The Moment Before

by Suzy Vitello

  “Sunset in twenty minutes,” calls Dad now, on this Good Friday. Sunset. Hardly. Maybe a tiny sliver of red on the horizon, but it’s a ritual, walking the strip of beach to town and back as afternoon sinks into evening. Sun or no sun, it’s what we do. And this evening we’re going to do it with some of my sister’s cremains.

  Seagulls screech, and a curved line of pelicans descends into the surf when we get to the ocean. It’s a herring run, and the three of us stop to watch the big, brown birds dive and scoop up the tiny fish into their pouchy bills. Dad points to a young bird that is pick-pocketing an adult. “Spring,” he says. “The season of generosity.”

  I nod. “Easter bounty.”

  Dad holds up the baggie of shards and fragments, as though lifting a young child for a better view of something.

  Mom hugs her ribs. She’s wearing a shearling jacket and matching deerskin hat. She says, all wistful, “What would it be like. To be a seabird?”

  We’re quiet for a few moments, gazing out at the spectacle of feeding frenzy. The pelicans lift and lower. Like cheerleaders. All together. Choreographed perfection. Riding the tide, then beating their massive wings, and rising, rising, hovering, and then crashing down again, the “U” of them. Standing at the water’s edge with my parents, I decide that my sister has joined those birds. If it’s true what Nona says, and she’s waiting for her call from God from that green room limbo place, knowing Sabine, she’s not just sitting there. She’s with these pelicans, one eye on us, her former family. Maybe she sees the baggie of ashes dangling from Dad’s fingertips. Her bill full of herring. Hungry, as always.

  “I imagine,” I say, answering Mom’s rhetorical question, “it’s like being a cheerleader.”

  I feel the breath of Mom locked in her throat. The shards of her own heart just like the ashes in Dad’s grip. My words hit her ears different than I meant them to. “Brady,” she says under her breath.

  “Shall we?” says Dad, unzipping the bag with a fingernail.

  Mom puts her hand on top of Dad’s. Not in a loving way. “No.”

  “We have to do it sometime, Sonia. Bit by bit, like we discussed.”

  “Not. Yet.”

  Most of my sister is still in the Asian urn in our living room. This is just a start. Somewhere to begin. “Why not, Mom? Isn’t this why we’re here?”

  Mom turns to face me. “I’m not sure why we’re here, exactly.”

  “We need to all be in agreement,” Dad says, resealing Sabine.

  The pelicans lift again, and fly off in a brown curl. Full from fish, ready to head to their nests for the night. The fog has lifted too, as it often does at the edge of the evening.

  “It’s getting late,” says Dad. “Almost 7:30. I’m starving.”

  “Fish on Good Friday,” I offer. “Should we go to the Clam Shanty in town?”

  Nobody agrees out loud, but our footfalls continue on, leaving a pattern in the wet sand behind us. Waves lap near our feet. Rising tide will erase us soon. Then, out of nowhere, the image of Connor’s face shrouded in hoodie forms in my mind. The glimmer of Sabine’s crucifix earring against the fold of cloth. I close my eyes and can smell him, Sabine’s best friend. Her partner. The boy who knows. The boy my parents blame.

  By the time we reach the main drag, it’s dusk. We wander up Laneda Street with the few tourists and second-home people who have come to spend Easter weekend at the coast. There’s the cheap taco place, the expensive taco place, and the local watering hole. Three espresso shops, all closed for the night. A grocery store. The library. A used bookstore and a bakery. Realty offices with their laminated photos of beachfront in the windows. We always stop and browse the enticing descriptions, mostly so Dad can see if the beach house he got such a great deal on is still appreciating. The second-home market is in the ditch, the economy below water, still. Dad sighs as we pass the evidence: New Low Price, Owner Motivated, Short Sale, all typed in red block letters under pictures of custom beach homes. Ours is a shack by comparison. Not really an investment. More like a retreat.

  We walk on. Mom’s shearling beaded with the dew of nightfall. The kite store. The pet store. The whimsical jewelry place where Sabine and I once shoplifted a necklace, and then, guilt-ridden, secretly returned it.

