The Jetty

by Jay Brandon

  unformed, so that fleeting emotions played across it clearly. Her eyes grew wider and innocent. “Yes, five. I was standing there watching Mama talk to him, waiting for my turn. I was being good, you know, I wasn’t dancing around, I wanted Mama to tell him how good I was being. I guess I was too good. Because Mom forgot to give me my turn on the phone. Mama said goodbye and hung up without letting me talk to him.”

  And it had hurt, Michael thought, because she still remembered. He could imagine the pain on her five-year-old’s face.

  “The thing is,” Kathy had said, leaning forward, “he probably remembered me as soon as he hung up, but he couldn’t call back because he’d already made his one call. You see?”

  Michael thought he saw a lot. It was a chain of loose connections that had brought Kathy to this little anecdote, the kind of story that didn’t come out until someone had talked freely for a while. Michael wondered if she ever got the chance to talk like this with anyone else. Kathy answered his unspoken question as she rose and walked to the window. “He drank sometimes, too, my father, I mean,” she said. “Once when I was a teenager, my Mother sent me looking for him. I remember driving past a couple of bars he frequented. I never did find him though . . . I’m rambling, Michael. You need to assert yourself more. Nobody else lets me just chatter on like this. Even my close friends. They just sit there waiting for their turn to talk. Ever notice how people do that? But Michael, you really listen. I must’ve been boring you to death.”

  “No,” Michael said.

  She smiled at him, unbelieving. “Well . . . I haven’t said anything

  worth hearing.”

  “I enjoyed it.” “Why?”

  Michael didn’t want to sound noble, and his tongue wouldn’t say

  Because I care about you. “Because I’m interested in you.”

  Kathy laughed self-deprecatingly. “I’m a specimen, all right. Like an

  economics curve, or a computer program.”

  “That’s not what I – “

  “I know, Michael. Thanks.” And he thought, surely she knows. She

  has to know.

  “Michael,” Kathy asked, “Can you believe we’ve been out of college for three years?”

  He shrugged. “I guess.”

  At the time she asked her question he’d been slumped by the window in the overstuffed old chair she’d bought at a garage sale. Kathy’s little two- bedroom house in the Heights was nicely old-fashioned, with its hardwood floors, tiny kitchen, and clean front porch. Sometimes at night it made her feel confined or unprotected or both, but in the daylight it was airy and sweet.

  Michael was always casually at home in her house – they even had keys to each other’s places, for plant-watering and emergency purposes – but he never seemed to take up as much room as the unfamiliar men who came to pick Kathy up for dates. Those unfamiliar men spread out through the rooms of her house after bringing her home, sometimes staying until the next morning.

  “Who are you going out with now, Michael?” Kathy had asked him one night. “You haven’t mentioned anyone in a while.”

  “Oh, you know, different ones.” “Playing the field?” she had teased.

  “Yeah, whoever’s brave enough to call me up. This is the twenty-first century, you know, men don’t have to do all the work any more.” He smiled a fake smile.

  “What about that Alison you introduced me to? She seemed nice.

  Why don’t – ”

  “She was nice, she was real nice. I got an invitation to her wedding next month, you want to go with me?”

  Kathy leaned toward him. “Seriously?”

  “You can go with me seriously, yes. Or we can go tragically. Or even comically if you want. We can wear red noses and Bozo hair – ”

  “Stop!” she said. “Didn’t you and Alison just break up a couple of

  months ago? Why did you break up? Did she say – ”

  Michael enunciated clearly, as if Kathy were being thick, “I didn’t want to marry her, Kathy. Some girls want to be married, you know?”

  Kathy was still in a teasing mood. “And boys never do? I’m surprised at you, Michael. You seem like a real marriage candidate. You’d be perfect. And you always talk about how awful dating is. Haven’t you met anyone you wanted to marry?”

  Michael had looked at her. A blazing look that burned away frivolity. His face had made her ashamed of herself. Yes, she knew. She had always known.

