Chapter Eight
No one told her about the silver ticket until it was too late.
She didn’t know as a child, playing on the beach, watching the waves, wondering what would happen if she just walked out into the sea.
She didn’t know as a teenager, dealing with acne, and dating, and the perils of being a girl who grows up on the ocean but doesn’t know a thing about the water—a man out of land, so to speak.
She didn’t know as a new bride, as a new mom—when she would have done anything to have someone tell her: Don’t worry, you can turn back the clock if you need to.
Make a mistake, it won’t hurt her, not really.
No.
She finds out after the accident. After the death and destruction and the catatonic heartbreak—the love of her life, gone—her mother comes to her in the hospital. She tells her there is a way.
“You have a chance to take it back,” Sylvia says. “You can undo it if you want to.” She hands Marcella a small wooden box. Inside is a silver ticket.
“What is this?”
One of her mother’s new age beliefs. More crystals, sage, bullshit. Marcella throws the box down on the floor.
“Pick it up,” Sylvia says. And the way she says it—stern, focused, capable—makes Marcella wipe her eyes and do it.
She holds it in her hands.
Marcella has never had a particularly close relationship with Sylvia. After she was born she made Sylvia a single mother, which couldn’t have been easy in the sixties, although she’s never asked. They don’t have that kind of relationship.
After they came to this country, Sylvia’s mother met her father and they settled in Scarsdale, New York.
He was a banker, and she never gave up the shoe business she’d inherited.
They had some success together—not a lot, but you didn’t need a lot in those days.
It wasn’t like it is now. You could get by on the middle.
Sylvia was raised in New York, and—as she tells it—the day she turned sixteen she loaded a car up with three suitcases and headed for the West Coast. She didn’t have a particularly close relationship with her parents, but then again, Marcella never heard her say a bad word about them, either.
Sylvia’s mother was only twenty years her senior, but she was from a world so removed from the one her daughter was born into, there could have been a century between them.
Sylvia was beautiful—and beauty is currency. Marcella doesn’t know a lot about the years in between leaving home and becoming a mother, but she does know that they brought success and adventure. Lots of it.
Marcella remembers her mother cooking at the beach, the hot oven open, Sylvia forgetting to turn it off but Marcella, somehow, knowing to stay away.
She remembers the red kerchiefs Sylvia would tie on her head when they took out the convertible and the way they’d blow away in the wind.
She remembers Donny and Sam and Len Banks, who was her favorite.
She remembers more than her mother believes she does.
Sylvia has always seemed so irresponsible to her, so out of touch. It was Marcella’s job to follow behind, to make sure the doors were locked and the windows closed. She couldn’t rely on Sylvia, not exactly, so she learned to rely on herself.
Standing in that hospital, though, Marcella understands that she needs to trust her mother.
And she has no guidepost on how to do that.
She has spent her adolescence making decisions in antithesis to what her mother believes, says, does.
Trusting her now, believing her, is not an easy thing to do.
It runs counterintuitive to the (successful) system Marcella has lived by forever.
But this was not in the plan. This grief, this early, surely is for someone else.
“You have had this ticket since the day you were born. It is your right to use if you want it. I had one, too.”
Marcella looks at her bewildered, but something is already beginning to happen. She can feel the edges of this reality folding in, the softness of this hard-boiled hope.
“Think of the moment,” Sylvia says. “Think of the moment you want to go back to.”
Marcella closes her eyes. She thinks about a lot of things—the memories clamoring for top billing.
She thinks about meeting Dave—the way he’d come up to her on the beach, right there, board in hand and asked if she wanted a beer.
The way she took the bottle from out of his lips, the boldest thing she’d ever done.
The day that Lauren was born—quietly into the world at Cedars-Sinai hospital. The panic Marcella had had before she heard Lauren’s first small, impish cry.
Big moments—wide, sweeping moments. Her wedding day. Dave’s surf accident. The moment Lauren learned to walk, toddling in the kitchen, Marcella’s arms extended wide. And then:
She thinks about the previous Sunday, at the house.
How Dave had taken his board out early and how Lauren had stayed asleep.
Marcella was rarely up before her, and when she went upstairs she peeked her head into her room and found her sleeping.
She stood by the door like that for what felt like ten minutes.
Lauren never let her be a mother anymore, never let her braid her hair or cuddle on the couch or put a cool hand to her forehead.
Marcella misses it. Not that Lauren has ever let her do much—even as a child, she was always wriggling away, seeking independence, seeking the water, her father.
But Marcella misses the closeness, still.
The necessity by which mother and child are linked.
The biological business of the whole thing.
Marcella didn’t know whether Lauren was missing it, too, but she believed in that moment that she was and this hurt her—the fact that her child had a need she could no longer meet.
Dave came back then, barreling inside the house the way he always did—full steam, full volume. Wet from the water. Shaking like a dog absolutely everywhere.
She went down to warn him, Be quiet, our child is asleep, but when she got to him he swept her up into a loud, wet hug.
She remembered feeling the salt of the sea on her cheek, the way she breathed in the familiar scent of him.
And for whatever reason, in that moment, she didn’t take it for granted.
She knew how lucky she was to have this man hold her close to him.
“Honeydew, want to have breakfast? Is there coffee? The waves were off the hook this morning, wowwweee.”
This is the moment she thinks about in that hospital. Inside her husband’s arms, him asking about breakfast, her daughter safely asleep upstairs.
Isn’t it always the mundane we want to return to when something catastrophic happens?
So she thinks about that memory, as Sylvia instructed her, she gets inside of it. And then, miraculously, she is back there.
There Dave is, dripping wet on the living room floor. There he is, asking for breakfast.
“Is there coffee? The waves were off the hook this morning, wowwweee.”
Marcella screams. She keeps screaming. And hugging him. And kissing him.
Dave looks confused but only briefly. He screams back, still high off the ocean. He thinks it is just what they are doing: howling at the sun.
“With a welcome back like this, how am I supposed to not go out in the morning?”
And then Lauren comes down the steps. “What is going on?” she aasks. “Are you guys… OK?” She has on a white-striped T-shirt and yellow pajama pants. Her hair has come unspun from a ponytail—scattered straw.
Marcella throws her arms around her, stays that way.
Lauren is still half asleep, maybe, and that’s why she lets her.
Marcella cannot remember the last time she held her daughter in her arms, and this closeness, this beating of her child’s heart right here, right between her rib cage, makes Marcella weep.
“I love you,” she says.
“God, Mom, enough. What is wrong with you?”
“I love my girls!” Dave bellows.
There is relief—puddles and pools of it. Relief that she has avoided tragedy. Relief that the past twelve hours are now just particles of memory, a memory that belongs only to her.
But the relief is not an ocean, cannot renew itself. It is like a saturated rainstorm, and eventually, when it dries up, in its place springs terror.
Marcella now knows that the unthinkable could happen, that it already has. And she also knows that next time she’d have no ability to stop it. No power, now, to save her husband.
Lauren still remembers that day, the one with the hug on the stairs. Although she does not know why it lingers so strongly in her memory.