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Notes like birds rise up from the horizon, fall off the edge of the world and settle into silence again, but he still feels the hum in his chest, white noise that he’s grown accustomed to but will never get *used* to.
If his cheeks are sunburned, he doesn’t feel them as he checks his compass again, spits white foam over the side of the boat, rubs his face where the skin is peeling and raw.
Fuck heartbreak. This was not heartbreak, it was heart torture. Heart mutilation. Heart rolled over by Julie’s monster trucks, stepped on by Luke’s soccer cleats, ground into the asphalt and speckled black.
They were supposed to be brothers. He finally had a brother. He spits off the side of the boat again and tries to feel something tangible, something that spikes and rises and breaks off from the water, jolts him back into being.
He fails at that, but he’s still left with the hum.
*
Ryan comes back to Newport two weeks later. For a visit, he says, and hugs Kirsten tight, forgetting that once upon a time neither of them liked hugs. He hugs Sandy too, because a handshake is too formal.
Theresa stays home, but that word feels foreign now when he applies it to Chino. Still, he tries to make it work, even when it refuses to roll off his tongue. He borrows her yellow convertible, drives into Newport Beach without a second thought, not even pretending he’s going out to get Theresa club soda, not pretending he isn’t going to see Marissa, even if he’s not sure that he is.
After all, he still has scars from before he learned that lying wasn’t the way out.
He looks around and expects to see Seth before he remembers the phone call, the catch in Kirsten’s voice when she said he was gone.
Ryan can’t help himself, goes up to Seth’s room anyway after the small talk and the lunch, runs his fingers over the striped bedspread, opens the bottom drawer where Seth keeps his comics, pulls one out, begins to read.
He didn’t even take Captain Oats, Summer says as introduction, making Ryan look up.
He tenses, drops the comic on the bed. Summer sits next to the comic, and Ryan holds his breath, hoping she doesn’t crease it, because god knows Seth hates that. Would hate that.
If he were here.
He didn’t even take him. Bastard. Who is he going to talk to on that damn boat? Her mouth tightens. Fish make very bad friends, she says, and she sounds like she’s trying to convince herself of something.
Ryan straightens, pushes his back up against the pillow. He wants to put his hand on Summer’s shoulder, but he presses his tongue against his bottom lip and lets her talk.
He promised, she says, and Ryan looks at his fingernails, at the dirt under them, all while watching Summer waver back and forth, her profile flitting in and out of the edges of his vision.
He’ll be back. Ryan grasps for the words, and when Summer’s face doesn’t change, he puts his hand on her shoulder anyway, and is surprised at how small she feels. He can almost feel her pulse, even through her cap sleeve.
Summer looks up, swipes the corner of her eye. You came back. You came here.
She looks around Seth’s room, and for the first time Ryan notices that it’s still so full of pieces of Seth. The rows of polo shirts in the closet, the Death Cab and Ben Folds posters adorning the walls, even an errant Trident gum wrapper on the floor.
It’s been weeks but the room is still heavy with Seth, and Ryan wonders for a moment how long it took him to pack, how long it took him to decide to leave. Leaving was supposed to be his specialty, not Seth’s, and for a moment he feels guilty, for having his hand on Seth’s girl, for sprawling out on Seth’s bed, for reading Seth’s comics.
He didn’t even take his stupid horse. Ryan sees the water in her eyes, watches as she rubs at the outer corners with her fingertips, managing not to smudge any of her eye makeup in the process.
I miss him too, he says but the words sound hollow, bouncing off the walls.
What he really wants to say to Summer is that sometimes it’s easier to leave, that sometimes it’s easier to keep lying to yourself when you’re alone. Duty is a tricky thing, and he’s found himself bound to more people in the past year than he’s ever imagined he’d be bound to for the entirety of his life.
He lies to himself every day he’s with Theresa. He lies when he says it was easy to leave because it was the only choice he had. It wasn’t.
