Before My Eyes Read online

  Yet that morning, I only stared at her. She wasn’t supposed to be on the floor. She was supposed to be getting dressed. I had to blow-dry my hair. She was unconscious on the sea green tiles. Her purple toothbrush was next to the sink, and I thought: I have to brush my teeth. My mouth tasted of night, pasty and leaden. I almost reached for the toothpaste first. Instead, I bent down, I’m sure of it, and touched her hand. Her fingers were already stiff. I said, once, softly, “Mom.” She didn’t move, and I put my face next to hers as if the problem were that she couldn’t see me.

  Why didn’t I run when I heard her fall? Why did I waste time? Why did I hesitate? If I had helped her sooner, would she be like this?

  Later her doctor said to me that she might have had a series of small strokes before the bigger one. He couldn’t be sure. He did say that she was at the hospital in plenty of time for new, life-saving medicines, which she received. Her life was saved.

  But maybe I could have done more.

  I pick up the hairbrush, her hairbrush, and sweep it down through my hair, once, twice, at least twenty-five strokes. I’m facing the mirror, but I don’t truly see myself because if I look I’ll see her. I hear her deep, smooth voice say my name. Claire. She named me Claire, telling me my name meant “clear and bright” in Latin. She’s saying my name to me as if I’m her lifeboat in the wide empty sea. I close my eyes and hear my mother telling me to brush the back of my hair: Make sure you get out all those knots, Claire. Make sure you brush at least twenty-five strokes, angel. I want to see her. And I do. I see this: Her hair is chopped off at her neck. Her eyes are red-rimmed, naked without makeup, unfocused. She wears glasses instead of contacts. She used to hate wearing glasses, even the violet ones, which she once thought of as “funky” and now just look weird and oversized on her. Her good arm, the one that can still rise and fall, is scabbed, scaly, bruised black and sickly yellow from the intravenous needles, and it reaches for me—

  Stop it! She will get better. She will come home—restored, that’s the word she used, like an old piece of furniture. But that doesn’t sound right. She’ll be home and everything will be back to normal. She promised. That’s enough.

  I open my eyes and brush, hard.

  Max

  Friday, 10:00 A.M.

  “Vanilla? Chocolate? Or swirl?” I ask the kid, even though it’s way too early for ice cream.

  “Chocolate?”

  I wait him out.

  “Vanilla?” He’s nine or ten. His swim trunks hang on bony hips. His hair sticks up from sand and sea. In his fist is a crumpled up, sweaty ten-dollar bill, clutched in a way that says: I don’t have to care about money. He’s North Lakeshore all the way.

  “Swirl. How about swirl?” I offer. I remember being his age, being given money, trusted for the first time to return with change, and I remember the lecture afterward about being careless with money. I may be North Lakeshore, too, but my parents, especially my dad, care about the so-called “value of a dollar.”

  “I hate swirl,” he shouts at me.

  “Vanilla, then?”

  “I hate vanilla. Got any other flavors?”

  I stare him down. “Vanilla or chocolate or swirl.”

  The beach is quickly filling up with more kids like this one, kids who will all run over throwing dollar bills at me like I’m in a cage. My mother used to bring me to this same beach, and it hasn’t changed much since then. Every winter, there are warnings about sand erosion, about the ocean reclaiming the shore, about the barrier of land between the rest of the land and the Atlantic sea washing away, and one recent October there was even a major hurricane. Ninety percent of Long Island lost electrical power. The tide rose across Ocean Parkway and upended it. Water surged into houses. Even those that had always been far enough from the ocean or bay were flooded. And yet every summer, we are back.

  Of course, the larger state park has more shoreline, more room for everyone to spread out, and it’s only a mile or so west of here, past the dunes. Anybody can go there. Some even take buses from I don’t know where—Queens or Brooklyn or other parts of the city. I never go there. Nobody goes there, it’s too crowded, and of course, we have our beach.

