“Little, I told you, I don’t have one.”
“Well, when you’re ready to tell it, you owe me a story,” she said it like she didn’t believe me.
“Has anyone ever given you a really good one?” I asked her as we grappled up the inclined beach to her home.
“Not as good as mine. But Sarah came close.” Little’s eyes flashed, knowing she was holding up a ball of string to a kitten.
“Oh no,” she said before I asked. “That one is hers to tell. You never take a love story away from a body when the story’s all that’s left.”
Little’s story gave me just enough strength to bear lines that night. If she could look across the dinner table every night at the man she loved when she was my age, then I could face Nathan for half an hour. And despite my worst fears, it went better than I expected. Though I almost choked on the tension in the air, Sarah never seemed to notice. Nathan tried on nonchalance, tugging its ill-fitting shape over his uncomfortable shoulders. It did not suit him. No matter how many times he put on a careless smile, I missed his thoughtful, straight mouth. I missed the way his eyes sparked when a real smile fought its way to his face. I noticed every twitch of his arms, tap of his fingers.
It made me wonder what he saw when he looked at me in the faded light. Did I reveal my feelings in a turn of the eyes, a movement, a word? I held my hands firmly in my lap and tried not to move or speak more than necessary. Only once, when I mentioned that I’d been looking at flights home did his face twitch with unspoken emotion.
When Sarah read a funny quote from Oscar Wilde my thoughts traveled back to Little. I tried to take the black and white images from her movies and turn them into a flesh and blood girl standing in the cove behind us. Had her lips been a crimson red, or a blushing pink? Was her skin a ruddy rose, a porcelain pale or a deep, sun kissed tan? And her hair – was it heavy and glossy like Cleo’s or did it float on the air in feathery curls? Had Newell ever seen a shadow of pain cross her sapphire eyes as he sat across the table? If she had stood up and told him just how she felt … I looked at Nathan, knowing the answer. If she had told him he would have run. Like Joseph in Potiphar’s house, he’d flee so fast he’d leave his thick cloak in her outstretched hand. Like Sarah’s John. Like Nathan on the beach. They all run.
Sarah asked me about my line and I raised my head, trying to remember what I was supposed to say. I read a short, unoffending line from Tale of Two Cities and gave a quick comment while avoiding Nathan’s face. And all the while, despite his painful admission that he had no interest in me, I kept wishing for Sarah to retreat. I could not entirely relinquish hope that another talk alone with him would revive whatever feelings made him kiss me. And I would take it. Anything. Even knowing he would run again, I would put all pride aside and scrape up whatever crumb he dropped.
I called my father after lines and told him that I was second guessing my plan. “I think I’ll just come back Monday. Finish the week here and fly home.”
“But I thought you were so sure about your mother coming. And she’s been pretty calm lately. I don’t think you need to rush anything right now.” Did I imagine the disappointment in his voice? “I even thought about taking your mother away for the Fourth. Get her mind off things.” My father tried to put it diplomatically, but I heard the hint. Their plans didn’t include me.
I wasn’t going to spoil a romantic weekend for them just because I was too cowardly to face Nathan. We settled on a compromise. If my mother didn’t come by the next Saturday, the Fourth of July, then I would catch a flight home right after. It meant looking at Nathan’s face for the next several days, but that was both pro and con. The only thing worse than being with him was being without him.
“I suppose that works. But don’t tell your mother that. If she knows you’re that close to coming home she’ll lose all motivation,” my father pointed out.
I promised to keep my plan to myself and hung up, feeling that it had become a game to him, as well. A point for everyone if Claire shows up. Never mind that Jennifer was stuck on the fifty yard line with no pads and no helmet and staring down a brutal heartache waiting to sack her. Never mind that I was already battered from the last several plays. Never mind that I didn’t think I would survive another tackle. Never mind.
