“The lonely sands stretch away from all of us. From the wrecks of our lives,” Sarah said delicately. Nathan asked her what she meant but she smiled sadly and said she lost her train of thought.
“I had it for a moment, I could see it. Funny how some things only make sense for a second,” she said, covering her lips with her fingers. Charlie pulled his head up from the planks and looked at her, thumping his tail once in what seemed like sympathy.
“It’s God,” Nathan said, startling me.
“What’s God?” I asked.
“Those flashes, those moments of truth. He is too much for us to see all at once. Maybe it’s like looking at the sun. Just too much.” The tension in Nathan’s face ebbed as he spoke, his icy guard slowly melting. He spoke with disconcerting sincerity.
“Are you religious today, Nathan?” Sarah mused.
That made a true smile break across his face. “I usually am, Sarah. Have to keep an open mind,” he tapped the side of his head.
“Too open …” Sarah interrupted.
“And your blessed brain will fall out. You would know,” Nathan gave her a taunting smile. I peered in bewilderment at her face and then his, trying to interpret their conversation.
“He’s mocking me because I’m always trying something,” Sarah explained to me. “I used to be a good Methodist. Some days I truly think I still am. But there is a streak of Evangelical in me and some Southern Baptist because sometimes I want to stand up and shout my Hallelujahs. Not demurely, not reverently, but pull it out of my diaphragm and really bellow!”
Nathan shook his head tolerantly and in his softer countenance I could see some of the quiet boy that Sarah loved. “So she’s a mess of faith. When you believe everything, you don’t really believe anything, in my opinion,” Nathan said like a parent speaking of their child.
“I’m not a mess – I’m a work in progress,” Sarah laughed. “I have narrowed it down to Christianity, so that should count for something. But I do like a lot of the good pagan rituals. And incense - no one uses incense like the Catholics. What ambiance!”
Nathan snorted and pretended to hit his head against the porch post. “You are no more decisive than I am,” Sarah rebuffed. “I’m not church hopping, truly.” She insisted. “I’m … keeping my options open.” At that we all laughed and for the first time I noticed how the sound harmonized with the ocean song, adding light to the thunderous depths. “Okay, I’ve been ridiculed enough tonight. It’s Jennifer’s turn to read.” Sarah leaned toward my chair.
I swallowed once, my chin dipping down shyly. “It’s Tennyson,” I said, my voice cracking as I moved from laughter to reciting. I brushed my hair behind my shoulders, picked up my book and opened it to the marked page. “Just the few lines, right?” I asked nervously.
“Whatever you want,” Sarah assured me. Nathan relaxed his head against the post and turned away from me so I only saw the curving plane of his cheek, the corner of his eye and the muscles in his neck as I began.
“Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.”
My voice faded with each line, until the last came out in a hoarse whisper. An unwelcome tear burned the side of my eye, slowly closed my throat. I wanted to turn my face away, but they already knew. If only Nathan wasn’t sitting five feet away from me. At least he had the decency not to look at me. He kept his gaze shifted up to the sky and I copied, noticing the black, spiky silhouettes of the pine trees against the canvas of night. I held my eyes wide open in the breezy air and blinked to force the tear back in.
“You love her, don’t you?” Sarah asked. I already knew when someone said
her
in that reverent tone it meant the sea.
My throat croaked from a word I started and quitted. I paused, groping for the truth. “She is strange to me.” I let my thoughts finish before the slow words rolled out. “Beautiful and intimidating and … strange.”
“She is a woman,” Nathan said, his accent subtle, but rich, in his quiet words.
Sarah turned toward the house as if she could see through it to the midnight waves and we lapsed into a comfortable quiet, each listening to the ocean’s whispers. What the sea said to Nathan or Sarah, I cannot say, but to me she cooed something like “Once upon a time …”
Almost as imperceptibly as the stars steal into the dark sky, Nathan slipped away with a simple, unassuming “goodnight.” Once we were alone, I turned to Sarah to find her gaze fixed on me, which gave me a queer feeling of being stared at by my future self. If only I could end up so elegant!
