THEO
THE ROAD, a ribbon of black along the Pacific Ocean, tunneled, wound, spiraled upward to the top of Neahkahnie Mountain then down the sloping highway to Manzanita. The lilac sky flickered with black birds. It was a quiet fall afternoon as I returned from the prison and down Laneda Avenue, at the end of which the silver-blue sea glimmered under the afternoon sun. I drove past the Bouvre family’s summer cottage—sea-haggard white, blue shutters, windows dark, a cold and empty skeleton, as it had been for years. A ghost. I’d heard the father passed away and the cottage was sold. But still, there it sat, lifeless. Would she return?
Next door to the Bouvre’s, Mrs. B sat on the veranda of her large log cabin painting at her easel, an oil canvas of her rustic lodge with red shutters. Sunflowers towered over her fence and her roses were in full bloom. She wore her straw Chinese conical hat. She waved. I tipped my hat and rolled the remaining two blocks home, watching her watch me in the rear-view mirror. The streets were cluttered with early hunters, fishermen, and the likes—flannel-clad locusts who fueled the economy of the Rounders (those of us who lived here year-round).
Several cars were parked along the quarter-mile stretch of Laneda Avenue, among them my sister Imogene’s Plymouth Woody, Mr. Gandel’s Ford truck with a bobbing hula dancer on the dashboard, and the Army jeep of the two soldiers who’d been in town on leave the last couple of days. Those two young soldiers who’d met two pretty girls over the weekend and who’d stayed at Bud’s family Inn, where Bud’s sister-in-law, Pearl, fawned over them during their stay, knowing they were off to an unknown fate. Those soldiers still smiled and fooled around like boys who hadn’t yet seen a battlefield—fresh out of training—unscarred and unafraid, still comfortable in their own skin, confident their girls would remain faithful. Now with their duffle bags in the back of the jeep, they drove by, returning to wherever they were stationed and wherever they’d be sent beyond that—and there would be a beyond, a place they couldn’t fathom just yet. They tipped their caps as they passed. I saluted. They looked startled but quickly saluted back, then drove on.
Imogene waved from the window of our family store, the Manzanita Market. I waved back with a forced smile, not in the mood for polite conversation, questions, and pointless concerns. I’d been home three months and still she and Mrs. B watched me the way mothers watched a wounded child, fearing another fall. Imogene’s neon sign sputtered OPEN on and off, shorting out again.
Solomon sat on the bench in front of the store carving a small piece of wood with his hunting knife. Our old shaman’s flannel shirt sleeves were rolled up, revealing his deft hands and muscular arms. I pulled into my driveway across the street.
A three-foot-tall pelican stood on the grass next to the house and watched me park. He waited as two marauding raccoons rambled toward Solomon’s hundred-year-old tree hut behind Mamaí’s cottage—well, my cottage now. Our family home was a small white house that had seen a thousand storms and only two coats of paint in its forty some years, with a sprawling brick-red porch and a weary white picket fence; every bit of it sported a healthy coat of moss.
The fresh warmth of an Indian summer day filled the De Soto Mamaí left me, yet the car still smelled of her gardenia perfume. I pulled the convertible top up and latched it down.
Imogene’s screen door opened. Wearing her work clothes – a gingham dress and Saddle shoes with bobby socks – her big green eyes fixed on me as she prepared to dash across the street and ask her barrage of questions: How are you? Are you hungry? Does your leg hurt? I loved my sister, but sometimes she was just too much, too many questions, always a battle. Whoever said, “The hardest fought wars were often encountered on the home front” was right.
Thankfully, Solomon waved her back into the store where she instead watched me from the window. He then glanced my way and nodded. I went inside.
***
Mamaí’s Persian carpet, with its many hues of red, lay beneath the dining table where we had done homework, eaten family meals, and played Yahtzee under candlelight during the storms off our portion of Oregon’s Coast. That table, witness to our early lives, good lives—so long ago—was now cluttered with the paperwork of life: sermon notes, Mamaí’s obituary (needing to be tucked into the family Bible), her estate papers, and a stack of dirty white U.S. Army envelopes held together by a blood-stained string. All but one marked Return to Sender.
Despite the glow of sunset sifting through the window, glistening particles settling on the white tablecloth, the room seemed cold and empty minus its family. I’d recently exchanged two dining room chairs with Da’s old leather armchair and ottoman, placing them in front of my glass aquarium so I could drink in peace and watch my three new orange-and-white-striped clown fish interact with the sea anemone, making sure they connected and became family. This dance was as critical to their survival as it was mine. The timid clowns struggled against the current as the water filter surged and foot-tall sea grasses rippled, but they were settling in.
Over the hutch Mamaí had hung my Navy Presidential Citation and the photograph from me at seminary—her tainted ray of hope for our doomed Irish family. It’s exhausting to be someone’s hope. Exhausting. Those souvenirs of the cracks in my soul had red rosaries looped around the frames. Mamaí placed rosaries on my boxing championship photographs, on awards and medals—none on Kiernan’s or Imogene’s—and not as blessings, protection, or pleas to God to keep me on a virtuous path, but out of fear. Fear that I may become my worst self again. She always looked at me as though she saw a shadow—something she loved but was afraid of. The blood-stained fists of a ten-year-old Irish lad who defended his own, who to her smelled like smoke until her dying days. I picked up the stack of letters. They also smelled of smoke: napalm, to be exact.