Page 91 of Stony Point Summer
He drags a knuckle along his scarred jaw. “Can we make tonight a date?”
“You mean make Elsa’s grand opening … a date?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Well. I can pick you up early and, let’s see. Maybe go out first. Grab a coffee nearby.”
“A coffee?”
“Sure. You know. There’s this bakery just past the Niantic drawbridge. It’s a nice spot, a little Italian place. We can get an espresso and maybe a cannoli.”
“Jason, I’m sure Elsa will have a spread of food. We’d ruin our appetites.”
“We can split something, then. They have these amazing Italian cookies there. So we can just have a cookie. To dunk in the coffee. And we’ll … talk.” He pauses, and the waves break on the beach. The dune grasses rustle in the breeze. All he wants is to sit at a tiny table, with her alone. For a little while. “It’s not really about the food, Maris,” he adds.
And waits.
And listens.
A few seconds pass when he only hears the muffled silence that comes through a phone. Oh, she’s there, on the other end. Maybe he hears a quick breath? A sigh. Or nothing, it’s hard to tell, until her quiet voice reaches his ear.
“Okay,” she says.
He switches the phone to his other ear. “What?”
“Yes, Jason. I’ll get a coffee with you.”
“You’re sure?”
“Do you want to give me a chance to change my mind?”
“No. So I’ll pick you up, then. For our date. And after the bakery, we’ll go to Elsa’s together.”
“That’ll be nice.”
* * *
Which is all Jason needs to hear.That’ll be nice. Maris’ words repeat in his head as he crosses the deck and sits down for lunch. And again he hears them as he unwraps his roast beef grinder from Pizza Palace. As he picks up and eats some fallen olive-oil-soaked shredded lettuce. As he snaps open his can of soda and takes a long swallow. As he dumps his bag of potato chips on his plate.
“She thinks our date will be nice,” he says to Maddy as he tosses the patiently waiting dog a couple of chips.
So the day took a turn Jason didn’t really see coming. Damn, life’s like the tides sometimes. It just keeps moving, keeps changing. Today alone he’s gone from being the brunt of Maris’ barbed words in front of the TV crew, to being her date.
“Not bad,” he says to himself as he reaches for Neil’s canvas scrapbook. After unwinding the old fishing line around it, he uses the deck table’s conch shell centerpiece to hold the pages open. Lifting his dripping grinder then, Jason takes a big bite and skims some of his brother’s passages. This volume in particular holds a lot of photographs. Just about every Stony Point summer seems documented. There’s Kyle and Vinny charging into the water for a race to the raft. And there, there’s Lauren—painting at an easel set up on the beach. Her blonde hair is in a loose braid; her smile, genuine. Jason studies that picture, pulling the scrapbook closer. There’s a certain look in her grey eyes that, well … it’s obvious no one but Neil was with her that day.
Jason sits back and sips his soda. Turning the page then, he sees a picture of his father. “Dad,” Jason whispers. His father’s sitting on his stone bench on the bluff. Neil must’ve come up behind him and got the shot just as his father turned to him. There’s a serious look on his father’s face—a look he often had sitting there. And there’s that thin scar running through his right eyebrow, some injury inflicted in ’Nam where a line of lashes never grew since. Jason sees a little bit of Neil in his father, too. In the dark hair. In the astute brown eyes. The date beneath the photo is from the spring, twelve years ago—two years before Neil died.
There are architectural shots, too. Cottages Jason recognizes by the details themselves: a copper weathervane on a rambling two-story on Sea View Road. A painted arched door on the tiny bungalow on Hillcrest. Some cottages Jason doesn’t recognize. Old places fallen in disrepair. Sadly neglected cottages in which Neil’s lens still found some underlying beauty. These images definitely hold material Jason can mine now for his restorations.
He skims through the pages and reads some of Neil’s passages. Paragraphs about storm swells breaking on the rocks, and something about the abandoned fishing shack he’d found beyond Little Beach. Another page has a list of words Neil penned, each word beginning with the letter V:Vital…Versus…Violence. Beneath the long list, his brother had sketched the V-shaped Vietnam Memorial sculpture in New Haven. His pencil lines vary, outlining the straight path leading to it, but roughing in the black granite with strong zigzag strokes.
Downing a handful of potato chips then, Jason turns the page and sees that mysterious photograph of old beach binoculars. The coin-operated viewer is similar to the one he bought for the Fenwicks, so he studies this picture. It may give him a framework for the deck notch he’s working on for Mitch.
Still, just like the first time Jason saw this picture, there’s something haunting about the image. The silver-topped viewer is mounted on a black pedestal base. The viewer faces a distant harbor, so a quarter will give a panoramic view off the coast. There, a mist rises above the water, like the day was humid. Or the hour, late.
It’s not the viewer that gets to Jason, though—it’s who’s looking through the lens. Someone is standing very close and bent forward, face pressed against the eyepiece. That same someone leans to the side, too, as though turning the heavy binoculars to pan the horizon. Both hands grip knobs on the sides of the silver top. Whatever’s come into sight has the person riveted.
