Chapter Eighteen
Maisie
We set off for the shore, winding through a stream of small townships until it’s nothing but open road lined with thick copses of trees. About twenty minutes from our destination, Everett lowers his window, takes a deep breath in, and sighs.
“Smell that?”
And…I do. It’s a texture more than a smell, I think, the way the cool ocean air is both damp and dry at the same time, rimed in salt and heavy against the skin.
The same old balance of land and sky is fundamentally altered by a new presence approaching, transmuting soil into sand, infusing water into air, changing everything the closer it gets.
Once I see the unreal expanse of blue on the horizon, it makes sense to me that something so vast would announce its presence long before you see it.
The ocean.
With Chicken purring from his lap, Everett directs me into the state park.
We drive down roads made slender from drifts of sand, rimmed with scraggly beach pines.
The ocean peeks through the trees, as if it’s just as curious about us as I am about it.
Ahead, there’s a clearing where an old Victorian house sits on stilts, glimmering like the inside of an oyster shell against the clouded skies.
Beside it is a tall white tower, capped in paneled glass and a black metal roof poised at the large, yawning mouth of the ocean.
“A lighthouse?” I put the car in park outside the house and look questioningly at Everett. I was expecting a beach house, another dusty vacation home drowsing empty and quiet, waiting for its people to return and fill it with memories.
“My family came here sometimes when I was a kid. I didn’t appreciate it back then.
I always wanted to go to the boardwalk beaches farther south, but now when I think of the ocean, somehow it’s always this place.
” His smile is soft from nostalgia as his eyes sweep over the lighthouse and the old keeper’s home.
“And what safer spot than a lighthouse with ten flights of spiral stairs? We’ll be untouchable.
” He hoists Chicken to his chest, unlocks the passenger door, his hand paused on the handle. “Ready to explore?”
His lips curve at the corner as he looks at me with that tender patience I’ve come to think of as wholly his.
After twenty years with my mother in isolation, and ten years surrounded by other people and yet still on my own, I’ve learned just how rare true patience is.
Every time I asked Mom with increasing specificity about her fearful theories that drove her to keep us apart from the rest of the world, she’d grow snappish and eventually withdraw, punishing my curiosity with silence that could last for days.
Weeks. She was patient neither with my need to understand nor with my growing doubts about the life she’d chosen for us.
But it wasn’t just Mom, either. The moment the girls with their long hair and normal childhoods from my first college classes sensed something was off about me, whether it was the ill-fitting sweatsuits from Walmart that were all I could afford or when I asked who Taylor Swift was, they’d make some thin excuse to get away from me as fast as possible.
One weird outfit. A strange comment. A question that’s a bit too na?ve. It took so little to be discarded in the normal, painfully impatient world. I truly never had a chance.
But even before he needed me to survive, Everett showed me patience, probably more than anyone other than Gramps ever has.
I wince now, thinking back to our first date and my misguided attempts to mimic reality dating shows.
I was a stone-cold weirdo, but Everett didn’t hold it against me.
Well, not until he saw that I was heavily armed, which, okay.
I can see how that’d be intimidating. But in the days we’ve spent together since, his patience has only grown.
He meets my questions about the world with real consideration instead of judgment for my not already knowing.
When I say something that’d be strange to anyone else, he listens and finds the value in it.
He’s giving me sex lessons, for god’s sake.
And when I discounted the danger posed by Connor, Everett didn’t get frustrated with me, and he didn’t give up.
He waited. He understood. And then, he helped me.
Is there anything so generous and kind as the soft gift of patience?
I could make a single mistake, or a hundred of them, and I don’t think it’d matter to him at all.
Everett would still look at me the way he is now—like I’m a badass, like I’m worth something.
Like my past doesn’t need to be feared, only understood.
A part of my whole, but not the whole of who I am.
It’s freeing, being seen this way. And more than anything, I want him to keep looking.
I nod, sparing myself the effort of speaking through the tightening knot in my throat, and when I open the car door, my feet find sand.
