A Gift Upon the Shore

by Wren, M. K.

  She recognized both the miracles and the mania. Enid, Grace, and Bernadette lived in that golden age, too, but only on the edges of it; the edges of mania. They remember almost nothing of it.

  I remember.

  “The story begins, Stephen, when I left Portland.”

  He nods. “Why did you leave the city?”

  “Because I wanted to write. Not just bureaucratic semitruths and useless bulletins.” I smile at his look of confusion. “I worked for the government, Stephen, for IDA: the Information Dissemination Agency. And I left the city because it had become a place where you couldn’t breathe for the smog, you couldn’t move for the people, the homeless, the unemployed, the huddled masses longing to be fed. This country—the world, in fact—was in an economic depression. The sheer numbers were finally catching up with the resources, and what resources were left were squandered in wars. If only we could’ve . . .”

  He’s still looking at me in confusion, and I stop to remind myself: simple, Mary, keep it simple.

  “I left Portland because I had a dream of living and writing in a house by the sea. I thought if I couldn’t make a living at writing, I could get a job cleaning motel rooms, if nothing else. Shiloh Beach was a resort town, a place people came to stay for a while to enjoy the sea and the beach.”

  “Didn’t you come to live with Rachel?”

  “I didn’t know Rachel then. I didn’t know anyone in Shiloh. I hadn’t been there for thirteen years, since I was eleven. The house by the sea was my aunt’s; she willed it to me when she died. It was so naive, that dream. There was so much I didn’t know. I didn’t know how hard the depression had hit the coast, I didn’t know about the road gangs—Rovers, Gypsies, Goolies, they had various names for themselves—I didn’t know about the squatters and migrants. Well, I knew of their existence from television and newspapers. But I didn’t understand. . . .”

  So much I didn’t understand then, still don’t. I left the city in search of a place to write because it was the one thing I did well, the one thing that seemed to justify my existence. In search of the sea that I loved with the passion of childhood. In search of a dream.

  Before the beginning of years

  There came to the making of man

  Time, with a gift of tears;

  Grief, with a glass that ran;

  Pleasure, with pain for leaven;

  Summer, with flowers that fell;

  Remembrance, fallen from heaven,

  And madness risen from hell. . . .

  —ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE,

  “ATALANTA IN CALYDON” (1865)

  Mary Hope stared through the glass only inches from her right shoulder. Beyond the window—fogged with the heat of the bus, smeared with fingerprints, streaked with yellow spears of reflected light—was another world, and it sustained her. Phosphorescent silver shapes whisked, fragmented, past the black span of glass, but she knew them and in imagination made them whole: meadows of velvet grass; groves of alder, pale limbs winter bare; fir and hemlock catching stars in their crowns, their trunks black columns for temples consecrated to their own existence. Sometimes, when the winding of the road turned the bus southward, she could see the moon, a perfect disk of ultimate white, flickering through the black smoke of trees.

  Mary sat squeezed into a seat once meant for two, now, with the center armrest removed, occupied by three adults and a baby. She hugged her duffel bag to her chest. The strap angled around her body, the buckle digging into her backbone. All her worldly possessions—all that she hadn’t sold or given away—were in this canvas bag. Clothes and cosmetics, three books, and the few thousand dollars that were her grubstake for a new life. She felt her shallow breaths on chapped lips, wondered if she could ever get used to the sour-sweet smell of tobacco and emjay smoke and liquor—all illegal here, all tolerated indifferently. Tolerated like the fetid air and the odors of overheated bodies, of mold and urine that clung to the upholstery.

  Mary Hope considered the relativity of time.

  Rather, the subjectivity of it. Her watch informed her that five hours and forty-four minutes had passed since the beginning of the twentieth day of February, that twelve hours and twenty-one minutes had passed since she left her apartment to wait in the hellish limbo of the terminal for a coast bus, that two hours and thirty-six minutes had passed since the bus left Portland. And every one of those hours and minutes, every second of them, she had experienced separately and distinctly. She had learned that boredom and fear can coexist and that they make a mind-racking alchemy.

