The Impossibility of Us Read online

Instead, I sink down to sit beside her.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?” she rasps.

  “You could have drowned!”

  She could have drowned,

  and I would have been responsible.

  She wrings the ocean from her long ponytail,

  then pulls her shirt, drenched and transparent,

  from where it clings.

  I am tired and I am troubled,

  but I am mesmerized by her movements—

  I am mesmerized by her.

  She glares, flagrant, and I shrink into myself.

  I avert my gaze; my face sizzles with shame.

  A dog bounds over—her dog.

  It is discordantly cheerful,

  covered in wet, wheat-colored curls.

  It licks salty water from her face.

  She gives its head an amiable pat,

  while scowling at me.

  Finally, she snaps, “You’re welcome.”

  As if I have thanked her.

  I should. I should say something.

  Instead, I shiver against harsh wind,

  and commit her features to memory.

  She is a heart-shaped mouth.

  She is slick caramel hair.

  She is bottomless brown eyes.

  Even in anger, she is dazzling.

  elise

  I throw my sweatshirt over my wet tank top (my white, see-through, no-wonder-he’s-staring, thank-God-I’m-wearing-a-sports-bra tank top), clip Bambi’s leash to her collar, shoulder my camera, and literally pound sand.

  He never says a word.

  At home, I give Bambi a once-over with an old beach towel, then stand in the shower under a blast of hot water until my skin’s no longer gooseflesh. I throw on jeans and a T-shirt that bears a growling tiger, my old high school’s mascot, then twist my hair into a knot at the crown of my head. Racked by a lingering chill, I shuffle into the kitchen for coffee. My mom’s made a pot, a vanilla blend that’s still steaming. I retrieve my favorite mug from the cupboard, a lumpy, oversize atrocity my brother spun in his high school pottery class. I pour coffee and sweeten it before wrapping my cold hands around the warm ceramic.

  “Elise?” Mom, from down the hall.

  I make my way to the tiny space that branches off her bedroom, the one she insists on referring to as her library because she’s pretentious that way. She’s not a writer or even an author—she’s a novelist. Our dog is a companion. The many multicolored book spines that line her shelves are a mélange.

  She’s sitting at her desk, a refinished secretary littered with file folders and pens and research materials. She writes pantie-melting romances set on the western frontier and, bizarre as it sounds, she’s a household name within her literary niche. Over her desk there’s a wall-spanning collage of her book jackets, matted and framed, images of ladies with barrel-curled hair and bustled dresses posing with rugged men who’ve lost their shirts but managed to retain their cowboy hats. She hung those jackets the night we moved in, inspiration for her latest manuscript, one she sold on proposal, the first in more than three years.

  “How was your walk?” she asks, swiveling around to face me.

  “Eventful.” I sink into the overstuffed reading chair that occupies one corner of the room and smile at the sight of Bambi, passed out on her flannel doggy pillow.

  “How so?”

  I sip coffee, gauging how much I can divulge without instigating an anxiety attack. “There was this guy at the beach. He went into the water.”

  Mom’s brow crinkles. “He was swimming?”

  “I guess? He was wearing his clothes, which was weird. The surf was crazy. He might’ve gotten into trouble if I hadn’t…”

  Her eyes have gone Frisbee wide. “If you hadn’t what?”

  I fidget. I swallow more coffee. In a minuscule voice I say, “If I hadn’t helped him.”

  “Elise Parker, tell me you didn’t go into the ocean.”

  “I didn’t go into the ocean,” I say obediently.

  She glances at Bambi, who raises her head as if to counter with, Oh, she did.

  Mom looks back at me. “You’re a terrible liar.”

  “But I’m a good swimmer.” It’s true. The summer before I went into third grade, Nick and I spent hours at the pool in our neighborhood, where he taught me the crawl stroke, how to dive, and how to tread water. I’m practically a mermaid.

  “Doesn’t matter. Nobody’s a good swimmer in those currents. Who was this guy?”

  “No idea. I didn’t stay to chat. He was … odd.”

  She pushes her reading glasses up her nose. “Maybe I should walk Bambi with you from now on.”

