Useless Bay

by M. J. Beaufrand

  Henry sprang. He grabbed her by the lapels and started throwing her against the door. “I hate you! I hate what you did to me! I hate what you did to my family!”

  I heard the door groan. There was so much water, the Lexus was now listing from side to side. I knew this was it. We were all going to get washed away. I pulled Henry off Joyce. “Everybody grab onto something —quick!” The door rattled. Hard. I dragged Henry to a hook that held an oar and grabbed on.

  There was a split second that I played over and over in my nightmares just before the door broke, when Joyce sat up in a pool of water, seaweed for hair, teeth looking jagged, inhuman. There was something in her hand. I heard a loud bang and then felt a burning sensation in my arm.

  I let go and felt myself getting pulled toward the bay, but Henry took over. He held that oar hook with both hands and covered me with his body.

  “Hang tight,” he said. “I’ve got you.”

  The water was alive, tugging on me, but Henry held tight to that wall-mounted oar hook, and I held tight to Henry. A wave came over our heads, but we didn’t let go. I should’ve known. Rupert didn’t make anything flimsy, and that included sons.

  When I was able to get a gulp of air, I looked toward the ruin of the seaward doors.

  And there he was, gnashing, barnacle teeth and all.

  He was even uglier than I’d imagined him, with bulb kelp for hair and the flesh of his face half eaten away by crustaceans, which were crawling in and out of the holes they’d created. Things scuttled through his black eyes, doing their black business.

  The phrase better with animals than with people ran through my mind.

  The worst part was the sheer scale of him. His face alone took up the entire breadth of the garage, and his nose was bulbous and as long as an SUV.

  I spat seawater out of my mouth and tried to get a breath. It was no use screaming now.

  Joyce was flailing, grabbing for anything. There was terror in her eyes. Whether she saw what was behind her, I don’t know.

  But I do know what happened next: The troll reached a gelatinous hand inside, grabbed her, brought her up to his barnacle teeth, and crunched her neatly in half.

  She didn’t make a sound but flopped like a doll in his mouth.

  I would’ve thought, after all he’d been through, he would’ve wanted her to suffer more, to take her apart one piece at a time. But no. With one clean snap, he was done.

  Then those black eyes fastened on me.

  I held tighter to Henry.

  Stay. Good girl, he growled. And, with pieces of Joyce still in his mouth, he inched his way back out of the wreckage of the seaward doors.

  As the salty water washed over us again and again, slightly lower each time, I finally understood.

  The troll had never been coming for me. He had merely been issuing a command, the way he did to all animals and people when he was alive.

  His prey was someone else entirely. Someone who wasn’t content to be a dog trainer’s wife or a nanny or even an assistant. She wanted signs on buildings that read THE RUPERT AND JOYCE SHEPHERD FOUNDATION. And she went about it the only way she knew how: manipulating other people. And when that didn’t work, she resorted to strangulation. Anything to get her way.

  All over with one quick snap.

  As I clung there to Henry, something amazing happened.

  I was wrapped around him so close I could feel the beat of his heart. I felt a soft tap, and then a lotus-shaped light lifted up from Henry’s heart, hung in the air for a second, and floated out to the bay.

  Henry didn’t seem to notice it, but I did.

  I listened closer to his heart. It was still beating solidly. Pa-pum. Pa-pum. So death hadn’t come for him, but something else had.

  I looked at his expression. All the intensity seemed to have gone out of him. It was as though he’d let go of whatever drove him to pound Joyce before the seaward doors gave way.

  And I wondered if it was at that exact moment that he chose to forgive himself.

  When the water reached our waists, Henry tentatively let go of the wall hook and lowered me to the floor. “You okay?” he said.

  I nodded. My face smarted from where an oar had hit me, and blood trickled down my arm from where Joyce had got off a wild shot with her gun.

  But I was in one piece.

  “You?”

  He didn’t say anything but sloshed to the Lexus. “Sammy? Mere?”

  No response.

  “Everyone okay over there?” I called.

  Silence.

  “Sammy! Meredith!”

