A mouthful of steak-and-cheese challenges my jaw. The cheese forms a white glaze over knots of shaved meat. Bubbles of fat pop against the roof of my mouth. My mandibles ache. This is not a dream.
I whisk inadequate napkins one after the other from a dispenser to absorb the grease. “Another one?” Gordy asks.
I say no, still chewing, and chase the meat with black cherry soda that rinses clean and dry, almost salty.
Gordy finishes his soda, and the door of the sandwich shop pulls closed behind us on a spring. Sand washes across the threshold and rubs the soles of my sneakers.
“I’ll pay you back sometime.”
Gordy shrugs. “Forget it.”
We walk down the road to a beach. A recent sleetstorm has left pockmarks in the sand, and the tide has gone out, leaving patterns like dragged hands in the wet areas, Vs within Vs within Vs. Our shadows walk with us dully.
Everything on this beach seems humanish to me. The moon, already visible at four p.m., resembles a fingernail clipping, and the fallen shreds of curly brown and black seaweed are snips from a giant’s beard.
“What a great place.” The beach is right near Gordy’s house. It might even be a private beach. Once again it strikes me that everything about Gordy seems excellent. He’s one of those preppy, well-rounded types and will probably be way more successful than me.
“Do your parents have a boat?” I ask.
“My dad has a modified lobster boat. It’s in the marina for the winter.”
Crap. I said “your parents” instead of “your father.”
“We go out fishing for the weekend once in a while. Maybe you’d like to go with us sometime?”
On the spectrum of moronic things to say, asking about someone’s dead parent as if they are still living is probably at the far end. How could I do this? Gordy’s mother died shortly after they moved to town, of cystic fibrosis. People were talking about him when they first got here, because when his mother brought him in to register for school, she kept spitting blood into a handkerchief, right in the administrative office.
“Sorry. I forgot about your mom. Stupid.”
“That’s okay. It’s not as bad anymore. She spent the whole last year talking to me about what to expect. That part was harder than it is now.”
Then he surprises me by tossing an imaginary Frisbee. I catch the Frisbee and set the figures in my mind on it—the mother and father, little kitchen figures, diorama-like. I set them on it and whirl them out to sea, on their problem-plate, their Thought-Frisbee.
I walked out again! I walked out and left Linda in charge! Linda and Jodie are in charge of Dad. If Lucky Linda knows so much about what he needs, and Jodie is so indispensable, they will do a fine job taking care of him. I don’t know whether Linda will tell Mom or not.
A barge heading into the harbor makes an engining thrum that carries. Gordy and I race to the end of the beach, where a copper-colored granite shelf is ideal for sitting but sends cold through the seat of my pants. At our backs is a stone wall. Above it, trees have twisted into tough survivalist shapes.
Gordy pulls a knit cap from his coat pocket. “Can you picture me out here this summer, maybe on the Fourth of July, with Brenda Mason or some other girl? I would have a blanket all spread out, maybe a portable grill. We’d be watching the fireworks over the harbor. You could come out too. Maybe it could be a double date. Who would you bring?”
Out on the water, the barge has cut its motor and a tugboat aligns itself behind it.
Is there anyone I can want? The prettiest girl I know is Lisa Melman, but she’s in Linda’s grade, and anyway, she’s not as nice as her mother.
“I’m trying not to think too much about that stuff now. I’m trying to stay—I can’t think of a better word—pure.”
“Pure with girls?” Gordy asks.
“No, pure with thinking about only one thing at a time.”
The tugboat, pushing, and the barge, gliding, are little and big, like the two-space and the five-space boats in the Battleship game. Concrete thoughts of chores to be done at home soften and rise. Mists, wishes, smoke signals. I’m not there. I’m here now. I got away.
“How is your dad, by the way?”
What to say? I brush the powdery sand into arcs with one hand.
“He’s much better.”
“That’s great.”
“What was wrong with him, anyway?”
“He was depressed.”
“That must have been rough. He seems like a great guy.”
“He really is.”
“Glad to know he’s better, then.”
I rub my palms together slowly and watch the grains fall. “It takes a while to get better in a really obvious way that you would see by looking at him or talking to him, but things are getting better…underneath. It’s more like an improvement in a different layer. An unconscious or subconscious layer.”
“The human mind is fascinating, isn’t it?” Gordy says. “I’ve always wondered about stuff like that.”
“He’ll probably be fully recovered soon. Maybe you can come by the house again.”
“That would be great.”
We’re both lying back now, watching scuds of clouds move in to smother the moon.
“Do you want to get an ice cream or anything?”
“No, thanks. The sandwiches were enough. I should go home soon. I left without charging my headlight.”
An arm of land reaches around the harbor. Across the water from us is a castle built by an eccentric inventor. It contains all kinds of things he lifted from humble little towns in Europe. A pipe organ, a reflecting pool of blue tile, even the coffin of a young girl. At the edge of the horizon, lights fall slowly from the sky—not shooting stars, but airplanes making their descent into Logan.
“Right after my mom died,” Gordy says, “I would sit and look out here. Not toward Boston, but past it, where you could just keep going. I would try to convince myself that if I went far enough there was a place where we could all still be together.”
“I know.”
The sky darkens, but we lie on the rock like sacrifices. Then rain comes, hitting our faces like a metaphor.