It depresses me.
I have seen this too many times before. The unwarranted devotion. Putting up with the fear of being with the wrong person because you can’t deal with the fear of being alone. The hope tinged with doubt, and the doubt tinged with hope. Every time I see these feelings in someone else’s face, it weighs me down. And there’s something in Rhiannon’s face that’s more than just the disappointments. There is a gentleness there. A gentleness that Justin will never, ever appreciate. I see it right away, but nobody else does.
I take all my books and put them in the locker. I walk over to her and put my hand lightly on her arm.
I have no idea what I’m doing. I only know that I’m doing it.
“Let’s go somewhere,” I say. “Where do you want to go?”
I am close enough now to see that her eyes are blue. I am close enough now to see that nobody ever gets close enough to see how blue her eyes are.
“I don’t know,” she replies.
I take her hand.
“Come on,” I tell her.
This is no longer restlessness—it’s recklessness. At first we’re walking hand in hand. Then we’re running hand in hand. That giddy rush of keeping up with one another, of zooming through the school, reducing everything that’s not us into an inconsequential blur. We are laughing, we are playful. We leave her books in her locker and move out of the building, into the air, the real air, the sunshine and the trees and the less burdensome world. I am breaking the rules as I leave the school. I am breaking the rules as we get into Justin’s car. I am breaking the rules as I turn the key in the ignition.
“Where do you want to go?” I ask again. “Tell me, truly, where you’d love to go.”
I don’t initially realize how much hinges on her answer. If she says, Let’s go to the mall, I will disconnect. If she says, Take me back to your house, I will disconnect. If she says, Actually, I don’t want to miss sixth period, I will disconnect. And I should disconnect. I should not be doing this.
But she says, “I want to go to the ocean. I want you to take me to the ocean.”
And I feel myself connecting.
It takes us an hour to get there. It’s late September in Maryland. The leaves haven’t begun to change, but you can tell they’re starting to think about it. The greens are muted, faded. Color is right around the corner.
I give Rhiannon control of the radio. She’s surprised by this, but I don’t care. I’ve had enough of the loud and the obnoxious, and I sense that she’s had enough of it, too. She brings melody to the car. A song comes on that I know, and I sing along.
And if I only could, I’d make a deal with God.…
Now Rhiannon goes from surprised to suspicious. Justin never sings along.
“What’s gotten into you?” she asks.
“Music,” I tell her.
“Ha.”
“No, really.”
She looks at me for a long time. Then smiles.
“In that case,” she says, flipping the dial to find the next song.
Soon we are singing at the top of our lungs. A pop song that’s as substantial as a balloon, but lifts us in the same way when we sing it.
It’s as if time itself relaxes around us. She stops thinking about how unusual it is. She lets herself be a part of it.
I want to give her a good day. Just one good day. I have wandered for so long without any sense of purpose, and now this ephemeral purpose has been given to me—it feels like it has been given to me. I only have a day to give—so why can’t it be a good one? Why can’t it be a shared one? Why can’t I take the music of the moment and see how long it can last? The rules are erasable. I can take this. I can give this.
When the song is over, she rolls down her window and trails her hand in the air, introducing a new music into the car. I roll down all the other windows and drive faster, so the wind takes over, blows our hair all around, makes it seem like the car has disappeared and we are the velocity, we are the speed. Then another good song comes on and I enclose us again, this time taking her hand. I drive like that for miles, and ask her questions. Like how her parents are doing. What it’s like now that her sister’s off at college. If she thinks school is different at all this year.
It’s hard for her. Every single answer starts with the phrase I don’t know. But most of the time she does know, if I give her the time and the space in which to answer. Her mother means well; her father less so. Her sister isn’t calling home, but Rhiannon can understand that. School is school—she wants it to be over, but she’s afraid of it being over, because then she’ll have to figure out what comes next.
She asks me what I think, and I tell her, “Honestly, I’m just trying to live day to day.”
It isn’t enough, but it’s something. We watch the trees, the sky, the signs, the road. We sense each other. The world, right now, is only us. We continue to sing along. And we sing with the same abandon, not worrying too much if our voices hit the right notes or the right words. We look at each other while we’re singing; these aren’t two solos, this is a duet that isn’t taking itself at all seriously. It is its own form of conversation—you can learn a lot about people from the stories they tell, but you can also know them from the way they sing along, whether they like the windows up or down, if they live by the map or by the world, if they feel the pull of the ocean.
She tells me where to drive. Off the highway. The empty back roads. This isn’t summer; this isn’t a weekend. It’s the middle of a Monday, and nobody but us is going to the beach.
“I should be in English class,” Rhiannon says.
“I should be in bio,” I say, accessing Justin’s schedule.
We keep going. When I first saw her, she seemed to be balancing on edges and points. Now the ground is more even, welcoming.
