Barefoot Beach

by Toby Devens

  “You’re okay with that? The meeting part?” I wasn’t sure how I felt about laying out the welcome mat for some nameless number who liked Beethoven.

  But Lon was. “Absolutely. Everyone has the right to know where they come from. If our child is interested, I’ll invite the guy over for a beer. We’ll do some backslapping and I’ll brag about how well John London Farrell or Maureen London Farrell turned out.”

  “Let’s call him Jack. It’s a strong name. But Maureen Quinn Farrell, please,” I said. “I’m a person too.”

  “That you are, Nora Farrell née Quinn,” he said. “And a fine figure of a lass, indeed.”

  I reached for his hand. It was warm and I brushed the back of it with my lips. “You really think this will work out?”

  His fingers unfolded to stroke my cheek. “Yup, it’s going to be good,” Lon said.

  And he was right; it was very good. For quite some time. Until something or someone screwed with the magic, and it wasn’t.

  chapter three

  Jack’s car pulled in at three twenty-six a.m. I knew the time precisely because at the sound of the garage door grinding up, I roused from a restless half sleep to check the neon green numbers on my bedside clock. I heard the garage door go down, an assortment of thumps and creaks, then Jack’s tread mounting the stairs. For the child of a dancer, he was not light on his feet. Clump, clump, clump. On that reassuring music, I floated off until dawn.

  In the new light, I peeked in his room, and, frankly, I didn’t like the look of him. His normally ruddy complexion was washed out. He was curled on his bed in jeans and an old golf shirt of Lon’s, probably the same clothes he’d worn on the drive. His fists were clenched, and his eyelids, fringed with thick blond lashes, twitched. He’d propped his iPhone on the pillow next to him so I figured he was waiting or hoping for a morning call from Tiffanie, the sophomore, the older woman, the mean-mouthed girl. Even in the sexy-pouty, too-much-cleavage-revealed glamour shot he’d passed around at Christmas, she’d looked narrow and pinched. The camera didn’t lie and Photoshop couldn’t blur her essential skinniness. The picture told the story: there wasn’t enough of her to share.

  She’d been jerking Jack around since February and had administered the coup de grace during finals week. Finals week! How cold was that? My nineteen-year-old, in the throes of first crazy love, accent on the crazy, had decided to stay on at Duke for an extra month to try to salvage the relationship while Tiffanie started summer school. I wondered how that had turned out.

  The room was cold, over-air-conditioned, thanks to Jack’s heavy hand with the thermostat. I pulled the top sheet up to cover him. Even that light touch caused him to stir. He flinched and turned his head so his cheek rested smack on the iPhone. Not a good move.

  I smiled at a memory. When Jack was eight, he and Lon had worked together over a two-week stretch of August twilights to build a model of the Wright Brothers’ first flier. It turned out to be a delicate wonder of struts and strings that set off a frenzy of high-fiving between them. Exactly how it happened Jack couldn’t tell us, but after spending a few days on his bookshelf, the model had found its way to my boy’s pillow and sometime during the night it got crushed. Lon repaired the damage, but you could see where it had been patched. That was Jack’s first lesson in how bad stuff happens and afterward things might never be the same.

  Thinking of the splintered airplane, I moved in to rescue the iPhone, sliding it out from under the weight of his head, slowly, carefully, but not carefully enough, because he gave me a slitted stare and mumbled a cottony, “Hey, Mamma-mia.”

  That was what I’d called my mother, whom Jack had never met. Born Maria Bellangelo, Italian through and through, Mimi Quinn died when I was seventeen, but I’d told Jack about Mamma-mia and he’d picked up on it.

  “Hi, Bambino,” I said. But he wasn’t my baby anymore, I thought with a catch in my inner voice. It all goes so fast. From tentative baby steps to giant strides—all that moving away in less than two decades. That was the natural order of things and, yes, it was right, but sometimes the yearning for the scent of baby lotion or the desire to nuzzle toddler-smooth skin melted me to just short of tears. I consoled myself with the hope that though the maternal gravity would weaken, the power of love would always be strong enough to keep him at least at the edge of my orbit.

  The hand splayed on his chest was a man-sized paw with fuzz on the knuckles. He stirred and his fist opened. I planted the iPhone in his palm, brushed a kiss on his forehead, and watched him lapse back into sleep. Then I went back to bed and tossed and turned for the next two hours.

