He nods, clicks his tongue, says nothing.
“And then there’s the personal stuff. You could tell us about what this shed means to you. You could talk about Mom, like what you were feeling when you first met her. You could talk about the house or the bluff or the town. You could talk about Elizabeth. You wouldn’t want these thing to be lost.”
“No,” he murmurs, and, almost amused, arches a silver brow. “I could tell you about John Doe.”
“John Doe?” Everyman? An anonymous client? A corpse?
“John Doe.”
Okay. I bite. “What about John Doe?”
But he is suddenly frowning, staring past me at the peg-board where Mom’s garden gloves hang from hooks. There are three pairs. Each is a different color, though what with dirt and time, the colors have begun to blend. “She forgot them.”
“I think she figured she wouldn’t have time to garden. You know she went back to school.” Dad’s paying her tuition was a contentious part of their divorce. He didn’t see why he needed to pay for her to learn a skill if he was giving her alimony so that she didn’t have to work. She wanted both. She got both. He wasn’t pleased.
Memory of that shows on his face. “Such a ridiculous thing. And then she jumped off the boat. She’s hiding somewhere to punish me.”
I give him a minute to rethink. When he simply scowls at the peg-board in silence, I say a gentle, “Mom isn’t hiding, Dad. She died. You know she was living in Chicago when she left here. There was a car crash.”
Frightened eyes meet mine. “Margo?”
“Eleanor.”
“Chicago?”
I nod
“Not Albany?” he asks.
“No.”
“Not John Doe?”
“No. Mom. She was identified at the scene. Her identity was never in question.”
“Ah,” he says, opening his mouth in an exaggerated fashion to let the word out. Then, seeming to have had enough, he turns and strides off.
How had we ever played hide-and-seek in this potting shed? Alone here now, I take in the whole of it. It’s smaller than I remember—but isn’t that always the case? Life through a child’s eye has to be supersized to hold the huge wealth of possibility she sees. I would squeeze under the wheelbarrow or flatten myself behind the ladder when it was draped by one of Mom’s shirts. I would make myself long and narrow behind the coils of hose on the lowest shelf, praying those coils weren’t snakes.
Hah. Snakes. Not part of my memory, but something I can hear now coming from my daughter’s mouth.
Without conscious intent, I raise my camera and start shooting. Odd, but I’ve never photographed the potting shed before. The exterior, yes. But not here inside. I work quickly, snapping the whole of it, then individual parts, and all the while I feel a pressing need to preserve something that might soon be gone. It was a ridiculous thought. This shed will likely outlive us all. And still, I hurry to memorialize and keep it forever.
Like my father’s thoughts.
* * *
There’s no sign of him, not at the ocean edge, in the yard, or through the kitchen window. And for a minute I feel guilty, thinking that I should have followed him the instant he left. But I can’t crowd him in. If I do that, he’ll never talk. And that is what I want. It doesn’t matter whether I record what he says or write it down. I won’t be publishing a book on the life and times of Thomas Aldiss. All I want is more information than I’ve gotten so far.
There is a difference though, between crowding him and making sure he’s all right. Needing to do the latter, I enter the kitchen through the beach door. Lina isn’t here, although I see a loaf of bread, a head of lettuce, and a bowl of what looks like chicken salad on the counter, if the denuded rotisserie chicken is any indication. Chicken salad was always Dad’s favorite.
I’m heading for the hall, when I hear voices. One is Dad’s, meaning he’s safe with Lina. That’s all I need by way of permission to play.
* * *
The late-morning sun is high above, and while clouds drift, its heat is strong enough that I welcome the breeze on my skin. Heading for the beach stairs, I start down, then sit, brace my elbows on my knees, and lift the camera to my eye. The surf is up, making for more dramatic shots. I take several at a fast shutter speed to freeze the high tumble of the waves, and think to go for blur with a slower speed, but there is simply too much light. A tripod at twilight would work for that. For now, I continue down the steps.
