We’re at the firepit on our own beach. Mom and Elizabeth are scraping sticks down to the green with pocketknives, which I so remember doing myself. But they’re on opposite sides, not connected at all. “That they don’t like each other?”
“That they’re deliberately avoiding each other?”
“That we’re making s’mores? I don’t know, Margo. Does this get us anywhere else?” I look closer. “So sad. Jack’s Dad is alone over there by the water.”
“Richard.”
“Did he and Dad ever talk?” I ask.
“What could they talk about? They had nothing in common. He isn’t still around, is he?”
“No. He teaches at Berkeley. He doesn’t look happy here.” Lonely, is what he looks. Forlorn. Abandoned, like Jack. Had he been a different sort of man, the two of them might have been close to make up for Elizabeth’s distance. But Richard just… couldn’t and, in his super academic eyes, Jack felt stupid. Rather than try to compete, he went the other way. From what I could see, he turned his life around only after his father left.Sad.
“Richard never smiled,” Margo remarks. “What did he get out of that marriage?”
“Jack,” I say pointedly, thinking of all the man squandered.
Margo’s eyes touch mine before her finger taps on the tall figure with long hair and a defiant expression. “And how is our boy?”
Our boy.I smile at that. It’s a little jab that goes nowhere. Margo knows she and Jack would have bombed. “He’s fine,” I tell her and, in that instant, wonder if Jack is better off now that his parents are gone. Both of them were emotionally dysfunctional. His childhood rebellion may have saved him from that. He is levelheaded, at least, where animals are concerned. I’m familiar with TNR programs. They rely on the volunteers. Jack Sabathian volunteering? “Interesting, actually,” I say. “He’s still here, but he’s different.”
“Aren’t we all,” Margo murmurs and, that quickly dismissing Jack, reaches into the carton for her own handful of photos.
For the next few minutes, we sort through them in what would have been silence had the rain not pulsed against the roof. It slows, then picks up, gusting and calming in the sky’s mimic of the surf. Margo shows me a shot of her working with Mom in the potting shed, then sets it under her thigh in the unobtrusive way that speaks of appropriation. I show her a shot of the three of us, our backs to the camera as we sit shoulder to shoulder at the end of the dock, silhouetted against a mackerel sky.
“Mom took this,” Margo muses. “She was artistic back then. It’s like there’s a part of her that she left behind when she left here.”
“Didn’t we all?” I say, thinking just then of goodies like sunrise and sunset and rain on the roof.
But Margo is distant as she studies the photo. “I did. No part of my childhood made it to Chicago.”
“Have you missed it?”
She doesn’t answer at first. Her made-up face is carefully composed, but those green eyes, so like all of us, are troubled when they rise from the print. “Last week I’d have said no. Hell, twenty-four hours ago, I’d have said no. Then I heard Dad’s voice coming through your phone, and a window opened. I tried to close it again, tried all last night, but I couldn’t.” She is so poised, so in control but for the pain in her eyes and her voice. “Memories are always there. Y’know?”
I do. “They’re like freckles under makeup—”
“Hold that thought,” she cries and, in a flash, is backing down the attic ladder. Had it not been for the rain, I’d have heard where she is going—her old room? Downstairs? Out to her car?—but her footsteps are lost.
While I wait, I push deeper into the box of photographs. The memories they bring are different from the ones I carried with me to New York. Those were dark. They were of loss and confusion, unanswered questions, distrust. But the ones in my hand are lighter. They conjure fun and closeness and love. Yes, love. Even in candid shots of Dad, who shoots daggers at my camera while actively, proudly posing for me holding a boat line in one shot and extracting a clam from the sand in another, there is feeling. I’ve always focused on the negative. Nightmares kept me away from this place, and staying away kept me from hurt. But what about comfort and warmth? There was positive here.
Margo returns with her iPad. “My next column,” she states, and though she sits beside me again, she is distracted typing notes.
Leaning in, I read,We can look the other way when a memory intrudes, or deny that it ever existed, but it doesn’t go away. Memories shape us as surely—and invisibly—as DNA.
I reread that sentence. She’s hit the nail on the head. But she isn’t done.
I’m visiting my childhood home for the first time in years. The trip was a spontaneous thing, or so I tell myself. I wonder now, though, if I’ve been waiting, just waiting for the right time, maybe waiting until the pain of staying away became worse than the pain of coming home.
Her fingers still, then fall away from the keyboard. Raising resigned eyes to mine, she says, “Memory is life experience. When we deny it, there’s a hole where it should be.”
I’m still thinking of that hole an hour later. She’s given a name to what I sometimes feel. It comes at odd times, down times, times when a dream wakes me or when I hear the sea in the dark and sense a vague emptiness, a distant shadow, the motif of a song that I don’t know, but do.
Having taken a raincoat from the mudroom hook, I’ve come down to the beach. Rain falls on my hood, my shoulders, my bare feet. It falls on the sand, thick drops dappling what was dry before and leaving a new sheen on the rest. Meeting it, the waves rush in with the force of the storm to break like dominoes along the shore, and retreat. The clouds overhead aren’t dark, just dense.
Growing up here, I used to find these clouded days soothing. Rather than a complex world of color, there is one, and the simplicity is striking. It also haunts. Standing with my hands deep in the pockets of my wet raincoat, I sense that emptiness off in the distance.
The sound of the sea soothes, I tell myself, then repeat the thought to drum it in. But that distant emptiness haunts, perhaps more vividly now that I’m here. It reminds me of past pain. Maybe, too, it calls me back.
