Lemon Reef (8 page)

When I heard her regret, I stopped and waited.

Katie pressed her lips together and stared at the ground, as if thinking about what to say next. “I've missed you, Jen Jen.” Both she and Gail called me that sometimes, and hearing her say it reminded me of how close I had been to her once. “I know you've been mad at me for a long time. I'm sorry I wasn't more there for you.” Her blue eyes fixed on me from under long lashes, the earnestness of her apology making it seem as if we'd had the fight yesterday, as if nothing more important had happened in the last fifteen years. “Truth is, I didn't know how to help you. I didn't understand how deep it was between you and Del. I didn't get the problem until it was too late. You always knew how to be there for me. But I didn't know how to be there for you.”

Appreciating her now, I felt foolish for my grudge. For some reason, Katie had always been someone I loved for her effort more than for any result. No matter how disappointing she was, I had the sense she was doing her best, and I just forgave her. Except over what happened with Del; her disregard for my feelings about Del, the way she gossiped about us along with everyone else, was a deal breaker. Del had felt betrayed by me; I had felt betrayed by Katie. Del had cut me off; I had cut Katie off. Was this all not just adolescent-girl drama? Could I have expected us at fifteen to have behaved any differently than we did, to have known any better? I stared at her now, having missed her more than I realized, and felt as if I'd been too hard on her.

“Maybe I wasn't so easy to help.”

“Well, that's true!” We were turning to walk again. “You could read rejection into anything.” And as if citing the definitive authority on the matter, Katie said, “Del was just saying that about you.”

“Del?”
I balked. “Del made rejection her art form.” Then: “What do you mean, Del was
just
saying that? When did you last see her?”

“Oh,” she said. Silence. Katie strained to sound nonchalant. “We hung out sometimes.”

The air left my lungs, my chest caved in, and I felt my most basic assumptions shatter. Synchronously, like a once-practiced dance the moves of which you're surprised to find you still remember, Katie took hold of my elbow to steady me. My inability to hide my sense of betrayal and anguish compelled Katie to abandon the casual tone and begin explaining.

“She started waitressing at the deli right after Gail did. We got to know each other again. It was no big deal, Jen, really. We only saw her a little. I swear. It was no big deal.”

I knew Gail, who was a teller at a bank, had taken a weekend job at the deli to make some extra money to help pay off her new car.

“Gail didn't tell me Del worked there,” I said, my chest feeling as if a demolition ball had just dealt it a first major blow. We arrived at the baggage conveyor belt and stood side by side, waiting for my suitcase to appear.

She focused her attention on the bags going by. “Nobody wanted to tell you.”

Second blow. This one made my legs a little wobbly. I was beginning to realize this trip would test my hard-earned steel infrastructure in ways I could never have anticipated. The crushing feeling was accompanied by the thought of Del seeming so far away all these years—gone from our lives. No news of her, no idea where to find her, no sense she would want to be found. Now I was being told she'd been right next door, and I was the only one who didn't know it.

“What you're saying is my two best friends were hanging out with Del and didn't tell me.”

I saw the slight twist in Katie's face, as I said “best friends.” Saying it had surprised me as well. But strangely, I knew it was true. In my current life, I had Madison, and I had many close colleagues, and I had people I hung out with—but friends? Like this? Like Del, Katie, Gail? I was embarrassed to admit it, but no. When Gail had visited me in California a few weeks before, she had said growing up we were like the kids in the
Peanuts
comic strip, raising ourselves and each other. The adults in our lives had been nothing but whiny EKG lines for voices, coming at us from offstage. It was true. We had been responsible for each other. I was there now, with Katie, on our way to Gail's, concerned that Del's daughter needed help, because we still felt responsible for each other.

She squeezed my elbow reassuringly. “You were doing so well, Jenna. You were with somebody else—
finally
. You were happy.”

