The Night Swim(27)

When the waitress came around, Rachel ordered the crab burger from the specials chalkboard. It came with chips, a side of salad, and an artfully presented sliced avocado with a squeeze of lime. Rachel ate it all. She opted not to order dessert or coffee. She’d dawdled enough. When the waitress came around with an American Express folder containing the check, Rachel slipped her credit card inside without looking at the bill.

“Oh, I don’t need your card,” said the waitress. “Your bill has been paid in full.”

“By who?” Rachel opened the folder to find out. Inside was a cash register receipt stapled to an envelope with her name scrawled on it.

“Don’t know,” the waitress answered as she stacked Rachel’s dishes into a neat pile. “It was paid for at the counter.”





17



Hannah


Rachel, have you ever done something you regretted so badly that you’d sell your soul to go back in time and reverse it?

Maybe for you it was getting married to your college boyfriend and then divorcing him six months later when you realized that you’d married your best friend, but not the love of your life. You mentioned that in an interview you gave to some magazine. I forget which one.

For me, it was three weeks into our summer vacation. I’d fallen asleep on the beach to the sound of summer hits playing loudly on the radio, and a constant trill of laughter woven between the crash of breaking waves.

When I awoke, everything felt different. It was still, and very quiet. The ocean was oddly subdued, on its best behavior. The light was soft. The clear blue sky had been replaced by billowing gray clouds. The temperature was cooler. I sat up and saw that we were the only people lying on the beach. Everyone else had gone home, taking their towels and umbrellas with them. Down the headland, surfers with longboards and half-zipped wet suits emerged from the water and crossed the beach in a raggedy procession as they wrapped up their day.

Jenny was putting on a tie-dyed turquoise beach dress over her bikini. Her damp hair hung loose. I packed my things into the beach bag and we began the long walk home. Our hair knotted with salt and our flushed skin sprinkled with sand.

When we passed the gas station at the Old Mill Road, I asked Jenny if we could stop there for an ice pop. It had become a tradition at the end of each day at the beach.

“It’s going to rain soon,” said Jenny, looking up at the overcast sky.

“It’ll only take a second,” I insisted. I made my bottom lip tremble dramatically. Jenny sighed and we crossed the road. Long afterward, I wondered if our lives would have turned out differently if I hadn’t made a fuss. If we’d kept on walking.

That’s the thing about mistakes. Not all of them can be fixed. I can’t bring the dead back to life, no matter how much I might wish it.

The gas station was run by a man called Rick, whose face was set in a permanent scowl and who never had a kind word to say to us. He’d shout at us for treading sand into the gas station’s convenience store when we hadn’t even been to the beach, or yell at us for opening the freezer door when we hadn’t touched it. “You Stills girls don’t have two cents to rub together. If you’re not going to buy anything, then get out,” he told us once when we came in during a thunderstorm. I’d been afraid of him ever since.

I waited near the gas pumps while Jenny went inside to buy my ice pop. My feet were sandy and I didn’t want to give Rick a reason to snap at me. I watched through the windows as Jenny looked into the freezer and selected a red ice pop. She crossed the store to the cashier area to pay Rick. Through the reflection of the shopwindow, I saw a pickup truck pull up at a gas tank.

Three teenage boys were in the cab. A fourth sat in the back. I recognized him immediately. He was the boy with gray eyes who’d asked for our phone number that day at the beach. As his friends emerged from the pickup, I recognized them, too. I didn’t know their names. All I knew was that those boys always hung out together on the sand dunes, smoking and playing loud music on their boom box. I instinctively knew that it was best to give them a wide berth.

Light rain sprinkled across the cracked raw concrete of the gas station driveway. It was only a matter of time until a downpour erupted.

“You live at the end of the Old Mill Road, don’t you? It’s going to storm soon. I can give you a ride home if you don’t want to get wet,” said the driver, holding the nozzle as he pumped gasoline into his truck.

My eyes flicked to the store. Jenny was waiting for Rick to serve her. He appeared to be adding up a long column in his ledger, and even though he must have known she was there, he kept her waiting until he was done.

“Do you want a ride or not?” the driver asked me again.

“I have to ask my sister.”

Jenny came out of the store and handed me the ice pop. “We’d better hurry home before the rain hits,” she said, picking up the beach bag that had been lying by my feet and walking quickly past the pickup.

“He offered us a ride home,” I called out, my eagerness to get home outweighing my wariness.

“We’ll walk. There’s still time,” Jenny said, motioning me to catch up with her. “Hurry up, Hannah.”

“My foot’s sore. I’m getting a blister,” I complained, lifting up my shoulder stubbornly. “I don’t feel like walking in the rain.”