Beach Trip

by Cathy Holton

  She avoided Elizabeth Hatcher whenever she could. The poor woman hovered around the baby, constantly wanting to hold him, to feed him, to put him down for his nap.

  “You two go out and let me babysit,” she said desperately to Tom and Sara but they, of course, never even considered it.

  In moments of quiet clarity, she thought about moving.

  It would be easier, moving away and leaving all the drama of the Hatchers behind. And their townhome was three stories, which was not really good for a toddler, although Adam was not toddling yet; he was still crawling around like a fat grub. A one-level house would be better, maybe a fixer-upper in Sandy Springs with a large flat yard and access to good schools.

  But Sara loved her old townhome with its brick walls and heart-pine floors and air of lives long past. And Sandy Springs was expensive. She needed to save the money in their bank account to buy into a partnership, on the slim chance that one would ever be offered.

  And then one morning in September as she was getting ready for work, she heard a sound like a bowling ball rolling slowly down the stairs. She stopped applying her mascara to listen. In the split second before the rolling stopped, she realized it was the baby, falling down the stairs.

  She screamed and ran out into the hallway. Leaning over the banister she could see Adam lying on his back on the first-floor landing, his face red, his mouth open in a soundless wail. Tom ran out of the kitchen. It was a Tuesday and he was dressed for work. He was shouting, “Oh, my God, oh, my God,” and rushed down the stairs to the baby, but Sara could only stand there leaning over the railing, immobile with fear and grief.

  Adam recovered his breath and began to howl. Tom picked him up and cradled him against his chest. “Where were you?” he shouted at Sara. “Why weren’t you watching him?”

  “I thought you were watching him!” She flew down the stairs. “My baby!” she cried. “My poor baby!”

  They took him to the hospital but all the scans were negative. Babies are resilient, the doctors assured them, but Sara would not be comforted. There was a nagging sense of guilt that would not let her go, even years later, after his diagnosis, after the doctors had assured her that secondary autism can only be caused by an injury much greater than the one Adam had suffered rolling down the stairs, and that primary autism is present from birth.

  No matter what they said, she couldn’t let go of the guilt, the feeling that his affliction was somehow a punishment of her, something she was paying the price for at long last.

  Chapter 29

  fter losing Lola at the marina, the trip to the Isle of Pines was uneventful. They followed the coastline, staying close to the barrier islands for Annie’s sake, and fifteen minutes into the ride, she had relaxed like the rest of them. As long as she could see even a distant rim of land, she seemed fine. They sat up on the canopied flybridge, clustered around a table drinking pitchers of sweet tea while Captain Mike stood at the helm, steering the boat through the treacherous Frying Pan Shoals at the mouth of the Cape Fear River and out into open water. Hundreds of wrecks lay buried under these shoals, the debris of five hundred years of European and American naval traffic, but he seemed to know what he was doing. He stood with his legs spread slightly to take the shift and roll of the boat, his baseball hat turned backward, his eyes constantly scanning the horizon. He was built like a rugby player, solid and well muscled, and watching the way he handled the wheel, Mel felt a little tremor in the pit of her stomach.

  “You can tell he loves this,” she shouted at Lola, indicating Captain Mike’s sturdy back.

  “Yes.” Lola pushed her wind-tossed hair behind one ear and nodded. “He’s an old soul,” she said in her singsong voice. “In another life he sailed with Stede Bonnet all along this coast. He knows every shoal and inlet between here and the Berry Islands.”

  Mel didn’t know what to say to that so she said nothing. Looking at Captain Mike now, at the confident way he stood at the wheel, his sunstreaked hair fluttering against his deeply tanned neck, it wasn’t too hard to imagine him as a buccaneer. Mel turned to Sara but she and Annie were deep in some private conversation, their heads close together, their voices low. They were fitted into the curve of the bench seat that circled the table like a horseshoe, and they seemed oblivious to anything else, to the sun sparkling off the whitecapped ocean, to the barrier islands with their wide beaches and dark rim of maritime forest. The Miss Behavin’ churned past a charter boat anchored near an artificial reef, its cargo of scuba-diving tourists readying themselves for an afternoon dive. Two dolphins raced along the starboard side, slicing through the water like a pair of rodeo riders, before veering off toward open sea.

