Running along the edge of the sea, Mark pants and calls out to slow down. Despite his dreams of being a basketball player, he is not used to running any distance. She slows down, lets him catch up. He complains that his pants are too long and drag. She rolls them up, so that he can run in the water beside her. But he falls back again. The pants are still rubbing; he is getting a rash between his legs. He wants to walk.
She walks beside him, thinking that she would never have complained like that as a child. She remembers her years at boarding school, where she had been sent at his age, and how she had to take cold showers in the coldest of weather, the shock of the icy water like a knife on her tender skin. What would he say to that?
She says, “We were taught as children not to complain. I’ll just go on ahead, and you can catch up,” hoping he will, if she sets the example, but he stalks along the edge of the beach, lagging further and further behind, gradually disappearing in the glare.
Eventually, thinking of her daughter’s words, she runs back to him and asks if he wants to swim with her. He has not put on his swimsuit, as she had told him to do. It would have rubbed, he explains. She says, “Never mind. Just go in your boxers.”
He looks horrified. “What if someone sees me?” he says, though there is only one man strolling on the beach at this early hour.
“Don’t be so ridiculous. No one is going to pay attention to a nine-year-old boy.”
He looks up at her angrily. “I don’t want to swim,” he says, folding his arms, standing on the edge of the sea looking at the empty blue sky.
She peers at the smooth cool water longingly and shakes her head. “Then I’m going to run back home. You know the way, don’t you?”
He nods and gives her a sulky look.
“And don’t look at me like that; it’s rude,” she says angrily, and takes off as fast as she can. As she runs across the beach she crosses the lone man who wishes her a good morning politely with a foreign accent and smiles at her graciously, showing white teeth.
“A lovely way to start the day,” he says.
She nods and notices a tattoo of a snake on his muscled, bare arm.
In her big, cool bedroom she strips off her shorts and her bathing suit and showers. Under the water, she thinks with relief that she will have a little while to work before he returns. She is fascinated by the lives of these brave women who lived through such difficult times with courage and dignity and wrote about it.
She imagines her grandson, strolling slowly and sulkily along the road, kicking at pebbles. She doesn’t like children who sulk. She considers she never sulked as a child. Of course, she got angry, but it never lasted.
For a second she imagines how much easier her daughter’s life would be if she had only one child. Emma teaches four classes all through the year to large numbers of students who demonstrate little intellectual curiosity. She has to grade hundreds of papers, meet with recalcitrant, rude students, who have little respect for her, and attend endless meetings; the arduous, grueling, badly paid work of the adjunct professor.
She remembers her daughter calling to tell her she was pregnant again, just after she had enrolled in graduate school. “How will you cope with two children and your studies? Are you sure you want to do this?” Stella had asked. Well, she has done it, with great courage and determination, but at what cost to herself, and her children?
She sits down at her desk and notices the letter from her colleague, the young Ethiopian woman who wrote to her so warmly. She opens up the letter and reads the words again.
You cannot imagine how difficult and lonely it feels sometimes, trying to raise this boy on my own. I miss my own family so much. There is no one here who understands or wants to help. People stare at me with a kind of disgust when I take him in the subway or on trains, and he cries.
I’m filled with terror most of the time. How am I going to give this child the care and attention he needs and make enough money for us to live? A little brown boy in this very white world. How on earth am I going to give him a good life?
She remembers sitting in the armchair with the little boy warm on her lap, with Eleni, in her bright orange skirt, opposite her. She remembers saying that it must be so interesting to be married to a poet. Eleni’s large, expressive eyes smoldered at her unfortunate words. “Interesting for him! Not so interesting for me! He’s gone most of the time doing readings while I have to stay home and take care of the child!” she said with so much raw rage in her voice, and so much hate in her eyes, that Stella felt herself clutching onto the child. She can still see the anger in the young woman’s face.
She notices a telephone number at the top of the page, and reaches for the phone on her desk, hesitates, and then works on her book instead. She has a small idea, which she doesn’t want to forget. She forgets things, misplaces things so easily these days. Soon she has forgotten all about her colleague, all about her grandson.
