A gentle breeze is blowing by the water, so we stroll down that way among the boats moored into the dock, looking, imagining what it’d be like to own such a boat, big enough to take us all miles offshore for fishing, with beds to rest and dream in along the way. We are passing time before dinner at a seafood restaurant that anchors the dock. We have a reservation for five—the first time Kent and our children have vacationed together in several years, since before the divorce. Yes, the band is back together after breakup.
I’m sure getting from one’s teenage years when everything feels so hard to having a family of your own comes with its struggles, yet it happens that way for most—blink, and here we are, the Magees, all five of us, together in harmony: me, Kent, and our three children, now nearly grown themselves. It hasn’t happened easily since that day I met Kent in the park, me sharing my big dreams, hoping she’d take me back and the rest would follow. But here we are, walking again, talking again, laughing, smiling, as we like one another, as we love one another, because we do, on a trip that is a celebration, really, because we figure we’ve survived the worst of the storm—divorce, Hudson surviving a near-fatal accidental drug overdose and subsequent coma, Mary Halley making progress battling her eating disorder.
Kent and I are not yet remarried, but we are together, dreaming again, as we did in engagement as mere children in our early twenties so many years before. I’ve been busy rebuilding my career, trust in myself, and trust from Kent, one step at a time, taking baby steps into recovery, into a new life in search of purpose, in search of joy, the destiny the Dreamer pointed me toward. Hudson is taking similar steps, learning life as a college student that doesn’t revolve around self-medication and its ultimate betrayal, while William, a recent college graduate, has recently expressed that he wants sobriety, seeing how it suits Hudson and me.
We don’t need the dinner reservation, since there is barely anyone on the Gulf Coast besides us, despite the fact that it is Labor Day weekend. The weather is dry and unseasonably cool, but mere hours before there was a tropical storm warning in effect for the area, clearing out residents and tourists alike. I’d closely watched the radar with bags packed, making a last-minute travel decision, seeing that the storm pushed ashore at the last hour some thirty miles to the east, which meant Gulf Shores, our destination, was on the west side of the storm, where there was little rain or storm surge, and on the back side of that reverse-clockwise rotation, which meant a gift for that area was forthcoming, because, as the storm departed, the tropical system ushered in cool winds from the north, which cleared the skies and dropped the temperature, delivering us a chamber-of-commerce weekend without crowds or traffic or restaurant lines. A beach almost exclusively for us.
Kent has long since grown weary of my bragging whenever a waitress or local asks, how did we know to come on down with the tropical storm forecast? And I say, well, it’s about paying attention; you just watch the radar and ignore the warnings. They have to put those out, I say, to make sure folks who don’t track the storm are safe. But if you closely follow the track, you can easily forecast the wind, rain, and storm surge based on the storm’s winds and pressure. When I saw the storm slide to the east, we put our bags into the back of the car and headed on down, because I didn’t want to miss having us all together on the holiday weekend, a reunion and celebration for the storm we survived.
William’s presence makes us ecstatic but also worried. He’s started an outpatient program for substance misuse recently, after graduating from college, and we were hoping it stuck, but his behavior alarms us. The day before we left on the trip, he was agitated because he’d lost his sunglasses and couldn’t imagine, he said, going to the beach without any. When we told him we didn’t have spare money for another pair, he’d pouted like a toddler. I should have known that it’s not about keeping the sun out of his eyes but keeping our eyes from seeing his. Still, I’d given in because we parents are weak that way, so he’s wearing the Maui Jim’s I bought for $165 to hide his drug use, which is costing considerably more than $165.
But we are together. It is what parents want the most, having their children with them, together, enjoying one another, without conflict. We are all tanned and slightly burned from a late afternoon at the beach under eighty-three degrees, low humidity and full sun that emerged just as the tropical storm warnings evaporated. It was like we had a private beach all to ourselves, and I didn’t want to let any of them forget that’s the value of studying the conditions, understanding the climate rather than simply following the herd.
Strolling along the dock, we look at boats, and at condos to the left and right, and I say we’ll have one of those soon, and Kent smiles. She is believing more of my dreaming, because more of it is coming true, incrementally, yes, but surely, as well, with the passing of each good day that adds on to another, how progress is made, one small step becoming another, eventually becoming a long swatch covered. I’d dreamed bigger, but stopped chasing the finish line when years before I’d chase the result, getting lost along the way.
We encounter a man inspecting his boat, making sure the storm that didn’t happen didn’t do damage, tugging on the ropes tightly tied to keep it safe. “Looking good,” he says, relieved.
“Sir,” Kent says, thinking of the storm we’ve survived. “Would you mind taking our picture?”
Of course, he says, and she hands over her iPhone 3. We line up in front of the boat, breeze blowing our hair. Kent, glowing in her dark complexion; Mary Halley, radiant and hopeful; Hudson, strong and sober, having gone on a run earlier in the day; William, striking, like a movie star, and jovial, his favorite familial role, holding sunglasses in his hands, eyes showing.
“Make sure to smile, David,” William says, and we chuckle.
We haven’t had a family picture taken together in three years, since 2009. We are sure it is a sign, the sign, that we’ve survived the worst, heading for clear days ahead.
“Ready?” the man asks.
We smile.
Click.
———
That was the last family photo we had together, our family of five. From the moment Kent and I married as children with big dreams, and into William’s birth two years later and through two more births and vacations to celebrations and graduations, we’d snapped hundreds of images to capture our togetherness as a unit on this earth, united by my borrowed name at adoption. But this new branch of Magees, I proudly claimed in ownership.
We took for granted that we’d have another opportunity together, and another, until the divorce splintered us. Back together at the beach, under clear skies, with the storm slipping off to the east, leaving cool, northerly winds that felt refreshing, like renewal, it seemed we’d avoided the worst. We were sharing a shrimp scampi appetizer at dinner, talking about how good the redfish was later that night, unaware how our family’s history and trajectory had been stamped in that moment down by the boats, hair blowing in the wind, along with our future.
We were concerned on the trip that William was still using drugs despite the fact that he was taking weekly tests at the outpatient center. He was smart, William—all users are smart, the smartest, literally too smart for their own good, because they learn to make lies become a truth that they believe, studying detailed information on the internet and dark web that tells one how to hide use, how to pass tests, how to deny, deny, deny. His determination to hide behind those sunglasses that I never should have bought, combined with periods of extreme talkativeness, made us wonder if he was upping and downing. Sure enough, a binge night a few weeks after we returned home revealed the depth of his inability to quit, and we escorted him off to residential treatment.
Multiple treatment facilities and six months later, he settled into sober living and then into the apartment where I found him dead from an accidental overdose. There, the coroner snapped a photo of his lifeless body for the records.
Click.
Effectively reading the radar doesn’t mean you control the storm, of course. Some moments, we’re just in it, trying to get through it.
They wheeled William off on a gurney, covered in a sheet, and just like that, our family of five became four, and we were back to trying to survive, because sometimes, that’s the best you can do.
Survive.
And that alone, for the moment, is enough.