  “I’m fine, Mom. Besides, mornings are your writing time.” It was the move to Cypress Beach that reignited her fire. She’s not only writing in the mornings; she’s been working all day, well into the night, sometimes. Now that she’s under contract again, she seems almost happy. “And anyway, you’ve been bugging me to get out and meet new people. That’s what I did.”

  “Still, you shouldn’t be wandering around on your own.”

  “Please. Cypress Beach: Where Old, Rich People Come to Die. That slogan’s carved into the welcome sign—surprised you didn’t notice when we cruised past. Besides, I’ve got my vicious guard dog to keep me safe.”

  Mom heaves a sigh, but her mouth turns up in a slight smile. “Promise you’ll stay on the beach and out of the water?”

  “But what if my life’s calling is to save foolish people who wander into the ocean?”

  She meets my gaze, solemn now. “What if you get hurt? What if…?”

  What if I die? Like my brother.

  “I can’t do it again, Lissy,” she says, her voice soft, quavering a little. “Losing Nick is the worst I’ve been through. If something happened to you…”

  “I know,” I say, and I do. Nick died at twenty, tragically young. I was fourteen. Janie, his daughter, was a wrinkly-faced newborn; he’d only seen pictures of her, sent as email attachments by Audrey. My mom isn’t over his death—I’m not sure any of us ever will be—though she’s doing better. She adores Janie, and she’s gathered Audrey neatly into the Parker family fold. But she still worries. She still what-ifs.

  “Please stay out of the water, Elise.”

  “I will.” To seal my promise, I lean forward, passing her my half-full mug.

  She sips, then, thankfully, changes the subject. “What are you up to later?”

  “Hanging out with my slew of friends, obviously.”

  She frowns. She looks tired and older. I feel bad for making her worry.

  “And by friends,” I amend, “I mean Janie and Audrey. We’re going to the park on Raspberry Street. Want to come?”

  “Can’t,” she says, glowering at her computer. The first draft of her book is due to her editor in a month and a half, just before I start my senior year at (terrifyingly unfamiliar) Cypress Valley High. “Rain check?”

  I push up out of my chair. “Definitely. I’ve got photos to edit until then. I’ll fix us lunch before I go, okay?”

  “Thanks, Lissy.” She moves to hand me my coffee mug.

  “Keep it,” I tell her. “You’re on a deadline.”

  elise

  The park on Raspberry Street is straight out of any fanciful kid’s dreams. It’s a huge wooden castle, with slides and turrets and a drawbridge that swings creakily anytime someone runs across it. Janie is in heaven.

  She’s dressed in pink: tutu, hoodie, miniature cowgirl boots, with a glittery bow pinning her wispy hair off her face. She’s the cutest—blue eyes, blond hair, perpetually golden skin—one of those kids who could be in commercials, if her equally beautiful mama was into all that.

  Audrey sits on one of the benches surrounding the playground, reading from a thick textbook. She’s working on an early-childhood development degree, though with everything else she’s got going on, it’s taking her forever. She spends a few nights a week waitressing for big tips at Camembert, o
ne of Cypress Beach’s fanciest restaurants (my mom and I have been sharing babysitting duties since we moved here), and weekday mornings, she works at the local preschool (where Janie tags along and scores a free education). Every so often, she glances up to watch her little girl take a trip down the coiled slide.

  While Janie plays, I snap a million pictures. Normally, I choose inanimate objects as subjects—architecture, the seashore, and cemeteries, lately—but my niece and my dog are exceptions. Their jubilation is inspiring.

  Janie scampers into the grass surrounding the playground. I follow, but at a distance, because I like to see where her imagination takes her. I snap a few shots as she stoops, teetering in her boots, to pluck a dandelion from the lawn. She examines its head, gone to seed, running a finger over the white fluff. She turns to me, holding it out. “Look, Auntie.”

  I lower my camera and crouch down beside her. “These are seeds,” I say, pointing. “When the wind blows, they scatter. They make new flowers wherever they land.” I almost say new weeds but catch myself. Janie doesn’t see weeds; she sees beauty and believes in magic. “Do you know what your daddy and I used to do with these?”

