Beach Read

“READY?” GUS SAID.

I clutched the advance copy of The Great Family Marconi against my chest. I suspected I would never be ready. Not for this book and not for him. Handing it over to the world was going to feel like falling headfirst out of an airplane, and I could only hope that something below decided to rise up and catch me. I asked Gus, “Are you?”

His head tilted as he considered. He had just finished the line edits phase of editing his book, so his manuscript was held together by binder clips, rather than the cheapo paperback binding used for the advance copies, which would arrive any day now.

In the end, my book had sold three weeks before his, but his had sold for a little more money, and both of us had decided to ditch the pen names. We’d written books we were proud of, and even if they were different from what we usually did, they were still ours.

It was strange not to see the little sun over waves, Sandy Lowe’s logo, on the spine where it had been for all my other books. But I knew my next book, Curmudgeon, was going to have it, and that felt good.

Curmudgeon, my readers would love. I loved it too. No more or less than I loved Family Marconi. But perhaps I felt more protective of the Marconis than I did my other protagonists, because I didn’t know how they’d be judged.

Anya had insisted that anyone who didn’t want to swaddle the Marconis in the softest silk and hand-feed them grapes is just swine with no need for pearls. Don’t you worry. Of course, she’d said that when forwarding the first trade review this morning, which had been largely positive apart from describing the cast as “unwieldy” and Eleanor herself as “rather shrill.”

“I think I am,” Gus answered and handed his stack of pages to me. He had no reason to worry, and I told myself I didn’t either. In the past year, I’d read both of his books, and he’d already read all three of mine, and so far, each other’s writing hadn’t left either of us repulsed by the other.

In fact, reading The Revelatories had felt a bit like swimming through Gus’s mind. It was heartbreaking and beautiful but very, very funny in some moments, and extremely odd in many.

I passed him my book and he grinned down at the illustrated cover, the stripes of the tent swooping down into curls at the bottom, tying knots around the silhouetted figures of the characters, binding them together.

“It’s a good day,” Gus said. Sometimes he said that, usually when we were in the middle of something mundane, like loading the dishwasher or dusting the front room of his house in our nasty cleaning clothes. Since selling Dad’s house in February, I’d spent a lot of time in the beach house next door, but Gus came to my apartment in town too. It was over the music store, and during the day, while we were working in my breakfast nook, we could hear stray college students stopping by to test out drum sets they could never have fit in their dorms. Even when it bothered us, it was something we shared.

Truthfully, sometimes Gus and I liked to be grumps together.

At night, after the shop closed, the owners, a middle-aged brother and sister with matching bone gauges in their ears, always turned their music up—Dylan or Neil Young and Crazy Horse or the Rolling Stones—and sat on their back stoop, smoking one shared joint. Gus and I would sit on my tiny balcony above them and let the smells and sounds float up to us. “It’s a good day,” he’d say, or if he’d accidentally shut the balcony door with it locked again, he’d say something like, “What a fucking day.”

And then he’d climb down the fire escape to the weed-smoking siblings and ask if he could cut through the store to the second stairwell inside the building, and they’d say, “Sure, man,” and a minute later, he’d appear behind me with a fresh beer in hand.

Sometimes I missed the kitchen in the old house, that hand-painted white and blue tile, but these past few weeks as summer began anew, I’d heard the clamor and laughter of the six-person family that was staying in it, and I imagined they appreciated the touch as much as I ever had. Maybe someday, one of the four kids would describe those careful designs to his own children, a piece of memory that managed to stay bright as everything else grew vague and fuzzy.

“It is a good day,” I agreed. Tomorrow was the anniversary of the day Naomi left Gus, the night of his thirty-third birthday, and he’d finally told Markham he’d prefer not to have the big party.

“I just want to sit on the beach and read,” he’d said, so that had been our plan for the last two weeks. We would finally swap our latest books and read them outside.

I was, of course, surprised he’d suggested it. While we both loved the view, I’d seen in the last year that Gus wasn’t lying about how little time he spent on the beach. He thought it was too crowded during the day, and at night, it was too cold to swim anyway. We’d spent much more time down there in January and February, walking out along the frozen waves, holding our arms out as we stood on the edge of the world, squinting into the dying light, our jackets rippling.

