Free Academy Street by Mary Costello Page A

outside,
breathing deeply before entering the kitchen, then standing behind him, laying her
face against his back. Home. She shook herself out of the reverie and smiled at Anne.
They rode the subway back into the city, trundling along under the hot streets into
the heart of Manhattan.
    Oliver came out in June, and found work in construction. The American sun bleached
him blonder. At weekends he joined Tess and Anne and their social group. They went
out to New Jersey for a Fourth of July garden party. Oliver was handsome beyond words.
His blue-eyed charm reminded her of the Kennedys. If you weren’t my brother, she
thought, I’d marry you. There was no one to whom she felt closer than to her siblings,
no greater bond. She thought of David constantly. Already he had forgotten her. She
felt the approach of hurt. She tried to glean things from Anne, careful not to betray
the tug she felt. The longing to see him became a kind of sickness.
    And then, one Saturday, there he was, on the beach at Coney Island when they arrived.
Sitting on a towel in their crowded patch near the water, smoke trailing from his
fingers. Emblazoned in the sun, the glittering sea before him. He looked up, wordless,
unyielding. But something in his eyes—a flash, a shock—before he averted them, and
she knew she had not been wrong, that what she had felt was the truth. She retreated,
and watched him from a safe distance. When he removed his shirt she saw his chest,
his skin, his bare beauty. She thought of a deer; stark, sleek, nervy. Now and then
he looked out at the ocean with a far-off gaze. In an instant he could break her
heart.
    All day long, they came and went, swimming and eating and talking. She stayed close
to Oliver. She looked at the others, wondering at their lives now, their mothers
and fathers back home. All the time the sea, the wing-flash of gulls, him on the
edge of her vision. She had to pass him to get to the water and she half ran, shy,
feeling the pull, the oscillation in him: in a glance, an invitation, in the next,
a rejection. Admit it , she wanted to cry. Only the truth matters. Tense, febrile,
she threw herself on her towel and watched him through half-closed eyes in a swirl
of sun and cigarette smoke. A birthday card was passed around and he took the pen
in his left hand and tilted his head and half twisted his torso and hooked his wrist
at an awkward painful angle, and scratched out the words. She was rooted to the spot.
In his hooked hand, his twisted body, she saw a striving, something that rendered
him vulnerable. Misshapen hand, she thought, misshapen words. Misshapen man. The
effort implied something fragile, broken, a wound far greater than any visible deformity.
    The sun beat down. From the promenade, the cries of carousel riders carried in the
air. She got up, walked into the water, pushed her legs against the weight of the
sea. She had learned to swim in Dublin, the one thing in her life that she had ever
mastered. Chest-high in the waves she lowered her head, raised her legs, let her
body float, the ocean under her. She lay on the shimmering surface. The swell of
each wave lifted her, then gently lowered her again. She was almost dreaming, the
sun on her back.
    And then he was there, gliding silently under her. Hair flowing back from his temples,
his head pushing on. All sound muted by water. She glided, opened her arms and legs,
swam parallel above him. They were beyond the reach of others, moving in perfect
unison, two sea creatures, cold, radiant, luminous. They swam further, deeper, through
sudden patches of cold. She had an urge to wrap her legs around him, ride on his
back down into the dark.
    And then he banked and they were before each other in the underwater silence. His
eyes blinked, searched hers. He brought a hand to her face, stroked it. Air bubbles
rose from his mouth. A faint frown, and then a smile. She was elated. And then he
was gone, surging upwards, breaking the surface into sunlight. In his