“Ma, fer cryin’ out loud, will you stop it? I told ya already, they don’t need me here anymore. . . .What? ... I told ya. The season’s winding down. . . . No, I’m not a quitter. Since when am I a quitter?”
Chris sat on the edge of his stripped bed, bouncing his legs up and dow n on the balls of his feet and wondering what the hell had possessed him to call home. He supposed he had to; he had no place else to go and he figured it was better to give them some warning than just to show up. Now he wasn’t so sure.
“Listen, don’t start that college bullshit with me again, will ya? . . . What? . . . Oh, so now yer gonna get on my case ’cause I say ‘bullshit,’ gimme a break. . . . Huh? . . . I don’t know. . . . That’s what I said. I don’t know if I’m going to California. I need some time. . . . No, I’m not going to just hang around. Geez, don’t you think I want a life, too? . . . No way will I work with Dad. . . . Hey, listen, he doesn’t want me to work with him any more than I want to. You know what he said to me when I ... wait, wait, don’t interrupt, I’m telling you something . . . you know what he said to me when I tried to help him with that Delaney job? He told me I had clumsy hands. Nice, huh? Did I deserve that? . . . Oh, don’t start defending him now, okay? Spare me, all right?”
A timer went off in the kitchen.
“I gotta go,” Chris said into the phone. “I’ll see you at dinnertime. . . . No, I’m not running away from our conversation. Where do you get that crap? You’re watching too many of those talk shows. . . . I gotta take my lunch out of the oven, okay? . . . Yes, I can cook. I can take care of myself. . . .Yeah, fine, it’s frozen, what do you care? Listen, I gotta go. . . . Yeah, fine, I love you, too. I’ll be home around six. . . . What? . . . Yeah, of course, you can tell Dad, why wouldn’t ya? He won’t care anyway, he doesn’t give a shit.. . .Yeah, I gotta go, too.... All right. . . . I’ll see ya later, all right.”
Chris hung up the phone and counted slowly to ten. If he didn’t, he would probably have had to yell or throw something and break it. By the time he got to the kitchen, his chicken pot pie had bubbled over and made a mess on the bottom of the oven.
“That’s their problem,” he muttered with satisfaction as he turned off the timer.
Giving the steaming pie time to cool off, Chris popped open a can of beer. Why am I going home? he thought. It wasn’t even his home anymore. He didn’t want it to be. Problem was, he had no idea what he did want.
Except. And this was crazy, he knew that, but the one thing he wanted was to save his brother. He wanted to travel back in time and be eighteen years old, just like he was now, and be standing there at the edge of the pool when his brother fell in. He wanted to dive into that water and pull his brother out and save his father’s life.
And save my father’s life, Chris thought.
Chris thought, If my brother had lived, he would be older than me. Who knows, maybe he would have been married by now, have a kid. I’d be an uncle. My dad would be a grandpa.
Funny, Chris thought, J always think of him as younger than me, my kid brother. That’s because he’ll always be four. But the truth is he would have been older than me. Maybe he would have taught me a few things. Maybe he would have been here now to tell me what to do.
Even now, Chris wasn’t sure why he’d quit his job. He just knew he couldn’t do it anymore. He was through lifeguarding. It got to be, in his head, this pressure and this need all rolled up in one to save somebody’s life, to prove he could do it. No, the opposite: to prove he wouldn’t blow it. The longer it didn’t happen, the more the pressure and the need built up inside him and the harder he partied at night and the sicker he felt during the day. The animal was consuming him. He had to get out.
It hadn’t taken him long to pack. He could eat his lunch, have another beer, be down at the dock in plenty of time. He’d already said his goodbyes. Last night, Jenny had told him she was disappointed in him. Chris had told her to shove it, which on reflection may have been an overreaction. Still, she had come around in the morning to apologize. She’d said, what is it she’d said? Oh, right, that she’d only meant she cared about him.
He was a good guy, Jenny had told him. He had a lot more going on inside than most guys she knew. What had she called him? “A hunk with a heart of gold.”
A piece of chicken caught in Chris’s throat. Damn. Why did Jenny have to say those things? What did she have to care about him for? He’d told her that morning he was going to miss her. It had come out of his mouth like one of those automatic things you say, but then he’d said it again.
“No, honest, Jen. I’m gonna miss you.”
It wasn’t like he loved her or anything. She was not remotely his type. But all those hours up there on the stand together, they’d developed this special thing between them. At least he’d felt that way. They hadn’t even talked all that much, not as much as Jenny would have liked them to, for sure, but he’d gotten to, what? trust her? Yeah. Trust her.
“Shit,” Chris said, tossing the rest of the pot pie in the garbage, “now I got nobody to trust.”
One time during his senior year the school counselor had asked Chris, “If you could do one thing to change your life—one real thing, not magic—what would it be?” Chris had sat there for what felt like an hour, and the only things he could think of were the magic kind. The counselor, who was this really nice and dynamite-looking lady who happened to have the name of Miss Fox, finally reached over and touched the back of Chris’s hand and said, looking him straight in the eye, “That’s your question, Chris. Don’t let it go until you’ve answered it.”
So was Miss Fox to blame for the mess his head was in this summer?
Hey, it wasn’t her fault he couldn’t answer a simple question.
Chris glanced at his watch. He had about an hour. Maybe he’d kill some time going for a walk. In all the time he’d been out on the island, he’d never just gone for a walk. Not for its own sake. It wasn’t too late. He could go for one now, and, what the hell, if he missed the one o’clock, there was always another ferry at three. And the five-thirty after that. He could always call his mother, tell her he’d be getting in later. Tell her to tell the old man not to wait up.
Thing was, Chris didn’t want to go home. Not really. It was just, he didn’t have anyplace else to go.