Writers & Lovers(72)

‘Your age? He might be your age, but he’s not in the same solar system, Casey. That guy lives on Jupiter.’

I don’t mention that Jupiter is actually in our solar system.

He says a few more insulting things about Silas and Silas’s writing, then he tries to tell me again why we should be together but with less conviction. It’s starting to sink in.

‘Well,’ he says, taking his keys out of his pocket. ‘Maybe I’ll make that deadline after all.’ He gives me one last peck. ‘Probably the youngest lips I’ll ever kiss again.’

I’ve forgotten what gets revealed right after you break up with someone.

‘I doubt that,’ I say.

He chuckles hopefully and walks down the driveway to his car.





We go in Adam’s car to Horseshoe. It’s a dismal day, a shredding wind, the water gunmetal gray and hard as stucco. There’s a photo somewhere of my mother and baby Caleb on this beach. She’s in a bikini, the bottoms big and square and rising up past her bellybutton. But she wasn’t a swimmer and wouldn’t want anything to do with this cold water now.

We walk against the wind on the firm sand to the shoreline. Caleb opens the cookie tin and takes a fistful of the silver rubble inside. The wind is coming too fast off the water for flinging, so he drops the coarse bits into a little wave that creeps up toward our shoes. I don’t allow myself to believe it’s her. I don’t allow myself to believe that my mother’s body—her hair, her smile, the two chords that made the sound of her voice, her heart, her good bum, her moisturized legs, her toes that tinkled when she walked — has been burned down to this rubble in my hand.

Still, I can’t do it. I can’t put these gray bits in water this cold on such a gloomy day.

‘You do half,’ I say to Caleb. ‘I’ll put the rest somewhere else.’

I stand near him while he does it. Adam hangs back behind us. A lone seagull, the only one in the sky, flies low along the beach, close to our heads, then out to sea again, tilting hard left, one wing tipped toward the water, like a plane doing a trick. It rises and levels off then drops down, skims the surface, trailing its feet through the water, then lifts up again, raising itself in great wing-driven pulses, up, up, up, then a long glide and a few flaps then a long glide—up, flap, glide, until it’s somehow no longer there at all.

I look around. I’ve been following the gull down the beach without knowing it. Caleb’s done and leaning against Adam on the dry, white sand.

We were somber in the car on the way up, the cookie tin on Caleb’s lap, but once back in the car, he tosses the remaining ashes from the front to the empty spot beside me in the back, cranks the radio, and starts teasing Adam about his driving.

We stop at the clam shack and eat at the window near the picnic tables that overlook the harbor where I sat with my mother the day she came back from Arizona and tried to explain, again, her year and a half of absence. I just nodded. I wish I had been awful to her that day. I wish I’d thrown my food and screamed vile things at her. I wish she’d dug all my feelings out of me. Maybe I’d be better at saying them now.

But Caleb has other memories. ‘Do you remember coming all the way here after Gus’s wedding?’

‘Yeah,’ Adam says. ‘I remember that guy with the goatee tried to make out with you when I was right there in the back seat.’

Caleb laughs. ‘He did more than that after you fell asleep.’

They’re leaning over a dessert menu, pressing against each other.

‘Can we go back now?’ I say.

Caleb stays for five days. Adam doesn’t go to work. I leave them alone. I drive my new car. I drive to Harry’s and to Muriel’s. I drive to the grocery store three blocks away. I answer ads in the Globe and get an interview at a school in New Hampshire. I drive up there, find the gothic, gloomy school, turn in the half-moon driveway, curve around the lawn and flagpole, pass the parking lot, and drive back home crying and clenching.

Phil leaves messages on my machine that Caleb doesn’t answer.

He has a flight out on Thursday, but he doesn’t get on it. He says Adam has tickets to a play and has asked him to stay.

That night I’m reading in bed, and I hear them come in the driveway and go inside Adam’s house. I don’t like what’s going on. I want to call Mom. She wouldn’t like it, either.

I go back to my book and try not to think of them.

I hear knocking and open my eyes. My light is still on, and my thumb is still inside the book, but I fell asleep. I fell asleep. I don’t even care that I’ve been woken up, because I fell asleep like I used to, for years and years, my thumb in a book.

I unlock the door. Caleb is still in his suit from the theater, but he seems smaller in it. I’ve never seen him look so small before. Nothing is right about his face, either.

‘Can I sleep here tonight, Case?’

He falls onto my bed, and I sit beside him.

‘What happened?’

He shakes his head. He takes a deep breath. ‘We consummated our flirtation.’ And then he curls up and covers his face and a terrible whine comes through his hands. I didn’t know how Caleb cries. I’ve never seen it before. It sounds physically painful for him. I rub his arm. I smooth his hair. The futon shakes beneath me.

‘It’s okay. It’ll be okay. Phil will understand.’ I don’t know if Phil will understand. But I don’t think he’ll be as surprised as Caleb might think.