Page 18 of High Season

THIRTEEN

Gabby shows up at the house that night, the exhaust on her battered car announcing her arrival long before she knocks on the door.

“Have dinner with us,” Calvin says to Josie as he goes to answer it.

But Josie makes her excuses. She says that she’s tired, and that she’ll take a plate up to her bedroom instead.

It’s not exactly a lie. The early start and long, hot day has exhausted her.

But it also wouldn’t have been a lie to say that she can’t stand the thought of dinner with her brother and his girlfriend.

Gabby’s kindness, and the inevitable questions about her meeting.

Josie does not have the energy to deal with either.

From downstairs, Josie can hear the sound of Gabby and Calvin talking.

Laughing. She’s surprised to realize that they’re speaking to each other in French.

Calvin used to be so bad at it, when they first moved here, but now he’s fluent.

To Josie, everything is stuck in the past. Everything is the way it was twenty years ago.

When Josie wakes the next morning, there are sounds coming from the room next door. A rhythmic tapping of a headboard against the wall. A low, animal moan.

It takes Josie a moment to fully come to consciousness.

To understand what she is hearing. When she does, she scrambles to her feet, face burning.

She grabs a thin sweater and pulls on a pair of pajama shorts, hurrying down the stairs so quickly that she turns her ankle on the bottom step and has to hop across the kitchen floor, desperately trying not to make a sound, trying not to be there at all.

It’s only when she’s outside that it occurs to her that she has nowhere to go.

She hasn’t dressed properly to go down to the village, to kill an hour or two in a coffee shop.

She has no friends who she could shelter with until the coast is clear, to laugh off the awkwardness of hearing her brother and his girlfriend having sex.

In fact, there’s nobody here who would want to see her at all.

She walks slowly to the edge of the driveway, onto the scrap of a road.

There’s a broad stone post inscribed with the house number that she still remembers her dad hammering into the ground, irritated that nobody could ever seem to find them, waiting for letters from home that rarely came.

She perches there, her flip-flops grazing the ground.

She’ll tell them she couldn’t sleep, she thinks. That she went out for a walk to clear her head.

She wonders, briefly, how long Calvin will put up with her staying.

How long before having his sister hanging around starts to grate on him and he begins to long for his own space again.

She pushes her toes into the foam soles of her flip-flops.

She’ll find somewhere new to live, as soon as she can save enough for a deposit.

Where exactly she’ll go, she isn’t sure.

Like always, the future seems to gape in front of Josie, vast and undefined.

Sometimes, she imagines her life as a fall from a very high cliff, trying to grab on to the first thing that might stop each inevitable plummet.

Sometimes, she finds a safer place to land.

Sometimes, she manages to clamber up a few feet.

Sometimes, the earth seems to crumble away from beneath her, and she is falling, falling all over again.

She lifts her face up toward the early morning sun, closes her eyes, and waits. She doesn’t open them, even when she hears the sound of a car rolling slowly up the hill. Even when the engine cuts, a handbrake creaking on.

“Not disturbing you, am I?”

She opens her eyes.

The man in front of her is tall. Tousled dark hair and a lean body. A deep voice with a lilt of French beneath a good English accent. Someone who’s been here for a while, who’s used to tourists, and who can spot Josie’s British genes from a mile off.

“No,” she says. “I was just…”

She trails off. Gestures one hand, uselessly.

“I thought it was you I saw yesterday,” he says brightly.

“Yesterday?”

“At the dive shop?” he says. “I waved at you, through the window. Didn’t you see?”

He shakes his head, incredulously.

“Josie Jackson,” he says, as if he can’t quite believe it himself. “In the flesh.”

“I’m not—” she starts.

But he’s looking at her like he knows her.

“Do I—?”

“You don’t remember me?”

She shakes her head.

“Oh, come on,” he says. “I know I was only a kid back then, but I was always running around after you and Hannah. I thought you guys were so cool.”