I tried to distract myself from the entire situation. Sarah helped coordinate the town’s Independence Day celebrations every year and so I spent several days helping her hang red, white and blue buntings from the light poles and wrapping the trees on Main Street in red, white and blue Christmas lights. To my chagrin, Nathan also helped every year so when he wasn’t landscaping, he was with us, climbing the ladder and handling the highest branches. But I must admit that when he worked he seemed like a different person. He was so relaxed that I started to believe our kiss was truly just an impulsive accident. As I tossed him clips to hold the lights the fishermen on the docks tossed their catches and the sounds of work and the light of day chased the awkwardness away. There were moments I almost didn’t care that he had no interest in me – that he saw me at worst, as a nuisance, and at best, as a cousin. Almost.
Then I would see the worried curve to his lips when something went wrong, and I would forget to act like I didn’t care. He was hard at work on Wednesday untangling some light strands when a broken lightbulb sliced through his finger. I grabbed his hand instinctively, looking at the clean, narrow cut covered in blood. “It’s nothing,” he said, tugging back his arm, but I didn’t let go.
“It’s bleeding.” With my spare arm I yanked a napkin from my pocket where I’d stashed it after eating a cinnamon roll from the bakery and pressed it to his finger. Again, he pulled away. “Just wait,” I insisted, engaging in a strange tug of his war with his hand in the middle. “You’ll get it all dirty.”
At last he relented and I finished wiping it, rotating his hand as I studied the cut. Just as I noticed a raw hangnail I remembered Little taking Newell’s hand and kissing it, defying ten years of absence, a score of lovers and two wives, living and dead. The impulse burned a hot fire through me. A few inches is all it would take. A few inches and I could put my lips to his skin. That made me hastily drop Nathan’s hand, pronounce it “all better” and turn before he noticed my flushed face.
I never saw such a hand.
Little’s words echoed in my mind. I’d seen bigger hands, stronger hands, but never such an
intelligent
hand. Is that what Little saw in Newell’s hand? And then I felt like a blasphemer, comparing my two week infatuation to the love of her torrid, adventurous life.
But it started like this,
I justified as I watched him scale the ladder. When she had described her sixteen-year-old self I felt like she had broken into my private thoughts and stolen several intimate pages from my heart’s history.
Just like this.
Some unspoken, mutual agreement to stick to unromantic topics made lines more bearable, though far less interesting. Sometimes when he was reading a philosophical and stoic passage I remembered him kneeling down across the burning brush pile, his words low over the crackle of consuming pine needles and billowing smoke and I ached for another chance to talk to Nathan. That Nathan.
And the week passed. I can give no accurate accounting of the hours; it was all just passing time to me. Claude helped to fill in the days and one afternoon Will showed up at Claudia’s house with his friend Michael. After some persuasion, they convinced me to join them and we ended up at a dollar theater watching a bad movie I’d seen with Cleo three months earlier. But two hours lost was two hours lost. I couldn’t ask for much more than losing hours. They hung like heavy rocks around my neck, pulling me to the bottom of a dark pool. Each one that dropped allowed me to float farther from the dark abyss that was Nathan’s rejection.
After the movie we sat outside on the patio of the Sturgeon, sharing a plate of French fries and sipping milkshakes. The more time I spent with Will, the less I minded his pinched face and clumsy, elongated body. He was far from brilliant, often missing the simplest innuendos, but his affection for Claude was obvious. If she didn’t mind that he could barely grasp long division and he didn’t mind that she couldn’t stand on the boat where he made his living, then God bless them both.
Will’s friend Michael was a comedian with common good looks, black eyes and dark hair, though he was a bit shorter than me. I noticed a few admiring glimpses stealing my way, but considered them no more than I would regard a glance from a Riverhurst boy. The only uncomfortable moment of the afternoon was when Nathan ran an errand down to the docks as we sat at our table. I saw him jog past as I raised and lowered the straw in my milkshake, watching the patterns in the icy milk. I almost rose to invite him to join us but one glance at Will’s arm around Claude’s shoulders reminded me why I couldn’t. I settled back in my seat, wondering if Nathan would see us on his way back up the ramp. The way the terrace kissed the sidewalk, I didn’t see how he could avoid it. He’d only missed us the first time because he was walking with his face to the water.
