5

Friday Night

She helps carry the dirty dishes to the sink and, at his insistence, takes a seat in the sitting area of the room to answer emails while he finishes the cleaning up and loads the dishwasher. That done, he takes his glass of wine and the opened bottle and heads out to the porch and the stairs that lead to the upper deck.

“Come up when you’ve finished,” he says, “but better put on a sweater or fleece or something. A cool evening is setting in.”

Ten minutes later, she takes a seat next to him in another hammock chair he has turned to face the headlights cresting the inlet bridge. A black quilted jacket with gold embroidery is zipped to the soft depression at the base of her throat, and a memory pops into his brain of the ruddy blush that used to flood that depression when they made out. He would unbutton her blouse and watch as the blush spread to her chest. Now the depression is pale and shadowed by translucent tendons that seem strained to hang on.

“I sat here last night,” he says, “watching those headlights come over the crest of the bridge and wondering what this visit would bring.”

She takes a sip of wine and casts him a furtive glance before turning back to look at the sea.

“And?”

“I guess I’m still a bit confused,” he says, “over why you came down here—to set things straight over you and Mason, rekindle old memories of Seth and Anna? I mean, it’s great to see you, but, well, I’m just confused.”

“I had not planned to tell you about Mason, and certainly not about the abortion. It’s a constant source of grief and shame for me. But, I don’t know, somewhere on the drive here from the airport, past those east Carolina swamps and fields that seem to stretch forever, it became clear to me that if I did not tell you, the weekend would feel false and very lonely.”

“I know about the effect of those fields and swamps,” he says. “They stir something in me, and I spend the rest of the drive trying to figure out what it is. In your case,” he sighs, “it seems to have been a need to clear your conscience.”

“That’s a bit too succinct,” she says.

He notices for the first time, consciously at least, the red taillights going in the opposite direction from the incoming headlights on the bridge. They are there, and then they vanish over the rim of the world.

“This conversation,” he says, “feels very one-sided.”

Her voice deepens like the evening light. “You remember that Valentine’s Day cotillion I asked you to my senior year? You remember what happened?”

The claws of a shriveled memory scratch in a corner of his mind. “We had some sort of falling out. I wound up going with what’s-her-name, Allison… something.”

“Allison Winslett.”

“Yeah. You’re not still upset about that, are you?”

“I thought you understood how much that cotillion meant to me, that it was a chance for me to prove something I’d wanted to prove for so long to everyone at that dance, and to myself. I wasn’t pretty or part of the in-crowd, and I had worked so hard to make up for that, to be a good student, athlete, and student leader. That cotillion was a chance for me to prove there was something more to me than Miss Know-It-All and Miss Do-It-All.”

“You were something other than a Miss Know-It-All. People liked you; they elected you class president.”

“No. I wanted them to see the ‘me’ beneath all that. I wanted them to see us on the dance floor, whispering, snuggling, holding hands—that special thing we had that most of them just dreamed about—and know I was a person with deep feelings who could fall in love and glow with it. I wasn’t pretty or popular, but I had that. I had you; I had us. And then you bailed and those hopes came crashing down. My parents had to scramble to get me a date. Bobby Ravenel came all the way from Montgomery.”

Around him, the night’s silence stirs and hums and grows louder. In the cup of his hands, the half-full bowl of the wine glass feels huge and empty. He starts to speak but catches himself. Yes, he knew about all of that, about what it meant to her. He knew from clues he had picked up that, for all her achievements—class president, straight-A student, swimming team, tennis team—she felt out of it socially. She thought those sharp, angular features and quick eyes—so attractive to him now as well as then—didn’t compare to the soft, round faces of the beauty queens featured in the Oneonta High yearbook, floating in the flounce of their hooped evening gowns. And he knew that somehow being with him helped her make up for that. He knew all of that, yet he stood her up. Why?

“I know,” she says, “it was just a teenage dream, but it was so strong. It seemed so meant to be. And then it wasn’t.”

He stares out at the gathering darkness. No moon or stars yet, but there is that sense of clouds somewhere out of sight, moving in to steal the night.

“I needed that dream, Ace,” she says, “at that time in my life. I wanted to be there with you.”

“Yes,” he says. “I wanted to be there with you too.”

“Then why?”

