Chapter 49
Out of this time, one particular day stands out, both for its stark perfection and for its suggestion of what was to come.
As it happens, it was Christmas, though it might have been any other day.
We’d lost track, opening the few gifts we’d brought several mornings before: a set of pastels for Ida, an action figure for Henry, a hardcover copy of The Borrowers that Tom had already begun to read to them each night, sitting on the floor next to their bed.
Henry had begun asking if there was a place where the water was calm enough for him to actually swim.
On Christmas Eve, I learned of a place from the man who owned the laundry.
“Es mar tranquilo,” he assured me. He’d taught his own son to swim there.
The next morning, I packed a picnic and we all piled into the car.
It was the first time we’d driven since arriving.
The kids were excited, leaning their head out the opened windows.
The man had drawn a map on the side of a brown paper bag, noting that the final turn was unmarked.
“Pero no se preocupe,” he’d said, don’t worry; we would know it by a fat pig tied to the base of a tree.
It was our joke the whole drive: Turn left at the pig.
But then, unbelievably, there it was, sprawling in the dust. “God, I love this country,” Tom laughed, Henry and Ida pointing out the window, hollering with glee, “The pig! It’s him!
” Then on for several more miles. The trees thinning and ending, the road narrowing.
Until, without warning, it dissolved completely into dunes.
Tom shook his head, saying, “My God, we’ve actually found it: the end of the road.”
The kids were desolate. “What do we do now?”
“Do we have to turn around?”
But there wasn’t space even to turn the car around. We simply took the keys and left it, Tom and I laughing, Henry and Ida cartoonishly wide-eyed as we walked away.
“You’re sure it’s the right way?” Henry ventured.
“It’s the way to something,” Tom answered mysteriously, climbing up a steep dune.
“But what if we get lost?”
“We’ll live off the land. We’ll catch fish with spears. Mommy knows her way around a spear, how do you think she caught me?”
Ida roared at that, while Henry darted his eyes around, thrilled, terrified.
Then, suddenly, as we crested the dune, the ocean appeared, vast and azure, gently lapping an endless stretch of white sand.
It was like nothing I’d ever seen. Henry pulled off his shirt, whooping as he skied down the dune and bounded farther and farther into the water.
Fifteen yards from shore, it remained only inches deep, clear and still.
He crawled through it on his hands. He belly flopped, fell backward, sending huge splashes into the air.
“I want to take my shirt off, too,” Ida said.
Tom had ambled ahead. I glanced around. The beach was deserted, and she was barely eight; puberty was still far off for her. Yet for a second, I hesitated.
“Can I?” she persisted. “Henry did it, why can’t I?”
Because you’re a girl, I silently answered, the thought immediately striking me as punitive and deeply fucked-up.
I shrugged, said yes; she pulled her shirt off, bunching it into a tight ball that she handed to me before sprinting away, arms lifting at her sides.
Even if someone came, I thought, why would they care?
With her short hair and slender tanned limbs, she was as much boy as girl, trotting proudly along the beach beside where Henry swam.
There was a new lightness to her, and catching up to Tom, I commented on it.
“Ida’s doing so well.” I wanted him to agree, to say he accepted her, he liked her hair this way, and I nudged him, saying, “Her hair really suits her, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, she seems happy.”
“Louise actually did a nice job.”
I felt the thread that a moment before had spanned between us like sunlight snap. I’d often imagined it coming out; Louise might tell him herself in her bragging way, or Ida. Never had I thought it would be me.
“What do you mean?” Tom said sharply, stopping. “Sally! Hold on a minute. I need you to explain this. You told me you took her to get it cut.”
“I—yes,” I faltered. “That’s true, in the sense I gave Louise permission.”
“That’s not what you told me.”
“Okay, maybe I gave the wrong impression. But if you think about it, what difference does it really make? Louise knows how to cut hair. And Ida wanted it so badly.”
“That’s not the point.”
“But, Tom—” It was his look that had made me stop; the way it interrogated me, as though I were a thing beyond understanding. I tried to shake it off, saying his name a second time, like, Come on, you’re making too much of this.
“I’m just trying to understand why you lied,” he said evenly.
“I didn’t mean to!” Then, switching tacks, pleading with him, “It’s only because I didn’t want you to be upset.”
