what to do, a laugh ascends from somewhere inside the house. Helen thinks it is her mother’s laugh, though it sounds different from the way it usually does, more loose and varied, maybe younger too, though Helen can’t decide if a laugh contains an age. She edges slowly down the wall toward the windows of the kitchen but can’t yet bring herself to glance inside, so she walks past the windows into the backyard, though it doesn’t seem large enough or even alive enough to be called a yard.

A dilapidated motorcycle sits on a slab of concrete beneath a clothesline, tools set neatly on a red cloth beside the bike. Dead grass stretches out to a high wooden fence. Helen sees movement in the weeds of the yard’s far corner, and then a turtle wanders out, making its way toward her across the lawn. Gerard has mentioned this turtle at work; he purchased the turtle to keep him company, claiming he didn’t want anything as high maintenance as a dog or cat. After hearing this story, Helen imagined Gerard asleep in a large bed with the turtle tucked in beside him. The picture makes her smile and calms her enough so that she can walk back to the side of the house and look through the windows.

The kitchen is empty, its gray counters vacant except for an open gallon of ice cream, fifteen feet or so away from the window. She thinks the label reads “Chocolate Chip,” her mother’s favorite flavor.

In the next second, her mother wanders into view; she is barefoot but fully clothed, wearing the same long white skirt and sleeveless top she left the house in. She crosses the kitchen to the ice cream, which she begins eating from the carton with a spoon. Helen holds her breath and moves away from the glass, leaning against the wall with her eyes closed, debating whether she should run or risk another look.

When she chances a second glance, she sees Gerard appear on the edge of the kitchen. He is completely naked and moves to put his arms around her mother’s middle from behind, laying his cheek on her shoulder, face turning toward Helen; she pulls back from the window but then sees that his eyes are closed. His bliss is palpable even from across the kitchen and through this dusty glass; the certain shape of his happiness floats toward Helen and secures her to this spot. She cannot move, cannot turn away from them. He is dark from the sun except for the space his swim trunks usually cover, the half-moon of his ass as pale as any skin Helen’s ever seen.

Her mother’s lips move, saying something quiet to Gerard, and in that same moment he opens his eyes and looks directly at Helen. Before she can decipher if he’s really seen her, before she can wait and learn what happens next, she runs, down the driveway, across the street into her father’s car, and turns it on; it dies; then she tries again, sweat flushing across her chest and back before she’s able to release herself from the curb and out into the street.

Did he see her? She can’t be sure. There was, she hopes, enough space between them, enough glare across the windows, enough sleep left in his eyes to make her presence shadowy and vague. In her rearview mirror the street is empty. No one is running after her. She continues on her way toward home, car growling beneath her, cicadas shrilling through the heat like a distant scream, the one she can feel building in her throat.

To settle her nerves, she decides to lengthen her drive, so she turns left on Tropicana and heads for the Strip. Once she reaches it and turns right, traffic slows, so she relaxes her foot on the gas pedal and tries to empty her mind by focusing on everything going on around her. There, up on her left, is the Dunes. Ernie and Miles are working today, and she wishes she were too, that she hadn’t had the time to drive all the way out to Gerard’s and spy.

A billboard that she sees every day on the way home from work fills her window. It shows a row of women, lined up in black high heels and G-strings, asses to the camera. Floating in silver script above their heads, the caption reads: “The Crazy Showgirls of Rock and Roll: No ifs, ands, or …” A cab pulls up beside Helen, sporting a large display poster on its top of bikini-clad women splayed out provocatively on sand, advertising some new show called A Day at the Beach. At a stoplight in front of Caesars Palace, she sees men passing out pamphlets to tourists. Helen has seen enough of these booklets littering the gutters to know they advertise women you can order up to your room, like a tray of food.

Usually all this strikes her as amusing, completely unrelated to her actual life. But today it seems to stain her, to invade her skin to the point of leaving a sticky film on her limbs. Has the city infected her mother as well? Have all the years spent surrounded by sex sent her falling toward Gerard?

She is relieved finally to reach Oakey, where she turns right and heads toward home through the familiar neighborhoods, the ranch houses that look as if they could fit into any western U.S. town. When she passes Leo’s house, the sight of his Nova sitting vacant beneath the carport, waiting for his return from Denver, pains her. She hasn’t received his usual call for the last two nights, and she tells herself that he has probably fallen in love with another girl.

HELEN HOPES to find her own home empty, but when she steps inside the front door, her sister is sitting in the living room, crying on the couch. After moving to sit beside her, she puts an arm around Jenny’s shoulders, waiting to hear what’s wrong. What else could possibly be wrong?

“Ricky dumped me,” Jenny murmurs into her hands, rubbing her reddened face with her palms.

Helen nods and pulls her closer. “Oh, honey,” she says, feeling suddenly like a mother, like her own mother’s replacement, “I’m so sorry.”

“I couldn’t do it.” Jenny shrugs and looks up at her. “I guess I got scared.”

Helen can feel a deep relief moving through her, cooling her overheated limbs like a salve. “You did the right thing,” she tells her.

“I don’t know what stopped me. People used to get married when they were twelve, you know. They had kids by the time they were my age.”

