“Connor, you don’t have to convince us.” Deacon held his hands up. “We’re all on the same side here.”
Maybe. Okay, probably. But I still couldn’t help feeling like people, my family included, weren’t taking Scott Nash’s serious shittiness seriously enough.
As far as I was concerned, learning that Scott Nash supported turning McIntyre Beach into luxury condos was all the proof you needed that he was behind the vandalism, too. He’d never been afraid to break the rules to get what he wanted.
But, much as it annoyed me to admit it, Deacon was right that Scott had half the island eating out of the palm of his hand, and the other half too scared to open up their mouths. I might not need more proof that Scott was up to some shit, but the rest of the island would. And the first step in getting that proof was seeing the beach for myself.
I glowered into the darkness as Roxie and I walked along the county road that led out to McIntyre Beach later that night. Well, as I walked, and Roxie zigzagged, her nose continually taking her off into the brush on the side of the road. I’d had to pull her out of three people’s yards already.
It had been easy to take walks like this when I was in high school, before I had a dog. I’d started when my mom got sick. My dad was spending all his time in the hospital with her, Deacon was hardly around, and Em was too young to lean on. I used to go out at night and just walk for miles, until I was tired enough to sleep.
That was when I discovered McIntyre Beach. I would come out to the beach night after night and let the roar of the waves fill my ears until it drowned out all the voices that told me my mom was going to die, and left a calm sort of emptiness in its wake.
My mom got better, unexpectedly, during my junior year of high school. And then she died, also unexpectedly, the summer after it. In a car accident. With my dad.
That was when I started breaking into people’s houses on my walks.
I knew it was wrong. Let’s be clear about that. I did it because it was wrong.
Because it felt like it evened out the hypocrisy and bigotry we got from family after family in the wake of my parents’ death. People blathering about, ‘God’s plan,’ and, ‘a reason for everything,’ in one breath, then telling me I was going to hell for liking boys in the next.
Each house I snuck into, I took something. Never something large or valuable, or anything that looked like an heirloom. But something just important enough for the owners to notice it was missing.
I wanted to unsettle people. To make them lose sleep. Wanted them to feel a fraction of what I’d felt for so long.
And honestly, I did it because it was the only thing that made me feel something other than an aching emptiness. Loss had hollowed out my insides like a cave.
It had been on one of those nighttime walks that I talked to Julian for the first time. We’d said hello in school a few times before that, of course. You couldn’t avoid it, on an island this small.
But we’d never really talked until the night someone called the cops while I was inside their house, and I’d sprinted away, looking for somewhere to hide. I found it when I stumbled into Julian’s yard, and he let me climb through his bedroom window.
Julian was the reason I eventually stopped my juvenile crime spree. He was the reason I returned everything I’d taken, too. When you got right down to it, Julian was the reason I’d even made it out of senior year alive.
But I hadn’t known any of that the first time I climbed into his bedroom and stood face to face with the beautiful, quiet boy who’d haunted the edges of my awareness for years.
I pushed the thought away as I approached the beach. I didn’t want to think about Julian. Not now.
The thing was, I thought I’d prepared myself for what I’d see at McIntyre Beach. The shoreline strewn with trash, the stream clogged. I even thought I’d prepared for the pervasive scent of sewage and rot that Deacon had, annoyingly, been right about. I thought I’d prepared myself to see a place I’d once loved being destroyed.
But I hadn’t prepared myself to see a place I’d once loved, full stop.
And when I turned off the road into the patch of gravel that had always served as the beach’s unofficial parking lot, my breath caught. I was standing in the middle of a glorified field of rocks and I couldn’t even move. It was so long since I’d been here, and it felt like just yesterday.
I know that’s a cliche but that was how it felt—like I could reach out and catch the past between my fingertips. Change it maybe. Like I could find my younger self somewhere through those trees and tell him—what, exactly?
That it got easier with time?
Standing there in that weed-choked, dusty rectangle, I wasn’t sure it did. Things I’d studiously refused to let myself feel for years were suddenly just under the surface of my skin. If I stood still any longer, they might claw their way out and run loose into the night.
I forced myself to keep walking—further into the park, and not back out onto the road as my brain begged me to. A low border of trees beckoned from the far side of the lot and I ducked under them.
The path was more overgrown than I remembered, but all the brush in the world couldn’t have hidden it from me. I pushed branches out of the way as I wove through the scrubby coastal forest. The moon was bright above me, halfway to being full, but I could have walked this path blindfolded.
The ocean was never far away on Summersea. Even when you couldn’t hear it, it pulsed in the back of your mind like half-remembered truth. But as I approached the dunes, the pound of surf on sand grew louder. Even on a calm night, the ocean was restless, calling out to you.
At the inside edge of the dunes, the smell of salt finally overtook the fetid odor that had pervaded the woods. The winds had scoured the sand clean of anything but starlight and saline. I walked over the dunes on the rickety remains of steps that looked more like a pile of matchsticks than any functional structure.
When had the town stopped maintaining those? And how many people had crossed directly over the sand since then, their feet destabilizing the delicate architecture of the dunes?
Then my foot left the last wooden step, and the ocean stretched out before me. There were tears in my eyes, and they had nothing to do with the wind.
I came to McIntyre Beach the night I left Summersea, to think. To decide whether to stay or to go. That was the last time I’d touched this sand, but that night felt as much a part of my present as it did my past.
My legs gave way beneath me, but I didn’t notice I was on the ground until my fingers dug into the sand. Roxie padded over and licked my face, confused about why I was suddenly on her level. I threw an arm around her, hugging her close. Used her solidity to tie me to the here-and-now, and not that memory.
‘You don’t make it easy.’
That’s what Julian had said.
I didn’t make it easy for people to love me. Didn’t even make it easy for them to want me around. I didn’t do anything except make people’s lives harder, and Julian was no exception.
He hadn’t said it in so many words, but I knew what he meant.
And when I’d been faced with the choice of leaving Summersea on my own, or asking him to come with me, those words had echoed in my mind. ‘You don’t make it easy.’
I’d made the right choice. No matter how many times I’d wondered, no matter how many nightmares I’d had over the years, I had to believe I’d made the right choice.