“Upset at whom?”
It was all he said, in his correct way. It was enough.
By now, the children had gotten far ahead, and I gestured that we should catch up.
Not because I was concerned for them. All I cared about was diverting Tom’s attention, invoking Ida and Henry to make him love me as he had a few moments before.
As we slowly closed the distance, I found myself hoping someone would appear, to force him to pretend everything was okay, reassume the role of attentive husband.
Yet the farther we walked, the more impossible it was to imagine encountering anyone.
We were like the world’s first family, or its last. The car forgotten behind us, the children still far ahead, little dots of happiness.
Eventually they stopped to wait for us at a rocky barrier.
Climbing over it, we discovered a second beach, also deserted, where on a small outcropping of rock a group of buzzards as big as Henry were picking a sea turtle clean.
They hunched over it, tugging ropes of rancid flesh from the massive shell.
We stood very near to one another, engrossed.
Whenever one of us stepped forward, the buzzards startled noisily up, croaking, landing back with a hollow thump onto the sand.
Eventually, in wordless agreement, we walked away, and a little farther on, we came upon the great discovery of the day: a huge fish more than three feet in length washed up on the beach, silver with an ice-blue eye and pointed nose, a vivid blue stripe around the neck.
Its mouth was hinged open, the teeth like pearly thorns.
“What kind is it, Daddy?” the children wanted to know.
But he surprised us, for once saying he didn’t know.
Unlike the buzzards and the turtle, this marvel was not forbidding. Ida knelt beside it, Henry peering from behind her shoulder. They took turns touching or nearly touching it, pulling their hands away as if burned. They fell into whispers, consulting.
“The souls go up into the clouds,” Ida said.
“What are they?”
“Like, the part of me that’s me and not my body, separate.”
“You split up?”
“Sort of.”
“But can it happen when you’re alive?”
She was too intent to answer. She had bent very close over the fish, examining the one glassy eye with clinical detachment, and Henry said, his voice high with fear or excitement:
“Let’s dig a hole and bury him.”
After the hole was dug, at the kids’ request, Tom took the fish by its tail.
It lifted like a single tensed muscle. It must have been very recently dead because there was no odor to speak of.
For a few silent moments, we all admired it, hanging from Tom’s hand, its skin gleaming in the light.
Once it had been buried, the packed sand slightly darker in color, Ida wrote some symbols with her fingertip.
As she recited a prayer, tentatively, I took Tom’s hand, feeling with relief the pressure of his hand in return. He had forgiven me.
After that, I set out our picnic beneath a tree: cheese and salami, a plastic tub of watermelon sprinkled with lime and chili powder, a dense loaf of bread bought from a man on the side of the road that we tore hunks from with our hands.
Henry’s tooth was loose, and because we had no knife, I bit off small pieces of meat and then passed them to him to chew, like a mother bird.
“Is there anything to drink?” Tom said.
I’d packed a bottle of beer and two bottles of soda, dewed and still slightly cool. Henry drank his soda sitting in the water, his shoulders dark as a nut, his hair sun-bleached. Ida bounded noisily through the water.
Merry Christmas, I mouthed across at Tom, suddenly remembering.
Merry Christmas, he mouthed back, his face tanned and handsome, creased about his eyes as he smiled. “Another sip?” he said, passing the bottle of beer.
When I rested my head onto his lap a moment later, inhaling his smell, I thought drowsily how nice men are. Men can forgive and move on; men don’t lie in the same way women do, their meaning tangled in layers of subterfuge; if you ask a man if he is happy and he says yes, there is his entire truth.
“I wish I could take a picture of you right now,” Tom interrupted my thoughts, and I smiled up at him, saying, “Just always remember the perfection of this moment. You will, won’t you, Tom?” smiling dumbly at him, and he smiled back at me and said, “Only because I’m very gifted.”
Suddenly then, from far away, we heard a sharp cry. I jolted up, scanning the beach, my heart pounding.
But all was well. The kids were far from shore, huddled close together in waist-high water.
Slender and small, backlit by the sun, they looked like a single strange being balanced on the surface of the sea—a praying mantis, a walking stick.
Then one part disentangled itself and became Henry.
He was holding one fist high in the air, calling out to us:
“Look! Look! My tooth came out!”