As the surf recedes, my eye catches tiny jigglings in the sand. Stepping out of my flip-flops at the foot of the stairs, I cross the beach and squat as another wave breaks. Left behind in the ebbing is a squadron of sand crabs scrabbling to dig in. When we were kids, we used to catch them in flat-topped nets and give them to Dad as bait. Wanting to capture something of that memory, I photograph through several more breaking waves, bunches more crabs, farther out ruffles of surf, still farther ocean. I could photograph here forever. Sinking onto my bottom, elbows on knees again, I take a panoramic sweep of the ocean. That’s when, scanning far left, I see Jack.
Chapter 12
Sitting all the way down the beach near the Sabathian stairs, Jack is bare-footed, bare-legged, bare-chested. He is staring at the horizon, which, compared to the clear overhead, is a ripple of murk. The dog’s head rises between his bent knees, muzzle aimed seaward as well, and their profiles are in such perfect alignment that I can’t resist. Zooming in, I take a handful of shots, then move closer to the bluff to capture them outlined against the sea.
I’ve barely lowered the camera when Jack turns his head. I don’t know if he’s seen me taking pictures, but now that I’ve been spotted, disappearing is pointless.
His eyes hold mine. They’re too far away for me to know what shade of gray they are. But the set of his brow suggests deep grooves between his eyes. And I remember the words we spoke in the square.
I should be riled up, should be offended all over again, should be ready to shout right back at him if he dares shout something even remotely offensive. I want to be bold, if only to prove how different I am now from the person who left here years ago.
But I can’t muster anger. I said my piece back at the square. The best way to prove its truth is to be self-confident and move on. Besides, the words that weigh on me more are the ones my father said. Not that he said anything I didn’t know. Just that his saying them makes them real, and their reality hollows me out.
Time has taught me that the best antidote to hollowness is activity. In the early years after I’d left Bay Bluff, when I missed my mother, missed my family, missed Jack, I immersed myself in whatever mind-absorbing project I could find. Sometimes it had to do with work, sometimes the condo, sometimes friends. I was running away for sure. But what good would come of obsessing over things that had to be?
Needing something consuming to combat the hollowness now, I consider going to the house and fighting to get Dad to talk about something relevant. That would be worthwhile. So would searching deeper in his diaries for clues. Or sorting through old pictures. Or looking for that damn gun in the potting shed, though I cannot imagine that he would ever hide it in Mom’s sacred place.
There’s something about the way Jack is staring at me, though, that holds me in place. Forget shouting insults. If I want to prove self-possession, approaching him now would be a good way.
Being casual about it, I walk down the beach, or try. The tide is out, and with the sun high and the breeze up, the sand closest to the bluff has dried, meaning that I sink deeper, and the walking is hard. With as much dignity as wading through soft sand allows, I pass the firepit in a diagonal cut toward the water. He watches me the entire way, but what I initially took for challenge isn’t that on closer look. There’s something about his bare shoulders, and his features, even the placement of his hand on the dog’s back that has a slump to it.
Then I remember his parting words and realize that what I see is Jack subdued.
“The cat?” I a
sk when I’m close enough to be heard over the breeze and the waves.
He stares at me for a minute longer, then looks out over the water and does something with his mouth, like he’s trying to clean off a bad taste. “Couldn’t save her.”
All too clearly, I remember the blood on his shirt. “You tried. That’s something.”
After a negligent shrug, he stretches his neck side to side. It’s the dog who is watching me, bloodshot eyes pleading, begging me to say something to make his person feel better. I’m trying to decide what that should be, when the surf gives a thunderous crash.
I wait for the sound to die. “I’m sorry.”
Jack nods. “It happens.”
“That doesn’t make it easy. The frustration must be awful.”
He darts me a look. “Try anger.”
“Anger?”
“At the car that hit her. At the family that couldn’t keep her secure. And at myself. Maybe if I’d focused on her lungs. Maybe if I’d stabilized her before trying surgery. Maybe if I’d spared her the pain and euthanized her at the start. I knew her chances were slim.”
