“But when you say it, Greer,” he begins, his voice even lower now, well into a register I recognize only as the one he uses when he’s inside me, or close to being so. Those dogs in Pavlov’s experiment, I sympathize. I start to wonder whether Pavlov had long eyelashes, but the next thing Alex says wipes my brain of all coherent thought.
“You say it, and I feel like I want to drag you back to that room I’ve rented. So you remember what it’s like to be together. Not separate at all.”
We almost miss it, the stroke of midnight. I push Alex onto his back, so he’s only half on the blanket; I straddle his hips and lean down to kiss him; I move my hips across the bulge in his jeans—frustrated, hungry,separate. He grunts his impatience, his fingers digging into my hips, but eventually he lifts himself, the lean, strong core of his body jackknifing up as he shifts his hands to my ass. It’s a little clumsy, the sand underneath us soft and shifting, but eventually he comes to his feet, me wrapped all around him as hewalks forward.
“Eleven fifty-nine,” he says to me between kisses, taking us to the water’s edge. I’d planned to take off my sundress, to go in in the bathing suit I’m wearing underneath, but I don’t care now. “You almost missed your luck, sweetheart.”
I shake my head, moving my mouth back to his, feeling the fine spray of saltwater on my feet, ankles, shins as Alex continues wading us forward. This is supposed to be a cleansing ritual, that’s what Alex said—wash away your bad luck, splash on some good. But when Alex is up to his knees, his lips still dragging across mine, I start to think of this ocean as something else—a vast, endless wishing well. When he dips down, the water swirling around us both now, we’re the coins—plain copper pennies about to be turned into something special and precious and memorable. Maybe he’s making a wish on me, and I’m definitely making one on him.
A big, bold,unlikely wish.
When we stop kissing long enough to laugh, to splash ocean water on each other and run back onto the shore, our clothes and the sand sticking to us uncomfortably as we race back to the blanket, I think about telling him. About throwing caution to the wind and saying aloud every big, bold, unlikely part of that wish.
But ofcourse I don’t.
Of course I know that your best chance of having a wish come true is to not say anything about it at all.
Chapter 14
Alex
“You’re telling me you can fix this camera?”
“That’s what I’m telling you, old man.” Bart turns the Lubitel over in his hand again, bends his head closer to where he’s popped off the camera back so he can look at the take tip spool. He and Henry Tucker are the same age, I think—Henry might even be a little younger. But since this is maybe the third time one of them has laughingly called the other one old in the forty-five minutes since we’ve been here, I’m guessing this is some kind of local small business owner friendship ritual. Both of them seem to have thicker southern accents now.
“Fix it so it takes pictures?”Pitchers, that’s how Henry says it. Bart looks at him across the counterlike he’s nuts.
“What else would I fix it for? I’m not selling decorations over here.”
Henry takes the ball cap off his head and runs a hand through his blond-gray hair. He looks a lot like my new brother-in-law, and for some reason I take this as a comfort on behalf of my sister, like I’m judging Ben’s fitness for staying healthy as the years go by.
“You know it’s funny you should say that,” he says, settling the cap back on. “I got a whole table full of old cameras and I get these kids coming around, real tight jeans on, you hear? Flannel shirts when it’s this kind of hot. They buy these cameras and I’m telling you, it’s for decoration.”
“Oh, I know those kids,” Bart says, but listen, I don’t think they mean kids. Probably they mean people in their twenties and thirties who’ve got a thing for vintage home design. There’s a whole show about it on Kit’s cable TV; Greer and I watched an episode last night. Or I guess I watched, and she fell asleep, her hair tickling my beard pleasantly and the smell of lavender infusing me with drowsy calm. The lavender, I’ve learned, is from a little bottle of oil she keeps in her purse. When she feels a headache come on, she rubs a small amount right behind her ears, then she does some of those exercises she told me about that night on the beach.
