“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.
“You should take a photo,” I told Leon. “Don’t tell me you’re not that kind of person. You can always delete it after you get home. I won’t know.”
Leon shot me a look, but he got his phone out. He told me, “Go on, then, pose.”
“What? It’s not supposed to be a photo of me. It’s supposed to be a photo of this glorious morning. Or of you in this glorious morning. A memento.”
He was amused. “I know what I look like. Go on.”
I flipped amiable devil horns at him as he took the photo. I said, “I consider this day seized.”
He checked his watch. “And it’s only just started.”
Chapter Ten
· isabel ·
Cole had gotten a bag of stale powdered donuts for breakfast.
Or possibly more than one bag. When I arrived at the house the next morning, I discovered a note taped to the gate. It said: 24-13-8. Follow the sugar, princess.
And then there was, no shit, a trail of small, white donuts leading around the side of the concrete house.
Shaking my head, I entered the numbers into the combination lock. Then I followed the donuts. A sliding door to a house on the other side of the yard stood open, but the donuts didn’t lead to it. A girl with blond dreads and dirty eco-cargo pants did yoga in the yard. She opened her eyes only long enough to give my outfit a brief gaze that managed to convey that she hated everything about my consumer lifestyle. The donuts didn’t go anywhere near her, either.
As I got to the last donut, Cole manifested on the deck above me. He was beautifully shirtless, skin tinted light blue by my enormous sunglasses, and he wore the same pair of jeans I’d seen him in the day before. His hair was a mess. He was already a blur of motion, leaning hard on one side of the deck and then the other until he spotted me.
My heart lurched. I tried to call up that image of him collapsing behind the keyboard instead. The memory of him seizing beside a needle.
Not his face above me as he said, long ago, That is how I would kiss you if I loved you.
I wasn’t going to get in too deep. That was the thing.
“Stairs,” he told me, pointing. “I ran out of donuts.”
I could tell that he was in brain-on-fire mode. “Is there anything better than donuts up there?”
Yoga girl’s eyes continued to judge me — and now Cole as well.
If she didn’t look away soon, I’d give her something really worth judging.
“Me,” Cole said. He pointed to the corner of the roof. “Camera, camera, camera. PSA. Just saying. Camera. Also, camera.” He craned his neck to look over the roofs. His back muscles stretched gloriously and distractingly. “Did you see anyone coming?”
I climbed the stairs. On the deck, the view all around was the flat roofs of California Avenue. “No. Is someone coming?”
“No. Probably not. I don’t know. Come, come, come.
Up, up, up.”
“Nice of you to get dressed for the occasion.”
Cole’s eyes darted to himself; he plucked at the skin on his chest. “Am I not wearing — I’m wearing pants! In, in. Come into my lair.”
The apartment was unexpected. It was a uniquely West Coast magic trick, I’d discovered: Take a building that looked like a small garage and turn the inside into a vast, airy living space.
I could tell at once that this streamlined studio had been furnished for Cole, not furnished by Cole. An artsy bookshelf studded with California knickknacks separated the bedroom from the living area. Framed vintage travel posters and fake vintage neon lights decorated the walls. In the living room, a rather fancy-looking keyboard sat on a stand, a thin layer of dust shimmering on the speaker beside it.
The keyboard was what made this moment real for me.
This was really happening.
There were so many cameras. Several at knee height.
The only evidence of Cole’s form of interior decorating was in the tiny kitchen area: The arm-length counter was spread with three half-drunk soda bottles, an open bag of chips, and the end of a hot dog lying on an exhausted bun.
“This is disgusting,” I said.
I was as close to the trash can as he was, but I stood there until Cole made a little mreh noise and swept the lot of it into the bin.
“Was that breakfast? Should I have had the donuts outside?”
I asked.
In response, Cole seized my arm. Rather dramatically, he dragged me into the bathroom and slammed the door shut behind us. My reflection appeared simultaneously in the mirror and the all-glass shower.
“Hey —”
Cole put a finger to his lips and shut the door behind us.
“Cameras. Cameras, cameras, cameras.”
“But not in here?” I spun. Like the rest of the apartment, the bathroom was light and airy. Plenty of room for a rock star and me. I inhaled, and could only smell air freshener and soap, no wolf scent. I had to admit that I was more relieved than I thought I would be.