  A few minutes later, April appeared on deck, carrying a tray of frozen margaritas. She set the tray down on the table in front of them.

  “You read my mind,” Mel said, reaching for a drink. Lola lifted one of the margaritas and offered it to April.

  She took the glass, smiling, and said, “I thought I’d serve lunch once we get to the island.”

  Lola waved her hand lazily as if lunch was the last thing on her mind.

  The girl moved off, her hips swaying gently to the subtle rocking of the boat. She was wearing a pair of short-shorts and a tiny T-shirt that showed her flat stomach. Her feet were bare. She stood next to Captain Mike with her hip resting against him, one arm looped casually over his shoulder. From time to time, she gave him her drink to sip. Mel couldn’t hear what they were saying but they were obviously amused by something, chuckling and leaning their heads close together.

  She was surprised to find herself suddenly jealous, which was odd, considering that she didn’t even like Captain Mike. Not really anyway. She put it down to a week of drinking and inactivity bordering on boredom. Or maybe it was just loneliness.

  As if reading her thoughts, Captain Mike turned his head and glanced behind him. He lifted one arm and pointed out the Isle of Pines, a long, low-lying barrier island that was visible now off the port bow. “Ten minutes,” he shouted.

  Annie stopped talking to Sara and stared at the distant island. “That place looks familiar.”

  “Maybe you knew it in another life,” Mel said. She smirked and rolled her eyes at Sara, who smiled faintly but didn’t say anything.

  Lola didn’t seem the least bit disturbed by Mel’s skepticism. She stuck her finger in her glass and stirred the frozen mound. “We were sisters,” she said, staring fondly at the pale green concoction.

  Mel knew better than to ask the question but couldn’t stop herself “Who?” she asked. “Who were sisters?”

  Lola twirled her finger in circles, indicating the four of them. “We were,” she said. “Not sister sisters. The other kind. You know, nuns. In a seventeenth-century convent in Paris.” She held her glass up and tapped the edges until the frozen mound collapsed into the middle.

  Mel pursed her lips and gave her a patient stare. “Where do you get this crap, Lola?”

  She pulled her feet up on the bench, folding her legs beneath her. “I did this thing called past-life hypnotic regression. Y’all should try it.”

  “I have enough trouble dealing with this life,” Mel said, “much less dealing with one that happened hundreds of years ago.”

  “After the convent, I was a boy on the Kansas frontier whose parents died in an Indian attack,” Lola said matter-of-factly “And then I was an elderly woman who died at Treblinka.”

  No one said anything. Annie turned her head and stared at the distant shape of the Isle of Pines. Mel asked Lola, “What medication did you say you were taking?”

  “I’m not taking any medication.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  Lola lifted her drink and sipped it. “Not now,” she added in that enigmatic way she had of answering direct questions, like a child playing a game of twenty questions.

  Mel felt a twinge of irritation. “Not now, as in ‘Not while I’m drinking?’ Or not now, as in ‘Don’t ask me now’?”

&nbs
p; Lola giggled. Annie said warily, “The Bible doesn’t say anything about reincarnation.”

  “Do you only believe what you read in the Bible?” Mel asked.

  She didn’t. Not anymore, anyway, but she had been raised to believe that the Bible was the inspired word of God, and her life had been a whole lot easier back when she still believed it. Now she found herself questioning everything. “I try to stay away from all that new age stuff.”

  “Reincarnation isn’t exactly new age,” Mel said. “It’s one of the oldest known beliefs. Some people claim that it was a major tenet of the Christian religion up until the fifth ecumenical council in 553 A.D.”

  “I don’t believe in reincarnation,” Sara said. “Not rationally, anyway. But the concept of karma is pretty interesting. It makes a lot of sense if you think about it, the idea that we’re all put here to learn from our mistakes, no matter how many lifetimes it takes. It’s a whole lot more comforting than the Judeo-Christian belief that we’re put on Earth with one life and one soul and if we screw up, we go to hell. A religion that has us believing in a loving God who watches over his flock. How does that explain abused children? How does that explain children dying of cancer?”