  We heaved ourselves through the salt water, which was still up to our knees, to the other side of the Lexus. Meredith was on her hands and knees, feeling around for something. Sammy was crouched and looking, too. They were acting as though Meredith had lost an earring.

  And then I saw Sammy’s right hand, which was a gory mess. In his left hand he was clutching something about the size of a breakfast sausage. “Hey, Pix, could you get a flashlight? We need help finding my other fingers.”

  EPILOGUE

  For the last time, it is not ‘awesome,’” Mom says, waving a carving fork at Sammy. If she’s not careful, she’ll slice off his middle finger, so carefully sewn on, one of the few he has left. His trigger finger was found too late on the beach and sits in a jar of formaldehyde on a bookshelf in the bunk room. His ring finger is gone, although a bone from the tip was found a month later in an owl pellet.

  “You think you’ve done everything you can to get your kids to adulthood whole,” she says, and in that moment, my tough mother looks like she needs more than just comfort. She looks like she could use one heaping bowl of religion. Which she would never do, because around here (according to her) religion comes with potlucks and heaps of judgment—especially for single mothers.

  She wipes something from her eye and goes off to assemble more panini.

  Ellen and Hannah don’t trust her to make the bread, but she wanted to do something for us kids during our last weekend of summer, so they let her assemble the sandwiches.

  I don’t know how my brothers feel about the “adulthood whole” comment, but I want to go easy on Mom for a while. I keep forgetting there are five of us and one of her. Most of the time she acts as though she can take it, but there has to be a price. I know we have a reputation for being tough, but do we have to be so tough? All those visits to the ER, all those resuscitations, broken bones, missing fingers. She’s never asked for help with us. She’s never asked for backup or a day off. She’s a foot shorter than we are but mightier than us all.

  At my feet there is an aroo! I’ve stepped on Calamity’s ear again.

  I spent most of the media frenzy that followed Joyce’s death and Grant’s homecoming from Hannah’s wai po’s farm by Henry’s side, holding his hand. The media didn’t seem particularly interested in what I had to say. I was just window dressing. The only thing I was asked about was when I was getting another dog to replace the one Joyce slaughtered.

  I said not anytime soon, that it had been too hard burying the last one. Then the search-and-rescue people heard my story. The bloodhound people heard my story.

  Suddenly everyone knew a guy who had a litter. Everyone wanted to help. They wanted me to have the best bloodhound in the state.

  Two weeks ago a crate arrived on our doorstep with a note from agent Armstrong that read: “This dog is a complete calamity. Man up and train her.”

  And then Calamity crawled out.

  She was smaller than Patience, and thin, too. I could count her ribs under her fur. The first time I unleashed her in the backyard to soak up the wildlife smells, she stayed at my heels. She wouldn’t eat unless I sat on the floor next to her.

  After two weeks of training, she follows a scent for five feet, then realizes she’s gotten away from me and comes cowering back. She jumps at the slightest noise. Tall men freak her out. Loud noises freak her out. Even bunny rabbits freak her out.

  I mean, how
do you train someone to be brave?

  Henry still has no idea what really got Joyce that day in the garage. He thinks she drowned in a really big wave so powerful that it split her in two—both halves washing up in different places on the shore. I was there when we discovered her top half. Everyone kept saying what a blessing it was that the crabs hadn’t gotten to her eyes, which were wide open. I didn’t think it was such a blessing. She looked completely terrified. I couldn’t tell from the deluge in the garage that day, but I wonder if, in that last moment, she saw the troll who had her in his grip and recognized him for what he had once been.

  The only ones to whom I can tell the tale are Hannah and her wai po. They believe me.

  Hannnah’s wai po is a small woman who walks with a cane, nearly bent over double. But I wouldn’t want to get on her bad side. Her eyes, according to Hannah, are “freaky.” To me, there’s nothing freaky about them.

  They’re the color of the sea.

