THE BEACH IS deserted. The reeds are dancing to the sound of the northwesterly wind. The sand makes little whirls on the dunes. It’s cold, even though it’s mid-May. A man is standing on the shore, looking hypnotized by the sea. I can’t see his face. I don’t need to see his face. His hair is disheveled and frizzy from the salt breeze. He’s barefoot, with khaki pants rolled up a few times. The waves break with a wild beauty. The receding surf traces furrows around the soles of his feet. I come over slowly, as if I want to surprise him or am worried I’ll frighten him. I’m naked, except for a baggy turtleneck sweater that hangs almost to my knees. I think I just made love to the man, and the sweater is his. The neighing of wild horses. A seagull suspended in the air. I no longer know what I feel for this man. I don’t know if I want to frighten him, push him away, hit him, kiss him, hug him, love him. I come up beside him and he looks at me. He smiles at me.
“Alice, look for simple things. Life isn’t as twisted as it seems.”
I slap him. He remains impassive.
“Life is a succession of loose ends, Alice. And it’s right that it’s like that.”
I slap him again, harder. He doesn’t budge, even though he’s bleeding from the corner of his mouth.
“Why don’t you ask me? Come on, ask me. Ask me what I’m doing on the island.”
Another smack. Another. And another. Harder and harder each time, more and more desperate. But soon the blows turn to desire, arousal. I kiss him. His mouth has the metallic taste of blood. I like it. It turns me on even more. We fall to the ground without hurting ourselves. We start to make love. The waves caress our feet. He gets on top of me. His thrusting is in time with the crashing of the waves, stronger and stronger as the tide rises, closer and closer to orgasm. I swallow water. I try to slow him down even though I don’t want him to stop. The waves drag me away. Just me.
I die from pleasure. I die from drowning.
I woke up brusquely soaked in a mix of tears, sweat and vaginal lubrication. I was still coming as I tried to catch my breath.
I was afraid to look at the clock, thinking it would be 12:01 AM. The accursed hour when I received the call from emergency services telling me about Chris’s accident. This was the accursed night, the night Chris had died. I finally looked at the clock. It was 5:30 AM. I cried when I remembered the absolute helplessness I’d felt just a year ago at that same hour, more or less, when I saw the sun come up at St. Luke’s Hospital in New Bedford, and spoke with my mother on the phone, lying, unable to tell her the truth.
I thought about getting into bed with Olivia, but I didn’t want to transmit my anxiety, even if I was calmer now. So I got up, put on one of Chris’s sweatshirts and went out onto the porch wrapped in a blanket to cry a little more and watch the sunrise.
“How much time has passed, Mommy?”
It melted my heart that my child, queen of numbers, expert counter of things, didn’t know that just that very day it was a year from her father’s death.
“Exactly one year, Oli.”
“And after a year you have to cry?”
“If you need to cry, then yes, of course. Whatever your body asks you to do, honey.”
“My body’s asking me to change the flowers. Can I do them my way?”
“But you chose that bouquet. It’s gorgeous. Why do you want to change the flowers?”
“I don’t want to change them. I want to put them in order, because if I don’t arrange them my way, then I’ll want to cry.”
“Whatever, honey, cry, I mean, arrange them however you want.”
I had gone to the cemetery with Olivia and Ruby, to have a picnic next to Chris’s grave and feed the swans and ducks in the pond without the guard seeing us. It was a beautiful, cheerful day. If not, I wouldn’t have taken Olivia. I wanted her to associate that place with something that would assuage the grief of recalling that her father was no longer with us.
“Much better, right?” Olivia asked me.
She had taken apart the bouquet and placed the flowers over the grave to read DAD. Each letter with a different type and color of flower. At the florist, she had insisted she wanted three different types of flowers: white roses, yellow daisies and purple irises. And the same number of each.
“Were you already planning this at the florist?”
“Of course, Mommy.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because it was a surprise. I have secrets too . . .”
“Well, I have to admit, your secret turned out very nice, honey. It’s a beautiful idea.”
Then she took out the adhesive tape she had in her pocket—which indicated that she really had planned everything before leaving the house—and began taping the flowers to the stone so they wouldn’t move.
In the meantime, I rustled in the bushes to rescue the photo camera. Useless up to now. I smiled when I recalled the first photo I took in the cemetery. Ruby’s carriage and the rake placed beside it to simulate a person’s stature. All the things that have happened in a year, I thought. I had suffered almost the worst devastation, and yet there I was. I remembered the sorrow and frayed nerves of that moment in the cemetery, setting up the camera. And now that seemed to me as easy and routine as brushing my teeth. Hadn’t I done far more complex and risky things? Suddenly, I felt a little like Katniss Everdeen, the heroine of The Hunger Games, one of my favorite series. Chris liked it too, and we used to get in bed, each of us with our tablets, and read it simultaneously, page by page. I still remember how mad I got when Chris was on one of his trips and couldn’t help it and read the end of the second book. That was expressly prohibited. We could only read it together. I waited for him biting my nails, anxious to know how it ended, and he cheated on me. Was that the only way he’d cheated on me? The funny thing is I caught him. When he arrived home from that trip, we had dinner, then a quick fuck, so we could get down to reading, and I caught him. I saw almost right away that he’d already read it. He really was bad at faking. He was quiet, not doing or saying anything, taking refuge in the screen of his e-book. But I realized it. I’ve got you! You read the end! I berated him. No, what are you talking about?! Shut up and keep reading, it’s really interesting! he said, turning red. I got pretty pissed, not just playing around, for real. How was it possible I could catch him in all those innocent little lies, almost imperceptible, and not the huge lie he was living? Had I not wanted to see?
There were 4,344 new photos, for a total of 18,358. A good batch, given that only a month had passed since the last harvest. It is spring, which encourages families to visit the graves of their loved ones, I thought. I was glad to know I had two or three days of work ahead of me to go through all of them, but it was also worrying. I changed the battery and the memory card discreetly before my parents popped up in the distance in the company of the Williamses.
“Mom, we’re going to try and make this a nice, upbeat day for the girls,” I whispered when I hugged her. “No drama and no painful crying bouts, OK?”
Against all predictions, my mother kept her word. Crying, well, of course she cried. We all cried. But it was a liberating cry, accompanied by laughter and funny stories about Chris. A proper homage. I brought up that thing Chris had said about when he was a boy and he thought he was adopted because he didn’t have gapped teeth like his mother, aunt, sister and cousin. All because of his dumb cousin Kenny and the damn gap between their teeth. Betty remembered they decided to show him the video of the birth to get him to chill out, but no matter how diligently they looked through the boxes in the basement, they couldn’t find it, and finally they showed him the video of Tricia’s birth, because they weren’t that far apart in age and a baby’s a baby and it’s impossible to tell. Chris calmed down and never brought it up again. As much as I laughed at the anecdote, I was still taking note, pestered by the thought of my justified, but now discarded, suspicion of a possible relation between Chris and Stephen, and thinking maybe I had been wrong. What if Jennifer was the one who was somehow related to Chris? I knew good and well that my random hunch had more to do with my wishes than with reality. I would have loved to have a sister like Jennifer. Like Jennifer or like Miriam or like Julia or even like Karen. Maybe you should give them all DNA tests while we’re at it, everyone on the island, what do you say . . .