by Ursula Hegi
“Winning you every day?” Jake asks.
“Or you.”
Jake wonders how much she encouraged Mason’s jealousy.
“Actually, he was not as amorous as it may have seemed. There was a lot of show, touching me…when you were around.”
The bone? The warm-up? Jake feels a silent scream inside, holds it in. Getting me to fuck you for him.
“What, Jake?”
HE PARKS at the end of Ocean Road, stares at the waves, furious.
“What is it?” she asks, not touching him though her voice is touching him.
Getting me to fuck you for him. He feels queasy.
“Jake?”
“Getting me to fuck you for him,” he says, jolted at having said it.
She crosses her arms, fingertips on her shoulders, bends forward, lips moving.
“I can’t hear you, Annie.”
Lips moving. Rocking herself.
“I was the stand-in,” Jake says.
“Have you ever thought—No.”
“What, Annie?”
“That it was the closest Mason could let himself come to fucking you?”
“I’ve made every effort not to think that. Or that maybe he wanted both of us.”
“Fucking both of us by making us act it out for him?”
“We did.”
“Only to shut him up, Jake.”
“Or to please him?”
She’s rocking. Rocking herself. Lips moving. And finally Jake can make out what she’s whispering: “Mason did not survive the three of us.”
“If you ever want to talk, Annie, about that night and Mason’s death—”
“Aunt Stormy says quite a few people have drowned here.” She motions to the water.
“Because there’s something I have to tell you.”
“It’s a beach without lifeguards. That’s why.”
“Annie?”
“People who can’t get beach passes swim here. Like the undocumented workers. One more document not available for them.”
“LOOK LOOK, Jake. A mud snail.” Opal holds out the shell, sets it into his palm.
“Pretty cool.” So far, he has given her five hugs.
“Mason says if you dribble water on your skin, it’ll move around.” She scoops water into his palm.
After a moment he feels it, a slight pulling of membrane against his skin. Creepy. Like velvet sliding across his hand. He wants to shake it off. But for Opal, he holds still.
“Better put it in the water, Jake.”
“Good idea.” He pulls it from his palm, sets it into the bay.
The water is still cold, the sand too, but he and Opal are building a sand castle with garden shovels. Already it’s waist high, with a driftwood pole and curls of dried brown seaweed.
Annie watches. Doesn’t help. Just watches them.
For what? To try out my father potential? It’s obvious how much Opal has missed me.
“We need shells for decoration,” Opal decides and runs off.
He follows her. Carries the shells she picks up.
“Jake, look—” She stops.
Huge letters carved into the sand. GIVE WAR A CHANCE.
“That’s sick,” Jake says.
Opal tramples across WAR. Tramples the three letters till the sand is flat. With the tip of her right sneaker, she prints PEACE into the space.
“That’s ingenious,” Jake tells her.
“Can you eat that seaweed?” she asks him when they press the shells into the walls of her castle.
“I’m not sure.”
“They sell seaweed salad at the fish market.”
“That’s probably imported,” Annie says. “This here may be polluted.”
“Ouch—” Opal cries out.
“What is it?” Annie asks.
“A shell. It’s too sharp.”
“Can I take a look?” Jake asks. “Dr. Pagucci on splinter patrol.”
“It’s not a splinter.”
“Then we’ll have to improvise. You used to get more splinters than any of my other patients.”
“You don’t have any other patients.”
“Dr. Pagucci limits his practice to family. Because everyone else would have fired him by now.”
“I’m not your family. You are so stupid.”
Sand in the pinpricks of his wing-tip shoes.
“You are stupid because you don’t come see me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“If you don’t have anything else to eat, then can you eat seaweed?”
Jake can tell she wants this answer to be yes. Is she planning survival out here in case she doesn’t have anyone left? “Do you still have my phone number memorized, Opal?”
“Yes.”
“It’s good to remember the phone numbers of everyone who loves you.”
Everyone who loves you. Mason—
Mason chasing Opal along the beach, getting farther away till their figures merge, one shape for an instant and then Opal rising as Mason swings her onto his shoulders. Then one shape again, one figure set atop the other, as he gallops toward Jake and Annie, closer, Opal laughing and shrieking, her fingers holding on to his forehead. “Mophead,” he calls her.
“Oh no,” Opal cries out as licks of tide start coming in. She clicks her tongue, stomps her feet, arms snaking the air above the castle as if she were a shaman.
Jake feels such affection for her as she dances around her castle.
“You’re my Mophead,” he says.
“Don’t call me that!”
“What can I call you?”
“Fuck off, Jake.” Such fury. Then a look of horror as if she were waiting for him to die.
“What did you say?” Annie asks.
“Jake is still alive. So it wasn’t that.”
“I want you to apologize to Jake.”
The blue-green of the water gets closer, turns into foam that slicks the sand around her castle.
With his feet, Jake drags sand into a moat. “You think we’ll save our castle?”
“It is not a castle.” Opal takes her shovel and whacks the surrounding sand toward her castle, raising the wall. “You should know.”
“I should?” Jake pulls ditches into the sand to divert the water.
“Because you helped build it, Jake.”