  “Oh, that one,” she says to me as I strain the seeds from tayberries to make ice cream. “The troll. I’ve been hearing him for years. I knew the sea was unquiet. I’m surprised he allowed his feast to wash up on the shore and didn’t keep it all for himself. But he did his job. He got his vengeance. And then he spat her out here for the family to see what kind of fate had been meted out to her. Now, I call that justice.”

  I agreed with the justice part of what Hannah’s wai po was saying, but I thought there was another element she’d missed, which was that everything dead washed up on Useless Bay. I suppose that applied to Joyce, too. It was gross, but part of the wild beauty of the place that I loved so much.

  It is the last weekend of summer. We can see weather systems rolling up and down the entire Sound. One moment it’s sunny; then the wind blows a certain way, and it rains.

  My brothers and I hoist the coolers with the sandwiches (excuse me, panini) and Gatorade to take down to the Shepherds. Grant runs to meet us halfway. He appears unfazed by his time in hiding with Hannah’s wai po. He helped make loganberry wine. He got served sweet potato waffles with fried chicken for dinner.

  But no matter how good Hannah’s wai po was to him, I know he is not unchanged by his experience in the Breakers that day. He saw his own mother strangled. Mr. Shepherd whisked him straight to therapy—none of which seems to help as much as that book of Russian fairy tales, Henry tells me. “He keeps looking at the illustrations. He wants to know if, wherever his mother is, she is dancing. I tell him that, yes, she is dancing the Firebird Suite so well she lights up the morning sky.”

  Here at the bay, safe with us, Grant can still be excited by things. “Can I see? Can I see?” he asks Sammy now. We are in the middle of the dike path, halfway between our house and his.

  “Sure, spud,” Sammy says, and unwinds the layers and layers of packing around his right hand. Even after two and a half months, his hand looks like something out of Frankenstein. His stumps are red and uneven. His middle finger sticks up, but the skin around the base is raised and jagged.

  “Does it hurt?” Grant asks.

  Sammy allows him to feel the edges of his scars and gives him a grown-up answer: “You get used to the pain.”

  Grant reaches out with his whole little-boy fingers and traces the outlines of what’s left of Sammy’s hand. I can almost hear him thinking: Where does it hurt when someone cuts away your mother?

  Henry isn’t far behind his little brother.

  I want to say I don’t get the same lurch of sensation I used to get seeing those auburn curls coming at me over the beach grass, but I do. And the lopsided grin that’s finally directed at me: I hoard it like found treasure. “Well, look who’s here. If it isn’t the shortest Gray. She’s my favorite,” he says, and he kisses me on the lips. These days his kisses don’t feel like desperation. They feel like they should—a day at the beach, grass waving, and the promise of volleyball and good food and the only worry being whether Mom burned the panini.

  I wonder if his kisses will always be beach kisses.

  He takes my hand in his and clutches me a little too hard. After the incident in the garage, sometimes we are both afraid that the other will be washed away.

  He also has a bad hand. But, unlike Sammy’s, his will get better. He doesn’t have to keep his scars in a jar on the bookshelf. In fact, the one that was so bad, the one on the valley between his thumb and trigger finger that he kept picking at? It’s smooth now. We’ve decided it’s been downgraded, like Pluto, to dwarf-planet status.

  He squats and whistles. “Hey, Calamity Jane,” he says softly to my puppy, and waits for her to come to him. Calamity is afraid of tall men, so she lives in constant fear of my brothers, but not of Grant, and she tolerates Henry as long as he doesn’t talk too loud and bends low. I don’t know how I’m going to train her to do anything.

  She creeps out from behind my legs and tentatively allows herself to be petted by the one boy in my life who doesn’t think mortal injury is a competition.

  Today is supposed to be a special day in the Shepherd family. It’s the groundbreaking of “the Herons.” The damage to the garage was so extensive that Mr. Shepherd tore it down and is building a new one. And while he was at it, he tore down the Breakers, too. No one wanted to sleep in a place where Lyudmila had been strangled.

  This new guest cottage is just for Ellen, Henry and Meredith’s mother. Instead of calling it Ellen’s cottage, she’s decided to call it the Herons.

