They lay flattened on the beach, pinned down by the gravity of the things they longed for, as the house fell slowly into the sea.
Get up, McKenna told herself, the sand working deeper into her hair. Get up and walk inside, go to bed and do not choose who you dream of. But she did not move from between her two half-brothers, Neil and Joshua. Blaming the joint they passed between them, blaming the humidity that blocked their mouths like a kiss, not one of them got up. Two or three moths left the temptation of the porch light to get drunk off McKenna’s perfume.
For a long time after the ember went dead at the edge of someone’s lips they lingered, as the milk-stained moths got desperate. A few stars upstaged the clouds, looking extravagantly young. The house yearned one inch closer to the ocean and the Atlantic held its arms out, waiting and blue.
* * *
The house hadn’t been made to last so long.
It had been built in the nineteen-twenties, meant not to be a fixture, but another pearl on a necklace of wealth being constantly wound and unwound. It might go, it might stay, it might be sold for profit or for loss. Nothing then was meant to last since hope in the form of bigger houses would be for sale the next day.
When poverty crashed down again, only the house survived. First because the family could not sell it, then because they could not let it go, each generation kept coming back. The house’s four pale stories still stood like the figure of a twenties coquette, the last beauty at a party whose charm had long since drained away.
When the three almost-siblings hauled in bags packed for long weekends they realized, again, how grand the structure was. The porch curled out like the edge of a slip and from the breakfast room on the top floor the sunset looked like an art collector’s prize. So close to the ocean, the waves drowned out all other noises on the air.
They’d come, not to be reminded of this, but because Neil’s impressive new lease didn’t start for three days, because Joshua thought there was something to save, because their parents were not sure NYU was doing McKenna good. Because, despite what Joshua said or hoped, erosion was pulling the shoreline too close. Soon they’d have to pack the closets, switch off the lights and sell what they could for scrap.
As McKenna searched through kitchen cupboards she caught strands of her half-brothers’ conversation. Joshua was saying something about a petition, a jetty, a company that reshaped shores.
With a pang of guilt, she realized she hadn’t seen one of his art shows since she left for freshman year. Joshua used to paint the ancient gods stranded in New York or Tokyo, wearing windbreakers and jeans and facing a future in which they were even less sacred. It was hard to say how you knew them for Zeus and Aphrodite without their thunderbolts and laurel crowns. But everybody, somehow, could tell.
The boys—by then more like men—set the last bag on the coffee table and instinctively turned to McKenna. They were only stepbrothers—one the child of McKenna’s mother and the other her father’s son—both sharing in McKenna’s genes. She walked over to them instantly, ready with something to say. She’d long since agreed to be the best excuse for common ground between them.
* * *
It only took a moment too long for Neil to reach for the bottle. McKenna watched Joshua disappear inside, and her attention drifted back into her glass. Neil leaned over to light the citronella candles permanently stationed on the porch. The flames jumped to life and lit up blue eyes set shallow in his face, the ledge of his dark hair casting shadows.
“You look like you’re going to tell me ghosts stories,” McKenna said.
“You want me to tell you a ghost story?”
“I want you to tell me a story.”
“Once upon a time there was a princess whose castle fell into the sea.”
“Oh, enough about this house.”
“Y’know, I think I’ll really miss it,” he said, looking up at the ceiling.
It was a moment before McKenna could name the emotion that gripped her. Hours later, she still wondered why she should feel gratitude just then.
She remembered how, one night over Christmas break during freshman year, she snuck home late, eyes unfocused and blood alcohol-sweet . She did not remember how she wound up on the floor, half in her room, half in the hall. But this she knew: that it was Neil, in his quiet grown-up competence, who propped her up against her bed. The warmth of his fingers, as he pulled her hair into a rubber band, reminded her of waking to the heat of summer mornings.
