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“And what are you doing standing there?”
“I’m pretending.”
“Pretending what?”
“That when you’d look up, you’d still be as happy as you usually are to see me. That your face would light up how it does, you know . . .” He uncrosses his arms, motions with the keys in his hands to his own face. “That I’d get to watch you get a little happy.”
She takes a closer look at him. “Did I?”
“Half,” he says.
She smiles, looking down at her piles, reaching for more newspaper, trying to decide what to use it for. “That’s not so good.”
“It’s not so bad,” he says. “I thought I’d be starting at less than that. So maybe we’re doing okay.”
The newspaper is turning her hands black and yellow, and she turns it over, away from herself, which is when she catches the headline on the top of the page, the headline announcing that today is the anniversary of the hurricane. Sixty-nine years ago today. Sixty-nine years ago. What was happening in this room then, she wonders? How did they come out the other side of it?
Nate walks deeper into the room, toward her, so that he is just a few feet away from her. He doesn’t sit down, though. He waits. He waits for her to give him a sign that she wants that.
“Murph told me what she said to you on the bus. It’s not true. We never slept together. We never even kissed. Except during some stupid spin-the-bottle round in the fourth grade.”
She looks up at him. “Then why did she say it?”
“Because she could.”
“She picked a bad day.”
“Yes, she picked a bad day,” he says. “Maybe that’s not the real problem, though.”
“What is?”
He shrugs. “Why were we playing spin-the-bottle in fourth grade?”
She starts to laugh, and feels something come loose in herself, or loose enough that she does it, the first thing: she moves some of the books out of the way, so he can sit across from her.
She moves some bad paperback novels, a small hardback, and an aquatic dictionary, the largest book, out of the way. He sits down, cautiously, leaning backward on his hands, looking at her, really looking at her.
“Thank you,” he says.
She nods. “You’re welcome . . .”
“What are you thinking?” he says.
She looks at him. “Nothing.”
“No, not nothing. Tell me.”
“Well, right now I’m thinking that you rarely ask me what I’m thinking.” She pauses. “And I’m feeling grateful for that. It’s a terrible question. There is nowhere good to go from there.”
He smiles, and turns briefly toward the window, looking outside, at the night—the outline of the ocean in the distance. “He asked me something today which I keep thinking about. He asked me a question when we were walking back from surfing earlier.”
“Your dad?”
He nods his head, turning back to her, a look passing over his face. “It was strange because he didn’t sound like himself exactly. He asked if when I look at you I feel rational. He said I shouldn’t,” he says. “I shouldn’t feel rational about you.”
“Rational? What does that mean, even?” she says. “Like I should still be a fantasy?”
“I don’t know. That’s my point.” He pauses. “It sounded like he was talking to himself more than to me.”
