11.
Y’all get that lightning down here like we did yesterday evening?” Ethel asks. We sit before the ocean, watching a helpless fisherman casting his line over and over but catching nothing at all. There is no breeze off the water, no relief from the midsummer sun.
“It lit the sky up like an amethyst,” Ethel continues. “My Elijah, he used to love them storms. He used to like fishin’ for nothing, too, like that poor dope out there. I always felt like telling him about something better to do.” She chuckles. “Like, I need my nails fixed, my dishes washed, my hair done. But Elijah, he always put the ocean ahead of me.”
“Ethel, have I—” I say, then stop.
“What, honey?” she asks.
“Have I always been sad like this?”
“You poor thing, don’t you know it yourself?” Ethel asks. “You were happy, too, or at least you pretended good. You used to throw such nice parties. They all envied you, Clarke’s wife and her gang, even though they acted so gosh-darn smiley. Sometimes I reckon they cast a kinda evil eye on you. And then that fellow of yours started haunting you again. Gabriel. It ain’t my business if he was really your cousin. I can’t blame you for loving a ghost so hard, what with Simon and his business and all those . . . those associates, as Elijah called them, always coming around,” Ethel says. “Then, later on, it was just doctors, all of them hovering all over you. That’s when you got sad sad, like everyone talks about. They just don’t have a good memory. Hardly anyone is good at really remembering how things was. Except me. Elijah used to say I got the memory of an elephant.”
I look down at the sand and see Gabriel’s shirt lying in it. The one with the hole in the armpit. The one he always wore, that he wore that last night. The sun glimmers on the sea, preparing to set, and there he is, staring me down, gulping me back through time.
“Hell, I’m not any better than you,” Ethel goes on. “No matter how many times I seen it, when I look at the ocean, I just see my husband’s face. I still think sometimes he’ll come walking out of it. He loved me, sure, but the Atlantic, her right here, was his great love. He found his life’s calling on that ship—on the Blue Rose. Even he couldn’t believe a colored man could love a job and get a pretty check for it, too. All the other jobs he came home cursing. Oh baby, he was always sayin’, the plantation never died, just came back reincarnated. But the Blue Rose, he called that ship his baby grand. Sure, sometimes he had to mouth off Mr. Simon for treating him, well, you know it, Elle, like the associates. But he was real happy all those years. ‘I’m just out there playing my music, baby,’ he always said. And he always came home to me.
“But then one day Mr. Simon called everyone around.” She coughed. “Decided there was gonna be no more jewel hunting. The company was gonna make that snake medicine instead. They didn’t need Elijah’s eyes onboard, so he could run on back to keeping the grounds . . . and there went his sweet song.” Ethel limps down toward the water. “Sometimes, I can’t figure why that broke his heart more than everything else that happened. But sometimes I can.”
At twilight, I open my eyes. Ethel is no longer talking but beside me asleep. The ocean sings to itself beyond us. The fisherman has retired for the night. A trace of whiskey floats off Ethel’s breath. She snores and her head falls lower and lower down her chest, until eventually it rests on my own shoulder. A sudden vision of Lyra: A ghost town. Wild horses strolling down Main Street. Everything on the island is closing, isn’t it? But that is the future. Somewhere in the past, Ethel’s husband died on his boat, two miles offshore. One gunshot to the head.
That morning, Ethel did not come to work. We had not heard the news, and I remained in the kitchen all through the day, waiting for her figure to cross the yard in one of her polka-dot dresses, a bright silk scarf on her head.
Days afterward, I found Ethel on the beach, sitting in one of these same chairs. It was that morning I first noticed the trace of whiskey coming off her breath, bright and early as it was.
“What is the date today, Ethel?” I ask below my breath, mostly to myself. Something important happened, she told me, on this particular day. How is it that my knowledge of it is already gone? But that memory of only hours earlier has slipped off the deck of this sinking ship. Once, I suffered recurring nightmares of the Titanic, but only now have I begun to envision its underwater afterlife, its deluged memory, the sea moss wrapped around its banisters, handwritten letters bleeding out, read only by the sea. All the ocean is a haunted house.
I shake Ethel awake. She opens her eyes like a child, slowly and adorably, perturbed to find it is already night.
“What’s today again, Ethel?” I ask her.