But, for Seth, it obviously was, and Ryan has only himself to blame.
Ryan imagines Seth, alone on the ocean.
He sees Summer, alone on the bed.
Ryan can’t fix everything, but he slides his hand up Summer’s shoulder, into the silk of her hair and runs his fingers through it, lets her bury her face in his neck. She smells like lilacs, and Ryan realizes that despite everything that has made the last few months feel like years, it is still technically spring.
I miss him too, he murmurs again, and he realizes that this is only a shade of a larger truth.
She runs her hand up his chest and fingers the buttons on his collar with her manicured nails, and when her lips move and part against his Ryan knows that she’s wishing for dimples and curly brown hair.
If she realizes that he’s suddenly thinking the same, she has enough tact not to say it out loud.
*
He comes back to Newport again and again. He has takeout dinners with Sandy and Kirsten, watches Marissa lift glass after glass to her mouth at a party. Mostly, he comes to meet with Summer in Seth’s room, where they talk about the boy who left as he runs his fingertips slowly up her thighs.
They don’t have sex, not really. It’s always quiet and desperate and fast, and if she ever comes from his hand rubbing against her, finger tucked under the elastic edge of her panties Ryan isn’t sure, but she still whimpers and throws her head back. Sometimes she has tears in her eyes and he stops, but she tells him go on, go on, and her fingers tickle at the skin under his waistband, so he does.
Her scent changes from lilacs to lilies to peonies as the season speeds by. Each time before he leaves, Ryan showers in Seth’s bathroom. When he gets home, he kisses Theresa’s abdomen and tells her that Seth isn’t really such a bad choice for a name.
She hits him gently like she knows it’s a joke, but he doesn’t miss the tears that well up in her eyes.
*
This has to stop, he says, the next time.
She nods and her breath is warm against his neck. He wets his lips, tastes her sugar on his mouth.
She gives him Captain Oats before he goes, says Seth would want Ryan to keep him.
Ryan looks at the plastic horse in his hands, runs his fingers up and down the toy’s forelegs before he gives him back to Summer, says that he doesn’t deserve him.
It’s only after he gets back to Chino that he finds Captain Oats tucked neatly under a seatbelt in the backseat.
The next week there is a postcard from Seth in his mailbox. It is postmarked Tahiti.
Ryan doesn’t visit Newport after that. He decides he will wait until Seth comes home.
*
Seth flies back to Califoria on a twin engine plane, exchanging his boat, the new Summer Breeze, to a nut-skinned local for the cost of a ticket home.
It's the second time he's cast aside a boat on his journey, but this time he thinks ages may pass before he will go on the water again.
The sound of the air outside the plane’s windows as they land reminds him of the roar of the ocean, and he pops his ears three times to clear them, holding his nostrils shut tightly with a rope-burned hand.
He wants to call Ryan first, tell him what he couldn’t say in the postcard: that somewhere in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by terrain dotted with white swells and marked by latitude and longitude he couldn’t remember, he forgave him.
He wants to tell Ryan about how orange the sky gets in the morning, and what the air smells like at night. He wants to tell Ryan about the first time he heard wind chimes made of shells, how they broke through the salt-coated exterior and how he cried at the music.
Instead he calls Summer, because he still owes her that much. But when she comes to her door she watches her bare feet, looks at his weather-worn skin, anywhere but his eyes.
I gave Ryan Captain Oats, she says, and bites the corner of her lip.
Seth wraps his arms around her in a mixture of guilt and relief and lets her cry, hopes that the brittle crust of the season will wash away like salt from the skin but knows that it won’t be that easy as her body shudders next to his.
She tells him things he doesn’t want to hear and things that he does, and he goes alternately rigid and limp as he holds her close, shuts his eyes and listens to the rise and fall of her words.
I missed you, she explains, but he missed you more.
I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry, she says, and between the hitches of her breath, it sounds like she is singing.