Further Out Than You Thought (32 page)

He was yelling. “Tink, Fifi!” A hundred gulls or more huddled on the beach between them flapped and flew and took to the sky, circling. And then Leo was beside her, breathing hard. “Tink,” he said, “Tink,” and his eyes were bright. “I thought you—I was watching and then—you were gone. You and Fifi. I was alone for a lifetime. And I didn't like it, Tink, not one bit.” She searched his eyes and found they had the ocean in them, all that orange fire. He pulled her close and squeezed her like he'd never let her go.

Feeling the warmth of him, melting with it, she wondered how he
hadn't
managed to find her. Had he looked?

He took her hand and they walked down the beach, back toward the pier. “Tink?”

“Don't call me that.”

“Why not?”

“Because we're at the end of the play now. We're at the end and that's when Tinker Bell takes the poison that's meant for Peter, because she wants to save him. But she can't save him. I mean, she does, in the play. In the play, she almost kills herself for love. I'm not going to do that.”

He was quiet. She saw the gulls land behind him. “I thought we were at the beginning,” he said at last. And she found herself wishing it were true.

They stood in the shallows and watched the sun at the edge of the deep end redden to a bright coal and sink. The clouds flushed and darkened, and the sky turned a pale, watery blue. Gwen spotted a bird out there, its far silhouette. A large bird, not flapping, soaring. It was following a boat, riding its current of wind. She thought of the albatross, the boat ride to Sausalito. She thought of her father, at home in his study, on his first Scotch by now, and she longed to hear his voice.

A girl was coming toward them, passing them, turning her quick cartwheels on the hard sand. She couldn't have been more than seven. She wore a loose dress that fell over her face each time she was upside down. She was followed by a couple, holding hands, talking and laughing. They wore sweatshirts and jeans rolled up to their calves. They smiled at Gwen and Leo and said hello. So easy. A life by the sea. She took Leo's hand and pressed it. In return, he gave her hand a squeeze that was somehow weaker and briefer than she'd wanted.

Looking over the ocean to that farthest line, where the lighter blue met the darker, she thought she saw a sprig of water, a burst, so small from this distance, this edge where the waves swallowed her feet and Leo's and then rushed back, leaving them covered with sand. There was nothing, and then she saw what appeared to be another spray of water. She pointed. “Do you see?”

“Whales,” he said.

“Whales?” she said, and she tightened her grip on his hand, and said, again, “Whales,” to feel the wide word in her mouth, the inhalation of breath it seemed to necessitate.

He let her hand go and began to talk in earnest now, and she listened to him from a great distance. “God, it's been years,” he said, and she was, she realized, years away, far into the future, looking back on the moment, the father of her child talking about when he'd been a kid. She tried to notice things, the way he spoke with his hands, gesticulating, the way his face reflected the calm gloss of the afterglow. “When I needed to be alone,” he was saying, “I'd come out here, out to the pier. I'd run to the very end, to where I couldn't go any further, and the ocean would take it, all of it. I'd feel so small by comparison, all of my worries, my anger, none of it mattered. And I remember seeing the whales. I pretended I could hear them calling me—like we knew each other, across all that water.”

They were back to where she'd dropped her purse and purchases. She found her jug of water and drank from it in big gulps. She changed from her suit into her dress and drew her sweater around her. It was getting cold.

“Let me see,” she said, reaching for Leo's arm. The wound was sealed shut. Less livid, it seemed to be healing. Even so, she doused it with hydrogen peroxide, and when the fizzing stopped she smeared it with the antiseptic ointment and covered it with a bandage.

Leo had spent the afternoon gathering driftwood. There was a cement ring beside them and a pile of wood beside that. And now, in the center of the ring, he leaned twigs together in the shape of a teepee, and the bigger sticks over those in the same shape. He took his time perfecting the design, as if it wouldn't all go up in flames.