  She stood up and walked to the window behind the overstuffed chair. He couldn’t see her; he could only sense her presence as if she were a spirit form. He could detect a scent – Chanel perhaps – ever so subtle. Perhaps this was the end, he thought, no more pretending he was satisfied with his “buddy” status. How would she break it to him? Would she say ‘Michael, I don’t think I’m comfortable going on like this – now that I know’? But then, she leaned over his chair and kissed him on the lips. “I knew I’d have to be the one to take the initiative,” she said.

  The following month, Michael and Kathy went to Alison’s wedding. Two weeks after that, Kathy stopped accepting dates. Michael made sure they did things they’d never done together before: went dancing; went to Astroworld; ate oysters at Shanghai Red’s in a dim little room where huge tankers glided past their window. But they had been unsure of themselves. Were they old friends having a fling, or a brand new romance? It was Gail who had secretly suggested that Michael take Kathy to Port Aransas. ”It has to be your idea, Michael,” Gail had said, and so far as Kathy knew, it was. So Michael and Kathy’s first out-of-town trip alone and together

  was to Port Aransas: to pluck their budding romance from its too-familiar

  Houston setting and see if it could thrive in relatively foreign soil. It had.

  And now Gail was gone. Michael still vividly recalled the funeral – Gail’s open grave, the huddled crowd of mourners, the green graveside tent with the folding chairs, and sitting apart from the rest – Kathy. He had never seen her in such distress. After the service, he watched her standing, hovering over the still freshly dug gravesite. For a moment, he thought she would leap into the grave alongside the casket.

  The months that followed Michael could only describe as Kathy’s withdrawal. It wasn’t that he was unsympathetic. Grief was expected; grief was necessary. But over a year had passed since Gail’s funeral. Was it unkind of Michael to wonder how long Kathy’s grieving would go on?

  Since Gail’s death, Kathy had refused to discuss the future, refused even to make plans. It was one day at a time. Then, suddenly, she suggested this trip to the beach. A change of scenery, she said, a different perspective perhaps. Michael thought it a poor idea, but what could he say? “Kathy, I don’t think you’re up to it.” No, once Kathy got an idea, she would not be dissuaded. She wanted to see the beach, needed to see the beach, spoke of it in an almost desperate way. And so, reluctantly, hesitantly, he had agreed, or perhaps more accurately, acquiesced, and Kathy and Michael were back in Port A, surrounded by memories, happy and sad.

  Michael could not sleep. He lay close to Kathy in the narrow confines of the double bed. She was wearing the white shirt as a nightshirt. He watched her curled into a curve, eerily enveloped in a strange soft light that filled the room. Was it only the moonlight reflected off the dunes? In the dresser mirror on the opposite wall indiscernible forms moved, like an alien audience. Michael lay back on the pillow, his arm around her shoulder, the heat in his face beginning to subside as he began to breathe

  hard. Gratefully, he felt the sea breeze cooling his bare chest.

  The window next to the bed was open. The thin curtains blew inward, and the wind was cold. Odd. Michael was certain he hadn’t left the window open, and he found it hard to believe that Kathy had opened it, or that she could have done so without waking him. He stared out the open window. The mysterious light had died away. It was very dark both outside and in the room.

  He left the bed as quietly as possible, careful not to wake her. Kathy’s b
reathing remained easy and rhythmic. He put on a sweatshirt to go with his long pajama pants and bedroom slippers.

  Heading through the living room toward the front of the house, he heard a sound like a handle turning. Behind him a narrow sliver of light escaped from the bathroom. He could see the knob of the front door turn, and it opened a few inches. The breeze stopped.

  He saw a shimmer, like a bad TV reception hovering in the darkness. He had a feeling; it was as though someone was about to step into that spot. Then, the strange shimmer moved towards him, coming closer and closer. Michael’s heart raced. His skin was chilled. He stood there in the dark for a long minute, waiting for something to happen.

  Then it was gone. For the longest time he stood there afraid to move. He managed to slide one foot forward, then the other. Each movement tested his nerve.

