In Five Years(30)

Chapter Fifteen


When Bella and I were in high school, we used to play a game we called Stop. We’d see how far we could get in describing the grossest, nastiest thing before the other would be so revolted they’d have to yell out stop. It started with an unfortunate piece of forgotten freezer meat and carried on from there. There were ant hills, poison ivy welts, the intestines of a cow, and the microenvironment at the bottom of the community swimming pool.

This game comes to mind the next morning when I come upon a dead seagull on my run. Its head is bent at an impossible angle and its wings are shredded, the meaty portion, or what’s left of it, being feasted on by flies. A piece of its red spine sits disconnected from its body.

I remember reading once that when a seagull dies it falls out of sky on the spot. You could be just sitting on the beach, enjoying an orange ice pop, and wham, seagull to the head.

The fog is thick—a hazy mist that hangs over sand like a blanket. If I could see for a mile, which I can’t, I might spot a fellow morning jogger, out training for the fall marathon. But as far as my eye can see, it’s just me here now.

I bend down closer to the seagull. I don’t think it has been dead a long time. but here, out in nature, things evolve quickly.

I snap a picture to show Bella.

No one was awake when I got up. David was snoring next to me, and the upstairs was still, but then it was barely six. Sometimes Ariel gets up to do work. I tried last summer to get her to jog with me, but there were so many excuses and it took so long that this year I vowed to invite no one.

I’ve never been a late sleeper, but these days anything past seven feels like noon. I need the morning. There’s something about being the first one awake that feels precious, rare. I feel accomplished before I’ve even had my first cup of coffee. The whole day is better.

The return is short, no more than two miles, and when I get back the house is still asleep. I take the gray-shingled stairs to the kitchen and edge the sliding door open. My shirt is damp from my run—a combination of sweat and sea mist. I take it off, toss it over the back of a chair, and head toward the coffeepot, just in my sports bra.

Lid up, filter in, four giant scoops and an extra for the pot. It’s a full house. I’m leaning forward, elbows on the counter waiting for the first drips of caffeine, when I hear Bella’s feet on the stairs. I can always tell it’s her. I know the way her body sounds. I can hear the way she walks, honed from decades of sleepovers, her cushioned feet padding around the kitchen for late-night snacks. If I were blind, I think, I’d be able to tell every time she entered a room.

“You’re up early,” I say.

“I didn’t drink last night.” I hear her slide onto a stool, and I take a second mug down from the cabinet. “Did you sleep well?”

David is a silent sleeper. No snoring, no movement. Being in bed with him is like being alone. “I love waking up to the ocean,” I say.

“It reminds me of when your parents had that place at the shore, remember?”

The coffee starts to descend in a sputtering fit. I turn toward Bella. Her hair is down and tangled around her, and she’s wearing a white lace nightgown with a long terrycloth bathrobe, opened, over it.

“You came there?” I ask.

She looks at me like I’m crazy. “Yeah. You guys had it until we were like fourteen.”

I shake my head. “We got rid of it after Michael—,” I say. Still, all these years later, I can’t bring myself to use the word.

“No, you didn’t,” she says. “You kept it for like four more summers. The place in Margate. The one with the blue awning?”

I take the pot out. It hisses in anger—it’s not time—and I pour her half a cup, setting it down on the counter in front of her. “That wasn’t ours.”

“No, it was,” Bella says. “It was on the ocean block. That little white house with the blue awning. The blue awning!”

“There was no awning,” I say. I go to the refrigerator and take out almond milk and hazelnut Coffee Mate. Bella remembered and picked it up for me.

“Yes there was,” she says. “It was two blocks from the Wawa, and you guys kept bikes down there and we’d lock them up at the condos with the blue awnings!”

I hand her the almond milk. She shakes and pours.

“There was a dead seagull on the beach today,” I say.

“Gross. Rotting carcass? Snapped spine into bone-popping shreds? Fly-eaten eyes pecked down to hollow sockets?”

“Stop.” I slide her my phone, and she looks.

“I’ve seen worse.”

“You know they fall out of the sky when they die?” I say.

“Yeah? What else would you expect them to do?”

The coffee machine downshifts into maintenance, and I pour myself a full cup, adding a hefty portion of creamer.

I go to sit next to Bella at the counter.

“Doesn’t look like a beach day,” she says. She swivels on her stool and looks outside.

“It’ll burn off.”

She shrugs, takes a sip, makes a face.

“I don’t know how you drink that almond water,” I say. “Why suffer? Do you know how good this is?” I hold my cup out to her.

“It’s milk,” she says.

“It’s really not.”