“He’s been coming here more often, right?” She pointed to the water’s edge, and there was Gramps in the distance, walking alone. “I hadn’t seen him for a long time. Now I see him almost every week.”
I couldn’t answer her. Besides his trips to the grocery store and his clockwork poker games, Gramps’s comings and goings were mysteries to me. I’d run into him on the beach a few times, but I wasn’t usually here at this time in the afternoon.
“He was a good surfer,” she said. “Better than a lot of us, even though he was older.”
Gramps never talked to me about surfing, but sometimes he’d make comments about the waves that showed he knew a lot about the water. I had suspected that he’d been a surfer at some point in his life, but I hadn’t ever asked him.
“There was this day,” Emily said. “A couple months after Claire died. Do you know this story?”
“I might?” I said, even though I didn’t know any stories. “Tell it to me anyway.”
“None of us had seen him out there since we’d lost her. It was a Saturday, and so many of us were out. He appeared with his board on the sand. Some of us saw him, and we knew that we had to do something. To show our respect, let him see our grief. So we got out of the water. We called out to the others, who hadn’t seen him. It didn’t take long until there was only him in the water, and all of us were lined up on the sand in our suits, watching. We stayed like that for a long time. I don’t remember how long, but we stayed like that until he was done. When he finished, he paddled back, tucked his board under his arm, and walked right past us, like we were invisible. I don’t even know if he noticed us there.”
He was closer to us now, but I knew that he wouldn’t look around and see me and I decided against calling to him. A wave crashed in, took him by surprise, but he barely tried to dodge it. It soaked his pants legs up to the knees, but he kept walking as though nothing had happened.
Emily’s brow furrowed.
“I know I don’t need to tell you this,” she said. “But it can be dangerous out here. Even just walking.”
“Yeah,” I said, and I felt fear rush in, compounding my guilt. Did I dredge up memories he’d worked hard to forget? Did I drive him out here with my request? “I should say something to him about it.”
She kept watching him. “He already knows.”
chapter six
WE’RE WAITING AT THE BUS STOP in the snow.
Mabel was already showered and dressed by the time I woke up. I opened my eyes and she said, “Let’s go somewhere for breakfast. I want to see more of this town.” But I knew that what she really wanted was to be somewhere else, where it wasn’t the two of us trapped in a room thick with the things we weren’t saying.
So now we’re on the side of a street covered in white, trees and mountains in every direction. Once in a while a car passes us and its color stands out against the snow.
A blue car.
A red car.
“My toes are numb,” Mabel says.
“Mine, too.”
A black car, a green one.
“I can’t feel my face.”
“Me, neither.”
Mabel and I have boarded buses together thousands of times, but when the bus appears in the distance it’s entirely unfamiliar. It’s the wrong landscape, the wrong color, the wrong bus name and number, the wrong fare, and the wrong accent when the driver says, “You heard about the storm, right?”
We take halting, interrupted steps, not knowing how far back we should go or who should duck into a row first. She steps to the side to make me lead, as though just because I live here I know which seat would be right for us. I keep walking until we’re out of choices. We sit in the center of the back.
I don’t know what a storm here would mean. The snow is so soft when it falls, nothing like hail. Not even like rain so hard it wakes you up or the kind of wind that hurls tree branches into the streets.
The bus inches along even though there’s no traffic.
“Dunkin’ Donuts,” Mabel says. “I’ve heard of that.”
“Everyone likes their coffee.”
“Is it good?”
I shrug. “It’s not like the coffee we’re used to.”
“Because it’s just coffee-coffee?”
I pull at a loose stitch in the fingertip of my glove.
“I actually haven’t tried it.”
“Oh.”
“I think it’s like diner coffee,” I say.
I stay away from diners now. Whenever Hannah or her friends suggest going out to eat, I make sure to get the name of the place first and look it up. They tease me for being a food snob, an easy misunderstanding to play along with, but I’m not that picky about what I eat. I’m just afraid that one day something’s going to catch me by surprise. Stale coffee. Squares of American cheese. Hard tomatoes, so unripe they’re white in the center. The most innocent things can call back the most terrible.
I want to be closer to a window, so I scoot down the row. The glass is freezing, even through my glove, and now that we’re closer to the shopping district, lights line the street, strung from streetlamp to streetlamp.