Postcards From Last Summer (17 page)

“H
ave you seen the forecast?” my mother asked, leaning into the laundry room where I was folding colors. “The hurricane is picking up strength, a category four now. Maybe you should go back to school today. Get ahead of it.”

“And spend extra time in the dorms?” There was nothing more dweebish than arriving on campus too early, especially since I had signed on to live in the dormitories as a resident assistant instead of taking a share in a student rental house. Though I'd love to be hanging with friends, I'd chosen to reduce my student loan by working for free housing. Always penny-pinching, the way of the McCorkles. Still, I couldn't stand to be back in the sterile dorms early. “I'll be okay driving on Tuesday, Mom.”

“Not if some of the roads wash out. You know, the Shinnecock Inlet was created by the hurricane of 1938. You can't underestimate the power of a storm.”

“I'll be okay, Ma.” I shook out an oversized red T-shirt and held it under my chin to fold it. “I want to be home right now, to make something out of the last few days of summer. My birthday, Ma.” Of course, I couldn't tell her that I needed some closure with Bear before I left. Ma and I didn't discuss the fact that I'd been crushing on him for years, that he hadn't returned to work at Old Towne Pizza after the Hatteras competition. That we hadn't really talked, either at the dinner table or out in the surf line.

That my heart was breaking.

Some days I wallowed in dark thoughts, viewing the tragic turn of events as one of the daytime soaps Darcy was glued to. I blamed my brother for sweeping Bear off to the competition that forced me into the wicked Austin's arms. I imagined the sponsors to be unsavory, wretched men who promised Bear a glowing treasure chest only deliver a piece of driftwood on a crowded Honolulu beach. The evil sponsors.

How could they take Bear away from us?

Ma pulled a navy sheet out of the laundry basket and handed two corners to me. “Why don't you drive back to Brooklyn, then?” she suggested. “That'll put you halfway back to school.”

“You trying to get rid of me?” I pressed the edge of the sheet to my mother's hands, getting in her face.

“I've been trying for years, and still I've got two clinging like there's no tomorrow.” With a wry grin, my mother snapped the sheet into a compact square and placed it onto the dryer.

“Oh, come on, Ma. You love having us around. If Kathleen and all the others would move back in with all the grandchildren, you'd be in your glory.”

“Wouldn't I?” Mary Grace smiled. “The human race is the only animal that doesn't know when or how to kick its young out of the nest.”

I folded a white sweatshirt and loaded it into my duffel bag. “Well, if Steve were mine, I would have drop-kicked him years ago.” I mimed punting a football.

Ma just shook her head. “Such a wise guy. You'll see when you have your own, my dear. You'll see.”

A
fat ribbon of wind and rain blew up onto the covered porch of the Love Mansion, sprinkling Tara's skin and feathering her dark hair back. She crossed her arms and hugged herself, wondering if they'd made the right choice to stay here. No one else seemed fazed that she and Charlie were holing up in the path of a hurricane, but Tara was sure it was the most reckless, adventurous decision she'd ever made.

Surprisingly, their scheme had been masterminded by Wayne, who'd spent a lifetime wandering the path of least resistance. “Why do you think I care if you two are together, and why do you keep trying for Mama's approval and Daddy's blessing? Get a motel. Tell them you're going back to Princeton early, to beat the hurricane. Lord, girl, you were supposed to be the brains in this family. Don't they teach you strategic operations at Princeton?”

“You know, with devious minds like yours, maybe the U.S. stands a chance in maintaining itself as a superpower,” Tara told him, eyeing him curiously.

“Is that supposed to be funny?” he sniped.

Instead of letting him engage her, Tara had hugged her older brother. “Now that you're leaving, I'm going to miss you.”

“I'm just going back to Manhattan,” he said flatly. He planned to wait out the hurricane in the city and meet Charlie at JFK Airport for their flight back to Korea.

“Yeah, but I probably won't see you before you go. Take care. Keep those computers virus free.”

Wayne had just rolled his eyes and told Charlie to be packed by noon. The two guys would say their good-byes and head off together, then Wayne would drop Charlie anywhere he wanted.