The lake froze so far out that we could even walk on it past the lighthouse my father had once ridden his tricycle into. And what was more, the water froze so high and the snow piled on top of it such that we could walk right up to the top of the lighthouse, stand on it like it was part of some lost civilization underneath us, Gus’s arm hooked around my neck as he hummed, It’s June in January, because I’m in love.

I’d had to buy a bigger coat. One that looked like a sleeping bag with arms. A fur-lined hood and rings of down-stuffed Gore-Tex all the way to my ankles, and still I sometimes had to layer sweatshirts and long-sleeved T-shirts under it.

But the sun—fuck, the sun was brilliant on those winter days, glancing off every crystal edge sharper than when it had first hit. It was like being on another planet, just Gus and me, closer to a star than we’d ever been. Our faces would go so numb we couldn’t feel the snot dripping down them, and when we got back inside, our fingers would be purple (gloves or no) and our cheeks would be flushed, and we’d flick on the gas fireplace and collapse onto the couch, shivering and chattering and too numb to undress and tangle up beneath blankets with any semblance of grace.

“January, January,” Gus would sing, his teeth clacking from the cold. “Even if there aren’t any snowflakes, we’ll have January all year long.”

I had never liked winter before, but now I understood. Sitting on a blanket on the sand tonight was nice, but we were sharing the sparkling waves with three dozen other people. It was a different kind of beauty, hearing shrieks and squeals rise between the crashing of water on shore, more like those nights I’d sat out in my parents’ backyard listening to the neighbor kids chasing fireflies. I was glad Gus was giving it all a try.

We read for a couple of hours, then staggered home in the dark. I slept at his house that night, and when I woke, he was already out of bed, the burble of the coffeepot coming from the kitchen.

We went back to the beach that afternoon and sat side by side, reading each other’s books again. I wondered what he would think of the ending to mine, whether it would feel too contrived to him or if he’d be disappointed I hadn’t truly committed to an unhappy ending.

But his book was shorter and I finished first, with a burst of laughter that made him look up, startled, from the page. “What?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I’ll tell you when you’re done.”

I lay on the sand and stared up into the lavender sky. The sun had started setting and we’d long since eaten our snacks. My stomach growled. I stifled another laugh.

Gus’s new book, tentatively titled The Cup Is Already Broken, was nothing close to a rom-com, although it did have a strong romantic thread woven into the plot and had come extremely close to a happy ending.

The protagonist, Travis, had left the cult with all the evidence he needed. He’d even talked Doris into leaving with him. They were happy, extremely happy, but for no more than a page or two before the world-ending meteor the prophet had been predicting hit the Earth.

The world hadn’t ended. In fact, Travis and Doris were the only two human casualties. It had missed the compound and hit the woods just off the road the two were traveling on. It hadn’t even been the meteor to kill them—it had been the distraction of it, Travis’s eyes skirting off the road he’d worked so hard to get onto.

The right tire had run off the shoulder, and when he’d cranked it back too hard, he’d hit a semitruck that was flying past in the other direction. Come to a screaming halt, crumpled like a stomped-on can.

I closed my eyes against the dusky sky and swallowed my laughter down. I didn’t know why I couldn’t stop, but soon the feeling hardened in my belly and I realized I wasn’t laughing. I was crying. I felt both defeated and understood.

Angry that these characters had deserved better than they’d gotten and somehow comforted by their experience. Yes, I thought. That is how life feels too often. Like you’re doing everything you can to survive only to be sabotaged by something beyond your control, maybe even some darker part of yourself.

Sometimes, it was your body. Your cells turning into poison and fighting against you. Or chronic pain sprouting up your neck and wrapping around the outsides of your scalp until it felt like fingernails sinking into your brain.

Sometimes, it was lust or heartbreak or loneliness or fear driving you off the road toward something you’d spent months or years avoiding. Actively fighting against.

At least the last thing they’d seen, the meteor streaming toward Earth, had distracted them because of its beauty. They hadn’t been afraid. They’d been mesmerized. Maybe that was all you could hope for in life.

I didn’t know how long I’d been lying there, tears trickling quietly down my cheeks, but I felt a rough thumb catch one and opened my eyes to Gus’s gentle face. The sky had darkened to a brutal blue. Seeing that color on someone’s skin would make your stomach turn. It was gorgeous in this context. Strange how things could be repellent in some situations and incredible in others.

“Hey,” he said tenderly. “What’s wrong?”

I sat up and wiped my face dry. “So much for your happy ending,” I said.

Gus’s brow furrowed. “It was a happy ending.”

