Before My Eyes (15 page)

“Hey, Ricky, we almost drowned on your beach,” says Max, kicking the sand, clenching his fists, forcing my hand away.

“Almost. Next time, you'll know better, got it?” He flashes me a smile of white, even teeth. “Now let me put out an alert for your little sister. We'll have everyone we can out looking for her. We'll find her, you got it? Describe her to me.”

As he waves his arms, coming forth with a smartphone, I start to say that her name is Elizabeth but I call her Izzy— A shout breaks over the rafts of blankets. Down through the empty fire lane toward the high white chairs races a blond head in a bathing suit with pink stars. She falls headlong into me. I kneel and scoop her up.

The lifeguard climbs back up to his white chair and stands there, arms crossed around his hairless chest, white teeth blazing from tan skin, and scans the ocean as if hoping someone will need saving right there and then. Beside me, Max digs through his backpack, searching for something, too. I hug Izzy toward me, knowing I have in my arms all that matters.

“Where were you?” I ask. “Why didn't you listen to me and stay on the blanket?”

“Max said he'd go in—and make sure you were alright—and he said for me to go to the lifeguard—and I could see you and I ran but I couldn't find one—and this guy, you'd remember him, he said he'd help, but then we could see you and Max just flop out of the water—and then he wouldn't let me go—and then he did. He showed me where you were and let me go. Claire, you wouldn't get lost, would you? Not without me.”

“What guy?” asks Max.

Izzy points past the lifeguard chair at the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd fanned across the beach and boardwalk. I can't tell who she is pointing to and it doesn't matter. She's back with me.

“Am I lost?” I kiss the top of Izzy's head. She clings to me. I whisper in her ear, “I'm here. Right here, Izzy. Just don't tell Daddy about this, okay? Promise me. Or I'll never bring you to the beach until you are a hundred and six years old.”

Izzy buries her head in my stomach. “Just don't ever do what you did again. I need you around until I'm a hundred and six.”

I should have paid attention to the warning sign near the rocks. I should have seen that the waves were getting rougher and higher. But I've been in this ocean all my life and nothing's happened. I should have known that even on the most ordinary days, even on the days when you wake up and think that all you have to do is brush your teeth—and you can go without a care—the world will surprise you. The waves will hit harder; the current will drag you under.

“Are you listening, Claire?” says Izzy, as if she is suddenly the older one. “You were almost lost. I want to tell that ocean: no more losing my sister, mister.”

“That's right. Are you listening?” says Max beside us. “No drowning Izzy's sister!” I notice he has dimples on each cheek when he laughs.

“No drowning, Max!” I join in. I stretch up on my toes and shout over people's heads, at the waves, at the deceitful sea. Max reaches over and swats at the sand on the side of my face. I laugh. I lick my lips and find more sand and salt there. And my lips sting, ache. And all of this doesn't make sense. I really like Brent, so why am I wishing Max would brush the sand off my lips with his own?

Instead he says, “I'm late for my shift. I work at the Snack Shack.”

“I think I know that,” I say.

Izzy nuzzles between us. “Can I have an ice cream cone?”

The sand from my face rubs between Max's fingers and is returned to the shore.

“Maybe. Before we go home,” I say to Izzy, distracted by Max. Not that he's paying attention to me. He's squinting at a squad of girls in string bikinis parading over beach blankets as they march to the sea.

“I got to go,” he says, sounding miserable that he has to leave the sight of bikinis in their neon colors attacking the gray sea.

“You're late for your shift,” I repeat back to him. His eyes won't meet mine. “Will your boss understand?”

He shrugs. “Who cares?”

The state senator's son races off. I am not going to waste my time on him when I can truly connect to someone as serious and intense as Brent. Though I have to think that Max has decent speed—and he's careful to leap around other people's property. He pauses to kick a soccer ball back to a group of pint-size boys. He concentrates when aiming the black-and-white ball as if he's planning to kick it far from the kids. He doesn't. He uses the side of his foot to send it right to the smallest boy.

Izzy taps my back with the palm of her small hand. “I really want an ice cream cone. Should I get vanilla or chocolate?”

