I climb down the stairs and step off the swim platform of the boat onto the dock. We walk across the silent street that separates the dock from the property, pass the house. We stroll across the wooden walkway that leads to the beach. You always loved those, remember? The more rickety and overgrown with sea oats, the better. Then the jewel at the end, the sugar sand, the silky blue-green of the ocean.
The gulf is usually lazy, languid, with waves that can barely be bothered to lap, much less crash, against the shore. But there’s a storm out at sea, a no-name, threatening Texas and Louisiana. So the surf is wild. We stand a moment side by side. It’s a time warp; we’re twenty-two again, everything ahead of us.
I try to take your hand, but you pull it away.
“What do you want, Scottie?”
Your eyes are sad. I see it now, the disappointment in it all. All the things they tell you you’re supposed to want. How once you have it, you’re left to wonder what, if anything, comes next.
The world is crumbling. The planet dying, people diseased by greed, by technology, medicating to avoid the pain of their empty lives. But here we are, all the same.
“I want to go back to that night. I want you to make a different decision.”
You just laugh. You were the one with the brains, the real talent for code, for numbers, for science. I was just a Florida cracker in flip-flops and board shorts. You did my math homework while I snorkeled, raced the optis with the sailing students.
You should have been the one to go, and I the one to stay.
“Betsy.”
We spin to see his thick shadow at the base of the walk. The soft reverence, the sweetness, are gone from his voice, replaced by the timbre of the bully he always was. You draw in a breath and start to move toward him, but I grab your wrist.
He moves quickly until he is in front of me, you between us, pushing back on his chest. He’s a steamroller. You’re a blade of grass. But he stops.
“Betsy, let’s go.” Voice granite-cold.
“Who’s with Piper?”
“Your mother.”
“You called my mom?”
She won’t be happy, a stern, cold woman. Never kind to you, a drunk. One of those who drinks slowly all day just to feel normal. It never shows until after dinner when the five o’clock cocktails take it up a notch. She never liked me. I saw right through that patrician facade to the piece of white trash she was at her core. The cruel, careless things she said to you. How you used to cry.
How they all conspired to keep you here with them. She by undermining your self-esteem since childhood. Your dad, a titan in business, a weak enabler of her dysfunction at home. And him, Big Brad the college football star, golden, reflecting back to you the person you thought you should be. Hypnotizing you with your own warped, subliminal expectations.
“Don’t go,” I whisper.
But you’re already gone, disappearing into his shadow.
The next day while I idle at the club, I see her with a gaggle of her tween friends. Piper.
She’s your very image. And then as I stand there watching her drink a milkshake, laugh at something her friend said, another piece of the puzzle falls into place.
When he comes to the boat later that afternoon, all his polish, that bright smile, has rubbed away. He has an aura of wild desperation, hair mussed, tie loose, the purple shiners of a sleepless night.
I’ve seen this look before. The man about to lose everything. I saw it in grad school as people flailed under the mammoth workload. I saw it in 2007 when the market crashed. When my company went public. Dropouts. Debtors. Naysayers, short sellers proved horribly wrong. How I love the bitter truth, the authenticity of that look. I feel it in my gut. We all know what it feels like to lose, to fail. The agony of defeat.
“Drink?”
“You left them,” he says from the dock, not climbing aboard. I sit on the aft bench, cross my legs, and lean back. “You can’t just come here now.”
The truth is, I didn’t know.
You never told me.
That night on the dock, you said that no, you weren’t coming to MIT. Your father needed you to help with the business. You mother was ill; she was fighting breast cancer then. You were, in fact, staying here, you said — to be near them, to be with him. We couldn’t be together anyway, you told me, as cold and stern as your mother ever was. We were too different. Surely, I could see that.
All of it lies.
You two. Betsy and Bradley.
Married with a baby before I could blink the bitter tears from my eyes. I was too stupid, my ego too gigantic, swollen, and injured to understand what you did.
You let me go. Let this little town keep you here.
I wept over the wedding pictures on Facebook like a lovesick teenager. How happy you were.
How stunning. You were so tiny, you didn’t even show. Maybe if you had, I could have done the math. Figured it out before it was too late. I decided to hate you instead, hate myself for not being the man you wanted to marry.
Enigma. There are seven layers to the game. He is a traveler, lost and far from home. They say it’s addictive, that people lose sleep and days at work, make themselves ill trying to get Enigma back where he belongs.
“That’s true,” I say to Bradley now. “I left.”
He nods as if we’ve come to some agreement. He turns back to look at the house, then back to me.
“You could have gone anywhere,” he said. “Why would you come here?”
People say that a lot, the folks who never left, those who think that there might be something else, somewhere else. Something better. A thing they missed. I want to tell them that there’s nothing out there that you don’t already carry within you. But that’s not a thing people want to hear. They’d rather believe that there’s something more and they simply failed to find it.
“I’m just back to take care of my dad,” I say. “He’s sick. Did you know?”
“No.” He looks a little less ruffled. “I didn’t. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you,” I say.
The niceties, the phrases that roll off the tongue, a verbal dance designed to keep things shallow and easy. It’s a relief. That’s how people like it mostly, surface — not too deep.
“Just — just,” he says, working for it, remembering why he came. “Just stay away from them. That’s my family.”
When we were young he was bronze, with flashing-white straight teeth, a surfer’s body — lean and muscular, fluid. Nice enough on a good day, but with that blank entitlement of privilege, so blessed that he didn’t even know it. He was easy with boats, on a board, he had a way with the weather — knew when a storm was coming. He’s a dimmer version of himself now — softer around the middle, a little gray in the hair, tiny lines around the eyes. Still beautiful, of course, still broad and well-built. I feel bad for him, though I’m not sure why. He was the kind of guy I wanted to be — not the skinny, bespectacled nerd that I was, the son of the club bartender, the camp counselor, but not the child of a member.
He stands a moment, waiting for my response, which is just a vague nod I’ve mastered. It implies consent without being a commitment. He seems satisfied, if a bit confused by my calm, then walks off. I text you.
Biff was just here. Warning me off.
That’s what we used to call him, remember? When you used to make fun of guys like him. I watch the little dots pulse on the screen, but you don’t answer. You never do.
A few minutes later, there’s a text from Sean.
Wanna go to a party tonight? Should be fun. At Ronnie’s.
We’ve fallen back into the ease of our childhood friendship. It’s like putting on an old baseball glove. It’s as if I’ve been around the world, and I have, been to hell and back — that too. Then in a box in the garage of my childhood home, I find it. When I slip it on, that old glove, the grooves of my hand are worn in deep. I never left.