The Last Embrace. Pam Jenoff
with their football, tossing it in the grass yard between the two houses. The boys were outpacing me now, I noticed. The twins were as tall as Charlie had been the day we met. Even Robbie’s shoulders now nearly matched my own. And Charlie... I looked back at the Connally house. Why hadn’t he come out yet?
From our rooms above, I heard the scrape of a window screen and saw a curtain move. Aunt Bess had been watching me with the Connallys, her expression undoubtedly one of disapproval. Though I had been friends with the Connallys for over a year, it seemed to bother her and Uncle Meyer now more than ever. They were forever trying to push me toward Jewish kids back in the city. “There’s a dance at the Y,” Aunt Bess had said tentatively at dinner about a month before we’d come down the shore. “I thought that maybe you would like to go.” I had not answered. It wasn’t that I disliked the Jewish kids, but even if they would have accepted me, I didn’t want to go. I had the Connallys. I didn’t need anyone else.
“You’re almost eighteen now,” Aunt Bess had pressed. “You need to meet some nice boys.”
“And the Connallys aren’t?” I demanded. Uncle Meyer blinked in surprise at the forcefulness of my voice.
“It’s not that. But being Jewish matters. After everything that you’ve seen, I would have thought that you would appreciate that.”
I pushed aside my aunt’s disapproval and watched the boys play as they had done dozens of evenings this summer. But this time was different: it was the last time. Tomorrow it would all be gone. Swatting back a tear, I ran up the stairs to my room and grabbed the camera that Uncle Meyer had given to me as a birthday present. “I noticed you admiring it,” he’d confessed. It was smaller than the one Papa had let me use and not as new. But I didn’t mind; I took it everywhere, capturing bits of the city, like the shopkeepers beneath the sagging awnings at the Italian market and the old men who fed pigeons in Mifflin Park. I saved a bit of my allowance each week to buy film and had gotten permission to use the darkroom at school, rinsing the images until the contrast was just right.
I stood on the stairs, snapping shots of the boys as they tackled one another, their hair and skin golden in the late-day sun.
“Hey!” Liam scowled at the clicking sound. “No pictures.”
I lowered the camera and walked down the steps. “Why not?” I challenged.
“You gotta be careful with that. Someone might think you’re an Axis spy.”
“Liam!” Jack cautioned.
“I didn’t mean anything by it.” His face flushed. But there was some truth to what he’d said: people looked at me differently since the war began. Even though I was an American citizen now and my accent had faded with time, my past meant I would never truly be one of them. I was an outsider, foreign once more.
“I doubt the Germans would want a photo of you anyway,” Jack chided his twin, trying to break the tension. Liam did not answer but stormed off around the side of the house.
“But, Liam, we’re going to the boardwalk!” Robbie could not imagine anyone passing up on that. His voice was drowned out by the choky rev of Liam’s dirt-bike engine, then tires squealing. Seeing Robbie’s face fall, I walked over and squeezed his hand, which was still a bit slick with bacon grease. Jack looked at me helplessly. Liam was so much moodier and more distant than a year ago. We had hoped that the summer away from the city, where trouble was so easy to find, would have done something to calm Liam’s wild ways. There were moments when he seemed his old self, playing with his brothers in the surf. But his darkness always returned.
Mrs. Connally stepped from the house, shielding her eyes as she scanned the side yard. “Where’s Liam?”
“Gone—on his bike. He said something earlier about meeting some friends at the beach.”
Mrs. Connally’s face fell. “I hate that thing,” she said bluntly. The bike had been a reward—Liam was allowed to buy it with the allowance he’d saved in exchange for finishing the semester with no Fs. But it had backfired, allowing him to roam farther and longer than ever before. “He’s having such a hard time.” She seemed to be pleading with me to do something, though what I did not know.
Before I could ask, Jack came to my side with Robbie in tow. “Ready?”
“What about the others?” I asked, purposefully vague.
But the point of my question could not have been more obvious. “Charlie’s got plans.”
“A date,” Robbie piped up cheerfully.
“Robbie, don’t.” Jack shifted uncomfortably. He had been trying to spare my feelings. A foot seemed to kick me in the stomach. I had seen Charlie talking to the girl who worked the concession stand by the beach a couple of times, a strawberry blonde a year or two older than me. But I had not actually thought he would go out with her tonight of all nights. It was our last night at the shore, for goodness’ sake. How could he waste it with someone he hardly knew?
A few minutes later, the jitney came and we paid a nickel each to board. Our nights had changed since last summer when the whole Connally family had made the trek to the boardwalk on Saturday nights to ride the Ferris wheel and watch the lights twinkle along the hazy coastline below. On the Fourth of July, we’d crowded together on a blanket, sharing caramel corn as fireworks exploded above and an orchestra played on the pier.
Now everything was different. Liam was off getting into trouble and Charlie was with that red-haired girl. My mind was flooded with images. Where was he taking her tonight? So those moments I’d glimpsed between me and Charlie had just been my imagination. How foolish of me! I had no right to stop him from dating, but it still felt like a betrayal—and it hurt worse than I could have imagined.
“We’re here.” Robbie tugged at my arm and we climbed off, then walked the last few steps to the wide promenade of the boardwalk. The shops and arcades stood in a row beneath brightly colored awnings. The heady aroma of taffy and funnel cake and caramel corn, which I normally savored, seemed stifling now. Roller coasters and other amusements rose on the massive piers that jutted out like freighters into the sea. Across the boardwalk, a serviceman who had not yet shipped out yet stole a kiss from the girl on his arm.
We walked passed the Warner Theater, its marquee alight touting a Gary Cooper film. Once the boardwalk would have come alive with twinkling lights even before dusk, but now they were dimmed out, lights covered with a special blue film in a precaution to make the coast less visible in case of an attack. “The Miss America pageant is coming,” Robbie announced as they passed a poster of a striking woman in a swim costume.
“She sure is a dish,” Jack chimed in, but the words sounded forced and silly.
“Hey!” Normally I didn’t mind the boys’ rough banter. “That’s rude to say in front of me.”
“Sorry, Ad,” Jack said, chastened.
But his apology did no good. My frustration, with Charlie and Liam and all of it, suddenly boiled over. The lights and merriment only seemed to amplify my sadness. I could stand it no longer. “I’m a girl, too, you know. Maybe it’s time you remembered that!”
I turned away blindly. Ignoring the boys’ calls, I dodged through children licking ice-cream cones and the wicker rickshaws pushed by colored men. I ran south, my sandals flapping against the boards until the sound and lights faded behind me.
Finally, I slowed a bit, breathing heavily. The sun was setting in great layers of pink, like wide swaths of strawberry frosting on a cake I’d once admired through a bakery window. The boardwalk grew quiet except for the cry of a few gulls and the rhythmic thunder of the waves. When I reached Chelsea Avenue, I saw a cluster of kids sitting around a fire down on the beach and Liam’s dirt bike propped against the side of the boardwalk. Before I knew it, I was going after him.
I took off my sandals and then stepped onto the beach. The sand, still warm, grew damp and harder beneath my feet as I neared the water. About fifteen feet away from the group, I stopped. Seven or eight kids