Barefoot Beach

by Toby Devens

  I’d have sworn that dog’s muzzle stretched into a smile.

  A drift of cigarette smoke from the next table reminded me there was someone else who hadn’t yet entered the conversation. I imagined Bunny at the edge of it, slouched against the magnolia tree, wearing her ridiculous hooker heels and shooting death rays my way. So far she’d been persona non grata at our little table. Scott hadn’t brought up her failure to show for class, a lapse I suddenly felt a compelling need to fill.

  “I thought Bunny was allergic to dogs.”

  At the mention of her name, a muscle in his cheek twitched. “She’s allergic to a whole list of things.”

  A sensitive soul, Bunnicula. Who woulda thunk it? And then the light that was dimming around us began to dawn inside me. My father used to say, mimicking an Irish brogue, “For a smart girl, sometimes you’re thick as a plank, Nora.” He was right. Sometimes it took fireworks to make me see the sparks.

  As in Scott leaning in and for a brief, breathtaking moment laying his hand on mine. “A lot has changed since we’ve seen each other, Nora.” His hand lifted, hovered, and went for his spoon. “It’s been a long couple of years. I missed being in class. I really did. The people, the music, the dancing. You all helped me get my head on straight. And my leg, too, of course. Can’t forget the leg.” He gave a dry laugh. “But life kind of took over and squeezed out most of the best stuff.”

  Now he was nervously stirring what was left of his ice cream into pale chocolate soup. There was some kid in him. I liked that.

  “You know my mother-in-law had cancer and we moved down here full-time to take care of her. I love this place, but not in winter. Then”—he caught his breath—“maybe part of it was the tension in the house, but Mom decided to enter hospice. That opened up a lot of possibilities. And yes, I’ll extend your sympathies to Bunny—actually, Belinda is the name she currently goes by—but it will have to be by email.” He chugged on, like a train trying to make it through a dark tunnel as quickly as possible. “She lives in Florida now. We’re divorced.”

  For a split second—or maybe it wasn’t split because it felt like an eternity—I felt a rush of pure connection to Scott Goddard. Not something censored by my thirteen years in Catholic schools, or adulterated by his situation, his marriage, his wife. To my credit, the worst curse I’d ever wished on Bunny was that she’d break a leg, not two, and a simple fracture, not compound—just enough damage so she’d have to be casted for a while and have the excuse she itched for to skip class. I’d never wished her gone in the long term, not from her marriage, not to Florida.

  Scott was rapping his knuckles on the table. The beat was a march. “It will be two years in December.” He wiggled his left hand to show me the fourth finger stripped of the thick gold band that had announced to the world: taken. I’d felt that ring, a cold, metallic warning brushing my skin when we’d held hands to foxtrot two years back. “Unattached,” he emphasized now, his sharpshooter eyes seeming to measure my reaction.

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Sorry? Past due? Congratulations? Nothing, is what I chose. Because I didn’t know what I thought about it. Him. All those fantasies starring the unattainable married man, and now he was free and there was a possibility of something real and . . . I felt a surge of panic. The way I’d felt when Lon and I went camping in Death Valley and I stood shivering and quiet among the salt flats—too much space and no landmarks to mark the way. None for me, at least. Lost without a compass. Sister Loretta had lapsed into a contemplative silence.

  Maybe Scott mistook my confusion for pity, because he added, “Hey, it’s okay. I’m good with it. It was a long time coming, the breakup. Our problems go way back.” He toyed with a straw. “When she was in high school my daughter said it was a bad marriage and asked me why we were holding on. For me, it was because of her and her brother. Well, they’re out of the house now and some new problems surfaced between Belinda and me. The timing was right. We never told my mother-in-law about the divorce. Spared her that. So”—he reached for the cup of water and gulped—“you didn’t ask me to revise my intake form when I re-upped for class. Now you can consider it current.”

