You (You #1)(77)
“Forget it,” Peach says and she drinks old kale smoothie right out of the pitcher. “I’m gonna have a shower.”
“Peach, wait. We should talk.”
“Beck, please,” she gripes. “Did you ever think this is possibly why guys can’t deal with you? I mean just let it be. We don’t have to analyze every stupid thing.”
She marches off with her kale smoothie and I can tell you feel responsible and this is not right. You call out to her and she responds by raising the volume on the Elton John. I hear a door slam. You cry and how dare she lay this all on you? You pass into the kitchen—fortunately, you don’t choose the path by the servant staircase—and you return with your phone. I am shaking. This is it. Here you come. Call me, Beck. Call me. But you dial a number and my phone doesn’t vibrate.
“Chana, I know you’re pissed at me but I need your help. Benji’s dead and Peach is upstairs crying and I never should have come and I don’t know what to do. Please call me.”
You go upstairs and pound on the door and beg her to come out and say you’re sorry until your voice is raspy. She ignores you and she is vile. She has you trapped and you don’t even know it. I push through the saloon-style doors and leave.
33
IT’S a shame that this beach is wasted on people like Peach. All these waterfront mansions are empty, even though it’s unseasonably, gloriously warm. (Knock on wood.) The beach couldn’t be more pristine, yet none of these fucking second-home owners drive to LC to pay their respects. What idiots. I, on the other hand, am a grateful beachcomber.
Yesterday, I followed the tracks you and Peach left all the way down to the jetty that reaches into the bay. This is a great place to hide, to wait. There are scattered boulders—KEEP OFF ROCKS—and there’s a weathered wooden walkway that ends in the sand. I dug out a foxhole beneath the walkway and I think it is warmer here than it was in either of the damn boathouses. Although, it’s impossible to compare, given how cold it was the night of my accident.
In any case, the sun is coming up and it won’t be long now. Soon, Peach will be here, alone.
Candace would love it here. The last time I saw the sun rise on a beach, I was with her. This is no time to be thinking of Candace, but how can I not? We saw the sun rise on Brighton Beach and as it got brighter, she tried harder and harder to break up with me. I asked her to walk down to the water with me. She did. She was cruel in that way; a nicer girl would have said no, and left me to cry on my own, but she wanted to see me at my worst so she stuck around.
“I am leaving you,” she said.
Then go, bitch. Go.
It wasn’t my fault that Candace followed me down to the water’s edge and it wasn’t my fault that I picked her up and held her down in the water and watched her pass on to the great beyond. She wanted to be there, or she wouldn’t have gone down there with me. She knew she was killing me and she knew that I was not the type to go down without a fight.
I don’t blame Peach for being so miserable, the same way I don’t blame Candace for wanting to escape her family. What a shame to be so angered by what you don’t have that you treat what you do have like it’s nothing. She’s not grateful to have an extra home in a place where the biggest danger is Taylor Fucking Swift. She’s a lot like Candace, who wasn’t grateful for her voice, her talent.
I have a little time so I walk a few feet down to the shore. I like the way the water comes and erases my steps. I think of that fucking poem from middle school where the dude walking on the beach isn’t alone because Jesus is carrying him on his shoulders and I smile. For years, I thought it was the other way around, that the guy in the poem was carrying Jesus, you know, the way a Hare Krishna carries his tambourine, the way a Jewish boy carries a Torah at his bar mitzvah. I didn’t think of Jesus Christ as being this guy giving piggyback rides to fuckups and I don’t even leave one set of footprints, so take that, middle school poem. I admit, I am kind of grumpy. The last food I ate was that Danish. I cross over the walkway built by some family with something against walking on white sand and return to my foxhole and wait.
At last, I see Peach emerge on the patio, a hot red speck in the distance. She stretches and she trots down the walkway and here we go. With each passing second, I can hear her more clearly, her breathing, her feet pounding, and the Elton John blasting from her phone. She passes me, swoosh, and I leap out of my foxhole like a jack in the box and run after her. She doesn’t hear me. She is fearless on this beach. I grab her by the ponytail. Before she can even scream, I ram her into the sand and straddle her back. She struggles, kicking, but her mouth is in the sand and Elton won’t stop singing—sitting like a princess perched in her electric chair—and I pick up the rock in my pocket.
She squirms her head to the side and her eyes are more beautiful than I realized and she recognizes me and she spits, “You.”
She might be the strongest woman I have ever known and though her last words are spoken, she’s still struggling, gurgling. Her skin flares, Nantucket red, and all the exercise instilled her with a superhuman strength, a lung capacity that boggles my mind. I don’t blame her for fighting. Because she was raised by bigoted, hateful monsters, she never celebrated her life and I think this is why she musters the strength—those legs still quiver!—to maximize her last moments on earth. Her fingertips reach for my arm; it’s too late, Peach. Her eyeballs sail north, toward the top of her head, and we can all learn something from an untimely tragic death. What a danger, blaming other people for your problems. What a waste of a life. Had she disowned her cunty family and moved to one of her sunny foreign havens and been a bartender or a Pilates instructor, anything, doesn’t matter, she could have settled down with a nice, like-minded girl and paid respects for all her blessings—health, brains, muscles—by being true to herself. Nonetheless, fuck her parents. Don’t make a baby if you’re not capable of unconditional love.