She came up to the surface and the boy was nearby, swimming towards her, laughing. “It’s beautiful, ain't it?” he cried.
“Yes!” she said, and it was. The white image drifted from her mind. She looked off towards the beach and saw the bonfire, high and yellow and gorgeous. “They look like a painting,” she said.
He smiled—his smile was crooked, that was what made it always look like he maybe wasn’t smiling at all. He looked back at the bonfire, turning away from her. He floated on the water, one of the many young gods of the sea.
She was watching droplets of water fall from his hair onto his dark shoulders when a white-skinned woman rose from the waves between them. Deborah saw angry dark eyes and long black hair. She started to scream, and the woman’s fingers closed around her throat, catching the sound before it could escape. In less time than it took for the boy to look back, she dropped beneath the waves and all went black.
Chapter 6
Frannie Cohn wound up at the beach because she couldn’t say no anymore, even though it was Carol Dolenz at her door, who had never paid any attention to her before Noreen and Frannie’s accident. Carol had asked three days in a row and here she was back again, ringing the door at 9 in the morning.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Carol said. “I thought you’d be out riding.”
Frannie shrugged. Carol was one of the ones who hadn’t been on the ride that day because of Easter eggs and all. She come by the hospital, too, and in the last couple of weeks of class had brought Frannie some homework to try to get caught up. And Frannie had said how much she wanted to get back out on the road, get some soreness back in her legs, get moving. But of course...
Carol wore a long white cover-up over a bathing suit, and her battered 1930 roadster—the kind all the kids favored and probably on loan from her pop’s car lot—rumbled behind her in the driveway. Three other girls back there, sunglasses and cover-ups, all staring.
It should be Noreen. Frannie wanted to shut the door but couldn’t bring herself to be that bold, and she started to shake her head.
“Come on,” Carol said. “Come out with us.”
“Are you going for a ride?” Frannie asked.
“We’re not biking, Frannie,” she said. “It’ll be fun.”
“I don’t know.”
“Frannie, come on. You need to get out. We’ll stop by Noreen’s mom’s and say hi and head to the beach.”
“You really think,” Frannie mumbled, shaking her head, “that she wants us to drop by? On the way to the beach?”
Someone honked. Carol looked back at the roadster and held up a finger, curtsying a little before turning back. “I don’t know. Maybe we don’t if you don’t think that’s right. Maybe that’s stupid. I’m sorry”
“No, it’s not…”
“We just don’t want to see you waste away.”
Frannie sighed. She felt tired. All the antsy energy of the hospital bed had left her the moment she got home. She wanted to listen to the radio and sleep. “What’s at the beach?”
“Boys, Frannie.” Carol laughed, not harshly, a sweet laugh. “What else would be at the beach? Come on, you’re gonna be a senior. We gotta get you out there.”
Frannie sighed.
“Do you have a bathing suit? Get it.”
A bathing suit and a white men’s shirt for a cover-up. She was sixteen and a half and built like a long-haired boy, and as she rode in the convertible, she folded her arms around the white button-down and squinted into the sun.
“Hey gang,” Carol called as she zipped through the streets, headed towards Ocean Highway. “Frannie’s never been hunting!”
Frannie Cohn reached Laguna Beach for the first time in her life on May 15, 1958.
Carol parked the roadster in the sand at the side of the road behind a dozen other cars up the road a ways from a wooden sign that said MAIN BEACH.
“Seven miles of pristine sand, ladies,” said Noreen as she unloaded towels and suntan oil and other accoutrements onto her crew. Frannie took an armful of towels. “Let’s find the local fauna!”
Frannie squinted hard, wishing she’d brought sunglasses or at least a hat, and the sun baked the sand along the side of the road and heated her toes through her canvas shoes. Already she felt her pale skin frying as she and the girls found the wooden stairs down to the sand.
Frannie regarded the beach, struck for a moment by the curve of sand and the waves crashing to the cliffs, drowning out any traffic sounds from above. The pickings for mammals of the human male persuasion seemed a little slim, and that suited her fine.
They were halfway between the road and the water and Frannie spread out a towel and watched a few kids leaping in the water, tossing a Frisbee to their dog, and they all seemed to leap the same, like a school of fish trying to escape the ocean. She smiled to see this and thought maybe it would be the kicks to drag her parents out here. Her father would likely lecture her about Pinder and how water was the Greatest of All or some such and he’d miss the beauty of the thing itself. Still, she liked the idea of seeing her pop on the beach.
In the other direction there were some boys in the water, too far away for distinction so they looked like an army of bronze slashes in the bright day, human daggers, lean and running into the water carrying enormous slabs of wood. She’d heard of surfing but had paid it no attention.
Nadine Morley whistled behind Frannie and said, “That’s the idea,” and she and Carol made quick work of moving their whole campsite down the beach a little closer to the surfing gods. They sat down and started arching their backs, ready to be admired.
Oy. Frannie trudged after them and Carol said, “Sit, Frannie, you look like you’re either stalking us or about to take our order.”
“What can I get you?” Frannie grinned, pretending to write on her palm with a pencil she mimed pulling from behind her tied-back mountain of black, curly hair. “A slab of man-meat, perhaps? That comes a la mode.”
“Oh, she can be crass,” marveled Carol, as though she liked this change in Frannie. “Sit, Frannie.”
A thought came to her: her uncle, looking around nervously at his car as she watched through the hospital room window, making the sign of the evil eye. That was funny, because he had never struck her as the old-world type.
Come by the café when you’re out. I’ll fix you up with something nice.
Frannie frowned, looking down the beach. The surfers caught her eye again, bobbing in a long line far out on the water for some purpose. The sea sparkled as she looked farther out, until her vision filled with long waves and countless glistening points of light, all of it working like a blanket over the noise in her mind. Distantly a word moved through her, spoken by the golem in the dream: Emet, truth.
That made no sense to her at all. But she knew she didn’t want to lay here getting a sunburn.
“No,” Frannie mumbled.
“What do you mean, no?”
“I mean, before I get situated—my uncle has a café up the road,” Frannie said. “I promised him I’d visit when I got out. I might get a soda; I could bring you something.”
“Okay,” Carol said, with a look of concern that reminded Frannie of her mom. “I guess you could bring us some sandwiches.”