I want to give her a good day. Just one good day. I have wandered for so long without any sense of purpose, and now this ephemeral purpose has been given to me – it feels like it has been given to me. I only have a day to give – so why can’t it be a good one? Why can’t it be a shared one? Why can’t I take the music of the moment and see how long it can last? The rules are erasable. I can take this. I can give this.
When the song is over, she rolls down her window and trails her hand in the air, introducing a new music into the car. I roll down all the other windows and drive faster, so the wind takes over, blows our hair all around, makes it seem like the car has disappeared and we are the velocity, we are the speed. Then another good song comes on and I enclose us again, this time taking her hand. I drive like that for miles, and ask her questions. I ask her how her parents are doing. What it’s like now that her sister’s off at college. If she thinks school is different at all this year.
It’s hard for her. Every single answer starts with the phrase I don’t know. But most of the time she does know, if I give her the time and the space in which to answer. Her mother means well; her father less so. Her sister isn’t calling home, but Rhiannon can understand that. School is school – she wants it to be over, but she’s afraid of it being over, because then she’ll have to figure out what comes next.
She asks me what I think, and I tell her, “Honestly, I’m just trying to live day to day.”
It isn’t enough, but it’s something. We watch the trees, the sky, the signs, the road. We sense each other. The world, right now, is only us. We continue to sing along. And we sing with the same abandon, not worrying too much if our voices hit the right notes or the right words. We look at each other while we’re singing; these aren’t two solos, this is a duet that isn’t taking itself at all seriously. It is its own form of conversation – you can learn a lot about people from the stories they tell, but you can also know them from the way they sing along, whether they like the windows up or down, if they live by the map or by the world, if they feel the pull of the ocean.
She tells me where to drive. Off the highway. The empty back roads. This isn’t summer; this isn’t a weekend. It’s the middle of a Monday, and nobody but us is going to the beach.
“I should be in English class,” Rhiannon says.
“I should be in bio,” I say, accessing Justin’s schedule.
We keep going. When I first saw her, she seemed to be balancing on edges and points. Now the ground is more even, welcoming.
I know this is dangerous. Justin is not good to her. I recognize that. If I access his memories of her, I see tears, fights and remnants of passable togetherness. She is always there for him, and he must like that. His friends like her, and he must like that too. But that’s not the same as love. She has been hanging on to the hope of him for so long that she doesn’t realize there isn’t anything left to hope for. They don’t have silences together; they have noise. Mostly his. If I tried, I could go deep into their arguments. I could track down whatever shards he’s collected from all the times he’s destroyed her. If I were really Justin, I would find something wrong with her. Right now. Tell her. Yell. Bring her down. Put her in her place.
But I can’t. I’m not Justin. Even if she doesn’t know it.
“Let’s just enjoy ourselves,” I say.
“Okay,” she replies. “I like that. I spend so much time thinking about running away – it’s nice to actually do it. For a day. It’s good to be on the other side of the window. I don’t do this enough.”
There are so many things inside of her that I want to know. And at the same time, with every word we speak, I feel there may be something inside of her that I already know. When I get there, we will recognize each other. We will have that.
I park the car and we head to the ocean. We take off our shoes and leave them under our seats. When we get to the sand, I lean over to roll up my jeans. While I do, Rhiannon runs ahead. When I look back up, she is spinning around the beach, kicking up sand, calling my name. Everything, at that moment, is lightness. She is so joyful, I can’t help but stop for a second and watch. Witness. Tell myself to remember.
“C’mon!” she cries. “Get over here!”
I’m not who you think I am, I want to tell her. But there’s no way. Of course, there’s no way.
We have the beach to ourselves, the ocean to ourselves. I have her to myself. She has me to herself.
There is a part of childhood that is childish, and a part that is sacred. Suddenly we are touching the sacred part – running to the shoreline, feeling the first cold burst of water on our ankles, reaching into the tide to catch at shells before they ebb away from our fingers. We have returned to a world that is capable of glistening, and we are wading deeper within it. We stretch our arms wide, as if we are embracing the wind. She splashes me mischievously and I mount a counterattack. Our pants, our shirts get wet, but we don’t care. We are carefree.
She asks me to help her build a sand castle, and as I do, she tells me about how she and her sister would never work on sand castles together – it was always a competition, with her sister going for the highest possible mountains while Rhiannon paid attention to detail, wanting each castle to be the dollhouse she was never allowed to have. I see echoes of this detail now, as she makes turrets bloom from her cupped hands. I myself have no memories of sand castles, but there must be some sense memory attached, because I feel I know how to do this, how to shape this.
When we are done, we walk back down to the water to wash off our hands. I look back and see the way our footsteps intermingle to form a single path.
“What is it?” she asks, seeing me glance backward, seeing something in my expression.
How can I explain this? The only way I know is to say, “Thank you.”
She looks at me as if she’s never heard the phrase before.
“For what?” she asks.
“For this,” I say. “For all of it.”
This escape. The water. The waves. Her. It feels like we’ve stepped outside of time. Even though there is no such place.
There’s still a part of her that’s waiting for the twist, the moment when all of this pleasure will jackknife into pain.
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “It’s okay to be happy.”
The tears come to her eyes. I take her in my arms. It’s the wrong thing to do. But it’s the right thing to do. I have to listen to my own words. Happiness is so rarely a part of my vocabulary, because for me it’s so fleeting.
“I’m happy,” she says. “Really, I am.”
Justin would be laughing at her. Justin would be pushing her down into the sand, to do whatever he wanted to do. Justin would never have come here.
I am tired of not feeling. I am tired of not connecting. I want to be here with her. I want to be the one who lives up to her hopes, if only for the time I’m given.
The ocean makes its music; the wind does its dance. We hold on. At first we hold on to one another, but then it starts to feel like we are holding on to something even bigger than that. Greater.
“What’s happening?” Rhiannon asks.
“Shhh,” I say. “Don’t question it.”
She kisses me. I have not kissed anyone in years. I have not allowed myself to kiss anyone for years. Her lips are soft as flower petals, but with an intensity behind them. I take it slow, let each moment pour into the next. Feel her skin, her breath. Taste the condensation of our contact, linger in the heat of it. Her eyes are closed and mine are open. I want to remember this as more than a single sensation. I want to remember this whole.
We