  “That part bothers me, too,” Annie said.

  The sun had passed its zenith and was beginning its slow plummet toward the tree line. Mel crossed her legs on the bench seat, resting her drink in her lap. “Okay, Lola,” she said. “So you’re saying that if something bad happens to me, if I get run over by a bus or die in a car accident, it’s because I was an SS guard at Buchenwald in another life? If something bad happens to me, it’s my fault?”

  Lola tilted her head as if contemplating this. “I don’t think it’s that simple,” she said.

  Sara stirred her drink and raised her glass. “Well, Lola is right about one thing,” she said. “Y’all are my sisters. For better or for worse. I can say things to you that I couldn’t say to anyone else.” They all raised their glasses and clinked them together.

  “Here’s to girlfriends,” Mel said. She smiled at Sara, then returned her attention to Lola. “Maybe if you’d said we were saloon girls during the California gold rush or Ziegfeld girls working on Broadway. But nuns? What could we possibly have learned as nuns?”

  “No idea,” Annie said.

  “Don’t ask me,” Sara said.

  “Thaumaturgy” Lola said, holding her glass up so the sun shone through it like a prism. “Believing in miracles and loving each other. That’s all there is.”

  • • •

  They came through Rich Inlet and moored the yacht several hundred feet out, where the water was shallow and clear down to the sandy bottom. April served them lunch in the salon while Captain Mike got the dinghy ready They could see the low flat outline of the Isle of Pines through the salon windows. It was a small island, only about five miles long, and had been sanctioned years ago as a bird sanctuary and turtle hatchery so there was no commercial development. It was all pristine wilderness and white sandy beaches. A few scattered fishing shacks still stood at the northern tip of the island but other than that, there were no signs of human habitation. The island looked very much like it had three hundred years earlier, when Blackbeard and Gentleman Stede Bonnet terrorized the coast aboard the Queen Anne’s Revenge.

  After lunch they hopped into the dinghy and Captain Mike motored them in to shore. The island rose like a mirage beneath a cloudless sky. Sandpipers scurried along the beach, watching them with bright beady eyes. A series of rolling dunes rimmed the beach, and beyond them, a dark ridge of maritime forest stretched into the bone-colored sky. As they approached the island they could see a pair of turtle tracks running along the beach and dunes like phantom tire tracks.

  Captain Mike pulled the dinghy up on the beach and they climbed out. Waves lapped gently against the sand. The southern tip of the island faced the inlet and was somewhat sheltered, forming a slight cove. To the west stretched Middle Sound and to the east stretched the wild Atlantic. They walked up the beach and laid their towels on the sand. Sara and Lola went to look for shells, slowly following the gentle curve of the shoreline. Captain Mike put on a snorkeling mask and waded out into the water. A few minutes later, Mel joined him.

  Annie reached into her beach bag and took out a tube of Vaseline, which she applied liberally to her lips. It was her one beauty secret, Vaseline. It kept her lips moist and wrinkle-free. In the winter months she applied it to her whole face. Her hair might be prematurely white and she might have flabby Jameson thighs, but she had the unlined skin of a teenager. You had to take the bad with the good.

  She lay on her towel on the sand, resting her chin on a clenched fist and watching Captain Mike and Mel swim back and forth like a pair of ocean steamers. Captain Mike was always in front and Mel was always slightly behind, trying to keep up. Watching the two of them, Annie was glad, suddenly, that she was married and long past all that foolishness. And married to a good man, too, she thought. A keeper.

  The afternoon was hot and muggy. The Miss Behavin’ floated on the horizon like a toy boat. On her starboard side another yacht, slightly larger, passed slowly, its engines throbbing. Captain Mike stood up in the water and watched as the yacht motored out of the inlet and into the open sea. He had his mask pushed back on his head and he was holding something in his hands that he had plucked from the ocean floor. Mel stood beside him, peering down at it. She looked very pretty and very happy, standing there with Captain Mike. She was not a woman accustomed to rejection, and Annie guessed that she was having a hard time accepting Captain Mike’s infatuation with April.