You tried, I want to repeat, but the words clearly hadn’t done much. “Were you trying to swim it off?” His hair and shorts are damp, and the sand spattering his lower legs says they’d been wet as well. When all he does is snort, I say, “Didn’t help? Not even a little?”
“For the time I was out there, yeah, the waves are that strong. Come ashore, though, and it’s waiting right fucking here.” He finally turns his head, eyes finding my breasts. “Sex would help.”
He is serious.
I am suddenly, acutely aware that he isn’t dressed, and that I desperately wish he were. Jack Sabathian wearing nothing but shorts is a sight to behold. My sisters thought him too rough, though Margo said this only after it became clear that he wasn’t interested in her. Rough, to them, meant too much of everything—height, breadth, physicality. It meant too brawny. It meant un-refined, though that had nothing to do with upbringing, or physique, and everything to do with attitude. Same with outspoken and abrasive. None of that had ever put me off.
All these years later, I feel the physical pull. It doesn’t help that his eyes have gone lower. It is all I can do not to press my legs together. But sex with no relationship behind it? Oh, I did that a time or two in New York—well protected, thank you—when I found a man hyper-attractive, but the details elude my memory. What I do remember is the emptiness of it. To feel that emptiness with Jack would break my heart. Better to preserve the memories we had than to dilute them with something less.
“Uh, no.” My voice lifts, gentle but firm.
His eyes rise. “Why not?”
“Because that was then.”
“But it was good.”
“It was.” I have to give him that. “Well, after the first time.”
He seems surprised that I’ve dared mention it. Then he breaks into a sheepish grin. “What the hell did I know about being with a virgin? I wanted to make it good for you—for you, of all people—but I had no idea how. I barely knew how to use my own equipment, let alone understand yours.”
“Are you kidding?” I shoot back, because compared to what I’d known, he was the Oracle. “You were nineteen. You’d been sexually active for five years.” He lost his virginity to an upper-class girl in a supply closet at school, which was clichéd as hell, but quintessential Jack. Had he been caught, there would have been all hell to pay, and he would have had his parents’ attention. That was always his goal. Except when it came to him and me. We were a secret. Since I didn’t dare ask my mother about birth control lest she tell my father, who would say I was too young and place me under house arrest, Jack used condoms. And his parents? His dad wouldn’t have said much, but his mom would have been on her high horse about not doing that with Tom’s daughter, for God’s sake.
“Those girls were experienced,” Jack insists. “I just followed their lead. It was a physical experience that never reached the brain. Zero emotion, zero finesse. Did I ever tell you otherwise?”
“No.”
So there, says the arch of his brow. And while I don’t like his smugness, at least he looks better than he did moments before. I’m not about to have sex with him, but arguing about it is fine.
“So.” His stubbled chin is on his shoulder, which has bits of sand as well. “No sex?”
“No sex.”
Straightening, he shoves his hair back with a handful of fingers. “Then help me feel better about losing a beautiful tangerine cat whose owners are devastated. What’s that old Bobby Frost quote?”
Despite the irreverent nickname, I know who he means. I used to share Robert Frost with him, as I’ve done now with Joy. She isn’t into poetry yet. But she will be. She takes pop lyrics seriously, and aren’t they a form of poetry?
“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on,” I quote.
“It goes on,” he repeats and, putting his dark head to Guy’s, scrubs the dog’s neck with both hands.
Quitting while I’m ahead, I cross back over the sand, wading where it is dry, toward the stairs. Short of it, though, I stop, drawn again to the stark difference between Jack’s side of the bluff and ours. While ours is crumbling down to the beach, his is intact. Because of the plantings he put in? Even my untutored eye can see that they are strategically placed and varied.
“The key is using plants with root systems that grow deep and wide, and that do it fast.” His voice comes from behind and is even. It isn’t smug, just a statement of fact.