That’s when it clicks.

“Nicolas?”

There’s a vague memory, like an object just beneath the surface of water.

Hannah’s little cousin. He lived somewhere else—somewhere inland—but he and his parents would come out here to visit.

When Josie was fourteen, he had stayed for the entire summer.

His parents were getting a divorce, and he had been offloaded with Hannah’s family while they sold the house and squabbled over custody, as Hannah told Josie in whispered asides when Nicolas wasn’t listening.

They had spent all summer trying to cheer him up, taking him down to the beach and showing him their favorite places to cliff-jump.

They had taught him how to dive, just below the surface of the water where small shoals of fish would dart away from them, the world still and quiet.

“Everyone calls me Nic now,” he says. “But that’s me.”

“God,” says Josie. “You’re still here. Does anyone ever leave?”

He shrugs.

“You did,” he said. “And Hannah. Hannah left.”

The name hangs between them.

“Where did she go?” Josie asks.

Nic rubs the back of his neck, as though trying to knead out a knot.

“England,” he says. “You know she always wanted to go there. She moved the year after… everything. Went to university.”

“London?”

The possibility that Josie and Hannah might have been in the same city, might have passed each other in the street, their lives tantalizingly close and yet a million miles away, feels impossible. Nic shakes his head.

“Manchester,” he says. “She met a guy there. Got married. She’s got three kids now. They come back a couple of times a year to see her parents. They’re cute. I think I have a picture…”

He digs his phone out of his pocket and thumbs the screen.

“Ah, yeah. Here. Look.”

He holds the phone out toward Josie. She takes it with both hands, scanning the picture. The sea, the beach that she knows so well. A woman, crouching between two young boys, as if they could hide her from sight.

Her hair is shorter, a bob, and her body has filled out. She’s wearing a one-piece instead of a bikini, and there’s an exhaustion behind her eyes that wasn’t there before, but Josie would recognize her anywhere. Hannah. Hannah, twenty years older than Josie remembers her.

“That was before Isla was born,” Nic is saying. “She hasn’t been here the last couple of years. Said it was too much, with a baby.”

Josie wordlessly passes the phone back to him and he takes it with an affectionate smile at the screen.

“Mason’s fourteen now. I can hardly believe it.

And Noah—the middle one—he’s ten. They’re good kids.

Really good kids. Her parents retired a few years ago, and they wanted to keep the shop in the family.

Hannah was never that interested, and she’s got enough going on with the kids now, so they asked if I wanted it. And I was hardly going to say no.”

Josie doesn’t say anything. She can’t imagine having a fourteen-year-old.

Most of the time, she can’t imagine having children at all.

There were so many things taken away from her that early-August day, so many paths that her life could have taken, narrowed down to nothing. Dead ends and roads not taken.

“What are you doing out here anyway?” Nic asks, tucking his phone back into his pocket. “Are you waiting for someone?”

“Not exactly,” Josie says. “I…”

She pauses. Glances back toward the house.

“My brother’s got his girlfriend over,” she says, knowing that she’s blushing. “I figured they could use some privacy.”

“Ah.” Nic’s eyebrows raise slightly. “Yeah. Gabby’s not exactly the quiet and retiring type.”

“You know Gabby?”

“She’s actually my ex. Hence why I’m familiar with your… desire to be out of the house.”

Josie feels her nose wrinkle. She’s always been bad at disguising her thoughts, her face often giving her away. It used to get her into trouble, back when she was a teenager. It still does now, sometimes.

“Gross.”

Nic shrugs.

“Hey, Gabby’s cool,” he says. “We’re still friends. We can joke about it.”

Josie shifts, folding her arms across her chest.

“What are you doing here, anyway? You weren’t… you weren’t looking for me, were you?”

Nic’s face breaks into a grin that shows all his teeth. He has a good smile, easy and open.

“I was actually here to see your brother. He wanted me to drop some stuff before he started work. But it sounds like he’s otherwise engaged.”

