EPILOGUE

There was the sound of the sea, the last late moment of the season changing into winter from the vague twilight time it had been before. There was the sun turning to white ice and the ocean flecking the beaches with frosted tides. Boardwalk, surf, kids with cotton candy, machines that might conceivably guess your weight and issue your fortune on tiny cards with ambiguous messages. On the boardwalk was a telephone booth, a glass-plated obelisk around which Harrison kept walking, as if within the booth there might exist a secret too profound to fathom. Also, he kept wondering if the rattling rumbling of the Atlantic would obscure the sound of any phone call.

One day Madeleine said, “Do it, Harry. Get it out of your system.”

Do it, he thought, and put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her towards him as if he might save her from the wicked skin-chapping bluster of the ocean.

“Go ahead,” she said, nudging him. “One last call. That’s why you left it, isn’t it?”

Why? he wondered. What good would it do to make one last call? Just the same, he went inside the phone booth and picked up the receiver and thrust a bunch of coins into the slot. When he heard the voice answering him, his own taped message, his own alien sound, he remembered how they’d taken the rest of the tapes here, to Ocean City, and burned them on the beach and watched flimsy cinders get tugged away by Atlantic winds, like ashes of the dead scattered across beaches and set to drift on white tides.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry about everything.

Plain sorry, like a heart breaking against his rib bones. He watched Maddy through the glass panes of the phone booth and he thought how beautiful she looked and marveled at the way the wind-tossed spray pushed through her hair. I love her, he thought.

I’m sorry the project died. I’m sorry about whoever I might have wronged and hurt and I’m sorry about Levy and sorry about Jamey Hausermann and sorry for

everything

anything

just sorry

He hung the receiver up and went outside and put his arm around Maddy’s shoulder.

She kissed the side of his face. A wigwam, an igloo, a small private sanctuary: that’s where they belonged together. A safe place that could never be touched. They went out along the boardwalk where acrobatic gulls squawked and ploughed the air in a defiance of gravity. The wind was springing higher, rattling wood planks, shaking the lines of the fishermen who sat with stoic patience at the end of the pier.

Harrison smiled. It was perfect here in its own tidal way.

It was both random and exact.

He looked out towards the ocean. Something came floating through the air towards him, a scrap of paper which sunk and curled itself around his ankle. He reached down to untangle it when he realized what it was that had blown out of nowhere and become attached to his leg.

He realized only too well what it was. Out here, he thought. Carried out here by somebody the way birds carry seeds and drop them. He handed it to Madeleine, who regarded it briefly.

It was an Apology handbill.

He watched her fold it over, tear it through; saw her reach over the railing and let it go flying out towards the sea. The scraps reminded Harrison of fledgling gulls committed to a path of certain doom.

“We didn’t need it, did we, Harry?” Madeleine asked.

He smiled, shook his head, and gazed out over the grey sullen ocean.