  Manzanita is the one beach town on the Oregon coast that runs perpendicular to the ocean rather than boardwalk parallel. Which is, according to my parents, what makes it special? There’s less college kid hooligan cruising. Less cotton candy and tee-shirt hucksters. Unlike the towns slightly north—Cannon Beach, Seaside—Manzanita has a dearth of saltwater taffy for sale.

  But there’s the Clam Shanty. Known for razor clams and chowder and oyster shooters with handcrafted hot sauce. Sabine could eat a dozen-and-a-half in one sitting. A whole lemon sliced up thin, the way you do for tequila. She’d squeeze that lemon all over the jiggly oyster, dollop of sauce, then, raise the oval shell high, as though proposing a toast. The face she made when the fish slid down her throat. Repulsion and elation all at once. The same face she had when, one night, high on weed, she described what it’s like to give a boy a blowjob.

  The fish place is clearing out when we get there. The sidewalks roll up early in Manzanita. A disgruntled counter girl sighs as the bell on the door announces us. She’s Saran-wrapping the deli goods, and I watch as her head sinks into her shoulders. No doubt she has after-work plans. I feel sorry for her, but annoyed. Last summer, when I worked at the Grill and Scoop in Beaverton, I never let it show how pissed off I was when last-minute customers came in. My waitress smile was solid. Professional. Poker face Brady.

  Besides, we know what we want. This won’t take long. Chowder and sour dough.

  “For here or to go?” says the counter girl whose nametag claims she’s Sam.

  “We’ll eat here,” says Dad, and the girl lets out another sigh.

  She’s already put the chowder in the walk-in. She marches off, behind strips of plastic, and comes out bearing a steam pan between two thick mitts.

  We sit down at one of the red-checkered oilcloth picnic tables, a waxy cup of fountain soda wedged in my hand. Mom and her herbal tea. We hear the beep-beep-whir of the microwave being engaged. The sawing of our bread. Dad twists the metal cap off of a Hefeweizen. “Cheers,” he says.

  Later, back at the beach house, alone on my futon and wrapped up in a Nona quilt, the gulls’ screeching keeps replaying in my head. I can see those pelicans on the vast horizon, the gray and foam Pacific that goes on forever. On canvas, I’d choose thick, burnt gobs of sienna. Umber. English red. The tiniest stroke of cadmium yellow. Indigo and warm gray and a dab of French ultramarine. And then, a different painting. Azaleas, like the ones from earlier, all quinacridone magenta, sap green foliage against the cerulean sky. And Connor, half-hidden, but not. Connor Christopher, interrupting my vision of the ocean and the bushes and springtime. The earring, Sabine’s dangling jewel.

  Sabine. All my meanderings come back to her.

  We’re too far from the beach to hear the waves crash against sand and rock, but in my head, they do. The rhythm of it all is my heart. I want to hear her voice again tonight. Just once.

  I reach for my phone. Press 3 on the speed dial. I want to hear the This is Sabine. Have a great day.

  Instead, what I hear is the computer-voice of a robot saying, “The voice mailbox of the person you’re trying to reach is full.”

  No.

  Can’t be.

  All the messages falling in the forest. Hanging out in limbo, never to be heard by Sabine. I don’t know her voicemail password. Why don’t I know it? All of a sudden, in the deep night of my thoughts, I have a mission. To unlock Sabine’s voice mailbox. To know who is still talking to her. What they’re saying. Is Martha still calling her up? Is Nick? Is Connor? Mom? Dad? Nona?

  I press in her number again, and follow the prompts. Try a code. Another code. Her birthday. Nick’s birthday. Our address. Still, it’s the computer voice t
elling me that the mailbox has reached its capacity.

  I get up and climb down the loft ladder to use the bathroom, but the door is closed and I hear the whispering voice of Mom inside. Why is she in the guest bathroom? Who is she talking to? I sink down against the wall, crouched there, curious. My ear against the hollow door. “That’s really sweet of you,” I hear her say. “Yes, I’d love that.”

