I threw off my sweater and followed Gat into the sea in my dress. I crashed into the water, swimming out to where he lay on his back. His wet hair was slicked off his face, showing the thin scar through one eyebrow.
I reached for his arm. “Gat.”
He startled. Stood in the waist-high sea.
“Sorry,” I whispered.
“I don’t tell you to shut up, Cady,” he said. “I don’t ever say that to you.”
“I know.”
He was silent.
“Please don’t shut up,” I said.
I felt his eyes go over my body in my wet dress. “I talk too much,” he said. “I politicize everything.”
“I like it when you talk,” I said, because it was true. When I stopped to listen, I did like it.
“It’s that everything makes me …” He paused. “Things are messed up in the world, that’s all.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe I should”—Gat took my hands, turned them over to look at the words written on the backs—“I should live for today and not be agitating all the time.”
My hand was in his wet hand.
I shivered. His arms were bare and wet. We used to hold hands all the time, but he hadn’t touched me all summer.
“It’s good that you look at the world the way you do,” I told him.
Gat let go of me and leaned back into the water. “Johnny wants me to shut up. I’m boring you and Mirren.”
I looked at his profile. He wasn’t just Gat. He was contemplation and enthusiasm. Ambition and strong coffee. All that was there, in the lids of his brown eyes, his smooth skin, his lower lip pushed out. There was coiled energy inside.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” I whispered.
“What?”
I reached out and touched his arm again. He didn’t pull away. “When we say Shut up, Gat, that isn’t what we mean at all.”
“No?”
“What we mean is, we love you. You remind us that we’re selfish bastards. You’re not one of us, that way.”
He dropped his eyes. Smiled. “Is that what you mean, Cady?”
“Yes,” I told him. I let my fingers trail down his floating, outstretched arm.
“I can’t believe you are in that water!” Johnny was standing ankle-deep in the ocean, his jeans rolled up. “It’s the Arctic. My toes are freezing off.”
“It’s nice once you get in,” Gat called back.
“Seriously?”
“Don’t be weak!” yelled Gat. “Be manly and get in the stupid water.”
Johnny laughed and charged in. Mirren followed.
And it was—exquisite.
The night looming above us. The hum of the ocean. The bark of gulls.
8
THAT NIGHT I had trouble sleeping.
After midnight, he called my name.
I looked out my window. Gat was lying on his back on the wooden walkway that leads to Windemere. The golden retrievers were lying near him, all five: Bosh, Grendel, Poppy, Prince Philip, and Fatima. Their tails thumped gently.
The moonlight made them all look blue.
“Come down,” he called.
I did.
Mummy’s light was out. The rest of the island was dark. We were alone, except for all the dogs.
“Scoot,” I told him. The walkway wasn’t wide. When I lay down next to him, our arms touched, mine bare and his in an olive-green hunting jacket.
We looked at the sky. So many stars, it seemed like a celebration, a grand, illicit party the galaxy was holding after the humans had been put to bed.
I was glad Gat didn’t try to sound knowledgeable about constellations or say stupid stuff about wishing on stars. But I didn’t know what to make of his silence, either.
“Can I hold your hand?” he asked.
I put mine in his.
“The universe is seeming really huge right now,” he told me. “I need something to hold on to.”
“I’m here.”
His thumb rubbed the center of my palm. All my nerves concentrated there, alive to every movement of his skin on mine. “I am not sure I’m a good person,” he said after a while.
“I’m not sure I am, either,” I said. “I’m winging it.”
“Yeah.” Gat was silent for a moment. “Do you believe in God?”
“Halfway.” I tried to think about it seriously. I knew Gat wouldn’t settle for a flippant answer. “When things are bad, I’ll pray or imagine someone watching over me, listening. Like the first few days after my dad left, I thought about God. For protection. But the rest of the time, I’m trudging along in my everyday life. It’s not even slightly spiritual.”
“I don’t believe anymore,” Gat said. “That trip to India, the poverty. No God I can imagine would let that happen. Then I came home and started noticing it on the streets of New York. People sick and starving in one of the richest nations in the world. I just—I can’t think that anyone’s watching over those people. Which means no one is watching over me, either.”
“That doesn’t make you a bad person.”
“My mother believes. She was raised Buddhist but goes to Methodist church now. She’s not very happy with me.” Gat hardly ever talked about his mother.
“You can’t believe just because she tells you to,” I said.
“No. The question is: how to be a good person if I don’t believe anymore.”
We stared at the sky. The dogs went into Windemere via the dog flap.
“You’re cold,” Gat said. “Let me give you my jacket.”
I wasn’t cold but I sat up. He sat up, too. Unbuttoned his olive hunting jacket and shrugged it off. Handed it to me.
It was warm from his body. Much too wide across the shoulders. His arms were bare now.
I wanted to kiss him there while I was wearing his hunting jacket. But I didn’t.
Maybe he loved Raquel. Those photos on his phone. That dried beach rose in an envelope.
9
AT BREAKFAST THE next morning, Mummy asked me to go through Dad’s things in the Windemere attic and take what I wanted. She would get rid of the rest.
Windemere is gabled and angular. Two of the five bedrooms have slanted roofs, and it’s the only house on the island with a full attic. There’s a big porch and a modern kitchen, updated with marble countertops that look a little out of place. The rooms are airy and filled with dogs.
Gat and I climbed up to the attic with glass bottles of iced tea and sat on the floor. The room smelled like wood. A square of light glowed through from the window.
We had been in the attic before.
Also, we had never been in the attic before.
The books were Dad’s vacation reading. All sports memoirs, cozy mysteries, and rock star tell-alls by old people I’d never heard of. Gat wasn’t really looking. He was sorting the books by color. A red pile, a blue, brown, white, yellow.
“Don’t you want anything to read?” I asked.
“Maybe.”
“How about First Base and Way Beyond?”
Gat laughed. Shook his head. Straightened his blue pile.
“Rock On with My Bad Self? Hero of the Dance Floor?”