I knew Katie was trying to be supportive. Still, I felt alone and embarrassed at the idea of people handling me and devastated in realizing yet again, yet again the decision to see Del or not had been made for me. I fought my rage, trying to hang in there, forcing myself to notice how hard Katie was trying, telling myself she and Gail didn't know Del would die, that I would never have another chance to…To what? There were things I wanted to say to Del, but I didn't know what they were or why I hadn't tried to find her before now if what I'd wanted to tell her was so important.

“We thought if we told you we were back in touch with Del, you'd want to get back in touch with her, too.”

“So what if I did?” I spotted my bag and grabbed it off the belt, then turned and began walking away without concern for whether Katie was following me. Over my shoulder I said, “It was not your decision to make.”

“She wasn't in such good shape, Jenna.” Katie caught up to me, and we walked without speaking for a while. “Del asked us not to tell you.”

“Why?”

“I don't know why. Maybe she was embarrassed about how things had turned out for her.”

*

Heading outdoors to the airport curb was like entering a steam room filled with car-exhaust fumes. Bags disappeared into a slammed trunk, car doors closed, and we were moving forward, but were we really? Katie followed signs for I-95 North—I-95 North, the signifier that for the first twenty years of my life had marked my way home. The tires turned on the car next to us. They seemed to be getting somewhere, but were we? Should I trust this? Was there any traction left to be had on this highway home? It was like a freak attack of claustrophobia, my impulse to bust open the car window and climb out of it, to take some control over the feeling of backward motion or no motion at all. I was desperate for something to happen, some way to counter the static: the static of Miami gray; the static of idling planes and cars; the static of thick windows and recirculated air; the static of time loops, ash-colored corpses, and tires that only appeared to be turning.

I watched the golf-ball-sized soccer ball hanging in a net from the rearview mirror. I hadn't seen one since high school when we all had them. It was one of those identity objects like a keychain or a charm for a bracelet, an item one displays to mark a hobby or a favorite sport, or, for Katie, a period in time. A newspaper article about Del lay on the seat next to me, noticeable only because her picture was included. The article itself was short and buried in articles about the Republican primaries, which had begun to heat up in Florida. Del's hair was full to her shoulders, her eyes were still, with pupils dark and round like the heads of iron nails. What once were subtle laugh lines now were herringboned wrinkles in sprawls around her pronounced eye sockets, cradled by shadowed crescents. She looked at the camera, but her familiar aversion to posing for pictures came through in her expression of capitulation and her typical sarcastic smile.

The headline: “Local woman dies on Lemon Reef.” I held the paper in my hand and stared at her image. The article about Del was based on Talon's report to the police. He said that while diving on Lemon Reef, Del suddenly started scrambling to get to the surface. Then she went limp. Del was reportedly too heavy for Talon to pull onto the boat, so he left her body on the swimming ramp extending off the back of the boat and swam to the shore for help. Her body, he said, must have slipped back into the water. She was found seven hours later, a quarter mile southeast of the Sand Dollar Motel on Collins Avenue. Her drifting body apparently had gotten caught on a metal chain attached to debris thirty feet below the surface.

The Sand Dollar Motel referred to in the article was the same motel that my parents had owned and run throughout my childhood. Del and I spent the summer before tenth grade going there to sunbathe and swim. Lemon Reef was located a hundred yards from the shore of the Sand Dollar, and we dove on it every day that summer.

I put the paper down and watched the signs overhead, the veinal interstate and everything around it a wash of gray. The radio station Katie was listening to was called Golden Oldies. The song playing on the radio was “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas. I had landed in a circuitry of both familiar and unfamiliar currents, vaguely and aversively recognizable to me. I twisted through them, my vision corrupted by the glare reflecting from the tinted car window. I eyed the flat, dreary landscape and remembered how all I had wanted from the time I was fourteen years old was to leave this place.

*

“Where would you go?” Del had asked.

It was the middle of the night. I was sleeping over, as I often did on weekends. We lay on her bed atop the covers, the rest of the house dark and quiet. The window above us was open, amplifying the sound of a car engine revving and people across the street arguing in Spanish.

“California,” I said. “San Francisco, probably.”

“Why?”

I pulled a pillow over my head to hide.

