It is not difficult to betray Tami. I know she’s in the city tonight, with Vaughn. She is making this too easy.
But I didn’t want Ivy and Ash’s meeting to happen at my house. I love my home, but it’s so small and open, and the thought of Daddy undoubtedly being there hovering and wanting to talk to Ash and ask him about his dad, and being all starstruck and overly friendly to Ivy—it’s too embarrassing to think about. So I came up with an even more ridiculous idea.
Why not orchestrate a surprise reunion of lovers at an old army fort? What could be more romantic?
I think of them on some Brazilian island that will soon be erased under rising sea levels, but for now is still a perfect place with umbrella drinks, a cool ocean breeze, pristine soft sand, and a horizon full of blue sky and smooth water. And now they’ll meet here, at these moss-covered ruins slowly being reclaimed by the earth, at dusk, after the sun has already slipped behind the mountains, when all the shadows across pockmarked concrete walls are even more sharp, the angles more weird, with all the tufts of grass and tiny ferns growing out of crumbling holes, the canopy of trees blocking the sky, the stairs covered with pine needles, the bats starting to stretch their wings and get ready for the night, the old gun turrets full of rusty, mysterious metal that was too heavy to remove, the cigarette butts and graffiti all over the place, the occasional used condom or hypodermic needle buried in a corner.
What is wrong with me?
During the day, people come here for picnics. When we were kids, Ash and I would climb all over it, like a big concrete maze full of dark rooms with tiny, too-high windows, while Papa rattled off some facts about U.S. Army Coastal Artillery Corps at the turn of the twentieth century and top secret World War II operations. I tried to imagine soldiers in here but I couldn’t. The only thing I could imagine this place was good for was hide-and-seek with my best friend.
But now this. Waiting. With an actual picnic basket packed by Daddy, full of crackers and salami and fancy cheeses and fruit, and a handwritten note from Papa to give to Ash’s parents. “We’d love to see you both soon. Hope all is well!” it said. I crumpled up the note and threw it in the recycling.
I’m sitting on some kind of big metal stand. Maybe there used to be a cannon here. But now there’s just me.
“Fern?” says a voice in the shadows, and I jump. Ivy emerges from behind a corner, overdressed in a black sleeveless minidress. Her legs are long and flawless, and she makes even an old army fort seem glamourous. “What is this place?” She climbs crumbling stairs to meet me. “It looks like the set of a horror movie.”
I get the impression that under her perfect butterscotch skin, all her muscles and tendons are tying themselves in knots. “Do you have anything in there to take the edge off?” she says, eyeing the picnic basket.
“My parents don’t usually drink,” I say. “There’s nothing in the house.”
She looks confused. She does not live in a world where parents don’t keep alcohol in the house.
I don’t say, “Aren’t you supposed to be sober?”
“I was just kidding,” she says, her eyes darting around the structure, as if she might find a bottle hidden here.
Ivy sits down next to me, smooths her dress, pulls her phone out of her purse, and looks at it. “So he’s supposed to be here in, what? Fifteen minutes? Is he usually on time?” He’s supposed to be her soul mate, but she’s asking me if he’s the kind of person who’s usually on time.
“Yeah, I think so. Are you ready?”
She gets up and starts pacing. She doesn’t know what to do with her hands. I want to jump up and wrap my arms around her and hold her still. “Are you sure he’s coming? He confirmed it? It wasn’t like one of those ‘maybe I’ll stop by’ kind of things?”
“Yes, he’s coming.”
She moves around our strange little stage, touches the moss on the waist-high half-walls that surround us on three sides, inspects the metal bars that jut out in various places for no apparent reason, walks down a small flight of steps and peers into a dank and windowless pitch-black room, then comes back up and looks over the top of the wall, where you can barely make out a view of the water through trees that have grown tall and thick since this place was meant to be a lookout.
“Are you hungry?” I ask.
“I couldn’t possibly eat,” she says. But she walks over to me and opens the picnic basket anyway. Inside are Daddy’s little glass containers in their tidy arrangement, the linen napkins and bamboo napkin rings, the compostable cutlery and plates.
“This looks like something a sane person put together.”
“Um, thanks?”
“Do you think your family would adopt me?”
She looks at me and the raw hope on her face betrays the joke she was trying to make, and something about it strikes me as incredibly sad.
She takes a few steps back and I feel her inhale, feel my skin pull toward her, feel every molecule in my body want to be consumed by her, absorbed into her bloodstream.
Then footsteps on dried leaves. Ash’s low voice from behind a corner: “Hello?”