  She shakes her head, wide-eyed. She loves when I tell her stories about Nick.

  “We’d pretend to be the wind. We’d take big breaths, then blow the seeds. But the best part is, we’d make wishes every time. Then, when the seeds made new flowers, our wishes would come true.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. Want to try?”

  She nods earnestly.

  “Think of a wish—something really good.” I glance over at her mama and drop my voice, as if I’ve got a special secret. “Like, maybe you could wish for cookies. When I was little, I almost always wished for cookies.”

  “Daddy, too?”

  I have no idea what Nick wished for. I never asked, and I’ll never get to.

  I swallow around the stone of regret wedged in my throat. “Yep. Daddy, too.”

  “Okay,” she says. “You blow the seeds, too, Auntie.”

  We scatter dandelion fluff like gusts of wind, setting countless seeds to the breeze. We make a lot of wishes.

  After, we head to the bakery for drinks and cookies. Janie gives me a conspiratorial look as we walk through the glass doors, and I wink.

  Van Dough’s sits in the center of town, surrounded by galleries and boutiques and touristy T-shirt shops. Cypress Beach is one of those off-the-beaten-path vacation spots frequented by Californians seeking a break from the bustle of big-city life. Though I’d never been here prior to the move, I’d formed a vague impression of its lifestyle: a charming town where the privileged flock to piss away enormous disposable incomes. It’d never occurred to me that there were actual residents in Cypress Beach, people who live in the delightful cottages and work in the restaurants and specialty shops. People with average incomes, who stroll the sidewalks year-round, like Audrey and Janie, and now, Mom and me.

  Aud and I order iced teas and almond madeleines, and Janie picks a huge shortbread cookie with pink icing and sugar sprinkles. We sit on high stools at the counter that runs the length of the storefront widow, Janie in the middle, attacking her cookie.

  “Unpacked yet?” Audrey asks me, breaking her madeleine in two.

  “Mostly. My mom got sick of the boxes in my room and took pity on me.” In fact, she unpacked everything but my vintage camera collection, which I lovingly arranged on the shelves built into the nooks on either side of my window.

  “Please tell me you repainted your walls.” Aud shudders. “Obsidian. Only you, Elise.”

  “What? I am a sunny person.”

  “Maybe, but you’re also into expression, and you make snap decisions, and you like to prove your point in really passive-aggressive ways.”

  “I do not!” But I do, sometimes. I’m sour about the move, but I’d never complain to my mom or my sister-in-law, so I chose black paint to demonstrate my spite. Joke’s on me, though, because I’m the one who’s stuck suffering. “I picked Obsidian because I thought it’d make my bedroom seem like a darkroom.”

  “But you process all your stuff digitally.” She sips her tea, raising a graceful pinky. She’s blond and blue-eyed, like Janie, and she’s got this cool, effortlessly boho style: flowy floral dresses or bell-bottomed jeans and tunics, always with silver jewelry. She never wears makeup because bare is best—she actually said that to me once, while watching me coat my lashes in mascara. “You should’ve picked yellow or aqua,” she says, like she’s studying to be an interior designer instead of a teacher.

  “Or pink,” Janie says through a mouthful of cookie.

  Audrey nods. “Pink would’ve been perfect. Janie and I can help you repaint, if you want.”

  “No thanks. The black suits me fine. In fact, I think it offsets my sunniness.”

  Aud rolls her eyes.

  I’m not ready to admit I was wrong about Obsidian, though I wouldn’t mind spending the time repainting with them. Audrey and Janie have lived in Cypress Beach for the last year and a half, after a move that caught my mom and me completely by surprise. Aud grew up in the city like my brother and me; she and Nick met their freshman year of high school and were instant sweethearts. Even back then, when I was nine-ten-eleven, I recognized how in love they were. How they complemented each other.

