Afloat (15 page)

I can feel the draft standing close to the window, but there won't be snow yet for ages. That reminds me we've still got the garage to do, with the snow blower, the lawn mower, lengths of wire, patio furniture, sheets of wood, the tools and tins of paint, it's too much. There are too many things collected, waiting. I look down at the beige sofa covered in boxes, no room on the cushions for sitting. Anna's marked one of the boxes
MINE
, and it's too much for me, to wonder what's in it.

Through the window the street is still quiet, and though I wait, and watch, no one comes.

My time is divided into shifts. Every day I fold swan napkins and break glasses and try to remember my orders correctly as we are not allowed to write anything down. When asked, I always recommend the most expensive bottle of wine and ofer everyone dessert to ensure the bill is as high as possible. Every day I work, watch the waves, complain about the heat and sometimes have a table of guests worth talking to. These guests will be interested in where I live during the summer or where I'm from or where I got such an unusual name. They will
not
ask if the Tippecanoe's arugula is organic.

Outside the streets are filled with men in suits wearing badges and smiling at everyone, as the Republican convention is in town. Rumor has it that last night a senator from out west was beat up on Main Street. (The man had propositioned Neil's wife; Neil owns the Whisky Bar and like most locals has no tolerance for tourists who get loud after a few drinks, regardless of their rank in the outside world.) The Democrats come next month for more of the same. The grass on the island is dark green even though it hardly ever rains anymore and the clouds move across the vast expanse of sky while more arrive to take their place. The flow of people is constant, and last night outside our apartments someone hung Brenna's pink bike from the lowest branch of a pine tree, making her late for work this morning. It is August.

Bryce appears in the doorway of our bedroom with a box of Q-tips in his hand. I look up from my place on the bed, waiting for an explanation.

‘Guess what time it is?' he asks.

‘What are you doing?'

‘Operation Earwax!'

He shakes the box beside his ear like there's candy in it.

‘No way,' I say.

‘Here, you sit on this.' He pulls up a chair and stands behind it, motioning me into it.

‘Fuck off. What's wrong with my eardrums?'

He opens the package, and patiently motions to the chair again. ‘They're dirty,' he says.

‘They are not.' But I sit in the chair. I tilt my head to offer him the best access to my ear canal. ‘Don't burst my eardrum,' I warn.

‘Don't worry,' he says.

Holding the opposite side of my head gently with one hand, he starts in the large ridge where the top of my ear is pierced. The cotton is dry and sounds loud. He sweeps down and around the outer ridges, around all the parts that probably have names, but I don't know them. He switches to the clean end before going in all the way, twisting the Q-tip as it plunges into my ear.

‘Not too far in,' I say.

He doesn't answer. After a moment he pulls the swab out and holds it up for me to see. ‘Look at your disgusting earwax.'

The swab is yellow at the end.

‘Gross.'

‘Next ear,' he announces.

‘I only have two.'

He switches sides and begins again. ‘Any news about your mom?'

The hand holding my head begins to feel hot, making my hair damp. I can't move away.

‘Can we open a window?'

‘I take it that means no?'

I don't say anything. I'd rather be here than there. Where I would know instantly, how everything was, when something new happened. Where my whole life would be that. But I'd rather be here. And so I know nothing.

Closing my eyes I practice the relaxation technique of pushing out my stomach when I breathe, forcing my muscles to relax, and I think of shrimp cocktails in crystal goblets and clean linen. I think of order and organization, of setting tables and lining the bottom edge of the fork and knife and spoon with the folded beak of the swan so there is a clean line one inch from the rounded curve of the tabletop.

‘Would you love me if I had no breasts?' I ask.

He thinks for a moment. ‘Of course,' he says.

And then, ‘Not as much, obviously.'

I grab his probing Q-tip and throw it across the room. He laughs and pats the top of my head.

‘I'd love you even without any arms and legs,' he says.

‘Ha.'

He retrieves the swab from the floor. ‘Would you love me if I were a superhero that killed bad guys to avenge the innocent?'