“Oh, you’re a real tearjerker, Elle. I told you, it’s the day I lost Elijah all them years ago.” Ethel shakes her head. “And you yourself was goin’ on and on about him before. But things are gone just like that for you now, ain’t they?”
The tide growls against the coast. One last pony gallops past us, kicking up the sand, running for home. The cicadas are up, crying against the dark, reminding us there is an end to this world. Ethel stands up and dusts off the sand from her dress. “I’d better get you to the house. I promised Mr. Raymond we’d be back a long time ago.”
“Y’all look sea-kissed,” says a young man in a sugary drawl when we approach him in the driveway.
“Mr. Raymond,” Ethel says. “I tried to get her back earlier, but she insisted like she does.”
“How do you do?” I say, not wishing to upset whatever is our relation. Inland from the sea, the clouds rest heavy on the trees. The sky will just coddle us until we can no longer breathe. Raymond lowers a box out from his truck and I see it is full of stacks of paper. His arms are strong and youthful, but his gut is distended. A thin sheen of sweat covers him. He’s got a boy’s head of hair, brilliant and black atop his skull. But it is his eyes that arrest me, so beautiful, so blue.
“Feel better?” He asks me as if my well-being and his existence were deeply entwined.
“She’s all right,” Ethel says on my behalf.
Raymond doesn’t quite look at me but just past my shoulder, hiding from me whatever inclination, whatever disappointment, has passed over his face. “When I’m done here, can I trouble you for one of your famous lemonades, Ms. Ethel? I’ll give you a ride home afterward.”
“I can walk just fine. Don’t need you driving into a tree again on account of my lemonades,” she replies. “Wish I’d whipped you when I found you in my sauce in the first place.”
“Oh, Ms. Ethel, I woulda gotten into somebody else’s eventually,” Raymond replies.
After the two of them exhaust their foolish exchange about a simple concoction, I ask the man at last why he has come. “Are you meeting with Simon?”
Raymond shakes his head and looks away, then covers his face with his hands. He appears to be weeping. “It’s like she blames me for being here. For finding her on the beach that morning.”
“Oh, shush up about that now. She’s sick, Ray. You don’t wanna hear the damnable things she says to me. She’ll be all yours again tomorrow, you’ll see. She always trots off to Shangri-La by nightfall. Here’s a hanky,” Ethel says, embracing him. “I’ll leave you a sip of lemonade. Our secret between you, me, and the Lord.”
“What are all these boxes?” I ask him once she’s left us.
“All my paperwork,” he replies, barely audibly. “I’ve got to go through every page of the accounting for the last fifteen years so I can show Dad over a whiskey dinner exactly how it was me, not him, that ruined everything.”
“Good heavens,” I say. “Have you been fired?”
“It’s worse than that. We’re bankrupt. And everyone’s abandoned us. Even the Clarkes.”
“Well, this entire island is employed by my husband. Perhaps Simon can help you in some way. That is why you are here, no?”
“Your Simon is out driving all over the state of Georgia, bleeding the rest of what we have on medicine men and quacks,” Raymond says.
“Why would he do that?” I ask. “Is he sick?”
“He’s convinced there is a cure for what you have. He blames himself. Even before the recall, he . . . He loves you so very much, you know,” Raymond concludes.
“What are you really doing with Simon?” I ask. My hands begin to shake. I have never said anything so bold. There were so many men through the years, so many boys, but I never said anything. I never met one face-to-face. One who pretended to be my friend this way.
His eyes grow wet again as he draws up another cigarette. “You know me. I’m your Raymond.”
“I don’t believe I know you, sir,” I say. “I am very sorry.”
The young man collapses on his pile of boxes and draws the handkerchief to his face again. “You remember we had those parties out on the beach every Fourth, Ma? You’d stand at the grill with Dad, from morning until night, cooking dogs for every kid on the island. We’d beg you to take a break and you’d shove us all off, telling everyone it was your son’s birthday party, and this was your gift to him. You always gave me your birthday, even though mine was a week later. I was the luckiest boy in the whole world. What other kid got fireworks for their birthday? And you always danced with me, every birthday, until I got to be a teenager. I know I told you it was embarrassing, that I didn’t want to dance with you anymore. I’m sorry for that—I hate myself for that now. Don’t you remember any of all that, Ma?”