  I was as ready as he was to change the subject, and for the next half hour, as the last light faded and we walked Sarge in the lantern-lit dog park, we talked books, new movies, nothing that would accelerate anyone’s heartbeat. Scott usually walked briskly, perhaps his message to himself and the world that he could. But I slowed us down, wanting to stay and stretch the moment even as I strained to repress the opposing desire to hurry home so I could pace the balcony outside my bedroom or perch on Mooncussers Rock and wonder why I wasn’t breaking out the champagne at the announcement that, ding-dong, the wicked witch had fled.

  We spent our final moments leaning side by side against my car, so close that his arm grazed my sleeve.

  Then, because I heard him groan as he bent to pick up a trashed beer bottle rolling toward my tire, I murmured, “Long day for you.”

  “It has been. All that travel. And Sarge here . . .” The dog barked recognition of his name. “I know, buddy. Mrs. Lynch did a good job watching you, but you’re ready to go home, aren’t you?” Scott said to the sharpening moon, “I don’t really want to, though. Dancing and ice cream. A good combination. You know, we could make this a Tuesday night tradition. After class.”

  An alarm buzzed in my brain and kicked me into my default, which was to deflect. “I don’t think the others will go for that. They’re regulars at the Turquoise Café. Morty has high cholesterol and Marsha doesn’t let him get near ice cream.”

  Margo would have my head on a platter for that response. I could hear her script. “I mean, really, darling, how could you squander such a fabulous straight line?” But that was Margo. She went for the laugh, the big payoff, and my style was lower key. “Yes, so low that only dogs can hear it,” as she would say. “Which is why you haven’t gotten laid since that slimy stock-broker nailed you after plying you with drink at your twenty-fifth high school reunion. But this is different, Nora. This is Scott. He’s as far from slime as you can get. Pay attention to the man.”

  Yes, Margo.

  He was saying, “I was talking about us, not everyone. Keep it in mind, anyway. And if not ice cream, a glass of wine?”

  “Sounds interesting,” I said, going for noncommittal until I could ponder the question, and plumb it for every bit of meaning and non-meaning.

  I clicked the remote to unlock my car, but he opened the door for me and, before closing it, said offhandedly, “I meant to ask you, all I have for contact data is the Hot Bods phone number and the email listed on the We Got Rhythm website. In case of emergency, if I’m running late like tonight, I’d like to have some better way of reaching you.”

  So, sitting there behind the wheel, one foot swinging symbolically between the accelerator and the brake, I sent him an email with my cell phone number. Just in case of emergency.

  chapter thirteen

  Lon and I had wanted a sibling for Jack.

  “You don’t want Jack to be a lonely only,” he’d urged.

  Easy for him to say. He had a younger sister living in Bangkok with her diplomat husband and her three overachieving, excruciatingly polite kids. Lon saw Kate only once a year, but they shared memories of a blissful childhood spent camping with their parents in the Sierra Madres and fishing on the San Gabriel River. Even separated by half a world, they stayed in touch, emailing weekly. Kate was a great gal.

  On the other hand, my brother, Mick, had been the bogey boy who popped out of closets and snapped rubber bands under my chin. He’d grown into a full-fledged wiseass of whom Lon had said, “Mick knows the name of the unknown soldier.”

  So I might not have been as enthusiastic about the value of the sibling bond as Lon had been, but I’d loved being pregnant and even more being a mom, and I’d watched The Waltons Christmas special enough times to buy
into the fantasy. Jack was such a great kid I figured we’d hit the jackpot in the genetic gamble the first time, so why not try to double our luck?

  When our son was three, we went back to the Baltimore Fertility Bank to get another shot of #1659. But we were told our DD had done a single run of six months—the minimum—and gone inactive. “Unavailable,” was what they told us, and that, “From a legal standpoint, frozen semen remains the property of the donor and its use for insemination can be withdrawn by said donor at any time.” The cupboard was empty. And Lon hadn’t been keen on pressing our luck with a different donor.

  Still hoping Jack might have a half brother or sister somewhere out there, I checked a national donor sibling registry online, punched in the name of the cryobank and #1659, and came up empty. There might have been other kids conceived with DD’s donor material, but they weren’t signed on. Over the years, I’d checked occasionally, but I never found any sibs.

  And then there were two.