I know this is dangerous. Justin is not good to her. I recognize that. If I access the bad memories, I see tears, fights, and remnants of passable togetherness. She is always there for him, and he must like that. His friends like her, and he must like that, too. But that’s not the same as love. She has been hanging on to the hope of him for so long that she doesn’t realize there isn’t anything left to hope for. They don’t have silences together; they have noise. Mostly his. If I tried, I could go deep into their arguments. I could track down whatever shards he’s collected from all the times he’s destroyed her. If I were really Justin, I would find something wrong with her. Right now. Tell her. Yell. Bring her down. Put her in her place.
But I can’t. I’m not Justin. Even if she doesn’t know it.
“Let’s just enjoy ourselves,” I say.
“Okay,” she replies. “I like that. I spend so much time thinking about running away—it’s nice to actually do it. For a day. It’s good to be on the other side of the window. I don’t do this enough.”
There are so many things inside of her that I want to know. And at the same time, with every word we speak, I feel there may be something inside of her that I already know. When I get there, we will recognize each other. We will have that.
I park the car and we head to the ocean. We take off our shoes and leave them under our seats. When we get to the sand, I lean over to roll up my jeans. While I do, Rhiannon runs ahead. When I look back up, she is spinning around the beach, kicking up sand, calling my name. Everything, at that moment, is lightness. She is so joyful, I can’t help but stop for a second and watch. Witness. Tell myself to remember.
“C’mon!” she cries. “Get over here!”
I’m not who you think I am, I want to tell her. But there’s no way. Of course there’s no way.
We have the beach to ourselves, the ocean to ourselves. I have her to myself. She has me to herself.
There is a part of childhood that is childish, and a part that is sacred. Suddenly we are touching the sacred part—running to the shoreline, feeling the first cold burst of water on our ankles, reaching into the tide to catch at shells before they ebb away from our fingers. We have returned to a world that is capable of glistening, and we are wading deeper within it. We stretch our arms wide, as if we are embracing the wind. She splashes me mischievously and I mount a counterattack. Our pants, our shirts get wet, but we don’t care.
She asks me to help her build a sand castle, and as I do, she tells me about how she and her sister would never work on sand castles together—it was always a competition, with her sister going for the highest possible mountains while Rhiannon paid attention to detail, wanting each castle to be the dollhouse she was never allowed to have. I see echoes of this detail now as she makes turrets bloom from her cupped hands. I myself have no memories of sand castles, but there must be some sense memory attached, because I feel I know how to do this, how to shape this.
When we are done, we walk back down to the water to wash off our hands. I look back and see the way our footsteps intermingle to form a single path.
“What is it?” she asks, seeing me glance backward, seeing something in my expression.
How can I explain this? The only way I know is to say “Thank you.”
She looks at me as if she’s never heard the phrase before.
“For what?” she asks.
“For this,” I say. “For all of it.”
This escape. The water. The waves. Her. It feels like we’ve stepped outside of time. Even though there is no such place.
There’s still a part of her that’s waiting for the twist, the moment when all of this pleasure will jackknife into pain.
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “It’s okay to be happy.”
The tears come to her eyes. I take her in my arms. It’s the wrong thing to do. But it’s the right thing to do. I have to listen to my own words. Happiness is so rarely a part of my vocabulary, because for me it’s so fleeting.
“I’m happy,” she says. “Really, I am.”
Justin would be laughing at her. Justin would be pushing her down into the sand, to do whatever he wanted to do. Justin would never have come here.
I am tired of not feeling. I am tired of not connecting. I want to be here with her. I want to be the one who lives up to her hopes, if only for the time I’m given.
The ocean makes its music; the wind does its dance. We hold on. At first we hold on to one another, but then it starts to feel like we are holding on to something even bigger than that. Greater.
“What’s happening?” Rhiannon asks.
“Shhh,” I say. “Don’t question it.”
She kisses me. I have not kissed anyone in years. I have not allowed myself to kiss anyone for years. Her lips are soft as flower petals, but with an intensity behind them. I take it slow, let each moment pour into the next. Feel her skin, her breath. Taste the condensation of our contact, linger in the heat of it. Her eyes are closed and mine are open. I want to remember this as more than a single sensation. I want to remember this whole.
We do nothing more than kiss. We do nothing less than kiss. At times, she moves to take it further, but I don’t need that. I trace her shoulders as she traces my back. I kiss her neck. She kisses beneath my ear. The times we stop, we smile at each other. Giddy disbelief, giddy belief. She should be in English class. I should be in bio. We weren’t supposed to come anywhere near the ocean today. We have defied the day as it was set out for us.
We walk hand in hand down the beach as the sun dips in the sky. I am not thinking about the past. I am not thinking about the future. I am full of such gratitude for the sun, the water, the way my feet sink into the sand, the way my hand feels holding hers.
“We should do this every Monday,” she says. “And Tuesday. And Wednesday. And Thursday. And Friday.”
“We’d only get tired of it,” I tell her. “It’s best to have it just once.”