In the car that night, driving back along the ocean, I felt something well up in me that I wouldn’t quite name. I wanted him to like them, yes, but more importantly, I wanted him to love them. I wanted him to call my dad up for work advice and share recipes and restaurant recommendations with my mom. I wanted his natural ease—the part of him that drew me to him like a magnet—to penetrate us. I wanted him to transform us, to make us that easeful, too.
I wanted to share my parents—the weight of them—with someone else. But I wanted them to be less heavy in the transformation. I wanted Leo to fix it, whatever this thing was between Marcella and me that had come out broken. And I wanted him to make it OK when the unthinkable happened, someday. When I would be here alone.
“It was just our first dinner, right?” Leo said. He had no attitude, no resentment or impatience. He was just stating a fact. Thestakes weren’t that high. It was one dinner. “I’m hopeful there will be a lot more.” He took my hand. I felt something relax in me that had been stiff for a long time.
“We’ll go out there next weekend,” I said. “You can see the house.”
Leo kissed the back of my palm. From above us the wind blew my hair everywhere.
“Whatever you want,” he said, and I knew that he meant it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The next morning I give up on sleep around five. The upside to this is that I’m able to exchange some texts with Leo, who is already up and location scouting in Brooklyn. Once he stops responding—must have found somewhere good—I hook my bathrobe around me and plod downstairs.
Dad is at the coffee machine, board shorts and an old Quicksilver sweatshirt on, worn at the collar.
“You going out?” I ask. The last word turns into a yawn, and I reach into the cabinet behind him and pull down a mug.
“Nah,” he says. “Gonna do some morning pages.”
Dad is a family lawyer, yes, but he’s also a writer. Twelve mystery books under the pen name Irene Stills. He’s been publishing since I was in middle school. A neighbor at the beach was a big literary agent at WME, and one day out on the water, Dad asked if he could give her something. They sold the first novel six weeks later.
Dad’s books sell modestly. He has a small cult following that comes out to every local tour he does—mostly Pages in Manhattan Beach and Vroman’s in Pasadena. Simon & Schuster always buys his next book. He loves it, and it’s nice extra money. Not enough torenovate a beach house, but enough to take a vacation once a year, handle some repairs, and buy Mom a nice piece of jewelry.
“My Monopoly money,” he calls it.
Dad hands me the pot, and I pour. It’s extra dark this morning. Dad has never been a great coffee maker—he’s inconsistent. No matter how many times we tell him—four scoops and an extra for the pot—it never comes out even.
“But you should,” he says.
“What?” I ask, although I know. His response catches me off guard.
Dad raises his eyebrows at me. “When was the last time you paddled out?” He takes a sip of his coffee. “Your board is still here, you know.”
I feel a familiar clench in my stomach. Surfing was always a point of contention for my mom with my father. Too dangerous, too much risk—too much downside. Over time I came to understand what she meant. If something happened out there, would his heart be strong enough to get him to safety? People who have multiple bypasses before forty shouldn’t push their cardiovascular limits.
But after the accident, Dad doubled down. He wanted to be out on the water even more—and he wanted me with him. “We can’t live in fear,” he’d tell my mom, and she’d just shake her head.
“We can’t live like fools, either.”
By that time what either of them thought didn’t matter. I was already hooked, and surfing was no longer just the story of me and my dad but the story of me and Stone.
Every inch of this shoreline, every molecule of water, reminds me of us. The way the tide recedes in the summer and leaves a huge swath of shoreline for walking, the break of the waves atLechuza Cove in the winter, the way the spray hits the rocks at sunset. When we broke up I tried to keep going out—surfing wasn’t just Stone’s thing; it was also mine, who I was—but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The water suddenly transformed. What I once understood, felt, lived, now felt foreign in a way I couldn’t quite grasp. And ignorance on the water is dangerous.
I gave it up completely about a year after we broke up.
But now—
Something about being here, coming down the stairs from my old bedroom, finding Dad in the kitchen, board on the deck, makes me feel almost as if I am retracing my childhood rhythms. Wake up, roll out, surf, school. I can feel myself being pulled backward, all the life that has occurred between then and now being unspooled.
I take another sip of hot coffee. It’s as thick as mud this morning. I head to the refrigerator to pour some milk.
“It’s pitch-black out,” I say. “Don’t know if that’s the time for me to wade back in.”
My dad waves his hand at me. “C’mon,” he says. “You used to rule dawn patrol.”
I shake the almond milk and pour. Dad comes over and slings an arm around my shoulder. He holds me to him, putting his head against my cheek.
