Eva and Maria had been best friends since Eva walked up to Maria in first grade and told her that her glasses were stupid. Eva had always been like that, lithe and tomboyish, brash without regard for others’ feelings.

They spent the first month after freshmen year lazing around their sleepy Pennsylvania suburb. The place, which only the summer before had been mysterious and wondrous, was as stultifying as the heavy summer air. Maria rarely woke before noon. She walked through her parent’s empty house in panties and a tank top, drinking coffee and eating peaches.

During the year, she and Eva had become strangers. Eva went to school on the other side of New York City and they hadn’t visited one another. They only saw one another once over Christmas, because Maria spent the whole month with her aunts and uncles in Chile.

In May, Eva came home with all her muddy blonde hair cut off. Suddenly she wore sun dresses which showed her sharp shoulder blades. Maria still wore the baggy jeans and formless t-shirts they’d disappeared behind in high school. Even in them, she felt her curves were too visible, her breasts too prominent.

She’d kissed two boys her first semester, ducking when the first one had moved in and giving him a bloody nose by accident. She’d spent her second semester leading on a quiet Puerto Rican boy from Harlem who came to her dorm room and played her songs on his guitar. It wasn’t that she did it intentionally. She found him attractive the way a twelve year old found Brad Pitt attractive. Not tangibly.

Despite barely speaking all year, and despite the sundresses, it was easy to fall back into each other. They’d mostly become equals over the years, Maria growing confident with Eva, and Eva turning inwards with Maria. But the old dynamic reasserted itself, Eva dragging them to parties where she flaunted her shoulder blades and flirted with everyone and Maria stood in the corner slowly sipping warm beer, trying to disappear, feeling visible for the sole fact of being not Eva.

During the day, when it was the two of them, things were better. Maria would walk the half mile to Eva’s house. She usually went barefoot, the hot roads turning her feet black. They lay in the backyard, Eva in a bikini and Maria in jean shorts and a rolled up t-shirt, reading in the grass, listening to the cicadas and the sounds of summer.

They spent them mostly in silence. Maria loved these empty afternoons. She read Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf and George Eliot. Sometimes Eva would rest her head on Maria’s chest, and Maria would absently stroke her brow, its surface stimpled with sweat.

On the really hot days, they would walk barefoot down the creek behind Eva’s house. It was overgrown with the green of summer. The sun puzzled the rocks beneath the surface, which shone like dull, brown eggs. Maria liked to watch Eva disappear around the bends ahead of her, the backs of her legs slightly pink with sunburn, her dress clinging to the damp small of her back.

On these walks they found remnants of civilizations, both old and recent. Arrowheads and iron pipes from the old paper mill. Beer cans and coke bottles, some of them still whole, others broken into pieces, their glass worn round.

They had dinner either with Maria’s parents, who were engineers, or Eva’s parents, who were teachers and spent their summers filling their shambly Victorian home with silly projects - wind chimes and mobiles, portraits and paper mache statues. Maria’s house, on the other hand, was modern and spotless. The dinners were always impeccable, beer-can chicken with corn on the cob and arugula, pistachio and gouda pizza with a side of brown sugar squash …

Eva’s dinners were thrown together from leftovers or whatever happened to be in the fridge. They were eaten atop old newspapers and amid stacks of dime store romance paperbacks, which her father would often read from in lieu of a prayer.

The parties blurred together. It was already the middle of June. Where was the summer going? Maria felt like her life was off somewhere in the distance and these days were just a holding pattern until the real substance began. The parties were awful. People they didn’t like in high school, drinking into oblivion, talking about nothing.

At one party, she was in a corner, as usual. She’d worn a tank top on Eva’s recommendation and she kept bringing her arms self-consciously to her chest.

A boy named Ted approached her with a beer.

“I don’t like beer,” she said, so he drank it instead.

Ted had played lacrosse in high school and pretended she didn’t exist.

“You’ve gotten really cool,” he said without prompting. “Eva, too. You guys were like, always together. It was like you were one person. Now she’s like, blowing Cal in the bathroom.” He pounded the beer. “Are they together or is she, like, single?”