“For who?”

“For them,” he said. “They were happy. They had no regrets. They’d won. And they didn’t even have to see it coming. For all we know, they live in that moment forever, happy like that. Together and free.”

Chills crawled down my arms. I knew what he meant. I’d always felt grateful Dad had gone in his sleep. I hoped the night before, he and Mom had watched something on TV that made him laugh so hard he had to take off his glasses and get the tears out of his eyes. Maybe something with a boat in it. I hoped he’d had a few too many of Mom’s infamous martinis to feel any worry when he crawled into bed, apart from that he might not feel so hot in the morning.

I had told Mom this when I’d gone home to visit at Christmas. She had cried and held me close. “It was something like that,” she promised. “So much of our lives were something like that.” Talking about him came in fits and starts. I learned not to press it. She learned to let it out, bit by bit, and that sometimes, it was okay to let a little ugliness into your story. That it would never rob you of all the beauty.

“It’s a happy ending,” Gus said again, bringing me back to the beach. “Besides, what about your ending? Everything tied up perfectly.”

“Hardly,” I said. “The only boy Eleanor had even thought she’d loved is married now.”

“Yeah, and she and Nick are obviously going to get together,” Gus said. “You could sense that through the whole book. It was obvious he was in love with her, and that she loved him back.”

I rolled my eyes. “I think you’re projecting.”

“Maybe so,” he said, smiling back at me.

“I guess we both failed,” I said, climbing to my feet.

Gus followed me. We started up the crooked, rooty path. “I don’t think so. I think I wrote my version of a happy ending and you wrote your version of a sad one. We had to write what we think is true.”

“And you still believe a meteor hitting the Earth is the best-case scenario in a romance.”

Gus laughed.

We’d forgotten to leave the porch light on, but usually there was nothing to trip over. He’d never had porch furniture, and when I’d given Dad’s to Sonya, we’d decided to save up and get our own, then promptly forgotten. Tonight, however, the porch wasn’t empty. A cardboard box sat against the door, and Gus scooped it up, studying the shipping label.

“Must be the advanced copies,” he said. He sounded a little nervous but didn’t hesitate to balance the box against his hip and use his keys to slice open the tape along the top. He set the open box down, withdrew a copy of the book, and passed it to me.

“Don’t you want to see it first?” I asked.

He shrugged. “You first. I’ll just watch your reaction for signs that they accidentally printed it upside down, or with the wrong title.”

But they hadn’t printed it upside down or made any other ridiculous mistake. It looked gorgeous, with shades of blue swirling across its cover, the clean white lettering of the title so large I could read it perfectly even in the dim light of the stars and moon. “It’s perfect,” I said, running my fingers over the words. I flipped the flimsy cover open, and thumbed through the first few pages. “The typesetting is really wonderful and—” I’d just hit the dedication page, and whatever I’d been about to say dispersed from my mind like smoke on a breeze.

The bound manuscript I’d read hadn’t had a dedication in it, or if it had, I’d somehow missed it. Which seemed improbable both because of how closely I had studied every word, as if each were a piece of Gus I could bottle up and keep, and because there was no way I could have missed those first two words.

For January, I don’t care how the story ends as long as I spend it with you.

I looked up at him, his perfectly imperfect face obscured by the prickling tears in my eyes, the mess of dark hair turned jet black by the night, the soft gleam in those eyes I loved so much. “You just had to outdo the most beautiful dedication you’d ever read, didn’t you?”

He smiled. “Something like that.”

His hand found the side of my face, and his warm mouth pressed into mine. When he pulled back, my hair catching in his scruff, he said quietly, “And to answer your question about the best-case scenario for a love story, yes. If I were hit by a meteor while in the car with you, I would still think I went out on a high note.”

My cheeks still heated when he said things like that. The lava-like feeling still filled my stomach.

“I love you, Augustus Everett,” I said, and he didn’t shudder at the sound of his name, just smiled and ran a thumb over my jaw. So much had changed in the last year. So much would change next year too.

In books, I’d always felt like the Happily Ever After appeared as a new beginning, but for me, it didn’t feel like that. My Happily Ever After was a strand of strung-together happy-for-nows, extending back not just to a year ago, but to thirty years before. Mine had already begun, and so this day was neither an ending nor a beginning.

It was just another good day. A perfect day. A happy-for-now, so vast and deep that I knew—or rather believed—I didn’t have to worry about tomorrow.