Wings flutter inside my chest. I close my eyes and when I open them, Ivy’s gone.
It’s just me, sitting here, on this broken old turret, facing Ash as he emerges from the shadows, shirtless and dripping with sweat.
I feel the weight of years of wanting. I feel all the miles between us. I feel Tami’s presence like some parasite inside him. And what am I? A memory? Someone he used to know that he will forget, someone fading away even as I sit here right in front of his eyes?
I stand up. I don’t know what to do with my hands. Everything inside my skin is gnarled and kinked.
“Ash,” I say. “It’s been a long time.”
“It’s good to see you,” he says, his voice so low, I can feel the vibrations of it in my chest, those same piercing dark eyes behind thick black lashes. He is the boy I imagined. He is the boy I’ve been following online while he’s been gone, living a life that doesn’t include me, growing into himself, growing into the world’s expectations.
He takes a tentative step forward. His lip twitches like he wants to smile but doesn’t remember how, or like he hasn’t decided if he wants to yet. He looks me in the eye, then looks away, then looks me in the eye again. I can’t tell if he’s genuinely nervous, or if this is all an act—the adorably bashful boy—calculated, showing me what he thinks I want to see.
We are out of practice. We have forgotten how to be friends.
We are just friends. We have only ever been just friends.
“What happened to you?” I say, and I’m not quite sure what I’m asking.
“I ran here.”
“Why?”
“I felt like it.”
Really? Do human beings really do these kinds of things? Just go through the world half-naked, expecting to stay safe?
Ash has been known to run through the trails across the island and then emerge sweat-drenched and blinking at various spots along the shore, where he’ll order a car on his phone to pick him up whenever he feels done. How strange to live like that, with no return plan, to trust your place in the world so completely that you know someone will be there to help you whenever you get too tired to make it home on your own.
Wandering the forest around my own house, I have always secretly hoped to see him break through the trees like the deer, invisible and hidden until they are suddenly right in front of you, sleek and beautiful, staring straight into your eyes.
“You don’t have a shirt on,” I say. I am trying not to look. Not at his smooth, hard chest. Not at the chiseled bone and muscle under the glowing sun-browned skin of his shoulders. I am trying not to imagine licking the sweat out of the well of his collarbone.
“That never bothered you before.”
I don’t know what this is. I don’t know if he’s trying to make a joke. I can’t tell if the movement in his lips is an attempt at a smile, or if it’s irritation. I don’t know what I’m doing here, why I agreed to do this. And where the hell is Ivy?
“Wait,” I say. “I have to go get something from my car.”
“Your car?”
“Something for the picnic. Here,” I say, pushing the picnic basket toward him with my foot.
“Wait,” he says. “I don’t understand.” I feel his eyes on my back as I run away.
I find my way through an old doorway, into a black room that smells of soil and secrets. I stand there trying to catch my breath, in the shadowed corner, where no one can find me. This is what caves feel like. This is where bats live. This is where dark things are born. It is where things go to die.
When I emerge, it feels like a new world. I don’t know how long I was in there, but now the trees are rustling with their evening conversations, the sky has darkened, and I can hear the waves rolling the rocks around on the other side of the trees. The breeze off the water smells of seaweed.
Somehow I know to peek around the corner before making my presence known. Somehow I know I’m not welcome. I am a watcher now. A witness. I have done my job. Ivy has found her way out of the shadows.
She stands before him, cocktail party ready, while he’s in nothing but running shorts. The breeze changes direction and I catch a whiff of his sweat and musk, and for a moment I think I know how animals feel.
The moon is half-full. Ivy is half-lit.
They are electricity, frozen. They are energy, bottled up, ready to explode.
“You invited my girlfriend to your party,” he says. I can’t decipher the meaning of his voice. Anger and passion have the same tone.
“I thought you would come.”
“This isn’t how to do this.”
“How am I supposed to do this? I tried emailing, I tried calling, but you changed your address and number. God, I sound like I’m crazy.”
This is what makes him step toward her. This is what softens him. “You’re not crazy.” He lifts her chin gently with his hand so her eyes meet his. I can almost feel the warmth of his touch on my own face. I can almost see his eyes staring into mine, seeing all the things no one else ever does. We are the only two people in the world, and this is our cloud, high above it all, and I am safe, and nothing can touch us here.
I don’t know why, but I start crying. Something about this tenderness releases me.
“I feel crazy,” Ivy says. “You’re the only one who’s ever made me feel sane.” For some reason, I think of Daddy, of being hunched over in the garden with him, weeding. Those are the moments he was always most likely to go off about his Buddhist stuff, and I would never really listen to his words, but the sound of his voice would soothe me. I remember his words now, something about how it’s not people and experiences that create pleasure and suffering, it’s our responses to them. No one can make us feel anything.