‘Only if you wore tights.'

There's a knock on our apartment door, and someone has their hand over the peephole.

‘I know it's you, asshole,' I say loudly. ‘You're the only one who does that.'

‘Open the door,' the voice demands.

‘Who is it?' Bryce wants to know.

‘Trainer,' I say.

‘Let him in.'

‘I'm going to.'

I open the door and he's barefoot.

‘Come see the caterpillar I stepped on,' Trainer says.

‘You stepped on it in your bare feet?'

He shrugs. ‘It was an accident. Come see.'

I follow him down the wooden steps. The grounds are quiet today as it's Friday and most people are working; no music and no voices. There is hardly any wind.

I'm not wearing shoes either and the ground is hard and uneven under my feet. Trainer pulls up the legs of his jeans before crouching down over a patch of gravel. I get on my knees beside him, and notice the tops of his toes and feet are hairy.

‘You have hobbit feet,' I say.

He touches the splattered remains of the caterpillar.

‘Honey, if you want to talk about hair we can talk about your eyebrows,' he says absently.

We keep looking at the ground. The watery yellow innards wet the sharp stones, the skin no longer visible.

‘I wonder where its family is?' I say.

We look up at the surrounding trees as if it had fallen from them like a pine cone. Nothing moves, not even the highest branches.

‘Everything dies alone anyway,' says Trainer. He keeps looking up, looking out above the trees.

‘Thank you, Zen master.' I bow my head towards him, but he's not in the mood.

‘You're alone right now,' he says. He adjusts his baseball cap and stands up. ‘But you just don't know it.'

He kicks a foot full of gravel over the caterpillar's remains. In the sunlight the tops of his feet are gray with dust, and the hair looks silver. I'm about to ask him a question when Bryce opens the window above our heads and leans out.

‘I'm not done de-waxing you yet,' he shouts down at me.

Trainer raises an eyebrow at me, and shrugs. ‘Wax on,'
he says. ‘I'm going to go throw rocks at some Republicans.'

He shuffles off towards the bike rack.

‘
Liberal!
' I yell after him. ‘
I'm telling Velvet
.'

He swings a leg over the seat of his red Schwinn, the one with Spice Girls playing cards stuck in the spokes.

‘Not really,' he shrugs. ‘I hate everyone equally.'

He gives me a salute before pedaling off down the gravel path, yelling behind him as an afterthought:

‘
Except for the governor though. Her shit is all right!
'

The flapping and flipping of the cards recedes until I can't hear anything any more.

Back in our room Bryce finishes my ears and we both want sex afterwards, the plunging of cotton into certain orifices not quite satisfying enough, and this week it is particularly messy.

‘At least my sheets are dark blue,' he says.

‘They're green. I told you that already,' I say from beneath him.

After ten minutes he withdraws, only half-heartedly hard. I immediately wonder if there's something wrong with him. Kneeling on the bed, he flaps his penis back and forth with his left hand while we look at it, concerned. Wet, pink and slightly bloody, he massages it with no result. There are so many things to learn about our bodies – liquids and plasma, hormones, cells containing codes not under our control. Add in the body of another and it seems there are infinite things likely to go wrong. Bryce loses interest in his dick and announces he's going to buy some beer. Getting off the bed he pulls on a pair of wrinkled khakis, then checks his wallet and withdraws a bunch of notes, tips from his breakfast shift this morning.

‘Can I see that?' I point to his driver's license.

‘What for?' He doesn't hand it over immediately.

‘Don't be difficult,' I say.

I take his wallet from him, the brown leather turned almost white with wear. On the outside is a round sticker of a pot leaf with the word ‘Heidelberg' above it, a souvenir from his class trip to Germany.

I examine the picture on his license, taken almost three years ago: Bryce with much longer hair and rounder features.

Date of Birth, November 30th, 1978. We have already discussed how Virgo and Sagittarius go well together.

Address, 45 Old Lake Drive, Grayling, Michigan. Grayling is located about midway up the index finger of Bryce's right hand, only a few hours south of the island. Home of the world's longest canoe marathon, he tells me.