Since a hotel would be expensive, hard to find on this evacuated island, and easy for her parents to trace in credit card bills, they had decided to barricade themselves in the Love Mansion, which fronted the beach but had an expansive lawn and massive bulkheads, able to withstand the storm.

Darcy was fine with it, even reassured somehow. “It might do this old place some good to have a couple who's actually in love staying here,” she'd muttered.

They'd said their good-byes a few hours ago, Darcy's car packed to the windows for her trip back to Bennington, a five-hour drive even when the Hamptons weren't being evacuated, probably more today. Kevin had been quiet, propped in the passenger seat; Tara hadn't been able to tell if he was sulky or nervous or both.

As the taillights of Darcy's lipstick red convertible had shrunk to small dots, Tara had stood on this wide wooden porch, considering the storm that had ended the summer so abruptly. Elle had already left for Connecticut and classes at Yale, Darcy and Kevin were on their way to Vermont to begin Darcy's senior year and Kevin's drug and alcohol rehab program. As soon as the storm subsided Lindsay would head back to Seton Hall for the last time.

One more year . . . they each had one more year before real life was supposed to begin, and yet Tara found herself in the throes of adulthood, as if she'd cracked out of the egg a year too soon and found Charlie waiting there, Charlie now imprinted upon her psyche.

Enjoying the fury of the wind, she clutched the smooth white porch rail and tried to imagine what the future held for them while Charlie prepared a dinner of avocado salad and roasted chicken in the Love's enormous state-of-the-art kitchen.

Wonderful Charlie, the only guy to make her feel that combination of passion and joy to be with him. He wanted her to join him when she finished school. He wanted to get married and start a family and make each other happy all the time.

Although her parents would have conniptions, she and Charlie didn't share their hangups about race. She could picture herself with Charlie, as Mrs. Migglesteen. She would research tort law while he taught sociology, and on weekends they would paint the trim on the house together or plant tulip bulbs in the garden. She would serve up a tall pitcher of lemonade after he cut their grass under a hot summer sun . . .

Or maybe, instead of growing closer this year, they'd drift apart. The daily e-mails would spread out over two days, then three or four. Snail mail would stop altogether, and phone calls would become awkward, full of difficult gaps and distant silence.

She wiped the spray from her face, swiping off the tragic vision. Maybe her cynical scenario was incorrect. For now, she was content to savor these last dwindling days of summer and ride out the storm with Charlie.

 

Her knuckles were white as she gripped the steering wheel, not from traffic stress or worry over the approaching storm, but from the ridiculous change of Kevin's temperament around the time they left New York City behind on the Throgs Neck Expressway and headed north on the Hutch. As they flew past streets packed with rowhouses tight as books on a library shelf, Kevin's remorse over his drinking problem shifted to a worry over the timing of his detox program.

“What if they don't think I need the program?” he said.

Oh, you need it.
Darcy gritted her teeth but restrained from answering.

“I can see one of these doctors saying, look, you drink too much sometimes, but who doesn't? Start flying straight. Hit the road and save the looney bin for the real lunatics.”

“And then what? What if I have to turn tail and head back? I'll be stuck until the hurricane passes through and roads open again.”

“I wouldn't worry about it,” she muttered.

“Yeah, well, you've got a car, so why would you worry?”

“Kevin . . .” She tried to be patient, tried not to steam as a car cut in just inches from her bumper and zoomed ahead of her. How many times did they have to go over this same argument? Didn't he get what a huge inconvenience this was for her, having to talk with the doctors and make arrangements for him and reassure him that this was the right thing to do? And all along he sat there sweating all over the passenger seat of her car, even with the air-conditioning blowing cool, whining about being stuck without a car. “You're not going to a looney bin. Green Valley is a treatment center dedicated to people with drug and alcohol problems, and I have it on good authority that some very famous people have spent time there. Celebrities. Actors and senators' kids. It's like the Hamptons of New England.”

“I don't know about this.” He folded his arms across his chest, his tongue sliding out to touch his lower lip. Somehow, the gesture that had once seemed so sexy now turned Darcy's stomach. “I know guys who drink a hell of a lot more than I do, and they don't need a program.
Fucking
program. Something tells me I'm gonna regret this.”