After a while she glances at her watch and realizes it is considerably later than she had thought. The sun is high, and it is hot and still, the house dead quiet. She runs up the stairs and peeps into the bedrooms: Rose still sleeps, sprawled untidily across the double bed in her pink pajamas amongst a pile of Beanie Babies, but Mark’s room is ominously quiet. She runs down the stairs and out the front door. She looks across the shadowy driveway, but can see no sign of him.
Her heart beating like a drum, her hands sweating with panic, she climbs onto her bicycle and pedals recklessly down the street, looking left and right. The hot sun pierces through ragged cloud, the sun and shade fall on her face. Perspiration pours down her forehead and her back. She rides to the beach where she abandoned the little boy, and strides wildly up and down, pushing her way through the people who are now arriving in large groups and stare at her with curiosity, as she makes her way rudely, stepping on people’s towels, knocking over baskets, rushing down to the sea.
But there is no sign of him here. She thinks of her daughter’s words:
He’s totally unaware of danger
. She stands at the edge of the waves which seem to have gotten higher, the sea much rougher now. The waves pound the sand with an angry crash. She puts her hand to her forehead, scrutinizing the water, the sun cutting a wide silver swathe on the slate-colored sea. She imagines Mark’s little body tossed onto the beach before her. Her mouth is dry with fear. Could he have gone swimming, after all? Could he have gone into this rough sea in a rage, and drowned? But surely the lifeguards would have seen him? She glances up at the bronzed lifeguards who now sit aloft in their chairs like young gods, unconcerned, flirting with pretty, bikini-clad girls, who have climbed up there. She stalks back and forth along the beach and again through the crowd, not sure what to do.
He is not on the beach, nor is he anywhere on the road. She remembers suddenly the man with the tattoo. Where has he gone? What might he have done to her darling boy? How could she have left her grandson alone with a stranger on the beach?
She sees a couple with a small child sitting near the spot where she left Mark whom she gathers, from the state of the sand castle the father is building, have been there for a while. She approaches and asks the woman if, by any chance, she has seen a small blond boy, a nine-year-old, in blue sweatpants? She has lost him, she says, he’s been gone several hours, and as she says the words her throat constricts, and she feels tears come to her eyes. The woman, who is holding her own little boy safely on her lap, looks up at her with sympathy. “How terrifying!” she says, rising to her feet and shading her eyes to peer along the beach. She asks her husband if he has noticed a little boy on his own.
Stella adds now, her own terror increasing with the sharing of it, as though the whole thing has not been quite real until she speaks of it, “He might have been with a man, a man with a foreign accent and a tattoo of a snake on his arm.” Her voice trembles.
The father says, “I think I did see a man here with a tattoo on his arm—yes, I’m sure of it, a snake, I noticed that, and he may have spoken with a foreign accent. I think he was with a little boy. It seems to me the child was crying. Didn’t you see them?” he asks his wife, who now nods her head and says, “Yes, I think I did. Could this man have taken your boy, do you think? Do you think you should go to the police?”
“I don’t know what to do!” she exclaims in despair. Panicking now, she runs back up the beach trying to find her bicycle which she had flung down on the road. Eventually she finds it, climbs back on, and races toward the house, saying a prayer.
Please, God, let him be safe. Please, God! Please!
Now, in her confusion, she makes a rapid, reckless turn into her driveway and miscalculates the angle. She falls from her bicycle, sprawling across the stones, scraping her leg and hands. She lies for a moment winded, brushing off stones embedded in her palms. She rises with difficulty, blood trickling down her throbbing shin, the pain returning so piercingly in her hip she can hardly walk.
She abandons the bicycle in the driveway and hobbles into the back garden and stands at the edge of the pool, where she sees the little boy calmly swimming laps. In the seclusion of the back garden he is swimming naked, his body strong and smooth, unharmed.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were home? I was so worried!” she screams at him in a rage.
