18
It’s Monday and Jack goes for a run before our appointment to see the Old Sloop Inn. I put on a sundress so I can seem bridal, like it’s an occasion. Which it is. Outside my bedroom window, my dad is staring at the engine of his old VW Bug, hand resting on the open trunk. He pours money into this car year after year, and it always lets him down. He claims that the sky blue of the paint and the curve of the fender inspired the original Current. I think he just doesn’t like throwing things out.
Wyatt appears from behind the hedge, and I briefly wonder what good a hedge is if it isn’t actually doing its job of keeping us separate. He has his head under the hood now, his toolbox on the ground. I want to hear what they’re saying, but I don’t want to draw attention to myself by opening the window. It’s hard to fathom the two of them together, just shooting the breeze like this. Wyatt is pointing to something and goes in with a wrench. Dad is listening to him, nodding.
Jack returns from his run, a new addition to this silent movie from hell. From my perch I see them together for the first time. My dad introduces them, and they shake hands. The two loves of my life, so different from one another. Everything about Jack is by design. His body is the result of a specific gym regimen engineered for ultimate fitness. His hair is parted and combed to hang at an exact spot on his neck, cut every three weeks by Pablo on Sixty-Eighth Street. Jack might be the privet of people.
Wyatt is bent over, working. His baseball hat is backward and I know exactly how his hair would pop out if he took it off. The muscles tense in his arms in a functional way. He looks fit from surfing and working with his hands.
Dad gets in the car, turns the key, and there’s success. Celebratory smiles and pats on the back all around. My dad is beaming at Wyatt, then Jack, who is considering something. He nods and this odd trio disperses.
* * *
“So your dad invited Wyatt on our excursion tonight. He seemed like he wanted me to okay it, so I did,” Jack tells me.
I pull into the Old Sloop Inn parking lot and find a spot before responding. “Why?”
“I don’t know. What was I going to say? ‘You can’t come because you dated my fiancé when she was a kid’? Plus, it wouldn’t hurt to have a mechanic on the boat. I’ve seen how much your dad knows about fixing a car.”
“He’s not a mechanic,” I say, and I have no idea why.
“He fixed your dad’s car. And he says he does a lot of that at a Shell station out in LA.”
So Wyatt works at a gas station. It tugs on me a little bit to think he’s so far away from where he wanted to be. I never imagined Wyatt doing anything besides playing the guitar. And now here he is, still looking out over the ocean trying to come up with something that will sell. But, whatever. I build productivity graphs, and it’s not like that was my dream. When we were kids, my dream was to be at the beach, with Wyatt, forever.
THEN
19
Wyatt
There would never be a better summer. Wyatt knew it the second he kissed Sam. He woke up every morning knowing that he was going to see her and touch her. He couldn’t imagine anything better than that. Sam got a job taking care of kids at the library five mornings a week. She’d ride her bike there, and after story time, Duck-Duck-Goose, and Goldfish, Wyatt would meet her with sandwiches and they’d drive to the north end of the beach and eat them on the jetty. Some days they’d throw their surfboards in the back of Frank’s old truck and drive around Long Island looking for waves. The only thing Wyatt loved more than kissing Sam was kissing Sam in the ocean. The feel of her wet body against his and the salty taste of her were his new favorite things.
Wyatt worked at the Auto Hop in the mornings, changing oil and occasionally taking apart engines. He loved how a car was a complete unit, built for the express purpose of running. There was only one way for the crankshaft to connect to the rubber belts and the rubber belts to connect to the camshaft. It made sense every time. When he wasn’t working or hanging out with Sam, he was writing songs. More accurately, he was writing songs the whole time he was with Sam too, just in his head. Fixing cars, writing songs, being with Sam. It was perfect.
It didn’t take long for everyone on the beach to figure out they were a couple. Everyone in town knew too. The waitresses at Chippy’s Diner smiled at each other every time they sat down at their regular booth. When they walked into Ginnie’s Bakery, Ginnie put her hand over her heart and said, “Oh, it’s that sweet young couple!” Sam’s boss at the library always called over her shoulder when she saw him outside, “Your Wyatt’s here!” He understood that this should have been embarrassing, but he loved being her Wyatt.
Most days they’d find themselves back at the beach after lunch. Sam would surf or sit and catch up with her friends. Wyatt tried to act like a normal person. He tried to hang out with his friends and talk to other people when they were in the larger group, but he always gravitated back to her. He loved when she’d catch his eye across the bonfire at night and smile at him in a way that made him know she was going to sneak out to the treehouse to see him later.
Dinner happened mostly on the Holloways’ deck. Wyatt’s family was invited several nights a week, as they always had been, just sort of wandering over with wine and something to throw on the grill. These nights with the sun setting over the ocean and his parents exhibiting their outside behavior—polite to each other and charming to everyone else—Wyatt felt the deepest sense of peace he’d ever known. Even Michael came to dinner and was his best self, laughing with Travis or talking about sports with Bill. Wyatt liked the way his family felt when it was part of the Holloways’.
20
Sam
Around midnight on a Thursday in July, Sam was sitting on her bed listening to Wyatt work on a new song in the treehouse. She’d been drawing him there since the first night he kissed her. His legs dangling over the edge, the moon over the water lighting up the space. She’d done eight versions of this drawing and she’d started to think the details of the treehouse didn’t matter as much as the opening she’d seen in his eyes. She wanted to crawl right into that space. The first versions of the drawing were overdone, but this was the one she liked best, with the whole scene in outline and only his eyes drawn in intricate detail.
Sam had gone to town for dinner with her parents and then to a movie, an excruciating four hours, which meant she wouldn’t see him until tomorrow. She and Wyatt had driven all the way to Garnet Bay earlier in the day, presumably to surf, but had ended up making out in the back of the truck instead.
“That’s it,” he’d whispered into her ear, the full weight of his body on her.
“That’s what?” she asked.
“My favorite sound. It’s like you’re catching your breath. It’s my favorite thing in the world. I’m going to write a song about it.”
“You’re my favorite thing in the world,” Sam said, and, although she knew for a fact this was true and that he already knew it, she felt completely laid bare.
He lifted himself onto his elbow so he could look her in the eye. It was an eternity before he said, “I love you, Sam.”
“Are you sure?” she said, mainly because she wanted to hear him say it again.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve loved you my whole life. But not like this, like I do now.”
Sam hadn’t heard anything anyone had said at dinner that night. She’d missed the entire point of the movie. She was scheduled to work in the morning, which meant she wouldn’t see Wyatt until lunchtime. This seemed impossibly long as she grabbed her finished drawing and made her way downstairs and out the back door and through the dunes to the rope ladder. Wyatt was right where she’d drawn him, brow furrowed and legs dangling.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, sitting next to him.
“Good,” he said, and kissed her.
“I drew this. I wanted you to have it.” She handed him the drawing and watched him take it in. “I know it doesn’t look finished, but I was just trying to get that expression, and I didn’t want all the other stuff to take away from it.”
“It’s incredible,” he said.
Sam felt relieved and also kind of embarrassed. “Let’s hang it up.” She got up and found a nail sticking out of one of the side walls. “Here?”
“That’s going to wreck it,” he said. “We can get a frame or something tomorrow.”
She loved that she’d created something that mattered to him. “Let me just stick it here. And if you think it’s wrecked I can make another one. I’m not going anywhere.”