“Hey, Mr. Bishop!”
The voice is so close it startles me and I thrash around for a second, searching for who called me, but I can’t find anybody. I tread water and spin in a slow circle.
A head explodes out of the ocean not two feet away from me. I lurch away, panicking, before I recognize Simon. He’s got a shit-eating grin on his face.
“Simon! Jesus Christ, I could kill you!”
His grin just gets bigger and he pushes his wet hair behind his ears. “Hey, Mr. Bishop,” he says again. “Nice day, huh? How are you doing?”
“Fine, fine, couldn’t be better. I just peed myself is all.” I splash water at him. “Where did you come from?”
He swims a few feet closer to shore so that he can stand. “I was over there in the dunes taking a nap when I saw you and decided to come say hi.”
I dog-paddle over to him and put my feet down in the sand, too. He’s about six inches shorter than me, because the ocean comes up to his neck while it’s only up to my armpits. “So you don’t have a job this summer? Or are you getting paid to scare the crap out of people minding their own business at the beach?”
“Dad and Mom won’t let me get a job because it’s already the middle of the summer and they say I need the time to study. I got way behind last year at my old school and they want me to get caught up before the fall.”
A wave pushes into us and moves us a little closer to shore. “And hanging out here counts as studying?”
He shrugs and his shoulders make a brief appearance above the surface of the water. “I’m doing good in my classes so they don’t care.”
I almost tell him he’s obviously not doing so “good” in English but then decide not to be a jerk. “What other classes are you taking?”
“Just remedial math. It only meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays.” He turns his head and sneezes, and the sun glints off the moisture spraying out of his mouth, making a brief but delicate snot rainbow. He laughs. “Cool.”
Why am I talking to this kid? “Well, I guess I should be going.”
He looks disappointed. “How come? You don’t teach in the afternoons during the summer, do you?”
“No, but I’ve got company coming into town. For all I know they may already be here.”
He walks with me as I head toward shore, plowing through the water. His ribs unveil themselves an inch at a time, and then his waist and butt, and eventually we’re both on dry sand. He digs around in his ear with a pinkie finger. “Yeah? Who’s coming?”
“My brother and three of his friends.”
Now why did I tell him that? When Cheri Tipton asked me the same thing I made her eat silence.
“Cool,” he says again. “Is he older or younger than you?”
“Younger. Two years younger.”
He reaches down to brush sand from his shins. The shadow from his body angles off to his left and he suddenly squats to hold his knees. “I’ve always wanted a younger brother but my folks don’t want any more kids.”
“Are you an only child, then?”
He nods, squinting at the sun. “Yeah. I had an older sister once but she died when I was a baby.” He stares up at me. “I bet you were a pretty good older brother.”
I barely know this kid. What makes him say something like that? I pick up my shirt and shake it out. “Yeah, well, I guess I should be going.”
He nods. “Okay.” He looks forlorn for some reason.
“See you tomorrow in class?”
He nods again.
I head toward the parking lot but when I get to the dunes I turn around. Simon is still hunkered down where he was, watching me.
Cheri left another note on my door. This one says “Hi, Nathan. Thanks for letting me have a look. The site looks promising! I’m going to keep searching through my archives and the Web and see if I can unearth more information. I’ll be in touch.”
Wonderful. Isn’t it precious that she has a hobby?
I’ve already put clean sheets on the bed in the guest room (after Dad died I sold the twin beds Tommy and I used to have and replaced them with a double), but now I open up the hide-a-bed in the living room and get it ready for whichever couple ends up sleeping out here. Having people visit wouldn’t bother me so much if they weren’t taking over the whole goddamn house.
I love this room. Books are everywhere, and there’s a ponderous old armoire made entirely of oak that takes up most of the north wall. It was already an antique when Grandpa bought it in the nineteen forties, and it’s probably worth a fortune by now. But what’s inside it is even more valuable: behind the locked doors is a small but impressive collection of first edition books, packed tightly onto three glass shelves. Grandpa didn’t have much money, but every time he had a little extra he’d go out and buy a rare book, and quite often he even managed to find a signed copy. God knows how, but he got his hands on first editions of Dickens and Tennyson and Kipling and Emerson and just about everybody else famous who wrote a book in the nineteenth century. If Cheri Tipton and her history-buff friends knew what was in this armoire, their shit would turn green for a month.
On a whim I get the key for the cabinet out of its hiding place (I keep it in a vase that belonged to my mother) and unlock the heavy doors. As I’m swinging them open the distinct aroma of old books—that weird combination of dust and paper and leather peculiar to used book stores and library basements—hits me full force. I love that smell. The best hours of my life have been spent in a quiet corner or under a tree or on the beach with a book in my hands. I’ve been told on more than one occasion that I should stop reading so much and actually have a life, but do you know what I’ve figured out? People in books are much more interesting than the people who’ve told me that.
I pull out a small black copy of essays by Emerson. The cover is slightly water-damaged, but the pages are unmarred except for places in the text where somebody has marked various passages with a pencil. I riffle through it and I’m startled to find that somebody in my family has underlined many of the same sections I’ve always loved. Whatever our differences, every single member of my family has always felt the same way I do about books in general and the Transcendentalists in specific—even my fucked-up father.
Emerson saved my life in college, by the way. I know that sounds melodramatic, but I’m not joking. I was planning to kill myself one night (attempt number three if I’d gone through with it, but who’s counting?) when for some reason I picked up a tattered copy of The Norton Anthology of American Literature instead of the bottle of pills next to it on the table by the bed, and I discovered the “Self-Reliance” essay for the first time. It was like I’d been having a nightmare and all of a sudden a sweet old man reached out of a book—and across a century and a half—to shake me awake. Scoff if you will, but I swear I could feel him in the room with me the whole time, sitting beside me and talking softly, like someone keeping watch over a sick friend. I know this makes me sound like a crackpot, but once or twice I even thought I felt a hand on my head.
Are there people still alive in the world who are as wise and kind and modest as everybody says Emerson was? I’ve never met anyone remotely like him, but I suppose that might simply be a reflection on what I deserve. I mean, look at his social circle: Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne—his journals and letters read like a Who’s Who from that era. Great people draw other great people to themselves.
And who do I draw to me? Cheri Tipton and Simon Hard-on. Jesus.
I’m standing on one bare foot with my other foot on top of it, and I’m still wearing my swimsuit and reading my favorite dead guy’s words