by Howard Owen
Leave him, she was shouting. It’s too late. You’ll drown, too.
Hank wouldn’t let me down. From his voice, I knew he was crying. You’ve got to come on, Momma, he said. There isn’t anything we can do. Come on, Momma.
We rode out the lesser half of the storm in that motel. There were others in there who had lost family, and there were others there more beaten up than Stephen. The people inside made more noise than the hurricane, grief feeding on itself.
If it makes you feel any better, the doctor said he’s pretty sure Stephen never would have made it to shore without that life jacket. Even with it, Paul had to help him in. He’s still using a cane, but his hip will be fine.
We all blame ourselves, Harry. We can’t help it. The doctor, the one who told me to write to you, says it’s normal, it’ll pass.
Stephen swears he’s never going to the ocean again. He wants to move to Colorado and live with Naomi’s family, as far away from the beach as he can get.
He and I were in the same hospital, and one day he came to see me, hobbling down the hall on the crutches they’d just turned him loose with.
We talked some, about this and that. He’s not much of a talker, and I’ve been a little terse of late. Finally, he just burst out crying, sitting in the chair beside my bed, and told me how sorry he was that he took that life jacket.
I told him what I think you probably would have told him, Harry, that you knew he wasn’t going to make it without some help, and that you were too weak to make it anyway, even with the life jacket. “Why throw good money after bad?” you might have said. I told him you were a good man and a smart one, that you had figured all the angles. I told him what you always told me: Harry Stein doesn’t make a play if he doesn’t know how it will turn out (although we both know you broke that rule on occasion). The only way to pay Harry back, I told Stephen, was to live long and well with the life he gave you. We held on to each other for a while and then he left.
Someday, Harry, and although this just came to me, I know it just as well as I know I’m sitting here in this bed, Stephen will marry and have a son, and he’ll name him Harry. Maybe not Harold Stein Flood, but Harry for sure. I know that just as sure as I knew there was another hurricane in my life.
Paul feels guilty about everything. I don’t know if he’ll ever get over this. But Harry, the only way he’d have taken it any worse would have been if Stephen had drowned. How could he have lived with that? We’ve all told him that it could have happened to anyone. Who could have predicted such a thing as that barge breaking loose? We tell him 12 people drowned on the island, and if the Sugar Beach Inn had been built a little more shoddy, it would have been a lot worse than that.
By the way, you’d get a laugh out of this: They’re already talking about another link, a drawbridge, for the other side of the island, a back door out. And you know what they’re talking about naming it? The Harry Stein Memorial Bridge. They made so much of it in the papers and on TV. They interviewed Tran on CNN, and she did such a fine job of telling the whole world what you did. I don’t suppose a state senator from North Carolina carries a lot of clout in Florida, but I have a few friends of friends, Harry. It could happen.
I took Paul aside before we left. Look, I told him, I’ve spent my whole life afraid of the sea, terrified. I don’t want you to be like that. What I want you to do is take that insurance money and build yourself another cottage at the beach. Maybe not right here, but on some beach somewhere. I promised him I’d visit him just like always, that the water was just the water and not some curse or ghost out there to haunt us. Truth is, I’m less afraid of it now than I’ve ever been. It’s done its worst with me and mine. It can have me, if it wants me. Paul’s fearlessness, his love of danger and challenge, is what has made him what he is. He wouldn’t be worth a hoot as a father or a husband or a man if he changed from that. Paul will get better, although it may take some more prodding to get him back to the beach. I might let someone else do the rest of the prodding, though; my heart’s just not in it, Harry.
Hank punishes himself for not being a better swimmer. If he had been a better swimmer, there would have been one more life jacket, is how he figures it. I’ve told him, over and over, that you weren’t going to make it, that I saw it in the look you gave me before I went over. That’s my story, as they say, and I’m sticking to it.
I told him the last thing I saw Harry Stein do was laugh.
It was really fine of your family to let you be buried here, in the same cemetery with my parents, the same one I’ll be in someday. I was glad Martin and Nancy came.
There were some in my little church, maybe, who tisktisked about a Jew in the Crowder family cemetery, but they’re the same ones who disapproved of us living together in our terrible sin, and nobody has the nerve to criticize me to my face anymore. I’m too old and too mean.
One day, it will make me comfortable to look out my window and see your headstone, hard as it is now. I couldn’t bear to think of you under some horizontal piece of rock, the kind people can step on or their dogs can go to the bathroom on, in some place far away. I didn’t want you cremated in a vase in one of those little drawers. I’d have to visit you once or twice a year, no matter where you were, and it would make me sad all over again. Having you here every day will eventually make me immune to the pain.
Eventually.
And Naomi. Poor Naomi takes the blame, too.
She wishes she had been nicer to you. (I tell her she was as nice as could be expected, under the circumstances.) She wishes she hadn’t kept you outside until almost dawn (as if a couple of hours’ sleep one the way or the other could have changed things; as if, I’m sure, you weren’t the one doing all the talking). She wishes she would have insisted on getting you to a hospital when she first saw you at Sugar Beach, because she knew you were at death’s door. (Why not spend the last few days with your family, I told her, at a nice beach?)
Of course, while I’m trying to make everyone else feel normal and halfway good again, my own guilt is like a sack of bricks on my back. Why didn’t I marry you, when you came back to me and made my life worth living? Why didn’t I take better care of you?