After they finished their wine on the porch, Neil and McKenna called it a night. She headed to her room to shower while he rummaged around for the book he’d brought with him. She caught a glimpse of him as she walked upstairs and briefly, desperately, wondered what he was thinking. Then he was out of sight, and she was sorry.
The plane ride and wine had left McKenna’s head sluggish, as hot and overcrowded as a subway car in July. She tugged off her clothes and stood naked before the shell-rimmed bathroom mirror, taking notes: the flare and tuck of her hips, the bags beneath her eyes, the pale curls gone electric in the damp. She tried to see herself as a stranger would, a man, but she couldn’t summon the energy to look through the eyes of any other human being.
When the door clapped open and Neil walked in, she jumped, she was caught so off guard. Neil’s face, in the first moment she saw it, bore the same look that hers must have had: free to be tired, sure of being alone. It took them both a minute before they understood.
The house had been scrambled over the years, its rooms cut up and recombined like an unsolved puzzle with stationary parts. The bathroom attached to McKenna’s room opened, at the other end, to Neil’s. McKenna stood still, too old to shriek and hide herself, too tired to laugh it off. She blinked at him, pale and shaved for swimsuit season, bare as a ghost.
Neil pulled an exaggerated face and swung back across the threshold, pulling the door behind him. If it had been morning they might have laughed at each other from across the thin wall. As it was, McKenna only smiled as she shook her head, ran the tap, tested the water with her hand. The look on his face reminded her of old stories she would’ve thought she’d long forgotten.
* * *
Neil lay face-up on the porch, sunglasses hiding whether he was sleeping or watching the progress of the late-morning sky. Every so often strains of music snaked out of his headphones and McKenna could not, though she tried, think of the name of the song. It was some rock standard older than they were, a title she should have known. She hummed it off-time as she rattled through drawers for something to write a grocery list on.
Her first thought, when she saw the papers, was a simple swear as her stomach rocked. Her second thought: of course Neil already knows.
She understood enough of the terms to confirm what she knew as she thumbed through the pages. Her father’s signature left the house to its ruin and his stepson in the dark. She set the file down and shut the drawer.
The clean wail of a trumpet shook loose from Neil’s headphones as the house shifted and creaked. It had been witness to greater tragedies: heart attacks and love affairs, bad marriages, bad debts. It did not seem to mind.
Joshua thudded over the final lip of the stairs and walked into the living room. His fingers bounced restlessly against his thigh. McKenna recognized the shirt he wore, a faded blue Oxford that had slept in the house’s closets for years. Half an inch too much of his wrists fell through the sleeves.
“What’s up?” he asked quietly, meeting her gaze.
For a moment, she really thought she might tell him. But then she gave a shrug and a closed-lipped smile that technically told him no lies. “I just realized I haven’t seen you guys since I turned 21. We should get a drink tonight,” she said. She looked him up and down again, then asked with an interest that was suddenly unfeigned, “Don’t you think?”
* * *
McKenna was glad Joshua took her question seriously. When he’d nodded her pulse had picked up, a familiar excitement she never tired of replaying. By the time Neil came inside and added his agreement she’d half-forgotten the paperwork in the drawer. She could already hear him telling jokes that no one would remember in the morning.
McKenna was the last one ready that night. She skidded downstairs in heels while Joshua waited in the cab and Neil pulled on one of the cigarettes he’d quit months before. When she rushed out the door she almost ran into him and they both froze in the sudden wake of each other. For a moment, they said nothing. Then Neil dropped his cigarette and held the cab door open, saying gallantly, “after you.”
The club was just like any other, noisy and dark to degrees that always seemed new. None of them quite knew how to act with each other, but without the pressures of eye contact and conversation they soon let their postures go, unchained their trains of thought. As they pushed toward the bar it got harder to keep together. And, as they drank, they stopped trying.