“Who told you that?”

“Ricky.”

“Well, that’s because they had to.” Helen laughs. “This is supposedly considered progress.”

“Right.” Jenny grimaces and leans closer to her sister. “Progress.”

They sit for a while in silence, the clock on the mantel clicking at them. Outside the front window Helen can see a giant blue and white sky racing over the neighborhood; below this, their ant-red driveway seems to emit a rising pinkish heat. Inside the living room it is cool and quiet, the muted colors providing calm, as they are meant to do.

“Where did you drive today?” Jenny finally asks.

Helen shrugs. “Oh, nowhere really. Just around.”

FOR DINNER that evening they eat the grilled halibut and salad her mother made when she got home, an hour or two after Helen. Talk across the table consists of the Russian films her father found today in the university archives, Jenny’s breakup with Ricky, Helen’s day of driving. “It went fine,” is all she offers when her mother asks about her progress. “I’ve got it down.”

It seems to Helen that her mother is eating more than usual and maybe drinking a bit more wine, the flushed planes of her face rising and falling with conversation. She is vibrant with color and chatter, waving her fork through the air as she offers words of consolation to Jenny. “There’ll be other boys,” she tells her. “It may not seem like it right now, but trust me.”

“Don’t tell her that,” Helen says, her angry tone creating a sudden silence. “Don’t make it sound like Ricky didn’t mean a thing to her.”

“Helen, I certainly didn’t mean to imply that Ricky was unimportant.”

“But on the other hand,” her father interjects with a laugh, “maybe he was.”

“He was a jerk,” Jenny says, and shrugs. “Who needs him?”

“That’s my girl.” Her father chuckles and puts an arm around Jenny.

Helen pushes back from the table and stands up. “Can I please be excused?”

Before anyone can answer, she has left the table behind, escaped to the kitchen, where she scrapes and rinses her plate, then runs the faucet over her hands and rubs them across the hot skin of her face. Laughter reaches her from the other room, first her mother’s, then Jenny’s and her father’s, and Helen leans against the sink and stares out at the darkening backyard, thinking for the first time all week that maybe she does miss Leo, just a little bit.

AT THE POOL on Monday, Gerard acts as if nothing were different. There is no variation in his gaze or manner to suggest he saw her through the kitchen window. Ernie and Miles arrive at the same time, kissing lightly beneath the lifeguard chair before Ernie climbs the ladder and settles in for her first shift. Helen ascends the other chair, where she leans back into the seat as deeply as she can and splays her legs out over the platform, feet resting only on the blazing air.

She watches Gerard, sitting beneath the red umbrella, sipping a Diet Coke, and tries to decide if she hates him. He seems so innocuous right now, so different from the man glimpsed in the kitchen, that yesterday’s vision feels unreal. Is this really the person who huddled lovingly at her mother’s back?

At lunch Ernie joins her, without asking, in the casino. Helen tries to talk to her, to distract her mind from other matters and simply listen to this girl. “I think I’m really falling for Miles,” she tells Helen. “Isn’t he adorable?”

Helen shrugs, then nods.

“We’ve only been dating for a couple of weeks, but I don’t know. He might be it.”

“Have you ever been in love?” Helen asks her, for no real reason, just to make conversation.

Ernie looks at the ceiling then takes a bite of her ham sandwich. “No, not really. How ’bout you?”

Helen thinks of Leo, but he seems so far away right now, as if he were already someone from her past, a boy she used to think she loved. “I don’t know,” she says at last.

THAT EVENING her mother is late to pick her up. Helen waits in the parking lot; the sun is at its deepest heat, burning past the high white walls of the Dunes directly into her bare legs and arms. Down the street she can see the clear, cool fountains of Caesars Palace, rising and falling, and she briefly considers running over and jumping in. Miles appears through the exit door and sees her standing there alone. “You need a ride?” he calls, crossing the lot to his minitruck.

She debates a moment, then yells “Okay,” leaps off the curb, and sprints across the asphalt into the waiting cab of his Toyota.

“Where’s Ernie?” Helen asks as they pull out onto the Strip.

“Oh.” He waves a hand. “Some family thing tonight. Her sister’s dance recital or something. I don’t know.” He turns on the radio, then says, “Hey, why don’t we go to the lake?”

“Right now?”

“Yeah. We’re both dressed for it.” He smiles. “Why the hell not?”

Helen thinks about her mother, possibly pulling into the Dunes parking lot right this second and wondering where her daughter is. “Okay,” Helen says. “Let’s go.”

THEY STOP at a 7-Eleven on the way out of town. Miles goes inside to “get some refreshments,” and Helen waits in the cab of his truck, eyeing the pay phone by the door. Should she call her house and let them know what she’s doing? She will only be yelled at for leaving without asking first; she will only be questioned about the safety of Miles’s driving, about the safety of Miles himself, and she decides to leave the trouble she is already in for later. Helen rolls down the window, props her feet up on the dashboard, and decides that for the first time in a while she is happy.