  The fear was the ancient fear of strangers. Too many strangers, any one of whom could be mad. There was no way to know which among the pressing thousands might be over the edge past sanity.

  But that was one of the things she was leaving behind.

  Her left arm from the elbow up was numb. Laura’s right arm was undoubtedly equally numb where it pressed against Mary’s.

  Laura. Mary didn’t know her last name, but Laura wasn’t one of the strangers to be feared. To be pitied, perhaps. Laura, alone and lonely, sixteen years old, her baby only three weeks old, trying to return to her family in Coos Bay. The baby began crying, a fretful wail against the rumble of the bus’s motor. Laura sang, “Hush you by . . . don’t you cry. . . .”

  Mary closed her eyes, listening to that frail lullaby. The baby was sick. Probably one of the viral mutations that seemed to appear magically every winter. This year’s model was called L-flu. Someone would come up with a vaccine, and she’d have to get a shot. There must be a USMA hospital in Shiloh Beach.

  The bus slowed for a wide turn to the south, and Mary, suddenly alert, stared out the window. A plain of silver grass . . . there, the moon glinted on water. It must be—could be—the Coho River estuary.

  Reflected moonlets raced over the water at the speed of the bus, and Mary held her breath to avoid fogging the glass. She couldn’t doubt it now. The Coho River estuary. That was only—how far? No more than three miles from Shiloh Beach. Her breath came out in a sigh that caught in muscular tremors. Aunt Jan—oh, finally, I’m almost home.

  The beach house—that was all Mary could see now. She could even smell the misted scent of sea winds. It was gray, the house, shingled in weathered cedar. There was one bedroom; a kitchen with minimal, almost antique appliances; a living room with a fireplace and big windows looking out on the sea. The furniture was made of wood, real wood in unique varieties, like the cherry dining table, the rosewood rocker, the nested teak tables. And the clock on the mantel, the old Seth Thomas that clanged the hours so steadfastly—

  “Mary? Are you okay?” Laura was nearly shouting over the spitting of the motor and the baby’s crying.

  Mary tried to control her trembling, tried not to laugh aloud, but she didn’t have time to answer Laura’s query. The ampsystem blurted the bus driver’s announcement: “Passengers for Shiloh Beach, we will arrive in approximately five minutes. For continuing passengers, there will be a twenty-minute stopover. Rest rooms and vendor refreshments will be available. There is also a Federal Transit Administration infocomp at the terminal. Shiloh Beach, five minutes.”

  Along the aisle, people began shifting, pulling themselves out of cramped squats. Laura said plaintively, “I wish it was Coos Bay.”

  “It’s only a few more hours, Laura. You’ll be all right.”

  “I wish you were—oh, Jamie, please shut up.”

  The baby wailed louder, and Mary turned to look out the window. Black smoke of trees rushing past; ahead, another open area. That would be the golf course—

  The ampsystem came on again at the same moment the driver hit the brakes, hard. “People, we got trouble!”

  Mary threw her arms out to brace herself against the seat in front of her, caught a split second’s glimpse of the highway ahead, of two cars barricading the road, glittering
in the bus’s headlights.

  “Hang on!” the driver’s amplified voice shrilled. “Rovers!”

  The terror in that word shivered through her. The bus lurched to the right, tires screaming. Its murky interior erupted with cries of alarm, while Mary pounded desperately on the window. It was a breakout window. All bus windows were breakouts. It had to be—

  The bus careened left, then right again, and Mary was crushed against the window under the pressure of flailing bodies. The baby shrieked, and the hammering, grinding crash seemed endless. The window gave way as the bus thudded to a halt, listing to the right, and she tumbled out, breath choked off at the impact when she hit the ground. She rolled in a tangle of bodies to the bottom of the ditch, staggered to her feet, and there stood rigid.

  From behind the barricade of smashed cars at the front of the bus surged a troop of human figures as irrational as monsters born of a medieval imagination. Howling insensately, faces limned in fluorescent colors in the shapes of skulls, they brandished guns, axes, machetes, all strobe-lighted in the glare of hand spots dancing jerkily toward her.

