“She said that?” Beverly Taylor said. She laughed. She chuckled, in fact. “What in the world.”
“What?”
“Bringing a companion is not a requirement and never has been. There’s not a single requirement, actually, other than attending the presentation. I wonder where that came from.”
“So no strings,” he said.
“None,” she said. “All you have to do is show up, Mr. Branfman—”
“Bronfman,” he said.
“I’m sorry. Bronfman. Give me a sec. I want to look something up.”
He heard a drawer open, papers being messed with. She came back on the line. “Are you sure her name was D’Angelo? Because I don’t see where a D’Angelo ever worked for us here. She’s not in my records, at any rate.”
“Very strange,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Very strange indeed.”
In the light of this strangeness he waited for her to rescind the offer, but she didn’t. The existence or nonexistence of Carla D’Angelo didn’t seem to matter to her at all.
“Does this mean I can come?” he said.
“Of course,” she said. “Please. Come whenever you like.”
“Then I would like to come down now,” he said. “Right now, if that’s possible.”
And she said fine, she would reserve a room in the name of Edsel Branfman—Bronfman—and it was done, and it was as simple as that.
No strings attached at all.
* * *
Destin was a five-hour drive from Birmingham, about an hour beyond Bronfman’s comfort zone for a trip. Four hours kept him in a moon’s orbit of home; five sent him into what felt like deep space. So that last hour was tough. But this was part of a new way of being in the world. He could travel into deep space now. He could put himself “out there.” It helped that he did have a companion, of course, to share the driving with. In fact, she drove them all the way there.
* * *
They left midmorning on Friday and arrived on a postcard-worthy afternoon, the blood-orange sun suspended above the blue-green sea. Even from the Sandscapes parking lot, it was breathtaking. The pamphlets had misrepresented nothing. It was spectacular. It was even better than the pictures, actually, because no picture could capture the heat of the sun and the sound of the sea and how it felt when the wind blew through your hair. The smell of body lotion.
They did not go to the beach, however, not yet. First, they wanted to see the condo, which was free, he repeated over and over to himself, completely free, with a free continental breakfast to boot, for the next two days.
The condo did not disappoint. It was exceptional. There was a master bedroom and a smaller bedroom for guests—if your mother wanted to come down, say. Table lamps were festooned with scallop shells. There was an island in the kitchen, a long dark marble slab. Bronfman had never even dreamed that he would be a man in a kitchen with an island in it, but for the next two days he would be that man. They did have a minor objection to the thick green shag carpet in the living room (it looked like a neglected lawn to both of them), but after lying down on it for a bit they realized that the floor could actually pass for a bed if necessary, that’s how soft it was. He proved it by lying down on it and accidentally falling asleep, and when he woke up, fifteen minutes later, it took him a moment to remember exactly where he was. I’m in Destin, he thought. On the carpet beside him was a sheet of stationary embossed with the word Sandscape. He picked it up. She had written a note on it:
Come find me.
(Hint: I’m where the ocean meets the shore.)
And beside the note was the official Sandscapes stationary pen. So elegant. They were everywhere. He had already slipped one into his toiletry bag.
He had two bathing suits, brand new, one white with a bunch of blue anchors on it and the other one red with a dozen white palm trees (he had counted). He changed into the red one and slipped on a Hawaiian shirt she had found for him yesterday at a thrift store. It seemed “fun,” she said, just like something you’d wear to the place where the ocean meets the shore. Plus, he had sunglasses and a floppy hat. He stopped in front of the hallway mirror on his way out, and he looked kind of perfect, if he did say so himself—a perfect example of who he was, at any rate. The perfect Bronfman.
He took the elevator to the first floor and followed a slatted wooden path through the grassy dunes, and then, without any warning or fanfare whatsoever, there it was: the beach. The sun, the sand. The entire ocean. Stunning. He could see all the way to the horizon, to what appeared to be the very end of the world. For the first time, he understood why sailors used to think there were monsters out there, or why they thought that the world was flat and that eventually you’d just sail right off it, because that’s how it looked to him, too. Bronfman was a flat-earther at heart. It was all terra incognita to him.
And people. There were people everywhere—sunning on their backs, splashing in the surf, floating on rafts farther out than seemed quite wise, reading beneath giant umbrellas. Couples, kids, families. All shapes and sizes, colors and kinds. But he didn’t see Sheila.
“Edsel!”
