Jack and Becka were somewhere else, I thought. Jack is off with a woman and I’m off with a man. People who see one of us alone have no idea that the other one exists. The thought gave me a tiny, inexplicable thrill. As I swam back to the shallows, I thought, I could be any girl in the world. Michael could be my boyfriend or my brother or even a friend.
I stood up in the shallows for a moment, looking at him. His head was turned away; he couldn’t see me. He wasn’t handsome—his nose had a crooked place where it might have been broken and his eyes were too small. He was thin and wiry but not muscular. I found myself wondering whether he was attractive anyway.
Suddenly something sharp dug into my heel and I yelped. Michael raised his head. His impenetrable sunglasses stared out at me.
“What happened?” he called.
“I stepped on something,” I called back. “It’s okay.”
My heel was throbbing. I picked up my wounded foot and held it in my hand, turning it so that I could see the sole. The skin of my heel was wrinkled, pale, and shiny with water. There was a small dark object, smaller than my smallest fingernail, buried under the skin. As I watched, blood welled up from the dark spot and ran down my ankle in thin streams.
Michael stood up and walked toward me.
“You’re bleeding pretty good,” he said. “You want me to carry you in?”
“Just let me hang onto you while I hop,” I said.
He gave me his arm and I limped to the water’s edge, where a knee-high ledge had eroded away from the shore, and sat down.
“Ouch.” I gripped my heel tightly. “It really hurts.”
“Move your hands so I can see it.” He felt around the wound. “There’s something in there. Hang on, I’ve got a knife in my truck.”
“Knife?” I said, but he was already sauntering up the beach toward the road and the Jeep, and I remained at the edge of the water, bleeding into Lake Erie.
This is a place I never expected to be, I thought.
A moment later, Michael was back with a big bone-handled pocketknife. “Lie down on your stomach. Got to dig it out.”
“I’m not squeamish.”
“I’m a tattoo artist. I know about people and pain—and tattoos don’t hurt half as much as this is going to. Lie down on your stomach. The last thing I need is you jerking your foot and me cutting it off.”
I did as he said and he took my foot into his lap. My toes were pressed against his leg. The drying cotton of his pant leg was warm against my skin. He bent over my heel and I felt the knife cut like a bright flash into the throbbing.
“Easy,” he said. “You know, you should have taken me up on the tattoo offer. It really isn’t as bad as this and you’d have artwork under your skin forever. This way”—and the knife dug again into the meat of my heel—“all you’ll get out of it is a scar. There.”
Twisting my body around, I sat up and held out my palm. He dropped a small, bloody pebble into it. The pebble had only one sharp edge. “You hit it just right. Bad luck.”
I threw the thing out into the water.
“You’re bleeding on me,” Michael said, and I realized that my legs were still across his. I was almost in his lap. One of his hands, the one that wasn’t holding the bloody knife, was resting lightly on my ankle.
“I want to rinse this off.” I moved so that I could swirl my wounded foot around in the water. “I hope you were kidding about the sharks.”
He stood up, brought his shirt from the rock it was draped across, and handed it to me. It was a regular white sleeveless undershirt. “Wrap this around it.”
“I’ll bleed on it. It’ll get ruined.”
“They’re three for six dollars at the SuperMart. I can spare it.”
“Thanks.” I held it pressed to my foot all the way back to Becka’s house. By the time we got there, the bleeding had slowed. Michael covered the cut with a piece of gauze from the first-aid kit in his glove box, and I put on my sandals.
For a minute we sat in the car and stared silently at the small white house. Becka’s car was still parked at the curb in front of it.
“Do you think it’s safe to go inside?” I asked. He shrugged, inscrutable behind his sunglasses, and smiled his little smile. “Guess I’ll give it a shot anyway.”
“I’ll hang around for a second or two just in case. Nice meeting you.”
“Likewise,” I said. “Thanks for digging the rock out of my foot.”
I hopped out of the Jeep, feeling unexpectedly lighthearted. But the closer I got to the house, the heavier my mood grew. Jack was there, but I didn’t want to go back in.
As I walked into the front room, I heard the unmistakable sounds of loud, vigorous sex coming from the bedroom. I stood for a moment, not knowing what to do.
Through the wall, Jack moaned.