I hear bats. I hear the sounds the night makes. I hear Daddy’s voice telling us “All beings are responsible for their own actions.”
But what about feelings? What are we supposed to do about feelings? Who’s responsible for those?
“I see you,” Ash says.
“Yes,” Ivy says, breathless.
“No one else does,” Ash says.
“You’re the only one.”
Ivy steps forward, putting her face only inches from Ash’s, and I am struck by how brave she is. Her want is brave because it makes her vulnerable. It gives him the power to hurt her, but she does it anyway.
She has put herself in front of an audience for most of her life, has faced ridicule and gossip since she was a little kid, and she keeps doing it, keeps putting herself out there, over and over again, and the world keeps beating her up. Her want, her need, bare and naked, for all the world to see.
“How are we supposed to do this?” she says softly. The trees rustle with her breath. “We’re doing this, right? I’m here now. Ash, tell me we’re doing this.”
And then I can’t watch any more. My skin feels wrong and the electricity is catching. I am behind a stone wall but I am also somewhere between them, sandwiched between his sweaty chest and the thin layer of expensive fabric covering hers. I am somewhere between their lips, no longer talking, breathing each other in. They are not kissing, not yet, but it is only a matter of time. And then they will not need me. Then I will be irrelevant.
I close my eyes and find my way back into the cave. It is a place for underground creatures that don’t need light. The silence is heavy with fear and disappointment. I wait. I know Ivy is coming.
Her shadow blocks the pale light coming in from the doorway and for a moment there is total darkness, and I do not feel the floor, and I do not feel my skin, and I am floating in space between here and not here, and now the only thing that’s real is Ivy’s body against mine, pushing me into the wall. And I’m suspended in the split second during which I return to my body, and a memory’s created in this place where time sits still: a scene like in a show, soft music playing, a game played in middle school, minutes spent in a dark closet on a dare, with a boy who was one hundred percent gay. We were supposed to be kissing, or whatever almost-teenagers are supposed to do together in dark closets, but instead we talked about our pets. He had a dog named Peanut and I had a cat named Gotami, and it was safe and warm and the definition of innocence, and I want to go back there, I want to live there forever, but that place does not exist, and I can never, ever go there again.
Cold, wet stone with mysterious slimes and textures. Ivy’s hands grabbing my shoulders. Her pelvis pressed against mine, her hot breath against my lips. I can’t even hear what she’s saying. Something about Ash. Something about this being a disaster. I am consumed by the darkness erasing the distance between our bodies. She is shaking me. She wants to make me feel what she feels. My mouth is full of the almost taste of her.
“Shhhhh,” I say. It is white noise. It is the sound babies hear in the womb.
I have power in this darkness. In here, Ivy needs me.
“You’re both nervous,” I tell her. I use a voice I didn’t even know I had. I think one day I will be a mother.
“You think he’s nervous?”
“Of course he’s nervous.”
“He doesn’t have a shirt on,” she says. That makes her laugh. She giggles uncontrollably for a few moments, shallow puffs of adrenaline on my neck. Her hands all over me, desperate for contact, grabbing my back like she wants to hold me but also wants to claw at something, to break skin, to make my skin hers.
“Okay,” she finally says, and just as quickly as she came on, her hands fall against her sides and she takes a half step back. I feel myself sucked away with her. I lose some of my skin. Dim light seeps through the doorway and I am left in the half shadow, half panting.
She is gone, on her way to Ash. She is not mine.
I don’t tell them I’m leaving.
I don’t know if they hear my car crunching over pinecones and rocks. I watch them as I back away, sitting across from each other, face-to-face, foreheads touching, whispering incantations. I do not exist in the space between them. This place from my childhood is no longer mine. Every memory becomes paper thin. Their one meeting here has more gravity than my whole life. They now own it.
It is not a long drive home along the waterfront. My mind is strangely clear, empty, like part of it is missing, left back there in the ruins.
Before I go inside, I take a minute to walk through Daddy’s vegetable garden, his perfect rows of beans and carrots and greens and squash, and I am suddenly irritated by what I have always admired about him—his determination to do things the hard way, his faith that working for something gives it more value than if it comes easy. What a waste of energy it is to create things with his hands that he could so easily buy. All his little projects, all these extensions of him. He makes things difficult so he can create the illusion that they have meaning. That doing them gives his life meaning.