“I thought it was a castle.”
“Stupid…,” she mutters. “And now you think it’s a castle.”
“If it’s not a castle, what is it?”
“A dragon house.”
“Of course. A dragon house.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s a dragon school. That’s what it is.” She pushes her flat hand toward the ocean as if to stop traffic.
Already the tide is at the lower walls of her dragon school, flattening all details.
“Over here, Jake. More sand. No. Not there—”
Why doesn’t she destroy her dragon school before the waves overtake it? It hurts less if you break it yourself instead of waiting for someone else to break it.
But Opal is still working to save the last turret of sand, digging another moat even as her dragon school falls to the waves.
Mason
—stumbled, Steadied myself with one hand on my daughter’s mattress. She was getting smaller and smaller—
“Don’t go, Mason.”
I blinked, and she was back, her real size. “Sleep tight, Stardust—” Once more, my lips briefly against her forehead.
Like ice, my belly.
The sky even darker now, Annie, than when you and Opal got into the car.
Drive carefully. It looks like a hurricane about to start, though it doesn’t feel like a hurricane. The sun like an old bruise. The way I’d imagine if after a fallout. No moisture in the air—just this harsh dryness.
Cold…so cold—
In your studio, I pull your cashmere shawl from the back of your work chair. You’ll never get rid of that barn smell in here, animals long gone, even though you scrubbed the w
alls, the floor, the rafters. I take a piece of rope from your supplies, wrap your shawl around myself and am suddenly in my parents’ house, cold like the vault at the bank, and the cacophony of piano as another child struggles through a lesson…,
There is nothing of yours, Annie, I want to destroy—except myself.
I know what you’d say: “Don’t be so dramatic, Mason.” Or rather: “Don’t be so goddamn dramatic, Mason.”
But think about it, Annie. Now that I no longer have you, I can abandon myself to death—
“The idea of death,” you called if when I talked about it.
The difference? What does it matter? If the idea of it is leading me death? Remember Spoorloos, Annie? That Dutch film about a woman who’s kidnapped at a gas station? Saskia. Whose lover, Rex, wants to know so desperately what has happened to her that he makes a pack with her killer to let him experience the same death. So that he will know.
I know.
I know what it’s like when you need to know so desperately that it kills you, Annie.
I know what’s it’s like for Rex when he wakes up and finds himself buried alive.
Tell me what is worse, then? Reality, Annie? Or what you imagine reality to be?
Your shawl around me, I curl into myself on the floorboards, knees drawn against my chest. As a baby, I sucked on my toes when I curled up like this. My mother told me. It amazed her. Delighted her.
I tell you this, Annie: Of all that used to matter there’s just one thing that’s still important to me. The belief in being able to win you back, no matter what I do. I can stand anything if I have that, the magic of winning. Except winning in the sauna was not winning. The cost outweighed the booty, and I’m furious with myself. Furious with you for deserting me. And winning, of course.
Are you waiting to see how far I’ll trust you? To measure how much you can trust me before you come back? Don’t wait too long. I know about tests, about pushing beyond the—
My eyes and throat itch.
Your shawl…suffocating, the weight of it. But when I throw it off, cold air rushes at my skin. I’m shaking…coiled into myself on your floor. Shaking. But I won’t stop to put on more clothes. If I let myself stop for anything, I might not go through with it. Oh, Annie—
Ten
Annie
{ The Peace Nest }
O utside: thundering. And on the television similar sounds as Iraq is battered by bombs. The flicker of intense light. Onscreen and outside our window. All heavens striking back at us for starting this war today.
“Such a lie that we’re liberating the Iraqi people.” Aunt Stormy is furious. “Expecting them to run toward our soldiers, welcoming them.”
I agree with her. “And the arrogance, calling it terrorism when the Iraqis defend themselves.”
“Of course they’ll defend their homes. Just as we would defend our little piece of earth. That’s what we’re attached to. Not a ruler.”
Suddenly a commercial, the Viagra guy, wiggling his crotch while running out a front door to the music of “We are the champions…”
“That man is so ugly,” I say, “makes me want to swear off sex.”
“You?” Aunt Stormy mutes the TV. “What sex?”
“I can’t believe you’d say that.”
“You and Jake are—”
“There’s nothing happening.”
“So true. A nun-in-training and a monk-in-training. You certainly wander about like a nun. All bundled up.”
“Any other observations?”
“Oh…just that your parents hoped it would be Jake for you.”
“They never said.”
“Of course not. What could we have said?”
“You too?”
“I was hoping for Jake but betting—as you would say—on Mason, especially after Morocco, when all he talked about were those wedding plans…like he was afraid if he let up for five minutes, you’d run off with Jake. What we thought—” She shakes her head. “I don’t know if you want to hear this.”
“Tell me.”
“We thought you picked Mason because that was the only way to keep the three of you together. Jake was always going to be there. But Mason would have gone off sulking for good if you’d picked Jake.”
My head is spinning. “In the end though…that’s the choice Mason forced on me…on us, and then he killed himself.”
“The ultimate sulking for good.”
“I love you for not asking details. Someday I will, but…”
“When and if…” She points to her heart. “You know I’m here.”