Looking out at the blackening sky, at Venus, low and yellow over the dark water, she found she was thinking of a snake, or a poem with a snake in it—the Ouroboros encircling Brett's arm (which was also a poem), her arm moving as she danced, serpentine. Gwen felt in her purse for the notebook and her good fountain pen, the one her father had given her to show his support for her writing. In the gloaming, she put pen to paper. Hardly able to see her own scrawl, she wrote as it came to her, line by line. It felt like an exercise in trust—this writing in the near dark.

Venus, the goddess of love, winked at her, but planets weren't supposed to flicker.

She wrote the line and like magic her heart slowed. Her heart was the languid breaking of the waves. It was wide open like that, like arms before a long-awaited embrace. She watched the waves, the way they phosphoresced as they crashed, turning a brilliant green and glowing. The sky was dark, and she could no longer see the page. She closed her notebook, twisted the lid onto her pen. But she'd written. At last she'd started something new.

Leo balled up newspaper and stuffed it into the structure like batting. His thumb flicked the wheel of a lighter he'd found in the sand, flicked it over and over, until a flame appeared in the dark. The paper caught quick, as did a few twigs, but the big pieces of wood only smoked. He kept at it until the fire took, enough for a small glow, and they sat close, warming themselves. Sparks lifted into the cooling night. As he stoked the fire, she watched him with a fondness she recognized as maternal. And mothers must let go, she thought. In the flickering light, his hair a tangle of ringlets, his hands and his face smudged with ash, he was the beautiful boy he had always been, would always be: happiest in his freedom, squatting beside the fire and poking it here and there with a stick, tossing in new balls of newspaper for extra flare.

He hadn't eaten all day, and she was hungry again, so she left him to his fire, walked to the Pizza By the Slice shop beside Frank's and brought back four big slices of pepperoni. They devoured them, agreeing that pizza had never tasted quite so good. They fed Fifi their crusts and she rolled in the sand and curled up beside them.

When the fire had dwindled to coals, they lay back, Gwen's head on his arm. The stars had come out, the marine layer of moisture having lifted and somehow cleared. The moon had yet to rise, and in the deep sky there were more stars than she'd ever seen. The sky was cloudy with them. And she thought she could see, in the Milky Way galaxy, the snake with its mouth ajar, its tail inserted. Here on Earth, they were a part of it, part of this very galaxy. Galaxy from the Greek
galactose,
meaning milk, which her body, all by itself, would soon make—as if she were the universe, she thought, and she focused on a dark portion of the sky, feeling its mystery as though it were her own.

Leo was talking and his voice—or was it the stars?—made her eyelids heavy. She fought to keep them open, waiting for that one shooting star. “We can only exist in a thirteen-billion-year-old universe,” Leo was saying. “We come from the stars and it takes time for there to be enough atoms from all these stars to make us. An eleven-billion-year-old universe would be too young, and in another twelve billion years, it'll all collapse into itself and then, maybe, there'll be another Big Bang, and we'll start all over again.”

Her eyes were shut, she'd been drifting. She willed them open, and just as they focused there it was—the falling star. Not very long or luminous. Just a tiny fleck of light falling from a corner of the sky. Her falling star.

She made a wish.

SHE HEARD THE gulls' cries and the slow, rhythmic crashing of the waves, and she lifted one drowsy eyelid. Dawn had brought the fog. Soon she'd become aware of just where she was and the fact that she'd slept all night on this bed of sand, but for a moment longer the dream hung like an overlay on the fog. She couldn't pin it to any characters or actions. It had the texture of dissolution, a thread she'd held in her fingers as it frayed and thinned to air. Less narrative than lyrical—like the ocean that had risen in the night, nearly taking them with it, and was now retreating, leaving in its wake a stretch of flat, abandoned sand—the dream left in her a sense of anguish. Loss in the form of an emptiness that nothing and no one could fill. She felt hollow, and rather than dissipating, the feeling intensified with the realization that she was more or less alone. Fifi lay on the sand beside her, but Leo was gone.

Her purse was splayed open, and a few of its contents—her brush, her notebook and her pen—were spilled onto the sand. The violation sent a jolt of panic through her. She checked to see if her wallet was still there and it was, along with her cash. The baggie that had held the mushrooms was there, too, only now it was empty. Mystery solved.

