I didn’t tell the boys about the trip until the week before we left. I chose what I was sure was the perfect moment to spring the news. They’d come in from shoveling the driveway, their wool hats were crusted with snow, and their cheeks were throbbing red. It was mid-December, pitch-dark by five o’clock. “A week from now, you know where you’ll be?” I asked as they slumped off their coats. I waited for them to step into the kitchen before I gave the answer. “On a beach in Puerto Rico!”
After a month of relentless Googling, I’d scored cheap plane tickets to the Caribbean and found a condo on the beach for a hundred bucks a night. Our kitchen linoleum was starting to peel, our upstairs toilet would run all night if you didn’t flush it the right way, and last spring’s thaw had flooded our basement, but I hadn’t forgotten the promise Katherine and I had made in Ireland a year and a half earlier. We’d sat together on the couch after the boys had gone to bed, totaling up Katherine’s holiday bonus and the money we saved at the credit union, and had figured out that if we totally blew off Christmas, all the gifts and cards as well as the peppermint bark we delivered to the neighbors and the ham we ate on Christmas Eve and the bottle of scotch we opened on Christmas afternoon—if in other words we screwed over everyone we knew and loved—we could make it work. For the last few weeks I’d dreamed about lying on a towel in the sun, a book tented on my chest and a beer next to me in the sand. Christmas that year would be sunny and blue instead of our usual white.
I expected the boys to jump and cheer when they heard the news, but in my excitement I’d made what turned out to be a crucial mistake. I led with what had been for Katherine and me a major selling point: We wouldn’t bother with presents or decorations or overly complicated cooking. All we were going to do was hang out and swim.
“No presents?” Galen asked. “Not even stockings?”
“The present is the beach,” I said. “What more could you want?”
“You mean like a jar of sand?” Hayden asked. Snowmelt puddled around his feet. “How am I supposed to show that to my friends?”
“Your friends will be super jealous,” I said. Belatedly, I realized that most seven-year-olds would mortgage their souls in order to get their hands on whatever toy was currently being hawked during commercial breaks. “At least their parents will be jealous,” I added.
“Like I care about that,” Hayden said.
“You’ll miss the last few days of school. Does that sweeten the deal?”
Galen’s face twisted even tighter. His lips wrinkled like an elderly smoker’s. “Our holiday party is on the last day,” he said. “We’re doing a gift exchange.”
When I was Galen’s age, the holiday gift exchanges at school had been invariably lame. Most kids pilfered their parents’ desk drawers for something to give away, even while we hoped to be the recipient of a gift from the kid whose mother was ignorant of the five-dollar price limit. In second grade, I received a paint pen, a single marker tied haphazardly with uncurled ribbon. The next year, my prize was a sleeve of golf balls. Of all parties, it seemed like a good one to miss. But Galen’s eyes were welling. He turned away so I couldn’t see.
“Maybe we can get a few souvenirs when we’re there,” I offered.
Galen wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Can I get something for Max?”
Max’s was the first family we met when we moved to Wisconsin. Galen had known him longer than he’d known his own brother. We’d shopped for Max in every city we’d ever visited. We’d combed five-and-dimes along the west coast of Michigan and scoured the Canal Street kiosks in New York in search of tchotchkes worthy of Max’s bedroom. We’d wasted a considerable amount of time in Ireland twirling racks of key chains and shot glasses and family crests, including a half hour in a store on Galway’s Shop Street that specialized in deep genealogical research. I didn’t realize that the place wasn’t just another run-of-the-mill keepsake depot until the ruddy-cheeked man behind the counter cheerily offered to find, frame, and ship back to the States Max’s family crest for €450. The thought had crossed my mind, more than once in fact, that we ought to bring Max along on our next trip simply in the interest of saving time.
I loved Max like a nephew and I loved Galen’s devotion to his pal, but a small part of me worried about it, too, if only because friendships in Galen’s world had lately become complicated. What had once been hordes of sweet, moon-faced boys and squeaky-voiced, pig-tailed girls had morphed into warring tribes of preadolescents with hormonal glands rapidly starting to throttle. The boys, I’d noticed, no longer wore T-shirts silkscreened with race cars and Disney characters, as they had two years earlier; they all now donned sports apparel—in our case, the Packers, Badgers, and Brewers—as though they were uniforms. Whenever I witnessed the parade of fandom at the boys’ school, I thought of the men at the birthday party we’d attended a year or so after we’d arrived in Wisconsin, the icy stares I’d received when I stepped through the sliding glass door in my non-emblazoned polo.
