Joy said she needed some time to get a few things done and walk the dog. Anthony could go home, and she’d pick him up in ninety minutes. She’d drive, because he still didn’t have a car, and anyway his house was right on the way to where they were going. When she pulled up in the yellow Jeep she gave two successive short honks, but he was watching out the window—he didn’t need the honks.
“Hey,” she said, smiling, when he hurried out. “Hop in. It’s really close, where we’re going.” The top was down. The sun was still up.
He buckled his seat belt, suddenly shy. He felt like he was on a high school date—excited and anxious, almost sweating, certainly uncertain. His eyes fell on the Jeep’s door. In the little pocket there he saw a cherry ChapStick and a pack of Trident spearmint gum, along with a package of tissues. The cherry ChapStick also reminded him of high school; his first girlfriend, Tricia Sanders, had been a prodigious user.
Joy turned down a narrow road across from a large yellow farmhouse. Anthony had been up and down this road many times by now, but he hadn’t noticed the house or the road. Not long after, she pulled into a parking lot, where there was a wooden sign reading Clay Head Trail.
“A hike?” he said doubtfully. He wasn’t dressed for hiking—he was wearing sneakers without socks, and he’d put a long-sleeved plaid shirt, unbuttoned, over his usual gray T-shirt.
“Just a tiny one,” she said. “Not even a hike. A small walk.” She slung a backpack over her shoulders and pointed east. “The ocean is right over there. But you won’t know it until we’re right up on it. These trails are twisty. We get a lot of migratory songbirds out here. And if we’re lucky, we’ll see a yellow-crowned night heron. They’ve got these plumes that come out of the back of their head, makes them look like balding men.”
He said, “I hear the night herons are much cooler than the day herons,” and then held his breath until she laughed. This modest joke had been a risk—in the past six months, he’d given up on both laughing himself and encouraging laughter in others. But she laughed, and he exhaled.
It wasn’t a long walk, nor was it arduous in any way: Joy had told the truth (another point in her favor). About a third of a mile in, they came to a fork. Joy hesitated. “Sea level?” she asked. “Or up?”
“Up,” he said, immediately regretting it—he was prone to vertigo. The trail twisted and turned some more, and now they were headed up, up, up, until at last they stood on top of a bluff overlooking the ocean. Joy indicated a labyrinth of trails winding away from the water. “You can wander on these paths forever,” she said. “It’s called ‘the maze.’” She pointed. “And if you look all the way down there—see? It’s the North Lighthouse, which you can also get to by following Corn Neck Road to the end and then parking and walking along the rocks. This”—she stomped her foot—“is all clay. That’s where the trail gets its name. Maggie used to make little clay figures when we came up here.” She seemed to be lost for a moment in a parental reverie, so Anthony remained quiet and enjoyed the view. He avoided looking straight down, because of the vertigo.
He thought about a young Maggie building clay figures, and the image made him smile. He wondered if Maggie had had stripy hair and funny T-shirts back then; he wouldn’t put it past her. Then he thought about Joy, hiking up here, knowing that if Maggie fell ill or scraped her knee or broke her finger it would be up to Joy and only Joy to take care of her. It must have been difficult and sometimes scary for Joy to hoe that lonely row alone.
His thoughts turned to Cassie. “Look at Mommy,” Cassie said once, trying to get Max’s attention for a photo at the playground. And Anthony found himself standing just off to the side, saying, “Look at Daddy!” They weren’t working together. They were competing, volleying Max back and forth like a tennis ball.
In the final, rotten days of their cohabitation he and Cassie had given up saying hello to each other—they’d let go of all of the casual niceties that you’d bestow upon a virtual stranger. Cassie had begun to speak to him through Max: Look at that, Max! Daddy is having another drink. He started to do it back: Max, is Mommy just getting back from meeting with her art dealer? That meeting took a very long time. Obviously the barbs from their words flew over Max’s head, but it wasn’t fair or right for either of them to throw them.
“Look!” cried Joy. “Down on the beach. See that? It’s a baby harbor seal.”
Grateful for the interruption, Anthony steeled himself and looked down. He imagined that he was swaying, then falling. He reprimanded himself. All he could see was a gray lump of rocks. “I don’t see it,” he said, unbelieving.
Joy pointed. “There!”
He saw just the lumpy rocks. He peered and squinted. At last one of the rocks began to move toward the water, and it turned out it wasn’t a rock at all. “What do you know,” he said. The seal seemed awkward and uncomfortable, like a slug with flippers, though it moved quite quickly. “How old is it?” he asked. “Is it old enough to be out on its own?” He felt concerned for the seal.
Joy chewed her lip. “Probably over six weeks, at least. If the mother isn’t with it. After around that age, the baby sticks with the mother, but the mother mostly ignores it.” Almost under her breath she added, “Which is the opposite of my experience.”
“How do you know so much about seals?”
She shrugged—she looked delightfully sexy when she shrugged, and he felt his pulse race. “The harbor seal is our state mammal,” she said. “Knowing the details is in the residency requirements.”
They stood on top of the bluff and watched the seal’s progress. There was something so optimistic about its shifting, unrefined locomotion that Anthony felt a sudden spring of hope. You go, girl, he thought. He was guessing at the gender, but the sentiment was exact. Shouldn’t they all, once beached, get the chance to make their way back to the water? Shouldn’t he? He had made a mistake he’d been led to believe was unforgivable. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe, in fact, forgiveness could take an unexpected form. The seal—bumbling, yes, but stalwart and somehow proud—was a testament to possibilities. He reached for Joy’s hand and realized that she was reaching for his at the same time. The vertigo he felt now wasn’t uncomfortable or frightening so much as it was bracing, restorative.
“What are you doing after this?” he whispered.
“I’m free,” she said. “I’m free as a yellow-crowned night heron.” She pressed her body close to his and moved one hand up until it was covering the back of his neck. Her hands were small, but somehow she seemed to be holding his entire body with just the one.