He looked left and then right and then straight ahead, and there she was, waving, sitting on a huge blanket a safe distance from the surf. The blanket’s corners were flapping in the breeze. He waved back and flip-flopped his way across the hot white sand and sat down beside her. She was wearing a blue one-piece bathing suit, and her shoulders were completely bare, and already turning pink.
This is really happening, he thought. I’m here on the beach with Sheila McNabb. Could it have been otherwise? He supposed so. As impossible as it may have seemed months ago, there was a remote chance that he could have been here with any one of three women, because any one of the three would have satisfied the requirements of the time-share as he understood them at the time. He had an authentic fondness for both Coco and Serena, but Sheila was different. She was the only one he would have wanted to remember having gone with. That is, even before coming here with her he was envisaging what it would feel like to have already done so in a past that hadn’t happened yet, and it was a feeling that he found himself enjoying many times a day in the days before they left. This was what grown-ups did, wasn’t it, how they choreographed their lives, by imagining scenarios? Or was it just what grown-up Bronfmans did? He didn’t know, and the truth is he didn’t really care. He was happy.
“See that guy?” she said. His eyes followed her finger, going west. “The one with the buzz cut and beady eyes? A hedgehog. His wife, with the long legs and bounce to her step—a wildebeest, maybe. Kids look like rabbits.” She shook her head. “Edsel, there’s a Noah’s Ark of people out here.”
But Bronfman only had eyes for her. She was more beautiful than anything he had ever imagined.
They sat there, soaking up the sun and the gentle sound of the surf.
“I’m very happy you’re here,” Bronfman said.
“And I’m happy you’re here, too, and not in jail.”
“Thank you,” he said, even though he had thanked her several times already. “You didn’t have to bail me out,” he said, using an expression that he never thought he would have a chance to use regarding himself. “That was kind of you, after everything.”
He had been locked up for about forty-five minutes, and it would have been less had Serena and Sheila not gotten into a discussion about Cedar Court, and how Birmingham youths amused themselves vandalizing the sign for it. They had a pretty good laugh over that, Sheila said. Sheila liked Serena. She could even imagine Serena as a friend, she told Bronfman later. He could, too—their first friend as a couple. And this—the story of the night he was arrested, the night she bailed him out—was their first truly thrilling story as a couple. He never tired of hearing it. They could dine out on this story for years.
“A little money changed hands,” Sheila said. “Sure. But mainly I just had to promise to keep an eye on you, so you’d stay out of trouble. I would have been crazy
to leave you down there, though, with those two women who clearly had a thing for you.”
“You were jealous?” He sat up a little straighter. This was the first time anyone had been jealous of him, in any way, ever.
“I wouldn’t say that,” she said. “All I mean is, I had to stake my claim and get you out of there. That Coco was a wild card. Now I feel like I kind of own you. I bought you at the city jail.”
The prospect of being owned by Sheila was not unpleasant to Bronfman, so he didn’t object, and moved closer to her on the sandy towel. He was getting hot, quickly, so he took off his Hawaiian shirt and boldly bared himself to the world. He was whiter than the underbelly of a fish, but, on the other hand, he was somewhat defined. He was on the road to a definition that he wasn’t even sure he needed anymore.
“Look at you,” she said. “Where’d you get all those fancy muscles?”
He shrugged. “At the gym they have specific machines for specific parts of the body. Biceps, pectorals, et cetera.” She nodded, as if he was telling her something she didn’t know. He looked down at himself. “I like how I can actually see where my chest ends and my stomach begins.”
“That is very cool,” she said.
They sat there watching the waves until the silence between them became a thing in and of itself.
“So, Edsel,” she said. “Are we—?”
“What?”
“You know. Are we going to…”
He knew. “Do it?” he said.
She glanced at him, smiled, nodded, and looked away. “Because we don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“I know. But I want to—really.”
“Really? No pressure, though, okay? No expectations.”
“Right.”
Sheila took a deep breath, girding herself. “I think we should do it now, then,” she said. “So we don’t have it hanging over us. And if we like it we can do it again tomorrow.”
“We have time?” he said. “Before the presentation?”
“Sure,” she said. “We’ll keep it short the first time.”
He stood. She raised her arm for him and he took her hand, pulled her up. She stood beside him, and they both gazed at the watery world. The ocean seemed to take the sunlight and explode it; even the foam possessed its own little shine. Then the sun went behind a bank of huge, puffy clouds, clouds that Bronfman knew had their own specific name—currolous, curranbulus, circumculombulus, something like that. He would look it up at some point. He would learn the names of clouds.
They took a few steps toward the edge of the world. A wave rushed in and lapped at his feet, bringing a grainy sock of sand with it.