  Had it been his imagination? His subliminal fear? Kathy’s words “scaredy cat” echoed. He pulled the door farther open and stepped out onto the front porch. There was no one. He went down the stairs into the side yard and around the corner of the house; light from the bathroom window spilled out onto the scrub-covered dunes. Across the emptiness he saw Mrs. Gaford’s house. He thought of her words about the cottage. Haunted. Haunted, she had said. Scaredy cat. Haunted. ‘Foolishness,’ he thought. ‘Superstition. Get hold of yourself.’

  Then he heard a noise, steps. He turned. A figure in the dark. The

  air rushed from his lungs, the sweat ran down his back. He lost his balance and fell back into the side of the cottage.

  “Mr. Shaw?” It was an old woman’s voice.

  It was Mrs. Gaford, his neighbor. She had heard something, seen something, she explained, a prowler, perhaps the ghost. She was frightened. Well that made two of them. He calmed her, reassured her, grateful for the fact that the danger was imaginary. He walked with her to her house, across the dark, dreary dunes.

  Mrs. Gaford’s house was unremarkable, musty and old-fashioned with many possible hiding places for phantoms. She asked if Michael would mind checking her house, and he did so, making a big show of looking under furniture and in closets. The coast was clear, he declared, for the first time realizing the nautical connotations of the phrase. Oh, she was so grateful, forever grateful, she said. He assured her it had been no trouble, really no trouble at all. But she talked on and on; perhaps it was her way of spending a little less time alone.

  He returned the way he had come, across the dunes, now darker. He was hastening his steps, like a horse returning to the barn, when he heard a low growl. Nothing, he thought, and continued. Then another growl, an ominous, chilling growl. A cloud passed over the moon.

  When the moon emerged, a beast stood before him, huge and black! An enormous dog! All teeth and snarl and shoulders. Mastiff ? Wolf? Michael turned on his flashlight and the beam bounced off the dog’s black fur with an eerie glow.

  The flashlight’s beam suddenly faltered, then failed, leaving Michael suspended in the dark. He desperately brandished the flashlight itself in what must have seemed a ridiculous gesture. The dog issued another rolling growl as if signaling the prelude to an attack. At first, Michael backed away, holding his beamless flashlight as if that would be some defense. Then, realizing he was going in the wrong direction, he turned, went sideways, and ran toward the cottage, with each stride hoping, begging that he could reach the safety of the porch, the house itself.

  He reached the yard, the porch, the kitchen door, the house. He hastily closed and locked the door behind him, his back to both the door and to the danger outside. He gulped for air, as if he had reached the surface of the water after a deep dive. Then for a seeming eternity, he stood in that exact position, as if any movement on his part would disturb the universe and safety’s delicate balance.

  He sighed, permitting himself a small smile for the first time. He flipped on the kitchen light, turned and nearly jumped out of his skin. A face in the window! A face hard-pressed against the pane, its features distorted and unrecognizable.

  P art 2:

  Dangerous

  Chapter Three

  inally.”

  Until Michael heard the word, he hadn’t realized his eyes were open. The world was as gray and blurred as the insides of his eyelids. The first thing to come sharply into focus was a white coffee mug, coming toward him. He looked beyond it and the world came fully alive. He was stretched out on the sofa. He remembered now. He had collapsed on the sofa after his encounter with the wolf-like creature. Kathy was sitting beside him, perched on the edge of the sofa cushion like a sea bird about to take flight. She was already dressed in a black one-piece swimsuit and white shirt.

  “Why didn’t you come back to bed last night?” she asked, waiting for

  an explanation he refused to give.

  “Where did you get that shirt?” he asked, answering her question

  with one of his own.

  “This?” she said. “It was in the closet. Like it?” she asked coyly,

  standing and pirouetting.

  “Hm,” Michael said vaguely. “What time is it, anyway?” He was still groggy. The room was filled with a light that made everything look mysterious. It was a world of questions. He wondered if he’d wasted half their first day.

  “Almost seven,” she said. “Seven! Are you crazy?”

