Fear No Evil

Chapter One Happy Birthday I dug in the sand looking for stones and shells, bending over and showing off to an empty beach, wearing nothing but white short-shorts, a tiny tank and lots of attitude. My God! Why not the attitude? My eighteenth birthday, I was on top of the world. When else was I going to feel so grand? Everything seemed eternal on that stretch of beach that afternoon. Very little had changed over the last twenty years in our sheltered domain. At least that is what Lavinia said. But what did she know, really? For as long as I’d known her, which was all of my life, nothing existed for Lavinia outside of her body aches and her immutable opinions. She saw little of the world beyond the condensed picture from her bedroom window where she commonly sat gazing out on the shore. In this case, however, she was likely right. (Lavinia, by the way, is my mother, although I’ve rarely called her mom.) What I did know for sure on that lovely afternoon was that time stood still in the heart of Michigan on our beautiful tree-lined shore, while the world outside this small sphere changed daily. In other places, streets disappeared with an overnight flood, buildings were washed into the sea, and in vast deserts weathered structures turned to dust and blew away. At one time the government rushed in to fix things, sometimes forced there by an anxious constituency that demanded drastic action for drastic times. But there’s no longer any money to build seawalls, or pump flood waters from ruined neighborhoods, or reclaim beaches and buildings and four star resorts that rising oceans have swallowed whole. In lonely deserts there is no money to build where there’s no water to quench the human thirst. No one in these times, even as young and innocent as eighteen years, can fail to understand the havoc these last twenty-five years of environmental neglect and widespread war has wreaked upon an unsteady planet. I grew up with the daily horrors, reading one frightening headline in the newspaper after another, until Lavinia finally canceled our subscription. “No use filling your head with all that untidiness, when everything is perfectly all right here,” she defended her decision. ‘But everything isn’t perfectly all right here!’ I silently exclaimed when I was sixteen and I knew better than my arrogant, self-absorbed mother. By eighteen, however, I’d proven to be my mother’s child in spite of myself, and I blithely chose to follow Lavinia’s wise counsel and forget all that untidiness, especially on my birthday. Instead of wallowing in the darkness of terrible times, I went about combing my favorite beach for treasures, rejoicing in the fact that I was at last eighteen. And on that perfect day, the sun shone blistering from the flawless sky, so bright that it blinded my eyes, tickled my nerves, its fierce rays no doubt damaging my youthful skin. That sun had its rewards and its dangers, but danger was the furthest thing from my mind. It also completely messed up my intuition as I casually made my way alone along the sand. I had no clue that Jack Wright was stalking me. Then suddenly—“Gotcha!” I shrieked. With his hands on my waist, he lifted me high and twirled me around, smiling greedily. “What the hell are you doing!” I screamed. I jubilantly attempted to worm my way from his fierce grasp—a useless project; he was much too strong to overpower. He finally set my feet back on the sand and smiled down with a half cocky, half melancholy grin—something pretty intense for a boy of eighteen. I used my hand as a visor to peer into his dark, dreamy face and immediately a flutter of excitement skirted all the little places in my body that light up with erotic desire. It had only been within the last six months that I’d considered Jack as a s****l being. However, those s****l feelings, those desirous thoughts about one of my two best friends were so new, so fresh and so frightening that I made every effort to will them away. However, I could not will away the fact that Jack was becoming a man—and a very handsome one at that. But what about me, I was forced to wonder—was I still stuck in girlhood? I didn’t feel particularly womanly or grown up or ready for the adult world. Maybe I was simply languishing in childhood, in need of something monumental to lift me from an unchallenged virginity. When we were sixteen and seventeen, Jack kept telling me that I had to give up my virginity to him first; I’d be betraying our tight allegiance if I squandered my pluckable womanhood on anyone else. To that I’d make a face, stick out my tongue or roll my eyes. Lydia, the third in our inimitable threesome, said that Jack’s bold declaration was as good as written in stone, “Why the hell are you sweating it out, Priss? It’s not like there’s anyone else.” But maybe there would be someone else, I’d defiantly think to myself. The conversation would then skip on past that topic, and the matter of my virginity would go on as before, unchanged. “You look pretty good for being in the middle of hell the last six weeks,” I laughed, as I stared into Jack’s deep set eyes. Middle of hell had been his words when we last spoke on the phone about his internship in a Detroit accounting firm. He certainly didn’t look like hell now. He was dressed for the beach, wearing knee-length khaki shorts and a faded retro Dylan T-shirt. His dark brown hair was tousled by the wind off the lake; his cheeks were burnished and tan. And his smile warmed me, all the way to those self-conscious feelings of lust he generated in my virgin body. Yet while he looked like the typically self-possessed Jack I knew well, I saw that his eyes were especially dark, almost brooding. The sadness in his face seemed to tug them down at the corners. The youthful Jack seemed weary with life. Although for the moment I ignored the observation and my worry. I was too happy to let anything cloud this day, too happy to