  I came down to the kitchen a little after eight to find Jack sipping orange juice, chomping on a bagel draped with lox, and thumbing through the Coast Post, the resort strip’s newspaper. From the glint of his blond-streaked hair I could tell he’d showered, but he hadn’t shaved. Or maybe it was the style again, the all-day five-o’clock shadow.

  He’d dressed in khaki shorts and a shirt I recognized from last summer, the Duke Lacrosse Blue Devils tee that was too small for him now—my son had built muscles over the school year. His eyes, a startling amber—Lon had called them golden eyes and said he’d never seen them in a human before, though some eagles, owls, and domestic cats had that color—brightened as they lit on me.

  They flicked back to the paper and he read aloud: “‘Get moving, get happy, and get dancing. Zumba and belly dancing at all levels. Ballroom lessons, group and private. Sign up now for summer classes.’” I moved to look over his shoulder. The ad for We Got Rhythm had landed on page four of the newspaper. Good placement for the first advertisement of the season. I needed to thank Emine, who’d negotiated the spot. She had the touch for driving a hard bargain.

  “That’s one of my favorite pictures of you,” my son said.

  The head shot had been taken just before I’d opened the studio. My hair had been longer then, and what the woman at the Clinique counter at Nordstrom euphemistically called laugh lines hadn’t begun to sprout around my eyes. I looked five years younger, which of course I had been.

  When I sighed, Jack said, “There’s also a page-one story about someone you know. That army guy who was in your class a few years ago, the one with the fake leg?”

  Scott Goddard. The lieutenant colonel wore a prosthesis that replaced the half a limb he’d lost during an insurgent attack in Iraq.

  Jack handed me the paper. I flipped pages and my heart did its own flip as I got my first look at Scott’s photo. It wasn’t recent either, this portrait of an active-duty officer. He was wearing dress blues, his chest decorated with stars and bars and badges. His face, shaved to a gloss, was a ruddy, healthy color. His hair was buzzed to half an inch of his scalp.

  “Combat Hero to Lead July Fourth Parade,” the headline announced. I tried to focus on the copy, fighting the tug back to his photo.

  “Army Colonel Wounded in Iraq Chosen Grand Marshal.” Scott Goddard was currently residing in Tuckahoe, according to the lead paragraph. When they were in my Tuesday night ballroom class, Scott and Bunny had lived a few miles up the coast. Her mom had terminal cancer and they’d moved into her Rehoboth house to care for her. Maybe Mrs. Gleason had passed on and they’d found a place here in town. “It’s an honor and a privilege to preside over this event,” the article quoted Scott. His eyes were very blue, the irises outlined in black. My glance stalled out. His smile, warm and confident, exposed even white teeth. Colonel Goddard was my definition of handsome.

  “Earth to Mom,” Jack said. “Hel-lo up there.”

  I tossed the paper on the table and shook my head to clear the last image and the accompanying guilt. The man was married, after all.

  “You must be beat,” I said, rushing to change the subject. “You didn’t get much sleep.”

  “I learned during finals that I can operate on fumes. Anyway, I’ll catch up. As long as I’m here, I’m fine.”
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  Did that mean if he wasn’t here, he wouldn’t be fine? I heard the tremulous echo of my meeting yesterday, the one that put my job on the line. I had a son in an expensive college, rent due monthly for the house in Baltimore, taxes on the beach house, rent and salaries at We Got Rhythm . . . I grabbed a sesame seed bagel and bit into it to keep from gritting my teeth.

  Jack slugged the rest of his orange juice and enfolded me in a bear hug, temporarily wiping away all thoughts of disaster. Before letting me go, he bent down and pecked the top of my head, the way I used to kiss him when he was a baby.

  His father had nicknamed him Jacko early on, but after we saw the writing on the wall (the penciled height marks were still visible in his closet), he became Big Guy. By twelve, he’d already topped me by three inches. Now he towered over my measly five foot six, the shortcoming that was my mother’s greatest disappointment. She’d danced for nearly a decade in the line at Radio City Music Hall and she yearned for me to follow in her tap shoes. But I didn’t make the Rockettes’ minimum height requirement. On her deathbed, she forgave me. “Not your fault, Nora. I should have married a taller man. But I loved your father.” She would have adored Jack. Maybe the chromosome for tall had jetéd over a generation, or more likely he’d inherited it from #1659.