“Well, that one,” Cole said dismissively, gesturing at a camera lying in the basin of the chic sink. It was unplugged and half disassembled, an examined corpse.
“Where did it come from?”
He stepped into the shower without turning it on, slapping his bare feet against the tile inside. “Over the bed. I want to see how long it takes them to notice it’s missing. Come in, child, and see the wonders that await.”
“Are you being funny, or are you talking about the shower?”
Cole pressed himself back against the shower wall so that I could see that he had folded towels over the tiled seats inside it.
A yellow plastic kitchen stool served as a tiny table. He made a grand gesture.
This was breakfast.
With a noisy sigh, I stepped into the shower and sat. Cole sat down opposite. The table held a bowl with a few donuts in it — these were the waxy chocolate sort, not the sort to lure girls into an apartment. A mug held two eggs and a single kiwi fruit.
In the middle was an empty glass; Cole reached out and placed it one inch closer to me than him.
“This is fancy,” I said. “Would you like to explain the dishes?”
Cole cracked his knuckles and pointed to the food in turn.
“Here we have the glazed miniature chocolate bathroom cakes with a paraffin topping. These here are a duo of free-range eggs that are probably hard-boiled, or at least were wet for a long time. This here beside them is a furry, green egg. And this —”
He produced a two-liter Diet Coke from the edge of the shower and filled my glass. As it began to foam over the edge, he put his finger in it to stop the fizzing.
“No glass for you?” I asked.
Cole sucked his finger before taking a swig directly from the bottle. “I’ll rough it.”
“Noble.”
It was hard to imagine a person on the planet managing to be uncharmed by this Cole.
He asked, “Can I peel an egg for you?”
“I don’t know, can you?”
“May I?”
I waved a hand. He arduously peeled an egg and handed it to me. I nibbled the white while he worked on the other. I got to the middle, which was rather underdone, just as I noticed that Cole had pretty much swallowed his without chewing it.
“Chug chug chug,” he told me.
I gave it to him instead. “Are they really filming everything you do?”
Cole swallowed the rest of my egg and handed me a donut instead. “It’s supposed to be just an off-the-cuff documentary about me recording this album. But I’m sure they’re hoping I mess up.”
I held his gaze over the donut. Cole was in possession of so many different precedents for messing up that it was hard to know which one was the worst one to be caught on film.
“Could it happen?” I asked him.
His voice was careless. “Impossible.”
It was like when he had answered so quickly before to say that he was here for me. I couldn’t believe an answer given that easily. But maybe it was impossible. I didn’t know the rules of shifting anymore. Once upon a time, it had seemed to be temperature-based. The colder it was, the more likely you were to be a wolf. But it had never seemed to work very reliably for Cole, who had studiously cooked his brain chemistry through a number of substances. When I’d left Minnesota, he had been conducting experiments on the shifting.
I suspected that now he could do it on purpose.
I didn’t know how I felt about that. It was better than heroin, I guessed, but it wasn’t he**in that had killed my brother.
He offered me another donut, which I accepted. The waxiness wasn’t bad when you washed it down with enough Diet Coke.
I asked, “Does Sam know you’re here?”
Sam was one of the members of the wolf pack back in Minnesota. Sort of. He was sort of cured. Sort of getting there.
I probably should have called him to see how he was. Probably should have called Grace, too, to see if she was happily anticipating college. But like I said. I wasn’t really friendly.
“Yeah.”
“Did he think it was a good idea?”
Cole shrugged. “His concept of a good idea is majoring in obscure poetry. He wanted to know the pack was taken care of, and they are. I have it all set up. They’ll be fine until winter.
And, anyway, he knew I wanted to make some of my own money back again. Not that being a property owner isn’t incredibly satisfying.”
This was because Cole had bought the piece of land the wolves lived on now.
What about me?
“It didn’t have to be California,” he said. “It could have been New York. Nashville.”
He didn’t say anything else. I didn’t want to ask him anything more about it, because I felt strangely emotional and unbalanced over just the few words he’d already said.
Instead, I asked, “What about your green egg?”
Cole picked up the kiwi fruit. “Do you peel it?”