The wine glass feels even larger now, as if he is holding a globe. The plaited ropes of his hammock chair press into the bend of his spine.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe I was jealous, resentful of your accomplishments. Maybe I saw you slipping away. Or maybe I was just adolescent, selfish, and stupid.”

He draws in a deep breath and lets it out slowly. If he tried to rise, it would be like heaving himself from a dark hole.

“Or maybe in some unconscious way, I sensed your fling with Mason Morrel.”

“It wasn’t a fling.”

“OK, sorry.”

“And Mason wasn’t even on the scene then, at least not as far as I was concerned.”

He heaves a frustrated sigh. “I shouldn’t have called it that. It’s just that, I didn’t mean … Shit, I don’t know what I mean.”

Silence hovers between them, darting its eyes. It is as if they have both settled into their spaces on the deck and become part of the dim evening. When she speaks, her voice seems to come from far away.

“After Bobby Ravenel brought me home from the party, I lay in bed in the mushy smell of tears and teenage grief and felt truly alone for the first time since I met you. The bed seemed very small, the room detached and afloat as if I was drifting away from that party and all the silly hopes and fantasies I’d left there. I felt foolish and stupid, and I hated that.”

“Yes, I know the feeling.”

“Well, it was there in that dark bedroom that I began to flee the life I had tried so hard to create for myself. For the first time since we started dating, I allowed my thoughts to venture beyond you and me and high school to what might lie ahead.”

He sees himself, back there on that dance floor, peeking over Allison Winslett’s freckled shoulder for glimpses of J’nelle, that selfish, idiot boy, weighted with the dread of someone who has stumbled—no, pushed himself—through an unseen barrier into a strange and uncharted land.

“What I remember about that dance,” he says, “is watching you with some guy I didn’t know and feeling even more of whatever it was that made me bail on you in the first place. And I also remember now, having thought about it, that Mason was there, and he was sort of hanging around you, trying to be close.”

So when did it begin, Ace thinks, there at the Valentine’s Day dance or later when he saw them talking at the end of the hallway or somewhere in between?

“He made it clear he was interested,” she says, “back in the fall when I first walked into his class. It was as if he was extending his hand to help me make the leap from where I was.”

“Hello, scholars!” Mason would say when the class was seated. “What a bright-eyed, brainy bunch! Ready to rumble? Let’s talk about dreams, where they come from, what they tell us, how they lead to stories. Who has a dream they’re willing to share to help us get started?”

And he, Ace, had volunteered—some adolescent dream about his girlfriend who had gone off to college. What a sap!

“And,” J’nelle adds, breaking into Ace’s thoughts, “he seemed to care, to really care.”

“So,” Ace says, “what became of old Mason?”

“When I told him I was pregnant, he fled the scene, sent money for the abortion—no card or letter with it, just bills in an envelope. I think, after your senior year, he and his wife moved to Texas. That’s the last I heard of him.”

Texas had always seemed another country to Ace. So big. A place to get lost.

“I blew it, J’nelle,” he says. “I’m sorry. I was just, well like I said, stupid.”

“And perhaps a little heartless—at least it felt that way to me.”

“Yes,” he says, “I guess so.”

“But handsome,” she says. “Allison seemed pleased with herself.”

“I have no idea.”

He can’t remember what the fight that precipitated the whole mess was about. Almost certainly, she will know, but to ask would be one more sign of his callousness. Besides, he does know what it was about—the real reason. Resentment, jealousy, fear of losing her. What if he had been more of a man? What if that dance had happened the way she dreamed? How would that have changed their lives?

From beneath them comes the sound of clawed feet on the front porch.

She grabs the arm of his chair. “What is that?”

“Raccoon. Pays a visit every night.” He glances at his watch. “Tonight he’s ahead of schedule.”

The scratching continues in a meandering pattern across the porch, pausing, then moving on.

She relaxes back into her chair.

“A dark messenger,” she says.

“More like a thief searching for food.”

“Even thieves bring messages.”

The scratching sounds fade toward the far edge of the porch, then stop.

“Definitely a messenger,” she says. “I watch for messengers these days.”

“For news of what?”

“I’m not quite sure, but I feel an urgency to know where my life is headed. I’ve left so much behind, or it’s left me. I feel adrift. Seth is gone, Anna. My work is sporadic. I feel a need to know.”

