Miracle Beach (12 page)

But as far as she could see, there was nothing but water. And Macy reminded herself that the only thing that had washed ashore there lately was a severed right foot, still wearing its shoe.

Still, she walked. Until the sun sank and the water rose higher and Macy grew dizzy from the constant scanning. Looking over her right shoulder, she could see that the thick stretch of Miracle Beach where people tended to congregate had emptied. The water, as clean and clear as the air, had turned opaque below her without the sun shining on it. Three fires flickered on the sand in the almost-night. The mountains that stood dark and tall across the strait now nearly blended with a deepening sky. Soon, in a matter of minutes, not hours, they would look less like shadows and become almost invisible as night closed in around them. And her.

Macy had run out of time. Her day—their day—had ended.

She gulped the last of the wine from her glass and tossed it as hard as she could. She thought she heard it break, the sound like a wind chime.
Take that
, she thought. She wished she had another to whip at the water.

She did, she realized. She had another glass, and a bottle. And then she felt foolish. The glasses, the corkscrew, the wine. Hauling it all out here in a bag at exactly three p.m. central time. For what? So that her dead husband could conspire with the universe and send her a message in a bottle? And what if he had? What difference would it make?

Because Nash wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere. He was just gone. And he wasn’t coming back.

THE BLACKNESS OF THAT NOWHERE TIME BETWEEN MIDNIGHT and dawn settled on Jack like a stifling blanket. He had never been big on sleep, had never needed much, although as a much younger man, he had always been able to will it to him if he wished. But the older he got the less often it came. It seemed to know he wanted it, needed it—if for no other reason than to fill a few more hours in the day—but it taunted him from just beyond the footboard; it forbade him to fall into it.

So, on those mornings—or late nights, as the young folks and those who believed they were still that young swayed their way home from the bars liked to think of them—Jack would walk.

Despite it being summer, Jack could feel the bite of the night air coming through his window. He swaddled himself in layers of outerwear and, after gingerly closing the door behind him, headed behind the barn and down toward the beach.

Too many times to count, Jack had trudged through Wisconsin’s thick northern woods in the November dark, his way lit by the moon on snow layered like powdered sugar. He was always the first one out of camp, hoping to arrive at his hunting post before the deer. A little snow on the ground now and he might’ve been right back there. But before long, the canopy of trees and pitch-blackness gave way to a wide expanse of beach lit like a stage by the moon.

The rocky beach growled beneath Jack’s feet as he made his way toward a giant driftwood log that looked to be the perfect place to camp out and watch the ocean.

The water was Jack’s favorite thing about Vancouver Island. Wherever you went, it was there, always in motion. The sound that sang to him like a lullaby—the lap-lull-lap-lull-lap beat of it flirting with the beach. Kiss and retreat, kiss and retreat. In no other place did water make that kind of sound or keep that particular rhythm. Even the ocean in Mexico seemed to speak differently, Jack thought. There, the water whispered over sand beaches. Here, it moved sternly over rocks, stating its case. He stripped off his jacket to put underneath him before settling back against the log.

Jack must’ve slipped off to sleep, because he woke to someone calling, “Hey, there! Everything okay?”

He waved to the figure, lit by a beam of moonlight, and gave a thumbs-up in the general direction from where the voice was shouting, a rowboat about a hundred feet offshore. Then he took a second, closer look.

“Ms. McLean? Sophie? That you?”

“Jack?” the voice called back. “You wait there. I’ll row in.”

“Well, I’m sure as hell not going wading,” Jack muttered.

As Sophie pulled her rowboat onto the beach, it struck Jack how small she seemed—like a kid playing dress-up. She had on yellow waterproof pants that seemed fit for someone three times her size, held up only by built-in suspenders. Even her black fleece sweatshirt draped from her shoulders as if on a waifish storefront mannequin.

“What are you doing out here?” Jack asked Sophie. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“Actually, it’s around three in the morning. And I should ask you the same thing,” she said. They looked at each other, neither of them speaking. After a time, Sophie asked, “Well, are you getting in?”

“Uhh, I don’t know,” Jack stammered. “What are you—I mean, how long do you think—”

“How about I make this easier for you? Get in.”

Jack did as he was told.

He climbed into the middle, thinking that he could row—although where to, he wasn’t quite sure. But when Sophie pushed the little boat from shore and hopped in, she settled at the stern. With a couple of quick pulls, a motor so tiny that Jack hadn’t even noticed it murmured and came to life, and Sophie guided the boat out into the ocean. Jack had turned himself around so he now faced rearward. He fixed his gaze on the boat’s tiny wake cutting through the water’s opaque surface, a paper cut bleeding silver.

Jack remembered Nash telling him that no matter what time of year it was on the island, in the mornings and late evenings, fall always felt just seconds away. Maybe this was why Nash had liked it so much here—twinges of his favorite season all year round.

They were headed straight across toward Quadra Island when Sophie cut the motor unexpectedly.

“Problem?” asked Jack.

“Only if you don’t like catching fish,” Sophie said. She pointed, drawing his attention to bursts of splashing he could now hear all around them. First at three o’clock to their boat, then at seven, and another at one, all originating from under the water and jumping straight up.

“Are those
fish
?” Jack asked.

“Not just fish, Jackie. Salmon.”

Their little boat bobbed on a quiet ocean as Sophie got to work. Two poles seemed to materialize, and onto both she threaded a transparent line. Then she rummaged in a tackle box at her feet and produced two spoons that flashed intermittently in the moonlight.

“Lucky dog,” she looked up and said, as if finally remembering Jack was there.

“Huh?”

“We’re going to use Lucky Dogs for lures. They’ll work fine.”

“Is there something that works better?”