“Did you do the planting?” I ask, not quite looking back. I’m well aware of him without the visual.
“Me and Mike Hartley. He owed me for helping his dog through an immune deficiency issue, so we did an in-kind swap.” Coming close to my shoulder, he points at various spots where thick clumps of tall green blades rise from the slope. “That’s switchgrass. It’s the first thing you try, because its root system is made to order.” He gestures at other plants. “Goldenrod. Beach plum. Bayberry.”
I repeat them silently. Despite my mother’s aptitude, plants have never been my thing. Photography, yes. But the few times I’ve tried to grow herbs or houseplants or even get an avocado to sprout for Joy’s sake, I’ve bombed. “Anne says she’ll take care of this, but I’m thinking I can give her a nudge. Mike, huh?”
“I’ll help you plant.”
I laugh at that. “My dad nearly had a fit when I mentioned hiring the Hartleys. Think he’d feel better if I hired you?”
“Would he know?”
And isn’t that the question of the day? I drop a hand and, startled, snatch it back when it hits the dog’s head. Guy. Now that I know he is there, I let my fingertips graze his sandy fur and look up at Jack. I have to squint; the visor of my ball cap runs out when I tip my head back, which I do, he’s that close. Jack was always much taller than me. In spite of the different roads we’ve taken and the memories that keep us apart, I am still drawn to that. And yes, to his body. He has aged well. Call him too coarse, too tanned, too ripped. But there is something about his solidity that offers comfort.
“Mallory.”
My eyes fly up from his chest.
“No sex?”
“No sex.” I swallow. I should take a step away. But I do crave comfort. “I want to talk about my father. We walked back from town together. I’m not sure if he was deliberately looking for the opportunity or if it was a spontaneous moment, but he said he knows his mind is going.”
“No surprise there,” he says. “Tom is a smart guy. The only surprise is that he spoke the word aloud.”
“He didn’t. Not the word. But a spot-on description. He is perfectly lucid about what he wants, which is no doctors, no medicine, no prolonging the inevitable.”
“Would he rush it?” When I look at him blankly, he asks, “Is he suicidal?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Any mention of the gun?”
“No.”
“Or anything else?”
“Like pills or a noose? Hell, he could just jump off the bluff.”
“Wouldn’t work on your side,” Jack remarks, reaching for a stick that is caught in his vegetation. “It would crumble under his feet, so he’d just slide down the hill.” Turning away, he hurls the stick, sending it end over end in a high arc toward his end of the beach. Guy shoots after it.
Suicide? Would he? What would I do, if it was me in his place? “What is it like, knowing you have something that’ll eat at your mind, piece by piece? Knowing that it’s only a matter of time before you don’t know the people around you? Knowing that your mind may be gone but your body lives on? That he won’t even be able to do the most intimate things for himself. Maybe he’s obsessing about that. Maybe he doesn’t have Alzheimer’s at all, but is worried he does, since his mind has always been his claim to fame. Maybe he’s just clinically depressed?”
I look to Jack’s face for the answer, but he is watching his dog leap for the stick, juggle it in his jaws to secure it, and race back.
“Jack? Do you think he is?”
“Clinically depressed? No. He has Alzheimer’s. It’s the memory thing.”
“Have you talked with him, I mean, other than the night he banged on your door?”
“I didn’t talk with him then. He did the talking. And no, I haven’t talked with him. Other people tell me. He’s at the breakfast shop every morning. When he walks into the place and looks around like he has no clue what he’s doing there … No, hon, it isn’t only depression.” Bending to take the stick from Guy, he straightens, hauls back, and hurls it again. The movement is nearly as beautiful as the surprising flow of his barrel-bodied dog.
After several beats, he glances my way. His expression is one I haven’t seen him wear. “I don’t envy Tom. Don’t envy anyone who has that disease. At some point, though, it won’t be as hard on him as it is on you. Or Anne. Or Lina.”
A Week at the Shore Page 15