  Then, Dad’s snoring from the master bedroom. Lately, it’s like a buzz saw with Dad. Mom whispers, “Maybe Wednesday. Or, if I come home early Sunday.”

  Then, “I’m not sure.”

  And, “Can’t wait.”

  I tip-toe back up the ladder to the futon, the phone cradled in my hand like a brick I want to hurl through glass. I am sick to death of secrets. I am tired of never knowing the truth. I wish I had the nerve to call Connor is what I’m thinking as I drift off to sleep.

  seven

  Duplicity, Mrs. McConnell writes on the board, underlining the word three times and following it with several dots of punctuation. “Faulkner’s work is full of it. Exploring betrayal from many, many points of view. As I Lay Dying, ladies and germs, is awash with the theme.”

  Duplicity. The form of that word, the sound of it, is lyrical, beautiful. I loop the letters across my notebook.

  “The interface between existence and the next thing—the hereafter, or the cessation of consciousness, these are all the themes our Faulkner explored,” Mrs. McConnell continues. “Heavy stuff.”

  It’s after lunch and warmish outside. The classroom windows face south. Heads are on desks. Some students are completely asleep, and the boy next to me has a thin line of drool pooling under his cheek. Mrs. McConnell is known for her death obsession. Her “Classics in Context” lit class will probably be cut next year, because it’s controversial. Last grading period we read De Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay, and I couldn’t shake the death of the character, Francois, from my memory: On the bed there still remained a living form, but it was already no one.

  “Faulkner was a post-structuralist, ladies and germs,” says Mrs. McConnell. “By which I mean he explored matters of religion and religious truth.” Her fingers make invisible quotation marks when she says truth.

  “Duplicity, infidelity, God and the question of God, mortality, class and race theory, all classic Faulknerian themes that fuel this story about the death of matriarch Addie Bundren.”

  There is a wave of laughter because when Mrs. McConnell says Faulknerian, it sounds like she’s saying Fucknarian. A few sleeping heads rise from their desks. A hand goes up. It’s Cathi. Mrs. McConnell points to her with her chalk, “Question, Miss Serge?”

  Cathi clears her throat. “I understand Faulkner was a racist, and I’m wondering why we’re reading a racist book that actually uses the N-word.”

  “Twain, Faulkner, Welty, yep, they all used the N-word in their books. They were describing the world in which they lived. Faulkner was a diagnostician, not a fixer.”

  With the word fixer, again the invisible quotation marks. Cathi is not pleased with the explanation. “I don’t think we should be reading a book written by a racist,” she continues, her hand still half-raised in the posture of permission-seeking.

  “As I Lay Dying is not a prescriptive on how to live one’s life, Miss Serge,” the teacher retorts, whirling around dramatically so that the knee-length cardigan she’s wearing swirls like an umbrella caught in a gust. “Faulkner boldly unveiled the dark side of humanity, unflinchingly setting his characters in a sort of truth pudding where questions like what is truth, what is life, what do we really want are presented through a narrative that takes the reader to the edges of comfort. That’s art, Miss Serge. Art.”

  In my notebook I’m working on a huge, stylized “L” which will start the word Liar that will cover the entire eight-by-eleven page.

  Cathi says, “Still,” under her breath, and the teacher continues to lecture about integrity and free will. Once it’s clear that Mrs. McConnell did not, indeed, swear, heads return to desks.

  In the paper today was the piece on the Greenmeadow Art Fair and Martha’s smiling face above the oversized Cupworth check. Her Mt. Hood rendition, the other photo in the article. Above the fold in the Life & Lifestyles section. Life. Right. Cupworth’s rant was also part of the article, where she said, Art does not come cheaply, ladies and gentlemen. One must nurture the soul in order to grow one’s appreciation for beauty. The reporter left off the bosoms on the Internet part.

  Now, the As I Lay Dying lesson on integrity and duplicity and truth accompanies a replay in my head of this morning’s newspaper scan. No mention of me—and it made me furious with myself that I had even looked for my name or the image of my charcoaled homeless guy.

