Invincible Summer(51)

Originally innocent without knowing it, we were now guilty without meaning to be. 18th s u m m e r





n i n e t e e n


I spend a lot of time wondering if I’m going back to the beach this year. I change my mind quite a few times.

Noah is steadfast from the beginning—we must come back.

Months before it’s even warm, he starts sending me postcards. They’re all Camus quotes. My favorite says, “There are no more deserts. There are no more islands. Yet there is a need for them.”

M aybe there is.

“The beach isn’t an island,” Claudia says. “And it’s not a desert.” But she likes any opportunity to get me out of the house, and she especially loves traveling with me, especially when we don’t bring Dad and we can choose whatever music we like.

Of course, she’s fourteen now, so she usually wants something dreadful. But I’ll put up with dreadful for her.

“What are you going to do for college?” Claudia asks me a lot. “You can barely step past the front door.”

“I’ll think of something.” Or I’ll get over it. Isn’t that what I’m doing now?

T he postcard about the islands wasn’t the best one Noah’s sent me, but it’s the one that was the most perfect and short.

Some of the other ones, like the one that’s sitting on my dresser at home—“When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear.” —actually made me laugh a little. It’s a beautiful quote, and certainly appropriate. But it’s ridiculous to think that something morose as that could somehow incite me to action. That quote just reminds me of the days I get so tired that even sitting up in bed seems out of the question.

Driving down to the beach house without our parents—

our parents who want so little to do with this place that they can’t even bring themselves to sell it—doesn’t feel as heavy as I thought it would. It’s the same drive, and I don’t feel any pangs in my chest with each mile away from home or anything like that. It’s the same as it always was, the same as it was last year, just no father in the passenger seat. And it’s not as if he’s really gone. I kissed him good-bye this morning. Just like every morning. We make sure.

“When will you be back?” he asked, and I had to tell him that I didn’t really know.

“But I will be back,” I promised. “I will be.” I kissed him again after that.

Dad’s doing all right. He listens to more classical music now that he used to, and he works fewer hours, but he still talks about doing silly things like visiting National parks or taking rides in hot air balloons. We never actually do them, so he asks me to write songs about them. Which I do.

Claudia is beside me instead. She’s wearing a new shirt and drumming out the beat to this song on her streaky legs.

I finally convinced her to choose the spray-tan route instead of just going for it with the skin cancer, but she’s too cheap to spend her money on a good place—always buying new shirts—so she’s kind of orange at the moment. Noah’s going to laugh. He hasn’t seen us since we hit our growth spurts.

Claude’s pushing five eight now, and I’m probably Noah’s height, though I haven’t stood side to side with him in months. But we do talk. Phone calls. E-mails. The postcards. I don’t tend to see him during his breaks, since I don’t go over to my mom’s house much. She doesn’t ask me to babysit anymore.

Near the beginning of the year, in the fall, I saw Noah a lot. He made a point of stopping by whenever he was home for the weekend. Dad was always happier to see him than he expected to be, and sometimes even got a little teary when Noah left.

I don’t blame Noah for what happened. None of us do. I think, for a while, he was waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for us to lose it and finally scream at him that we were so angry and so disappointed and we wished he’d never come home. He used to steal my stuff every time he came over. He wouldn’t be sneaky about it, and he always took stuff that I’d be sure to notice was missing, like my favorite shirt or my toothbrush. I confronted him about it once, and he kept saying, “Why don’t you tell me what you’re really mad about? Why don’t you tell me what the real problem is?”

until I eventually got him to shut up and just stop stealing my shit. It’s not as if we’re still fighting about that, but that was when he stopped coming over.

I take a deep breath. I’m feeling okay about going back.

Quiet, but okay. I’m feeling ready. After all, as Noah and Camus and probably Melinda—though I don’t think of her much anymore—would say, one always finds one’s burden again. The off-season hasn’t made it any easier. I found my burden that night in the shower, and each of us finds it again every morning that we wake up and remember that we are four.

We haven’t been four in a long time. Not since before Lucy was born. And that felt different, anyhow. Lucy doesn’t fill any sort of sibling-void. We love her, but she’s always felt more like our kid than our little sister, Noah and I have agreed.

This makes this whole thing harder. The only thing worse than waking and realizing you’re four is realizing you’re fun-damentally three, and it creates this awful perception that we’ve lost more than we actually have.