I stop and read the name a second time.

‘Lehi B. Russo. Lehi?'

‘Yep.'

I look up at him and back down again at the license.

‘What?'

‘It's my first name. I don't use it, everyone calls me Bryce.'

‘You never told me your real name?'

‘Bryce is my real name. My middle name.'

He takes the license from my hand and casually scratches the end of his nose with it, before returning it to his wallet. We stare at each other.

‘I think you enjoy surprising me,' I say.

‘I'm proud of my name,' he says crossing his arms. ‘You just never asked.'

I cross my arms back. ‘Fine,
Lehi
. I'll tell Velvet to change your nametag.'

He thinks for a moment and sits beside me on the bed, putting his hand on my knee. ‘Fine. Here. Ask me anything.'

‘That's not the point. You're missing the point.'

‘Take it or leave it.'

I think for a moment, wondering what I don't know about
him that I need to ask. Who is the blonde woman in your photo album, the one wearing overalls that came before me in more ways than one? Why is your favorite color so predictable? Why did your sister Odette throw her ice skate at you when you were ten? Why did she call you at the restaurant on Tuesday? Why do you want to be an electrical engineer? Why do you keep telling me about the intricacies of testing an electrical current and how the brown wire is always the live wire and the blue wire is always neutral and how easy it is to forget to dry your hands when I don't give a shit? How can you do all of this work with colored wires when you're color blind? Why are we both going back to community college in October instead of buying a yacht and living off the coast of Portugal drinking Spanish sangria and imported beers with limes in them and suntanning naked while you bite my skin with your crooked teeth just to make sure I'm real, it's all real?

‘Who's your favorite author?' I say.

He rolls his eyes. ‘Lame question. People with favorite authors are assholes.'

‘
I
have a favorite author. Asshole.'

He claps his hands and bounces on the bed with sarcastic expectancy. ‘Thrilling! Tell me.'

I ignore him, and think for a moment. ‘Well, when I was little, it was John Bellairs.'

‘Bel Air, like California?'

‘No.'

I don't explain and he doesn't ask.

Instead he says, ‘Books are boring. New question.'

‘Fine. What's your worst secret?'

He looks out the window and seems unusually serious.

‘You're not interested in my worst secret.'

‘Tell me,' I insist, squeezing his knee.

‘Let me think.'

‘And kicking cats doesn't count,' I add.

Bryce looks at me as if he's not sure I'm ready. I raise my eyebrows, waiting. Suddenly, I'm nervous and everything feels sad somehow, sitting together on a bed that doesn't belong to us on an island we cannot, will
never
afford, and I don't want to know what he's done that didn't happen here.

Putting his hand over mine, he tells me the worst thing he's ever done –

‘When I was fourteen, for an entire year I saved all my semen in a two-liter pop bottle.'

‘You're joking.'

He shakes his head. ‘I'm not.'

‘What for?'

‘I don't know. One day I looked at it, on my stomach or whatever, and it was like, potential halves of babies. I wanted to keep them. It was like my own little aquarium.'

I imagine a cloudy white bottle in the back of his teenaged closet, the contents wet and creamy like hand soap.

‘Didn't it smell after a while?' I ask.

‘Semen doesn't smell.'

‘Says you.'

He shrugs.

‘It's not the easiest substance to work with though,' he admits. ‘The lid of the bottle got all crusty. And then my mom found it.'

‘Oh my God.'

He pats my knee again. ‘She freaked. So does this make up for the name thing?'

‘No.'

‘Your turn. Worst thing.'

I shake my head. ‘I have no worst thing.'

But I know he doesn't believe me.

‘We're sharing, Bell,' he insists. ‘We're having a moment. It's your turn.'

He waits, and I wait, both of us wondering what I will say. Until I know what it is.

‘My worst secret is knowing that if my mother dies, I'll be okay.'

My sentence sounds too loud, echoes in the air so I can't take it back. I wonder if it's true.