These days, Ralph lived in an abandoned-looking trailer perched on top of a sandy cliff, miles from the closest town. The trailer was high above the ocean and surrounded by bent, hardy pines.
No one lived nearby. From his door, he could see the ocean.
He let himself in, seeing the day-old oatmeal dried up in the pot on the stove. He lifted the ladle, which was glued to the bottom of the pot. He set the pot in the sink and poured rusty water over it to soak. In the centers, they didn’t teach you to cook or balance a budget. He had forgotten how to even tie his own shoes. They had the Velcro ones like Dennis wore. Ralph’s life after his release had been one embarrassment after another.
He had finally been declared cured by Martha when he was thirteen (by then he was a mess) and sent to a nearby foster home, where the parents used the compliant graduates of the center as free labor on their irrigated farm. At sixteen, he had run away, riding the trains into the vast Midwest, where he met an old man with an apple orchard who was willing to trade him an old truck and driving lessons for a year of farmwork. Eventually, he followed the crops all the way to Oregon. He had been harvesting strawberries in the Willamette Valley when another migrant told him about the Pacific Ocean.You have to see it, man, he had said. So when the berry harvest ended, he had driven his battered truck to the coast. He had stopped in Wheel Stone for gas. In the gas station window, he saw a sign:custodian needed.
He had driven to Brightwood. Just seeing the building brought back memories. He didn’t think he wanted the job, but he went through the motions of following the director to the custodian closet. It was whenhe saw Dennis being led out from isolation that he knew why life had brought him to this moment. It was to save a little boy just like him.
He poured a glass of iced tea from a cloudy jar in the fridge and sat down on the sagging couch. His walls were covered with paintings of beaches he had found in hotel dumpsters. Ralph liked to look at the paintings and then the reality. It reminded him that people often lied, and this calmed him, because it was the truth.
He drank the iced tea slowly, looking mindlessly out the open door, at the tumultuous sea.
Dennis was in danger. They all were.
11
Amanda was packing her car. She tossed in her backpack and added a bag of goodies from the market, including a jar of Gertrude’s boysenberry jam and a breakfast biscuit for the road.
Larry came to see her off. He looked sad, standing in the parking lot with sand drifting at his ankles.
“Maybe you’ll hear back from her,” he said.
They had found an email address for Martha King, who had retired to a resort in eastern Oregon. There were pictures of her online—she had joined a golf club and looked fit. Amanda had written her a long, heartfelt email about her brother. She had also left a voicemail on the number Larry had found. So far there had been no answer.
“She’ll probably just say she can’t talk,” Amanda said.
“There is that.”
“Thank you, Larry Palmer. You’ve been a friend.”
“Be well, Amanda Dufresne.”
The man stood in a screen of pine trees far up the dune, a pair of binoculars in his hand. He watched as Amanda put a bag with the Eagle Cove Market logo on it in the back seat of her car and said goodbye to the retired cop. They did not hug or touch.
She headed toward the coastal highway, and he thought of following her car through the dark trees, but it wasn’t necessary.
It was over. He hoped.
On the way back down, he stopped at the memorial. He took a shell from his pocket and added it to the others strewn across the sandy soil. It was a mussel shell, and it glimmered blue-black along the softer biscuit colors of smaller shells and sand dollars. He knew that if he dug, there would be twenty years’ worth of buried shells here.
The smells of salt and dead fish were very strong. Molly lunged upright. She was seven feet tall when standing, a massive bear cloak wrapped around muscle. Even on all fours, she was almost as tall as Amanda, who felt comfortingly small in her presence. Amanda liked feeling in place in nature.
The back of the polar bear habitat, unlike the front, was all bars and bare concrete. It made it easier to clean. Polar bears shit a lot, and their shit was very smelly.
Amanda picked up a frozen fish—the zookeepers called them bear popsicles—from the bin. “There you go,” she said, tossing it through the bars. “Don’t say I didn’t miss you.”
Molly caught the fish with her long black claws. Each claw was a deadly weapon that could rip a person or seal wide open. She held her paws delicately, and munched the frozen fish. Her large dark eyes were filled with humor.
Polar bears, Amanda told the visiting schoolchildren, were like big dogs. Very big dogs. They each had their own personality. Molly was a mischief-maker. But she was also a very sad bear. Bears had memories. You could see the past zoos in her eyes, and maybe even memories of being abandoned as a cub in the wild. A team of Arctic researchers had found Molly in an empty den and sent her to a zoo to be raised by hand.Now fifteen years old, Molly was one of those animals who remained attached to those who knew nothing about her.
No wonder I like you so much, Amanda thought, tossing her another fish.
In the background, Arctic sounds played over a loudspeaker. Amanda always turned on the music when she first arrived. It soothed Molly.
There was a clattering of a metal door behind her.
It was her coworker Sean.
