“White trash women.” Birdflower grinned.
“It's more than some have to show for themselves,” Emily said.
“I just don't think of you as a mother.”
She pointed to the photos. “Which ones are which?”
“The blood-orange suns, the ones like coals, are the sunsets. The other ones are mornings.”
Emily stared at the dawn suns, which were grayer and seemed to have a kind of music in them; flute, guitar.
He set down seashore-pattern plates bordered with tiny umbrellas and beach balls. “Former tenants,” he said.
Emily gazed to the bongs, rolling papers, and pipes scattered among his things. “You smoke a lot, don't you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But not like you might think.”
She watched him lever up the fish and peek underneath.
For months bodies had blurred in her mind. Lips, puffs of underarm hair, the swell and curve of a fleshy calf. John Berry had become familiar, like a brother it seemed; he held her in the nights. But the thought of him fell away each time she strayed. He became a blind spot with the whoosh of her clothes landing on the floor. With strangers there were ten minutes of unornamented reality. A kind of mainline black rush of being alive in the most obvious, necessary way. Her whole life was lived for these: cheek to the hollow space between back and shoulder, arm resting in arm, legs wrinkled together.
With the spatula, Birdflower put a sword steak onto her plate and then poured butter and squares of onions over it. It smelled intoxicating. The gallon of wine swayed slightly as he raised it between them. Emily felt her hand cupped around a wineglass, the other resting on her thigh, and her back against the metal of the chair. She settled into herself and lifted her glass for more.
SEVEN. MTV
Snowflakes and stars, no color really, just shapes suggesting silver or white made by the pressure of his fingertips on his eyes. Lila was stretched out next to him. Her head rested on the tab of a huge Miller beer — and her arms and legs sprawled over the towel's edge. “Never?” he said pressing harder.
“You know I've heard of ‘em. The channel we get from Nags Head just has drag racing and reruns. Every time I turn it on, those cars that look like water bugs are rounding the track.”
“Too bad,” Eddie said, fingering the swimsuit his mother had bought him: long shorts, with a drawstring waist and bright shapes floating in canary yellow. He remembered his favorite video: Sting messing up a ballroom, then following a blonde into a Rolls-Royce.
“What's so great about them?” Lila asked.
“They're like movies,” he said, “but better, the best part of movies, when stuff is happening and there's music.”
“I like listening to music,” Lila said, her eyes closed. Tiny beads of sweat gathered on her upper lip and brow. “What's so great about getting a few more channels?”
“MTV is not a TV channel,” Eddie said.
“You turn it on the dial, don't you? It's little color and light particles in the air like all the others.”
“I can't explain it.” He shook his head, leaned back on his palm tree-patterned towel, and put his sunglasses back on. “It's beyond words.” Eddie saw a thin and unshaven rock star, diamond stud in one ear, singing to her. “They're like dreams,” he said.
“Not any I've had,” Lila said and turned her head.
“Take my word for it.”
“Does your mother?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“If they're all that great, I'd bet she'd like them,” Lila said. She started talking about his mom the way she always did, as though she were some sort of magical person, different from everyone else on the island.
Eddie half listened; he looked down to the public beach where kids in the surf caught tame waves as far up the sand as their father's feet. Sometimes in Tennessee — the ground covered with snow, his dog Sebastian sending wet puffs up in front of him, the ice-covered trees tingling like angels — Eddie would wonder about Ocracoke and the island winters there. He'd daydream about high waves drenching his mother's house, the water sitting for days till it froze and encased things: the red bathroom trash can with the British hunters on it; the bag of oranges near the refrigerator; his mother's soft leather sandals with the darker sunken spot for each toe. But rising water wasn't really what he worried about. He thought mostly of her and how restless she would be during the winter rainstorms. He wondered if she missed him. It bothered Eddie that she never asked to see him in the winters. He wondered if she drank too much, if she was careful in the ocean, and what the men she was with were like.
Eddie interrupted Lila and asked her what it was like on the island in the winter.
“You never listen to me,” she said.
“Yeah, I do.”
“You act like I'm some kind of ape or something,” Lila said.
Eddie thought of her being a delicate baby ape. Like the tiny monkeys in lace dresses he'd seen on talk shows.
“Everything closes,” Lila said, “and we all sit around and stare at each other.”
Gulls were edging closer. With heads cocked they eyed the sweaty Coke cans and bag of chips.
‘'I'm sorry,” Eddie said. He waited for her to answer. “Want to come to my house tonight? I got some beers. And my mother won't be back until late — she's deep-sea fishing.”
“Sure,” Lila said lazily. “I got nothing better to do.” As if she just thought of it, Lila leaned up and moved her lips close to his ear. “I heard they found that pony.”
Eddie said, “No one knows. .”
“Just you and me,” Lila said, lying back down. They were quiet a moment. “If you want, we could go to the lighthouse after.”
“Really?”
“My father helped paint it last year and he still has keys.”
“But let's drink the beers first at my house.”
“Okay.”
She got up quickly and went to the water. He followed, thinking of it like a movie: high steps through the waves, then in slow motion diving into the sea.
“The waves come in sevens,” Lila said. She breaststroked toward his open hand. Eddie pulled her to his lap where she floated light as balsa wood above his knees. She noticed his hair curled up around his face and how the longer pieces on the back of his neck waved. “Do you ever tell lies?” she said.
“No,” he said, looking way off to the blurry horizon. But swift as a good pin, he thought of the time he was caught shoplifting albums under his shirt, and how the cellophane had stuck to his chest. Also the fibs he'd told this summer, mostly to tourist girls, that he played tight end at college, had been an extra in a movie.
“I do, all the time,” she said.
“Why?” Eddie said. He held her as gently as possible. Cigarette-thin fish turned together toward them, their pale underwater legs an obstacle, then the school formed like geese and headed back to shore.
“Nearly everything I say is a lie,” Lila said, her arms in a loose ribbon around Eddie's neck. “I just start going and I see whatever I'm talking about like usual. But then it has on a new dress, or a green ring, or maybe the words somebody said are funnier.”
“Lying's for kids,” Eddie said.
Lila said, “Your mother lies.”
“She never lied to me,” Eddie said, seeing thousands of his mother's lies coming out from her mouth in written words as if she was a sword swallower pulling out a hundred swords.
Lila snuggled her head into Eddie's neck. He liked the easy motion of the waves breaking behind them. His mother still had a few bruises the color of bird eggs and one heart-shaped scab on her temple. He put his cheek to Lila's wet hair. “Meet me at the dock tonight. Then we'll go to my house.”