McKenna wondered if either brother remembered just then the nights she’d spent in hospitals, sleeping it off with an IV in her arm. Both times, she realized, she’d lost track of her ER wristbands. She’d meant to hang onto them, as souvenirs. She wasn’t, as her parents silently feared, addicted. Drinking didn’t cross her mind when anything better was on it. It was only that so often there was nothing to do but pre-game and bar-hop, nothing to look forward to but sinking into her bed delirious and swollen-tongued. A few times she’d fallen flat to the sidewalk as she walked from the bar with her friends. She harbored vague memories of metallic grit against her lips, of trying to summon the strength to throw up.
That was why her parents had so encouraged the visit, a respite to a house that had seen its share of alcohol and discontent. She didn’t try to tell them that she never minded winding up on the pavement, slipping through memories that were only half real.
When McKenna realized she couldn’t see Joshua she was already on her way gone, dancing with strangers and taking compliments she couldn’t hear. Neil, she knew, was talking to a woman in a backless dress. But from a vantage point that should’ve showed her both brothers, McKenna could only see one.
McKenna scanned the room again and knew that Joshua had gone. She pictured it briefly—a dolled-up twig on her somber brother’s arm—and laughed as she finished her drink.
She looked to Neil as he eased a woman against the wall of the bar. A finger of her hair swung against his cheek. McKenna wondered if he’d ever loved someone enough to believe the only evil in this world is the fact that people leave it.
When she glanced around the room again, the dark-haired man who’d come in grinning with another group was looking back at her. Soon she felt two not-uncertain hands on her, and it only took a glimpse across her shoulder to be sure it was the right him.
Clouds danced and parted over the coast and moths with wood grain wings threw themselves into the light. McKenna laughed gently into a different stranger’s teeth. She’d done nothing she regretted until she pulled her kisses to his neck and realized, in a glance, just who he reminded her of.
* * *
McKenna and Neil saw Joshua as they were walking back to the house. They shouted and waved at him broadly, as though he could’ve missed them on that empty seaside street. Then one of them urged a walk to the beach, an edge taken off, with urgency that seemed strange at the time. But Joshua asked no questions and went along, letting Neil’s steadier hands roll the joint.
McKenna. It was McKenna who seemed so rattled, smiling and lit with fear.
* * *
When she woke, McKenna could not at first remember why shame was weighing her fingertips down.
She pressed her fists to her eyes and tried to concentrate on the smell of the house, its linen and salt, its sunscreen, driftwood and wine. Had she reached for Neil as they lay on the beach last night, getting stoned? She remembered the action but thought it was a dream. She couldn’t really have rolled across his elbow and kissed his collarbone, reproachless. God forbid, she thought. But she knew even then that God did not restrain, only guarded sadly over them.
Footsteps cascaded up the stairs and she heard Neil in Joshua’s door.
“All right, nap time’s over,” he said. “Wake up, you lazy sonofabitch.” His voice was pure muscle, full of grit and hidden springs.
McKenna moved rockily to her doorframe and stared into the room across the hall. When Neil turned and saw her there he grinned.
“Good, you’re up,” he said, tugging the sheet from Joshua’s legs. “Get dressed. We’re going to the beach.”
Nothing happened, but for the rest of her life McKenna would dream of that afternoon. They flocked to the water like children, baptized back into younger selves. They whooped as they offered themselves to the waves, dizzy and reassured each time they were pummeled. When they bobbed to the surface seawater left mosaics down their spines.
Sunlight poured through the billion windows of McKenna’s skin while Neil stood waist-deep in the water, indifferent beneath a hot-blooded sky. He looked as immortal as Joshua’s gods. She had never felt younger.
Joshua floated on his back, his sunglasses two mirrors of the sky. “What’s so interesting,” McKenna asked, but in reply he only smiled.
Neil dove under and grabbed McKenna’s ankles, an old game long forgotten. She shrieked until the lifeguard whistled, until saltwater fizzed in her throat. She splashed Neil back and wished him well, wished him whatever it was he wanted.
