HOMECOMING

 

It will be eight months this Saturday, and I’ve finally decided to write it all down.

My therapist is going to call this a breakthrough. He’s been pushing me in this direction for months.

“You’ll want to make a record, Alan. There will come a time, and I know this sounds impossible right now, when the details of what happened to you on that afternoon become fuzzy. When the time that you spent with them drifts off into…well, into the fog of memory. But if you capture it now, while everything’s still fresh in your mind, then you won’t have to worry about that. You won’t have to suffer through losing them twice.”

I often wonder, does Dr. Pemberton actually believe me?

Part of me thinks he must. Why else would I go back to that cramped little office?

Aside from my parents and a few close friends (and even the friends, I’m not so sure about), he might be the only one that does.

None of that matters, though. Dr. Pemberton is right. I have to do this, because the fear of losing them all over again is more than I can bear.

My story begins like this—it was just another regular day. That’s one hell of an introduction, right?

It was just another regular day.

“Daddy, please!” Jennie had begged. “Just come and play with us for an hour! We can build a sand fort!”

“Don’t pester him, Jen,” Laura said, a wry grin on her face. She knew my feelings about the beach. I’d agreed to purchase the house on the water for their sake, but I seldom dipped a toe in the Atlantic myself. There was something I’d never liked about the ocean. All those miles of sand—eons’ worth of coral and stone ground down into a fine powder—felt unnatural to me. Nothing grew there. The beach has always struck me as a barren, final place.

And don’t get me started on the ocean. I once saw four fully grown men resort to using a Toyota pickup truck to wench an 800-pound hammerhead off the tip of the Jacksonville Pier. They’d caught the damned thing in fourteen feet of water—a depth my wife and little girl spent hours in every week.

No sir, the beach was not for me. I enjoyed swimming—don’t get me wrong—but give me a pool filled with clean blue water any day of the week.

But they loved it, and so I was thankful when the Gormans accepted our offer. We’d been in the house for almost two years and, despite the ubiquitous skirls of sand on the hardwoods and the ever-present pile of damp beach towels on the back patio, I was the happiest I’d been in all my life in that house.

“I’m sorry, Jen. I have to work,” I said, leaning down to peer into those startling green eyes. They were such a vibrant shade that they made her appear older than her four years. But when she smiled—which she did often—you understood that she was simply a beautiful and trusting child, in love with the world and thankful for her life. “Maybe we can ride our bikes down to Sliders for dinner, though, after you get back? How does that sound?”

She grinned and wrapped her arms around my neck. I smelled sunscreen, noticed a few flecks of glitter where she had grasped my forearm. Such a kid. “Okay, Daddy. We’ll be back soon.”

Jesus. She’d actually said that.

“Get your sundress on, kiddo,” Laura said, and Jennie skipped away. My wife pulled me close. “We’ll miss you, Alan. If you finish early, would you please come down to the water? It’ll make her day.”

“I will,” I said, knowing that I probably wouldn’t. An afternoon beer and some golf on the tube was much more likely if I did finish the final revisions. “You guys have fun, and be safe.”

“Will do,” she said, giving me a quick peck on the lips.

They gathered their things and were off, making the eighty-yard trip over the dunes and down onto the beach. I knew where they were likely headed, and I could go out on the deck in the guest bedroom if I wanted to check on them. There was a place where the currents piled the sand into a long spit, making a little pool of warm water that Jennie loved to splash about in.

I retreated to my study, put on a Clapton disc, and booted up Autodesk. I was just finishing up the aesthetic revisions on a design that I was going to pitch the following morning. The project looked good, and some of the other architects at the firm were just a little bit jealous that I’d won the design. Work had been going well, but I was definitely putting the hours in.

Lord, was I putting in the hours.

I worked until my stomach’s gurgling notified me that I’d skipped lunch. I slid into my sandals and walked the four blocks to the local deli for a tuna on wheat and a glass of strong iced tea.

I ate outside, watching a thick mass of thunderclouds blowing in hard from the southeast. The air had cooled significantly in just the twenty minutes I’d taken for lunch, and it looked like we might get a pretty good banger of a storm.

I guess the girls felt it too because, by the time I got home, there was a pile of sandy towels, a few errant beach toys, and two pair of sandals in the front doorway.

“Hello?” I called. “You girls let a few thunderheads chase you off the beach?”

“Shhh!” Laura called. She stood at the top of the stairs, dripping water on the landing. I looked down. Two sets of wet footprints traced through the house. “Jennie’s napping.”

Criminy—I’d have to mop again.

“Laura, why can’t you two just—”

“Come and see,” she whispered. “Something’s happening down at the beach.”

I sighed, careful to avoid the water on the steps. “What is it?”

We went out on the deck, and she pointed off into the distance. An ambulance with flashers had pulled out onto the sand. Maybe two dozen beachgoers had gathered to watch a trio of lifeguards slicing through the choppy waters out beyond the breakers, their red floats bouncing around on the waves.

“Damn,” I said. “That doesn’t look good.”

“No,” Laura agreed. Her voice was flat. “No, it doesn’t”

I felt water on my arms, on my neck. Thick raindrops pattered against the house, and I turned to see the squall line advancing on the frantic search.

“Come on,” she said, taking my hand and pulling me inside the guest bedroom. Her fingers were frigid.