Leo was out in the fog again, spending another morning in Neverland.

She stood up, brushed the sand from her legs. Crouching behind a boulder, she lifted her dress, squatted in the soft, dry sand and peed. The morning was moist as a good kiss, and colder—her favorite sort of morning. Beside her purse was the jug of water, nearly half left. She drank, and walked down to the ocean.

Looking into the fog, she could see as far as the nearest wave—the red-brown curl and the ruddy foam, so very different, she thought, from the pure white from which Aphrodite had sprung. Still, the ocean was the ocean and she had to get in it, to immerse herself and come out new. Groggy and inspired, she ran back to their tousled camp and changed from her dress to her bathing suit. She walked into the ocean one slow step at a time, feeling each inch of her calves and her thighs as the gelid water shocked them to life. Behind her, Fifi followed the tideline up and back, barking at the waves.

Out of the mist, a red wave rose and crashed. Another followed close behind it, dissolving to milk at her waist, and then she saw him in the low cloud. He had never been much of a swimmer, but now he sputtered, he floundered, he sank. Perhaps he was calling her name, but all she could hear was the roar of the waves. From where she stood, she felt the riptide tug at her legs. It was stronger than it had been the day before. The waves grew big and bigger, folding in on each other as the tide rushed in and, more fervently, out again. Thick with kelp, the white water surged and hissed. He waved at her, flailing his arms.

Not waving, but drowning.

Perfect, she thought. Now it was his turn. The Fool on the edge. But where was his little white dog to keep him from tumbling off the cliff? Gwen could no longer hear her bark over the ocean.

The low cloud moved past them, shoreward, and in the clearing she could see a swatch of red fabric flying from the pier. Red for warning: danger. A notch up from yesterday's yellow, it was a signal she was sure he'd missed.

She yelled for him, and the ocean folded her voice into its fervent, hissing body. She wanted to turn around and head for shore. After all, no harm could come to the Fool. The sea would save him. It had to. And she had her child to think about. No, she insisted, she'd go no deeper.

Here was a wave and she caught it. The surge hurled her toward shore, her arms out in Superman fashion, as though she were flying—how her mother had showed her, her mother who had taught herself to swim, who'd mastered Lotta's fear of the water and made sure Gwen had loved it, seeing that she was on the swim team every summer, that she had strength and stamina. For what? To let this man she loved drown? She turned back to where he had been, but the fog had closed in again. She could see just as far as her hand.

Panic shot its numb, breathless electricity through her stomach and her chest, down her arms and legs. She realized that he might actually die and she was the only one who could save him. “Leo!” she called. The ocean answered with its thunder. She was a survivor. She'd survived her mother's death, she'd survived the riots, and she'd survive this, too. She swam under one wave and held her breath. Another wave moved over her and pushed her to the ocean floor. She thought of the child inside her and she felt powerful, capable of any feat. She fought her way up through the seething water and gulped air. With the next wave she was down again, where the rip seized and sent her out further. It was yesterday all over, only worse. No sooner had she thought it than she knew. This would never happen again.

If she made it out of this ocean, she would leave him.

She swam parallel to the shore—one fierce breaststroke after another. The stroke had won her a blue ribbon once, and she could almost hear the crowd of parents and children yelling, cheering, her mother's voice over them all, and she darted under the surface until the riptide had lost its hold and she was free. She saw him, further out still, but close enough to reach. Another wave swept him up and she swam to where it would fling him, her eyes open in the teeming ocean. The salt stung but she found him, a dark mass in the plankton and the kelp. Flotsam. The sailor sunk when the ship had foundered. Their ship. What was no more. She wrapped her arms around his waist, pushed off from the ocean floor and kicked. He was deadweight. She needed oxygen. She gripped his wrist with her hand and reached the surface, sucking in the air. The ocean swelled and gathered and curled around them. She took one stroke, two, and then lost her hold.

Either the ocean would take him, or it would let him go. She'd done all she could.