Sophie thought for a moment. “Nah, not really. Not for this time of day. I’m partial to my other Luckys”—she held up a red-and-white shovel-nosed wooden lure that resembled a small fish—“Lucky Louies. But they’re sort of a collector’s item, if you will, and the tide is still out, so the dogfish are probably out in force right now, and I don’t want to risk losing any of these guys.”

Jack had no idea what the hell she was talking about. He was a hunter: deer, duck, and pheasant. He’d never been much of a fisherman, for no reason he could pinpoint at the moment. He nodded, if only to acknowledge that Sophie had been speaking to him.

She handed Jack a pole, which upon examination he was surprised to find was missing two things he thought were imperative to catching fish: a barbed hook and live bait.

“Uh, I think you forgot something here, ma’am,” he said. And he knew as soon as he said it what was coming.

“There you go ma’aming me again. Gal darn, Jack. I’m not
that
old, you know!” Sophie shook her head at him. “Anyways, you’re all set there. Go ahead.”

“But there’s no bait.”

“Don’t use bait, Jack.”

“What about this hook?”

“What about it?”

“There’s no barb,” Jack pointed out, though he wondered why he needed to.

“Nope, there isn’t,” Sophie said. “I like to fish Tyee Club rules. That means no jigs, no bait, and barbless hooks only. Oh, and no motors. Usually. Though it would take these old arms eons to row all the way out here, so tonight we cheated a wee bit.”

“But why?” Jack couldn’t understand for the life of him why, with fish all around them nearly jumping into the boat, Sophie wouldn’t want to nab one and get home.

“It levels the playing field,” she said. “Makes things fairer for the fish. Gives them a bit of a fighting chance. And then I don’t feel as guilty—like when I get one, I don’t feel as though I’ve tricked it. So even when I’m way outside the Tyee Pool—that’s a particular area the club fishes—I still fish by as many of those rules as I can. Plus, I can only eat so much salmon, and my clients tend to take more than their fair share. The rules even it all out.”

Sophie cast out and nodded for Jack to do the same.

“Plus,” she added, “I promise you’ve never seen a sadder thing than a fish starved to death because of a barb stuck in its gullet. They don’t ask for that. We shouldn’t give it to ’em.”

Jack nodded. There wasn’t much argument he could think to muster against that point. And so he watched Sophie, who watched the span of water in front of her with a mix of reverence and intensity. Sophie’s rod seemed to be an extension of her body, the line an extra set of fingers with which to sense the motion beneath the water’s surface.

“How did you start doing this?” Jack asked. “How did you learn it all?” He thought of Nash then, living here on an island focused on fishing like Green Bay was on the Packers. He wondered if anyone had ever asked Nash how it was that he didn’t know how to tie a lure or even cast. He wondered what Nash might have said. Jack felt a sick stab in his gut that he’d never made time to take his son fishing. He’d done other things for Nash, he reasoned—coached his hockey team, helped him with geometry, grilled steaks and potatoes for a small group of Nash and his friends before his senior prom. But he’d never set out onto the Fox River or one of the nearby lakes with his son, just the two of them alone in a boat for a good stretch of the morning.

“My dad,” she said.

Jack nodded. Of course it had been her dad. Those were the sorts of things dads were supposed to do.

“It took me almost fifteen years to catch my first certifiable Tyee,” she said. “And my pap rowed me to it the day before he died.”

Sophie dug inside the pants of her survival suit, and Jack, unsure as to what exactly was going on, looked away. But he heard her say, “Here,” and when he looked back she was holding a worn photograph inside a plastic sleeve.

Sophie was standing near the weigh scales, her fifty-one-pound fish nearly as long as and looking heavier than she was. The fish, hanging by its tail, mouth agape, seemed surprised to find itself in that position. Sophie had one sun-browned and scrawny arm slung casually around the fish, the way most young girls posed with their best friends. The camera had caught her stealing a glance at her father, who stood off to the side, beaming, with both arms extended out toward Sophie as if to say, “Look at this girl—my girl!”

“It was a good moment. It was a good day,” she said.

And then she told him about the day that followed. How, before dawn the next morning, her father boarded a friend’s commercial fishing boat to fill in for a sick deckhand. They’d headed north through the Seymour Narrows—a spot Captain George Vancouver described in the late 1700s as “one of the vilest stretches of water in the world” because of the twin peaks of Ripple Rock that lurked just beneath the narrows’ surface and the spontaneous whirlpools they produced.

That was the last time Sophie McLean had seen her father. “They just vanished,” she said. “And there was no searching for people who went down in the narrows.” Sophie told him how, years later, when engineers attempted to soften Ripple Rock’s peaks with the biggest nonnuclear explosion on record, she was sitting at her family’s kitchen table—that picture in hand—remembering that day she caught the Tyee with her pap, as the salt and pepper shakers rattled against the seashell napkin holder, all the while hoping that her dad’s final resting place was elsewhere.

Jack didn’t have any idea what Nash had done the day before he died, or whom he had spent it with. And how expensive would it have been to call his son at the end of every day, just to check in? Jack scoffed. Money wasn’t the thing. Still, if someone had told him to do just that, Jack would have dismissed the idea out of hand. His son had his life to live, after all. There wouldn’t have been all that much to talk about every single day. But having something to talk about seemed absolutely ludicrous now. Simply hearing Nash’s voice, his deep belly laugh, would have been more than plenty.

Jack leaned over the side of the boat and tried to peer down into the water, but the sky was still black and the surface shone back up at him as a mirrored sheet of sequins, prohibiting any real depth of vision. He would do this whenever he was out in large expanses of water, trying to see what was down there, underneath. And it scared the bejesus out of him every single time. Jack had seen Shark Week and programs like it, and none of those underwater scenes looked anything like the ones found on bedspreads or made into poster-size prints—all colorful and idyllic.