48
“Please.”
I jar forward, my hands hitting the hot sand and the scuffing of spiky green grass. The sun reaches down and smacks my back in sharp streaks of heat.
I draw in a ragged, grateful breath, half-sob, half-joy.
The bright, sea-washed light assaults me, and I blink into the hot sun.
A scurry of gulls flies overhead, cawing and quarreling, white dots against the sun-bleached sky. The wind wraps around me and tugs at my blonde hair and my black cotton dress. I’m Becca then. Although now I know Becca is real. Maybe I lived her life, or maybe I lived her dreams. I don’t know.
I only know that I’m kneeling in the coarse sand, the salt-soaked wind whipping around me, and the waves are crashing, harsh and wild, at my back.
My heart pounds at the crashing of sea against shore, and there’s a salty, bitter taste on my lips. My throat aches even when I pull in another gasp of humid air, and my eyes burn.
The humidity presses over me and sweat runs down my back. Close by, a stand of whistling pine—casuarinas—twists in the wind. The scantest line of shade flickers beneath their boughs. I’m on a beach. One with rough-limbed pines, gulls sailing the wind, and the sharp scent of old pine and salt.
It’s not a beach I remember.
When I stand, a ghost crab scuttles across a long ribbon of olive-green seaweed and disappears into the sand.
I turn, scanning the rugged shoreline and the whistling pines, bent and weeping.
It’s all wrong.
I’m on the island, I know I am, but it’s all wrong.
I can see the line of the reef with its white-capped waves breaking and the water edging to turquoise, but the reef is further out now, by a few hundred meters at least. There’s the mangroves to the south, a thick line of them, with their tube-like red roots reaching into the saltwater, but at least half of the mangroves are gone.
The hill that Aaron and I biked? The one that was a fifteen-minute ride from the cottage? Far from the beach? I trail my eyes over the rise, following the sandy path to the top of the hill, sitting on the water’s edge.
A mosquito buzzes then lands on my sweat-covered forearm. I slap it and then step under the line of trees, the pine needles crunching under my feet. A picnic table, a gray, worn, splintered thing, sits hobbled and lonely under the trees.
A lone blackbird watches as I walk further from the ocean, toward the tall granite marker. The bird isn’t singing. It’s perched on the stone, its feathers glossy black, its head cocked.
When I reach the stone, the blackbird flutters away in a spray of wings and wind.
I don’t want to look.
I don’t want to see.
I know what I’ll find.
I’m too late.
I step forward, pressing my fingers to the pink-and-gray granite. The stone is warm, almost hot, in the sun. It’s unyielding. Unfeeling.
It’s a memorial. A granite marker. The kind placed in cemeteries or at battle sites, or where people want to remember or perhaps never forget.
“You came back.”
I turn at the deep, craggy voice.
My heart jolts, kicks, and then settles. It’s Odie. Or a version of Odie I’ve never seen. His long, black pants are wrinkled, his white shirt salt-stained, and his face creased and worn with wrinkles that weren’t there the last time I saw him.
The tears, the fear, the shock, the wild rage that’s been pressing on me since I read the article, and then the next, and the next, claws and fights to be freed.
I want to fall to my knees and weep at his feet. Instead I nod.
“I’m back.”
He gives a sharp nod. Looks at my hand pressed to the granite. The name my fingers trace.
“Hard to think it’s been two years,” he says, studying the memorial.
My throat tightens and I nod.
“Will you come back every Christmas? Pay your respects? It gets lonely, me being the only one left.”
“Why do you stay?” I ask, thinking about the emptiness of the island, the loneliness of living in a place where you’re the only person left.
He shrugs then looks out over the sea. The shadows of the whistling pines fall in bars across his face. “I figure I should’ve died here too. I might as well stay.”
I look back to the gray stone then. To the marker that tells me in harsh, stone-cut lines, what happened on Saint Eligius. There’s the date, Christmas Eve, two years ago.
The words—“In memory of the residents of Saint Eligius who died on December 24”—and a list.
That’s all.
A list of names.
As if names written on a stone can tell the world how much they have loved, how much you have loved them. As if words on a stone can describe a life.
The names are all there.
Amy Marie McCormick.
Sean Alexander McCormick.
Aaron James McCormick.
I wonder. Did he try to save them? Did he struggle to free them from the water? Or was it sudden? A flash. A raging sea. Gone so quickly he didn’t know he was losing them.
Those names, set together in stone, they don’t tell anyone how much he loved them. They don’t tell how Amy loved poetry, how she dreamed of the New York Public Library and of flying into literary worlds. They don’t tell how Aaron sang to Sean during storms. How much he loved his kids. They don’t tell about how he loved the sea. He loved it even when it took him and everyone he loved.
There’s Junie Avery Finch.
Jordi Finch.
And under their names?—
Adelle June Finch.
They had their baby. A girl.
The list goes on. Cold, unfeeling type. All of them. Maranda. Essie. Dee.
Robert Stanton.
Gone.
Sixty-four names.
Just words in a stone.