It shifts beneath my weight, and, like Everett, accommodates me in a way that the rest of the world doesn’t as we move toward the lightkeeper’s house and the shushing ocean beyond.
Everett lets Chicken hop down, content to paw her way through the small humps of dunes and brittle grass to the wide, empty beach.
The wind is a constant, filling my ears from a hundred directions at once, as if it doesn’t know which way to blow in this new, frightening world, either.
Its damp edge leaves my cheeks cold and clammy, transforming the longer strands of my hair into the stinging fronds of jellyfish, lashing my skin.
But as hard as the blustering wind tries, it cannot distract me from the stark, simple truth of blue in front of me.
I know all about the ocean, of course. You can’t work in actuarial science without calculating the risks posed by it in some way or the other.
How hurricanes threaten bananas, for example, by disrupting a freight liner’s route and delaying shipment during the fraught month of September.
The cost of life insurance for a commercial crab fisherman sailing off the tempestuous shores of Alaska.
The impact a single terrible drowning can have on a small, family-owned beach hotel.
But as I stand here at the cusp of the earth’s two worlds, that of land and that of water, I realize that in this liminal in-between, you can know all about something and understand exactly none of it at the same time.
Because this is…more. More than I can possibly take in. Even more than the beautiful sunrise over the snowy mountains of Shenandoah.
And I wouldn’t be here without Everett.
Everett removes his shoes and socks, rolls up his pants to his calves, and gestures for me to do the same. “It isn’t a trip to the beach if you don’t put your feet in.”
The cold sand slips between my toes until I get to the wet-packed strip in reach of the waves.
My heart picks up in beat as a big blue breaker builds and builds, straining toward the sky only to collapse in on itself, the dregs of its ambition lunging toward us instead.
I take a quick step back, then another, but Everett holds out his hand, and wordlessly, I take it.
When the wave finally reaches us, it’s nothing but a piercing cold froth that tugs lightly at our toes.
When it recedes, we’re still standing there.
Everett doesn’t let go of my hand. Wave after wave, he anchors me, and even in this great, empty place, I don’t feel alone. We walk down the shore until a throaty shriek rides the wind above us. I startle toward Everett, and his arm goes around me automatically.
“Just a seagull,” he says, and my cheeks burn as the white bird with its gray-streaked wings dips and dives over the water. What would my mother say if she saw me retreat into the arms of a man for protection?
Over a bird?
How embarrassing.
Still, there’s something about the way his arm encircles my shoulders, bringing me into his warmth, that ripples pleasurably through my insides. He doesn’t want our time to end yet, either. The thought engenders a small smile, which I aim down at my feet.
Another seagull cries, joined by another, and soon a large flock appears on the horizon, heading toward us.
“What do they want?” Everett frowns up at the flock and their furiously beating wings. “We don’t have any pizza.”
“Come on.” I tug at his hand draped over my shoulder. “We should get settled for the night anyway. I don’t know if this state park has troopers, but I don’t want to find out, either.”
Everett scoops up Chicken, and we head inside the smaller of the two buildings.
The lightkeeper’s house has been converted into a museum, with roped-off rooms decorated with the original furnishings, and while there aren’t any usable bedrooms, there’s still a functioning kitchen in the back and no humans, current, former, or otherwise, lurking about.
All in all, a win.
I radio Gramps a brief message that we’ve arrived at our stopping place for the night, then turn the radio right back off because I’m not ready to talk to him yet.
After our big fight this morning, I still feel raw.
The way he lobbed Mom at me like that—it was low.
I know that it all comes from a place of protection and love for me, but hearing him voice the same way of thinking that’s resulted in all of my biggest regrets hit me in my most tender places.
I was yelling at Mom and my own decisions as much as I was yelling at him.
It wasn’t fair to him, but he wasn’t fair to me, either.
I’ll check in with him again in the morning, and maybe by then I’ll be ready to talk.