  It was now officially summer and it felt like the height of it, searingly hot. The thermometer on the widow’s walk read ninety-four degrees and the radio threatened record-breaking heat for the day. I wriggled into a year-old bathing suit. It still fit, which brightened my mood. I grabbed a hat, sunscreen, and a beach towel and followed the gulls cawing their siren song. At Mooncussers Rock, I tossed my stuff and ran for the ocean the way a lover runs to a lover, anticipating bliss.

  Up to my shoulders in water that looked like velvet but felt like satin—cool and luxurious as it wrapped around me—I glided in. Fully submerged, I felt the shock of its June chill and surfaced to gasp. After a moment, though, my happiness at being where I was, exactly where I wanted to be, warmed me, and I swam easy strokes, feeling half human, half fish, tasting salt, thinking I hadn’t had a margarita in almost a year and remembering every other delicious thing I hadn’t done for ten months that waited for me on the horizon.

  Jack, on his iPhone, caught me smiling as I emerged. He smiled back from his perch on Mooncussers Rock and, as I approached, tossed me a towel.

  “Water warm?”

  “Let’s say refreshing.” Goose bumps rising from the breeze against my skin, I toweled off. “What’s up?” I asked. From my son’s expanding grin, I knew something was.

  “More news from Dirk,” he said, glancing at the screen. “Well, not really new news. He mentioned it in our call yesterday.”

  Yesterday? I felt my mood plummet. I’d overheard a conversation between them two days before and caught Jack’s easy, intimate tone and intermittent laughter. Were they phoning back and forth every day now in addition to the emails? My stomach clenched, a cramp of fear, a spasm of envy. During the school year, Jack and I connected once a week, and it was almost always a call from me to him. Occasionally, I’d forward a joke or a link to a newspaper article. Once in a blue moon, we’d Skype. He was so busy with classes and lacrosse and Tiffanie, whose name, by the way, hadn’t come up much since DD got into the picture. Okay, I’d add that to the Dude’s plus column.

  “Just FYI, Dirk’s pretty careful about feeding me stuff slowly. He told me there’s a lot I’ll want to know but we’ll take it a little bit at a time so I’ll have a chance to process it.”

  Very sensitive, I thought with a twinge. What next? The Dude’s criminal record?

  Jack handed over the iPhone, displaying a square of color photo. “My half sisters,” he murmured, as soft as a prayer, and for a few seconds the screen dissolved to a blur.

  Dirk was right. The brain can absorb only so much at a time. “What?” I said stupidly, so that Jack repeated it louder and more distinctly, as if he were talking to someone without hearing, or to a foreigner. I did feel, had felt since Jack first told me he’d started his search, as if I’d wandered into an alien country. Not France, Italy, or Spain, where if you knew one romance language you could get by. More like Hungary or Finland, where everything is unintelligible. In Helsinki, Lon and I had walked backstreets, gripping hands for balance, strangers in a strange land.

  “I . . . have . . . two . . . biological half sisters. From Dirk and his ex-wife,” my son pronounced.

  I bobbed my head to let him know it was filtering through. I held the iPhone up and blinked until the picture cleared.

  “I’ll send the file on to you so you can open it on your laptop. But wait a sec.” He magnified the iPhone image and peered at it over my shoulder.

  Two girls were posed with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Their smiles were wide and orthodontically perfect. Not a lot of makeup on either, but more on the younger one. Both wore sweaters and jeans. Behind them, flames licked a stone fireplace.

  “Sara’s fourteen. Jen—Jennifer—is seventeen. Sara’s in middle school. A social butterfly, Dirk says. Jen’s really smart, like a math whiz.” Math was Jack’s strong suit. “She jumped a year in high school and she’s starting Berkeley in the fall.”

  He gave me a moment to exhale. “The picture was taken at the Tahoe house. They have a second home on the lake.”

  Oh God.

  “Everyone likes to ski.”

  Jack’s favorite sport. Lon’s too, I reminded myself.

  “So what do you think?”

  Thankfully, I could get away with a shallow response. Deep down, I was churning. We hadn’t given our son a sib. But Sixteen, converted to Donor Dad, now Dude, had done that times two.

