A smiling older woman approaches, and it takes me a second to recognize Mrs. Barton, our librarian. She drops her grocery bags and pulls me into a hug. “Sam! I can’t believe it! I heard you were engaged! Is this him?”
“I’m so happy to see you.” I hug her and breathe her in. If it’s possible to smell like books, she smells like books. “Yes, this is Jack.”
“So handsome! Your mother tells me he’s a doctor!” says Mrs. Barton, because maybe she’s lost her filter and her command of punctuation.
“It’s nice to be back,” I say. “We were just noticing all the press, what’s that about?”
“So much excitement. There’s an amateur music festival at the Owl Barn this weekend. Lots of up-and-coming musicians are here for it. Usually happens in Newport, but your Wyatt told someone about Oak Shore, and here they are! Great for the local economy, though no one comes to the library.” He’s not my Wyatt.
3
I’m tired when we come back from the commotion of town, and Jack wants to read. Jack and I read a lot. He picks the books, literary fiction mostly, though I have veto power. We read a lot about historical figures, fictionalized to include children and relationships they never had. There are ghosts sometimes, and chapter to chapter, I have a hard time knowing who’s talking, but by the time I’ve finished I feel like I’ve accomplished something. Sometimes we buy two copies and read the same book at the same time. It’s a particular level of intimacy, reading a book with another person. Today we are reading Wetlands of Westerleigh, and I’m forty-three pages behind where Jack is. We sit, feet up, on the back porch with our books and iced teas. I pretend to read.
The beach has its own symphony—waves breaking, children playing, gulls squawking. These sounds roll over me, and I remember why I only come back here once a year. Coming home feels like tiptoeing through a minefield, like I could happen upon one particularly compelling shell and all of my hard-earned defenses will be gone. Before yesterday, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d thought about Wyatt in more than a passing way. Sometimes I hear that song and think of him, but that can’t be helped. As time goes by, it’s on the radio less and less, and I steer clear of stations that are playing anything that’s not brand-new.
The ocean is reaching out to me and I’m afraid it’s going to crack me right open, and there I’ll be like a Russian doll, with layers falling off until I’m so small that a seagull could just pluck me out of the sand and swallow me. I remember my body in the ocean, unburdened and strong. I remember the feel of Wyatt’s skin on mine for the first time, just where the waves break. I remember standing under the linden tree and willing my hands not to touch his stomach. I haven’t thought about that in a long time and the memory of it makes me smile. I close my eyes and remember the kiss that came next. I can feel the breeze off the ocean, I can hear Wyatt’s guitar.
“That guy’s literally playing the same part over and over. Are we allowed to make requests?” Jack’s talking.
I open my eyes and realize it’s actually Wyatt’s guitar that I’m hearing. “Is that coming from the treehouse?” I ask.
“Sounds like.”
I turn to face him. “Do you care that he’s here? My old boyfriend? I guess he’s here to break into the music business, but I’m sorry it’s this weekend.”
“Well, it turns up the drama a bit, doesn’t it?” Jack laughs a little.
“I know. But you don’t mind, do you?” And I realize that I want him to mind. I want Jack to fully understand the seismic impact of that breakup on my life. It’s like when you’ve been covering up an ugly scar but also sort of want to show it to people so they know what you’ve been through.
“Don’t be silly. Why would I care? You were kids.” Jack goes back to his book.
THEN
4
Wyatt
The first time Wyatt laid eyes on Sam, she was five years old. He was six and had just finished kindergarten. His family drove up from Florida on the last day of school with his and Michael’s feet propped up over coolers in the backseat to find a new family living in what they called the Porch House next door.
Sam was squatting at the base of the maple tree in the front yard, picking up sticks and yelling something at Travis. When Travis saw the car pull up, he immediately disengaged and stood at the edge of the hedge to watch them unload. It was a miracle to show up somewhere and find kids your own age; at least Travis was eight, like Michael. Within the hour, the three boys had climbed the big oak between the pool and the dunes, contemplating but not executing dives from it into the pool. They raced into the ocean and swam until they were forced out by hunger.
Sam’s parents met Wyatt’s when they came looking for Travis. Bill and Laurel, new in town. Marion and Frank, on their eighth summer in Oak Shore, offering the inside scoop. The adults drank beer and snacked on Fritos and grapes. The boys jumped in and out of the pool, the energy of the third boy revitalizing the games Wyatt and Michael had played for years. Sam sat by her mother, ignored.
* * *
Wyatt pretty much ignored Sam until the summer she was nine. By then, she was a strong swimmer and didn’t seem like such a liability. She could hold her own on a boogie board and knew enough not to cry if she got tumbled. They invented a paddle game with lines in the sand that they could all play now that they were a group of four. Wyatt was the first one to call her Sam instead of Samantha, possibly his way of making it okay that he was playing with a girl.
They dug holes and buried themselves in the cool of the undersand. They built sandcastles and carved paths in them for tennis ball races. When these projects deteriorated into the boys’ pelting each other with tennis balls as hard as they could, Sam would go home and read in bed or walk down the beach collecting shells. One thing Wyatt always knew about Sam, she knew when she’d had enough.
By the summer that Sam was twelve and Wyatt was thirteen, the foursome was part of a bigger pack of kids. They’d spend the day at the beach, sprawling on an island of towels. Their daily business was swimming and sunbathing. In the afternoon they’d all hop on bikes and head to town for ice cream, biking back to the beach one-handed to carry their cones.
One night in late August (it was almost September, when Sam would have been thirteen, Wyatt liked to remind himself when he thought about this), the kids were on the beach after dinner. The sun was low but not down, that last whisper of a summer day that you want to suck dry. Travis and Michael and some of the older kids had procured beer; one each was all they could get, so they sipped them slowly and left them carefully in the sand as they went for one last swim.
If Wyatt was being honest, he’d admit that he’d felt left behind. Michael and Travis were crossing a bridge into a world he wasn’t invited to, even if he’d wanted to go. It was as if a line had been drawn, and he woke up one day and was stuck with the little kids, no longer part of their crew.
“They think they’re so cool,” said Sam, watching the older kids in the water. She was braiding her hair, just the front piece, black ropes intertwining away from her face. He may have thought she was beautiful then, or he may have just tried not to because, well, weird.
“They’re not,” he said.
“It’s okay if you want to go in. You’re not staying here to babysit me, are you?”
“You’re not a baby, Sam.”
“Let’s dump their beers,” she said, jumping up. “Quick. Just Trav and Michael’s, and we’ll run. They can’t tell on us, because they’re not supposed to have them anyway.” Her hands were on her hips, her left foot tapping.
Wyatt was used to ignoring Sam’s sudden, poorly thought-out ideas, but he was just the right amount of resentful to like this one. He leaned forward and took each of their half-full beers and thrust them headfirst into the sand.
When he looked up, the crew of older kids was coming out of the ocean. Sam grabbed his arm and said, “Run!” They ran up the beach, into and through the dunes, and heard their names being called, and not in a friendly way. Wyatt looked over his shoulder and saw Travis and Michael thirty feet behind them. On the other side of his pool was a small cupboard where they kept the cushions when it rained. The door was half open. Sam saw it the second he did, and they ran to it and slammed the door behind them.