Through all the years ahead she left unquestioned the pull, the push, that never quite abandoned her. Though there were other men—men she married, men she loved—she kept the scraps of Neil’s affection somewhere deeper. The only thing she could not forgive him was his death. She never did accept the thoughtlessness with which he left her behind.
The beach kept them long that day and they got home later than they’d planned. Sun-sick and tired, they did not try to talk, till Joshua picked up an old conversation with Neil. “You’ll look at it later, won’t you?” he said as he dropped his towel across a chair.
Neil stopped short, unsettled, as if some pest he thought he’d gotten rid of had darted back across the kitchen floor. “Joshua, don’t waste your time,” he finally said, with a quietness that was not quite gentle.
“What?”
“Repaving the foundation, or putting in a jetty, whatever it is you want to do. Just don’t bother.”
“Why not?” Joshua said, his color deepening beneath a new sunburn.
“It’s done, OK?” Neil said, his voice cracking with the surprise that anyone could be so naïve, could pin all the hope in his stepbrother’s voice on something that mattered so little. “Dad sold the property to the city already. I saw the papers, all of them. It’s done.”
In the round beat of silence that followed, McKenna suddenly remembered a girl she used to see around with Joshua. She remembered brown hair and a bitten-lipped smile and wondered what had happened to her.
“That’s what this is, a last fucking hoorah” Neil continued, unchecked. “That being the case, we should probably cut it with the theatrics. I don’t need this.”
McKenna did not move as the argument unfolded. She let the emphasis of Neil’s words sail up her bloodstream to a part of her memory age would never touch, and she stood there getting cold in her blue plaid bikini. She did not bother to catch what Joshua swore as he lunged at his stepbrother. She did not hear Neil’s reply as he, barely moving, knocked him back.
No one moved again until McKenna turned and walked upstairs, looking not at them but at her phone as she searched for a name she could not recall. She wouldn’t waste her time replaying the looks on their faces. She would not think how they were less than brothers and she as much a sister as either one would ever have.
She found the name, sent her message, slipped her phone back in her shorts. The cool wall against her head was all she was asking of God.
* * *
The Jack Daniels’ amber shadow somehow suited the pastel woodwork of the room. “It’s an old house,” McKenna explained. “It’s been ours since it was built. There’ve been three weddings, two deaths, and a baby born here.”
“Who are you, a Kennedy?” the man who was not Neil softly teased.
Instead of answering she kissed him, drunk and overtired. She let loose her obsession for his dark hair and square teeth, the puckish turn of his voice. When she felt the pressure of his thumbs on her hips she nodded, long past coyness and negotiation. Hello and welcome in, she thought as she traced the machinations of his back. May you get everything you ever wanted.
* * *
McKenna pressed her fingers to her ribs, her hips, her collarbone. It was ten thirty-seven a.m. Was Neil upstairs drinking coffee already, pale sunlight falling over his skin? Was he waiting for her, sly-smiling, ready to tease her about her late-night guest? God, it was their last morning there. She swung out of bed before more time could pass, pulling a flannel over the elastic shorts and camisole she wore. She hugged the collar tight, then—after one grain of hesitation—let it loose over her breastbone again.
“Morning,” McKenna said, and “morning,” Neil replied, sounding like statements instead of well-wishes. She got half a smile before he turned back to his phone. And with a cup of lukewarm coffee in her hands, McKenna began to realize what she might long ago have known. That he found her beautiful, and did not care. That sooner or later she’d have to learn how to harbor the things she could not have.
She watched as Neil stood up and glanced at her, taking in her red-eyed tangle. He stopped humming, a bewildered grin blooming on his face. He seemed unable to comprehend how a one-night stand could paint even her in the colors of strange sorrow.
Neil moved toward McKenna and briefly, impulsively, caught her face between his palms. Close enough to kiss, he only smiled. Remember, she told herself, be reasonable. Remember that you can have less but no more.
______
Photo credit: mallix / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)