  Jack backed off, grinned, and rolled his glance across the kitchen and its view to the sea. “Oh man, I have been so looking forward to this.” We took in the scene for a moment. Then he made his way to the fridge, calling behind him, “The drive in was okay?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Except there was hardly any traffic on the bridge and the sky was clear so you could see the scary part.” A kink in the Chesapeake Bay Bridge created the optical illusion that you were about to drive off the end of the world. “But I sang my way across. To ‘Surfin’ USA.’”

  Lon had suffered from bridge phobia, and the Bay Bridge was his worst nightmare. He’d discovered that singing along with the Beach Boys worked as a distraction from the fear. At the beginning it was just him and me pounding out, “If everybody had an ocean, across the USA.” After Jack was old enough to chime in, we were a trio. Then, without Lon, we became a duet again. That was until this year. Yesterday, I’d sung solo. Felt solo.

  “And I’ll bet you also yelled, ‘Is this where summer begins?’ at the Coastal Highway,” Jack said. He’d asked that question for the first time when he was five, and from then on, when we hit the final route to the beach, we shouted it in unison to mark the official start of the season. I nodded.

  “Tradition,” he said. “You’re really big on that.” He was rummaging around deep in the refrigerator, but he looked over his shoulder to smile at me. Indulgently, the way adult children smile at their parents. “I thought all that tradition stuff was Dad’s thing, but you’re as bad as he was.”

  As bad? My ears pricked up. Jack had adored everything about his father. Up till now, even Lon’s memory could do no wrong.

  “You got a problem with tradition?” I countered, half joking, half defensive.

  “Just saying. You don’t want to get hung up in the past, right?”

  He pulled out the jar of osetra caviar. “Whoa, fishberry jam for you, and look at this, corned beef and pastrami. Thank you, Aunt Margo. You really outdid yourself this year. But no coffee, huh?” Jack asked. Margo hadn’t included coffee because she figured I’d be stopping by the Turquoise Café, the Haydars’ coffee shop, on my first day in town to pick up fresh ground.

  “Only instant.”

  “Slumming.” Jack laughed.

  I fixed two mugs and carried them out to the deck, and he followed, balancing a second bagel piled with cheese and lox for him and two black-and-whites. He handed over a cookie and we stood together at the railing, munching and marveling silently at the stunning stripes of sky, ocean, beach. God, I loved Tuckahoe, the house, the view, the waves breaking with a calming shushh-shushh. I felt my breathing slow to their rhythm as I lost myself, or maybe found myself, in the scene. No other place had this effect on me. No other place ever would, I suspected. For a few minutes, Jack and I stood mesmerized.

  “So, what are you up to today?” he asked finally.

  As I talked though my schedule, Jack pulled his iPhone from his pocket and stared at it as if he could summon up what he wanted to see. A message from Tiffanie, I guessed, which, from the sudden slump of his shoulders, I figured hadn’t arrived.

  His stare was still fixed on the screen when he said, “Okay, coffee with Mrs. Haydar; then you’re teaching class. That takes you to midafternoon. What’s on tap for the rest of the day?” Odd, this sudden interest in my calendar.

  “Heading back here to spend the afternoon reading on the beach. I’m halfway through a pretty good mystery.” The heat and the rhythm of the waves would probably lull me into a nap after a chapter or two. I’d wake up hot and sweaty. “If the water’s warm enough, maybe I’ll take a quick dip. By then, it will be time to start dinner.”

  Jack grunted, but to me it sounded like thunder on the horizon. Mothers read their kids like a weather map and I could feel his barometer drop.

  “Don’t bother with anything for me,” he said. “It’s my first night back at Coneheads and I’m meeting a couple of friends at the Burger Shack before work.”

  Jack had signed on again for the weekend evening shift, scooping the best ice cream on the Delmarva resort coast. “I haven’t seen most of my Coney buds since last summer. And this morning I’ve got two first-timers for Sea Spot Run.” The dog-walking service he’d launched when he was sixteen was paying for his books at Duke. “I’m thinking of adding an extra half-hour session late afternoon.” He turned to me, his amber eyes clouded. Sunshine beat down on the deck, but I picked up electricity in the air. “The summer’s really going to be jammed, like, killer busy,” he said. Then lightning struck. “Mom. We need to talk.”