“God, everyone around here really does know everyone.”

“Yeah,” he says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “That’s what I like about it.” He swings the door of his car back open. “Calvin can wait for his gear. I’m coming back this way later, anyway. You need a lift? You look like you could do with getting out of here.”

Josie spreads her hands wide, indicating her pajama shorts.

“I’m not exactly dressed to go anywhere.”

He opens the passenger door and starts to sling things into the backseat. A pair of scuba goggles, an armful of wetsuits.

“We’ve got a ton of stuff down at the dive shop,” he says. “Lost property. It’s amazing how many people come to a lesson and manage to leave the clothes that they showed up in behind. I’ll give you a ride down, if you like. You can help yourself. And then you’re a free woman.”

“I—”

He straightens and gestures to the emptied front seat, beaming.

“Come on,” he says. “This car doesn’t get cleaned up for just anybody.”

Josie hesitates. But then she thinks about going back to the house. The awkwardness of drinking coffee at the kitchen table with Gabby and Calvin, still glowing with sex.

She stands, grit sticking to the backs of her thighs.

“Fine,” she says. “Let’s get out of here.”

At the dive shop, Josie finds a pair of women’s jeans scrunched up in the bottom of the lost-property basket. It’s always hard to find clothes that fit her right, jeans always coming up too long for her, too tight on her thighs, but when she pulls them on, she finds that they are perfect.

“Thanks,” she says when she emerges from the back room.

Nic looks up from the front desk, where he’s counting a basket of regulators.

“Hey,” he says. “They suit you.”

“Oh,” she says. “Thanks. They’d probably look better on someone taller. But. You know.”

“You’re not very good at accepting compliments, are you?”

Josie doesn’t have a response to this, so she bends down, pretends to be smoothing the jeans down against her thighs.

“Well,” she says. “Thanks again for the lift. And the jeans.”

“It was my pleasure,” Nic says. “It was cool to see you again, Josie Jackson. After all this time.”

She finds herself smiling at this, ducking her head to hide it. It’s an unexpected pleasure for her, too, to come across someone from her past. Someone who knows who she is and doesn’t flinch away from her. Who doesn’t look at her as if she did the worst thing imaginable.

“Hey,” says Nic. “I have to open up here in twenty minutes. But do you fancy maybe going for a drink later?”

Josie pauses, one hand already raised toward the door.

“A drink.”

“Yeah. Or a coffee. Whatever you fancy.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“Oh, come on,” he says. “Don’t tell me you have something better to do.”

“Like… a date?”

He tilts his head to one side. Smiles.

“Sure,” he says. “Like a date.”

He must see the expression on her face, because he holds his palms out flat toward her, mock-defensive.

“Wow, OK,” he says. “Not the reaction I usually get. Too forward?”

“It’s not that, it’s just…” She hesitates. “Don’t you think you should be dating someone your own age?”

“I’m thirty-two!”

“You are not.” In her head, Hannah’s cousin had seemed so young. Childlike in comparison to their pretense of adulthood.

He laughs. “Alright,” he says. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-five.”

“I’ve dated older.”

“Showing off now, are you?”

“I’m just saying, it’s not a big age gap.”

“Alright then. Don’t you think you should be dating someone who isn’t a convicted criminal?”

There’s a glitter behind his eyes. “I always liked a bad girl,” he says, deadpan.

Josie laughs, in spite of herself.

“Come on,” he says, cajoling now. “Give me your number, and I’ll plan something fun for us.

I reckon you could do with a night out. That is…

” He pauses, a smile spreading out from the corners of his mouth.

“That is, assuming you have a mobile phone, of course. You never know, with thirty-five-year-olds, if they’ve caught up with the latest tech. ”

“Very funny.”

“Is that a yes?”

She holds out her hand. She’s smiling now. “Give me your number,” she says. “I’ll contact you.”