She wished she could relax with other people. She felt like, if she could be the version of herself she was with Eva, a boy would definitely fall in love with her. And then she wouldn’t feel so adrift whenever Eva wasn’t around.

A few days later they were sitting on Eva’s large front porch. It overlooked a quiet, leafy street, the other houses just as old and grand as Eva’s, their yards shaded by towering old growth elms and oaks.

Maria was reading Middlemarch and Eva was watching a storm move in. The wind picked up and the sky turned the same green as a potato gone bad. Every minute or so, Eva would roll a quarter down the porch, whose boards sloped noticeably towards the front yard. The sound of the coin rolling, along with the wind shaking the trees, created a sort of crescendo as the storm built and built.

The girls’ legs were intertwined at the ankles. Eva’s head rested on Maria’s shoulder. Maria looked up from the book, looking out over the yard, its grass blowing white with the wind.

“It’s going to be a big storm,” she said.

“Mm?”

“I haven’t seen it like this in a long time.” She went back to reading.

Later, the storm still hadn’t broken. Children pedaled past on their bikes, hollering with the wind.

“Hey, I was talking to some friends of mine,” Eva said.

“From school?”

“We’re thinking of going down to my parent’s summer house until the end of August.”

“To stay?” Maria asked, suddenly wounded, her chest briefly tightening. But she was excited, too. Without Eva, she’d be forced to get more comfortable with other people. Or she’d just read more.

“Yeah.”

“I’m surprised your parents are okay with that.”

The house was on an island in South Carolina and had been in the family for three generations. Eva’s father was notoriously protective.

Eva shrugged. “You want to come?”

“I don’t think my parents would let me.”

“Come on.” Eva shook her friend by the thigh, which was meatier than she remembered.

“What would we do for money?”

“Anything.”

She put the book down; Eva rolled the quarter. The storm never did break.



~

It was easier than Maria could’ve imagined. Her parents said that she was free to do what she pleased. She packed a bag of clothes (along with her watercolors) and a bag of books. Four days after the storm didn’t happen, they pulled off I-95 just across the South Carolina border, exiting into a land of deadwood swamps and vast, flat tobacco fields. The horizon boiled.

There were six of them in the car, an old station wagon that one of Eva’s friends owned. The car was so weighed down that it scraped the pavement on hills. The AC didn’t work. Maria would sometimes remember the smell years later, driving to pick up her daughter in suburban Atlanta, the smell of bodies after a long trip and the rotten earth of the rural south.

They passed sleepily through brick main streets. Old theaters with their lights burned out and their matinee’s reading “Cl s d.” Barns collapsed beyond reparations. Breakfast huts and ice cream parlors. Corn fields burned to dust and tobacco leaves wilted and lilting. Abandoned barbecue shacks. Possums flattened and exploded on the macadam.

The house was little more than a shanty nestled between two bigger, newer developments. It rose from the featureless earth on stilts. Its paint had been chipped away by the brine and humidity to reveal earlier colors, and also wood that had been eaten by termites. There was no air conditioning. The kitchen was beloved by ants and ancient looking palmetto bugs; food left unattended went stale or devoured within minutes.

Eva and Maria shared a room on the ground floor, beneath the main body of the home. Their windows looked onto a tidal creek. It was barely big enough for a double bed.

The ocean was across the street. When the tide was going out, they could float on their backs around the end of the island a quarter mile distant, being pulled like debris swiftly out to sea. They did this one morning, sharing a small raft, lying on their backs, Maria’s head on Eva’s warm stomach, which smelled like suntan lotion. She circled her finger around Eva’s belly button. It was half innie, half outie, which she’d known but never taken note of. The sky above was the color of pewter.

Maria found work at a bakery and Eva as a gardener. Maria come home smelling of yeast and Eva came home with the rotten southern earth worked into her skin and under her nails. By the end of the summer, neither smell could be washed away. Both of them were too used to the other’s scent to notice its perpetual presence.