“Green Valley has one of the leading programs in the Northeast,” she said. The treatment center was also one of the priciest, requiring a commitment of thirty grand for the first three months, but Darcy didn't care. She'd given the nurse her father's Amex card number over the phone, pretending she was Kevin's stepsister. She'd do anything to help him get through it, and footing the bill was inconsequential, except for the inevitable talk she'd have to suffer to offer up some lame excuse to Daddy. “If anyone can help you, they can.”

“Yeah, well, we'll see about that.” He frowned, turning to stare out the window, once again giving her the feeling that she'd lost him already.

Just get better,
she said silently, wishing she could make the words strong enough to penetrate his thick skull for absorption in his brain.
Do it for yourself. Do it for me . . . for us.

A
lthough it wasn't raining as I drove to Bikini Beach, strong winds battered my Saturn wagon, giving me the sensation of swimming against the current. Another example of how difficult it was to have a relationship with a guy like Bear Harmon; you had to drive into hurricane force winds just to say good-bye.

A fitting send-off for Bear, who'd always been out of reach—the floating ring bobbing on a riptide. He'd been threatening to leave the Hamptons for years, leave the old surf crowd and pursue tournaments around the world, surfing south of the equator during the winter months in the north, chasing the endless summer.

“Don't know where I'll land next summer,” he'd told the guys one night as everyone roasted dogs on the barbecue outside his camper. “California, or maybe Aruba.”

Of course, Skeeter and John couldn't resist taunting him with that latter-day Beach Boys song: “Aruba, Jamaica, ooh, I wanna take ya . . .”

Personally, I couldn't believe Bear was really leaving, didn't want to believe that he wouldn't be back in the Hamptons next June just as he was every year. His VW pop-up van was one of the few vehicles left in the camp area as I pulled into the parking lot, but he'd already taken down the tarps, packed up his possessions, and collapsed the roof in preparation for his escape from the hurricane and the Hamptons. The windows were dark, apparently vacant, which was no surprise. Knowing Bear, he was on the beach, trying to harness a ride on some of the killer waves caused by hurricane-force winds.

The roar of the wind whistled in my ears as soon as I got out of the car. I plodded toward the beach, overwhelmed by a sense of missed opportunity. All these years, Bear had been hanging around my family's summer house, a regular at the dinner table, one of the few helpful surfers on the beach, my brother's best friend, and the closest I'd ever gotten to revealing my feelings for him was inviting him to Darcy's party this summer. All those years, all those intimate talks, and I'd never been able to reach out and link my arm through his, touch his hand or lean on his shoulder?

What a failed flirt I was.

But my life had never been like the scenes in the women's novels I'd read, where the women knew just what to say to snag their men, even after they'd acted like comic clowns. Those characters had their happy endings, and I was left chasing Bear down in a hurricane just to pressure him into a good-bye scene I could hold on to over the years.

Sand stung my bare legs and whipped back my denim jacket. Ahead of me, waves rose in great walls of gray water, curling and rallying along until they slapped against the packed gray sand with brute force. The magnitude of it all was breathtaking—the power of nature, all that fury—but I felt too tangled inside myself to feel the appropriate awe. Damn the hurricane; it blew into town, cutting my summer short and chasing my friends away. My twenty-first birthday was two days away, and how would I celebrate now? I'd be lucky to score a beer with Milo at an off-campus pub.

Two guys in wet suits stood on the beach, watching someone in the surf, and as I approached them I recognized my brother and Skeeter Fogarty, both in dripping wet suits.

“Steve!” I shouted, breaking into a run. “Aren't you supposed to be at work?”

He looked beat, his face windburned, his dark hair swiped flat against his skull. “Not with waves like this. It's a little whipped up now, but for a while there I do believe we harnessed the perfect storm.” He waved his arms toward the surf. “We're going, Bear. You're on your own!”

As if Bear, the lone head bobbing in the wild water, could hear him. I shook my head. All along the coast beaches were closed and the Coast Guard was broadcasting warnings for people to stay out of the water, but wild surf always attracted wild surfers. The very reason I'd known I'd find Bear here. “Where's Johnny?” I asked Skeeter.