I remember the other beat: one long … two short, as if I am remembering my heartbeat.

Max

Saturday, 12:50
P.M.

Back on my shift in the Snack Shack. My last shift ever, and somehow I'm ten minutes early. I could have stayed with Claire and her sister, but I couldn't think of anything else to say to a girl like her. Anyway, I don't want or need any more excitement. I need boring. I need to float from here until the first day of school. I'm sure I can just ease through the rest of the afternoon, ease through—and go. I slide my feet across the floor in my effort to be effortless.

From the front counter, Trish calls, “Hero-boy, look at you.”

“Hero-boy!” echoes Peter.

The shore is packed with people dashing in and out of the water. No sign of currents that could drag anyone under. No sign at all that someone, that Claire, nearly drowned. But I'm not a hero. I don't know what came over me going in the water after her. I am not the kind of guy who saves people. I'm the go-along-to-get-along type of guy. I'm the ultimate team player, the guy who can play a half dozen positions on the soccer team, and play them well enough. I'm the guy who doesn't like to work too hard or think too much, who has had the easy life, according to my father, even if I did spend the summer working at the Snack Shack.

“How'd you hear?”

“Barkley told us,” says Peter. “But he sounded mad at it.”

“He always sounds mad,” says Trish with a big laugh. Squeezing by, she tosses a smile at me, and I even smile back, but just a bit. I don't want her to get any ideas, even on my last shift ever. “I'm on a bathroom break,” she calls out, leaving me with Peter.

“Where's Barkley?” I ask him. He's working with the broom, sweeping with great energy but no results.

“Counting water bottles again,” says Peter. “Why does he always count the water bottles?”

I don't know why anybody does anything. Dive in after a girl you hardly know, count water bottles when nobody asks you to count them. “Maybe we're all just a little bit weird.”

“Yeah, maybe we are,” he agrees happily.

“Anybody working here?” says a middle-aged customer with a mass of hair everywhere but on the crown of his head. “I'd like a chocolate ice cream cone over here.”

“One ice cream cone?” Peter repeats, dropping the broom. I pick it up and put it away so we don't trip and kill ourselves. “What kind of ice cream cone? We have chocolate, vanilla, or swirl?”

“Chocolate, I said.”

“Chocolate?”

“Chocolate!”

Peter trudges back toward the ice cream machine, muttering “chocolate” so he won't forget.

“Cooper,” Jackson beckons to me from the front of the line. He leans across the counter, confidentially, as if he wants to consult with me, probably on something to do with the team. I'm going to have to assure him that I've been practicing those penalty kicks. I'm going to be cool with him today.

“Hey, man.”

“Still working here?”

“Last day.”

“Party this weekend?”

“You know it,” I say.

“Nobody's going.”

“Yeah?” I say, as if I care, which, of course, part of me does.

Samantha eases up behind him. Today she is in a hot-pink bikini. Her hair hangs straight down her back. For the first time this summer, I think: this girl must never swim at the beach. I've never seen her hair wet, not like Claire's—all wild and undone.

“Hey,” she says to no one. But what she does is this: wrap her arms around his stomach and reach up to scratch his chest with her long pink nails.

“Hey,” he says to her, twisting around, talking down to her head, and asking her, “You going to this loser's party?”

She doesn't even look at me, only at him, and shrugs. “He never asked me.”

She's right. I never asked her. All the back-and-forth between us was in my mind. She's like any other girl on the beach—sparkle and flirt and giggle and it's hard, sometimes, not to look at her. She expects you to look and once you know that, you know it's all about her. I can't really think this through right now—with Jackson and her contorting, claiming each other with lunging kisses—and kids calling out for ice cream: vanilla, chocolate, swirl, and Peter, man, he's not keeping any of it straight and there's no sign of Barkley or Trish—I've got to admit it was never about me or us in her eyes.

He pushes her away and she giggles. “We're not going, are we, Jackson?” she says to him, swinging around to face him, noticing, I guess, that his attention is not on her at that moment.

