“You.” His voice a growl, the word an insult. He was trembling all over. He raised his hand and I panicked in that instant he might strike me. And then the fear turned pliable, bending inside me, rubbery and soft, and I wished he would. But he stepped away, moving toward the door. “You drunk piece of shit. I’ve always known you weren’t into this.”
“That’s not true. Sit down. Let’s talk.”
“What is there to say? I guess it’s pretty pathetic, me sticking around. Hoping sooner or later you would see this could really work. I might be a fool, but I’m not an idiot. Something has changed. But you, you can’t even look at me.” At that I raised my head, of course; I wished I hadn’t: Stephen’s face was twisted, terrible. I had done this to him. “You’re too shut down and scared of people to just tell me whatever the fuck is going on. I’d rather be a fool than a coward.”
“Stephen, wait—”
But he was out the door. It slammed shut, rattling in its jamb. I listened to him bounding down the stairs. I thought I even heard a pause, halfway down. I imagined him realizing he had left hisjacket—it hung on its hook, limp and gray—and then deciding it wasn’t worth coming back for.
I woke with a vicious hangover, a lump on the back of my head where I’d struck the wall. Somehow I made it to the airport. The plane was mercifully uncrowded. I had a row to myself. We took off, rocking through pulpy clouds. I palmed some aspirin, forcing them down with a cup of lukewarm coffee. It tasted of plastic. When the flight attendant passed a second time, I asked for a beer. She hesitated—it was not yet eight in the morning—before smiling. “It’s how we get through the holidays, isn’t it?” I fell asleep and woke, a searing crick in my neck, to the announcement that we were landing.
I stepped onto the jet bridge and the eager humidity enveloped me. Even in late November, the South Florida air clung to you, a second skin you could not shed. It felt immediately and deeply familiar. I turned my Tyler phone back on and a moment later it sounded with a message. I opened it: a photo in bed, shirt off, wide grin. He had gone home to North Carolina at the start of the week. He said he argued with his mother about it; it seemed like a waste of money when he’d be back for winter break in just a few weeks. “But she’s obsessed with Thanksgiving,” he said. “Last year she asked me to do grace and when I said something about genocide, she started screaming about why can’t she have just one nice day.” He’d laughed as he told the story. I peered at the photo grainy on the small screen, trying to glean some detail about his life from his surroundings. But there was nothing but a blank wall behind him. I typed my reply—miss you—and hitSEND.
I moved out with the slow mix of other last-minute arrivals: retired snowbirds starting their winter seasons, struggling off-kilter with overstuffed suitcases; young couples, voices stretched with tension, wrangling children fussing to be set loose; a teenage girl traveling alone, head encased in gigantic earphones, the tinny sounds of thrashing guitars eking out. Curbside, families reunited, grandparents swooping those same fussing children into outstretched arms as the parents hoisted luggage into trunks. Traffic was light but steady and I watched for the car, trying to remember my last trip down. Had it been a year? Or more? They were almost upon me when I spotted them, my father at the wheel, my mother pointing through the windshield in my direction. The car looked more weathered than I remembered, sun-bleached maroon, paint brindled and curling at the seam of the roof. I tossed my bag into the back and followed.
“You made it,” my father said—he loved announcing the obvious.
“I did.”
It was freezing inside; I’d forgotten how high they kept the AC. My father wore a baseball cap, thin wisps of white hair flying from the sides. My mother’s hair, too, seemed grayer. And then I realized: She had stopped coloring it. She faced forward, watching the road, correcting my father’s driving and asking questions about my classes, my book. Traffic picked up outside the airport, families headed to join other branches for the day. The battery of cars inched along in fits and starts. We exited the highway and rolled down a long stretch of road, blocks of parks and condo developments and gas stations, medians crowned with palm trees, shopping centers with grocery stores as big as amphitheaters. Every other building new and unfamiliar.
We pulled into the driveway of my parents’ house—our house, I suppose. One night, right before the start of ninth grade, toward the end of what I thought of as my mother’s year of exile, we sat around watching some show none of us cared about. My mother grabbed the remote, shut off the TV, and announced, her voice shredded with exasperation, “I can’t live in this house anymore.” They sold that home, where I’d grown up, and we moved to this one, twenty miles away, closer to the center of the town. My father fretted about me changing school districts, but I didn’t care. I didn’t make friends at the new school, but I had so few at the old one anyway. I had learned to keep to myself, to avoid the trouble that inevitably came from being noticed; at least now, no one knew anything about me. I would eat lunch alone at a picnic table near the teacher’s parking lot, picking at my sandwich until the bell rang and I went back inside to get through the rest of the afternoon.
“Do you need help with your luggage?” my mother asked.
My father answered for me. “He’s hardly brought anything.”
