I hold my breath. The signal comes again.
Quickly, silently, I pull my Bay Bluff sweatshirt over the loose tee I sleep in and hop into sweatpants, one leg, then the other. Flip-flops in hand, I tiptoe to the door, open it carefully and, after checking to be sure Joy is still asleep, inch it closed.
Avoiding creaks, my bare feet whisper down the stairs and run lightly through the kitchen and mudroom to the side door, the one we always took to the beach. It isn’t until the cool air hits me that I stop dead still.
This has all been pure habit, true muscle memory. From the time I was fifteen and found Jack, until I was nineteen and left home, I responded to that light. Now, at thirty-nine, I wonder what in the hell I’m doing. The signal? Our signal? After all this time, all this acrimony? If I go down to the beach, what do I hope to find?
I don’t know. That’s the thing.
But I had seen his light. And there is no way I can not respond.
Slipping on my flip-flops, I walk along the side path at a more adult pace, giving myself plenty of time to rethink what I’m doing. But I can’t find a reason to turn back. If I’ve misinterpreted the signal, I’ll be alone on the beach. If not, well, I’ll find out why he sent it in the first place.
The moon is a slim cradle that comes and goes through fingers of clouds. Though there’s enough light to see, I hold the railing as I take the stairs, because my eyes aren’t on my feet. They’re searching the beach. It isn’t until I’m at the bottom and starting toward the Sabathian side that a dark figure takes shape at the end. Fortunately, he’s well before the outcropping of rocks that used to hide us from the world. I’m not sure I could have dealt with those particular memories.
He doesn’t meet me halfway. No. He’s making me commit. But then, he always did. Jack understood that I wanted to please. His mission was to make me take a stand—which, of course, I did when Elizabeth couldn’t be found. Unfortunately, my stand wasn’t compatible with his.
His hands are under the tails of a tee, tucked in the pockets of his shorts. Arms, legs, and feet are all bare, all long and well-formed. This is not memory. This is fact.
I pass the firepit, which is a murky saucer in a field of dim sand. When I’m just close enough, I stop. You called? I might have quipped had our recent history not been so taut, but my insides are in a knot. I have no idea what to expect.
Another throwback? He is chewing on the corner of his mouth. Good. So I’m not the only one feeling weird. That was one of the things we used to talk about all the time—feeling weird in one’s own home—because if I had family issues, Jack’s were worse. I’d seen firsthand his attempts to get his parents’ attention. But his father was forever distracted by one intellectual cause or another. And his mother? Self-absorbed. Her disappearance would have poured salt on the wound of being her son, for sure. For sure, her disappearance would have exaggerated his long-running sense of abandonment.
Realizing that, I feel the urge to fill the awkward silence with consoling words, even to touch his arm. But I’m afraid to reach out lest I be bitten. Like dog, like man.
Speaking of which, I ask, “Where’s your dog?”
“Sleeping. Where’s your daughter?”
“Same.”
A tiny wave breaks, rolling our way in a whisper meant as backdrop alone, because we’re the main attraction, Jack Sab and me. I’ve broken the silence by speaking first, and I can easily make other conversation. Middle children are practiced at lessening awkward moments, and here in my hometown I’m the middle child. But I’ve been away for a long time, been a different person for that long time. And I didn’t call this meeting.
So I wrap my arms around my middle, clutching the folds of the sweatshirt, and wait.
Finally he says, “I overstepped with her. Did I screw up?”
The words are right, even if the tone isn’t exactly apologetic. But then, I don’t know how to be with him, either.
“No,” I say, grateful for the statement regardless. “I’ll just tell her it won’t work.”
“It will on my end. I can always use help.”
“We’re only here a week. Is it worth training her for that little?”
“Training?” he mocks. “To give love to frightened pets who are caged up, waiting for treatment, feeling abandoned? She was a fast learner when it came to my dog. Where’d she come from, by the way?”
Startled, I’m silent for a breath. Then I echo, “Come from?” I hope he doesn’t mean what I think. “New York. With me.”