She pushed me down onto the bed, and that’s when I first noticed. Her skin had become bruised in places. The water—that cold, Atlantic water—still covered her goose-pimpled skin. It was uncanny.

She straddled me, her sodden hair spilling rivulets of water onto my shirt.

“Laura, let’s take a shower. You’ve got to be freezing, and…and you’re soaking wet. I don’t know how you—”

“Shhh,” she said, pressing her mouth over mine.

She tasted like the ocean. Her tongue touched mine, the sensation one I’d never experienced with my green-eyed darling—not in all the eighteen years we’d been together. It was like…well, it was like an eel or something. Cold and foreign and more than a little bit unsettling.

I retreated from her kiss. “Laura, please—you’re freezing.”

“Then warm me up.” She placed my hands on her hips, rubbed her body against mine. Despite the damp, I felt her there and I knew how much I had missed my wife. All those long hours…

I clutched at her suit and felt the ragged fabric of her tan one-piece. Four or five sizable holes had been torn down the side. “Laura, what is this? Your suit’s all torn up.”

She swallowed hard and looked away, staring out at the water and the squall now blasting our beachside home with rain. I don’t know if it was a tear, or saltwater of another kind, but when she turned her gaze back to mine, there was anguish in her expression.

Anguish and regret.

“It’s okay,” she whispered. Her voice little more than a whisper. “It’s gonna be okay.”

She kissed me, deep and hard, and then I heard little Jennie. We’d never gotten rid of the baby monitors, and my little girl’s whispering voice now crackled through the house, carrying from the monitor in our bedroom.

“Daddy?” she called. She sounded so far away. Her voice echoed throughout the house, the rain thrumming hard against the shake shingles above our heads. “Dad…dee?”

“Jennie!” I called. “Jennie, sweetie, are you okay?”

“Don’t, Alan!” Laura hissed. Her eyes flashed. “Please…just don’t. Let her rest. Let’s not waste this time together. Please, Alan. Warm me up.”

I touched the holes in her swimming suit. I stared into her tired eyes. Tiny blood vessels had popped, little rivers of crimson now streaking through the whites.

“Laura…” I said, and then she pressed herself down on me. She kissed me furiously, deeply—her breath clean and cold and tinged by salt.

I felt her hands, and then she pushed her swimsuit aside and we were together, merging and moving with each other in that familiar, comfortable way. I touched her hips and felt sand. There was sand in her hair, sand caked onto her shoulders.

So much sand.

“Dad—DEE!” Jennie called, but then Laura had her biceps tight around my ears, grinding hard against my hips, our foreheads touching.

“I love you, Alan,” she whispered. “We love you.”

There was a long hiss of static, followed by some kind of mechanical feedback on the monitors. I heard the faintest whisper in the hallway.

“…love you, Daddy.”

Laura pushed herself up, grasping my biceps. She was near climax, and she took my hand and placed it on her chest. The flesh was cool and wet.

We finished together, and when she collapsed onto the bed next to me, there was a gusher of sand and water over the bedspread.

“Laura?” I said. “What happened to you, honey? What…what happened out there?”

“Please,” she said. Her eyes were closed tight, her voice low and filled with sadness. “Please, Alan. It’s time for you to go take that shower.”

“I can’t. I…I won’t! What happened, Laura? What the hell happened out there? Your suit…your, your hair is filled with sand.

“What happened?”

She pushed herself up and wrapped her arms around me. “Take that shower. We’ll talk when you get out. It’ll all be better. It’ll all be just as it once was, okay?”

She kissed my lips, my cheeks, my eyelids.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

I looked over my shoulder as I left the room, and Laura offered a weak smile. She did her wave—a little half rainbow that usually said I’m good. I’m okay.

Usually.

I took a quick shower, the water scalding my skin. I scrubbed until it was pink, rinsing the smell of the ocean and the sand and the little bit of glitter my baby girl had left on my forearm down the drain. I toweled off and pulled on shorts and a tee-shirt.

“Laura?” I called. The guest bedroom was empty. The indentations of where we’d lain remained, but there was no water, no sand.

I ran down to Jennie’s room, calling for her along the way. The vague shape of where a four-year-old girl enjoyed her innocent dreams was there in the blankets. I felt her sheets.

Dry.

There was nothing save the hint of saltwater on the air to indicate that my little girl had ever come home one final time.

I climbed the stairs and stepped out onto the deck. There was another ambulance now, as well as a couple of Red Cross beach cruisers.

The gawkers had their heads down. I saw the hitching shoulders of a lifeguard, his head collapsed in the embrace of one of his colleagues.

I sat down there on the deck, the last of the rainstorm buffeting the house while the wind whipped whitecaps on the Atlantic.

I sat there on the deck and I wept.

And when the bell rang downstairs, I just let it go. It rang again.

And again, and again, and again.

They knocked, and then I heard their faint solicitations from around the side of the house.

It wasn’t until an EMS worker ventured out into the backyard and saw me sitting there that any of it actually got through to me.

“Mr. Webber? Alan Webber? Can you—can you come downstairs, please? We need to speak with you.”

I went inside. I walked through the guest room where I’d been with my wife just minutes before.

Down the stairs and past my daughter’s bedroom.

I went down the hallway, where a throng clustered there in the foyer, huddled anxiously in the rain.

I walked slowly toward that ultimate threshold—that doorway between before and after, knowing that with every step, what had once been a damned good life was finished and that everything else was all just beginning.