Wish You Were Here(25)

Are you getting any of these postcards?

Love, Diana



The next morning, when Beatriz rounds the corner with her trash bag—a one-girl recycling crew—I am sitting at the shoreline, making a drip castle.

From the corner of my eye, I see her, but I don’t turn. I can feel her watching me as I scoop up a handful of wet sand, and let it sift through my fingers, creating a craggy turret.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“What does it look like I’m doing?” I say.

“It doesn’t even look like a castle,” she scoffs.

I lean back. “You’re right.” I hold out my hand for her plastic bag. “Do you mind?”

She hands it to me. Mixed in with the same plastic water bottles from the Chinese fishing fleets are twist ties, burlap curled with seaweed, scraps of foil. There’s a broken flip-flop, green plastic soda bottles, red Solo cups. There’s electric-blue netting from a bag of oranges, and a tongue of rubber tire. I pull all of these out and use them to fashion flags on my castle turret, a moat, a drawbridge.

“That’s trash,” Beatriz says, but she sinks down cross-legged beside me.

I shrug. “One person’s trash is another person’s art. There’s a Korean artist—Choi Jeong Hwa—who uses recycled waste for his installations. He made a massive fish puppet out of plastic bags … ?and a whole building out of discarded doors. And there’s a German guy, HA Schult, who makes life-size people entirely out of garbage.”

“I’ve never heard of either of them,” Beatriz says.

I take the thong off the flip-flop and create an archway. “How about Joan Miró?” I offer. “He spent the end of his life on Mallorca, and he’d walk the beach every morning like you, but he’d turn the trash he collected into sculptures.”

“How do you even know this?” she asks.

“It’s my job,” I tell her. “Art.”

“You mean, like, you paint?”

“Not anymore,” I admit. “I work for an auction house. I help people sell their art collections.”

Her face lights up. “You’re the person who says I have one dollar, one dollar, do I hear two …”

I grin; she does a credible job of imitating an auctioneer. “I’m more behind the scenes. The auctioneers are kind of the rock stars of the industry.” I watch Beatriz take a handful of tiny shells and line the moat with them. “There was this one British auctioneer we all had a crush on—Niles Barclay. During auctions, I was usually assigned to be on the phone with a collector who wasn’t physically present and make bids on his or her behalf. But once, I was pulled to be Niles Barclay’s assistant. I had to stand on the podium with him and mark down the sales price of the item on the information sheet when the bidding closed, and hand him the next information sheet to read out loud. Once, our hands touched when I was passing him the paper.” I laugh. “He said, Thank you, Donna, in his amazing British accent, and even though he got my name wrong I thought: Oh my God, close enough.”

“You said you had a boyfriend,” Beatriz says.

“I did. I do,” I correct. “We gave each other one free pass. Mine was Niles Barclay; his was Jessica Alba. Neither one of us has cashed in on our pass.” I look at her. “How about you?”

“How about me what?”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

She flushes and shakes her head, patting the sand. “I mailed your postcard,” she tells me.

“Thanks.”

“I could stop by, if you want,” Beatriz says. “Like, I could come to your place every now and then and pick them up, if you’re sending any more.”

I look at her, wondering if this is an offer of help, or a need for it. “That would be great,” I say carefully.

For a few moments, we work in companionable silence, forming crenellated walkways and buttresses and outbuildings. As Beatriz stretches, reaching into the trash bag, her sleeve inches higher. It’s been a few days now since I saw her cutting herself. The thin red lines are fading, like high-water marks from a flood that’s receded.

“Why do you do it?” I ask softly.

I expect her to get up and run away, again. Instead, she digs a groove into the sand with her thumb. “Because it’s the kind of hurt that makes sense,” she says. She angles her body away from mine and busies herself by connecting some twist ties.

“Beatriz,” I say, “if you want—”

“If I were making things from trash,” she interrupts, shutting down the previous line of conversation, “I’d make something useful.”

I look at her. We’re not done talking about the cutting, I say with my eyes. But I keep my voice casual. “Like what?”

“A raft,” she says. She sets a leaf on the water of the moat, which keeps seeping into the sand until one of us refills it.

“Where would you sail?”

“Anywhere,” she says.

“Back to school?”

She shrugs.

“Most kids would be thrilled with an unscheduled break.”

“I’m not like other kids,” Beatriz replies. She adds a bit of yellow plastic hair to her twist tie creation, which is a stick figure with arms and legs. “Being here … ?feels like moving backward.”