“I wish,” Odie says, watching my fingers trace over the names, watching me press my hand to the unyielding stone, “I hadn’t listened to McCormick. He told me, ‘Go find Becca, she’s on the hill, make sure she’s okay.’ He went back to get the kids. To help. I wish I’d said, ‘You go get Becca. You take the kids up the hill.’ Then I’d be on there”—he points to the stone—“and he’d be right here.”
Sweat trickles down my back, the heat punishing.
“He knew something was wrong?” I ask, my voice as dry as a husk, hollow and ghostlike.
“Course he did,” Odie says. “We felt the earthquake, didn’t we? The airport crumbled like mud. Essie’s roof collapsed. He was sprinting back toward the cottage. Toward the damned sea. Grabbed me, pushed me toward the hill. Then I got there, and you and Robert were running down, and Robert said, “‘Stay here, I’ll help Aaron,’ and then—” His eyes cloud. “We stayed. We watched as half the island got swallowed, didn’t we? And us two, how come we survived? How come we were the only ones who got to live?”
I stare at the stone, at the names there.
They’ve been gone for two years.
When I started dreaming, they were already dead.
I was living their past, when in my time they’d already died.
When Amy said she’d die on the island and no one would care—she was already gone.
When McCormick said he’d be here, holding out his hand waiting for me—he’d already left.
When I said they weren’t alive, that they didn’t exist—I was half-wrong and half-right.
Two years ago a 7.8 earthquake hit off the coast of Brazil. I remember it because our leather supplier was badly affected. We sent aid: potable water, medical supplies, sat phones, and more.
Six months ago, Daniel and I sat in a meeting and I turned away from the reporter on the television screen recounting the effects of the earthquake. I didn’t want to see someone else’s suffering when I was already hurting so much. I didn’t know I was turning away from Aaron. The reporter stood in front of what looked like a decimated fishing village. I wouldn’t have recognized it. I hadn’t yet dreamed it.
But now I know where she was.
Charlestown, at the very edge of the town. The photographs online showed only three buildings survived. None of them were occupied.
The rest?
They didn’t crumble in the earthquake.
They didn’t collapse.
There was no tsunami.
No.
Instead there was an aftershock.
It struck off the coast of the island.
And then the soft, sandy soil that composed half the island’s geology—it fell into the sea.
It’s happened in history. Entire islands swallowed by the ocean. It happened a few hundred years ago in the Caribbean. An entire city was consumed by the water in seconds.
An earthquake hits and then the vibration in the sand causes liquefaction.
And suddenly, something that was solid—sand—becomes liquid.
Or at least it acts like a liquid.
And so, on Christmas Eve two years ago, all the people on the island were buried in the sea. It happened in seconds. The ground was solid and then it wasn’t, and the homes, the boats, the people, they fell into the deep, deep sea.
Robert once said other people die, but not McCormick.
He was wrong. Not even Aaron could survive this.
And he couldn’t save anyone else either.
“Why did I come here?” I ask, the sun beating down on me, the hollow note of the gulls’ calls echoing in the wind.
“Don’t know,” Odie says. Then he clasps my arm, his callouses rough. “Don’t stay out too long. The mosquitos are bad this year.”
He turns to go, to walk back along the rough, newly carved shoreline, toward the last skeletal remnants of Charlestown.
“Odie?”
He pauses. When he looks back I begin to shake, my hands vibrating with all the waves of emotion I’m not letting out.
“Yeah?”
“Why would I love someone if all along they knew they were going to leave? Why would I love someone when it turns out they were already gone?”
He looks at me then, his eyes shaded, his figure weathered and worn by the wind and salt of the island. I don’t know if he loved anyone. I don’t know anything about him, except that he sat on the road with his stop sign and played solitaire in the shade of a tree. How stupid, to know so little about someone when they’re the only person who has known who you loved, who maybe loved who you loved too.
“Why?” he asks.
He considers the cold granite, immovable, casting its shadow over me. He considers the wind bending the trees. He considers my hand, shaking against the stone.
“I suppose,” he says, “you just couldn’t help it. Mostly, we know loving means losing. But we still do it ’cause we just can’t help it.”
I take my hand from the granite, clenching my fingers in a tight ball. “I thought this time I couldn’t lose. I thought I couldn’t be left. But he was already gone before it even began.”
He rubs a hand down his grizzled face. “You talking ’bout Robert?”
“No.”
“McCormick then.” He nods.
“I wonder if I can save him. If I can save them all.”
Odie shakes his head. Then he points at the sun sinking into the dark, depthless sea. “Don’t stay out too long.”
“I won’t.”
And then, as the sun sinks beneath the surface and the ocean and the dark swallow the world, I sit under the whistling pines, and I listen to the wind blowing through the branches, I breathe in the salt and the stars, and I feel the scratch of the sand over my legs, and I think about loving and leaving and losing and then loving again, because that’s what we do.
I fall asleep, my cheek pressed into the cool sand, the ocean breeze stroking over me, the crash of the water a lullaby. In my dreams, inside this dream, I hear Aaron’s voice?—
If you ever need me, if you ever find yourself awake at night wanting me, I’ll be here. I’ll be here loving you.
“You said you’d let me go.”
I lied. I’ll be here, my hand held out to you. All you have to do is take it.
I hold out my hand.
He isn’t there.