CHAPTER 12

My car came down the road, Davy at the wheel, right on time. He pulled over, opened the door.

“OK?” he said.

“Perfect,” I replied. “I’ll drive back to the Lodge.”

He got into the passenger seat. I closed my door. “The other half,” he said.

I got out my wallet and took out three twenties. “I don’t have any change,” I said. So it’s ten extra. Which is OK.” We drove back to the Lodge in silence. There was a beat-up pickup truck parked next to where my car had been.

“You’ll never see me again,” I said. “At least not in the Saloon. I appreciate your help.”

“Not a problem,” he said. “Easy money. You need me again, you know where to reach me.”

“No,” I said, “this is a one-off. Forget you ever met me.”

He got out, climbed into his pickup and left. I opened the door to my lodge room and went in, took off my jacket and lay on the bed. I tried to imagine Winslow in the surf. This would be the last tine I would take a room at the Tomales Bay Lodge. I would no longer have to visit the spot where my daughter had died. Maybe I would even go back to carpentering. Make real houses, not birdhouses. I got up, put my jacket back on and walked out to the little marina. The tide was in and the boats floated on the shallow water. I looked out at the edge of the bay, hoping to see an egret. But there were no egrets, only seagulls and the insistent cry of crows in the trees across the road. Somewhere to the west, Winslow had drowned and now the current would take his body south until he floated onto a beach or got hung up in the rocks. Perhaps his body would sink and not surface for another week. It didn’t matter. He had struggled and eventually he had breathed in the ocean just as my daughter had done. I turned on the television and found the evening news: stories of disasters in the Middle East, a fire in the Sierra foothills, but nothing about a man tumbling in the surf at Point Reyes. Perhaps another night. I napped for a while, then got up, went to the café in the lodge. I ordered the fish and chips and it came, a big plate mounded with fried fish and French fries. I had a glass of wine and I felt good. Satiated. The water in the bay outside the window was dotted with whitecaps. A good wind. The wind that had heeled that little sailboat over when my daughter had hiked out to the high side. Wind that would keep the surf up on the western side of the peninsula. A wind that would keep the surf in turmoil. I slept well that night.