  Oh God, one of the most ominous phrases in the English language. I’d never known anything good to come of it.

  “Sure,” I said. But the crop of goose bumps sprouting on my arms showed just how unsure I was.

  “The thing is,” he began, but got stopped immediately by the ring of his iPhone. I looked over to see if Tiffanie’s photo had surfaced, but he’d turned away to scan the screen. “Gotta take this.”

  Instead of his usual casual greeting, I heard a serious, “Yes,” before he swung around to take the deck steps double time. Obviously a private call. I could only watch, wonder, and worry as he trotted down the path to the beach.

  Throughout Jack’s childhood, I’d played a game with him. With myself, really, because he didn’t even know about it. What if my sweet child wasn’t the biological offspring of donor #1659? What if, this one time, against all odds, the passionate coupling of Henry London Farrell and Nora Quinn Farrell had produced a pregnancy? Jack hadn’t been test-tube generated, after all. My gynecologist had used a modern variation of the old turkey baster to introduce donor sperm to egg, so it was on the outer edge of possibility that Lon’s feeble swimmers had suddenly and unaccountably turned into Olympic champions, beating out #1659 for the gold.

  Could be, I’d told myself. Lon and I certainly had sex around the time I conceived. And anything could have happened within the deep, dark recesses of my inner passages and chambers. Who was to say we hadn’t hit the lottery that one time? Maybe a miracle occurred, part of a divine plan to lure me back into the folds of the Mother Church. Stranger things had happened. People prayed to grilled cheese sandwiches embossed with the image of the Virgin Mary before selling them on eBay. Maybe, just maybe, Jack was Lon’s genetic offspring.

  For a long time—because it didn’t seem fair that a love as potent as Lon’s and mine wouldn’t create a fusion of the two of us—I wanted that to be true. Also, as the daughter of a biology teacher, I gave nature more power over nurture than it probably deserved.

  So all through Jack’s early childhood
years, I looked for evidence of a genetic link between my husband and my son. And found none. Lon was black Irish: hair the color of coal, eyes green, complexion fair. Jack had been born bald, and when his hair finally arrived around his first birthday, it came in corn-silk blond. By adolescence, his hair and skin color almost matched, in summer a tawny gold. Jack didn’t have Lon’s dimpled hands or his square jaw, his big feet, or the cleft in his chin. Nothing. But I continued to hope.

  Jack was six the first time we took him to the circus, and in the lobby we ran into a high school friend of mine. She backed off from our reunion hug, scanned the three of us, and said, “Oh my gosh, Nora, the child is your clone. Except for the hair, he’s your total clone, down to the crazy arch of your eyebrows.” She glanced at Lon, back at Jack, and laughed. “I mean, you’re sure he’s not the Immaculate Conception?”

  That night, after Jack was tucked in bed with his new stuffed elephant, Lon took a slug of Jameson and asked, “Your friend’s comment today, that bothered you, didn’t it?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “Please,” he said. “I saw your face.”

  “Okay, but only because I didn’t want you to be hurt.”

  He slammed down his glass. “Now, you listen to me, Nora. I don’t give a crap about his genes, designer or otherwise. In every way that counts, that boy is mine. If I weren’t shooting blanks, if that DNA had been Farrell—handed down through a long line of drunks, mogs, chancers, wastrels, and highway robbers, by the way—I couldn’t have made a better son or one I love more. In a couple of years, we’re going to let Jack know how he was conceived. And you better get good with that before we tell him, because I’ll be damned if I’ll have him thinking he doesn’t measure up for any reason. Especially not a bullshit one.”

  The next morning, when Lon wasn’t around, I opened the #1659 file on my laptop. Our fertility bank hadn’t shared pictures of our donor as an adult, but we’d been able to look at him as a kid. I hadn’t checked out the photo for a while. There he was at seven, the contributor of half my son’s genetic material. And it showed. The hair as pale as buttercream, the light eyes, the pigeon-toed stance that had made my toddler trip over his own feet. And I got good with that.