Her lips parted slowly and I expected her to say something about the lines or Nathan or even the night. Instead she began without preamble and said very softly, very gently, “The story begins so beautifully.” I blinked and dragged in a long breath while my limbs stiffened. I needed to know, but the thought of listening to a story that ended in the complete destruction of my family made me feel ill. I poised rigidly in my chair, a part of me, somewhere between my stomach and my spine, trembling timorously. “It was my senior year. My senior recital. Everything good at home. My father was having a tough time with his sardine catches and putting in some factory hours, but nothing out of the ordinary. I’d been accepted into the theater and art department at the University of Maine and I was practicing my valedictorian speech. I was going to be a dancer. And save the world in my spare time. All the normal plans of a naïve idealist.
“Then a few weeks before my graduation my father came down with the flu. We thought it was the flu. After two weeks of throwing up and stomachaches he went to see the doctor.” Sarah stopped and I watched her eyes fill with tears that grew heavy and fell before she could even blink them away. “Cancer. They thought pancreatic. They couldn’t be sure because it spread everywhere. It was eating him alive. He died a month later, right after I graduated.” My gut twisted and I pushed my lips hard together, hating the words sliding into my ears. “He couldn’t go. He was, well, he was mostly already gone.” Her swimming eyes pulled me into their depths of dark sorrow. “It was so fast, Jennifer. From perfect and strong and laughing to … dead.” The last word hit like an iron club, thudding against my soul in a terrible finality. “So fast.
“So I went off to college, dazed and in denial. I cannot tell you how many times I picked up the phone to call my dad …” her voice faded into nothing and I waited until she resumed. “We were always close. So I think I sort of detached. I didn’t come home much, took summer classes, kept my vacations short. Always an excuse not to be here. Because he wasn’t here. I couldn’t stand it. I thought of my feelings a lot. I didn’t really consider what it did to Claire to lose Dad and then me. I was a terrible sister.”
Chester clawed at the door and let out a deep cry, interrupting Sarah’s hypnotic words. I quickly opened the door and scooped him up, grateful for something warm to hold as the icy words crystallized inside me. I sat cross-legged on the porch and said a quiet “I’m sorry” as I settled Chester into my lap.
Sarah watched the cat lean into my hand and let out a booming purr, but her expression remained empty, distant. “My Junior year of college I was starting to put life back together, falling in love, getting good parts in the productions. Healing. And then …” she stopped, indecision in her eyes, her posture hesitant. “I … I went on a research trip with a friend over the summer. I was gone for six weeks.” She raised her head, a more business-like tone to her voice. “You see, life is about timing sometimes. Often. And my timing … it’s like a curse out of Shakespeare. I just do everything at the wrong time. When I got back to school my roommates were frantic, saying they called the police, everything they could think of to get a hold of me. I asked them why – they knew where I was going – and they said I needed to call my sister right away. They barely looked at me, Jennifer. I refused to call until someone told me what was wrong and they refused to say anything. I yelled at them, they yelled back. I knew it was bad.
“So, I called. Claire answered the phone and started crying, just sobbing, and asked me where I had been and if I was okay. I told her I was fine, I’d been on a trip just like I’d told them, and asked her what was wrong. She said, ‘Mother, Sarah. Mother had a stroke.’” Sarah’s hands halted in midair. “I froze. If I ever go to hell I will recognize it from that moment. My entire body full of a painful fire I couldn’t escape. And then it got a thousand times worse. She said, ‘She died, Sarah. I’m so sorry. We tried to find you. We did everything. We couldn’t wait any longer.’”
Sarah paused again, probably in response to my expression of horror. I wanted to push my hand over her mouth, make the story stop. I shivered uncontrollably, my teeth chattering and tried not to grip Chester too tightly. I could tell Sarah had told the story before because she kept herself somewhat poised and factual, despite her fluctuating voice and wet eyes. I should have asked what happened next, but I couldn’t speak, couldn’t control my knocking teeth long enough to make words come out.