Ten minutes later he reappeared, a paper bag clutched in one fist. As he made his way past the Jacks his gaze rose to our table and his eyes found mine watching him. Claude, fortunately, had her back to him and no one noticed my diverted attention. Just as Nathan assessed the scene with a tense frown, Michael tugged a piece of my hair playfully, leaned in close, and presented me with a small plastic card that he had managed to wrestle away from Will. I jerked in surprise and looked down at the driver’s license, complete with the obligatory terrible photo. The camera had captured Will with his eyes half closed, a ferrety look to his face. I laughed in spite of myself.
“Isn’t that the worst?” Claudia asked.
“Sorry Will, that’s pretty bad,” I chuckled. Will pretended to plunge a knife into his heart and by the time I looked back to Nathan his back was to me. I swallowed against the panic, wondering if he confused our spontaneous outing for a date. Then I bit the inside of my lip, remembering that it didn’t matter what he thought. I already knew how he felt.
Little visited the house several times that week, but I steered clear of her probing eyes. I don’t know how, but she knew too much. What Sarah’s eyes missed, what even Nathan’s eyes missed, she seemed to glean in a glance. Maybe she knew the look too intimately – the shy, tortured flick of the eyes when he crossed the room. I don’t know why she cared so much, but I theorized that it was odd for her to see it from that angle; to watch from the outside as a love struck girl held her tongue around the boy who would never acknowledge her beyond a child.
I sympathized with her star-crossed love story. She had seventeen years to overcome with Newell. I had only two. Two years, two thousand miles, and about a hundred I.Q. points. And when I listed the obstacles like that I realized that the odds were more stacked against me than I cared to admit.
We had to delay lines on the Thursday before Independence Day. We were up to our elbows in construction paper and not paying much attention to the clock because we were making paper flags with Hester and Darcy when Nathan walked into the living room.
“Have we switched to a nightly art project?” he asked as he looked at the room buried in paper scraps. My head jerked up at the sound of his voice.
“Just another way to express ourselves,” Sarah joked as she waved a pair of scissors in the air, “In fact, Nathan, I think I’ll start having you draw a picture every day instead of finding a line. I like that idea.”
“I hope you like stick figures. If it’s a really serious subject I can do a flip book. I love it when the little guys run off the page.”
I laughed out loud, remembering the thick flip books that Cleo and I slaved over in grade school. I hadn’t thought of those since I was ten.
“Nathan, look!” Darcy squealed as she held up a large piece of paper oozing with glue that held a hodgepodge of cut paper shapes.
“Wow, Darce. Wow. So you guys are making …” He paused, searching for clues until Hester held up her neat American flag, complete with fifty small stars, and Nathan winked gratefully at her, “flags! Nice flag, Darcy!”
“It’s the flag of Darcyland. All of the colors are simbotic.” Sarah laughed, but Darcy didn’t notice. She was paying too much attention to her own voice. “Pink is for everything beautiful,” she said pointing out a skinny, pink heart. “Blue is for the water because Darcyland is an island. Yellow is for happiness …” Her large, yellow oval flopped off the page when she touched it. “Darn it.”
“I’ll fix it,” Sarah said reaching for it.
“Heliotrope is for flowers,” Darcy continued, pushing her finger at a crudely cut purple flower.
“What’s the orange symbolize?” Nathan asked her as he sat down on the couch and rumpled Hester’s hair.
“Tigers.”
Hester giggled, a young sound from her wise face. I liked it. “Of course. Tigers,” I nodded solemnly while Nathan smirked and shook his head.
“I don’t have a line yet,” Sarah piped up. “I’m not even sure I can find my books. Is it that late already? We need to get the girls home.”
“I don’t have preschool tomorrow. It’s Friday,” Darcy said as she tore a white sheet of paper down the middle. “Is it time for the fireworks yet?”
“Saturday. You get to see them on Saturday,” Nathan answered. “Two more days.” Darcy dropped her paper and padded in her socks to Nathan, scrambling into his lap. She looked little more than a baby in his muscled arms.
“Will you take me to the rock to see the fireworks this year?” she asked.
“No!” Hester cried with a joking look of horror. “Not the rock with Darcy again!”
“What’s the rock?” I asked. The name conjured visions of Alcatraz.
“There’s a tiny island inside the bay. Nathan rowed us out there last year to see the fireworks and Darcy drove us crazy!” Hester answered, ignoring Darcy’s pink tongue that whipped out between her plump lips.