I don’t know if Sylvia comes down too often, though. It makes me sad to think about her no longer visiting the water, although she was never a big ocean swimmer. She used to take water aerobics every Wednesday at the community pool on the Malibu High campus but rarely went in the water here.
I’m careful to avoid the places with split wood as I cuff my jeans up to my calf and take the steps down to the beach. When my feet hit the sand my toes immediately sink down into the dampness. The water comes up quickly and licks at my heels. It’s icy cold. Even in the summer, the ocean in California is like a freezer. You can polar-plunge all year long.
I don’t see my mom in either direction, but I start walking in her favorite—to the right—because the sand runs for longer than it does to the left. The sun is directly in my eyeline, and I hold my hand up to shield my face. I should have brought a hat—Marcella is always going on about the dangers of sun damage—but the sun on my face always felt too good to waste. I close my eyes and lift my chin upward.
I left my phone at the house, and now I’m wishing I had it with me to take a picture for Leo. When we were first dating I’d bring him down to Malibu—not the house, not at first, but to Point Dume and the Sunset Restaurant at Zuma Beach. I wanted him to know the place I was from first, before the people. I wanted him to fall in love with this same coastline.
And he did. Not the beach, not exactly—the man has worn shorts only twice in his life—but the beauty. He got it immediately. Every time we come down now he brings his camera and juststands on the steps, shooting. I love that even though he doesn’t understand the water, he can admire it.
I think about his voice through the crashing of the waves.Hey, baby, hang on just a tick.…I wonder what he’s doing right now. Transversing the city, underground on the subway. Leo would never spring for a cab on his own dollar.
When I met Leo I had been single for a really long time. I was nearly thirty-three, an age where I sometimes thought my best relationships might have been behind me. And a point at which I had become settled in my singlehood.
I remember being worried about fitting someone into my life, how I’d have to sacrifice all the freedom I had grown accustomed to. But being with him was so easy. Every time he was at my house I wanted him to stay, and every time he was gone I missed his presence.
And then one day he was on his way over to mine and the phone rang. He’d tripped at a shoot, fallen on some heavy equipment. He told me his arm was hurt, maybe broken. My back broke into a cold sweat.
I met him at the urgent care. He was sitting on a gray plastic chair, trying to fill out the intake forms with his left hand. He looked so much younger than forty. He looked like a child.
“Here,” I said, “let me do it.”
I had watched my mom handle all the paperwork for my dad. I knew my way around a clipboard.
We sat in that waiting room for over an hour, his good hand on my knee and my head on his good shoulder. And I knew then I wasn’t scared of losing my freedom, not anymore. I was scared of losing him. My happiness was now dependent on the safety of someone else.
I let my memory linger in those early days. When everything about our relationship felt precious and tender. How at ease I felt in my body just knowing him.
“Lauren!”
By the time I hear him, I know it isn’t the first time he’s called my name.
I know it before I say it, before I even turn around. I can feel it in the way my chest reacts, in the tension that shoots from my sternum down my limbs.
Stone Morrow.
He extends his hands and smiles wide. “It is you.”
I take him in in fragments because it is too much to absorb him all, here all at once. Bare-chested, rash guard pulled off. Loose, long hair—longer than I remember. Dimples the size of potholes.
He comes toward me, closing the eight feet between us, and offers me a shallow hug. He’s damp to the touch, and I can smell the ocean—visceral—on him. I have a flash of us, barely seventeen, bobbing on our boards at dawn. He pulls back and looks at me, holds his hand on my shoulder.
“Just came off the water,” he says. “Wow, incredible. You’re here.”
Stone and I dated from fifteen to twenty-five, a full decade and what felt like more than a few lifetimes. We’ve seen each other only a handful of times in the intervening decade. His family still lives down here—we grew up as kids together, and it became something more midway through high school. For more than a decade now he’s lived in Boulder, Colorado, where he started a school modeled on Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch—a man-made ocean that can simulate waves for lessons and training. I think it’s successful, but I’ve never really looked into it. For many years it wastoo painful, to think about the life he had somewhere else. It also didn’t make sense to me that he had to build an ocean out there when there’s one right here.
“It’s good to see you,” I say. I hug my arms around me partly because the dampness from our hug has made me cool and partly because there’s something about being around Stone—even all these years later—that makes me want to protect myself. “How long are you in town?”
He squints past me, out to the water. “Not sure, actually,” he says. He takes a big breath. “Bonnie’s not doing so good.”
Bonnie is Stone’s stepmother, but she raised him from the time he was six years old. His mother moved to Canada when he was just a toddler, and he saw her on holidays, sometimes a stretch in the summer. I always thought that must have been really hard—having your mother leave so young, but Stone never seemed to harbor any resentment toward her or what happened.
“If she’d stayed I’d never have Bonnie,” he said.
From the way Bonnie tells it, the moment she met Stone’s father she liked him, and the moment she met Stone she was in love.
“I’m sorry, shit. I didn’t know,” I say. “Marcella didn’t say anything.”
I wonder why my mother hasn’t told me. But then I think about how little we talk on the phone these days. How she’ll call and I often send it to voicemail, anticipating some kind of reserved judgment. I know I am also to blame. I don’t talk about my life with her, I never really have. But the past few years the space between us has felt even more pronounced—like I finally named and saw all the distance that was always there. Part of it is that I don’t talk about the fertility stuff with her. The truth is, I don’t really talk about it withanyone. But there is something different about not sharing with your mother.