Sarah sighed and skipped over some of the story by simply saying, “She was only 47 years old. Claire told me that they buried my mother a week earlier. Our estranged uncle from New York had come and left, offering to handle the paperwork, taxes, will. Claire was all alone. I got home to Smithport a few days later. When I opened the door, Claire came storming out of the house with a suitcase. I went to hug her but the look on her face … Medusa couldn’t match it. I froze on the porch when I saw her and she started shouting. Hysterically shouting. When I finally got over the shock I asked her what she was talking about. On the phone she sounded fine. I mean fine, between us. She sounded relieved to hear my voice, desperate to see me. I never understood what happened between my call home and that day.” Sarah rested her gaze on me, hunting for some clue to put the savagely crumbled puzzle back together.
“Claire only said one logical thing to me that day. She said, ‘you get the house. I’m taking the insurance money for school.’” I watched her get into my mother’s car and I ran after her but she wouldn’t even look at me. I thought she would calm down and call me later. I thought we would make up. I have not seen her since that day. I’ve tried, mind you, but she always kept me away.” Sarah let her hands, which had been gesticulating gracefully, grow still and fall into her lap. I hung my head, watching Chester’s thick orange fur absorb my tears.
“Where were you, when they couldn’t find you?” I asked nervously.
Sarah deflated, her shoulders falling heavily. “You would ask that. I suppose a story half told isn’t a true story. I was in South Africa.”
“South Africa?” I blurted. That answer was just one line above Outer Mongolia on the list of things I didn’t expect her to say. “Why were you there?”
“I went as a research assistant. A PhD student was doing his thesis on dramatic therapy, helping to counsel people using role-play and drama. I took his class and he invited me to go as his assistant. We weren’t exactly reachable. The school tried to contact us, but we were traveling to different clinics and we never got the messages in time.”
“You went to
South Africa
?” I tried to fit the label of “world traveler” into my image of her.
“It was a long time ago.” She rubbed her neck, looking uncomfortable. Something about her eagerness to leave the topic alone made me more curious. Not quite willing to push my luck, I changed direction back to the original story.
“How long did it take you to get home after you talked to my Mother?”
A nervous tremor shot up her body and disappeared. “What do you mean?”
“You were only a couple hours away at the University of Maine when you called her. But you said you got home a few days later.” I swallowed and took a steadying breath before asking, “Was it five days?” My mother’s words marched like the condemned up and down the corridors of my mind –
five days, five days, five days
.
“I, I don’t know,” Sarah said, fear tightening her face. “I never counted. I got there as fast as I could. I just, I went to tell John. I needed …” Her eyes flickered coldly and then refocused. “I had a … boyfriend. Let’s just call him that. It doesn’t really fit, but close enough. After our trip to Africa he went home to Boston to finish his research. Anyway, I went to tell him and then I went home.” Sarah’s voice changed abruptly, serious and dreadful, “What is five days, Jennifer?”
“He was the one you went with? John was the PhD student?
“What is five days, Jennifer?” She asked, undeterred.
How could I tell her? I tried to look away, hide the terrible knowledge that hung heavy in my chest, but her eyes wouldn’t release me. At last I answered reluctantly, “My mother didn’t tell me anything.
Anything
. She just said that she was alone in the world and she needed you and you didn’t come for five days. She said… she said it felt like a long time,” I finished lamely, not willing to repeat Mother’s agonized description.
“Nooo,” Sarah drew the word out, her voice dripping with pain. “Jasper! I was coming. I was half delirious and then…” she looked to me like I could absolve her, but I met her appalled eyes with my sickened face. “I didn’t mean to not come home. Truly, it was the worst timing. . .” Sarah gave up and sat still, looking as ill as I felt. I pushed my hand over Chester’s fur, concentrating on the way his silky hair parted beneath my fingers. The world felt very big in that instant and I feared any movement, even a glance, would eject me from my place on the furiously spinning globe and throw me into the black abyss of space with only my aunt’s pain as my last memory.
“I think I knew that was part of it, but I never realized that
was
it. All of it. Five days! And I did it.
I did it
,” she repeated, revulsion distorting her voice. She decided “jasper” wouldn’t suffice and swore under her breath. “I’m sorry,” she said immediately, shaking her hand at me to erase the ugly word. “I’m so sorry!” She wasn’t just talking about the swearing anymore. “Why won’t she talk to me? Why?” She demanded, thumping her fist against the arm of her chair and looking at me, trying to find her sister’s reasons somewhere in my face. But the answers didn’t lie with me. Only more questions. And pity as deep as the sea.