by J T Kalnay
Joe
Tomorrow we leave for Costa Rica. She wants some time by herself to get ready. I oblige her. So it is March and I am running on the beach at Mentor Headlands and praying words of thanks. “Thank you God for all of this. For all these miracles. Please help Shannon. And please help Cara with her research. Please help Danny be happy.”
My turtle neck shirt is stretched high and my woolen hat is pulled low. The wind rushes in off the frozen lake and I shiver at both the temperature and the memory of the lighthouse. How we huddled together under the blankets and comforter and waited for the storm to subside so that a Coast Guard icebreaker could come alongside and snatch us to safety.
She has been cured and it is a miracle, there is no other way to describe it. For a moment I wonder what my Fundamentalist Colleen would have said.
I often pray while I run. I pray “thank you God for all of this, and for the will to try. Please help those in pain feel less pain. Please help those who are trying to help be able to help.”
My mind drifts and I begin to wonder.
Why did God create cancer? To test us? To purify people through suffering. Did He make a mistake? To provide a challenge for researchers, a test for their dedication and intellect? A problem for smart people to solve? So that we could understand perfection and imperfection? To give the zealots a way to identify sinners? Why? Why did He give it to Shannon and then save her? Why did He give it to Caitlin and then abandon her?
As I ponder and lose focus my left foot slips in the rocks and I stumble towards the Lake. I fall to my knees and come to rest mere inches from the dark angry ice filled waves that would greedily pull me under in my heavy winter clothes. I crawl back up the rocky bank, and turn to run back to my car. It might have been weeks before anyone found my frozen and drowned body in this icy gray lake.
Shannon and Joe
“Hola Salvaro,” I say.
“Hola Shannon. Hola Joe,” Salvaro answers.
We walk to his van that is parked at the curb of the San Jose, Costa Rica airport. A dozen official airport helpers who are identified with badges and radios protect the unsuspecting tourista from the gypsy cabs and worse that would whisk her away. Salvaro or his driver see these men every day and exchange a few Colones as is the custom to maintain their goodwill.
“It is good to see you,” I say. “Can you take us to my house? After we see Wendy and Tino?”
“Si,” Salvaro answers.
“Your house?” Joe asks.
“Si. Mi casa chica.”
Joe’s jaw literally hangs open.
“I have so much to tell you,” I say.
“Hola,” Wendy says. She hugs me and I can see that she has noticed something about me. Tino rushes into my arms and hugs me as though he were still a twelve year old boy and not the beautiful young man he has become. We sit at the big table in the main room and drink coffee and make plans for surfing in the morning.
“So where’s your house?” he asks.
“Mi casa está cerca de aquí.”
“¿Cerca?” Joe asks. “Nearby?”
“Si,” I answer. “Está cerca de Playa Hermosa.”
“When did you become so fluent in Spanish?” Joe asks.
“I have so much to tell you Joe. And I am going to tell you everything in my little house that sits next door to Salvaro’s mother’s house. Will you please come and stay with me? In my house in Hermosa?”
A tear forms in Joe’s eye.
He pours himself another cup of coffee, sips, and pours it on the floor.
Shannon
And so another ten years passed for Joe and I. We spent our Januarys in Topsail just the way we had. And we spent Julys on Topsail just the way we had. Over time the family came to know Joe, and came to know about us.
We spent Aprils and Novembers in Costa Rica. In my house. Together. We made love in the evenings and we slept together at night.
We visited a different lighthouse every October.
And we worked for the Foundation.
We lived the Topsail accord for another ten years until Joe passed away when he was nearly seventy. He wrecked on his mountain bike. What a sixty nine year old man was doing riding a mountain bike I’ll never know. But that was Joe. He had his habits. He made his deal, and he stuck to it.
I remember the day he died.
Salvaro and his mother and I were seated in rope chairs hanging on her front porch.
Tino rode up the drive, alone.
“Él está muerto,” Tino managed.
“¿Quién?” Salvaro asked.
“Signor Joe,” Tino answered.
Salvaro took my hand in his.
Salvaro’s mother crossed herself, reached into her apron for her rosary and began to pray.
It did not register immediately for me.
But then it did.
Joe was dead. On the road where someone dies every day. Joe was now one of those someones, and I was alone.
Shannon and Cara
“It’s our thirtieth year here,” Cara says.
“Yes. And the tenth without Joe. I still miss him,” Shannon answers.
Cara knows this is another time when she will just listen.
“He would have been eighty next week,” Shannon continues. “I can’t believe it’s been ten years. We had twenty years together, and now it’s been ten years without him. When I had cancer, I was sure that he would walk this beach alone, without me, for years and years and years. I tried to remember everything I could about the beach and I tried to remember everything about him and I tried to get him to remember.”