have him home to make an issue of his odd facial expression. “I’m glad to be back, Priss,” he said genuinely, “Happy birthday.” He gave me another hug, then he stepped back and pulled a small box from his shorts. Immediately I’m thinking something stupid like an engagement ring—like young men have that kind of money anymore. I pried open the lid and a necklace fell to the sand. “Oh, dear!” I crouched down to pick it up with my hand trembling as I fingered the smooth silver and the single gem. “It’s a peridot,” he said. I gazed up in wonder. “It’s the color of your eyes,” I said. “So it is.” Those eyes twinkled as he lifted me to my feet again. “Where did you get this?” I felt even giddier still, and very much confused. He shrugged, then helped me with the clasp at the back of my neck. “Just appeared one day.” Obviously he wasn’t going to answer the question and I knew enough not to pry. “It’s beautiful, Jack. Thank you…but why?” We rarely gave each other presents, certainly nothing as nice as a silver necklace with a sparkling peridot. “Because it’s your eighteenth birthday; you deserve it,” he sniggered. “And how do you plan to celebrate?” I let my bewilderment speak for itself. “Well…um…everything is at the boathouse. We’re just waiting for Lydia to get here. She’s on the train from South Bend. Damn thing is late as usual. She was suppose to be here this morning.” “And that surprises you?” “No. Lavinia said I shouldn’t put much faith in the things of man. They are bound to disappoint.” “Sounds like Lavinia,” he said dryly. We walked arm in arm toward the boathouse, relishing the moment, just like two old friends who hadn’t seen each other in years. Jack is one of my two childhood friends; Lydia the other. I suppose it’s a toss up which one I care about more. It was impossible to separate the two in my mind and heart with both being such essential elements of my life. The three of us were born on the same day in the same country hospital, and we’ve shared the same birthday for eighteen years. We weren’t the only ones who’ve snickered about the coincidence of our birth. But by now, the three of us have blushed enough when someone joked, ‘bet that was one hell of an orgy nine months before you were born.’ The snickering was never mean-spirited though. If there was an orgy, if our parents were fast friends at the time, it didn’t last long. Our three dads were on their way to the third Gulf War, and that experience ended badly for them all. Lydia’s dad came back in a box, Sam was severely wounded and died when Jack was eight. My father, Trevor Amberly, was the only one to survive, but he’s been hanging on by a thread. I knew before I was six that he didn’t behave like a typical dad. He floated in and out of our lives at the Bed and Breakfast, leaving my mom and me to handle more than our share of the work. Sometimes he was around to fix the boats, or he would paint the house when the weathered boards began to buckle. He’d even joined us for Christmas and Thanksgiving, which was as awkward as having a stranger in off the street. Dad and I would stumble all over ourselves for something to say during these occasions, while Lavinia acted as if there’d never been a drunken rant, or missed support checks, or weeks on end when we saw nothing of our father and husband. She blamed his erratic behavior on the war, as if that was all the excuse any man needed to abandon their family. I simply got used to it; a missing dad was all I knew. And since Jack and Lydia did perfectly well without theirs, I couldn’t see any reason not to do just fine without mine. I hugged Jack close as we walked along the beach, feeling almost afraid to let go. “You ever wonder why we were born now? I mean at this particular time in history?” He shrugged. “Don’t have a clue,” he said flatly. But then his mind started to wander and he began to ramble. “But if I did know, I’d say we were born now because we’re special people, because we can pull this world out of its miserable slump—either that or we’ll pick up the pieces when we’re the only ones that survive.” I laughed. Sounded like the idealistic Jack I knew. He’s always had big, bold ideas about himself. Lydia and I would just shake our heads. We reached the boathouse, mounting the creaky old steps with our bare feet dodging the worst of the splintered boards. The clapboard building had once been as white as the house on the hill, but by then it was just a weathered gray, its boards beginning to rot from too many fierce storms. We figured that someday it would finally fall into the lake. But on that day, the old boathouse was still strong enough to host another birthday party for the triplets of Pine Harbor Shores, as we were often called. “Hey, you two!” Lydia’s rasping voice made us suddenly freeze on the spot. We looked up and saw her wave from the bluff above. “Get your hot ass down here!” Jack called to her in a booming baritone. “Yeah, well wouldn’t you just like my hot ass,” she sassed him. It’s a running joke between them, since Jack’s the last person who will have our lesbian friend’s hot round ass. “You know I owe you one,” Jack started toward the bluff, grinning. “You want it now or later?” “Your threats don’t mean s**t, Jack!” Lydia called down. Her vivacious body oozed with sassy sexuality meant to taunt him. “Then why don’t you come down here and tell me that face to face!” Lydia never backed away from a challenge, and she didn’t back away from this one either. Smug and self-confident she sauntered down the hundred feet of steps with her plump ass jiggling inside her shorts and her breasts straining against the buttons of her blouse. Seeing that particularly vivid sexy strut, I realized for the first time how sexually daunting Lydia was. There was nothing playful and girlish about her anymore; just as there wasn’t much of the boy left in Jack. I felt like the young kid sister watching her older siblings bicker.