Swim Back to Me (10 page)

I found the street, then wasn’t sure which of two little white houses was his, one with a fence around the yard or one without. The house with the fence had a station wagon in the driveway, while the other had a two-door sedan, a Chevelle the blue-green color of the ocean. I got off my bike in front of that one. The yard was familiar, the steps up to the porch, the faded black of the front door. Standing there, I thought for some reason of the charred log I’d noticed in the fireplace, and I wondered if it was still there. My father’s area of interest was between-the-wars America, Prohibition, the stock market crash, the Depression; he’d told me that in the early thirties fuel was so scarce people would burn a log halfway and then smother the flames so they could get a fire going again the next night without having to use more wood. I imagined that the tall guy would do that, not to be frugal but because he was alone.

The Chevelle’s windows were open, as if he’d used the car recently and planned to go out again soon. I left my bike on the sidewalk, went up to the porch, and knocked.

Footsteps, and then the door was opened, but not by the tall guy: it was a woman with mousy brown hair in a ragged cut and, oddly, braces on her teeth, which she revealed in a broad smile that disappeared as she took in the sight of me.

“Sorry, I was expecting someone else. Can I help you?”

I looked past her: it was the guy’s house, with the guy’s saggy couch.

She cocked her head, waiting.

I said, “Is anyone else home?”

“You mean Karl? Are you looking for Karl? Karl,” she called over her shoulder, “there’s a boy here for you.”

She was a little ugly: “plain,” they would say in a book. She was flat-chested, and her eyebrows were so pale it was almost as if she didn’t have any. I hoped she wasn’t his girlfriend. I preferred the idea of him alone to the idea of him with her.

The tall guy appeared in the doorway, and I could tell he had no idea who I was. He was just the same, though: the lean, lanky frame; the light blue eyes.

“Yes?” he said.

Suddenly worried my bike might be gone, I swiveled around, but there it was, leaning against the tree where I’d left it. I faced them again, the woman with her hand on the doorframe, Karl towering over her.

“Can I help you?” he said. The way he spoke was soft, easy—very different from how he’d talked on the day of the Walk. “Are you selling something?”

“Gorp,” I said, and then I began to laugh. I backed down the steps, then turned and made for my bike.

“Hang on,” he said, coming after me. “You’re that kid, aren’t you?”

I kept going.

“You’re that kid who wanted to sterilize a needle. You were with that crazy girl.”

Now I turned around.

“You gave me some gorp.”

“You ate the raisins.”

“I probably did.” He lowered his chin, gave me a closer look. “What are you doing here?”

“I just—” I tried to think. “I just wanted to thank you,” I said, and I reached into my pocket and pulled out the bag of pot. “For helping us. Sorry it took me a while.”

His eyes widened. “What is that, marijuana? You can’t do that, put that away. Here, come inside.” Glancing around, he reached for my shoulder, and I let him pull me toward the house. The woman was still in the doorway, and he beckoned her inside and then closed the door behind us.

“What’s going on?” he said. “What is this?”

I looked around. It was dark after the bright afternoon, but I could tell it was different from the other time—definitely tidier, but also cleaner. The air seemed fresh, and the fireplace was empty.

“What’s your name?” he said.

“Richard.” I glanced at the woman; she was leaning against a wall, watching me. I knew I should talk. “My friend was Sasha. That day. We were doing the Walk for Mankind, the twenty-mile walk. There was a check-in station right across the street.”

“That’s right,” he said.

The woman cleared her throat, and he glanced over at her and then looked at me again. He said, “Richard, you shouldn’t give marijuana to a stranger. Not as a thank-you and not for any other reason. You shouldn’t do that.”

I stayed still, the Baggie slippery in my hand.

“I mean, what if I was a cop,” he went on. “Did you think of that? I could be an off-duty police officer.” He hesitated. “Are you in trouble? Do you need help?”

“No.” I started for the door, shoving the pot into my pocket as I went.

“Wait.”

This was the woman. I turned, and she’d moved away from the wall and crossed her arms over her chest. Now I was scared. I got the feeling he didn’t care, but she wanted to do something bad—call the police or worse. They were looking back and forth at each other, trying to talk with their eyes. Dan and Joanie sometimes did this, except Dan usually ended up blurting out whatever he was thinking.