The Jeep was still idling outside. “Not safe after all?” Michael said.
“Not by a long shot.” My hands were shaking. “Can I have a cigarette?”
“In the glove box,” he said. “So what do you want to do for the rest of the day?”
“I don’t care. Do you have anything planned?”
“Free as a bird.”
“Then take me somewhere.”
We bought strombolis and wine coolers from a dingy little Italian takeout place, and then Michael took me to the park downtown. There was a university nearby, and although it was summer there were still a few young people lying around on blankets, reading books with glossy covers, oblivious to the world. We sprawled out on the soft, thick grass under a tree.
I sat cross-legged and tore idly at a fallen leaf. Michael stretched out next to me, with his head propped up on his hand. His long legs, with their dark tattoos, drew curious glances from the strollers, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was watching a couple nearby, obviously college students; they were both reading, the boy lying on his back and holding a paperback book in the air over him and the girl on her stomach reading a heavy textbook. They both had highlighter pens. Sometimes, without a word, one of them would tap the other on the shoulder and they’d trade highlighters.
Michael said, “Sex, college-style.”
“Like entropy.”
“Disintegration into chaos?” He saw my expression. “Hey, I watch television, too, babe.”
I don’t, I thought. “Disintegration, yeah, but it’s also—wasted energy, I guess. Energy that you can’t actually use for anything, because it sort of—burns itself out by existing.” I pointed at the college kids. “Like spending all of your time reading about things other people have done.”
He shook his head. “Pass.”
“Me too.”
His eyebrows went up. “You? Hell, you’re still a baby. Who knows where you’ll end up.”
I looked at the girl studying on the blanket. She was wearing a clean, pretty blouse and exactly the right amount of makeup. Then I looked at my hands. “Not like them.”
Michael looked at me for a long moment. “No,” he said. “Not you. Not either of us.”
We sat in silence for a while, watching the college couple, and then I said, “Jack says you fence things.”
Michael gazed lazily up at the tree branches moving in the breeze. “From time to time, I am capable of finding homes for objects that have lost their way.”
“How does one get into that line of business?”
“You’re asking a lot of questions.”
“You bought me alcohol, and I’m underage. And you gave me a cigarette before.”
“In for a dime, in for a dollar?”
“I suppose so.”
“I used to work in a garage,” he said. “Made ten dollars an hour, and everything I made, Uncle Sam got fifteen percent. So I started looking for alternative business opportunities. Started out selling inspection tags and license plates. After a while it was spare parts—tell some rich guy he needs a new alternator and sell the old one to one of my buddies, cheap.” He shrugged. “I only did it to the summer people. Developed into quite a little sideline.”
“So why did you quit the garage?”
“Didn’t quit. Got fired.”
“For stealing?”
He smiled. “For making personal phone calls.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. And now I draw tattoos on people.”
“And do you find tattooing more emotionally rewarding than working on cars?”
“Somewhat,” Michael answered, nodding gravely. Then, suddenly, he sat upright. “Let me look at that foot.”
I extended my legs toward him and he pulled the foot into his lap. He peeled back the adhesive tape that held the gauze over the wound, and we both looked at the dark dimple on my heel. There was a little dried blood around the edge of the wound. Michael licked his finger and rubbed it away, gently. “You’ll probably live.” He pressed the adhesive tape back down to seal it; but his long, thin hand was still on my ankle, and he didn’t show any inclination to move it.
He pulled my other leg into his lap and I wondered what I would do if he leaned down and kissed me. Then he actually did, and I was surprised to find that what I did was kiss him back.
For the rest of the afternoon, we lay twined in the cool shade and kissed, and never once did he slip a hand under my T-shirt or ask me to get in his Jeep with him so we could drive somewhere. There seemed to be nothing else for the two of us to do other than lie on the grass in the cool summer shade, with the breeze coming in from across the lake, and share our innocent kisses, as though we were two normal people enjoying a day off together. Instead of ourselves.
I said, “Your eyes change color, did you know that?”
“Yours are army green,” he said. “They’re the same color as my pants.”
