The Taste of Salt (13 page)

One morning I was looking at a picture of us that I kept on my bureau. We were only about eight and six in the photo, out in front of our house. I was holding a bucket and standing a little bit behind him, smiling. He was astride one of those sticks with a stuffed horse head, charging straight toward the camera, ready for anything. He looked like he could take on the world. I jumped when my cell phone rang, picked up without looking at the number.

“Hey, Josie. It's Tick.”

“Whoa. Hey Tick. This is so weird. I was just looking at that old picture. You know the one where you're riding Black Lightning?”

He laughed. He sounded like himself. The self he was at his best. “Man, I loved that horse. He was the greatest.”

I laughed, too. “How are you, Tick?” Maybe it was looking at the photo. Maybe it was his laugh. Maybe it was knowing that I should give him more than I do. But I willed some kindness, some openness into my heart, into my voice.

“I'm all right. Doing all right. Work's good. Ain't the same since LeBron left but, you know. At least all the craziness is over.”

“I know! People lost their minds over that stuff. For God's sake, the guy's allowed to work someplace else if he wants to.”

Tick laughed again. “Players don't really think of it as working someplace else, Josie. People who talk about themselves in the third person—well, they're a little different from you and me.”

“Right.” A friendly silence between us.

“Well, Josie, I know you got to get to work. I need to leave, too. I just wanted to say hey. And say … say that I'm doing okay. I'm keeping clean, going to meetings. I'm doing okay.”

My hand was tight on the phone, my voice almost a
whisper when I said, “That's great, Tick. That's really great. I'm so happy to hear it.”

“All right. Call me, okay? Or at least answer a brother's texts, okay?”

“Okay … you punk.”

“Who you calling a punk?” he said. It was our old loving tease. “I'll talk to you later, Josie-face.” “Later Tick-tock.”

I was alone in the house. It took me ten minutes to get myself together enough to leave for work. My baby brother. How I loved him.

F
OR OUR PART,
Daniel and I kept to our routines—which included unprotected sex. We reached an uneasy détente about my getting pregnant: We didn't use birth control but I wouldn't take things any further—no ovulation watching, no sperm checks, no IVF (which we couldn't afford anyway), none of that. Every month when my period came, I felt as though I'd gotten away with something. Daniel looked so disappointed, and for his sake, I wished I felt the same. But I was happy to see the blood on the tissue, an old friend that meant I was not going to be a mother. We didn't talk about what was going on, but it grew—silent and hulking.

One Sunday morning, a springtime morning, we were
avoiding talking by both being deeply immersed in the
New York Times.
I'm a real old fogy about it—most of my colleagues wouldn't dream of reading the newspaper anywhere but on their laptops, but I like to sit with a cup of coffee and spread the whole thing around me in inky, tree-killing profusion. Reading the paper is one of the few things I can remember my parents doing together—sitting in companionable silence, my mother drinking coffee. Daniel has the same old-fashioned bias, so we subscribe—it costs a fortune, but we agreed it was a necessary indulgence. I was lying on the sofa with the “Week in Review,” and Daniel was in his favorite easy chair across from me scowling through an article in the business section. Our cat, Samantha, was asleep between my legs. The warmth there was soothing and vaguely sexual, but not a feeling I was particularly inclined to do anything about at that moment. I was deep into a piece about a cloning scandal when the phone rang. I'm the one who answers the phone around here. People rarely call for Daniel. He's a solitary soul. He has colleagues—but not friends who might call on a Sunday morning. He seems to feel that knowing that the phone is not for him exempts him from needing to respond to that particular sound. I sighed, pushed Samantha off me, and got up.

“Hello?”

“Hi, it's me.”

I walked into the other room with the phone. “Ben? Hi. What is it?” Since that night at the bar, we had begun to lunch together more often. When we sat together in the cafeteria or at one or the other of our cramped desks, our knees not quite touching.

“What are you doing?”