The boy turns his head and smiles back at her with some satisfaction, she thinks.
She says, almost in tears, beating her fists against her thighs, “But I have been looking for you everywhere, and I couldn’t find you! I was afraid something awful had happened. And now I’ve fallen off my bicycle and scraped my leg!”
He swims to the side of the pool and draws himself up on his arms to look, his blue eyes shining with sympathy. “Oooh! Poor Grandma! It looks awful! Maybe you need stitches? You better wash it and put on a Band-Aid, at least.”
She glances down at him and thinks he resembles his Irish father as he was when she met him for the first time. He had come toward her, not a tall man but blond and blue-eyed. He clasped her hand in his and stared at her with admiration, exclaiming, “But you are much more beautiful than your daughter told me you were!” Looking at this fine, lively boy, she can’t help feeling warmly toward her ex-son-in-law, despite everything. Perhaps she has judged him too harshly.
She feels the sharp pain down her leg and puts her hand to her side and sighs, “And my hip hurts horribly. I can hardly walk.”
Mark cocks his head and grins at her. “I thought you said we weren’t supposed to complain, Grandma.”
She gives him a dark look but can’t help laughing. “Well, you are certainly no fool, I’ll say that for you.”
He shrugs and laughs. “Come swimming with me, Grandma. Maybe it will be good for your leg.” He turns on his back and looks up at the cloudless sky and bobs in the water. She sees his little penis bobbing about hopefully.
“I’m going to make us some eggs and bacon and heaps of toast,” she says, suddenly starving, but when she breaks the egg a few minutes later, she drops it onto the floor.
That evening, after she has put away the Monopoly board and told the children to go to bed, the telephone rings. At first she almost hangs up on the caller, a man whose voice she doesn’t recognize who asks for her. Something in the cultivated and stricken tone of the voice makes her hesitate.
“This is she,” Stella says, and then, the pain in her leg piercing again, she thinks of her daughter, her darling girl, her pet, of the flight from Texas, which is to bring her back to them the next day. She remembers Emma standing on the stairs in her blue jeans and faded shirt, waving to her mother through the window. What if something has happened to her, the love of Stella’s life?
But the caller, who then identifies himself, is the head of the history department at the university where she teaches. “I’m afraid we have just heard some very bad news,” he says.
“What has happened?” she asks. As she sits down on the chair in the kitchen, her knees giving way beneath her, he tells her that her colleague, Eleni, has committed suicide this morning. While Stella was running up and down the beach frantically looking for her grandson, Eleni was cutting her wrists, after those of her little boy. There were signs of a struggle in the room, chairs overturned, he tells her. She sees the scene vividly, the little boy she held on her lap running from his mother in terror, knocking over chairs, struggling in her arms to avoid the knife. He must have fought for his life, but in the end he and his mother died together. They were found lying side by side in a pool of blood on the bed, while Stella and her grandson were eating their eggs and bacon by the pool.
After they are gone, unexpectedly, she misses the children. She runs alone up and down the beach in the early mornings in the mist and almost bumps into the man with the tattoo who, this time, is followed by a woman and a little boy who must be his own.
She wanders through all the empty rooms of the big house to see if the children have forgotten anything. With a little pang of remorse, she finds Rose’s Beanie Babies, the stuffed animals she had thrown on top of the canopy bed in some childish game and forgotten, a little elephant, a rhinoceros, and a yellow bear.
She looks into Mark’s room, which he has left neat and orderly. She goes downstairs into her big bedroom and tries to work, but in her mind she sees her grandson with his hair carefully slicked back with water, walking into her room in the morning, and she hears Rose clomping down the stairs at midday in her high heels. She sees the girl in all her hopeful finery, her hair swept up onto the top of her head, the dark makeup around the green eyes, the spangles shining on the innocent breasts.
But mostly she remembers Eleni, as she walked under the trees across the beautiful campus, where Stella will teach again in the fall. She sees her walking ahead of her in her bright orange skirt, carrying her dark, glossy head high, her slim hips swaying with dignity and life.