Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

Crossing the Big River Bridge into Mendocino, she stops and looks across the beach for them. Clear eddies have carved sandy pits against the river’s stony south bank and deep in these wells the water reposes gel-thick and sapphire-blue beneath the shifting top layers. A few people walk the tideline, but the boys are not there. She follows the road into town and stands on the high concrete sidewalk in front of the Gallery Bookshop, looking up the street. Main Street fronts the headlands, where blackberries sprawl up against the fence, and beyond which the velvet grass is blooming in the softest, gentlest purple she can imagine, white umbels of angelica floating in the field. She stands, going up onto her toes and down onto her heels, looking up the street.

In the evening she returns home and sets her stinging nettle to boiling in the copper pot, the leaves rafting together, and sits cross-legged on the porch eating strands of kelp that she has hauled up from the beach in crates, hosed down, and left to dry on stainless-steel laundry racks. With a pair of chopsticks, she shepherds a nettle leaf out from the others, rolls it slowly in the water, working with the chopsticks, and then lifts it dripping out of the pot. Cross-legged on the counter, she blows on the steaming leaf, waits, passes it into her mouth.

In the quiet of the house, the timbers creaking, the wind keening in the shingles, the roses itching at the window, her mind is entirely empty, and when it is not and when she cannot empty it, she repeats small phrases to herself, over and over, to drown out thought. Grin and bear it, she thinks, over and over, until the words no longer have meaning. She hinges open her Noveske and drags out the bolt carrier, her hands oily as a mechanic’s. The firing pin is muddy with powder residue and she stows it in her cheek, sucking the steel clean, dipping a rag in whiskey-colored solvent and taking up the powder-black bolt, thinking: grin and bear it, grin and bear it, grinandbearit, grinandbarret, grinenbarret. The well pump goes out. Then one night, the lights flicker. She looks up. They go out. There is a crackling screech like an arc welder. Turtle picks up her shotgun and, triggering the weapon light, goes down the dark hallway to the pantry. She opens the electrical box and pans the weapon light across it. Most of the fuses have been replaced with blackened, corroded pennies. They are ancient, caked in thick white concretion. One is smoking, molten copper running from it in long drips. She throws the main, cutting off all power. Then she picks up the fire extinguisher and walks back into the dark living room and stands waiting, wondering what she will do if the insulation catches fire. She spends long hours in the pump house with its two green water-storage tanks, pumping water by hand with the pump’s aluminum lever, bringing it up from the well down in the gulch to the tanks that feed the gravity lines in the house. She sits alone, bare feet on the concrete floor, levering and levering. She sits on rocks on Buckhorn Beach, cracking urchins open and picking out their viscera, barefoot, eyeing the ocean, rinsing their orange gonads in a sieve. She rolls handfuls of sea snails like dice, holding one poised between thumb and forefinger, waiting for it to relax, and when it does, she slides the firing pin past the black waferlike foot, through the muscular body, and draws it recoiling from the shell. She brings the others up to the house, pocketed in a fold of her shirt, stopping and unsheathing the knife to dig up a big white fennel root. Boiling, the shells rattle against the bottom of the pot. Some nights when she wakes in the coolest part of the evening and crawls out of her sleeping bag to sit before the window, she is sick with dread, telling herself, the solitude is good for you, girl, telling herself, this is not even solitude, this is something else. She sits cross-legged in the window and the cool breeze off the ocean eats into the dead parts.

After a week of looking for them, she walks out to Portuguese Beach, at the west end of Main Street in Mendocino, and they are there. Jacob is wading in the surf while Brett watches from the tide line, taking hits of whipped cream from the can. Turtle follows the staircase down to the beach beside Park Service signs warning of rogue waves. The beetling sandstone cliffs are overgrown with wild cabbage and hung in garlands of nasturtiums that braid with springwater. Turtle walks up the beach following a wavering tide line of dead jellyfish and sits down beside Brett. “Hey,” she says.

“Holy shit!” Brett says in delight.

Jacob turns to look and says, “Holy shit!”

“It’s Beaver!”

“It’s Turtle!” Jacob says.

“Turtle!” Brett lunges across at her, and Turtle laughs as he tackles her, saying, “You! You!” He bears her to the sand. “You!” he says.

Jacob says, “Where have you been?”

“Did the Avengers call you?”

“You look great !”

“Skinny, though!”

“How’s your summer?”

“We’ve missed you!”

“Seriously, dude, we have .”

“Home,” she says, “I’ve just been home.”

They are both in board shorts, barefoot, shirtless. Brett’s nose and cheeks and ears are sunburned. Sand sticks to their shins in patches, their hair is mussed. She can see their shoes on a log farther up the beach, their books, their shirts.

“Come on,” Jacob says, slogging up out of the water. “How long has it been?”

Turtle doesn’t know.

Brett says, “Dude! Like—mid- or late April to whatever today is.”

“July seventh.”

She says, “Can we not talk about it?”

“Sure. Like when we saw Brett’s mother, sitting on a pedestal, naked.”

“And we never talked about it.”

“Which might’ve been the right move.”

“Because what is there to say?”

Jacob lights a joint and draws on it and passes it to Brett. They sit down against a sandy, splintery redwood log looking out at the ocean. It is bright and there is a glare off the water and they are all squinting. The air is clear and it looks like they can see entirely across the Pacific.

“So how are you?” Brett holds the smoke in his lungs, nodding, and passes it to her. She looks down at it.

She says, “Good. I’ve been good.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Jacob says.

“Dude! She just said.”

“Are you all right, though? Can I ask that?”

“Yeah,” she says.

Jacob receives the joint and squints at her. “You eating at all?”

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey,” Brett agrees.

“I’m just asking.”

“Come away with us, Turtle,” Brett says.

“What?”

“Turtle. This high school thing is somewhat . . . a little bit . . . just a tiny bit lame.”

“No . . .” Jacob says, scandalized.

“Yes,” Brett says. “Profoundly lame.”

Turtle says nothing.

“High school is awesome ,” Jacob says.

“Mmm . . .” Brett says. “Mmm . . . Is it, though?”

“Brett wants to go away and become pirates.”

“Dude! You’re not saying it right.”

“How am I not saying it?”

“It sounds dumb when you say it like that.”

“Okay, so how should one say it?”

“Not like that! It sounds childish. Turtle’s gonna think I’m childish.”

“How do you say it?”

“I want to go away and become pirates !”

“You’re right. That sounds way less childish.”

“What do you think, Turtle?”

“No,” Turtle says.

“Harsh, guys. Harsh.”

“I like it here,” Turtle says.

“Jacob, tell her about the thing.”

“You tell her.”

“What thing?” Turtle says.

“Tell her, please, Jacob?”