  You have to live in the town of Lakeshore to go to this section of the Atlantic Ocean. You have to pay an annual fee and show identification to a group of teens, the ones with the easy jobs, sitting in an air-conditioned tollbooth out front, checking town passes. What everyone loves about this setup is that it feels exclusive. It’s the same water, the same sand as a mile to the west. I think some people, my parents, even believe the problems are over there, not here. They believe that there is a line you can draw in the sand—on one side you’re from Lakeshore and you’re safe, even if you’re from South Lakeshore.

  I’ve got to admit that within the boundaries of the town beach the North Lakeshore high school kids don’t like to be seen with the South Lakeshore high school kids. An outsider wouldn’t know who’s who to tell the difference, though of course, we all know.

  Some days our town beach is twice as packed as the state park, but it is packed only with people like us.

  Trish bustles around me. She’s in her usual defiantly striped tank top and shorts, as if saying to the world, “Nobody is going to tell Trish Nelson what to wear, even if she’s nearly six feet tall and over three hundred pounds.”

  “Excuse me, sweetie,” she says, as if I’m the one in the way.

  Trish is the type of girl I’d never talk to in school, would pass in the hall and look through as if someone her size could be invisible, though I don’t know if there are any girls in my school who have quite her heft and attitude. She’s South Lakeshore all the way. She’s not someone who lets you ignore her. But then, I had to spend my entire summer working with her in the twelve-foot-wide Snack Shack at the edge of the town beach.

  “I’ll get this, sweetie,” she says, saving me, again, from a nine- or ten-year-old boy who can’t make up his mind. Not much different from sixteen—nearly seventeen—year-old boys. That’s why it’s better, sometimes, not to think at all.

  I want to tell the kid that it doesn’t matter whether he chooses vanilla, chocolate, or swirl. His life doesn’t hinge on that decision. But I remember when it seemed like it did. Now, nothing I decide matters. I didn’t want to work here, but my father had a friend who was connected and I got the job without even an interview. My father made me take this job.

  “Your mother knows you’re asking for ice cream at ten in the morning?” asks Trish. “You want to grow up and look like me, sweetie?”

  “I won’t,” he says.

  “You won’t?”

  “I’m a boy.”

  “Yes, you are,” she says, giving him a serious look, making him blush and throw back his thin shoulders. “So what kind of ice cream do you want, big guy? Vanilla or chocolate?”

  He is suddenly shy with her size and intensity.

  “I like chocolate,” she says.

  “I like chocolate, too.”

  “Chocolate.” She gives him the biggest chocolate cone the kid’s probably had all summer. “Two bucks, sport.”

  I squint out to the ocean glistening in the sun, and wish I were anywhere else.

  The kid hands Trish the ten and almost forgets to wait for change. She’s good, though. She calls him back. Sometimes I just put it in my pocket—as a tip, that’s how I think of it. If anyone remembers, or if a mother sends a tearful kid back, I always give up the money, making the kid feel guilty, like it was his fault for being careless and stupid and a kid.

  Peter is another “coworker.” Even in my head, I put the word in quotes because I can’t reconcile that he and I are both in the same job, being paid the same wages. Of course, he’s happy he has the job. He likes the job. This job is a challenge for him—unpacking water bottles, wedging them down into the tubs of ice, making sure that we have enough ice from the ancient ice machine clunking out cubes in the back. The only strange thing about him at first sight is the wo
rk boots. Everyone else wears sneakers to the Snack Shack. One of the rules is no flip-flops. But there’s no rule against wearing big yellow work boots on summer days. Peter clomps around the Snack Shack in his size-thirteen work boots, ready and willing to lift, carry, or stack.

  Barkley usually shows up at some point. He’s twenty-one years old and sees himself as the “assistant” manager. That’s a title he gave himself. He’s the same as me and Trish and Peter, except that he closes up when Phil, the manager, isn’t around, and Phil is never around. In fact, Barkley was the assistant manager of the varsity soccer team when I was a freshman. As far as I could tell, he was in charge of water for the team. So maybe it’s something about the title. I didn’t know him that well, but all summer he’s been acting like we were, and still are, friends, and I’m trapped. I’ve got to admit, today I wouldn’t mind him showing up. Not that I need him for the Snack Shack. Any moron could run the Snack Shack. But I’m thinking of taking him up on something else.