  Mary shouted, “Laura!” But she couldn’t even hear her own voice in the din of cries and screams, couldn’t see faces in the darkness where more passengers spilled out of the bus’s windows in heaving avalanches. The Rovers plunged into the crowd as she scrambled out of the ditch, and she heard the spit of automatics, heard bullets pound into flesh. A man toppled against her in a rain of blood, and she broke away, struck out at an adreneline-charged run into an open field toward the haven of the trees beyond. How far? She couldn’t guess. She could only run. The guns stuttered amid cries of agony, banshee paeans. Stumbling, blinded by the searing afterimages of the lights, she ran toward the pallid fringe of alders.

  A sobbing yelp of pain, and something knocked her right leg out from under her. Drowning in dead grass, hands clutching a barbed vine, she lurched to her feet and ran.

  Alder ghosts ahead of her and finally around her. Silver branches in silver light, darkness pooled around them. Hands stretched out before her, she caromed from one dappled trunk to the next, the dense underbrush a riptide miring her legs. She swam into the shadows of the conifer forest beyond, where moonlight filtered icily into the depths. Branches raked her face, battered her body, roots caught her feet and threw her down again and again, and she pulled herself up again and again and thrashed on through the tangled darkness. She couldn’t hear beyond her own crashing progress, beyond the reverberations of her pulse and the hoarse rale of her panting. She plunged into a lightless ravine, terror intensified by the absolute blackness until she swarmed up the far slope, clawing at roots, toward the glimmer of moonlight.

  The light drew her on finally into a treeless aisle, and she followed the light as a flower follows the sun, followed it until she could no longer run, until she could no longer walk, until at length her legs gave way, and she lay with her cheek pressed into bladed gravel.

  She still didn’t hear the silence. That came only when her panting slowed and her pulse ceased pounding in her ears. With her awareness of silence—of safety—she awakened to pain. Her throat and lungs burned, her muscles quivered, her body ached with countless bruises and abrasions.

  But her right leg—that was more than strained muscles and battered flesh. The pain was so intense it kindled a new kind of fear.

  She tried to sit up and realized that the constriction around her chest was the shoulder strap of her duffel bag. All her worldly goods. She had somehow held on to that. No, not held on. It would have been difficult to rid herself of it; she had only managed to push the bag around to her back. She maneuvered into a sitting position, grunting with the effort. Below her right knee, the pant leg was wet. Her palm came away dark and glistening in the pallid light.

  Wind moved the black plumes of branches above her. She shivered, dizzied by their stately bowing and rising. The sky was perceptibly lighter than the trees, and the moon was sinking behind them. She could see, dimly, the ephemeral clouds of her breath. Dawn. The dawn’s early light, pearly light, first light I see—

  Damn, she was getting hysterical. No, that was over now. But the shivering wouldn’t stop. Laura. Poor Laura. And Jamie, only three weeks old. They couldn’t have survived.

  Those bastards! Those inhuman, insane—

  She couldn’t find words adequate for her rage. Perhaps the words to encompass it had never been invented, not in all the centuries that humankind had suffered at its own hands.

  She looked around in the ashen light that bordered on darkness. A road. She was on a road. Winter-dead weeds at the sides and in a fringe down the center, but it was a road, and it must lead somewhere.

  All she had to do was walk down the road until she came to a house, ask the residents to call the local or Auxiliary Police. Must be an Apie station in Shiloh Beach.

  All she had to do was walk. . . .

  Her teeth chattered uncontrollably, and it seemed that ice crystals were forming under her skin, exquisite fronded patterns slowly coalescing. She struggled to her feet, the effort wrenching out cries of pain, took two steps, and fell to the ground. She didn’t try again. The neural links between her muscles and brain were frozen.

  She looked up at the bowing plumes. I’m going to die here. Some bleak, unfathomable irony lay in that.

  In the distance a sound. She wasn’t sure whether she heard it or imagined or remembered it.

  The murmur of the sea.

