Invincible Summer(52)

Being here without Mom and Dad will be weird, but they can’t even be in the same room with each other anymore.

We’ve lost things.

Claudia pinches her striped thighs. “I wonder if the Hathaways will be here,” she says, in a snobby voice, like she’s finally realizing what a pretentious name Hathaway is. It took me a while to notice this too, actually. That they sound like the type of people you’d drink tea with.

I know she hasn’t talked to Shannon since my birthday— the last time Noah talked to Melinda, the last time our parents really talked to each other—but I don’t know which of these were big, theatrical breaks, or which were just the only option after that night and felt so inevitable as to be bor-ing and quiet. I’m so sensitive to these subtleties, now. I turn everything into a metaphor. I think of all things in terms of dramatic or undramatic, in finding bodies or never finding bodies.

I’m fine when we pull up to the house. I park beside Noah’s car and grab our bags. Claudia rubs the back of her neck, surveying the sand, looking at all the people with their beach bags and umbrellas and bikinis. So many more people came here when the beach was smaller, or maybe they just looked more important without all the space.

“See?” I tell her, pointing to the emptiness between the groups of people. “Islands.”

She sticks her tongue out at me, then I give her a little smile, which she returns. Okay, so this isn’t awesome, but we can get through it. We’ve gotten through the past year, and we are okay. This isn’t any different, just because it’s here.

Just because it’s summer.

We go inside. Noah’s in the kitchen feeding bites of cherry sno-ball to Lucy. She looks just like the pictures Mom still insists on sending every other week. Probably so I have no argument when I tell her I never see my sister. Check your e-mail. See? There’s your sister. And it isn’t that I never see her. I drive over sometimes after school. Not very often, but when I need to, and I feel like it won’t ruin anything if I do. Mom hugs me. Lucy hugs me. Five minutes of polite quiet later, I’ll suddenly remember that Mom’s cold, dead house is where I spent most of my childhood. And I have to remind myself that nobody’s making me come. That I don’t have to visit ever again if I don’t want to. I have to keep reassuring myself that I don’t have to go back. It’s the only way I can stand it. It doesn’t help that I know Mom would rather I only come over—that I only exist—when she’s ready for the responsibility of caring about me. I have a hard time blaming her for that.

Now I hug Lucy, then Noah. Noah lost quite a bit of weight during those months by himself at school, he’s only just now starting to get it back. I’m pretty sure Mom’s sneaking slabs of butter into everything he eats.

He smiles at me, the same Noah smile. I’ve learned that it’s stupid to expect people to develop new, more profound smiles.

“Renters moved the furniture,” I say.

“They always do. But check out the balcony. The extension looks pretty good.”

Dad had to hire someone to come out here and finish the extension in September because it wasn’t safe to just have the beams and nails and shit hanging around half-finished.

A bigger part of me than I’d expected really regretted not finishing it ourselves.

“I’m gonna go check it out,” I say, and they nod, and Lucy makes some almost-three-year-old noise of agreement.

The people Dad hired did a nice job. The boards line up way better than when we did it, the railing is stable, and they even fixed that one piece of wood into which Dad tried and failed to properly hammer about fifteen nails in a row. All in all, it looks great. Mom was right; we should have just hired professionals from the beginning. There’s nothing worse than getting DIYs cleaned up. You either do it or you don’t, but you have to finish. You can’t stop things in the middle. I think Camus would have agreed with that.

I look up and remember why we built the extension in

the first place.

You can still see only hints of hints of it from here, but the ocean looks like it’s been waiting twelve months to swallow me alive.

I throw up over the side of the balcony. People on the beach look up in disgust. I must have ruined their day.

The answer is yes: Even with the dune, you can still hear the ocean.

* I can’t believe I came. And I can’t believe Claudia refuses to go home. What the hell are we doing here? What the hell did we expect to find?

How long are we expected to stay in this house?

Because she’s three, Lucy’s excused from blame, but the rest of us fail at being able to communicate, and it’s somewhat scary. Especially when I consider that Claudia and I, on our own this year with Dad, have talked just fine. We compare days, we talk about our plans, we exchange I love yous. It’s just adding Noah and Lucy into the equation that’s making it impossible. We can’t figure out how to be whole together.

I thought Claudia could do it. I thought she would be

our savior. It was stupid of me to put that much weight on her shoulders, but I did. She was always the loud one, the spunky one. The one who hated inaction enough to hate philosophy. Now she just watches TV and reads magazines and texts people on her phone. I don’t even know who she’s texting. I don’t even know what’s in her head, but it isn’t what’s in mine.