Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (15 page)

He knew it would be something from the law firm. He didn't need to look to know. It would doubtlessly be urgent and require a minimum of three signatures, and he would most likely toss it in the garbage and not think about it again. His grandparents dele gated the dirty work to the lawyers, and he delegated it to the trash can. He signed Paul McCartney and took the package.

They always found him. One uniformed delivery person drove straight into Kings Canyon National Park after him. In certain paranoid moods, he suspected his grandparents had surgically fit ted a GPS into his anklebone while he was asleep.

He went back to his desk, dropping the package on a pile of papers. He stared at his screen and thought about Alice until the real Alice appeared in his door, stealthy and windswept. "Have you seen the beach?"

"Just from the window."

"You'd like it today."

"Come here," he said. The trouble with their new arrangement was that he wanted to be touching her at all times.

When she got close enough, he pulled her onto his lap. Immedi ately, her lips were on his and his hands were under her shirt.

"Are you done working?" he asked hopefully.

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"Until two."

"I missed you." Oh, the things he found himself saying. He used to imagine that people made themselves say these kinds of things when they were in love so as to demonstrate their status. He didn't realize they would just come out of you without you even being able to stop them.

"I love it when you wear the little skirts," he told her, hiking hers up. He had a condom in his pocket. He had them all around now. He had one in his shoe. He was prepared to make love to her in the deli aisle of the market if no one would object.

In just over a week of nearly solid lovemaking, he was getting good at navigating her trickiest bras and bikini tops, while she was an ace at freeing him of his pants. They hardly needed to pause or change position. Still on his lap and facing him, she put his arms around his neck and helped him find his way inside her. He groaned in contentment. He used to voice his sounds of pleasure as a kind of service to his partner, but with Alice he couldn't hold them in.

What if he couldn't do another thing in his life besides make love to Alice? It was all he thought about and all he wanted to do. Maybe after things settled down, he could work on his paper in this position. What could she do? Maybe read or write or grade papers. He'd have to try out that idea on her. Maybe they would be the first couple to achieve career success while having sex. They couldn't really teach classes or go to meetings, but maybe they could do conference calls. The lawyer route would be out of the question, which was all the better.

He kissed her hair and her ear and her eyelid. He was happy.

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And after she came and he came, they slumped together for a long while.

When it was time to go, he watched her sitting on his desk, fastening her bra and braiding her hair. She was so good at that.

She was telling him about Gabriel, the four-year-old who tried to flush his older brother's electric train down the toilet, and Paul was listening, he really was, but he was also admiring her. Love made you admire funny things about a person, like how good she was at remembering to return her library books and at slicing cucumbers very thin. She was a veritable wonder at pulling a splin ter out of her foot.

How could you feel this way? How could you just let your life spread out in front of you, with no plans other than making love? It just didn't seem possible. Or at least not allowable.

Had they stumbled into some existential loophole, where you could just be happy all the time?

He knew it couldn't be, but what did he know anymore?

It was unbelievable. It was impossible. It blew the hinges straight off his mind.

He would believe that the world could contain any amount of suffering, but somehow not this. This was the thing he had not foreseen. He was like an experimental rat, conditioned for suf fering, confused and half wanting to find his way back.

Alice stood up and kicked his toe affectionately. He didn't really want to find his way back.

"What's this?" she asked.

"Something from my grandparents by way of their lawyers."

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Not even that could take him down. He thought the package looked pretty in her hands.

"You didn't open it."

"I know. It will be a document I'm supposed to sign that trans fers some pile of money from my mother to me." He shrugged. "I'm hungry. Do we have time to make scrambled eggs?"

"Maybe quick ones. Are you going to sign it?"

"No. I never do."

"We have time for scrambled eggs, but not the scrambled-eggs special."

He looked disappointed. The last time they'd made scrambled eggs, they'd also made love in the pantry and burned the toast. "Please? That's the kind I like."

She checked the clock in the hallway. "Oh, okay."

He watched her crack the eggs (like a downright genius) and he sighed again. He couldn't help it. He found himself thinking that if the story of Alice and Paul ended right here, it would be happy.

u

"I heard Lia was here," Judy said.

"Right. Yes." His life had undergone such a conversion since then that he 'd almost forgotten about it until today.

"How is she?" Judy had her nosy face on, her nosy cadence, but Paul tried not to let it get to him. He saw her faults almost as clearly as if he were her child, but he forgave them as though he lived next door.

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Paul cast a look at Ethan. "She 's the same."

Alice sat across the table, one foot up on the chair. He would not let his mind wander under her skirt, but the act of forbidding it also made it so. He wasn't getting better; he was getting worse.

"I didn't see her," Riley said. "I didn't even know she was here."

That's because I've been avoiding you, Paul thought but did not say.

"Had enough of the pasta?" Ethan asked, getting up from the table, starting to clear it.

"Yes, thanks," said Paul. He 'd finished the pasta but was still hungry for Alice. But even though Alice had insisted he come to dinner, she wouldn't look at him.

"If you don't come, it will be weird," she'd said, spinning by his room before dinner but not letting him take off any of her clothes.

"You don't think it will be weird if I do?" he'd asked.

"When have you ever not come over when we were cooking?" she 'd asked, and she did have a point. So attuned was his nose to their kitchen that he managed to detect even a microwaved meal, even when the wind was blowing in the other direction.

"Am I supposed to keep my hands off you the whole time?" he'd asked.

"Unless you want them to know."

"Maybe I do," he'd said.

She looked at him as though he'd lost his mind, and essentially he had. He didn't know what he thought about anything anymore. His principles were deflated and flattened. He pictured them some where else, like in a Rolodex under his desk, and he would have to thumb through them to see what he thought.

