If I ever had her. Increasingly I think friends are illusions of love our younger selves create. The links between us are so breakable. No legal documents, no custody arrangements, no joint accounts. The only sign it’s over is that the mail never comes.
Candace addressed the letter to me and Jake. He wrote to Lynn, too? Maybe I’m seeing things that aren’t there. Except … knowing the things are invented doesn’t make me see them any less.
All these years later, I still remember that moment in Nangussett. I consent. I talked to Dr. Pottle once about how those words swirl around my head at night, and he said lots of people feel that way. Betrayed by the person who sent them there.
But I sent myself there. I went there on my own.
Jake only saw me when I was weak and pressed down on me like a bug.
Sometimes the only reason I want to live is that I still have so much art to make.
20.
KATE
The second Sunday in August, Theo arranged for one of the camp counselors to watch the kids for the day, and he and Kate drove down to a small beach south of Muir Woods so that she could go surfing for the first time.
She was bad at it. Even with Theo there to guide her, the whole thing was so foreign: the board banging up and down as she paddled out over the waves, the opaque rhythms of who got to go when, the complete impossibility of levering her body up at the right moment. Theo said when she caught the wave it would feel like a train beneath her, but that never happened. The wave always crashed over her, catching some odd angle of her board if she so much as moved a muscle. Again and again she was pounded down into the tide, her legs smacking water and seaweed and the board. And yet it was fun, in a weird way, the surrender, the momentary panic every time the water closed over her head, Theo’s too-detailed descriptions of the physics concepts involved.
At last, after one wave had pulled her (half-clinging to her board, half-scraping against the sand) all the way to the shallows, she hauled herself out of the water, laughing, and dropped the board on the ground. Theo was somewhere out in the water still, one of the many ink-black figures straddling their boards on the waves.
Wiggling out of her rented wetsuit, Kate gazed at the rest of the beach: people in bikinis and sweatshirts and parkas and tank tops; children waving pink shovels; dogs making mad dashes for any abandoned food; chatter burning the cool air. She could already feel the bruises forming on her shins, and in each place where the board had clanged into the bone, over and over, the blood seemed to pulse more intensely, glittering, trying to get out.
She didn’t know Theo was behind her until she was already up in his arms, hoisted under the armpits the way he would pick up Jemima to see ice cream flavors at the store. She shrieked in delight, and he threw her over his shoulder and marched them back down the beach.
“Wait, wait, wait—” she said, laughing. Waist-deep in water, Theo shifted his weight as if he were about to throw her in, and she locked her legs around his torso so that they both toppled over.
The water was ice. An octopus of limbs, they pulled and fought each other and the tide. She twisted away into the clean oblivion of the sea. Each wild wave folded around her, hugged her, told her, You are home.
They surfaced. Kate first, Theo next, shaking his hair and throwing diamonds of water onto her. She swam to him and wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist.
“You’re crazy,” she said.
“Yes, guilty,” he said, grinning back at her.
It was like that first kiss at Finley Lake. But he was different now, she realized: looser, at ease, as if the sea had sloughed off all his earthly hesitations. The past few weeks had relaxed him, too—he had become comfortable with her, the same way she had become comfortable with him.
She kissed him again and again, digging her fingers into his shoulder blades to find the bone beneath the neoprene. Her body was in emergency. His mouth was warm and salty. His eyelashes stroked her cheeks like a wet paintbrush. She was breathless, weightless, free.