“I forgot I didn’t like them,” I replied. “They’re a member of the deadly nightshade family, did you know? Slightly poisonous to dogs.”
And wolves. Just enough to give me a stomachache.
“Chocolate, too,” Leon said, looking at his milk shake, and I remembered that his dog had died. “Can I ask you a personal question?”
“All questions are personal.”
“I . . .”
“That means, yes, Leon, ask it.”
Just as long as it wasn’t about Victor.
“Why did you come back?”
It felt like a trick question. My hard-won hermitage — begun by me, secured by Jeremy — was no small thing. It was a chance to be someone else, and how many of those do you get?
And yet I’d left it behind.
I came back because I had to. Because there was nothing wrong in the world except that I was getting older in it. Because Sam and Grace had told me I should go if that was what I wanted.
What I wanted was:
I wanted.
Isabel —
I wanted to make something. At the beginning of all of this, I had just been a kid with a keyboard. It was less the game of it, and more those hours I spent falling from song to song.
“I want to make an album,” I said. “I miss making music.”
I could tell he approved of my answer. The waitress brought the check.
Leon said, “I liked that song.”
“Which — oh? Yeah?”
“You were right. Jazzy.” Leon made the subtlest jazz hands ever and I reflected them back at him, but bigger. “Did you ever do anything else with the lady who sang?”
Lady was not how I would have referred to Magdalene.
I’d had the hardest crush on her back then. I said, “She’s too famous for that now. You haven’t heard of her? She’s in the movies.”
He shrugged. Probably not his sorts of movies. “I bought one of your albums, too.”
“Which one?”
He considered. “It had a lady’s undergarments on the front?”
He seemed uncomfortable, so I told him, “If it makes you feel any better, it was our bassist, Jeremy, wearing them.”
Nostalgia chewed on me. No, not chewed. Nibbled. Just nibbled.
“Well,” Leon said, eyes on our combined funds by the check, “I guess that’s that. I better get you back.”
I pointed at the ocean.
“Pacific,” Leon said, with no smile, but a glint in his eyes.
“I think we should take off our shoes.”
Leon frowned. “I’m not really that kind of person.”
I knew that he wasn’t. At least, I knew he wasn’t the sort of person to abandon a car in the middle of the L.A. freeway. And that seemed to lead naturally to the sort of person who wouldn’t roll up their pants and take their shoes off with an unfamiliar rock star at five a.m.
“Don’t give me that look. I’m not asking you if you want to get matching tattoos. I’m asking if you want to take a manly stroll on the beach. How long is it until sunrise?” I asked.
He looked at his tasteful watch. “Probably thirty minutes.”
“What’s thirty minutes more to see the sun rise over the ocean?”
“We’re going to wait longer than that if you’re hoping to see the sun rise over the Pacific.”
“Don’t be pedantic, Leon.”
We faced off. He looked weary, tired, made soft by life, and I thought he was beyond my charms. But then he shook his head and bent to untie his shoes.
I triumphantly whipped off my sneakers. As Leon carefully untied his laces and cuffed the bottom of his slacks, I waltzed onto the cool sand. Up here, it was dry and soft and weightless.
Beside me, Leon tipped his head back to watch a helicopter fly along the coast, north to south. The boys with the kite had disappeared, and it seemed like the beach was finally going to sleep, right when it was time to wake up.
I led Leon to the packed sand at the ocean’s edge.
“Hot damn,” I hissed. The water was freezing. I could feel every nerve inside me twitching and shaking and considering shifting into a wolf.
“Cold,” remarked Leon.
Gritting my teeth, I hopped from one foot to the other until the nausea passed and my body remembered that it was human, only human.
“I remember reading that ocean temperature was sixty-four or sixty-five around here,” Leon said. He experimentally stepped a little deeper into the briny deep. “Feels colder, doesn’t it?”
Now that I was used to it, it wasn’t that bad. I kicked my toes in the sand and felt something squirm away from the contact.
“We’re not alone,” I said. “Something’s down there.”
Leon knelt, careful to keep his slacks dry, and dug quickly.
He made a few soft sounds of disappointment until he straightened with a handful of sand.
“Think one’s in there,” he remarked, holding it out to me.
I sorted through the sand until I found the creature: a whitebacked insect or crustacean nearly the size of a quarter. It had a lot of legs. “It’s an alien.”
“Sand crab,” Leon said. “It won’t hurt you.”
“It sure is ugly.”
“Ugly never hurt a thing.”
I scoffed. “Oh, ugly has hurt some things. It’s just that pretty hurts more.”
“Amen.” Leon tossed the crab gently into the surf.
We walked in silence for a little bit, no sound but the ocean and the cars moving on the street. Above us, the sky grayed and then pinked. In a few hours, I could call Isabel, and then I would switch on that dusty keyboard and start to make something real. As a flock of pelicans soared by us in the half-light, I thought about how beautiful this place was and how lucky I was and how all I had to do was not screw things up in any way.
I eased my little notepad out of my back pocket. Leon was looking at me as I did, so I said, “What?”
“You’re just something else, is all,” Leon said. “Most people aren’t. What did you write there?”
I turned it around so he could see what I’d written.
Lovers and lawyers
Lips and teeth
Tally that memory
Give it a price
Is that your dream?
Here’s a check
Something clever here
Pelicans are clever
He was charmed. “Lyrics? You just wrote those now? Will those really become a song?”
“Maybe. That pelican stuff is some of my finest work.”
Without any discussion, we both stopped and gazed out over the water. The sun rose behind us, but haze or smog filtered out most of the orange, making the ocean a slowly developing blue-and-purple portrait.