“It’s hot out there, Richard,” she said at last. “Don’t you want to have a drink of water before you go? We don’t want to hurt you or get you in trouble. Really. Come have some ice water.”

My eyes got hot, and I held them wide to keep myself from getting teary.

“Yeah,” Karl said. “Good idea. Come on.”

He headed for the kitchen and I followed after him. He filled a glass with ice water and gestured for me to sit at the table—in the same chair where Sasha had popped her blister. He sat opposite me and held his hand across the table. “I’m Karl—did I already say that? It’s nice to meet you, Richard.” We shook, and he said, “Oh, and that’s Mary Ann.”

The woman had come after us but stood in the doorway. She said, “Mary Ann who’s going to wait outside, OK?”

He shrugged.

“I mean, should I stay?”

They exchanged another look, and then she headed for the front door.

I picked up the glass and drank.

“Look, Richard,” he began.

“Thanks for the water,” I said, and I set the glass down and pushed my chair back.

“Hang on, hang on.” He got up and brought a jar of peanuts to the table. “Have some of these before you go, the salt’ll do you good.”

I took the jar and shook a few nuts into my palm.

“So how old are you?” he said.

“Almost fourteen.”

“Once you
are
fourteen you’ll be half my age. So, guess what, I’m twenty-eight.”

“OK.” I wanted to leave, but I didn’t want to have to pass Mary Ann.

He said, “I’m twenty-eight, I grew up in Sunnyvale, I’m a manager at the PayLess in Mountain View.”

I was surprised by the third statement; I’d been sure he was an academic. A scientist—that was what I was expecting. I’d been all ready to tell him I was a faculty brat.

“You want me to keep going?” he said. “You know what managers do, right? I’m the guy they call when there’s a problem. ‘Karl, Karl to register three, please.’ That’s me.”

“Do you wear a red vest?”

“White shirt and tie,” he said with a smile. “My red vest days are behind me.”

Right after my mother left, my father thought we should stock up on household stuff, and we went to the PayLess in Menlo Park and filled two shopping carts with toilet paper and Ajax and family-size boxes of breakfast cereal. Since then we hadn’t ventured farther than JJ&F.

His eyes were still on me, and I looked away. I imagined him as a teenager—a tall, skinny high school kid in a red vest. I wondered if he’d even gone to college.

There was a stack of photos on the table. The top one was a green blur, with some dark spots on one edge. Karl saw me looking and slid the photos to the middle of the table. He held up the top one so I could see it. “Guess what this is.”

I shrugged. “Something green.”

“Yeah, but what? Guess.”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re no fun. It’s a frog. Part of a frog. Didn’t come out too good, did it?” He tossed the picture aside and swiveled the stack so I could see the next one right side up. It was the same idea—blurry green—but I got it this time: the dark spots were bumps on the frog’s skin, and there was a grayish white thing that might’ve been part of its eye.

He tossed that one aside, too. “Here we go,” he said, and he held up a picture of the frog as a small green blob on the muddy edge of some water. “He wasn’t a close-up kind of frog,” he said. He turned the photos around again and slid one after another from the top of the pile. “Now we’re talking,” he said and tossed a photo at me.

It was a picture of snow-capped mountains, like something you’d see on a postcard. He tossed another, and a third, and they were all like that—mountains with forest, mountains with the sky pink behind them.

“Here’s us,” he said.

He and Mary Ann were standing together on a narrow trail, each wearing hiking boots and a huge backpack. She had on sunglasses, so her eyes didn’t have that naked look, and I had to admit she had pretty good legs. They were both smiling like crazy.

“And here’s me,” Karl said, and he passed me a picture of him sitting against a boulder, sticking out his tongue and crossing his eyes.

“Where is this?” I said.

“Cascades. It takes forever to get there, but it’s worth it, it’s beautiful. Does your family backpack?”

I shook my head.

“Well, maybe when you’re grown then. We spent ten days—it was pretty great.”

I put the picture down and slid the whole mess back to him. Like I was going to start backpacking when I was grown. I was pretty sure that when I was grown I’d be like my father, doing something that involved desks and table lamps. I hadn’t even gone to Muir Woods when I had the chance.

“So what’s going on, Richard?” Karl said.

“You mean with Sasha?”