  As soon as they graduated, they announced their engagement. Audrey’s always-apathetic parents shrugged the pending nuptials off, but my mom threw a fit. It wasn’t that she didn’t love Aud—she just wanted more for Nick. Degree, career, savings account, and then marriage. He wasn’t having it, though. They argued even after the City Hall wedding, disagreements that escalated quickly and seemed infinite. Nick was eighteen, jobless and skill-less, and Aud was waiting tables at a dingy cafe in Nob Hill. They were living in his bedroom. My mom cried the day he enlisted in the army, her long-dormant fears regarding Islamic extremists reawakening.

  After basic and skills training, Nick was assigned to a civil affairs brigade at Fort Bragg, and he and Audrey moved to North Carolina. They were nineteen, and she was pregnant almost immediately. A few months later, Nick deployed to Afghanistan. Aud was a mess, isolated and emotional and hormonal, and thanks in part to my alarmist mother, she was also terrified.

  It was like she knew—like she sensed she’d never see him again.

  Just before Nick’s remains were interred at Sacramento Valley National Cemetery, Audrey and baby Janie returned to San Francisco. They stayed with Mom and me, in my brother’s bedroom. But it was too hard, Aud explained when she broke the news that she and Janie were leaving the city—leaving us. She wanted a fresh start. She wanted to live in a place that wasn’t saturated with memories of Nick, where every park, every street corner, every landmark wasn’t a kick to the gut.

  “Cypress Beach,” she said. She and Nick had visited for a weekend after they were married, a sort of mini-honeymoon. “It’s special, but it’s not San Francisco. I think Janie and I could be happy there.”

  They’ve made a life for themselves and I’m glad, but at the same time, I wish my brother could be a part of it. It doesn’t seem fair that Audrey and Janie—and now Mom and me—get to live in this lovely seaside community when he can’t. Our world, no matter how beautiful, no matter how fulfilling, will forever feel off-kilter because Nicky was taken from it.

  “How’s your mom settling in?” Audrey asks now.

  “Good, I think. She says the ocean air’s doing wonders for her creativity.”

  “We’re so glad you guys came. I know the timing’s not ideal for you with school and everything, but having you here … It’s like having a piece of Nick back.”

  I shrug. “I got a dog out of the deal, so there’s that.”

  Aud shakes her head, biting her lip to hide a smile. “You can never be serious, can you?”

  “Sure I can.” I make a churlish face and tickle Janie. She giggles and squirms, scattering cookie crumbs over her tutu, flaunting the dimple she inherited
from my brother. I help her brush the crumbs from her lap before movement out the window catches my eye, and all the merriment’s knocked clean out of me.

  The boy from the beach.

  The tall, dark boy I hauled from the ocean a few hours ago, walking down the sidewalk in jeans and a burgundy T-shirt. His hair’s dry now, short on the sides, longer on top, and his eyes reflect the sun’s light as he speaks to the woman he’s with. She’s old enough to be his mother, wearing loose-fitting khaki pants and an indigo blouse, her hair tucked under a silky scarf. They’re carrying two grocery bags apiece.

  It’s difficult to tear my attention from the boy’s angular face, his graceful gait, his scrupulous half smile. His presence tugs at me, like there’s an invisible thread spanning the space between us. The same thread that kept me from turning my back when he walked into the waves this morning.

  “What are you staring at?” Audrey asks. She leans forward to follow my gaze, then groans with unmistakable disgust—ugghhh. I turn away from the strangers outside to focus on my sister-in-law. Her eyes hurl daggers through the window, and she’s crumbling her madeleine to pieces.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  She looks resentful, jarringly so, but she shakes it off like it’s nothing—like I don’t know exactly what she’s thinking about the tawny-skinned boy and his scarfed companion.

  “I’m fine,” she says. She kisses the top of Janie’s head, as if the contact tethers her to the here and now.

  When I look out the window again, the boy and the woman have disappeared.

  MATI

  The people of Cypress Beach stare.

  Like they are curious.

  Like my parents and I unnerve them.

  Like we are doing something wrong.

  They stare like they are wishing us away.

  I hate their stares.

  It is worst when I go out with Mama,

  because she does not pass.

  A silken hijab, blue or pink or soft green,

  hides her hair and proclaims her other.

  I am other, too.

  The girl from the beach thought so.

  Her expression roared loud as the rolling waves.…