“I was sitting on the sofa, reading the paper with Daniel. We're just hanging out. What's going on? Are you okay?”

He paused for a long time. “It's about Leslie. Josie, she moved out today. All her things are gone, she packed everything. She's going back to Florida.”

I'd met Ben's girlfriend but he didn't talk about her much. He never said, “Well, we …” or “The other day Leslie said …” I'd noticed this and, in my more fevered moments, wondered if it had something to do with me. My Daniel mentions, at first quite frequent, had gone way down since that night in the bar. Even so, I was a little surprised that I was the one Ben would call at a moment like this. I was also a little pleased.

“Ben, you're kidding. Really? I'm so sorry.”

“Listen, I know we don't usually talk on the weekends, but do you think you could get away today and meet me?”

“We don't have anything planned. Yeah. Sure.”

“OK. Can you meet me at the beach over in Falmouth, maybe around noon? I want to be by the water today.”

“Sure. Absolutely. Around noon. Do you want to have lunch?”

“Why don't you have lunch first? I'm not hungry anyway. I was up all night, trying to talk to her. I don't want to eat.”

“Okay. I'll see you in a little while, then.”

“Thanks, Josie.”

I went back to the living room. My Sunday-morning calm had vanished—I felt keyed-up, shiny. Daniel looked up from the sports section. “Who was that?”

“Ben.”

“Ah.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“What's what supposed to mean?”

“‘Ah.' He's my friend. Can't a friend call?”

Daniel lowered the paper and looked at me evenly. “Of course a friend can call.”

A band tightened around my head. I sat back down on the sofa and rested my hand on Daniel's foot. “Sorry. He's upset. His girlfriend moved out.”

Daniel wiggled his toes under my hand. “That's too bad.”

“Yeah. He asked me to meet him later.”

“Well, that's okay. I was going to go to the lab anyway. That way you'll have something to do.”

“I'd have something to do anyway.” Again, that same sharp tone in my voice.

“I know that.” The same mildness in his.

Daniel's dissertation was about the coelacanth, which seems somehow appropriate. These fish were assumed to be extinct until 1938, when a fisherman caught one off the coast of South Africa. Since then, they've popped up every so often, there and in the deepest waters off Indonesia. They are rare and big and quiet and slow-moving. They keep to themselves and move at great depths. Though my expertise is in warm-water mammals, my favorite fish are the tropical ones, even though I'm stuck up here in the cold water. I suppose that's a difference between us. I like bright things that flit about. He likes things to be even and predictable. I am much less sure of the value of that. That steadiness was one of the first things I liked about him. But now sometimes I wish he'd get a little crazy. I couldn't sit still suddenly. I went out to the porch to breathe.

Our house always smells slightly of the sea—I'm so grateful we're not far from the ocean. But as I stood out on the porch breathing in that fresh-washed air, I wished I could have just one more cig. Just a moment when that smoke eased into my lungs and quieted everything. I quit not long after Daniel and I started going out. Of course I knew how bad it was for me. Of course I knew the danger. I spend a lot of my time around oxygen tanks and a lot of my time underwater. I know that your lungs are important.
But I started in college. I liked the way it looked. I liked, for once, doing something I wasn't supposed to. And then, of course, I wanted to stop and I couldn't. That's addiction for you. It took me three tries before I was truly able to give it up. It was starting to affect my breathing on dives; that's what finally made me do it. I wouldn't mess that up for anything.

I crossed my arms and took a deep breath. Daniel put some music on inside the house. “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” He has a soft spot for Nirvana—perhaps it's that wildness in them. I don't like them that much. The way all Kurt Cobain's pain is just out there—it scares me. I sighed and looked up at the sky. It was a perfect angel blue day. I squeezed my upper arms briefly and then went back inside to decide what to wear. I tried to think of something pretty that wouldn't be so dressed up that Daniel would wonder why I was making an effort. He didn't look up as I walked past him. One of his feet was moving in time to the music.