It was too hot to sleep in anything but bras and panties. They’d wake up with the sheets thrown off the bed and their bodies stuck together at the calf or forearm, sometimes the thigh. During the half asleep hours before dawn Eva would often run her fingers along Maria’s ribs, or kiss the tendons of her neck.

Sometimes, during the day’s forgotten hours, Maria would look up from a book to find Eva staring at her.

“What?” Maria would ask.

“You’re so beautiful. Just look at you.”

Maria would blush and avert her eyes.

“No, I’m not.”

When she looked back, Eva was still looking.

In the south, the storms always broke. They sat on the small back porch and watched lightning dance over the continent that lay across the tidal creek.

When the tide was going out, swimming against it was impossible.

“Like fighting time,” Eva said, breathless. Maria’s shoulders burned, her heart beating like mad. She fought the current long after Eva let it take her. But finally she gave up.

The tide was all the way out, the beach exposed and the black sand glistening with the colors of dusk. Maria saw Eva far off, bent at the waist, searching for fossilized shark’s teeth. The beach was otherwise empty, another storm sweeping down from Appalachia. Maria felt let an explorer discovering an unknown land as she walked across the muck, her body light enough that her feet barely sank.

The other girls were musicians and they taught Maria how to play guitar.

Eva’s hair started to grow back. She drank her morning coffee in her towel. Some mornings, before dawn, she took Maria’s fingers in her mouth, one at a time.

“You’re getting calluses,” she said on the last day of July.

Their whole bodies were changing, though they were too familiar to notice most of them. Eva became leaner, dark as cured leather. Maria filled out as she hadn’t before. Her hips and breasts, always shapeless, were now undeniable. She was learning how to carry herself.

As the weeks unfurled, Maria found she knew Eva’s body more intimately than she’d ever known anyone’s other than her own - and more intimately, since hers was suddenly so foreign. She knew the birthmark on the inside of her right thigh, the veins and bones on the backs of her hands that she sometimes traced without thinking. She knew where on Eva’s hip her head fit comfortably.

They spent whole days in silence, languid as cats, reading or writing poetry that they would never share, painting water colors they would lose over the years as they abandoned apartments and houses and lovers. The detritus we all leave.

Whenever she saw Eva with any of the other girls she felt something building in her that she had no name for. It rose in her chest but made her feel like she was falling. She remembered that she and Eva were not one unified system but separate systems. She wanted to spend her whole life like this, waking together at dawn, Eva’s chin furrowed into the nape of her shoulder.

“I’m ready to get back to real life,” Eva said one day, coming home after a long day at work, her hands caked with earth. In the shower, the water that came off her was the color of coffee.

“Isn’t this real?” Maria asked.

“No. This is just waiting.”

At night, while the other girls played guitar and fiddle and sitar, Eva and Maria sang duets. One of the girls, from Detroit, taught them how to play euchre. Some nights, the other four girls would drink beer and play cards until well after midnight. Eva and Maria would lie in bed, listening to their voices the way young children drift asleep listening to their parents.

Once a week they left the island to buy groceries: industrial sized containers of hummus and pimento cheese; bushels of peaches and tomatoes from black men who’d parked their pick up trucks on the side of the road; soggy paper bags of boiled peanuts from old ladies outside of churches, ladies who drawled and laughed and talked about their dead husbands, husbands who had always died in grandeur: plane crashes or farm accidents or fishing trips gone awry.

On July 17^th, they lay on their backs on the dock and listened to the chorus of invisible insects and watched a meteor shower.

The only way to stay cool was to take cold showers. But the humidity never let them dry off, soon the cold water had become sweat.

They ran almost every morning, just after dawn, out the length of the island and across the bridge to the mainland. Flatter than a carpenter’s level. The heat already bottling on the horizon, distorting the day’s first colors.

One morning after their run, Eva was in the shower, which was just a small wooden outhouse with no light, when Maria, naked, opened the door and stepped under the cold water. She thought her heart might explode it was beating so hard. Eva, stunned, jumped and covered herself with her hands.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“It’s me,” Maria said, and suddenly calm washed over her. She took Eva by the wrists, opening her arms.