She giggled, followed me under. “Why are you embarrassed?” Bringing her face closer to mine, “Tell me,” she said. “I tell you
everything
.”

“They do sex-change operations there.”

Del was surprised. “Why would you want one?”

“I don't know.”

She just waited, resting her head on the pillow, her lifted brows and slight smile conveying a benign, thoughtful interest. I felt her light breathing on my ear, smelled her toothpaste-tinged breath and freshly shampooed hair. Suddenly risking it was easier than not.

“Then I could marry you.”

She hesitated, as if not sure she'd heard me correctly. Then she said, “I'm never getting married,” the implications of my confession falling to the wayside.

I just nodded, eager to have the subject change if she so preferred. A few moments passed during which I wasn't quite sure what to do. I certainly wasn't going to repeat myself.

Then Del got up, walked over to her bedroom door, and locked it. I watched disbelievingly, my heart beating staccato, as Del climbed back onto the bed and straddled my body.

“I kinda thought you felt that way about me,” she said. “But I wasn't sure.”

I lay there looking up at her, my hands in surrender position, my stomach getting whiplash. “Is that weird?”

“I don't know.” Her eyes were set firmly on me, her fingers folded in with mine. “I'm a really good kisser. Do you want to see?”

It was all I had wanted for months, and at the same time had not for one moment allowed myself to consider a real possibility. I simply couldn't believe it was happening. It was November of our ninth-grade year. I had just turned fourteen, and I had never been kissed before. My stomach in plummets and halts, I managed to push out of my throat a sound something like uh-huh.

Del pulled her near-dry hair to one side and pressed her lips against my lips—one soft, dry kiss. Then she waited a moment to check my reaction, seemed pleased by my apparently stunned expression. She kissed me again. This time her tongue skirted mine. I came undone, my hands tightening around hers, my breath quickening, my belly lifting, my panties dampening to soaked. More soft, slow kisses, more of her tongue to mine. Then our lips were tenderly opening and closing, tips to full tongues engaging, disengaging, reengaging. She spread her legs out behind her, pressed her full body against mine, and amped up the intensity.

We continued this way more and less intently, intermittently exchanging commentary. Advice from her about how much tongue to use—with examples, homework that was due, recent school gossip, angst over an approaching school performance, recent dreams and what they might mean. My head was propped up by a pillow against the headboard; Del was on her side next to me.

“What's the furthest you've gone with someone?” I asked.

Del hesitated, glanced upward and to the side as if she were thinking about it. Then she said, “I feel funny talking about what I did with somebody else.”

I thought her hesitance was because what she had done had been a big deal and she didn't want to admit it. I felt jealous.

“That's fine,” I said and tried to mean it. My eyes moved from hers to the dresser, and I studied the wooden statues she had lined there. I noticed a new one, Matsya, the fish, and was just about to ask her about it.

“Joel felt me up once,” she said trustingly.

“Shirt on or off?”

“On.”

I was surprised.

Del studied my face momentarily. “You thought I'd done more than that.” I couldn't tell if she was angry or hurt. “People say shit about me all the time that isn't true. I don't know why.” She propped her head on her elbow. “What about you? What's the furthest you've gone?” She was already starting to giggle because she knew the answer.

“Me?”

Del surprised me then by moving her hand up my T-shirt and touching my breast. Gripping my nipple, she said, “Now we're even.”

I felt the zing of her pinch down my center to my groin.

“Not quite.”

I began lifting her T-shirt. I wanted not just to touch her but to see her. It was the seeing her that she felt insecure about. She stopped my hand. Her lips folded in and disappeared and her forehead wrinkled with confusion and something like worry.

“Let me.” I pushed against her hand on mine.

Del met my words with steely eyes, which warned how vulnerable she felt, and then she let go my hand. I'd seen her naked by way of sneaky glances when we had changed in the same room, but now I stared at her breasts, mildly sloped from her chest to her nipple, rounder underneath. I was love struck. I ran the tip of my finger around her pinkish-brown areola, brushed over her nipple, gently pinched and twisted it. I felt it stiffen and watched it grow erect.