  Ellen gets everything she wants. I’ve met her a handful of times, and I like her. She’s got a shy expression that hides how she’s quickly sizing someone up, and you can see how she and Mr. Shepherd once fell in love. After her experience and long absence, she’s tentative around her kids, afraid they could be taken away from her again at any moment. She starts every conversation haltingly, as though thinking, “Is this how parents talk to their teenagers these days?” But all that matters is that Henry knows that she loves him so much he never even needed to be forgiven.

  After the extent of Joyce’s influence was exposed and Henry told everyone that he had lied about at whose hands he had suffered the abuse, Mr. Shepherd did everything he could to make reparations to his ex-wife. Luckily, Ellen isn’t the litigious type. She just wants to be around her children as much as possible, tentatively or not. Since she’s a caterer, she tries to smooth things over by making them goose liver pâté and duck confit.

  Hannah tells her to ease off—snickerdoodles work just fine.

  It was Ellen’s idea to call the new cottage the Herons after the birds in the lagoon. She thought it was appropriate because she loves the slow-motion way they walk on the sand searching for fish, so slow you’d think they won’t get anything, then, after what seems a lifetime, they do.

  Henry and I make our way to the end of the trail, Grant following behind carrying Calamity and swinging her around. Calamity tolerates this. Barely. My brothers are setting up the volleyball net. Ellen is on the beach, applying sunscreen to Meredith’s back. Meredith’s too old to be treated like a child of three, but she seems to be enjoying it. They’re both eager to make up for lost time—that touch of skin on skin, the reassurance of someone physically loving you without demand or reservation. I see Sammy watching them, a smile on his face.

  “Oh great, the panini have arrived!” Ellen says when she sees the cooler. She’d sent us up the bread earlier in the day. “Did you toast them already? Or shall we do it here?”

  I watch the three women, Hannah, Ellen, and Mom, working at the outdoor cooktop. Of course, after two seconds, Mom starts singing a Rat Pack song. This one is “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.” I cringe for a moment, thinking she could’ve picked something better to hum for Ellen’s sake, but apparently the Rat Pack is universal, because pretty soon Ellen is humming along with her.

  And I think, If Ellen can hum this with a smile on her face after all she’s been through, then maybe someday I can embrace my real name. Marilyn Monroe.

  Nah.

&n
bsp; There’s a coolness in the air. We’re trying to make the most of a dying summer day. We go back to school in a week, so I’ll see Henry less. But I’ll go over to the mainland and be part of his world whenever I can. For now, on the island, he’s still part of mine.

  The net’s in place and our sides are picked when Grant comes to me, visibly upset. “Oh my God, Pixie!”

  “What is it?”

  Everyone comes running over. We take Grant’s fears seriously these days. Very seriously.

  He’s crying, inconsolable. “I lost your dog.”

  I look around the beach. I don’t see her anywhere. Where could she have gone? This is the first time she’s been out of my sight since she came out of the crate two weeks ago.

  There’s a cluster around Grant now. A crowd telling him not to worry, that she’ll turn up. Then a chorus of voices shouting “Calamity! Calamity! Here, girl!”

  I don’t see her anywhere, but a cloud bank has rolled in over the beach.

  Then I see another dog.

  Patience is standing in a sea of driftwood logs at the edge of the spit, waiting for me to follow her.

  She leads me around the point of the beach, almost to the lagoon. As I reach the edge of where the waters turn, I hear the creak and groan of timbers. It could be that Mr. Shepherd has accelerated construction of the Herons, but I know he has not. And then I see him.

  • • •

  There he is, this man I think of with so much affection. He sits on a log, Patience at his feet. He gently strokes her ears. This must be what it’s like to have a father.

  I sit next to him. I love his nearness. I love his white hair and the way his uniform is so worn but so well kept. Most of all, I love the way his gray eyes have depths I can’t fully understand. I look for bits of myself in his features, and I fancy I find them. It’s not hard. He’s tall and has a similar long face to mine. He points over my shoulder, and I turn to see Calamity running toward us, practically tripping over her own feet.