  Jack’s brow knitted as he waited for my answer. What did I think? I made myself not think. Just stared at the girls’ photos and ached, even as I was happy for my son.

  Sara was elfin, with close-cropped brown hair, huge dark eyes, and small, sharp features, except for the nose, which she’d grow into. I predicted an exotic beauty in five years.

  “She must resemble her mom,” I said carefully.

  The older girl was California blond, tall, with a springiness about her, an energy that two dimensions could barely contain. Her shoulder-length hair was carelessly streaked with sun and shadow and she carried the golden-eyed gene. I said, “Jennifer looks like her dad, who looks like you, so . . .”

  “He was here first, Mom. I look like him.”

  “Of course. I got it backward.”

  My son regarded me thoughtfully. “If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be here. Try to remember that, okay?”

  “Yes, I’ll try to keep that in mind.” I tuned my voice to slightly sarcastic. He needed to hear the old me. The one who had spirit, who wasn’t going to fold in the face of all these goodies from Dirk DeHaven Donor Dad. The sisters. Lake house. Skiing. Father figure.

  Jack picked up the tone and a spiral nautilus shell at his feet. He pitched the shell toward the ocean. It was a hard pitch. When he turned back to me, his eyes had darkened to a tarnished brass. “Mom, listen. I’m getting the feeling you’re going off the deep end here. Dirk’s made it really clear. He knows he’s not my father. And I know it. Maybe he can be a mentor, maybe a friend. But whatever he is, he’s in my life to stay.”

  “Are you so sure, Jack? Because he may not . . .”

  “Yeah, I am sure. So chill, please, will you? I’m not a kid anymore; I can handle this, however it turns out.”

  Maybe, I thought, but I’m not so sure I can.

  My son hadn’t put his arm around me since we’d walked back together from the fringe of the ocean after salting it from Lon’s cremation urn, but now he gave me a side hug. “Dad would be good with this.”

  What had Lon said about #1659? “If our child is interested in meeting him, I’ll invite the guy over for a beer.”

  “Really, he would, Mom.”

  All I could manage was a series of nods, like the birdbrained seagulls strutting the shore.

  That night, alone in the house, I entered what Margo had christened “the shrine.”

  Against the far wall was the sacred desk, Great-grandfather Farrell’s, which we’d
inherited. Legend had it, and Lon had absolutely believed, that Jack London had written “The Law of Life” at that desk. A guest of the Farrells, he’d drunk too much at dinner and Dr. Farrell had insisted he stay overnight. The next morning, struggling through a hangover and smoking through a pack of Lucky Strikes, London had knocked out the short story in four hours.

  My husband had written his first and second books at that desk. The third, Wild Mountain, had been written in the Baltimore house on an IKEA table, a lapse that accounted for its failure, he’d been sure.

  On the left, in front of the built-in bookshelves, stood two ancient wooden file cabinets I’d first seen in his New York apartment. There was also a round glass-topped table on which he’d arranged framed photographs of his departed family and friends. The Circle of Death, he’d called it. The only picture that breached the Circle of Death had been the one that showed him at eight, along with his father and grandfather, all three lined up on horseback at the Glen Ellen ranch. Remarkably straight backed, standing next to the boy’s horse and holding its reins, was the iconic ninety-year-old great-grandfather, the doctor who’d treated and befriended Jack London.

  Lon, you’re one of them, a link in the circle. For the first time in eight years, I slipped into the chair behind the desk. When I’d been there last, a week after the memorial service, it was to search for the file folder in which my husband had kept records of household bills paid. I found it and never opened a drawer again.

  Now I did.

  Lon had never allowed anyone—not his agent, not his editor, not me—to read one of his books in progress. And I’d never been tempted. Not even when, after Lon’s death, his agent suggested I send him the unfinished manuscript. Nate Greenberg and Lon had worked together for years. He wasn’t Lon’s agent when the blazing comet of Canyon of Time burst upon the scene, but he was already something of a phenomenon himself when he took on Banshee River. A combination adviser, negotiator, therapist, and cheerleader, he never lost faith, not in Lon’s talent or his prospects for a triumphant comeback. He was overjoyed that Lon was writing again after a long dry spell.