She keeps the mute on when it’s back to bombs striking buildings, a landscape of sand, eerie in its noiseless devastation.
The only sounds from the kitchen…Opal rattling the box of dog biscuits, training Luigi. To sit. To stay. To not beg at the table. “Only the trainer should feed the dog,” she insists when we offer to carry the huge bag of dog food. “Otherwise it’s confusing for him.”
Last week, when Luigi got into some dead fish by the inlet and rolled himself, Opal tried to hide the stink by spraying him with Aunt Stormy’s perfume. Even after I bathed Luigi, he still smelled of lily of the valley, sweet and cloying.
“The far right has been planning this since the early nineties,” Aunt Stormy says. “Many groups working toward this. And it’s growing.”
“But it’s not hopeless,” I say, “and exactly for the reason you mention. Think about it. Because we can plan too.”
“But think of all the damage in the meantime.”
“Think of that peace service in Bridgehampton…about lasting for one day longer.” Yesterday evening, I felt comforted when one of the speakers at the First Church of Peace talked about how African Americans had always lived with not being heard…how they’d managed to survive by coming together and lasting for one day longer, one year, ten years.
“We can’t afford even one hour.” Aunt Stormy begins to cry.
“I’ve never seen you so discouraged.”
“I am so…very cold.”
I wrap my afghan around her. Knead her shoulders through the pink yarn. Yesterday, when I opened one of the boxes Ellen and Fred had packed, I found the afghan wrapped around several collages. And here I believed I’d given it to Goodwill. Although I wouldn’t choose those shades of pink now, I’m so glad I have it again because it’s part of Opal’s first few months with us.
In the kitchen the phone rings. Opal runs for it. “Hello?” Such eagerness in her voice. Then disappointment. “Oh…For you, Aunt Stormy.”
I bet she hoped it would be Jake.
“Or is it that you hoped it would be Jake?” Mason asks.
“Drop it!”
“Be careful, Annie. Don’t encourage something you can’t take forward.”
AUNT STORMY takes the call in the kitchen. When she returns, she’s grinning. “Our least favorite client.”
“Life-in-the-Colonies.”
“Remember how I’ve been talking about getting rid of him?”
“Oh yes.”
“He wouldn’t even say hello. Started right off with ‘Guess what now.’ So I told him. ‘We have started a war.’ He said that wasn’t it, that his new cleaning service already quit on him.”
“I wonder why…”
“Then he told me, ‘You must find me someone reliable, Stormy. And if they can’t come right away, you wouldn’t mind doing the cleaning this one time, right?’ I started to say that, yes, I would mind. But he cut me off the instant he heard yes. ‘You’re the best, Stormy,’ he told me, and when I said, ‘Yes, I would mind,’ he said in his uppity tone, ‘Well…I stand corrected.’ Guess what I told him, Annie.”
“To sit down?”
She laughs. “Yes, in the same tone, ‘Well…sit down already.’ ”
“It’s good to see you laugh,” I tell her, “even if it’s over Life-in-the-Colonies.”
Wind traps itself in our chimney, a wail that oddly sounds like bombing.
; “Let’s build an osprey nest,” Aunt Stormy says.
“In the storm?”
“Once the storm stops. I need to…do something to counteract that violence. I know it won’t make any difference to the people of Iraq, but I feel so powerless that I need to make something peaceful. Today.”
WE ASSEMBLE a wooden frame, staple wire mesh to the edges to make a platform for the nest, gather twigs and sticks and grasses to weave into that mesh.
“I want the nest to be a circle,” Opal says.
Aunt Stormy and Pete pull grapevines from the back of her shed. He’s getting back to the body I remember, to that flexibility, can touch the ground again and help Aunt Stormy in the garden. His focus has been on healing—stretching and therapy and walking—inspiring me.
After he and Aunt Stormy twist the grapevines into a wreath, they hook the wiry tendrils into the mesh. Together with Opal, I weave long phragmites through the squares of mesh until, gradually, the nest starts to look like a peace symbol.
“It won’t be…high enough,” Pete says.
“We can try.” With red string, Opal ties some of her favorite shells to the vines.
We all attach things that mean peace to us: Pete’s roses, almost wilted, splashes of deep pink among the grasses; Aunt Stormy’s amethyst and a long clear crystal; a shell I found at Sagg Main the day before, shades of brown and beige.
“Your shell,” Pete says to me. “Like different…colors of…skin.”
“I’ve had this amethyst for a long time,” Aunt Stormy says. “Waiting to use it.”
“The amethyst waited for this too,” Opal says.
All around us the scent of earth warmed by longer periods of sun. Working together out here stills our hearts, gives us reprieve from our sadness and fear.
I kiss the top of my daughter’s sweaty curls. “It’s a magnificent nest.”
“Who knows if we’ll ever get ospreys,” Aunt Stormy says, “but if we do, we can watch them build it up.”
“They like their…nests higher than the…surrounding treetops.”
“Could we make it higher?” I ask.
Aunt Stormy shakes her head. “The studs of the boardwalk are not long enough to support anything taller than this.”