I
MET BEN IN
the parking lot at Stony Beach. He had gotten out of his car and was leaning against the hood, looking around for me. I sat in the car for a minute, gazing at him. He really wasn't so spectacular—he looked a little owlish behind his black-framed glasses, and he was too thin. But he was such a lovely color, and his mouth was
so sweet and curved. What I liked best about him was his eyes—when I looked at him, I could see that someone was fully alive in there. Very sexy. I sighed and got out of the car and waved as I walked toward him.

He pushed off the hood and took a few steps toward me. As I reached him, he hugged me, which I did not expect. It went right through to my toes. “I'm so glad to see you. Thanks for coming,” he said. We both leaned awkwardly back against the hood. I slid my hand lightly and quickly across his back, over his cotton T-shirt.

“Sure, Ben. What happened?”

“She's gone. We had a really big fight last night and she just packed her bag and left. She went to her sister's in Boston.”

“Have you guys been fighting a lot?”

He had been looking at the ground in front of him but now he looked up, dead into my eyes. My hand was still on his back. “We have. She couldn't get a decent gig here and I've been kind of distracted.”

“By what?”

“I think you know.” He pushed off the car. “Let's walk, okay?”

As we moved away from the car, he gently took my hand. Just as gently, I didn't pull away. We walked out with all the beach-going families, hand in hand like any couple
anywhere. We found a quiet place and let go of each other's hands, spread out a blanket, sat down, talked. I don't remember much of what he said. I remember certain gestures he made—a smile, the way he reached off the blanket with his toes and dug in the sand. He didn't say anything flirtatious or anything about me or us at all. He talked about Leslie, what might have gone wrong, what he might do now. Neither of us said anything about taking the other's hand. Neither of us said anything about there even
being
an us. Better to talk about the woman who was gone than about the man and woman who sat across from each other, thinking so much more than they were saying. We sat and talked for an hour or two. He walked me back to my car and after I opened the door and sat down I looked up and said, “I'm glad you called me. Hope I helped.”

“Just being around you helps.” He touched my cheek so lightly that I might have imagined it. Then he turned and walked away.

MY MOTHER CALLED ABOUT
a week or so later.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hey, baby. How are you?”

“Okay, I guess. Just sitting here working on a grant.” The game of desktop solitaire I had been playing seemed to blink at me, as if surprised by the boldness of my lie.

“Well, that's good. Is it hot there?”

“Not too. You know it doesn't get real hot up here until July. It's all right.” She didn't say anything, so I kept talking about nothing important. “How is it there?”

“Oh, you know. Kind of muggy. The trees help—it doesn't ever get too hot in the house.” She paused again. “So.”

“Mom, what's going on?”

“It's Tick.” Tick. Tick again. Always Tick. When he was a kid, this is the kind of thing people used to say about him:
Shame having those eyelashes on a boy.

Mmm-hmm. And that good hair.

I'm telling you, Sarah. You better be ready when that boy gets bigger and the girls start coming around. It's gonna be like I don't know what. But I know you better get ready, girl.

I suppose I should say that they never said that kind of stuff about me. I was the smart one. I was pretty enough for all general purposes. Fix me up and I looked all right—Tick and I look something alike. But I could never quite get myself to care about it sufficiently. And I would have had to. I would have had to put in some effort to have what he had when he rolled out of bed in the morning.

You should have seen him in high school. I would walk past him at his locker and some girl would be talking to him
and I could tell by the set of her head and the intentness of her gaze that she couldn't have cared less about whatever they were talking about. She just wanted to see what his lips looked like as he spoke. She just wanted to soak up a little of the stardust that flaked off him as he moved to put his books in his locker.

Imagine if that were your brother. I used to look at myself in the mirror and wonder why things hadn't fallen quite the same way on my face as they had on his. I used to watch everyone jostling to be near him and feel my heart twist in my chest. Then other times, that twisting would fall away. I would sit in the stands at basketball games and watch him run and feel so proud and full of joy. I hoped everyone could see that he was my baby brother.