Galen had pined desperately for the attire, and Katherine had bought him a few shirts at the start of the school year. He’d dig them out of the laundry basket and wear them dirty rather than go to school in unmarked clothes. And to my even greater dismay, Galen had lately begun to show signs of my own propensity for obsession. He now had a difficult time with certain fabrics and shoes. Shopping with him took hours and usually ended with one, if not both, if not all four of us, screaming in the car. He also rejected paper that wasn’t perfectly crisp, pencils and pens that didn’t feel right in his hand, and every night before bed I retucked his bedsheets to make certain they were square and tight. Within minutes of switching off his light, I’d hear him moving around his room, pulling the mattress away from the wall, unmaking and remaking his bed all over again, growing increasingly agitated the entire time. None of us could ever get it quite right.
Galen had become in the last year especially sensitive to playground teasing, his skin as thin as an overripe peach. The vehemence of his reactions in turn made him an easy target and thus also easily excluded. He’d been left off the invite list for several birthday parties, and his self-esteem had taken a hit. Only later did I fully comprehend why he’d been so upset about missing the holiday gift exchange. It was the one social function he could not be excluded from.
Max, though, was loyal, as steadfast an ally in the fog of childhood as any I could imagine. But I knew neither he nor Galen were immune from the social forces acting upon their peer group. Case in point: I could feel the boys’ interest in girls ramping up, especially when Galen and Max were together. They spoke in code, using pronouns instead of specific names. No dates, from what I could gather, had yet been arranged but it wouldn’t be long. Desire could provoke jealousies that could topple even the sturdiest friendships. I believed Galen would in due time make an attentive boyfriend, provided he didn’t blow it first by getting too clingy. It wouldn’t take much for him to be branded the nice guy who tried too hard. In some ways, it was already happening.
Galen came home from school with a list of gift requests. The girls with whom he shared his table in homeroom wanted bracelets or necklaces. They didn’t want earrings because they weren’t allowed to get their ears pierced until junior high. A boy whose name I’d never heard before asked for a tropical bird, like a macaw or a cockatoo. Max was into pirates and had been teaching himself to speak buccaneer. When he was last at our house and I asked him if he wanted something to drink, he answered with “Splice the main brace, matey,” which I took to mean yes. He put in for a bag of pearls, preferably black, but only if they weren’t cursed.
“I’m not sure a bag of pearls fits within the budget,” I told Galen.
“I’m not going to buy them,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I’m going to find them on the beach.”
“You’ll probably have better luck with sea glass,” I said. He crinkled his nose, and I led him to the box I kept on the shelf in my closet. In it, I kept the hunk of sea glass I’d found on the beach in California during my first visit to my father’s house after he left Texas. The glass was the size of a walnut and as green as a lime. I’d dug it out of the wet sand, rinsed it in the tide, and carried it in my palm the entire flight back to Houston. It had survived because the box that contained it had sliding parquet panels the kids hadn’t figured out how to work. Whenever I opened the box and handled the contents—a dime-store ring I’d take from my father’s closet before he moved; a stack of wallet-sized pictures of junior high classmates, many with mustaches drawn in ballpoint ink; a silver chain that had belonged to my friend who’d died—I was so flooded with nostalgia I couldn’t bear to part with any of it.
Galen rolled the sea glass in his hand and held it to the lamp. The glass was smoky and opaque; the sand infused inside the glass sparkled beneath the yellow orb of the desk lamp. “These are on the beach?” he asked.
“They’re everywhere,” I said. “You’ll just have to look.”
While Katherine lounged on the sand and Hayden and I swam, Galen combed the Puerto Rican beaches for sea glass. He moved along the shoreline bent over with his hands behind his back, while farther down the beach senior citizens in sunbonnets and wraparound sunglasses swept the sand with metal detectors. Galen returned to our encampment with pockets full of sand dollars and horse conchs, Scotch bonnets and egg cockles, but little in the way of bona fide sea glass. Most of the pieces he collected were shards of broken bottles, the detritus of someone else’s party. “These are too sharp to keep,” I said.
“You said I’d find sea glass on the beach,” he said.
“This isn’t sea glass,” I said, holding up a jagged hunk of longneck. “It’s just glass. Put them in the garbage so people don’t cut their feet.”
He piled the shells by my chair and continued his restless search. To tell him to give it up would have only frustrated him, so I put my head back and closed my eyes and napped in the sun. When I stirred twenty minutes later, he was half a mile down the beach, still hunched over. Among the items he worked out of the sand was a fake pearl bracelet, an elastic band strung with hollow plastic beads. He added it to his stash, but Hayden, either in a fit of jealousy or retribution for some distant wrong forgotten by everyone but him, stretched the elastic until it snapped and the pearls scattered into the sand.
