Beach Read

by Emily Henry

And that was the moment I realized: when the world felt dark and scary, love could whisk you off to go dancing; laughter could take some of the pain away; beauty could punch holes in your fear. I decided then that my life would be full of all three.

There would be purpose. There would be beauty. There would be candlelight and Fleetwood Mac playing softly in the background.

Or I could just stay in this bathroom, forever. I had wine; I had a toilet; what else did one need?

Could this night get any worse? The Labrador nearest to me audibly farted.

That was what I’d always loved about reading, what had driven me to write in the first place. That feeling that a new world was being spun like a spiderweb around you and you couldn’t move until the whole thing had revealed itself to you.

Dad loved his space, but he also always said he liked to be reminded that there were other people out there, living their lives. People who didn’t know him or care to.

I know feeling small gets to some people, he had once told me, but I kind of like it. Takes the pressure off when you’re just one life of six billion at any given moment. And when you’re going through something hard—at the time, Mom was doing chemo—it’s nice to know you’re not even close to the only one.

Again and again he told me I wasn’t myself. But he was wrong. I was the same me I’d always been. I’d just stopped trying to glow in the dark for him, or anyone else.

He was always leaning on something, like he couldn’t bear to hold all his own weight upright for more than a second or two. He lounged, he sprawled, he hunched and reclined. He never simply stood or sat. In college, I’d thought he was lazy about everything except writing. Now I wondered if he was simply tired, if life had beaten him into a permanent slouch, folded him over himself so no one could get at that soft center, the kid who dreamed of running away on trains and living in the branches of a redwood.

Happy endings don’t happen to everyone. There’s nothing you can do to make someone keep loving you.

No one had chosen Gus. From the time he was a kid, no one had chosen him, and he was embarrassed by that, like it meant something about him.

“When you love someone,” he said haltingly, “. . . you want to make this world look different for them. To give all the ugly stuff meaning, and amplify the good. That’s what you do. For your readers. For me. You make beautiful things, because you love the world, and maybe the world doesn’t always look how it does in your books, but . . . I think putting them out there, that changes the world a little bit. And the world can’t afford to lose that.”

I’d had the conversation I’d been dreading all summer. I’d gone into the rooms I’d kept closed. I’d fallen in love and felt my heart break, and I’d heard more than I wanted to hear, and I was on my feet. The beautiful lies were all gone. Destroyed. And I was still upright.

We felt so bad. Sometimes, January, being a parent feels like being a kid who someone has mistakenly handed another kid.

my doctor had told me that pain was our body demanding to be heard. “Sometimes it’s a warning,” she said. “Sometimes it’s a billboard.” I didn’t know what this pain’s intent was but I thought, If I listen to it, maybe it will be content to close back up for a while. Maybe this night of pain would give me even a day of relief.

“No,” Shadi said seriously. “Falling’s the part that takes your breath away. It’s the part when you can’t believe the person standing in front of you both exists and happened to wander into your path. It’s supposed to make you feel lucky to be alive, exactly when and where you are.” Tears clouded my vision. I did feel that with Gus, but I’d felt it once before. “You’re wrong that you never saw that with me,” I said, and Shadi cocked her head thoughtfully. “That’s how I felt when I found you.” A smile broke across her face, and she tossed one of the couch cushions at me. “I love you, Janie,” she told me. “I love you more.”

“It’s a good day,” Gus said. Sometimes he said that, usually when we were in the middle of something mundane, like loading the dishwasher or dusting the front room of his house in our nasty cleaning clothes.