They reach the pier. Stop. Look out past the end of the pier.
“Want to go up?” Cara asks.
“No. Let’s go back,” Shannon answers.
Sometimes they will go up on the pier and walk all the way out to the end so that Shannon can be closer to where Joe’s ashes were spread on the Atlantic. Today they simply turn and head back towards her house on the beach.
Shannon snuggles in to her sister’s shoulder. This is a new habit, one that only appeared after they were both well over fifty, closer to sixty.
“I can feel him pretty good today,” Shannon says.
Cara’s heart breaks a little more each time she hears Shannon say that she can feel him.
“I think he’s nearby. Maybe he can see me or hear me. I know he can feel me.”
Cara leans in closer with her sister.
“I can feel him out here. And I can see him in the sunrise in January when the sun comes out of the ocean past the end of the pier. He is faint, barely there, but he is there waiting for me.”
Cara remains quiet.
“We’ll be together one day, out there, and here,” Shannon says.
Cara wraps her arm around her sister’s shoulder and they support each other on the slightly sloping sand just beyond the reach of the incoming tide.
Shannon
I am nearly seventy and tonight I die. I don’t know how I know, but I know. If not tonight, then tomorrow. This will be the last time I sit on these steps behind my beach house. This will be my last time on the beach. And I am fine with this. So I will remember every detail so that it will be with me in forever.
I will remember that low tide was best for running. That there is firmer sand where the tide has gone out. That there is more beach when the tide is out, so the few people on the beach can spread out more. And hardly anyone ever puts their chairs down at the low tide line. If they do, they are in their chairs. The unattended chairs stay up high, on the loose sand, above the high tide line, where they won’t get washed out to sea while unattended. Up by the highest drift line, the wrack line. Up where the ocean leaves everything, animal, vegetable, and even artificial things. Everything that the ocean has decided to put on the shore. Given a hundred years a little piece of saragussum up here on the drift line could become a new dune, if no storm tide or windstorm blew it away. When left alone the dunes are built and destroyed in geologic time.
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br /> I will remember the sweat in my eyes when I ran. The high humidity, sweat everywhere, sand sticking to every sweaty surface. I will remember sometimes rolling around in the loose sand when I was sweaty and looking like some alien and then laughing and laughing with the children when they saw their oh so proper aunt looking like something from a movie.
I will remember the salt breeze off the ocean. Yes, the salt breeze. Moist and heavy in the summer, acid, sometimes cutting on the rawest winter day. I will remember the salt breeze. My ashes will be scattered in a salt breeze so I will become part of the breeze that I will remember.
I will remember all the different types of sand. The firm sand, shifting sand, flat sand, angled sand. Sand in my shoes, sand on my skin, sand in my hair.
I will remember shells. Shells of all sizes and colors, single shells, big dense piles of shells. Old women walking the beach alone with shopping bags filled with shells they have selected carefully, taking one for every hundred they bend down to pick. Smiling broadly when they find the perfect shell to add to their collection, or to show to a favorite grandchild.
I will remember men with metal detectors never finding anything. Searching and searching, sweeping their heavy detectors back and forth waiting for a pip in their earphones. Stopping to scoop up sand only to dump the sand. Always hearing about the valuable ring or coin they’ve found, but never seeing them find anything. Like the men surf casting. I will remember these men surf casting and never catching anything. Even while small children hold dip nets in the retreating waves and catch hundreds of minnows. I will remember all these things.
I will remember the sun so very low in the east, up the shore, up the beach, beyond the pier. Measuring the days and months and season by where on the pier the sun rises. Or those rare days when it rises out beyond the pier, like it only does from December 18-25, or the even more rare days when it rises over the island, only happening on June 21. The pier is my own sundial. I would know the day and the season even without a watch or calendar. Simply by the pier. I will be scattered within sight of the pier so that I will always know where and when I am, even if these measurements have no meaning in the next dimension.
I will remember shrimp trawlers rocking back and forth, rolling terribly in the big waves just before they trip when their bottoms reach the sandbar and slow while their tops continue unabated to the shore. I will remember these fifty foot shrimpers, rolling parallel to the shore, with birds behind them, swooping near the water, near the deck. The shrimpers with their booms spread out to the side to spread the nets, the booms touching the water on the biggest rolls. Birds dive bombing to catch fish. Seagulls, pelicans, all the birds that ride on the sea breeze near the pier. I will remember feeling the low steady drum and drone of the diesel engines that push out puffs of black smoke that rise and are blown away in the sea breeze that is blowing from southwest to northeast. Sometimes from bow to stern, like you would expect, and sometimes from stern to bow, like an optical illusion.