“I mean with you. Is something going on with Sasha?”

I thought of how he was with her, the day of the Walk. Kind of mean. “She’s my best friend,” I said.

“But something happened. She’s in trouble. Or she got you in trouble?”

Suddenly I was furious at him. He’d taken one look at her and decided she was—what? A scammer. Just because she wanted to make a phone call. “No!” I said. “You’re wrong about her,” and I pushed away from the table and ran for the front door.

“Richard!”

I bolted out of the house, brushed past Mary Ann, hopped on my bike, and took off. I pedaled as hard as I could, my legs pumping, my breath coming so fast that soon I’d convinced myself it wasn’t misery making my eyes so wet but just the hot, dry air. Why hadn’t I seen her since the Fourth of July? I didn’t know anymore if I was avoiding her or she was avoiding me. What was I supposed to do? When I got home I left my bike in the garage and went around the corner, but when I imagined standing at their front door I convinced myself I should wait until tomorrow. I’d go over first thing, before she had time to go to Cal’s. “Want to go to the Union?” I’d say. Or, “Hey, I’ve got some weed, let’s get high.” No, that was stupid. “Want to ride bikes?” No, I’d just stand there and say, really deadpan, “Do you want to play?”

Our doorbell rang early the next morning. I was still in bed, and I let my father get it, then scrambled into shorts and a T-shirt when I heard Sasha’s voice.
She’d
come to
my
house? At first I was mad, but this was actually much better.

She knocked on my door as she opened it, saying, “Wake up, wake up,” and walking right in.

I stood in front of my bed, my face still chafed from the too-tight neck of my T-shirt. Her hair was in braids, a style I’d never seen on her. They made her look younger.

“Oh, good, you’re up,” she said. “We’re going to the beach, you can come.”

I wondered if I’d heard her right. “What?”

“We are going to the beach,” she repeated, enunciating each word. “And you can come.”

I was dumbfounded. Did she have no memory of the last time we saw each other? Or the time before that?

“Don’t you want to?” she said. “I’m not mad anymore.”

“About what?”

“The dogs.”

The dogs!
She
was the one who’d been obnoxious. I said, “Maybe I’m mad.”

“About what?”

“I said
maybe
I am. If I’m not then there wouldn’t be an about.”

“What is it?” she exclaimed. “What? I want you to come to the beach.” She seemed genuinely puzzled—as if she couldn’t fathom a reason why I wouldn’t want to go. I thought of the last look she’d given me, that sneer through the open window of Cal’s car. Had she truly forgotten?

She said, “Come on, it’s a special trip. We’ll bury Daddy in the sand like we did that other time.”

She was referring to a trip the five of us had taken ten months earlier, in September: my first trip to the beach with the Horowitzes. We’d buried Dan so deeply that from the back all you could see of him was his coppery hair, growing like some fantastic sea plant near the beach grass.

“It’s going to be really hot again today.”

It probably was. And going to the beach with them—I felt myself giving in. At the beach we raced up and down the tide line, built sand dungeons, competed to see who could get their s’mores the perfect caramel color fastest, without having them go up in flames. One overcast afternoon at Half Moon Bay I won, and Dan nearly had a fit. Looking at my golden marshmallow, he sputtered, “Well, but you …” “I mean, the angle …” Then he got hold of himself and said, “Richard Appleby is a young man of exceptional talents,” and Joanie said, “Dan Horowitz is a middle-aged man of exceptional restraint,” and he laughed this huge, happy laugh.

Sasha was waiting. I was about to say yes, I’d go with them, when I thought of Karl—not Karl yesterday, but Karl on the day of the Walk, standing outside his house waiting with me for Sasha to come out. Asking me if I always did what she wanted.

“No,” I said, “I have stuff to do.”

“What stuff?”

“Just stuff.”

She turned, and in a moment I heard her Dr. Scholl’s clacking down the hallway. I waited for the sound of the front door and then made my way to the kitchen.

My father was at the table eating cereal and reading the newspaper. He looked up as I came in. “She’s quite the early bird today.”

I got out the Raisin Bran and poured myself a heaping bowlful, then took the milk from the refrigerator and flooded the flakes. I ate standing, spooning up the cereal and barely chewing, and then tipping the large quantity of excess milk into my mouth.