“Don’t we all,” he says, “but we can’t know the future.”

“No, but you can try to understand how you got to where you are. And so lately my mind has been turning toward the past, searching for clues. How did I get to this place that feels so like a precipice? Those things that happened in high school, college, and through the years, how did they shape my life, and did they even happen as I remember them? Did I miss something? Did I add something? I want to find the true story of my life instead of just continuing to muddle through it.”

“You haven’t muddled through it.”

“You don’t know the whole story.”

Now he feels on a precipice. They are both there, two people looking down, not quite daring to hold hands.

“You can’t know the past any more than you can know the future,” he says.

“Maybe,” she says, “but you can try to see things more clearly, figure out how they fit in to everything else, understand better what they mean.”

He emits a slight chuckle.

“You don’t buy it,” she says.

“When I revisit my past,” he says, “I catch myself lying, and before I know it, I’ve lost the truth entirely, if it was ever really there to find in the first place.”

“Yes,” she says, “that’s how it seems to work, and that’s why I want to go back and peel away the self-deception. I want to know the truth. It’s become a compulsion.”

He is about to say, Darlin’, where you are concerned, that ain’t nothin’ new, when she says:

“And I realized about a year ago that it begins with what happened between us in high school. And that’s why I got in touch with you again, or at least one of the reasons. There’s the real answer to your question about why I’m here.”

He sips the last drops of wine from his glass. They always taste thinner and less sweet than the ones before.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” she says.

He rests his head back against the top of the chair. The breeze tickles his hair. The night itself seems nervous.

“I’m not sure.”

“I guess it’s more accurate to say: what I’m asking?”

“It might help to hear you say it.”

“Before we got to know each other, I had a real crisis of confidence.” She pauses. “You remember my parents?”

“Yes, they never seemed happy with me.”

“They weren’t happy with anything. They were alcoholic, emotional dead zones, spouting lofty plans for me without a clue who I was. I was their vehicle for fulfilling their own lost dreams, and they put on a lot of pressure. I was terrified of failure and afraid of living a future that wasn’t mine. And then you came along, and there was someone who liked me in spite of my self-doubt and who wanted to hold me and kiss me, and he was as lost as I was.”

“I was lost?”

“Yes, and that was important, because when we were together, when we got close, my fear melted away. I wasn’t alone. I felt warm and safe.”

She takes an ample swig of wine, presses her thighs together, and lowers the glass to rest on them, cupping it in her hands in a reverential way.

“That saved me,” she said, “from anorexia or bulimia or something even worse. I was on a slow walk toward the edge of a cliff.”

“Another precipice,” he says.

“Exactly.”

“I didn’t see any of that back then,” he says. “It seemed to me you pretty much had it together all along, and then for a while we did, and then it was gone.”

Another moment of silence.

“Maybe,” she says, “if you go along with what I’m asking, we can figure all that out. So I guess the question is: would you like to do it together?”

“Do what, exactly?”

“Search for the truth. About us, about each other, about ourselves.”

He feels a reflexive instinct to duck, as if a spear has been launched at him from his past. Somewhere out there in the night, the raccoon is at work, bent to its grubby task, scratching its fingers into the drippy black muck of the marsh for a clam. Cloud-filtered moonlight falling on its head and back. Mask across its eyes that see so well, so very well, in the dark.

She holds out her wine glass. “I could use a replenishment. Saying all of that wasn’t easy.”

He pours wine in her glass, then his. His hand trembles. The bottle neck taps against the rims of the glasses.

“Have I made you nervous?”

“No, I’m OK.”

“I don’t mean to drag you into something you don’t want to do.”

“It’s OK,” he says.

A moment of silence passes before she says, “Should I ask my question again or just drop the whole thing and enjoy the weekend?”

It dawns on him that from the moment he invited her to the beach, he has had no plan for what they would do other than meals and laughs and reminiscences over fuzzy memories of the past. No plan for where it might lead. And then she came, this new, older J’nelle, dragging her past with her, trying to drag their past—their real past, whatever in the hell it was—the Mason thing, the abortion, the guilt trip over the cotillion—right out into the open. He tries to recall the images from those old times, of them together, that were so vivid to him not more than twenty-four hours ago as he sat alone on this very deck, but all he gets is a kaleidoscope of silhouettes.