Peter shuffles back toward the counter. “Chocolate,” he says, pushing the ice cream cone toward the kid, who flings two dollars at him and runs off with the cone.

“How about taking my order?” says Jackson to Peter with a glint and edge.

“I'll help you,” I say to Jackson.

“Isn't he supposed to be helping me?” says Jackson, never breaking his smile. “I'll have a vanilla cone.”

“Vanilla?” repeats Peter.

“I got it.”

“No, I think I'll have chocolate.” He winks at Samantha, who giggles. She's freed him, for the moment, from her pink nails.

“Chocolate?” repeats Peter slowly, looking over at me.

“I'm getting it,” I say, hurrying. I just want this shift to be over.

“I want the sped to help me,” says Jackson in such a friendly way you almost miss him insulting Peter, that he's calling him what we all, sometimes, call the kids who are led by aides down the hall in high school, who are in the “closed door” classes, who are students in special education, or shorthand: “speds.” Peter may have one more year to go in high school, even be in regular classes like gym and health, but to people like Jackson he will always be a sped. While I may have called him the same name once or twice over the summer in anger and frustration, I don't like it coming from Jackson on my last day of having to work with Peter.

“Is that you, Cooper? Are you the sped these days? You spent the summer hanging out with this guy, maybe he wore off on you? You going into the special classes with kids like him in the fall?” I don't miss this. I stop in my tracks, clenching and unclenching my fists. This is worse than yesterday. I am so glad that today is my last shift in the history of Snack Shack shifts.

“You and I are at different schools,” says Peter, reasonably, to me. “Doesn't he know that?”

“Hey, hey, what are you doing?” calls out Jackson. “I'll have a swirl. You got that, Cooper?”

“Swirl,” repeats Peter to me, as if I need help.

Samantha giggles more.

“Maybe two. Should I really rock their worlds and order two?” he says to Samantha.

I don't know how I liked her. How I was always waiting for her to come up to the counter—and she came nearly every day. When did she hook up with Jackson? How did I miss that?

“Two?” repeats Peter, struggling.

“I'm on top of it,” I say to him. “Take care of another customer.”

“Two cones?” Peter persists to Jackson. “Vanilla and chocolate, or swirl?”

“Sure. Or maybe just chocolate. Or chocolate and vanilla. Or swirl and chocolate.”

“Or vanilla and vanilla,” says Samantha as if she has just caught on to the pattern.

“Didn't I say ‘swirl'?” Jackson spits out like he's in a comedy routine.

“I'm helping them, Max,” says Peter. “I can do it.”

“I know you can do it, Peter. But let me take care of these guys, okay? You handle the bottled water line. You know how I hate selling the bottled water.”

This isn't happening to me. Not on my last shift.

“It's okay, the sped's helping us, isn't he?” Jackson makes like he's innocent, with this broad smile on his pinhead. Samantha smiles at him.

“Cut it, Jackson.”

“What am I doing, Cooper? I'm just ordering ice cream cones. You and him can't handle that, it's not my problem, is it?”

“I can do this, Max,” shouts Peter, something he does when he definitely can't handle the situation.

Jackson leans across the counter toward Peter. “Chocolate. Vanilla. Swirl. What did I want? Tell me.”

Peter can only look in more confusion from Jackson to me. Before I can act or do anything with the cone in my hand, on the other side of the counter, Barkley comes up from behind Jackson. He's twice as big as Jackson, bald, pale, and wearing those creepy sunglasses of his. He looks like an off-duty cop.

Jackson holds his hand up between himself and Barkley. “You know something, I don't really want an ice cream cone, do you, Sammie?”

“Then let's move along, okay?” says Barkley. “Because you're not helping anyone being here. Not me. Not Peter. Not Max. Move along, you got it?”

“Okay, I'm going. But I will see you Wednesday, Cooper, first day of school.” Jackson leans back across the counter and without a trace of humor says to me, “Have fun at your party.”

“Move,” says Barkley, his voice modulated a notch or two above what's needed for the situation, not quite a shout, but loud, almost mechanical or without feeling—weird again. “Especially the girl in the pink bikini. Move off the line. You, I know you. I know what you want.”