33
IT’S a shame that this beach is wasted on people like Peach. All these waterfront mansions are empty, even though it’s unseasonably, gloriously warm. (Knock on wood.) The beach couldn’t be more pristine, yet none of these fucking second-home owners drive to LC to pay their respects. What idiots. I, on the other hand, am a grateful beachcomber.
Yesterday, I followed the tracks you and Peach left all the way down to the jetty that reaches into the bay. This is a great place to hide, to wait. There are scattered boulders—KEEP OFF ROCKS—and there’s a weathered wooden walkway that ends in the sand. I dug out a foxhole beneath the walkway and I think it is warmer here than it was in either of the damn boathouses. Although, it’s impossible to compare, given how cold it was the night of my accident.
In any case, the sun is coming up and it won’t be long now. Soon, Peach will be here, alone.
Candace would love it here. The last time I saw the sun rise on a beach, I was with her. This is no time to be thinking of Candace, but how can I not? We saw the sun rise on Brighton Beach and as it got brighter, she tried harder and harder to break up with me. I asked her to walk down to the water with me. She did. She was cruel in that way; a nicer girl would have said no, and left me to cry on my own, but she wanted to see me at my worst so she stuck around.
“I am leaving you,” she said.
Then go, bitch. Go.
It wasn’t my fault that Candace followed me down to the water’s edge and it wasn’t my fault that I picked her up and held her down in the water and watched her pass on to the great beyond. She wanted to be there, or she wouldn’t have gone down there with me. She knew she was killing me and she knew that I was not the type to go down without a fight.
I don’t blame Peach for being so miserable, the same way I don’t blame Candace for wanting to escape her family. What a shame to be so angered by what you don’t have that you treat what you do have like it’s nothing. She’s not grateful to have an extra home in a place where the biggest danger is Taylor Fucking Swift. She’s a lot like Candace, who wasn’t grateful for her voice, her talent.
I have a little time so I walk a few feet down to the shore. I like the way the water comes and erases my steps. I think of that fucking poem from middle school where the dude walking on the beach isn’t alone because Jesus is carrying him on his shoulders and I smile. For years, I thought it was the other way around, that the guy in the poem was carrying Jesus, you know, the way a Hare Krishna carries his tambourine, the way a Jewish boy carries a Torah at his bar mitzvah. I didn’t think of Jesus Christ as being this guy giving piggyback rides to fuckups and I don’t even leave one set of footprints, so take that, middle school poem. I admit, I am kind of grumpy. The last food I ate was that Danish. I cross over the walkway built by some family with something against walking on white sand and return to my foxhole and wait.
At last, I see Peach emerge on the patio, a hot red speck in the distance. She stretches and she trots down the walkway and here we go. With each passing second, I can hear her more clearly, her breathing, her feet pounding, and the Elton John blasting from her phone. She passes me, swoosh, and I leap out of my foxhole like a jack in the box and run after her. She doesn’t hear me. She is fearless on this beach. I grab her by the ponytail. Before she can even scream, I ram her into the sand and straddle her back. She struggles, kicking, but her mouth is in the sand and Elton won’t stop singing—sitting like a princess perched in her electric chair—and I pick up the rock in my pocket.
She squirms her head to the side and her eyes are more beautiful than I realized and she recognizes me and she spits, “You.”
She might be the strongest woman I have ever known and though her last words are spoken, she’s still struggling, gurgling. Her skin flares, Nantucket red, and all the exercise instilled her with a superhuman strength, a lung capacity that boggles my mind. I don’t blame her for fighting. Because she was raised by bigoted, hateful monsters, she never celebrated her life and I think this is why she musters the strength—those legs still quiver!—to maximize her last moments on earth. Her fingertips reach for my arm; it’s too late, Peach. Her eyeballs sail north, toward the top of her head, and we can all learn something from an untimely tragic death. What a danger, blaming other people for your problems. What a waste of a life. Had she disowned her cunty family and moved to one of her sunny foreign havens and been a bartender or a Pilates instructor, anything, doesn’t matter, she could have settled down with a nice, like-minded girl and paid respects for all her blessings—health, brains, muscles—by being true to herself. Nonetheless, fuck her parents. Don’t make a baby if you’re not capable of unconditional love.