“Wait,” Eva said, even as she leaned her head back so Maria could kiss her neck.

The other girls paired off, too. They made enormous dinners, pasta and salads and hot bread, and then they drank cold beer and played bluegrass music or cards until the mainland across the creek went dark and heat lightning fired silently.

They worked and ran and took cold showers together. The heat was a physical presence, dense and bellicose. At dusk they walked on the beach and if the tide was out Eva would scamper ahead to look for fossilized shark teeth, which Maria could never find, no matter how hard she looked. She didn’t have the eye for it. She watched Eva instead, her sun dress lifting in the ocean wind, buoyant. Maria always thought she looked like something from a folktale: a young girl running through the tidal pools, her dress aloft and her legs bare. But if it were a myth, Eva would be a ghost.

It was not something they could talk about or acknowledge in daylight, but sometimes in bed, Eva would moan, “I can’t sleep,” and Maria would take off her bra and trace her nipples until they were hard and then she would find her cunt and finger her until her body went rigid. Her orgasms were like cataracts, torrential.

One afternoon in August, the summer winding down, Eva quit her job. She came home to find Maria in their bedroom, topless, reading Elizabeth Bishop. Maria instinctively covered herself with her hands. Eva stood in the doorway.

“Let me see,” she said.

Maria let her hands fall away. Eva got a silk scarf from her bag. She eased Maria’s hands above her head and then she tied them to one of the bedposts.

“I’ll be back in a second,” she whispered, and then she stood outside the door, watching high tide fill the creek. It was like someone had turned on a faucet.

After five minutes, she heard Maria calling for her, quietly. She went back in and ran her hands up Maria’s ribs. She straddled her, feeling her squirming, at once resistant but also dying to be touched. Eva took Maria’s breasts in her mouth, biting them, hard enough to draw blood on one.

“Eva, don’t. Untie me.”

Instead she took off Maria’s panties. What if this were happening in reverse? Would she be as aroused if she had no power? If it was a stranger beneath her? A man atop her? She’d never felt Maria so wet. She lifted her ass into the air. Maria pulled at the bed.

Her desire for Eva came from someplace beneath her liver, a clenching and an electricity that welled up in her in quiet moments, becoming suddenly overwhelming. She would take Eva by the hand, already shaking, and lead her downstairs. She wanted Eva to see them as equals again. She also wanted Eva to tie her up again. She needed her approval as surely as she needed to chase it.

Afterwards she was always empty and scared, afraid that, without a word, Eva would put an end to all of it. She would pull at Eva, trying to bring her closer when there was no closer to get.

She would never find anything like it again. It was so easy it went deeper than love. She never once said I love you because it seemed inadequate.

The first time she would tell someone she loved them would be David, the next March, sitting on the trunk of his Honda outside a diner in Lancaster. She meant it, too, in as much as he wasn’t Eva. But she thought about him everyday. He was patient with her. People teased them about marriage and her parents invited him over for dinner. She sat in bed wondering about the definition of love and whether what she had with David was love. She would do the same with her first husband.

The summer seemed to slip through her hands like water, all of it escaping before she could even feel present. The only place she felt present was in memories, and even then, it was only as a shadow. She knew it would only get worse. There would be more and more memories to parse through, and fewer presents to fail to exist inside of.

“I can’t sleep,” Eva said one night in the middle of August. Maria kissed her and unhooked her bra, but Eva pushed her away. “Let’s go for a drive.”

They drove away from the island, out past the beach shops and the newer strip malls that were multiplying like an invasive species. Eva drove aimlessly until they hadn’t seen another car in nearly an hour. She smoked, which she did only at work or when nervous. The landscape was transfigured by darkness into an endless, ominous terrain. Spanish moss fell like Christmas garlanding from the oak trees.

She turned down back roads and then more back roads.

“Will you remember how to get home?” Maria asked, worried.

Pavement gave way to gravel.

“If somebody steps out with an axe, can we both agree to run them over and never speak of this again?” Maria joked, but Eva didn’t laught

She turned down a rutted lane that ran behind a Baptist church. It ended in a small, overgrown graveyard. The gates were rusted.

