Second Star

36

I get very good at waiting. I wait as I dutifully go to my outpatient therapy with Mary each week, talk about my feelings and answer questions and go through the five stages of grief for my brothers like I’m checking them off a to-do list. I wait until Fiona can laugh when I joke that I’m finally seeing a grief counselor, just like she wanted me to months ago. I wait until I can honestly say that the counseling helps; she was right after all. I wait until my parents have agreed that I can start college in January; they’ve ironed everything out with Stanford, I’ll just matriculate one semester late. I wait until my mother lets me take the car and drive myself to therapy, alone. I wait until she’s actually sent me out on errands by myself: pick up a dozen eggs, the dry cleaning, a tube of toothpaste. I wait until the weather turns cooler and the days are shorter, until I can speak about my brothers in the past tense without tripping over the words. I wait until my parents trust me. Only then do I take the car—a fresh, new, shiny SUV my parents bought for me to take to college, a belated graduation gift, so normal and unsurprising—and drive to Kensington Beach.

I drive there because I have to see it for myself. I drive there because even now, all this time later, I wake up every morning and think I’m somewhere else. Every morning, I think I’m in Kensington.

The roads are familiar, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Mary and her colleagues all conceded that I probably did make my way to the gated community that was once called Kensington Beach at some point during my psychosis. Fiona Googled the place and told me what I already knew: that it was a popular beachside housing development in the 1980s but had long since been abandoned. No one lives there now. It’s not safe. The only reason they haven’t torn the houses down is the cliffs aren’t stable enough for tractors and trailers to park there, let alone lug away debris. The place itself is unstable. Just like me.

Now I wonder how I found it; my GPS stops working short of the turn that leads me up the cliffs. In fact, according to my GPS, I’m driving straight into the ocean.

I pull into the driveway of what would have been Jas’s house. It’s there, just like I remember it, but instead of looking like it received a fresh coat of paint a few months ago, the exterior of the house is beat-up, the paint peeling and chipped. There’s graffiti all over the garage door, and when I try the front door, prepared to break a window to get inside if I have to, it’s unlocked.

The house is empty. There isn’t a single piece of furniture inside. There’s more graffiti on the interior walls, but it’s completely illegible. On one wall, someone has drawn a surfer taking a massive wave. It looks exactly like the picture I saw on the bench when I waited for the bus. There’s some trash on the floor. I take a deep breath, as though maybe there will be some trace of the scents I associate with Jas, but the place smells vaguely of stale beer and pot, like maybe some kids crashed here while they surfed the waves on the beach below. Or maybe they were just looking for a place to party, completely unaware of the waves at all.

At least the house is shaped like I remember it, a mirror image of Pete’s, perched on the cliffs on the other side of Kensington. I head for the garage, remembering the collection of surfboards I saw there the first time I saw Jas. Maybe there will be some trace of him there at least.

But there is nothing; just another empty room.

I walk out through the front door and head down the overgrown road that will lead to Pete’s house. When I see it, I break into a run. Maybe some of Pete’s crew still lives here; maybe Hughie or Matt is waiting just on the other side of the door.

But the house is a mess; it reeks of mildew, as if a wave rose up from the ocean below and drenched the place. The sliding glass doors that lead to the backyard are wide open; a few seagulls are hopping around the living room. They’ve made this house their home. The tile floors that were always gleamingly white, where Pete laid out a blanket and we all ate the dinner I cooked, are covered with feathers and droppings. The birds caw at me in protest as I make my way to the backyard, toward the one thing here that’s familiar: the sound of the waves.

The cliffs fall so straight and so sharp that I take a step back, afraid I might fall. The rocks are jagged and toothlike. It’d be impossible to build stairs into these cliffs. And I can’t imagine why anyone would want to.

Because below me, there is no beach. The water comes right up to the cliffs. There is no perfect triangle of white sand. The waves are rough and choppy, driving themselves directly into the wall of rocks, spray colliding with stone. To surf them would be certain death.

It’s as if the ocean has swallowed my memories whole.

I stop at Fiona’s on the drive home. I’d told my parents that I was going there when I left the house this morning, and of course they believed me, now that I’m back to normal.

Fiona’s home from school for the weekend—she left for college at the usual time in September, like everyone else—and after months away, she’s thrilled to see me out on my own.

“You look so good, Wen,” she squeals as we hug hello.

I laugh, but Fiona shakes her head.

“No, I mean seriously. I don’t know, ever since this summer … I mean, you even looked pretty that morning you showed up here, stoned out of your mind.”

“Now I know you’re just being nice.”

“I’m not,” Fiona insists. “Really.”

I put my arms around my best friend and hug her again as she oohs and aahs over my new car. I let her drive it down from her house in the hills when we go out to dinner. I roll the windows down and breathe in the scent of the eucalyptus trees that line her neighborhood, erasing any trace of the ocean.

I’m tempted to apologize to her, to tell her she was right all along. But instead I listen as she tells me about her breakup with Dax, about the cute guy who lives on her floor in the dorm, about the professor she has a crush on, about the sorority she’s decided to pledge.

“Not,” she adds quickly, like she’s worried it might upset me, “that I’ll ever know any of those girls the way I know you.”

I’m not sure I know me anymore. I’d been so certain that my summer in the sun was real, so certain that Fiona and Mary and my parents were wrong.

I was supposed to be a detective hunting for clues, but it turns out that my brain just constructed some kind of elaborate scavenger hunt for me, the same way I used to do for my brothers.

I close my eyes and remember the day that Fiona and I met in kindergarten; we were instant friends because we were both wearing the same purple striped shirt. We held hands on our first day of high school, terrified of the seniors, all of whom seemed a foot taller than we were. I remember the day Fiona passed her driver’s test and the first day of our senior year, the way we walked side by side, giggling because now the freshmen seemed so small. I can still hear the catch of pride in her voice the first time she called Dax her boyfriend, and I can still feel the way she hugged me tight even when she thought I was losing my mind. Which it turns out, I kind of was. I smile. I have plenty of memories that are real.

Poor Fee was right all along. I guess she really does know me best. She saw right away that I’d made up Kensington, Pete, Belle, Jas. All the money my parents spent on therapy and doctors, all that analysis to discover that I’d created a world where I could put off mourning my brothers because I was too busy falling in love and being loved, until my fantasy brought me to Witch Tree and finally began coming apart at the seams. I needed to see what my brothers saw; I even invented someone revealing their death to me. Fiona could have explained it all for free.

I reach across the front seat to squeeze Fiona’s hand on my fresh new steering wheel. I have a best friend who is real, who loves me, who tried to save me when I was going mad. I don’t need Pete and Belle; I don’t need Jas. I have something real right here.

“Of course not,” I answer finally. I pause, the beginning of a smile tugging at the corners of my mouth. “I think you might actually know me better than I know myself.”