  Still, you had to admire Mel. She had what the English like to call pluck. She wouldn’t give in, not Mel, she wouldn’t lie down and take it. She was competitive down to her last eyelash. It was that spirit of competition that kept her and Sara at odds; that and the unpleasantness that had passed between them all those years ago, that thing they never spoke of but was always there. The elephant in the room.

  Farther down the beach she could see Lola and Sara making their slow progress along the sand. She smiled, thinking of Lola’s strange word. Thaumaturgy. Annie had learned the word years ago in a Bible study class. It meant the art of working miracles.

  A crab poked its head out of the sand and ran across in front of her with its comical, sideways motion. The blue sea shimmered, rising and falling gently beneath a line of gauzy clouds. Annie turned her head to the side and laid her cheek down on her arms.

  Sara, of course, had her own cross to bear. They had spoken of it on the trip over, Annie listening quietly while Sara told her of the new program they had Adam on. She had visited Sara in Atlanta not long after Nicky was born, not long after Adam was first diagnosed with autism, and she had seen firsthand the devastation it had caused in Sara and Tom’s lives, in their marriage. She had been there for Sara over the years, had tried to make herself available when she needed a friend to confide in, a shoulder to cry on. A mother herself, Annie had not been able to imagine anything worse than a damaged child, a child who could never be made whole no matter how many doctors he saw, no matter how many promising programs he underwent.

  It was enough to make Annie’s own tragedy pale in comparison.

  • • •

  Mel followed Captain Mike through the water like a remora trying desperately to latch on to a tiger shark. He was a good swimmer, and moved with smooth fluid strokes, but she had failed the Red Cross swimming test three times. The last time Leland, watching from the balcony, had left in disgust, refusing to ever pay for another swim lesson. It wasn’t that she couldn’t stay afloat; she could. But during times of stress or fatigue she had a tendency to relapse into a clumsy dog paddle. She did so now, following him like a feeble lapdog while below them a silvery ladyfish made its way lazily out to sea.

  A lightning whelk moved slowly across the sandy bottom, and Captain Mike dove down and brought it up for Mel to see. They stood in chest-deep water and he pointed out the large muscular foot th
e whelk used to clamp down on its prey Mel wished she had a similar appendage. She spent a few pointless minutes imagining herself attached to Captain Mike. “Busycon perversum,” he said, dropping it gently in the water, where it sank like a large stone.

  Lola and Sara returned from their beachcombing trip, and Captain Mike went to join the three of them on the beach. He walked out of the water, the sun glistening on his wide shoulders, like a male version of Botticelli’s Venus. He raised his arms and pushed his hair back off his face, and Mel thought that she’d been wrong the other night when she’d decided that he didn’t look good with his hair slicked back. He walked up on the beach and stood over the three women, dripping water onto their brightly colored beach towels. Lola kicked sand at him and he leaned over her and shook his shaggy head like a dog. She screamed, giggled, jumped up, and ran a few feet down the beach.

  Mel watched her with a sullen expression. The snorkeling mask pinched her face and she took it off, flinging it toward the shore. There was no doubt about it; she needed to get laid. It had been nearly three months, and she hadn’t gone three months without sex since she was sixteen years old, except for the time she got sick, and then it had been nearly nine months, but that really didn’t count. She needed to get laid before she went berserk. It shouldn’t be this hard (it never had been before). Maybe she should just go right up to him and lay it on the table (so to speak). Maybe instead of trying to impress him, she should just tell him what she wanted so they could get on with it. She wanted sex. With him. Now.

  He knelt in the sand and pulled a CD player out of a canvas bag. The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” rang out suddenly across the quiet cove.

  Annie asked, “Do you have any Vince Gill?”

  Lola said, “Turn it up!”

  Mel did a slow backflip on the surface of the water so he could see her full bosom, her flat stomach, and her graceful hips, in case he had missed them earlier when she had stood so close to him that she was practically in his arms. As she surfaced, she slicked her hair back like a movie star, like Raquel Welch in Fathom.