I’ve always been too stubborn, too proud of sticking with something just because I decided to stick with it, as if changing for the better would be a sign of weakness. “I’m not going to make Harry Stein feel like he has to marry me because I’m pregnant, and that’s it.” “I’m going to have the baby, and that’s it.” “I’m not going to leave my husband just because he beats me and terrorizes the children, and that’s it.” “I’m not going to get married again, because the first one was such a disaster, and that’s it.” My life has been defined by “that’s it.”
After my parents died, my grandfather decreed that I would never be allowed anywhere near the ocean again. I was 14 and on a secret date before I ever returned to the beach. My grandfather’s favorite expression, his response to any questioning of his authority, was “Because I said so.” People thought he was a strong man because he never relented. They say my father was like that, too. Heredity? Environment? Surely there’s something I can blame.
I realize that, as much as we talked and wrote, all those years, there are still things I never said.
I never said how hurt I really was, beneath all the pride, that you didn’t somehow deduce my pregnancy, my need for you, my willingness to stand beside you no matter what anyone might say, in your family or mine. I never totally forgave you for that.
I never said how big a part that hurt pride played in my refusing to marry you when you came back.
I never told you how secretly, maliciously glad I was, in that dark little corner of my heart where selfishness blots out all else, when your marriage didn’t work out.
I never admitted the grim martyr’s pleasure I took in waiting out Henry Flood, no matter what it cost my children.
That psychiatrist—I told her some of this. I don’t know why; I guess they’re just good at draw
ing people out.
She told me it’s never too late.
It’s too late if Harry’s dead, I snapped back.
But it’s never too late for you, she said. She told me something that worked for her. She said that she just tried, every day, to improve a little bit. Maybe she would learn a new word, or she would read an article about something important, even if it bored her to death. Or she would make peace with someone, even if she thought the other person was wrong.
Nobody ever reaches perfection, she told me, but it gives you a sense of accomplishment, a feeling of forward motion, if you just keep pushing that rock up the hill, like Sisyphus. Except, she said, in real life, the rock doesn’t roll back. In real life, you can push it a few inches forward, stop and rest, and then push it a few more inches.
Fair enough. So these are my few inches for this particular day.
If anything good has come out of this blackest month, it’s Naomi and me. She stayed with me for a week, before they moved me to Atlanta. We talked and talked, more than we had since she was a little girl.
There was a time, before Henry Flood changed all that, when Naomi and I could sit there at the grill, between shifts, and talk with such ease. In the years before your return, the memories that got me through rough days were Harry Stein on the church steps in 1942 and my chats with Naomi in those innocent times. Damn Henry Flood. Damn forgiveness. This day, I’m not up to pushing the rock those few inches. I might never be strong enough for that.
Before Naomi went back to Colorado, we agreed to wipe the slate clean. We agreed that life was too short for us to get on each other’s nerves anymore. We agreed, for the most part, to stop dwelling on the imperfections of the past and try to salvage what we have left.
It might work. It might not. I’m going to try my damndest, though, and I’m not going to sulk and fret. If I have to go out there uninvited, I’m going to visit Naomi and Thomas and Grace and Gary in the new year.
On the evening before she left, Naomi hugged me goodbye, and for the first time in 40 years, I didn’t feel that tension, that holding back. And she told me she loved me. That might be what got me this far out of that black night you left us in.
You know what? I think I might be getting my Naomi back. Wouldn’t that be something, Harry?
There is one more thing.
Roy McGinnis came and got me in Atlanta—talked Hank into letting him do it—and drove me all the way back to Saraw. He didn’t say much, just drove until he got tired, then got us two rooms at a Hampton Inn, bought us dinner and breakfast the next morning, then took me home.
He’s been up here to see me almost every day, even though most days I’m not much company. Those days, he just sits and holds his hat in his hands, says something once in a while, waits for me to cheer up. He usually does cheer me up, Harry.
Roy never was much to look at, and he isn’t getting any better with age. Who among us is?
But he’s been my friend. Just between you and me, I think he’s had a crush on me for the last 50-some years, since we were in high school. He’s been my protector more than once, and I’m ashamed to say I’ve usually taken him for granted. Now, him an old widower and me an old widow (truly a widow now, Harry), I finally told him how much his loyalty has meant to me. He just shrugged his big old shoulders and said that was what friends were for.
I’m going to let him keep coming around, Harry, just to see how things go. It might work out, it might not. Too soon to tell.
There’s one thing we ought to get straight, though. There will never, ever be another time for me like that evening on the front porch of Crowders Presbyterian Church, Sept. 5, 1942. Everything else has been made of lesser stuff, even the second coming of Harry Stein. Some of it’s been good, some of it’s been bad, some of it’s just been different. My weeks with you, my early days with Naomi, nothing came along to match that. It’s horrible to say such things, when you’ve given birth to three other children, by another man, and that’s why no living soul is going to see this letter. But it’s true.
The key from here on out, if you listen to that doctor I had in Atlanta, is to make the best out of the material we have left. The idea of pushing forward a little bit every day, that’s growing on me.
Maybe I’ll even take swimming lessons.
I don’t believe in omens, Harry, and, God help me, I’m not even sure about Him sometimes. Before I finished this letter, though, I took a little nap. When I woke up, the radio was on this station that neither Hank nor I have ever listened to, to my knowledge.
And you know what was playing?
“Deep in the Heart of Texas.”
I clapped four times, and said goodbye.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2000 by Howard Owen
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1210-2
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