Lost and Wanted(83)

“History of science, maybe?”

“That’s hot.”

“Shut up.”

“No, really—I buy his act, and I like it.” (This was a joke between us, with several variations. We might say, “I like her act, but I don’t buy it,” or, “I don’t like his act and I don’t buy it either.”) “Are you ready?”

“No.”

Charlie honked and Neel looked up; I rolled down the window, letting in some of the cold air, and waved. Neel put his book away in the backpack, picked up something at his feet—it was the telescope, in its black nylon case—and jogged across the street, his breath steaming in front of him.

    “Sorry we’re late,” Charlie said when he got in. “We were making dinner.”

“Dinner sounds great,” Neel said. “Thanks for inviting me.”

“It was all her,” I said. “She’s a great cook.”

“I like cooking, too,” Neel said. “My mom taught me, after my sister disappointed her forever.”

Charlie made an illegal U-turn in front of a stone church with Gothic windows, its white spire rising in the dark. “Really? Disappointed her how?”

“Moving away,” Neel said. “Not going to graduate school. Becoming a midwife instead of a doctor. Not saying who she’s dating.”

Charlie looked in the rearview mirror. Other people’s families always interested her.

“Are you going to cook for us this weekend, then?” she asked.

“Probably not,” he said. “I can only do Indian, and it’s almost impossible unless you’re in an Indian kitchen. But I did bring us something to drink.” He handed me a bottle in a paper bag; it was bourbon, and I could see that Charlie, glancing over, approved.

“Ooh,” she said. “You know what we should do?”



* * *



—

The heater in the Jetta worked only intermittently, and we could see our breath inside the car. Charlie zigzagged easily through the village, with its narrow, irregular streets, and then took Bass Avenue east out of town, toward the Atlantic. The beach was surrounded by a preserve; on one side of the road were simple cottages—most looked shut up for the winter—and on the other were scraggly, maritime woods. The road ended at Good Harbor Beach, where the small parking lot was empty. Charlie found a flashlight in the glove compartment and we put on hats; when we got out it was cold but not unpleasant, somewhere in the high thirties. Charlie led the way to a narrow, sandy path that took us between the dunes to the beach. The beach was very dark; the houses with access seemed to be at least a mile in each direction down the coast. Small waves slapped against the sand, and the sky was overcast. In the breaks between the clouds, you could see a few stars.

    “Maybe it’ll clear up for you guys later tonight,” Charlie said, trying to make me laugh. I elbowed her, but if Neel noticed, he didn’t give any sign of it.

“I haven’t been to the beach in years,” he said.

“We should stay off the dunes,” Charlie said. “My aunt is obsessed with shoreline preservation. But if we sit just in front of them, we’ll be out of the wind.”

We sat close together, me in the middle, and passed the paper bag back and forth. The dunes did provide a little shelter, or maybe it was just the whiskey making us warm. In the dark the salt smell was intense.

Charlie told Neel about Penny: how she’d never married, how it had been her dream to buy this place, and then how Charlie and William had spent summers here.

Neel said that the extent of his childhood beach-going was Lee Street, on the lake in Chicago, where his parents had taken him and his younger brother once each summer, always packing a cooler full of food. “For a long time I thought that the point of going to the beach was to eat.”

“We did that, too,” Charlie said. “But Helen had the real experience in L.A.”

“Not really,” I said. “It was a good forty-five minutes from where we lived, and my parents were always complaining about what it cost to park. We went in the summer. But none of us really liked it.”

“You lived in L.A. and you didn’t like the beach?”

“I like this beach,” I said. “The ones in L.A. are so exposed. And I used to be scared of going in the water.” The whiskey was making me more comfortable.

“Sharks?” Charlie said.

“Waves. I’d read some book about a tsunami. Once I was being such a pain in the ass that my parents actually packed up the car and pulled out into the street—pretended like they were going to leave without me—just to make me get in.”

“Look,” Neel said, pointing to a gap in the clouds.

“Is that the comet?” Charlie asked.

    “No—good eyes, though. I thought it was the International Space Station, but it’s just a weather satellite. The comet wouldn’t look as if it were moving like that.”

Suddenly a section of the water lit up, a green-and-white cone.

“What is that?”

“From the parking lot,” Charlie said. “It’s so lame—sitting in your car to look at the water.”

“It’s not even that cold,” Neel said.