“I’ve thought about trying to go back there and somehow relive those times,” he says. “Verify that what happened was real. But it wasn’t, was it? It was what you just said it was: a teenage dream, puppy love, whatever they call it, very real at the time, good while it lasted, then poof! Gone.”

She rests back in her chair. A breeze has picked up with the nightfall. He imagines it flowing over the contours of her face, brushing her hair from her temples.

“No, Ace,” she says, “there has to have been more to it than that, because remnants of those feelings are still there.”

When he does not respond, she takes a generous sip of wine.

“Still here, I mean,” she says.

“Are they?”

Once again she bends into that prayerful posture, holding her wine glass like a chalice.

“Don’t you want to know?”

He leans forward with his arms on his knees, wine glass cupped in his hands in a copy of her.

“Maybe, I guess.”

She cants her head to look at him. “Does that mean you’re willing to join me in the great quest?”

“Not willing, but I will.”

“Thanks,” she says. “It means so much.”

“I have a feeling,” he says, “this will not be easy.”

“No,” she says, “probably not.”

The wine bottle is almost empty. He offers her the last drops.

She places a hand over the top of her glass.

“No thanks,” she says, “I’m over my limit,” then finishes off her last swallow. “It’s been a long day. I think I’ll go to bed, read my usual two-and-a-half pages of my current novel, and fall asleep.”

“OK,” he says, “I’ll see you in the morning.”

She rises to leave and starts toward the stairs leading down to the front porch.

“There should be some towels in the closet in your bathroom,” he says.

She pauses at the top of the stairs, then turns and comes back to bend and give him a soft peck on the cheek, her lips cool and wet from the wine.

“We’ll be OK, Ace.” she says. “We can do this, and help each other understand it all, and we’ll be just fine.”

Then she is gone. Her steps echo down the stairs to the porch, then across the main room’s floor on the way to her bedroom.

• • •

He throws back the remains of his wine, rests forward again with his elbows on his knees, and stares out at the night. Below where he sits, toward the rear of the house, her bedroom light comes on and casts a glow upon the leaves of an ancient live oak that all but covers the driveway. She is there now, in that room, moving about, changing for bed, maybe preparing to take a shower. On his cheek, the last trace of her goodnight peck lingers like a summons, gently delivered to suck away any anger left from the news about her and Mason Morrel. He should have been prepared for this. He should have had a plan. He should have known from his dreams alone what could happen.

Pam’s silent warning: You could get hurt.

And he was hurt, not more than an hour into her visit, a hurt that feels strangely like a slaughter, by this woman below him in the lit bedroom, J’nelle the stranger, the summoner, now on to her next task, her end-of-the-day routines: the tending of skin, hair, and nails, selection of clothing for tomorrow—those women things he saw Pam do for fifty years that are to him still mysterious.

And they will always be so, he thinks, and after all this time, who cares?

But back there in those high school days, he cared in a visceral way. He imagined what the young J’nelle was doing in those late night hours before bed, what intimate secrets got performed in the inner-sanctum of her bedroom, steeped in the smells of powder and perfume and all those other things girls used. The warm-honey smell of her washed hair; the fresh, clean smell of her ironed clothes carefully folded in her bureau that was, as he pictured it, lacquered white or cream with spooled legs and thin rings of gold between the spools. Maybe there were banners on the wall, stuffed animals propped against her pillows. Maybe there was a small desk, also lacquered white, with a crook-necked lamp where she did her homework. He imagined the imprint of her slender feet in the deep pile rug, the quick movement of her calves and ankles as she got into bed. All there, so vividly he could almost touch it. And he never got so much as a glimpse.

He never had—he could never have had—the nerve to try.

The branches of the live oak go dark. The great gray owl that calls almost nightly from the grove east of the house is silent. Out beyond the dunes, the relentless surf washes in and out, stealing sand from the shore, moving slowly in his direction.

He pulls out his cell phone, checks the Series score—Final: Sox 6, Dodgers 2. At least that’s going right, but Fenway Park in Boston, where they are playing, seems so far away. And the storm, maybe he should check it as well. He clicks on the weather app, but gets only the spinning circle of a slow-loading connection.

“Fuck it,” he says and heads to bed.