Beach House
By Jiaming Zhou
DILL’S FAMILY has a beach house by the lake. “Beach house” is what Dill always calls it.
As we drive down and up the narrow roads, he tilts his head toward the window on his right.
“You can almost see my farm,” he talks to both of us with his eyes fixed on the road. “See those sheep? They are mine.”
I try to look for sheep but see only hills.
“Don’t worry, we’ll catch it on the way back,” Dill says happily, not turning his head. “Have I taken you to our farm?”
For a brief moment I think maybe he has, but I quickly remember that he did message me once about staying over, and things did not happen as planned because his friends from middle school had come to visit at the last minute.
“I… I don’t think so,” I say instead. “I can’t remember.”
“I’ve been,” Saoirse murmurs.
The quiet humming of the car engine gently puts me into a tranquil trance. Now that we’ve been driving for an hour, trees start to pop up on either side. Tall and slender trees.
“How many times have you been here, Dill?” I ask tentatively.
“Heaps of times,” Dill answers, “I have done all, well, almost all the tracks, and my family, we go to the lake every year, sometimes twice a year.”
“Do me a favor, Saoirse. Call Frank. I’m pretty sure this is it.” Dill veers to the right into a side way.
“They are right behind us.” Saoirse puts her phone down.
“Do you think we will catch the sunset, Dill?” I ask.
“Yes, absolutely,” Dill replies quickly.
“That’d be wonderful,” I breathe out. It almost sounds like a sigh. The promise of a mesmerizing or dying sun pulls me out of my trance. I feel hopeful and relieved.
The beach house is half way on a hill. We pass three houses on the way here, and there are two more up the road.
“Let’s get in the water already!” Sam shouts and jumps into the thousand-year-old lake. He breaks the mirror-like surface.
I sit down and put my feet in the water. It feels chilly. The water is clear by the shore, but it gets more opaque as it retreats into the center of the lake.
There I am, with only the sound of wind in my ears, watching the five of them getting on the little wooden platform at the center of the lake. A giant moon is rising from the valley far away as I pick the crumbs off my wet toes.
Sam comes back running, looking for towels.
“Cold, isn’t it?”
“We’ll start a fire when we get back.”
Dill is next. I don’t know if it’s because of the white moon or the fading sunlight, but his blue eyes have soaked up all the warmth in the world and radiate a tangerine glow.
My feet are wet so I can’t put my socks on. I have to walk barefoot on the gravel like the rest of us and it hurts.
“Did you hear the sound earlier?”
“What sound?”
“I heard it.”
“I thought that was a bird- “
“Last year a woman was shot at a campsite here by a hunter. It was dark. He saw the light reflecting from her eyes and mistook her for a deer.”
“Dear, that’s tragic.” I feel a chill creep up my back.
“Glad we are heading back now.” Saoirse tries to lighten us up a bit. I chuckle a little, but nobody else responds to it.
Saoirse is taking the world’s longest shower. She must have been in there for forty minutes already. Frank is taking his turn in the downstairs bathroom. Simon and Sam are making dinner. I help stir some pasta and seem to have used up all my cooking skills by doing that. So I grab a beer and wander off into the living room.
Halfway across the room, Dill is trying to start a fire in the fireplace. Some of the firewood has been dampened, and it’s taking him a much longer time.
There is an entire wall covered with family photos. They are not in any particular order. There he is, cuddled up with his two brothers. He has an older brother type of smile on his little face then. I tear up a bit because it’s heartbreaking to see a little kid take on responsibilities, even the good kind. In another photo, Dill is standing next to his father with a huge rainbow trout in his arms. They have the same broad shoulders and slender but sturdy torsos. They both stand like soldiers.
The next morning, I step out onto the terrace. The day is covered in a rosy mountain dew. I catch eyes with a middle-aged man standing on the neighbor’s balcony. He nods at me. I nod back quickly before the thin mist engulfs us again.
Later that afternoon we left the beach house and the lake. Dill stopped at a gas station by the waterfront. It turned out that the gas station sold the best ice creams in the world. On our way back, in the car, I asked Dill and Saoirse if they had heard another gunshot the night before but they shook their heads.
And that was the end, the end of the best trip I have ever had. I would still think about it years from now. I would think about the white moon, the orange rocks; I would think about Dill’s tangerine eyes as he got out of the blue water, Saoirse’s wet hair, and the steam that came out of it as she sat by the fire. I still wonder, however, what the lake would have looked like if we arrived before the sun sunk below the horizon.
I haven’t seen Dill or any of them since, but I couldn’t care less about Simon, Frank, or Sam. The last time I heard about Dill was from Saoirse: it turns out that Dill has at some point left New Zealand, his farm, and his beach house.
Jiaming Zhou is a recent graduate with an English degree. He loves the ocean, the sky, and everything in between. He enjoys writing, and writes out of necessity. Officially, he has only written two short stories, a dystopian fiction for a college course, and a semi-autobiographical one for “Bright Lines”. English is not his first language, so he looks to Joseph Conrad for consolation and inspiration in moments of doubt.