  “Apparently,” she answered. “Ask Dr. Z.”

  He regretted his remark, but she seemed to accept it cheerfully. He took a swig from the coffee mug. The coffee warmed him, and the sun gave him energy. Kathy, beside him, looked vibrant. She leaned over and kissed him, her hand on his thigh. He realized he had slept in his clothes, his flashlight weapon underneath the sofa pillow, thirties gangster style.

  “Time for the beach,” she declared.

  Kathy staked out their plot of sand while the beach was still virtually tourist-free. She put out chairs, umbrella, towels, books, cooler. As they settled in their beach chairs, they watched the growing crowds swirl around them like a tide pouring in from the land. That was all right too, that feeling of closeness amid the crowd of strangers. Michael rubbed sunscreen into Kathy’s neck, down her back. She turned and smiled lazily over her shoulder.

  Michael was thinking about the night before, and not just about the romance. He was puzzled and frightened by the mysterious opening door, the demon-like dog, the startling face in the window. The identity of the face haunted him in particular. Could it have been the Pittsburgh Steeler from the ferry? Was it the college boy from the grocery store? The hostile policeman? Watching, he thought. They’ll be watching.

  He longed to talk to Kathy about these things, but he was uncertain of just what to say and how to say it. She often scoffed at his conspiracy theories. “You’re just imagining things,” she would say, or “You’re watching too much television.” Perhaps she was right, perhaps it was his imagination. Nevertheless, Michael seemed to remember a time when he could talk with Kathy on any subject, and now he was more cautious.

  He put some more sunscreen on her shoulders. The two of them felt a familiarity with each other, felt free to brush legs and hands as they walked. For Michael’s part, even their intimacy of the night before had not erased his lingering anxiety. Each “connection” he compared to those of the past.

  Kathy stood suddenly and shook off both sand and uncertainty, and

  ran into the water.

  Michael stayed behind, the shortness of his night’s sleep beginning to catch up with him. The warm brightness was like a waking dream of sleep. Suddenly there seemed to be no other people, no passage of time. The island itself was ceasing to exist beneath him, leaving only Michael and the sun. He lay back on a towel, falling asleep behind his sunglasses. He dreamed.

  In a large room, a young girl sits with her mother by the phone. They are expecting a call, waiting for the phone to ring. It does, and the mother anxiously picks it up. It is her husband. He has arrived safely at his destination. She is relieved.

  The young girl watches with anticipatio
n. She is only a week shy of her thirteenth birthday; soon she will be a teenager. She looks forward to her father’s calls. He calls her his “pride and joy.” He always brings her presents from his business travels, a bracelet, a pennant from a baseball game. At the end of his calls, her mother always hands the young girl the phone so she may speak to her father. Her father always says “I love my girl.” She looks forward to hearing those words. This time, she hopes her father will ask how it feels to be so grown up. She has been helping her mother around the house; she wants to tell him all about it. She has drawn a picture for him in art class; she wants to describe it.

  But then her mother is hanging up the phone! Her mother is crying! And somehow, in a perceptiveness beyond her years, the young girl knows. She knows that her father is not coming home from Tulsa; he’s not coming back, ever. And the young girl is so angry, because she knows things are going to be hard from now on. She is angry because she is going to be a teenager, and her life has been going well, and now through no fault of her own, things are going to be hard. She knows she will watch her mother struggle with money problems; she knows there will be no more happy times at the beach. And she will be haunted by her father’s unreliability, and worse, his ultimate deceit.

  The young girl is no longer by the phone, no longer standing beside her mother. The young girl is wandering through the house. It is an enormous house, full of dark, empty rooms. The girl is lost. Abandoned. She wants to cry out, but she can hardly manage a whisper. Outside the house, a storm is raging. Thunder. Rain. The girl wanders on. Is she looking for someone, or simply a way out?

  Michael rose up with a start. Kathy was running toward him from the ocean. She plopped down next to him in the sand. “Michael,” she said. “You’re freezing, and you haven’t even been in the water!”