  “Peter! Do you need help, sweetie?” shouts Trish. “If you need another hand, you have to ask!”

  He’s grunting, carrying twice as much as he should be, helping me out, really. Ever since he found out that I hurt my back playing soccer, he’s offered to load up the water bottles and ice from the back. I could lift if I had to, but Peter gets me out of the extra work.

  “Max, I’ll take care of Peter,” says Trish. I guess today she’s decided that she’s in charge. “You take care of Daisy.”

  I hate Daisy. That’s what we call the soft serve ice cream machine. Trish is much better with it. I’m not mechanical. Her pours are neater. Boxes of a thick, milky substance have to be dumped into the back of Daisy several times a day, and somehow, it comes out as ice cream. But Trish knows the tricks to Daisy—when she’s empty, how much to pour in so the ice cream is creamy and smooth and doesn’t melt before the kids leave the Shack, which only means that they’ll come back crying.

  “You guys are my best friends,” says Peter to nobody. He tends to talk to the floor, or to the walls. He has issues with eye contact.

  “We’re not,” I say, lifting a stack of water bottles out of his arms instead of dealing with the ice cream machine. I also hate having Trish order me around, even though I’ve got to admit, she’s good at it. “After tomorrow, I’m never going to see you again. And can you deal with Daisy, Trish? She hates me.”

  “Why am I loved by those who shouldn’t love me?” Trish asks in her over-the-top philosophical way. But she goes to the ice cream machine. The insides smell sour.

  “Now what’s your problem, sweetie?” She’s speaking to the machine.

  “We’re going to see you,” Peter says to me. He spins toward Trish for confirmation, knocking over the cartons of swirl mix. They crash to the floor. Lucky they weren’t opened yet, or the day would be totally ruined. “Aren’t we going to see Max?”

  Trish picks up the boxes for Daisy with ease. She could probably bench-press more than I could, too. “He just means that he’s going back to school—and so are you.”

  “But we can be friends even if we are in different schools. Can’t we, Max?”

  I shift the water bottles down to the ground. There is no answer for this. I don’t want to answer. I don’t want to be friends with him or Trish. I want to erase this summer.

  “Can’t we, Max?”

  How do you tell someone like Pete that these kinds of friendships don’t last, that they weren’t made to last more than the summer even in the best of circumstances, and these certainly haven’t been the best. That some friends aren’t meant to be, except in stories, or books. You miss a penalty shot and no one wants to talk to you, and maybe you don’t want to talk to them, either. You want your own oblivion, and they don’t understand. You don’t answer their texts or even answer the messages of the one or two who venture to call. None of this has much to do with Peter, but you know you won’t be friends with him past tomorrow. I close my eyes. I want to be inside my own head, nowhere else.

  “Didn’t we have a great summer together, Max? We’ll still be friends after it’s over, won’t we?”

  You won’t answer his messages or take his calls. You will never see him again. But I hear myself saying into the dead space between us, “Yup, Peter. We’ll be friends.”

  Claire

  Friday, 11:00 A.M.

  “Izzy. Let’s go. Now. I’m ready to go. We have to get out of here. Let’s move it. Let’s go.”

  Focus on getting out the door. Lock the door. Get in the minivan and drive away as if you’re never coming back.

  On the ride to the beach, Izzy, in the backseat, asks, “Can I open the window, Claire?”

  “No,” I say automatically.

  “I want to taste the ocean.”

  “You can’t taste the ocean.”

  “I can. My lips can lick the air.”

  I know my mother and father hate me to drive Izzy around with the windows open, even if she is mashed into her too-small toddler safety seat with her seat belt across her six-year-old chest. But I love the image of her “licking the air,” and so I say, “Yes, go ahead. But stay in your seat.”

  I unlock the window and she zips it down. She shifts to the edge of the seat. Her hair swoops behind her. She laughs. Her mouth open, she licks the air.

  I smell the ocean before I see it—like a hot burst in my mouth. The sky is bluer here. I always think the beach should be farther than it is, that it should be a long trip, because when I was Izzy’s age it always felt that way. I forget sometimes that we live on an island and that water, the Long Island Sound to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, surrounds us. Unlucky cars slow down to pay the tolls. Those cars go off to the right, to Jones Beach, the state beach. I head the other way, toward our town beach. The parking lot here is less crowded than the others down Ocean Parkway. I flash our town pass.