AS THEY DRIVE, the desert grows empty around them, convenience stores transforming into tumbleweed, corrugated sand replacing taverns. The desolation of this stretch of road is absolute, and Miles and Helen are silent until they top a ridge and see the lake below them, filling in the giant emptiness with cobalt blue. Helen smiles at the sight. “I can’t wait to jump in,” she tells Miles.

“Me neither.”

He takes her to the cliffs, a more secluded spot than Boulder Beach, a cove tucked away from the larger expanse of lake, and a place where the stoners from her school supposedly hang out. She’s been here once or twice with Leo, and there have always been a few people around at least, but today the sand below the bluff on which they park is completely vacant.

They climb down the hillside to the small strip of beach, where Miles lays down a blanket and a bag from the 7-Eleven. To their left, across the water, sandstone-colored cliffs rise like ancient structures, though Helen’s not sure they’re tall enough to be called cliffs. She herself has jumped off one into the water, and it wasn’t all that long a drop.

They both strip down to their swimsuits, then make their careful way across the rocky shore into the water. It is lukewarm from the heat, but a better alternative than the sun-baked beach, and they swim out to a jutting rock and climb it. They sit for a minute before jumping in and making their way back toward the sand.

As Helen steps onto land, the sun is beginning to descend, moving to meet the red rocks that surround the farther reaches of the lake, and as Miles gets out of the water, he is backlit by a thick burnished gold, his face and body so shadowed by the glare he could be anyone at all.

He settles down beside her, then opens the 7-Eleven bag, pulling out a six-pack of berry wine coolers and a bag of powdered doughnuts. “Dinner?” he asks, ripping open the doughnuts, then twisting the tops off two wine coolers.

Helen takes everything he offers, drinking quickly from the sweet cooler and eating three doughnuts before Miles has had one. He laughs at her and leans to brush powdered sugar from the edges of her mouth with his thumb. Is this how it began with her mother and Gerard? Helen wonders. With a touch that seemed both necessary and invasive, both innocuous and intimate? She remembers the party at his house last year and the moment when Gerard leaned to remove a crumb of chocolate cake from her mother’s upper lip. Did everything begin in that minute, the trajectory that would carry them separately through the school year, then back into each other’s presence beneath the red umbrella? Helen wants to travel the same path, to understand what’s happening between her mother and this man, so before she can think about it too much, she leans across the blanket and kisses Miles, close-lipped at first, then opening herself to him completely, searching the dark corners of his mouth for some sort of answer, an explanation for the way the world works.

After a few minutes she pulls away. “I’m sorry,” she tells him. “I know you’re seeing Ernie.”

He shrugs. “I like her, but she’s ‘saving herself,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

Saving herself. Helen turns the phrase over in her mind. Is the alternative drowning? There is a sense of being underwater as she leans her body toward Miles and kisses him again, but it is not an unpleasant sensation, not at all.

They separate, and Miles takes a long swallow from his cooler, then smiles at her. The sun has disappeared behind the mountains, and the sky behind him streams out blue and purple as a bruise. “I thought you were all serious with Leo.”

Now it’s her turn to shrug. “I sort of am.”

Before she can feel guilty about this half-true answer, she reaches across for Miles, grasps on to his bare arm, and pulls him toward her, against her, on top of her. They kiss for a while before separating once again to crawl out of their still-wet swimsuits, and Helen thinks of the locust shells that will be everywhere soon, and wonders at the beauty of being able to shed your outer body every summer and start again.

Their coupling is quick and fumbling and polite. An embarrassed “thank you” from Miles when she helps him get the condom open; a mumbled “sorry” in her ear when his watch catches in her hair. Helen does not love Miles. She knows this, knows it especially well now that they are physically connected. Yet she wants to tell him that she does. When he extracts himself and lies down beside her, she wants to say I love you, Miles, so she struggles quietly to keep these words inside her chest, since they aren’t even partway true.

He softly hums beside her now, half asleep already it seems, though he reaches now and then to rub her stomach. Neither of them speaks, and she guesses that they won’t, hopes they won’t, until they get inside his truck and reach the city. Helen rises from the blanket and returns to the water, where she wades in until she is waist-deep, then dives under and swims out into the darkness. Far out from the beach she stops, then flips onto her back to float. A gibbous moon swims above her in the sky, though whether it is waxing or waning, she can’t recall. The symbolism strikes her as important, and she wishes she could remember. Is this a beginning or an ending?

Maybe, she tells herself, it’s neither one. Just a middle. Just a new episode of her life linked to all the others from her past, waiting to be joined to more. The idea that life might be just that, a straight line without cycles, without predictable periods of growth and diminishment, without time laid out for rising and resting, without any coherent meaning really, frightens her. So she closes her eyes against the moon and tries to summon a thought that will ground her. Being punished for this excursion with Miles is what she should be worrying about, but she is not as nervous as she thinks she ought to be.

Helen thinks about Ernie and Leo, the way she’s just betrayed them both. Though if neither of them finds out what she’s done with Miles, is this still a betrayal? If no one is hurt, is it actually wrong? Helen knows, somewhere inside her water-cooled limbs, that it is, but she floats on the other possibility for a while, immersed in this soupy, too-warm water, in this giant man-made lake, wondering where she’s going to find the desire to return herself to shore.