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"How did she feel being back here?" Judy persevered.

Paul thought of the FedEx letter on his desk. He had a history of honesty with them. "No better than last time."

He heard Ethan singing along to a Bruce Springsteen song on the radio and noisily washing the dishes.

"Is she going to keep the house?"

This was the thing Judy couldn't square with. She could fathom the dead husband, the strained family, the life lived around the globe. But having a house on this island, a house much more valu able than hers, and neither using it nor renting it out nor selling it. Judy's efforts at understanding the mind of Lia came to a halt here.

"Well, it turns out she's not."

For a moment, Alice's face gave them away. "What?"

Riley caused her tipping chair to smack four legs to the ground. "She's selling it?"

"Well." He could feel Alice's eyes gouging into him. "She's giving it to me."

"She's giving it to you?" Judy repeated.

"I'm not sure why. But she signed the papers. I thought it couldn't happen without my signature, but apparently it can. I have no choice in the matter."

Alice had the look of a bar brawler who wanted to take him outside to the parking lot and pummel him. He should have told her this, he supposed, but she'd been working most all afternoon.

"Your grandparents must be happy," Judy said. She was tactless sometimes, especially if one of her many agendas was involved.

"Do you not want it?" Alice asked.

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"I'd take it," Riley offered.

"I'd rather have yours," Paul said without thinking.

"Yours is worth ten times more than this one," Alice pointed out practically.

"No. It isn't," Paul said. He 'd spent some time thinking about the way money worked and the way it didn't. He knew what it couldn't buy.

"What will you do?" Judy asked.

"I don't know," he said. "I just found out today." But in truth, he knew he'd sell it. One conviction, not entirely deflated, was that he was not the sort of person who owned a multimillion- dollar beach house, however much he was managing to enjoy stay ing in one.

u

"So you did open the letter after all," Alice said to him when she walked him home.

"After you left. I'm not sure why."

"Swell house you got." She looked up at it, looming its three grand stories.

"Thanks."

"I've got to go back and finish the dishes," she said.

He grabbed her and pulled her off the walk, into the shadows. He kissed her.

"We 'll get ticks," she protested feebly.

"I'll check you for them later."

"Ooh."

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"Please come tonight."

"I don't know. My mother has bionic ears."

"Come anyway." In his life he'd developed the habit of refusing people things because of how badly they wanted them. Mercifully, Alice wasn't like that.

"Okay."

u

And, true to her okay, Alice appeared in his bedroom before midnight.

"Is Judy on your tail?" he asked, looking up from his computer.

"No, I think I got away clean."

"Good girl."

Alice sat on his bed. "Anyway, I think she might be happy if she knew that I was going out to meet someone."

"You think?"

"She hates it when we are independent of her, but she also hates it when we aren't."

"She thinks you aren't?"

"She worries, I think. She worries about Riley the most."

This was tricky territory. Paul knew what Judy worried about and why, but he didn't like to acknowledge it to himself, and cer tainly not with Alice. Riley was enough like a sibling to him that it made her sexuality unpleasant to contemplate. Was Riley gay? Was she sexual at all? Was she lonely? The smaller minds specu lated about that, he knew, and it had always seemed a betrayal to join them. Another betrayal.

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"What about you? What does she worry about with you?"

"That I don't go out with boys."

He smiled. "Do you?"

"Just one."

They made love in his bed, and later they made hot chocolate, naked, in the kitchen. He suspected the mix had been there since the nineteen-eighties. Alice found an apple in her bag and they fought over it, both of them starving. At last they agreed to share, passing it back and forth.

What would he do with all the stuff in this house when he sold it? How would he confront his father's things? What was he sup posed to do with them? Maybe it was time somebody thought of it.

He watched Alice sitting on the counter, drinking her hot chocolate, her beautiful body in the slanting light from the pantry. He felt a stirring that came from wanting her, of course, but also something more. How could he sell this house? This kitchen counter on which Alice's ass had sat? The sink where she'd tossed the apple core? The nineteen-eighties hot chocolate mix?

Later, he watched her sleeping in his bed and he felt it again. A feeling about the future. It was beckoning him to look. Look at what you could have.

As a matter of principle, he'd resisted the future. He'd tried to resist most things he wanted or that made him feel good. He sensed the trick of them. The bribe he would not fall for.

And now? Now he wanted Alice in his bed. It made him feel good. He wanted Alice in this bed in this house with him forever. He felt as though he'd leapt off his trapeze, spun in midair, and caught on to a different one flying just as fast in the opposite direction.

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What if he kept the house? It was unthinkable, but what if he did? What if it were Alice's house? What if he kept it for her? What if they lived in it together and named the beaches when they were old? What if they got two of those old-man beach chairs and read detective novels all day long? What if they had babies who grew into children who swam in the ocean and massacred clams, fish, and crabs?

What if he learned to love what he had? What if he loved him self? What if he stuck around to enjoy it? These were dangerous thoughts to have, but he couldn't help them. What if he lived here with Alice?

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A Fitting Curse

A lice heard the emergency signal blasting about five in the

morning. Several long and a few short. She was too sleepy to count, and she'd never learned the meaning of the different pat terns anyway. Riley knew them.

She blearily looked out the window for signs of a hurricane or tsunami, and when she didn't see any, she acknowledged that another geezer probably suffered a real or imagined stroke. Both happened here with a certain frequency. Listening for the whoop- whoop of the medevac chopper, she wriggled in closer to Paul's warm body and fell back into a deep sleep.

When she crept home to get in bed before her parents or sister noticed her absence, she perceived a strange disorder in the kitchen. The message light on the phone was blinking double time. Riley's bed was empty as expected, but so was her parents' bed. How had