“But who’s her father?”
Bingo. That’s my Jack, filtered not. There are any number of answers I might give to succinctly end the conversation. Lord knew, I’ve used many of them over the years. But strangers with inappropriate questions are one thing, Jack Sabathian another. I never lied to him. He might have thought it. But what I said about my father was what I believed.
Honestly now, I say, “I have no idea.”
“Really? You?”
I don’t bother to answer. He’s thinking I was drunk, which goes to show how faulty memory can be. I didn’t drink. Never had. There was nothing spontaneous or irresponsible or unplanned about conceiving Joy, and it had been worth every terrifying minute.
“One-night stand?” he asks.
“Sperm donor,” I reply.
That draws a curious half smile splitting dark stubble, which the moon appears just in time to reveal. “Seriously?”
“Why not?”
“Because,” he says without missing a beat, “you can have any man you want. Why use a donor?”
“Maybe,” I say without missing my own beat, “because I don’t like the men who want me, but I wanted a child.”
“Does she know?”
“Absolutely. Joy and I know how to communicate. I told her as soon as she was old enough to understand.” Not making the same mistakes my parents did, my mind adds, and he hears that part, too.
His voice is faintly subdued. “Was it hard?”
“The telling? No harder than explaining adoption. ‘Mommy had a gazillion choices, but she wanted you.’”
“It’s different from adoption.”
“You know what I mean. There’s a similar issue of Doesn’t he want to know who I am?”
I feel a niggling of guilt, thinking of all the times my daughter has asked this. But no. She accepts. She understands, and only in part from the books we read of the why-don’t-I-have-a-daddy type. In time she came to see how many of her friends were being raised by single parents, making me no different at all. But my niggling remains. It’s the guilt that I feel, me, personally. It’s in subjecting my daughter to the same insecurity I felt myself about my own roots.
But this is the memory that’s just beyond my grasp, and curt Jack isn’t done with his questions.
“Doesn’t he? Want to know her?”
“He doesn’t know she exists,” I snap, annoyed that he has so quickly dredged up my guilt. “That’s how it works. You see characteristics and a number, never a name. Why are you making a big deal about this, Jack?”
He doesn’t have an answer for that. But the fact that he’s been so blunt gets me going. He wants me to stand up for myself? Fine. Fair is fair. “So do you know where Elizabeth is?”
He stares at me, then looks away and scratches the back of his head. By the time he returns, he is quiet. “Not one word since she disappeared from your father’s boat. How ’bout you? Did you find the gun?”
“We just got here. I haven’t had time to look. Do you think she’s dead then?”
“What else can I think? She was never a family person, but what kind of mother would leave her husband and son without a word?” His voice is deeper than when we were kids but vulnerable still, even after all these years. “I mean, no note, no call, no email, no text. Ever.”
Again, I think to touch him. Again, I hold back. But I do feel his pain. My sensitivity to him hasn’t changed. “Your dad heard nothing?”
He makes a throaty s
ound that doesn’t quite mesh with the tranquility of the sleepy waves trickling close by our feet. “He’d be the last one to hear. They barely talked. He could have been a renter in the house, for all she cared.”
“Did he look for her?”
“He? No. He just waited to see if she’d show up. He was like that. Mr. Passive. Me? Yeah, I looked. All that fall, I looked. I drove from one little coast town to the next. I read their newspapers and talked with their cops. I figured that if she’d washed up somewhere with no memory, someone would report it. Same if a boat picked her up, and she didn’t know who she was.”
“How could anyone for miles not know who she was?” I ask, astounded. “Okay, twenty years ago Google wasn’t what it is now. But her disappearance made headlines.”
“Yeah, well, I kept asking myself that, too,” he says, hanging a hand on the back of his neck while his dark eyes hold mine, “only not everyone reads the paper or watches the news. Some people live with their heads in the sand.”
Like ignoring dementia? Ignoring the risk of a gun?
