He placed the knot of gum in her hand, still warm and soft from his mouth, his front teeth marks like two dashes imprinted in it. She stared at the gum in her hand for a moment too long, feeling years younger, a lovely curl in her stomach that she hadn’t felt since she’d been a girl. One-handed, she fumbled in her purse and found a tissue. She tore it in half and folded his gum inside it, making a smaller and smaller square. She dropped the tissue inside his ashtray and shut it. For the longest time, as the fence posts blipped past like frames in a film, she stared out, not moving. When, with sharp little jerks, she started to crank the window up again, Sam said, “No, don’t,” reaching across to touch her arm. “Leave it open, too. It’s nice.”
The churning air changed the atmosphere in the car. For Sam, Covenant Heights and feeding the homeless and the parking-lot lighting and Joe dying and the disapproval of Grant Ransom all fell away. For Aubrey, the uncertainty of not knowing how to respond to her husband and the wet touch of her son’s lips and the police calls in the night and Channing’s slipping grades dissipated into nothing. Responsibility fell away; the hour belonged to them. They felt as young as two teenagers when the air rushed across and danced through their hair.
Sam straightened up, cocked his shoulder to one side, started driving with one hand, and curled his fingers possessively around the knob of the gearshift. Aubrey swept one hand through her hair and momentarily wished for a scarf, then thought, Oh, I’ll just let my hair blow in the wind, oh yes! I will!
He turned the radio on and scanned the stations, “. . . controversy over the double play in the fifth inning . . . admission is free! You can’t afford to miss it . . . for the Oregon News Network, I’m . . . really wins and loses when urban neighborhoods . . .” The scan finally stopped on music, light jazz with muted trumpets.
“I can’t find anything good. What’s good on the radio here?” he asked.
“I don’t know. How should I know? I don’t live here anymore.”
“Well, you used to live here.”
“There was K-Gull. KGUL. That’s the only thing I remember.”
He laughed.
“I know. It was cheesy, wasn’t it?”
“What sort of music do you like?”
She hesitated, realizing she was treading dangerous waters, but couldn’t stop herself. “The old stuff. The stuff we used to listen to.” He started to punch buttons again. He found one oldies station playing “Our Day Will Come” by The Shirelles.
“This place always was a little cheesy,” she said.
“No, it wasn’t,” he said. “It was wonderful.”
“Is that why you brought your nephew here?” she asked. “Because it used to be wonderful?”
She saw him stiffen behind the wheel and avoid the question. “The kid’s had a tough time.”
She waited.
“His father just died.”
“Your—” More pictures of his past came to mind—details she’d missed, dynamics she’d never known about and wished she had. He hadn’t had any brothers that she knew of.
“My brother-in-law,” he explained. “Brenda’s husband.”
“Oh.” And she couldn’t help but smile. “That’s a strange thought. Little Brenda all grown up and married.”
“Brenda hasn’t been little for a long time.”
“When are you going to tell me about yourself?” she asked him. “I can’t imagine what your life must be like.”
A coffee shop suddenly loomed. Ruby’s, a neon coffee cup dripping drops of light from it that reflected in the gleam of the fresh blacktop. A sign beside the door said YES, WE ARE OPEN.
Sam signaled to turn in. “This look okay?”
She scooted forward in her seat. Her voice sounded disappointed even to her. “Let’s go to the water first, Sam. I know this is supposed to be supper, but I don’t think I could eat anything; I’m too excited to see you. Maybe later.”
He let out a little laugh. “Well, some things about you have changed. Remember when you made me drive twenty-three miles to that place called Gladys Burger? Because of that fry sauce you liked?”
But when she answered, she wasn’t smiling. She suddenly felt all of her age again, staring at the ringless fingers on her lap. Of course, this was for old-time’s sake, nothing dangerous about it, she thought, as she fought the urge to hide her naked ring finger.
“Yes, Sam. Many things have changed.”
A sign noting BEACH ACCESS appeared in the headlights. “Oh, there it is.” He almost missed it, had to jerk the car without signaling to make the turn. They couldn’t see the ocean with their eyes because of the darkness; they could only see it the way Sam had learned to help people see their way to faith—from the lights reflecting off the jetty, sensing the dark, liquid movement before them, the tossing of water being flung to the shore, the smell of salt and seaweed and crab.
Sam found a parking lot behind the Best Western motel and steered into an empty space. He cut the engine. The water seemed to roar at them through the open windows. For one beat too long, they sat without talking. “The windows,” she said. “Should we roll them up so we can lock the car?”
“Guess so. Of course we should.”
While he finished with his window and locked everything, she climbed out, stood at the side of the car hugging her shoulders as if she needed to hold herself back from something. He came around the fender, and stood.
A clapboard bridge led from the motel parking lot over clumps of high grass. In the distance, the moon illuminated pathway and sea. The appeal of the bridge’s silhouette against the sea made her start toward it. She kicked off her shoes in the grass, while he bent over wingtip leather shoes, so different than anything Gary would wear. They left their shoes side by side in a shadowy pile. We’ll never find these again if we leave them here, she thought, but it didn’t seem important. Only staying beside him seemed important. When they walked barefoot on the sand together and felt the cool on their feet, it was as if they stepped into a distant past, a memory road they hadn’t known they could travel again.