We returned to our condo at the end of each day with a bag full of relics, which Galen methodically arranged on the kitchen table according to size and color. His clothes lay in a salty heap on the floor, but the shells he catalogued and displayed as though they were destined for a museum. He insisted they not be disturbed under any circumstances. Rather than clear them away to use the table for meals, we sat on the floor with our plates balanced on our knees.
The day before Christmas Eve, we drove to the eastern port town of Farjado and boarded the ferry to Vieques, an island once used by the Navy for target practice and since turned into a wildlife refuge. Ninety minutes from the Puerto Rican mainland, Vieques was the westernmost island in the Spanish Virgin Islands and less than forty miles from Saint Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Because of its long occupation by the military and subsequent protection by the Department of the Interior, the beaches on Vieques were rumored to be among the least spoiled and most scenic in the entire Caribbean.
The waiting room at the ferry terminal was divided into locals and tourists, one roped off from the other. Island residents had priority on the boat and got to board before the visitors. When we were allowed on, we followed the other gringos in their Tommy Bahama shirts and sport sandals through the parked cars and luggage hold to the upper deck. The looky-loos crowded against the windows and covered themselves with their beach towels beneath the air-conditioning vent. I noticed that not a single local sat among us. When the boat puttered out of the harbor, I realized why the folks in the know preferred the windowless lower deck. The pitch and roll was nothing compared to the ferry to the Aran Islands, but it was severe enough to send the people standing at the windows scrambling for their seats. I thought about the narrow staircase we’d climbed to reach our perch and the time it would take to disembark once we reached the other shore. I ushered Katherine and the boys downstairs, abandoning the comfort of our four-in-a-row faux-leather captain’s chairs for a spot closer to the exit. The lower deck, though, was so crowded that people sat on the floor beside the toilet. Rather than slink back upstairs in defeat, I insisted we claim a spot on the floor of the luggage hold, even closer to the way out than the lower deck. In the hold we were joined by mounds of wrapped Christmas presents, a crated rottweiler snarling behind his wire door, and a seasick Viequean local sitting with her head between her knees and swearing in broken English that she was never, ever going home again.
“You know we paid for seats,” Katherine said. “They’re included in the price.”
“If we stay here, we’ll be the first ones off at the dock,” I said. “More time on the beach.”
“Sometimes I think you have a screw loose,” she said. The ferry undulated beneath us. The hold reeked of diesel fumes. “Other times, I know it.”
I approached the first taxi driver standing at harbor gate, a bald man in a soiled chambray shirt who walked with a limp. When I tried to bargain the fare down a few bucks, he nodded at the boys and said, “How many kids?”
“Only two,” I said, confident he was about to give me a break.
“I have six,” he said. “And they’re hungry.”
He led us through the gate and down a long line of Econoline vans. Most were newer, with metallic paint glinting in the sun and the air conditioner keeping the interior cool. At the end of the line sat our driver’s van. It had a gigantic spiderweb crack in the windshield and an interior that looked like it had been through a war. The driver limped back to the terminal to collect another group of tourists, who were by that point jaunting gaily away from the ferry, having made the crossing in a seat with a view of the ocean. Katherine shot me a look that hardly needed to be explained.
“What the hell happened in here?” she said. Yellow foam mushroomed through the torn seat vinyl and lay in clumps on the floor. “Did a dog get trapped?”
“Have to be a big dog,” Hayden said. “Like a wolf. This van’s all wolfed up.”
“Good one!” Galen said. The school gift exchange was that day, very likely going on at that very moment. It seemed as far from Galen’s mind as we were from Wisconsin.
We crossed the island with the windows down, the air sweet with mango and mamey, up through a cloud forest and down to the southern coast where the sun glimmered over the turquoise water. The driver let us out in the little town of Esperanza and told us we could walk to the beach from there. He seemed eager to be rid of us, to return to the harbor for more passengers. He stopped the van in a dirt turnout and said the beach was at the end, past the campground, couldn’t miss it. “The farther you walk, the better,” he said.
“It’s nice?” I said. “That way?”
He let out a small, gravelly laugh. “Don’t worry, amigo. Es perfecta.”