We’ve been together every night since our trip, and in that time—only a few days, but we spend every minute we can with each other—I feel like I’ve been collecting small intimacies like this about her: the kind of toothpaste she uses, how long it takes her hair to dry when she gets out of the shower, the difference between the voice she uses when she’s on the phone with Zoe and the voice she uses when she’s on the phone with Susan. She likes a lot of milk in her coffee. She thinks ginger tastes like soap. She keeps cough drops in her purse all the time. She hates the sound of ice being put into a glass.
Mostly we’ve been staying at Kit’s, though on Tuesday we went to Greer’s townhouse, a comfortable but stale place that—other than Kenneth, who had a real fondness for my right thigh, kneading it with his paws like it was a slab of bread dough—doesn’t seem to have any meaningful trace of who Greer is. We eat out or in; we choose photos for her class and for my part of the showcase; we talk and sleep and make love like we’ve got all the time in the world.
We don’t, of course. Greer’s got her second to last photography class tonight, and in just over a week we have the showcase that’s my last official obligation here. On Tuesday Jae emailed me—not for the first time since I’ve been here, but it’s the first time he’s mentioned anything other than the book idea in weeks—asking whether I’ve got any interest in heading to Syria for a story theTimesis doing, working with a journalist I’ve partnered with before.Only if you’re feeling up to it,he’d added. And all this is to say nothing of the fact that my sister and Ben get back tomorrow, an eventuality that Greer and I have avoided discussing with surgical precision.
But this morning I’d woken up in Kit’s guest bed, Greer sleeping soundly beside me on her stomach, most of her bare back exposed to the morning light coming in through the window. I’d let my eyes trace over the freckles there, memorizing them like they were a map home. And then I’d thought:Maybe they are. Maybe they could be.I wanted to say something to her about that, to talk to her about what possible future we might have, given my work and her life here, given the way I’m obviously still dealing with the shit that brought Greer and me together in the first place.
But at 6:30 sharp her phone had started vibrating, her mother’s daily call startling her out of sleep, and it’d been time tostart the day.
“Say, Count Dracula,” says Henry, snapping me out of my thoughts. Count Dracula is his nickname for me, I guess because of my black hair, decided sometime between when I first met him a couple of years ago and the rehearsal dinner. He’s got a lot of these nicknames in his back pocket, I’ve learned, all of them a genial form of affection. “Me and your photograph friend here, we’re gonna do a little business about all those cameras I got at the yard.”
“Great.” I feel a blooming sense of satisfaction at setting up this meeting. Bart’s a good guy, a bit isolated since his wife died two years ago, and I get the sense he’s had trouble keeping up with his business. I’ve been bringing him film from the FG, pictures I’ve started to take over the last week when Greer’s at work or in her class. He knows more about cameras—digital or otherwise—than any single person I’ve met, and every hobbyist and professional in this city should be coming to him. I even sent Hiltunen and the showcase students an email about him two days ago.
“You walk here?” asks Henry, peering over my shoulder to look out the window, where a soft rain has started to fall. “Find something to do for a half hour, look at these fancy”—he gestures to the far wall, where Bart’s got a display of leashes and pro clips and cuffs—“whatever this weird stuff is, and I’ll give you a rideback to Kit’s.”
For a second my mind stutters over this, a benign offer of extra care from someone I hardly know who is also, strangely, something of a family member to me now. He lives in this town with other family members I have now. My new brother-in-law, sure. But also my new brother-in-law’s stepmother, and mother, and stepfather. They’re all connected to me, however distantly. I’m connected to Bart, and now I’ve connected him to Henry. Little dots everywhere, allover this map.
I wouldn’t say it feels good to me, not like waking up next to Greer feels good. I suppose it’s too new for that, or I’m too unpracticed at it. I clear my throat, look down at my watch, grateful that the time’s syncing up right, both for this specific moment and for the one I’m staring down more generally. The one where I try to figure how to keep Greer in my life, even when I’m thousands of milesaway from her.
“Thanks, but I’ve got an appointment. Youkids have fun.”
* * * *