  The boy next to me is still asleep. His plump brown lips are upturned, like he’s dreaming something really good. Then, because we’ve reached the end of the period, the bell rings and he twitches like an infant, jerking his head up, wiping his mouth with the back of his arm. Desk chairs scrape the floor. Backpacks unzip, rezip. Mrs. McConnell says, “Miss Wilson, a word?”

  Mrs. McConnell’s hair is a gray bob which she is constantly trying to tuck behind her ears, but now, obviously flummoxed, she runs her fingertips along its part, lifting the strands up, giving her a mad scientist look. “What is going on?” she says after the last student has scurried out the door.

  She’s one of my favorite teachers. Like Bowerman, she’s not afraid to take a stand against the administration when necessary. She’s gone to bat for plenty of students for things like truancy and drinking. But she demands engagement. If you’re slacking, she’ll call you out on the carpet and it won’t be pretty. Those kids who fell asleep in class? She’ll nail them on the Faulkner exam.

  “Nothing,” I tell her, trying to buy time.

  Her eyes lift my eyes with a mad dog laser gaze. She won’t accept my answer and she’ll stare me down until I give her something more. So I throw her a bone. “I’ve been sick.”

  Mrs. McConnell points to the chair next to her chair and I sit. She says, “Grief is a strange animal, Brady. It hovers and hovers and then it sees something and dives down.”

  That she is describing the pelicans of our Good Friday beach walk is eerie, and the chill of this creeps into my shoulders, making me spasm.

  “I just want to make sure that you’re taking care of yourself. Are you in counseling?”

  I shrug. “We go. My parents and I. Every week since…” I can’t bring myself to say memorial service, or even service.

  “Family therapy is very important. But so is individual grief counseling. You need to be able to communicate freely, Brady. Do you understand what I mean?”

  I nod.

  “You weren’t in school Friday. Were you home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alone?”

  I nod.

  Mrs. McConnell sighs. “I want you to give me your phone number. I know it’s not apposite with the rules and regs, but I’m concerned.” Again, her fingers make quote marks for apposite, which is a word I’ve never heard before. She hands me a slip of paper and pen upon which I scribble the information.

  That seems to satisfy her and she tucks the slip of paper into the pocket of her long, unfashionable sweater.

  Over dinner, Mom and Dad are doing the homework we’re supposed to do continuously in preparation for therapy tomorrow. It’s “I-statement” city while we pass the platter of turkey meatloaf and the bowl of spinach salad.

  Mom: I worry that our Easter trip to the coast didn’t meet with your expectations, John.

  Dad: I was disappointed that we weren’t able to come to an agreement about the ashes.

  Mom: Brady, do you feel let down by that?

  Dad: Do you, Little Bird?

  Me: shrug.

  Dad: When you don’t answer us, we feel left out.

  Mom: Blah, blah, I feel, blah, blah, blahblahblahblah

  Finally, they
get around to asking me how I felt about Martha and the Art Fair and the Cupworth Prize I didn’t get. Dad has brought the offending article to the table, and he spreads it out in the space where Sabine would be sitting if she weren’t dead. I’d avoided Martha all day. Didn’t look at her one time during trig, ducked behind other students in the hall as she passed. On the way to art, I saw her and Nick were standing next to his locker, their fingers a feather’s width from touching, so I went down the length of the middle line of the “E” and outside and back through the front door just to avoid them, knowing that now, the RIP and the kissing photo were officially stripped from the gray steel of Nick’s locker. Looking at Martha’s bubbly newsprint smile makes my heart and stomach collide. In a half-answer to their question, and in keeping with our “I-statement” theme, I say, “I wish I’d known. It was a little embarrassing having all of you there.”

  Mom says, “It was humiliating, and I want you to know that I’ve had words with Vice Principal Field about it.”

  “Oh, Mom, really? I don’t think he knew about it. I mean, I was in his office earlier that day…”

  “You were?” chimes Dad. “Why?”

  “Brady has been getting into a bit of trouble,” Mom offers. “At least that’s what the vice principal told me. He also said that he’s worried about you being in class with that boy.”