Karma, of course, loves to ladle out comeuppance. In my haste to be first off the ferry, we ended up nearly last. By the time we found our way through the trees and campground and came onto Sun Bay Beach, the sand was already thick with ferry passengers who had arrived via the main beach road. The other beachgoers sat on narrow hotel towels with their socks stuffed inside their sneakers, pale feet sizzling beneath the sun. Others sat with their backs to the ocean in an effort to block the whipping onshore winds. They appeared to be merely waiting for time to pass before they could go back. I noticed that the waves looked calmer at the far end of the bay, at least another mile, if not more, and after everything, the ferry and the wolfed-up van, the bushwhacking hike through the jungle, I insisted we keep going.
“Jesus Christ, Dad,” Hayden whined, dragging his feet in the sand. “Just pick a spot. It doesn’t have to be perfect.”
But Hayden, unlike his brother and me, was not an obsessive. He couldn’t understand that perfection was the entire point. I’d spent months dreaming of this week—a week at the beach in the middle of winter. I’d barely slept the nights leading up to our departure, buzzed with excitement but also with angst that something along the way would go awry. Our flight would get canceled or a postseason hurricane would blow in or I’d forget to lock the car door and our luggage would get stolen. It’s a father’s job to attend to the details, to plan ahead for every catastrophe, to make sure I always had one more trick up my sleeve. To see the journey through.
At the end of the bay, far from the madding crowd, we landed on the beach I’d seen in my dreams. Palm trees leaned crooked over the shadowed sand; striated azure water lapped against the shore. The sky was cloudless, and the wind, still churning up waves at the other end of the beach, was calm here. We had the entire stretch of sand to ourselves.
After lunch, Katherine and Hayden closed their eyes in the shade and Galen hunted for more sea glass. He’d found far less than he’d hoped for, and I could see him scanning the beach with more intensity than ever. I went to check on him, hoping to talk him into calling off the search. We’d passed plenty of junk shops and souvenir stands, including several that sold bags of rocks and shark-tooth necklaces and leather pouches full of fake pearls. We’d find something for Max. He should relax and enjoy the beach while he could. As I came up beside him, I noticed the sunburned skin flaking away from his neck and shoulders. I’d slathered him in SPF 50 every morning, but he’d burned anyway, the freckles in his skin like sand trapped in amber. I chided myself for not making him wear a T-shirt, though in the peeling skin I also saw the sloughing off of winter and of his self-consciousness. On this beach, at this far end of a remote bay on a remote island in the ocean, we could be as weird as we wanted. Hayden could swear, and Katherine and I could sip vodka cut with pineapple nectar and beer, and Galen could scavenge to his heart’s content. It was why so many of our trips led to water, to Lake Michigan and California and now Puerto Rico. It was for this that we’d stayed in our small house, why we’d given up cable, why we continued to lounge on a couch with Hayden’s name scribbled on the side. It was also why I swam every morning and took the boys to the pool on Sunday afternoons. In the water, we became elemental: shirtless and shoeless, our barest and truest selves. We could be who we were when no one was looking.
I set my hand on my son’s hot shoulder and said, “The funny thing about sea glass is that glass is made from melted sand that’s been blown into a particular shape. When you think about it, sea glass is regular glass that’s in the process of becoming what it used to be. I read somewhere that a good piece can take years to form. Like, decades.”
Galen stopped walking. He stared intently at the indentation in the sand made by his toe. A wave swept in and filled the hole. “Really?” he asked. “That long?”
The question made me unsure of myself. I’d only been talking, but Galen wanted bankable confirmation I was telling him something accurate. “I think so,” I said. “I’m pretty sure.”
He nodded, and tottered off away from me. I returned to my towel, Katherine and Hayden asleep in the shade.
Obsession is at heart an act of faith. Not of madness so much as hope. If you can bridle every contingency and mitigate every possible disruption, root out every flaw, the system will operate perfectly. The splendid outcome you once imagined and the cranking cogs of the universe will align, and you’ll become one, in harmony. The process may be anguished, but the results, when they come, are beautiful.
For the next hour, while his mother and brother slept, Galen gathered up every hunk of broken glass he could find—not sea glass, but ordinary glass, which the beach gave forth in abundance. He carried each fragment to a pile he’d made beneath a palm tree. Once he’d amassed enough, he scooped up the pile and headed for the water, both palms full. He swam with his arms above the surface, his face popping up every few kicks to breathe. He didn’t hurry. Thirty yards out, over deep water, he stopped swimming and let the pieces tumble through his fingers and sink to the bottom. Rather than put the glass in the garbage, he wanted to give the ocean a chance to do its work. To worry over the shards and cinders until they were polished smooth and washed ashore for another kid to find.