Page 12 of On Fire Island

She won the first game, which prompted her new friend, Gabe, a drummer from Brooklyn who had an upcoming gig on the island and planned on staying the week, to insist on a rematch. Three games later the place emptied out and it was clearly time to head home, though Renee still didn’t want to.

“What now?” she asked Gabe, madly out of character.

“A slice to soak up the tequila?”

They waited on line at the pizza place with more young people. She was too buzzed to be embarrassed in front of the few she recognized.

“That kid used to babysit for my son,” she told Gabe.

“How old is your son?” he inquired.

“Sixteen. How old are you?” She laughed.

“Almost thirty.”

He was still at the age where you made yourself older instead of younger. After thirty I started doing the opposite.

“I was almost thirty ten years ago,” she responded—peeling off a couple of years as she did.

“Was it a good ten years?” he asked.

If he had asked her that question a year ago, she would have said it was a great ten years. She’d had a happy marriage, a loving husband, a beautiful boy who had grown into a fine young man, and a killer career doing just what she’d always wanted to do—helping women exit unhealthy relationships intact, both emotionally and financially. Her success had helped her to slay her childhood demons and assure that she would never need a man, or anyone else, to support her—financially at least.

But now she answered with “That’s a loaded question.”

“Want to eat on the beach, check out the starry night?”

Another loaded question.

“OK, sure,” she said, clearly wondering if the words she heard coming out of her mouth were her own. I was questioning them too from the never-paint-outside-the-lines Renee I knew and loved. I couldn’t wait to see where this was all going.

They only ate a few bites on the beach before the pizza ended up in the sand, a casualty of his lips brushing against hers. It took her by surprise but was totally welcome and followed by a more passionate kiss and then a frenzy of wet and warm tongues and teeth connecting and teasing, and fingers, his, playing in her hair. I could almost see the thoughtWhat am I doing?run through her head, before running out just as quickly. As far as I knew, it was the first man, other than Tuck, that she had been with since she was in her twenties. Thanks to the combination of tequila andemotional numbness, she let herself go in a very atypical way. I was happy she had the chance to escape from her mind, to feel something besides sadness and regret.

“Was it a good ten years?”

If she was thinking of any of it, it all disappeared as the drummer’s hand reached under her skirt.

I left and headed to the dead boat in hopes of finding Ben.

nine

The Dead Boat

The midnight ferry appeared with Ben aboard under a dark sky. Despite the way the drummer had sold the starry night to Renee, there was only a sliver of a moon and a few stars to light it up. Ben was thankfully still gripping the candle but worried that he hadn’t yet lit it. I was in the dark on this as well. Was my soul looking for that particular flame to light my way to heaven? I wanted to at least stay the weekend.

More tears came for Ben, as he stared blankly out the ferry window. Sally did her best to keep up the pace, licking each away as it escaped his eyes. Thank goodness he had our dog. Her presence infused a small thread of warmth in his hollowed heart, assuring it wouldn’t implode from sheer emptiness.

It was very dark out, but Ben knew every inch of the way from the dock to our house by memory. His gait was unusually heavy. Each step looked as if he were about to fall off the horizon. The darkness was a reminder of the unlit candle, and I could see a fresh layer of panic come over him. He pulled the ziplocked pillowcase out of his pocket, opened up a little corner, and stuck his nose in, inhaling my scent before quickly resealing it. He’d oncesaid that burying his nose in my neck and inhaling deeply transported him to childhood visits to his grandma’s house in the country, the ethereal essence of the morning grass after a rain—he’d said I smelled like watermelon air. It was that kind of description that surprised me, both in his writing and in real life. He was a true enigma, my husband, with his clenched jaw and brooding eyes in contrast to his tender heart.

He was careful not to turn the outside light on when he reached the house. Even though it was after midnight and everyone was asleep, he still worried about drawing attention to himself. He was certain that, for him, it was best to grieve alone. He lifted the mat up for the key, but it wasn’t there. Attention be damned, I could see he was close to screaming at the top of his lungs. He jiggled the door handle, and the door popped open. It wasn’t surprising, really. Everyone from the plumber to our neighbors knew where we kept the spare key. It was a testament to the simplicity of owning a house on a car-free island where the action peaks at drunken fisticuffs and stolen bicycles. Though I heard people talking at the funeral about someone breaking in to houses in the middle of the night just to have a snack and take a load off. TheFire Island Newsdubbed the unknown person “the Goldilocks Interloper.”

Once inside, Ben set the candle down on top of the fireplace mantel and struck a long match to light it, wondering if there was a prayer for the occasion. He made one up, a mishmash of things he had heard over the years in synagogues and churches, hoping that doing his best would count for something, and followed it with a tearful and heartfelt amen. His efforts touched me, though they came with uneventful results. Nothing seemed to change for either of us.

Ben must have been hungry. He hadn’t eaten since themorning, and even then he didn’t do more than pick at whatever was put in front of him. We hadn’t been to the beach in months, so there wasn’t a morsel of food on the horizon until the market opened in the morning. I prayed he would sleep until then. He kicked off his shoes and stripped to his T-shirt and boxers, without even bothering to turn on the light. He slipped into our bed, which he expected to be cold but was oddly warm.

Even after the big nap in the car, Ben’s eyes looked heavy with the possibility of more sleep, a state far preferable to him now than being awake. He closed his eyes and tossed and turned before feeling a large lump move in the bed next to him—a lump that was most definitely not Sally.

Who’s been sleeping in my bed?I thought as images of the aforementioned Goldilocks interloper rushed to mind.

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