  “Promise me again, you’re not going to tell Daddy that I brought you to the beach?” I nod my head to her, urging her to imitate me, which she readily does.

  “I never told the other times. Did I?”

  “I don’t think you did.”

  “I am not going to tell anybody, not even me,” she repeats.

  I park the whale of a minivan. Across the parking lot, we hold hands, race-walk. My beach bag jostles against my shoulder. Cars shoot around us, and soon we are running, our ponytails loosening, the sea salt caught in our hair. Ahead of us is the tunnel that skims under Ocean Parkway from the parking lots to the actual oceanfront. The tunnel, short enough, is dark, damp; it’s a passage to another world. On one side is endless heat, on the other the ocean breeze. On one side, pavement, on the other, sand.

  When I was Izzy’s age, I was scared of the tunnel. Even then, it had no lights and water dripped down the concrete sides, no matter how dry a summer. Bugs drowned in its stagnant pools. My mother would encourage me to run, meet her on the other side. She wanted me to be brave, she said. Screams would echo, my own and of other kids. All of us were sent running through the dark. Now, I plunge in with Izzy in hand. No one permits the little kids to run loose anymore. We all have bags and chairs and children in tow and somehow we hold on to it all. I’m still a little afraid of touching the walls, of the quick darkness, of the stench of urine mixed with sea and coconut sunscreen. I wonder if my mother felt fear and just hid it from me.

  Izzy tugs loose, races ahead of me.

  Packs of families swarm by me. Mothers pull wagons of gear with them—they are prepared not just for a day at the beach, but for a lifetime, with coolers, blankets, chairs, umbrellas, and sets of underwear and shorts and T-shirts.

  I bump my bag against the shoulder of one girl striding in her black bikini and silver flip-flops toward the beach. She gives me a look that says, “How dare you touch me,” until even she sees that I’m no one, no one she needs to be worried about, and then makes a face and rolls her eyes and fixes her lipstick as if that’s what the real problem is. I never understood lipstick on
the beach. Hers is hot pink.

  “Izzy,” I say, realizing I’ve lost sight of her.

  She’ll know to wait on the other side. She’s a smart kid, starting first grade next week. Sweat stings my lips, mixes with the sea air, and I can taste salt as if I’m melting. “Izzy! Wait up!” I say as if I can see her. She’s disappeared among the bare legs and portable freezers and carts packed high with supplies. I break into the sunlight.

  Along the boardwalk and onto the beach, in a trick of light, people meld into other people. Girls in bikinis swim together—not really swim, they don’t go in the water; but they walk in schools together, a flutter of legs. The guys in the baggy, long swim trunks crash into the water as one; they plunge into the waves headfirst, and rise, flexing their abs and running their hands over their flat, hard stomachs. I hurry along the boardwalk searching for my sister, for a little girl in pink—no, in green with frogs—and curly blond hair. She is lost. The girl in the bikini with the pink lipstick slithers past with her friends surrounding her, all of them in bikinis and lipstick.

  “Izzy!”

  Once when I was Izzy’s age, my father brought me to the beach alone (I don’t know where my mother was, since they rarely split up), but I was with him one moment and then I wasn’t. I turned around and he wasn’t there. Sea gulls, hundreds of them, had landed near me in too-still lines. Until then, I was going along on the beach, certain I’d find my father. But these birds had black beady eyes that didn’t blink. I was sure they would snatch me up and drop me in the middle of the ocean. I would be lost and never found. I screamed, “Daddy.” And every father looked like my father: dark curly hair, muscled bodies strong enough to pick me up with one arm, a bathing suit that was blue or green and had a pattern on it like palm trees, a soft belly and a broad chest matted with lots of hair, thick enough to comb. I ran from those sea gulls certain if I ran fast enough I’d find my father. I was lost for what seemed like hours. My father swore to my mother it was only for a half hour, an hour tops that I was missing. But in that time, a half hour, an hour, I knew that the only one who could save me was me.