I pull a couple of small weeds. He calls this his weeding meditation. He calls doing dishes his dishes meditation. And laundry his laundry meditation. He says everything is a meditation if you’re mindful. It is strangely relaxing, the repetitive action, knees down in the soil, helping to make things grow by killing the things that might crowd them out.
But is any of this really necessary? The forest grows just fine without him. Maybe it’s an illusion that the plants need him at all. Maybe he just wants something to control.
Maybe relaxing is the same as boring.
Am I one of his little projects? Am I something to control?
Am I Ivy’s?
I don’t go inside the house. I take off my shoes and walk down the gravel road. The soles of my feet are getting stronger.
Scotch broom. Flowering blackberries. Chamomile growing among the rocks on the side of the road. All half lit by moonlight.
If Ash were here, he’d say something like, “I can’t believe you used to have to walk up and down this road every day for school.”
Ivy would say, “It’s like authentic country living. People pay good money for this.” They would laugh and I wouldn’t know what’s so funny.
Now here they are, exactly where I knew they’d be. Ivy’s space-age car in the driveway. Ash, his chest now covered with something borrowed from Ivy, a cool vintage T-shirt with the neck cut out, a showcase for his collarbones. I can see them through the glass walls, on display, like a giant television. But they can’t see me out here in the darkness.
The house looks different without the dozens of guests and blazing party lights, without all the extra staff. It is empty and sterile, like what’s left after some kind of viral apocalypse, a mass extinction that happened so fast, no one even had time for looting and destruction. Everyone’s just gone, their world left shining and intact and useless.
Ivy is making him a drink at the bar in the expansive living room. Even though I am outside, I can hear the ice tinkle in the glass. “Is this still your drink?” she says, pouring something brown. He nods. They are awkward again. Whatever connection they made at the fort has to be remade here.
“It’s just you and your mom here?” Ash says, taking his drink. Ivy does not make one for herself. She is still trying to be good.
“Yep,” Ivy says. “We both finally realized LA wasn’t the best place for us. I’m ready for some stability, you know? So I can really think about what I want for my future. Make some smart decisions.”
“Smart decisions are good,” Ash says.
“But not too smart.” She looks at Ash with so much desperation in her eyes, I feel nauseated, woozy, like I’m on a boat and the sea just dropped.
Before he has the chance to say anything, Ivy says, “I want to show you something.”
The front door is unlocked. I follow them into the grand entryway with the giant front doors that probably rarely get opened. It is not hard to be invisible. I am here in the place between places, in the place between before and after, the place where ghosts are born. Daddy says there are some Buddhists who believe in a place between death and the next life, a place where a soul can get stuck if it’s not careful. But he also says Buddhists don’t really believe in a soul, not the way most people do, so who knows what to do with that.
I swear I see figures out of the corner of my eyes, remnants from Ivy’s party who never left. They are hiding behind couches, under chairs, peeking out from closets and around corners. They follow us wherever we go. They feel familiar. They are the parts of us that get left behind. Now that I know how to be a ghost, I can see the others, the people without skin, the ones like me who are stuck in the in-between place.
Lining the walls are framed movie posters, photos of Ivy with some of the most famous people in Hollywood, photos of her onstage singing, photos of her accepting awards. The whole place is a shrine to her. I hide around the corner as she leads Ash to the centerpiece—her framed platinum record, sparkling under its own spotlight.
He is speechless, his face twisted with emotion. Ivy slides next to him, their shoulders touching as they stare at the platinum record. “Remember when we talked about making music together?” Her voice is thin. It sounds as breakable as glass. “None of the songs on that album come close to what you write.”
“Can I touch it?” he says.
“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” Ivy says.
I feel something wet on my cheek, and Ivy wipes hers, and a tear streams down in a perfect straight line to Ash’s chin, and she is staring at him, and he is staring at the record with a look of pure want on his face, and I am watching both of them, and all of our want has nowhere to go. It is too big for even this great empty room. It is stuck here like the not-souls between after and before.
Ash could have everything on that wall if he wanted to. I’ve heard his music. I’ve heard his voice. Maybe his being a musician wouldn’t be his parents’ first choice, but all they’d have to do is make a phone call and he could have the attention of anyone in A-Corp Entertainment. All it would take would be for Ash to say this is what he wanted, that he would risk everything he has to have it. But that would require him to make a decision. It would require him to fight for it.
Ivy reaches over and gently wipes the tear from Ash’s cheek, but he does not turn, does not lean into her hand, does not look away from the record on the wall. Ivy thinks his tears are for her, and maybe they are, but maybe they aren’t.