“He's whipped.” He zipped a block of Sex Wax into his backpack. “Marriage sucks.”

“Yeah?” I gave a bitter laugh. Considering the way the Fogarty brothers had been headed full throttle into trouble, I'd say their wives saved their sorry asses.

“We're outta here.” Steve pointed to a backpack and short board propped against the dune. “Bear's cell phone is in there. If you see him go down, call 911. Don't make the mistake of thinking you'll save him. It's hellacious out there. I almost went down in the soup.”

I felt my hands tighten to fists, annoyed by his pompous big-brother act. “I think I could hold my own.”

“Neophytes like you have no business being out there,” he said, jabbing a finger in my face.

I pushed his hand away. “You ought to know.”

“Just go back to school and learn to shrink somebody else's brain,” he snapped, following Skeeter to the path through the dunes.

“Yeah, since yours is already Barbie size,” I muttered into the wind. All this was Steve's fault, anyway. He was probably the major reason Bear kept his distance from me. And Steve, lacking in the diplomacy department, had never done anything subtle or overt to help foster a relationship between Bear and me.

I shielded my eyes against the wind, now carrying a spray of drizzling rain. Between breaks in the surf, I saw him bobbing out there, a lone surfer. I waved, but it was hard to tell if I got his attention since the whipping mounds of ocean required some negotiating.

Damn. With hours of sunlight left, there was no telling when he'd come in, and I couldn't wait here in this miserable, biting wind.

I thought about waiting in his camper—though the inner sanctum had always been sacred ground—and then considered just leaving. Wouldn't it be better to cut out than to wait here, a simpering, lovelorn groupie?

Another missed opportunity.

I pressed my palms to my face, trying to ward off the sandstorm and wondering how I'd get through the winter months without at least a shred of hope that I'd see Bear again. The wind pushed the board against my feet, and I looked down and saw the answer. Duh! Why was I standing here like an observer of my own life?

I shed my jacket and sandals on the beach, grabbed Bear's board, and pushed into the water. Paddling out was difficult since the waves were slamming in hard and the undertow sucked at my legs, toppling the board. I forged on, arms aching as I ducked my head against slapping salt water. The bottom dropped off abruptly, setting me in the churning water without any footing for balance.

A shot of panicked adrenaline whipped through me as I clutched the board.
You can do this. It's just surfing times ten.

Waves kept breaking around me, and I lowered my head and paddled through, thinking that the onslaught would have to end eventually.

I heard Bear before I saw him.

“Lindsay! What the hell are you doing out here?”

When I found him he was a few yards away, both of us rising and falling in a lopsided dance on unformed swells.

“I came to say good-bye.” It was supposed to be romantic, but somehow when the words were shrieked over roiling swells, it just sounded desperate.

“You shouldn't be out here,” he yelled.

“Neither should you!”

Not that it mattered, as the wall of water that came spraying toward us was probably going to kill us both.

In a flash I saw Bear hop up to a crouch, and I did the same, trying to balance while watching the wave creep up behind me. Bent over, my fingers skimming the suds, I kept low and raced away from the breaking part of the wave.

It worked.

I was riding a killer wave.

Until I stalled, losing momentum as the wave crumbled all at once into a smashing twist. In seconds I was doing a header over the board, plunging into the cold salt water.

There was a yank on the leash at my ankle, dragging me along underwater. Frantically, I tried to find the surface, but as I pushed up a torrent of water pushed me over, rolling my body into an underwater somersault. I flailed wildly, popping through the surface for a hungry breath of wet air.

That was when I realized it was gone. My board. The leash must have broken. I tried to find it in the surrounding hash of suds, but I was sucked down again by the back of a wave.

I held my breath, arms flailing in the gray undersea world, swirling in a violent, deadly maelstrom. I was caught in the soup, the foamy water that prevents buoyancy. Bear once called it surfer's quicksand, and yet I thrashed my arms like a wild woman.

The thought seemed suspended in time just as I lingered under the surface, suspended in the churning water.

Something grabbed me hard under the shoulders and yanked me up. My head shot into the wash, into salt-sprayed air, and I sucked it all in greedily, coughing.

Bear...