My mother busied herself in the kitchen, wiping down counters that already gleamed. My father tended to the plants on the back patio, green tendrils, vivid orange and yellow blossoms. I dropped my bag in my room. It was sparse, as if it had been cleared out when I left home, but I had never decorated; I always felt like I was visiting this house, on a stopover. I wandered down a narrow hallway that led to a small back wing with my parents’ room. Framed photographs lined a wall. Though the photos were old, they only started appearing a few years ago. Cassie and I, I think at eight and three, in bathing suits, jumping through a sprinkler in the backyard. Cassie before a ballet recital, enormous smile, bangs curled tight against her forehead. Her fingers spread wide across layers ofpink tulle. A photo from my first track meet—clasping my ribbon, mouth set in a tentative smile. A newborn me, hospital band enormous around my wrist, cradled in Cassie’s arms as our father knelt; his own arms stretched behind, protecting us both. Next to that one, a photo I remembered from my mother’s dressing table. Her high school graduation portrait, shot in black and white. Her luminescent face, unmarred by life or age, tipped toward some light, the source of which could not be seen.
A few years prior, my mother had decreed no more cooking for Thanksgiving. “It’s too much fuss, just for us,” she said. My father had made a reservation at a new Italian restaurant. When I said it seemed funny to eat pasta on Thanksgiving, my mother replied, “Italians are American, too.”
We spent the afternoon on the beach. The pale bodies of holiday visitors, released from the bundled layers of their northern lives, were stark among the tanned and oiled bodies of locals, some young and muscled, others old—tawny skin soft and wrinkled. The sun burned warm and yellow. Only an occasional flat wisp of cloud smudged the chalky blue sky. My mother sat in a low chair, draped in a thin blanket. The blanket hung over the arm of the chair, billowing out around her when a light breeze brushed past. She read a book, one of her mystery novels, pausing every few pages to glance up and scan the crowds. Next to her, my father’s book lay open across his legs as he dozed. After a while, my mother woke him, waving a bottle of sunscreen in front of his face. He obliged with a grunt, smoothing thick sheets of it across the dark hair of his arms.
I stretched beside them, letting the sun bake its heat into me, cells waking to the sensations of salty air and soft, gritty sand. I feltnew in my body as I glanced down at my outstretched form. Sweat rose in bubbles across my chest, glossy with sunscreen. I looked different to myself, unfamiliar, as if the hungry fascination my eyes had for Tyler were turning to me as well: the sinews of my legs, the eddies of hair circling my abdomen, disappearing below the waistband of my trunks. This is me, I thought, and felt surprised, the way I often would with Tyler. The feeling had traveled with me.
“I’m going to take a swim. Want to come?”
My mother wiggled her fingers. “I’m too comfortable. You go.”
At the water’s edge, the ocean swelled, forward and back, concaving the sand beneath my feet. I drew a breath and plunged in. The brisk shock of it jolted. The ocean’s volumes pushed against me, dampening the noise of its waves and the combative screams of teenagers. I sank slowly until my lungs ached. I twisted back up, breaking through the surface, the air pricking goose bumps along my arms. A lifeguard whistled at a group past the swim line. She stood in her raised station, the red sleeves of her windbreaker rippling as she motioned for them to come in.
I realized I was hungry; I hadn’t eaten all day and my hangover had passed. I swam back to the shore. The current was stronger than I realized and I had been in the water for some time—I had drifted quite far. The sun had shifted, pulling itself farther into the sky. It took a moment to orient myself. I headed back and passed two guys together on a blanket, one in a blue speedo, one in green. The one in blue waved and called out—“Come say hi”—the one in green hiding his face behind his hand, laughing.
“I have to find my parents. Next time.” I smiled and walked on—it felt good to be noticed. Maybe they could sense the new way I was feeling in my body, too.
I ate a sandwich my mother had packed and rubbed sunscreen on the back of her neck. I napped and woke to the beach clearing out. We had stayed longer than planned. There wasn’t time to go home before dinner. We rinsed at the showers outside the bathrooms, brushing the sand from our calves, waiting our turns for the changing rooms. My father felt we would be underdressed for the restaurant. “We’ll look like a bunch of beach bums.”
“We’re in Florida,” my mother said. “We are beach bums.”
The restaurant was in a part of town that was being aggressively developed. Glass towers, sea-green, loomed above an over-lit square bisected by a pedestrian-only street. The thick curved necks of enormous streetlamps swooped down at us, blasting with acidic light. Everything had been built at once so there was no variation, no uneven patina of wear. Storefronts and signage popped bright and loud. The whole scene looked as if it had been lifted from Disneyland, creating the uncanny effect of a town built to imitate an amusement park built in imitation of a town. (Somewhere, a first-year grad student hunched over a laptop writing a term paper about it, titled something like “Simulacrum by the Sea.”)
My parents sat side by side. My mother leaned toward my father, their shoulders touching, her fingertip tracing lines of the menu he couldn’t make out in the restaurant’s faint lighting. They looked small there, together. As my mother read out loud from the list of wines, my father buttered a shiny dinner roll and placed it in front of her. I felt a quick and painful surge of love for them. The food was good, my mother kept commenting on it, repeating how glad she was to be there, her voice a little loud, giddy with her second glass of wine. When my father hesitated to join her, I offered to drive home and switched to water. I would let them enjoy the night.
We finished our meals and wandered back outside, the evening sticky after the air-conditioned restaurant. We did a slow loop up the promenade, stopping to look in the windows of shops, closed for the holiday. My motheroohedandaahed, pointing things out to me, my father a few steps ahead. We looped back, down the other side, waiting in front of the restaurant for the valet to bring the car.
“Evelyn! Michael!”
A small woman, my mother’s age, waving and walking toward us.