We went to the bar, which wasn’t as crowded as I expected. Michael said that it would be, once the shift at the mill ended. I went into the bathroom and washed my hands; then I lifted my feet up into the sink, one at a time, and washed them, as well. I took the wad of bloody gauze and tape off my wounded foot and threw it away. The hole in my heel was still sore, but it was no longer throbbing.
When I came back, Michael was sitting at the bar, and there was a beer in front of the stool next to him. “I told the bartender that you were twenty-one,” he said. “So if anyone asks, that’s how old you are.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind.” I picked up the beer and took a long pull.
We sat in silence. People were starting to filter into the bar. Somebody put Johnny Cash on the jukebox; it was a song Becka liked. The bartender was leaning his round stomach against a corner of the bar, talking to an old guy wearing a John Deere cap. The old guy was eating pretzels, breaking them into pieces. I could tell he had dentures by the extra movements of his mouth when he chewed.
Then Michael said, “You’re a nice person, Josie.” He wasn’t looking at me.
I didn’t know what to say. I said, “Thanks,” but it didn’t feel like enough.
“It surprised me,” he said. “You being so nice. I expected you to be more like your brother.” Then he did look at me. “From what Becka said.”
I took another drink and swallowed it before answering, “We’re not that different.”
“You’re close.”
I glanced casually at him. “Sure. Broken home and all that.”
Michael gave me an appraising look.
A little while later, when the front door opened and we were hit with a gust of hot, reeking air, sour with the smell of the lake and the car exhaust from the highway outside, Michael’s hand was resting lightly on my knee. I turned and saw my brother walking through the door with Becka, one hand possessive on her shoulder, his hair freshly washed and his white T-shirt clean and soft-looking. There was a lazy, bored grin on his face that vanished when he saw us.
They headed toward us, Becka wearing a satisfied halfsmile and Jack with angry eyes fixed on me despite the look of patent cool on his face. Michael sat up straighter and said, “Hey,” as they came within earshot.
“We interrupting something?” Becka said. She was wearing thick makeup to cover a red, angry-looking mark on her upper lip. She’d been rubbed raw kissing my brother.
“The beginning of a long and drunken evening,” Michael replied. “And that’s about it.”
“Good,” Jack said. “Because you should have seen what happened to the last guy I interrupted with my sister.” His voice was friendly, as if it were a joke.
Soon we all moved to a table. Michael took the chair across from mine; Becka sat down next to me. “How was the beach?” she asked.
“It was the beach,” Michael said.
“It was fun,” I said. Jack’s eyes were fixed on mine. “How was your day?”
“Great,” he replied.
“That’s nice,” I said. “What’d you do?”
Becka said gaily, “Oh, we hardly did anything at all. Sat around on our butts all day.”
“I can imagine,” I said.
Michael’s eyes were on me, glittering brightly as he sat in silence. He was smiling his private smile again. It made him look closed off and distant, and it made me uncomfortable.
“I think I’ll go get another beer,” I said.
“Get a round,” Jack said.
“Want me to come with you?” Michael asked.
“No, I’m fine.”
The bar was crowded by now, as Michael had said it would be. There were men everywhere: big men in shabby work clothes, who smelled of sweat and labor, dancing with girls who were preened and pressed. I preferred the sweat to the smell of the girls’ hairspray and perfume.
I glanced back at the table; Michael said something and Becka, watching him, laughed. Only Jack was looking at me. His eyes burned and his jaw was tight. He looked a little like Raeburn had, that night at the Christmas party, when Claire was teasing him.
Suddenly I was intensely unhappy: forceful, tidal-wave unhappiness, the kind that washes over you and fills your ears and your eyes and your lungs. Sometimes when I feel that way it helps to get drunk, but it’s like shoring up a high-rise with playing cards. Sooner or later something happens—a word or a song or a turn of phrase or, more often, an unwelcome memory—and everything comes crashing down. This time it was remembering Raeburn that made it happen. I found myself fighting back tears.
I fought my way to the bar, pushing at people who couldn’t or wouldn’t let me pass. A woman carrying a glass of water bumped into me, and the water sloshed onto my shirt. It was one of the shirts that Becka had bought for me, and the cheap material instantly glued itself obscenely to my skin. The woman slurred an apology and vanished into the crowd. I made it to the bar and a man holding a beer said, “Hey, baby, when’s the wet T-shirt contest start?”