She is fading and Elton is louder than the waves and I don’t hear you anymore, we’ve all gone crazy lately, my friends out there rolling ’round the basement floor and I owe her a little help. I hit her head with the rock and she is quiet, at last. I flip her over and I’m shaking. She is gone, at peace, but what about me? Elton sings you almost had your hooks in me, didn’t you dear, you nearly had me roped and tied and I feel roped and tied out here, alone with dead, heavy Peach. Elton seems louder or is that just because Peach is quieter? I try to focus on moving her but then I hear a slip noose in my darkest dreams and I pause. I panic. What if you decide to go for a run? What if Officer Nico runs on this beach? I have to move fast. I load her pockets with rocks just in case she doesn’t disappear. I have to collect more rocks because this jacket has a lot of pockets and Elton would have walked head on into the deep end of the river.
I need to calm down. I close my eyes and see Candace’s open eyes in the mucky dreck of Brighton Beach and I open my eyes and I take Peach’s phone out of the contraption band on her arm. It’s my phone now and I cut off Elton as he swears they’re coming in the morning with a truck to take me home. No they’re not and I lift her body. Peach is so clothed and Candace was nearly naked, only wearing a little black dress over a bikini. It was summer, drunk girls drown, it happens, her family accepts that she is never coming home—and I walk toward the water. It is winter. Sad girls walk into the water to die. It happens.
I do not keep off rocks anymore and I carry Peach Salinger onto the jetty. The rocks are smooth and dry and I am steady. Peach is heavy because of the rocks in her pockets, because of the weight of her misery. I count to three and then I drop her into the ocean. The waves welcome her the way the water at Brighton Beach embraced Candace. I start an e-mail from Peach to you. It’s so easy to know what to say:
Beck, I need to go away. Lately, when I run, it’s like Virginia Woolf is running with me. She said, “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.” She was right. It’s worse to be locked in waiting for someone who isn’t coming. Much worse.
Enjoy the cottage. I love you, Beckalicious.
Bye,
Peach Is
My body is slick with sweat and my muscles ache from the exertion and I crack a smile because I understand what Peach was talking about earlier. I’d love to peel off my clothes right now. They do itch.
I check on you once before leaving. It’s less than an hour since I sent you the e-mail from Peach and you appear to be handling it all with aplomb. You’re blasting your Bowie and trying on Peach’s clothes in the great room while you dance and call Lynn and Chana and your mother and pig out. You are happy, Beck. You tell Lynn what you told your mother and what you told Chana: “This isn’t my fault. Peach ran away every other month in college. Hell, who wouldn’t with that kind of money? Also, I think it’s for the best. She seemed almost happy that Benji was dead. And yes, I know how sick that sounds.”
“Forget Benji,” Lynn says. “It’s sad, but being dead doesn’t make him into a good guy. Have you talked to Joe?” Go Lynn!
“No,” you say. “But I want to.”
That is all I need. I leave.
I walk up the deserted street into town. Nico’s guys at the body shop are super friendly. There’s not a lot going on (no shit) and they love the summa weathah sahprize so my brown beast is already good to go. The repairs cost four hundred bucks, and I’m glad I came prepared. New England is not a lucky place for me, Beck, so I took an advance on my salary before I headed out. The roads are clear and Peach’s phone has a lot of good music. Maybe my luck in New England is changing.
I’M almost home when I remember the mug of my DNA in the cottage. I hit the brakes, hard. But I don’t have to worry. People with second homes get off on giving out keys to maids, carpenters, and interior designers. I’m not gonna worry about a mug of dried-up piss, not after all the good I just did.
Besides, this is about you, and your Twitter confirms that you’re already on the way back to Bank Street. I know it will take time for you to open slowly petal by petal, as spring opens. But you will open. Peach can’t drag you down anymore. You’re free. She was never going to loosen her grip on you and you’re gonna be a whole new person without that pressure. She can rest now. You can relax. And when that first whiff of spring hits the air you will pass a bookstore or a horse-drawn carriage and find yourself blushing, ripe with want. And you’ll reach out to me, Joe.