“Look at all that water,” Sheila said. She had stopped moving forward. Even seemed to back up a bit. “Is this really a good idea? I mean, there are sharks out there, Edsel.”
“True,” he said. “Everything is out there, I think.”
“But they’re not here,” she said. “I mean, right here.” She indicated the patch of ocean directly in front of them.
“I’m not a shark whiz,” he said. “But I don’t think so. Other people are farther out than we are anyway. If there is a shark, it would get them, not us.”
“That’s reassuring,” she said. “Thank you.”
His eyes went from Sheila to the horizon and back to Sheila again. The wind blew her hair into and out of her face. For some unaccountable reason, he loved that. “But I’m scared, too,” he said, and he ducked as a swooping seagull came a little too close for comfort.
Neither of them took a single step forward.
She took his hand and brought it to her lips and kissed it twice, and then a third time.
“Let’s think of it this way, Edsel. It’s scary doing anything the first time you do it, right? Right,” she said, not waiting for what was almost certainly going to be an overly thought-through answer. “But this weekend … it’s going to be full of first times. What I mean is, we better get used to being scared.”
So the sun was shining and the wind was wafting and the waves rose and curled and fell and made a hushing sound as they swept across the shore. It was into all of this that Bronfman and Sheila started walking, from the sand into the surf, step by step until the ocean splashed their ankles, and then was all the way up to their knees, thighs, waist. Stomach. Chest. Shoulders. Spraying into their eyes. They were all in now, lifted by the waves, toes barely touching the sandy bottom, up and down and up again, drifting in the current. Bronfman took all of it in.
“We’re floating in the ocean, Sheila,” he said. “I like it. A lot.”
“I know! Me too,” she said. “Look at us. We’re like … dolphins. Or some other friendly sea creature.”
He paddled toward Sheila, the waves swelling around his chin, and met her wet lips with his. “Or just like two people out for a swim,” he said.
“Or like that,” she said. “Just like that.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel wouldn’t exist were it not for the following people. I know there are even more I’m forgetting, and others whose contributions were made as part of their jobs and who I may have never even met. Thank you all: Katherine Sandoz, Randall Kenan, Christine Pride, Lillian Bayley Hoover, Abby Brown, Nic Brown, Alan Shapiro, Sally Kim, Joe Regal, Markus Hoffman, Jim Kellison, Dennis and Nancy Quaintance, Lee Smith, and Hal Crowther. The people at St. Martin’s Press who ushered this book into the world, including but not limited to Laura Clark, Katie Bassel, Courtney Reed, Maggie Callan, Jeffrey Capshew, Ken Holland, and Elisabeth Dyssegaard. Extraordinary thanks go to Renée Zuckerbrot, my agent, who has been the best possible advocate, and to my editor, the great Brenda Copeland, who loved Bronfman unconditionally. He loved her back the same. Thank you all. And my Laura, of course, especially: past, present, and future.
Portions of this book were written at the MacDowell Colony, the Weymouth Center, and at the O. Henry Hotel, in Greensboro, N.C.
ALSO BY DANIEL WALLACE
Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions
Ray in Reverse
The Watermelon King
Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician
The Kings and Queens of Roam
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DANIEL WALLACE is the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his alma mater, where he directs the Creative Writing Program. He is the author of the novels Big Fish, Ray in Reverse, The Watermelon King, Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician, and The Kings and Queens of Roam. In 2003, Big Fish was adapted and released as a movie, and then in 2013, the book and the movie were mishmashed together and became a Broadway musical. His novels have been translated into more than two dozen languages. He lives in Chapel Hill. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Day One
Chapter One
Day Two
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Day Three
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Day Eight
Chapter One
Day Nineteen
Chapter One
Day Twenty-Two
Chapter One
Day Twenty-Eight
Chapter One
Day Twenty-Nine
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Day Thirty-Six
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Day Thirty-Seven
Chapter One
Day Forty-Three
Chapter One
Day Forty-Eight
Chapter One
Days Fifty, Fifty-Four, Fifty-Five, Fifty-Seven
Chapter One
Day Fifty-Eight
Chapter One
Day Sixty-One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Day Sixty-Two
Chapter One
Day Sixty-Five
Chapter One
Day Seventy
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Day Seventy-Three
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Day Ninety-Five
Acknowledgments
Also by Daniel Wallace
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES. Copyright © 2017 by Daniel Wallace. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Phillip Pascuzzo
Cover illustration © Jens Magnusson / Getty Images
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-11845-5 (hardcover)