And I will remember Joe.
I will remember Joe drawing a line in the sand and timing himself. Of how proud he was of his 19:56 record to pier and back. I will remember being unwilling to tell him that when he wasn’t looking I did the distance in less than half that time, in 9:20, without even having to sprint.
I will remember my water bottle waiting for me on the stairs, and the days when Joe would bring coffee and I would drink from the water bottle and drink the coffee.
I will remember using the hose on the deck to cool off, going into the ocean to cool off, going into the pool to cool off. Always needing to cool off after the big efforts.
I will remember Joe. Everything about Joe.
I will remember realizing that kids never run half speed on the beach. They start out sprinting and then when they can sprint no more they come to a complete stop, pant and gasp until they recover, and then start sprinting again. I remember realizing that this is the relationship I had with Joe for all those years. That my part of our relationship was like a child who sprints until she can sprint no more, who stops, and then sprints again when she can.
I will remember realizing that only later do they learn, or are they taught, to “take it easy” or to go half speed. Our natural condition is to go all out for brief periods and then to recover. Like sex, it is a sprint, with a certain intensity required before the goal can be achieved. While it can be paced, and while it can be built into, in the end there is the need for the sudden rush, the burst of speed that leaves you breathless and empty and full all at the same time.
I will remember watching kids running down to a wave and then sprinting away from it, no matter how clear and warm the water is, and no matter whether they have just been in the pool or in the ocean. I will remember also realizing that this too was the relationship I had with Joe. That no matter how deeply I immersed myself in him, no matter how long I had spent in the ocean of him, that when I was on the beach, on the shore, out of the ocean, that I would run down to him and then sprint away.
I will remember seagulls on the ocean breeze, seagulls on the beach, and sand pipers approaching and retreating from the ocean. I will remember seagulls that were white and grey, that were mottled, that had white wings with black tips and black beaks. The gulls mixed in with the sand pipers, oyster catchers, sand pipers, willets, and plovers. Their darting and digging for the clams that almost always burrow faster than the plovers can dig.
Digging. I will remember digging. The sea turtle project people digging and moving a nest from the television house because they film at night with the bright lights and hundreds of people and how that can’t be good for the nest. I will remember them digging and lining their bucket with a cool blanket doubled back on itself. Watching them carefully place eggs from top of the nest in the bottom of the bucket and eggs from the bottom of the nest in the top of the bucket so that they can reverse the process and make sure the bottom eggs are returned to the bottom in the new nest. The renters digging sand for sand castles and digging moats to protect them from the tide. Always a pointless endeavor, but one seen week after week during the rental season. I will remember some homeowners digging to try to prevent the beach erosion. Everything that they try will fail. The ocean will move the island as it sees fit and the houses will either stay or go regardless of what the people do. The ocean will have its way and the island will go on.
I will remember the pier as the pier, not just as the unfailing sundial. Its weathered wood and barnacles. How the fresh ocean was somehow always dark and oily near its pillars.
I will remember Joe.
I will remember the mist coming off the tops of the waves in the first morning light, when the sun and ocean and beach and air wrestle to decide who will dominate the moment, and the mist always coming off the tops while they decide.
I will remember Joe.
I will remember the sand stinging my legs in the stiffest breezes when the sea oats are bent over and the palm trees seem to bend beyond what can be believed. I will remember the first time I noticed that the dunes are crowned with sea oats here south of Hatteras. They had been topped with beach grass at Nags Head. But here where it is warmer, where the warm current controls, there are sea oats.
I will remember all this, from this walk on the beach, and from all my other walks and runs on this Topsail Beach. I must remember all this, because tonight I die. Tonight I go to Joe. Tonight I take all these memories to him, just in case he has forgotten any of it.
I will remember Joe.
I will remember everything about Joe.
How he held me, how he loved me, how he rescued me in the frozen lighthouse, how he cried the first time he came into my house in Costa Rica.
I will remember Joe, and the deal we made, and how it made us.
I will remember walking on the beach after Joe was gone and hearing from somewhere out on the ocean, out past where the dolphins patrol the sand bar, out near where sun appears on the solstice and where we had spread his ashes. I will
remember hearing Joe tell me that he loves me. Hearing it in each gentle wave that laps ashore in the brilliant Topsail dawn.
I love you Joe.
I have always loved you.
As I die, my coffee cup slips from my hand spilling the last drops onto the beach between my feet.
I will always love you.
The End
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