  I am here . . . I am always here. . . .

  Under a white sky in a white, frozen ocean, she lay on a white ice floe waiting for it to melt out from under her. It seemed fitting. Broken and useless things must be discarded for the good of the tribe.

  But the sound was puzzling. Sniffing. A soft whine. Something touched her cheek. She opened her eyes, and the creature drew back, watching her with amber brown eyes, cabochon gems trapping golden light. How did a fox get on her ice floe? Fur of russet blending into brown; under the chin, a ruff of white. Ice white . . .

  She realized then as her mind and eyes came into focus that her ice floe had vanished, that she lay in a place full of color: sky blue, looming conifers deep ever green, grasses winter rose and gold.

  With a cry, she jerked away from the animal, and it jumped back, teeth bared. She tried to get to her feet, but she was too weak, and the pain hit too hard. She only managed to prop herself on her left elbow, right arm raised to fend off the dog. And now there were two of them, the second smaller, blacker. They danced and whirled and barked, the sounds like bludgeons. The piercing whistle cut into her skull.

  “Topaz! Shadow! Here—come here!”

  Mary numbly watched the dogs retreat to flank the figure moving toward her.

  A woman. Age indeterminate, but past forty certainly. Small, compact body clad in jeans and a red jacket, both faded with wear. Below her knit cap, fine hair the color of sand lay on a high forehead; her face was all one color with her sandy brows, the weathered skin lined as if she turned her deep brown eyes often to distant vistas.

  Mary’s fear dissolved as it would if she’d met a friend of many years on this remote, forest-girded road. She didn’t understand that, but neither did she question it.

  The woman knelt beside her, regarding her with concern but no surprise. She asked, “What happened to you?”

  Mary didn’t try to answer that. She wanted to say, I know you. Instead, she asked, “Who are you?”

  The woman answered, “I’m Rachel Morrow.”

  Therefore to this dog will I,

  Tenderly not scornfully,

  Render praise and favor:

  With my hand upon his head,

  Is my benediction said

  Therefore and for ever.

  —ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING,

  TO FLUSH, MY DOG (1844)

  Shadow stretches
every fiber for her tumultuous runs after gulls, unaware, apparently, of the insurmountable advantage wings give them. At the end of each chase she returns to me, pattering along on the delicate feet of her mirror image in the sea-wet sand, and I remember the first Shadow. Rachel’s Shadow. Like her namesake, this Shadow is mostly black, a silky black like the waters of the night, with white stockings, belly, and ruff, white at the tip of her plume of a tail. Russet marks the divisions of black and white, forms expressive commas above her eyes. She is a replicate of the first Shadow, and from the moment I saw her as a blind, wavering pup, I claimed her as my own and named her for her ancestor, the good mother of our canine tribe.

  Topaz would have been a good mother, too, but there are no throwbacks to remind me of her.

  How many generations did the first Shadow and Sparky beget? I can’t remember, and the bloodlines were muddied—or invigorated—by feral dogs and by Agate, whom Rachel and I stole as a pup from a feral bitch. The dogs at Amarna now—there are only six since Desdemona died this winter—tend to pointed noses, long hair, upright ears, with black the predominant color, although Agate’s genes manifest themselves occasionally, as they have in Stickeen and Diamond, in a leggy sturdiness and tawny coat. Sparky was a mongrel, part spaniel, part terrier, black except for the white locket on his chest; he had the tenacity typical of terriers. I see his personality in his descendants more than his physical attributes.

  Is that anthropomorphism, to think of personality in animals?

  Perhaps. But I’ve lived too intimately with animals not to recognize in them the existence of unique characteristics of mind.

  I look down at the sand, at my tracks: drag lines between each print, the holes made by my cane like periods punctuating terse sentences. Then I look ahead and choose a log as a convenient resting place. I make my way up the slope of the beach and ease down on the weather-polished back of the log. To the north looms the dark, basalt wall of the Knob, at its base a tumble of rocks terraced by the sea that even on this calm day strikes with white detonations and rains spray into the tide pools.