It starts to rain while Lev stares at his sunglass frames and breathes back at God from his pool
chair. The flora of Annie’s house and all of Maryland flinches under pressure and her soft faded
reeds and leaves begin to atrophy and slump underneath the storm. Annie’s house, which is giant
and old, is on a plantation and sits basically in the middle of nowhere, where she would go every
summer because she is rich and her family has three houses and the feeling of getting away from
everyone was so important to her, even when she was three and seeing her third house for the first
time. Summer before sophomore year of high school she decided she would go to the plantation
house for a second time that summer, in August, with friends this time instead of her parents who
were distant and old fashioned and fine with Annie being at the Grandfather House for a week
because her mother Ainsley thought the worst thing that could happen was the boys getting
Annie’s mousey friend Sylvia pregnant, which would have happened either way, and her older
husband Grant said yes, distracted at the dinner table. The rain swells, and pullulates the pool and
Lev’s drink and accumulates milkily over his eyes. He takes his sunglasses off and is washed by
the grayness, blinking suddenly, spumed and refracted like the mimosa water in his cup.
Lev and Annie met Junior year, and she had a big crush on him and invited him to come to the
Grandfather house, which is kind of a stupid name, for basically a week with her and the girls and
Oliver and Owen, ‘who you know from the other night-‘ And Annie had an interesting face and
interesting friends so he drove up with them in Owen’s car and Annie had the best summer of her
life. That joy was completely gone and unreachable at this point, and not a single summer after
that one could give her the high she had felt when everyone slept in a pile in the living room and
she inspected his arms while he held her and fell asleep like they were in a coma together.
Annie gets out of the car she had just driven here in (Her pool is almost a quarter mile away
from the house, reachable only by a straight and brief country road that it’s easier to just drive
down) and hobbles barefoot over to Lev, holding her sunhat over her head like an umbrella and
then repositioning her left hand to her hip to precede the sentence she had been formulating
weirdly in her head on the forty second car ride over. “Joseph is back up at the house and I
thought we would make steak or something… for dinner… with the red bell peppers? Like
stuffed peppers if that sounds okay.” She had sort of already made up her mind about tonight’s
course, like she had the peppers on a plastic cutting board and the steaks on a wooden one next to
the stove, which was probably as old as the house was, Anyways, excitement or any kind of
precursory validation of her choice would be nice to hear. Joseph, her husband, sort of just went
with everything Annie said, he was happy to have a hot wife that could cook, and might have
been the most one dimensional man in the world; back at the house he was watching C.S.I. over
the baby’s head on the master bedroom’s ancient T.V., laptop open next to him where his wife
would sleep normally.
Lev hadn’t said anything out loud for the entire day, everybody had been wrapped up in their
own melancholy, aware of the rain that was coming and stuck in a preemptive rot from the
moment they all woke up, (Normally, there would have been more people than just Annie Joseph
Lev and the kid, but it was really different this year, the sun hadn’t been out at all for the past two
days, and Lev leaves tomorrow) So he hadn’t felt the need to speak at all. He shifts and looks up
at her, and she smiles fake-meanly, and as he gets off of the pool chair and stands, he steps on the
small book he left in the grass, now retrogressed and newly destroyed, like a soggy waspnest.
In the bathroom which branches off of the attic space he has been sleeping in, Lev steps out of
the shower and on to the old blue tiles and looks at himself in the mirror: He widens his eyes and
dries his stomach and back in front of himself, and touches his hair inattentively, putting on the
underwear he had placed on a step-stool next to the sink, and loose pants, which are pinstriped
blue like a sailor’s, floating into the bedroom to find a shirt. There is one window at the top of the
wall parallel to the bathroom door, suspended intersectionally between the roof, undressing a
singular beam of light into a dress shaped prism of lulled white dust. It had been probably a
decade since Lev had been in this room last; he and Annie kept in touch minimally after Coma
Summer ended and he disappeared back into his own life while school started again, and Annie
joined the swim team in Fall; it wasn’t until May of the following year that they randomly
reconnected when she saw him walking out of a store, and they spent a few days doing high
school things with each other and driving around in the car her parents bought her. When she
went to college she wrote him a letter once and they never spoke. Lev went to Annies wedding
when she was 24, which was awkward and pointless, and spent the night speaking with her gay
friend Ryan who was plastered and a pianist and involved in children’s musical theater; he and
Annie spoke for five seconds and Joseph said ‘Hey nice to meet you.’
Once it’s a little darker, in the dining room, gaping for more visitors and huge and filled with
cabinets and bookshelves. Lev sits across from Annie, a seat away from Joseph and the baby.