A long glass restaurant stretched the length of the pier, and as they came closer to it they could see a waitress moving from table to table. And then he started laughing, smiling up to the sky. “We were on the water at our cottages. We could have done this there, without driving so far.”
“I know. But—”
“—but Hunter was there.”
“Yes.”
She gathered up the sides of her skirt in her hands. She turned out, to the sea. Drew close enough that, when the water tossed itself up over the sand, it rolled over her feet, too.
She shrieked. The chill of the water surprised her. No matter how often she returned, which had been any number of times, she never remembered the cold of the ocean. It took her breath away.
Oh, to wade farther into the ocean, not to look back, not to be sensible anymore! Oh, to pretend she was who she’d once been instead of being who she’d become! Instead, she made her way under the pier and down the beach.
“Hey, wait for me,” Sam called, walking faster. Even before he caught up with her, his mind already toyed with the question. Where did the both of you go, Aubrey? Where had your father taken you when I came that summer?
Sam was breathless by the time she broke her stride. “How is your dad, Aubrey? What’s going on with him?”
She stopped completely, her shoulders square to the shore. “My dad. You want to know about him? He lives on a boat not far from here, cut off from the world. Doesn’t even have a telephone.”
“Does he take people fishing anymore?”
“No.”
Aubrey offered no more explanation than that. The word, her no, felt like a closed door. For the first time, Sam realized he’d always wondered if Walt McCart had done something to keep them apart from each other.
It wouldn’t do, asking something like that now. Sam chastised himself for the habit he was falling into with her, charting out his every word. “All
those years we spent looking across the water when we were children,” he finally said. “Did you ever stop to wonder what’s out there, no matter how far away it is, farther than we can see?”
She shrugged.
“Japan? The Midway Islands? But the Midway Islands are too far south, I think.”
“There isn’t much for a long way.”
“Russia. Russia’s out there. Is it even Russia anymore? There’s all those new countries.”
“All the world is out there, Sam. You just have to go out there and come around the same way and there it is again.”
“We used to look out all the time and think about it. Do you remember?”
“I do.”
Then from somewhere along the point, a long distance off, someone began shooting fireworks over the water. The reflection was beautiful. Their lights sprang into the air and onto the water like flowers—each a bright color, red and flickering silver, a gold and a green—the sprinkles of light flying far before they began to flicker and sink to the ground.
Aubrey gave a little bleat of surprise when something black and heaving moved toward her legs in the water. It was a Boogie board, heavy and waterlogged. Sam laughed and held it toward the sky, teasing, “A gift! Thank you, Lord!”
“I guess it pays to hang out with a minister.”
“Somebody must have lost it.”
“It’s soaked, though. It won’t float.”
“Maybe it will. You could try.”
“Yeah, or you could.”
“I’ll get wet.”
When she spoke, she included both of them in the dare. “But you know we’d both dry.”
He held her arm as if he were trying to see her face in the dark. “I will if you will.” It seemed, suddenly, that they might be talking about more than a swim.
She didn’t give her answer right away. She was counting the cost, perhaps a meal in damp clothes, a soggy, shivering ride in the car.
“Something else about you that has changed. You never used to think twice about things when you were young.”
“Shut up,” she said, batting at him. “You said I hadn’t changed. You lied, then.”
How dare he think she was afraid? He hadn’t gone in yet either. She began running toward the waves, laughing, flinging her arms into the sky, and the water crested a little. Suddenly it came, crashing into her, almost knocking her down. Before she knew what had happened, Sam was there beside her. He had the board, was trying to ride it, but it went under and so did he.
“Sam!” she called, laughing. “You’re crazy.”
He surfaced, sputtering, his hair flat against his head until it shook it out like a dog.
“Come in,” he said. “Come all the way in.”
She had no choice. Another breaker broadsided her and she dove beneath it. For seconds, she didn’t know which direction was up or down. The water boiled around her. She didn’t know whether it tugged her deeper or buoyed her toward the surface. When her head emerged, she and Sam were together, waves alternately lifting them and letting them fall.
Aubrey had never seen stars so bright as the ones above them. They swam in a heavenly sea of their own. She splashed Sam. He retaliated by taking two strokes and dunking her.
They didn’t stay in long. The water was much too cold for that. Their clothes were plastered against their bodies when they traipsed out. When they dried, their skin would be filmed with salt. Sam left the sodden Boogie board on the shore for someone else to find. “Come here,” he said, watching her shiver. He’d brought a blanket for himself, but he drew close and wrapped it around her shoulders instead. “You’re freezing.”
“S-so are, are you.”
He held the blanket tight at the hollow of her throat, and Aubrey stood with fists together inside of it, clenching it shut. We could share the blanket, she thought to say. But she didn’t want to share. She didn’t want to stand that close to him, to be wrapped together inside something warm. When they started walking back, she felt the light pressure of Sam’s guiding hand in the small of her back, felt his fingers slide possessively to the base of her spine. His chivalry sent an unwanted current through her. How many years had it been since Gary had been chivalrous? How many years since he had held a door open for her or taken her hand or guided her along like a man protecting his wife?