“You okay?” He swam beside me, one arm tucked around my shoulders, the other clutching his board. “You got sucked under. Lots of riptides today. We're going to ride my board in together, okay?”

Too caught up choking on salt water to answer, I nodded. He pushed the board to my chest, holding it while I pulled myself up.

Kneeling there, I could see the board I'd been using as a wave tossed it brutally. Long gone. “I'm sorry,” I gasped.

“Don't think about it.” He was already on the board behind me, his chin pressing onto my shoulder. “Just stay low. Keep in a crouch.”

Together, we rode and bobbed and paddled back to shore. I felt sick and cold as I slopped in through the shallows, my wet clothes smacking.

A wave struck me from behind, knocking me to my knees. I braced against the sand and hung my head down, exhausted and chilled through to the bone, relieved to be breathing again and alarmed at how close I'd come to drowning.

“Come on.” Bear was behind me again, propping me up, half dragging me away from the surf. My feet felt so heavy, my arms aching from fighting the tide. I was still in a daze as he opened the side door of his camper for me.

“The heat's pumping,” he said. “You go on in and get that wet stuff off. There's some towels and blankets to wrap up in.”

I climbed into the van and hunched beneath the ceiling as he closed the door behind me. The welcome warmth made me collapse onto my knees for a moment, and I sobbed a little, tasting the salt from my wet hair and tears. Funny how a death-defying experience isn't so scary until you look back on it and think of the what-ifs.

The sound of the boards sliding onto the side rack brought me back. I rose up on my knees, tugged off my wet clothes, and dropped them into the small sink. My skin felt clammy and cool, and I pressed into a soft, worn blanket that smelled of fabric softener, pressed my face into the smells of home and land and warm bedding. God, I'd been so stupid.

I shook the folds out of the blanket, wrapped up in it, and huddled in front of the warm vent. The inside of the van was compact and surprisingly neat, with a small kitchenette wall across from a bench seat that I assumed opened into a bed. I was wringing my long braid out into the sink when the door opened and Bear appeared, a dark, solid figure against the gray beach of swirling sand. His chest was bare and a towel was wrapped around his waist. He tossed his wet suit inside, climbed in, and closed the door on the storm's fury.

“You okay?”

“Fine.” I nodded, trying to cover the telltale squeak of my voice. “Just mortified at myself.” The worn silk edging of the blanket slipped over one breast, and I tugged it up with a fist. “Steve was right. I'm a neophyte asshole.”

“Don't let him bring you down. You held your own for a while.”

“I had no business being out there.”

“None of us did. You gotta respect it, but we're always trying to shave off a small piece for ourselves, just this next wave. And as soon as that's over the rush is so huge that we're all paddling back out like the lunatics we are.”

He knelt down to fish through a duffel bag and I felt my eyes on the knot at his waist, sure that the towel was going to stretch a bit too far and fall to the floor. Not that it would be a bad thing. In fact, I found myself wishing that the laws of nature would just help me out here and loosen that knot.

Bear turned back, towel in place. No such luck.

“But something tells me you didn't come out to surf today. Not dressed like that. Why'd you come down?”

I bit my lower lip, knowing that ten years of denial would shatter with my answer. “I came to say good-bye, Bear. I came for you. God, you're heading off to Hawaii, maybe never to return. It's like you're stepping off the end of the earth.”

“Sometimes change is good.” He lifted his chin. “I see these tournaments as a positive development for me.”

“Good for you, a major downer for me. Bear, I'm going to miss you.”

He grinned, dimples showing in the partial smile that had probably evolved to hide his chipped teeth. “You trying to get me choked up, squirt?”

I knew he was teasing, and I didn't want this entire conversation reduced to a playful joke. “Don't you feel anything for me, Bear? When we're together?”

“Sure, I do. I've always liked being with you, but I knew we couldn't go there with you being Steve's little sister and all.”

“What would you say if I told you I want to go there?” I asked him.

He squinted, then rolled back, his hands in the air as if I'd exploded a grenade in front of him. “Wow! I mean, that'd be great. Awesome. But don't you think we might feel bad about it later? I mean, there's something special between us, and I kind of like having that to think back on. I've known you since you were a little squirt, riding your Big Wheel over your brother's surfboards.”