On the drive home Laura kept wiping her nose on the back of her fingers as if I wouldn’t know her tears were leaking despite her best effort to hide them. I handed her a Kleenex from my tote and muttered something about summer allergies. She didn’t say what had happened when she was alone with Creighton, and I didn’t ask. I told her about how I had cornered Shayna Murry and got the feeling from our conversation that she was like Tracy Mack, Gabriel Delgado, even Todd’s girlfriend Madeline Stanley, knowing more than they were saying. Laura was unresponsive, lost in her own thoughts and leaving me to mine, which, as always, turned to Mom and Dad.
I would go back to the hospital, I told myself after calling Mom on the cell phone that she still did not answer, but before that I needed an hour with no one and nothing in it. After I dropped Laura off at home and got back to the Howard Johnson’s, I walked across the street and down to the hot sand that, barefoot, would feel like walking across hot coals. I kicked off my sneakers when I got to the water’s edge and in doing so felt the unaccustomed stiffness in my muscles. I stretched my arms behind me and felt the resistance. Oh man, I needed to work out. I tested my leg where I’d been shot some months before. Wondered if my back could take a run like in the old days. Tried a few tentative steps. Not too bad. The soft sand both cushioned the impact and created a challenge that I knew was good for me. Up down up down into the thin sheet of water that was the farthest point of the waves. I hadn’t been back so long that I couldn’t still smell the salty fishy smell.
I passed a few jellyfish washed up on the beach, looking like blueberry chewing-gum bubbles, and hoped to avoid their invisible tentacles that could be stretched out twelve feet in any direction and give a painful sting even when the jellyfish itself wasn’t attached. I passed a wad of netting. A filtered cigarette butt. A small dead fish. Danger and death all around, but then a tern ran into the receding water, so light its feet hardly left a mark in the sand. It picked up something I couldn’t see and ran back up the beach ahead of the next wave.
The eighty percent humidity might have made the running rough, but it was balanced against the drop in elevation, coming from thirty-five hundred feet where I live in Arizona to sea level. Huffing just a bit, but knowing it would pass as the endorphins kicked in, I headed along the water’s edge toward a small group of people standing solemnly in an uneven circle, looking down.
I remembered Alison Samuels’s story about the starfish and thought how weird that would be. Then I thought of a photograph I had seen in one of Dad’s homicide textbooks when I was six years old. The face of a man who had been in the sea for two weeks. His head looked like a white balloon. The photograph had never really left me, and my psychologist friend has suggested that I went into law enforcement because of it. He thinks I’ve spent my whole life confronting that image before it could get me. Hunting for it rather than turning my back to avoid it and letting it creep up behind me. It may be that the memories of events before the age of ten are the memories that stay implanted most firmly for the rest of our lives. They make us who we are. There had been many times before now when I wished I’d never seen that photograph.
Please, nothing awful this afternoon, I thought. So often in my life it had been something awful, and a dozen of those images flashed through my head before I came up to the group.
I laughed out loud that it was neither a floater nor starfish. It was turtles.
Some mother turtle, after enjoying wild aquatic sex, had crawled up onto the beach late one night, dug a hole with her flippers, and deposited roughly fifty eggs the size, color, and shape of Ping-Pong balls. She had covered up the hole with the sand she dug out of it, and then the bitch had headed back to sea without so much as a Good luck, kids.
Some mothers were like that. Some mothers, like mine, said that children should be like cookies; you should be able to throw out the first batch. Some mothers got in the bathtub with a glass of wine after taking a sleeping pill, leaving three children untended, undefended. Unalive.
Stop it, Brigid. Just stop.
Then, without trying, my attention was hauled kicking and screaming back from the internal vision of a crime scene to the real sight of about fifty baby turtles, each about the size of a silver dollar, following the same path as their mother.
The other people who had got there before me, most in T-shirts and shorts, each out for their own morning walk or run, had instinctively formed a rough cordon on both sides of the nest, leading to the water. No one seemed to be in charge. Without waiting for an invitation I lined up with them, and we watched the slow progress of the little feet and shells, with heads like a plug of licorice, over the sand. Some few of the turtles got confused and pointed their licorice plug in the wrong direction, west to where they’d be run over by cars or find themselves trapped against a two-foot-high concrete wall running along the sidewalk. One of my fellow turtle watchers put himself in charge of these. When he picked them up, he didn’t carry the turtles all the way to the ocean. He only brought them back to the vicinity of the nest and got them started in the right direction. One can only do so much to change the world, and then the world has to take care of itself.
A woman dressed in a long gauzy skirt flapped it and yelled “Ha!” at several seagulls who were also witnessing the activity, probably with breakfast in mind.
I bent down and picked up one little guy who had gotten himself stuck in the depression left in the sand by someone’s foot. His paws scrabbled uselessly and continued to do so until I put him down outside the footprint, where he gained traction again.
A half dozen of the turtles made it as far as the water’s edge and stopped, too exhausted to go on. Someone tried picking them up and putting them in the water, but they were too far gone and didn’t try to swim. You can’t save everyone. But most of the fifty made it at least into the water, where more would be food and who knows how many would survive to breed again. The ones who made it swam for a few seconds with their heads above water. In the afternoon sun their heads looked even blacker against the surface of the water, interspersed with the diamonds cast by the sunlight on the small rippling waves.
It would be nice to say they looked back at us, but we’re talking biology here. Over the course of a minute they were gone, without so much as a thank-you, and our role was finished. The seven of us stood on the beach, watching as if we could still see them. No one cheered. We looked around as if we hoped we could do it again, but there were no more turtles. I waved; what could you say, after all? It wasn’t until I started back to the hotel that I realized I’d gone a good twenty minutes without an ugly picture in my head.
My cell phone rang. Wanting the peace to last a little longer, I looked at my watch. Three P.M. It wouldn’t be Carlo; he was three hours earlier than me and always had lunch at precisely noon. Mom? I scowled to myself and answered it.
It was Laura. The tears that had finally burst their dam made it hard to talk, but she managed to tell me that nothing had done any good, a capricious judge had denied the stay of execution, and on June 23, 2015, at twelve o’clock A.M., Marcus Creighton would be put to death. I checked my watch. Thirty-three hours from now.