A group of teenage girls was heading toward them, bare feet plodding along the sand. One of them, who remarkably reminded her of Channing, carried a flashlight. The girls giggled and screamed as the flashlight’s beam arced back and forth across the ground. One of the girls cried, “There’s a crab. Don’t step on the crab.”
“Be careful,” Sam whispered conspiratorily to Aubrey. “It’s dark out here and there’s a crab in the sand and we’re barefooted.”
“We keep telling each other to be careful. Have we both changed that much?” Aubrey asked as they walked, their steps cradled in cool, soft sand.
“I was the careful one,” he said, reminding her. “But you, you never were.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Finding their shoes proved to be a chore. Neither had realized, as they’d hurried toward the water, that each access looked somewhat the same, each marked by a small walkway, low shrubbery, a wooden bridge with rails over the dunes. Even with the sand lit by the moon, it was almost impossible to stumble across where they had been.
“This is fine with me,” Aubrey kept babbling along, talking mostly to keep her teeth from chattering. “I can do without those shoes. I have another pair.”
But Sam kept searching through empty clumps of grass. “They won’t let us into a restaurant—”
“We’re wet from head to foot. Shoes are the least of our worries. We’ll stop at one of the tourist shops, buy a cheap pair of flip-flops.” Then, looking at him, she realized, “You don’t want to leave your shoes behind, do you? Those were your best shoes. You wore your best shoes to the beach.”
He didn’t say a word.
“Those were Sunday shoes. You probably preach in those shoes.”
“Well,” he said almost apologetically, “I do.”
“You can’t afford to lose your shoes, huh?”
“It would set me back a week’s pay.”
She gave an exaggerated sigh. “Things were so much easier before we grew up.”
He wouldn’t let them leave until they searched more. When they finally found the right bridge, the right steps, the right low shrubbery, Aubrey slid into her sandals without ado. He sat on the steps to put on his socks, brushing sand off the soles of his feet. As he tied his shoes and she watched him leaning over his work, she stared at the crown of his head, the hair that whorled around his cowlick in the shape of a galaxy. Oh, how she’d always loved the color of his hair!
If I could go back, would I want to? If we could turn back the clock . . . ?
Her throat caught and nothing seemed quite so innocent anymore.
“You ready?” He looked up at her as he made one final tug on his shoe strings.
“Maybe we should just go back to the cottages,” she suggested, “not eat anything tonight.”
“I’m starving, Aubrey.”
“Don’t you think we ought to change clothes or something?”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind, but I’d have to explain it to—”
“—your nephew.”
“Yes.”
“He’d want to know why we went swimming in our clothes.”
“He’d ask lots of questions.”
They were both thinking the same thing as Sam stood and did his best to brush off his slacks. Neither of them was ready to share this momentous renewal of friendship, its joy, its awkwardness. It would never do for Hunter to read something into this that he ought not to. It was too new to them, the monumental exchanging of history, the giving credence to their past.
They returned to Ruby’s coffee shop on foot, deciding that walking might be the best way to dry their clothes. They slid into a booth and the waitress handed t
hem menus while Aubrey unconsciously tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. It annoyed her that Sam had dried with relative grace. He sat across from her now, perusing the descriptions of hamburgers and sandwiches, his shirt looking crisp even though it had been in the ocean. His face was more handsome than it had ever been, his hair falling in endearing wisps against his temples.
Sam glanced up from his menu and said, as if he’d read her mind, “You look good. You know that?” He measured her with his eyes.
“I don’t. I’ve been swimming.” And the years had changed her. She tried to read the menu, but couldn’t.
“You’re wrong about that. The ocean did wonders for you.”
In spite of the late hour, Ruby’s was busy. Music blared from the jukebox, much too loud. They inclined toward each other so they’d be able to hear. “Now I know what you mean. I look better when I’ve been dunked.”
“Well,” he said, grinning. “Somebody had to do it.”
The waitress came to take their order, she a bowl of seafood chowder and he a burger cooked medium-well with cheddar cheese and bacon. (You don’t want something like a Gladys burger? he’d insisted. You don’t want something with fry sauce? No, she’d reassured him. I’m fine with soup.)
As quickly as that, the playfulness between them dwindled, replaced by silence. “What do you think about this?” Sam asked at last. “What do you think the Lord is doing, bringing us together again like this?”
She remembered Sam mentioning his faith when he’d been young; she had taken it in stride then, accepted it because it was a part of him. But now she felt too raw from battling her husband’s disease, would tell Sam that she could never accept that any of this might be planned by something. She remembered discussing it with Sam once on the beach. I don’t believe in God. I believe in the sea.
“Tell me about you, Aubrey. Tell me about your life, what you’ve been doing since I last saw you.”
My husband is in an institution, she might have said, there’s been a struggle in our lives for a long time. The children think we’re on a trip together because I didn’t want their worlds to be shaken.
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