“I need another drink,” he finally says, forcing a smile, but it’s too late. Something has cracked. An opening. A fissure.
Me too, I think. But I am not here.
How easy it is to erase a moment. How easy it is to walk away.
I follow them to the outdoor bar. They live in a world where houses have bars, one for outside and one for inside. They live in a world where kids know how to make drinks besides shots of cheap vodka and beer in cans.
“You have a good view,” Ash says, sitting down on the outdoor couch, even though it’s night and we can’t see much of anything beyond Ivy’s property except the lights of distant houses facing us from the other shore. “It’s nice to not see Seattle all the time. You can pretend you’re not near a city at all. Are those palm trees?”
Ivy laughs as she hands him his drink. “That’s why I picked this place. It’s like my own tropical island. Like our island.”
He is a construction of her memories. She is trying to shape him into the details of the boy she knew a year and a half ago. He is only two weeks old. He exists only on a tiny strip of beach, under a different view of the stars.
“I could climb those trees to pick you coconuts,” Ash says. “How many do you want?”
Ivy smiles. He is finally playing her game. “How many do you have?”
“I can’t believe you’re here,” he says. Something has softened. Maybe Ivy has awakened the part of him that remembers. Maybe he is already forgetting how to be cool. Maybe his want is making him brave.
“Me neither.” Then she swallows. Then she clenches her fists. Then she tries to smile her famous smile, but it comes out all lopsided.
Ivy turns to the bar and picks up a bottle of wine. She pretends to read the label but I know what she’s really doing is marking this moment as the space between after and before, a point in history that cannot be erased.
You would think relapse would have fireworks, that it would be some grand explosion of desperation and destruction. But maybe sometimes it is a series of small adjustments and unconscious decisions that have already been happening beneath the surface, laying the foundation, so that by the time the ultimate decision comes, it’s anticlimactic. Sometimes relapse is not one big break but a series of small fractures that all add up to a soundless shattering.
“This is one of the last vintages that came out of Napa before the Great Fire,” Ivy says, pouring a glass. She swishes it around for a while and smells it. She closes her eyes and takes a sip, and I can taste the warm comfort wash down my throat and spread through my whole body, the feeling of rightness, of relief, of escaping the place between places, feeling my feet firmly on the ground. Oak and cherry, and a little bit smoky. The taste of knowing who I am.
“To reunions,” Ivy says.
“Reunions,” Ash says.
Their glasses clink, and then Ivy looks straight at me where I’m hiding in the shadows. The look in her eyes says “I’ve known you were here the whole time. You are my secret.” And the warmth hits my stomach, and I want more.
“To us,” I whisper, and I know only she can hear me.
And that’s when I hear footsteps and hide behind a bush just as Ivy’s mom saunters out of the darkness in a see-through robe over a swimsuit. “Well, if it isn’t Ash Kye,” she says without any surprise. She must be as good at spying as I am. “How are you, young man? I’ve been meaning to get ahold of your mother, but I’ve been so busy since we arrived, and now with this remodel.” She waves her arm at nothing in particular.
“I’m sure she’d love to hear from you,” Ash says, such a gentleman. “She’s in Buenos Aires now, but will be back for a few days next week before she leaves again for Tokyo.”
“Lovely, I’ll be sure to make some time for lunch. Please tell her I say hello.”
Ivy takes a long sip of wine, and I am thirstier than ever.
“I see you’re drinking again,” her mother says.
“It’s just wine.”
“Last time I checked, wine had alcohol in it.”
Ivy looks her in the eyes defiantly as she refills her glass.
“Well, don’t hog the good stuff,” Ivy’s mother says, and grabs the bottle out of her hand. “You know, Ash, this is one of the last vintages to come out of Napa before the Great Fire.”
“You don’t say?” says Ash, and Ivy giggles.
“Well, I’ll leave you kids. Don’t have too much fun.” She gives Ivy a look that says “Don’t fuck this up again.”
She takes the bottle with her to the pool, illuminated in the darkness by underwater lights. Ivy immediately opens a new one.
I don’t know how long I wait there in the shadows. Long enough for their conversation to die down, long enough for Ivy’s mom to pass by again on her way back from swimming, long enough for the new bottle of wine to half empty. Ivy is in that perfect place between too drunk and not drunk enough, that moment of equilibrium before the scales tip.
They are alone now. They are whispering things I cannot hear. The words are not important. What matters is their leaning into each other. What matters is Ash taking Ivy’s hand and kissing the tip of each of her fingers. What matters is Ivy’s lips, stained red with wine from now extinct grapes, finally touching his.