He may not be thinking those things at all. I’m probably being oversensitive. But he was headed in this direction earlier, when Joy was here, and it was a dead-end street. “Please don’t go there again,” I beg and, in a more coolheaded voice, return to the larger discussion. “Wouldn’t her body have washed up somewhere?”
“Not if it was weighted.”
“Weighted?”
“We all watched The Sopranos.”
I’m appalled. It isn’t that he didn’t talk about murder back then, or that I haven’t considered it lately myself. But a gun is one thing. Weighted is something else. Weighted means tying something heavy to a body and pushing it overboard. Weighted means premeditated.
I wish I could see his eyes to know if he’s serious, but the sliver of moon isn’t cooperating just then. “You’re saying my father shot her, then made sure the body would never surface? That is sick, Jack.” Turning, I start back toward the dock.
“Still running away?” he calls in a taunt that stops my flight.
He’s right. I whip back, needing this discussion. “He wouldn’t kill her. He loved her.”
“Lovers kill. They kill all the time.”
“I didn’t say they were lovers. I said he loved her. There’s a difference.”
“You don’t think they had sex?”
“Maybe before they were married, but not after. I remember us all together—cookouts, boat rides, even just sitting here on the beach. There were no secret looks, no sneaking off.”
“No? I remember my father barely talking to yours and your mother barely talking to mine. I remember your father touching my mother’s hand. I remember her touching his arm. Did they touch their own spouses? Ever?”
They did. Of course, they did.
At least, I think they did. Suddenly, though, as I struggle to see it, I’m not sure. “No?” I ask, wondering if I had missed something there.
But my indecision is short-lived. Of the other, I am entirely sure. “My father didn’t kill her. He was as frantic as any of us looking for her that night on the beach.”
“Sure he was,” Jack says. His head is lowered, eyes on his foot as his heel drills a hole in the sand. “He was afraid she’d wash up with a bullet in her head.”
The image makes me flinch, it’s that vivid. “And where was the blood? The boat was clean.”
His head comes up, eyes on mine. “Boats can be washed. Or maybe he pushed her into the water and shot her there. That’d really be clean.”
“You are sick.” I’m about to turn and walk—not run—walk away, when he holds up a conciliatory hand.
“Okay. Maybe it wasn’t that. But put yourself in my shoes. I’ve spent twenty years trying to figure out where she went and why. So forget family. Think business. She founded a company. She loved it more than anything on earth. There’s no way she would deliberately walk away from that, even if it was going downhill—especially if it was going downhill.”
“Was it?” I ask. That would be a new twist, though not surprising. Elizabeth had been on the ground floor of electronics, creating a computer in the mid-seventies that was small and powerful. Unfortunately, her company was similarly small. It couldn’t begin to compete with the Apples of the world.
Jack looks like he hadn’t meant to blurt it out. But he isn’t a liar any more than I am. “Yes,” he admits.
“Couldn’t that be a motive?”
“For her to jump ship and leave the mess for someone else to clean up? She wasn’t a quitter.”
“She quit on her family.”
“You can only quit if you’ve signed on, but she never did with us. Know how many business trips she took? How many days at a time she was gone? How many important life events she missed, like birthdays and anniversaries and football playoffs and—” He stopped the list with a sputter. “Besides, where would she go?”
“Margo remembers seeing a second boat—”
“Which the Coast Guard couldn’t find. If Margo saw something, it was a mirage. So where would my mother go?”
“Did you talk with her family?”
Hands on his hips, he faces me straight on. “Of course, I did. I’m not stupid, Mallory.”
I forgive him the tone. “I’m as frustrated as you are.”
“No way.”
“Yes way. What happened to your mother directly impacts my father. You don’t think I’ve wondered for twenty years? You don’t think the not-knowing is part of what kept me away?”
He is quiet.
I sigh. “So. Her family. Any clue?”
“Nah. They were estranged.”
“But she kept their name when she got married.”