“Let’s walk,” Eva said.

They strode arm in arm between the headstones, reading the names and dates. Most of the gravestones dated from the late nineteenth century. There seemed an abundance of children. On all sides were swamp, the somnolent hum of insects and amphibians.

Eva lay down at the foot of a grave and Maria, reluctantly, lay beside her. Eva rested her head on Maria’s belly. She lifted her shirt and kissed her stomach. She was crying. The tears rolled warmly on Maria’s stomach, and she ran her hand through Eva’s hair.

“Why are you crying?”

She had a premonition of comforting a daughter after she’d lost her virginity. “Because it will never be like this again. We’ll get older and move into our own lives. We won’t even know it’s happening. One day we’ll just be very far apart and this will be over.”

“We’ll have winter break. And next summer, and the summer after. We could get married.”

Eva let loose a snotty laugh. She looked up and they kissed. Maria felt Eva pull her down to the soft earth. Normally, she kissed tentatively, as if worried someone might catch them. She fell into this one, though. She took off Maria’s shirt, unzipped her shorts, and fumbled down the front of her’s panties, moving ungracefully, like a novice playing guitar.

“Slow down. Gentler,” Maria whispered.

Afterwards, the sadness lifted, Eva laughed about how clumsy she was. They would never talk about any of it again.

“You were so sad,” Maria said.

“Yes, I know. I’m sorry. I was being ridiculous.”

They drove back. Maria fell asleep. Her dark pig tails had come undone and now hung like two frayed ropes. Twigs and dead leaves were stuck in her hair. When she came to, the sun was up. They stopped at a roadside stand and bought a quart of strawberries and sat eating them against the back of Eva’s trunk, their fingers and tongues stained deep, deep red.

A week later they drove north. In November, Maria met David.

~

The next time Eva makes love in the house is years later, the first time she and her husband, Theo, go there together. He is methodical, attentive, sweet. During evenings with her family, she smiles at him reassuringly from across the room.

“This place is amazing,” he says. “I’m so happy I can share this with you.”

He helps her father repaint the place, a job that has to be done every couple of years.

She decided early on not to tell him about that summer; his ego wouldn’t be able to handle it. He’s a good man, a professor. Smart, thoughtful, knows how to cook complicated dishes. Her parents like him. He drinks too much sometimes, but it just makes him sad and jealous. He loves her completely, she thinks. It will blindside her when he leaves her for a student.

Maria comes down every few years with Marcus and the girls. They show the girls how to ride the tide out around the point. Maria still can’t find shark’s teeth; very deep down, Eva’s inability to have children delights her. She would never admit it, not even to herself.

One year, she realizes she hasn’t been to the island in half a decade. Soon, it will be a whole decade, and then two. Eva’s father dies and leaves her the house. Alone, she retires there to be haunted.

There was a day the last week of August, a few days after they drove to the graveyard and ate strawberries. The other girls in the house wanted to go for a picnic. They packed pimento cheese sandwiches and sliced cucumbers and potato salad and drove south, away from the strip malls and into the swamps. Eva tried to find the Baptist church but couldn’t. Instead, they found a state park. It had trails that cut through the deadwood swamps, eroded boardwalks that baked in the still air, the hazy sun.

The girls walked together along the boards. The dead trees were like skeletons around them. Maria fell behind to put on more sun screen. In front of her, the other girls started to sing. Softly at first. There was no wind to drown them out or carry their voices away. They sang rounds, old church hymns. She could make out Eva’s voice amongst the chorus. The five of them walking through the nothingness.

Eva slips back. She reaches for Maria’s hand, taking it lightly in her own, their fingers loosely intertwined. Eva lets her head fall on Maria’s shoulder.

“Thanksgiving isn’t so far away, right?” she says.

“No, I don’t think so.”

In front of them the round begins to fade, one voice cutting out, then another, until they’re walking in the silence after the song.

“Another,” Eva calls out. “Do another. We’ve got all afternoon and nowhere to be.”