“She didn’t want to take my father’s name. Says something right there, y’know? Not that a name ties you to family either way. I used to see cousins when I was a kid, so things were fine at first, but then something happened. I never knew the cause.”
“Did you ask?”
He snorts. Of course, he asked. Jack Sabathian wouldn’t not ask.
“What did they say?”
“Nothing. My mother said nothing. My cousins said nothing. My uncle, Mom’s only sibling, refused to talk with me on the phone, so I tracked him down, went all the way to friggin’ Tallahassee. He refused to talk about it even in person, just him and me, and I badgered. Didn’t get anywhere.”
But he’d made the effort. From the sound of it, he had gone well beyond what the local police or my father and his private investigators had done. I have to give Jack credit for that. “I’m sorry. It’d be nice to know.”
“Yeah, well, life doesn’t always work that way.”
I do know that. Ten years after my parents divorced, Margo called in a tearful rant about an auto accident that she claimed Mom wouldn’t have been anywhere near if Dad hadn’t made her feel so unwanted that she dated anyone who asked, including a guy with a history of DUIs. An auto accident. She was dead before I could ask her about all the things I didn’t know.
Which is about me. But we are talking about Jack. “Where’s your dad now?”
“Berkeley. He gave it a couple of years here, but the memories were hard to take.”
“I’d have thought you’d leave, too.”
Bending, he picks up a rock and wings it into the sea. “And let your father off the hook?” he asks almost distractedly. “Are you kidding? I want him to see me here in this house, year after year after year, and remember the family he destroyed.”
I can’t imagine nurturing that kind of bitterness. “How do you do that—live with constant anger?”
A piece of driftwood is bobbing in the shallows. Sloshing over, he catches it and lobs it toward the firepit. Then he straightens and puts his hands on his hips, thumbs bearing the weight while his fingers lie long and loose against the cotton tee. He takes a visible breath. “My work helps. Animals appreciate what you do for them. Pets give the unconditional love parents can’t.”
I want to tell him that what I feel for Joy is unconditional to the extreme. But Elizabeth never felt that. Nor, really, did my mother, or she’d have answered the questions I lacked the courage to ask.
With mention of Jack’s work, we’ve come full circle, but I don’t want to leave him just yet. I always felt a connection to the boy he used to be. Time and adversity haven’t changed that. I hated the anger between us twenty years ago and would give anything to replace those memories with kinder ones. It has nothing to do with my being the peacemaker and everything to do with my feelings for Jack. The past may be over. But I want us to be friends.
Returning to the splotch of a firepit, I sit on one of the logs at its edge and hug my knees.
He continues to stand for a while, ankle-deep in the surf as he studies the midnight sky on the far horizon. Looking for Elizabeth, as Anne claims? No. He’s looking there because it’s beautiful, because it puts provincial Bay Bluff in context and reminds us that we’re part of a larger world. Way back when, we used to look at that horizon and imagine the places we’d go and the things we’d share. I know he has gone places since. I googled him after he called, of course I did. He got his degree in veterinary medicine at UC Davis, one of the best, and I’m sure he didn’t limit his travels to California. I’m sure he traveled. But I refuse to believe it was the same as we imagined, because I went places, too. It wasn’t worse without him. Just different.
But this is history, and here we are in Bay Bluff eyeing that same horizon. We often talked about the comfort of the sea. Surprising, given the circumstances, I feel it now.
Apparently Jack does, too, because, after several minutes, he joins me at the firepit. Once upon a time, we shared a log. Margo would glare each time, and while I cared, Jack did not. Now, though, he sits one log over with his legs sprawled.
We don’t talk. I might have remembered nights when this fire blazed and we were all here, or nights when it was just Jack and me. But I don’t want to remember. Right now, I’m the me who lives in the moment, and this moment is nostalgic in an undemanding way.
“Why did you call me?” I ask. I haven’t planned to speak, but there is my voice.
And then his. “Because I felt bad. I shouldn’t interfere with your daughter—”
A Week at the Shore Page 9