Miracle Beach (19 page)

But then there was the matter of the mattress. How to erase him from that? How to erase him at all?

Macy left the sheets straggling off the bed, as if they had been victim of fierce lovemaking instead of quite the opposite. She gathered Nash’s baseball hat, taking time to wind up like a pitcher on the mound and whipping the watch inside it at the wall of their room that seemed to be the best stand-in she could find at the moment for her cheating, son-of-a-bitch husband.

“You’re damn lucky you’re dead, Nash,” she muttered. Then she burst into tears.

Macy opened drawers, pulling out Nash’s old T-shirts from concerts and hockey tournaments that had survived this long on sheer nostalgia. She piled his favorite jeans on top of them, stopping to think that his legs would never fill them again. Right then, she couldn’t put a finger on how she felt about that, so she moved on to the closet, tossing shirts and ties onto the growing mountain of clothes in the middle of the bedroom floor.

And somewhere in the midst of the mad pulling and yanking and piling of clothes, Macy’s fingers closed around something as familiar to her as her own skin: Nash’s UW sweatshirt.

It was gray with red lettering. A hoodie with WISCONSIN arching over the figure of a sweater-clad badger. The kind of sweatshirt that was once heavy but was now threadbare, the front pocket ripped almost clear off, the neck cut into a vee to make room for Nash’s 17.5-inch neck and now comfortably frayed.

It was the one item of clothing that the Nash in her mind always wore. His parents had given it to him the day they visited the Madison campus for the first time. He had probably worn it weekly, if not more often, until the end.

Macy brought it to her nose and inhaled. It smelled faintly of him: musky and spicy and with a hint of something rich like leather. She smiled, thinking about how she used to bury her head into the crook of his neck to fill her nostrils with exactly this scent. And then she thought of that little kid sitting at her kitchen table and just how she came to be, and Macy found herself growling hard and low like a junkyard dog.

She had the urge to get back at him. To hurt him like he had hurt her. The impulse settled in her stomach like hunger. It parched her throat like thirst.

It came to her then. His wine. Nash’s precious collection of wine that she knew, in an unspoken directive, she wasn’t to open. He had started collecting it in college, back before he even appreciated it, because he admired his roommate’s dad and, by proxy, the man’s collection of and knowledge about wine. By the time he moved to the island to be with Macy, his collection took up almost a larger portion of the U-Haul than his couch. It was for special occasions, he said. He knew which bottles should be opened when, and how much they would be worth. In Nash’s own kind way, he had made it clear that the wines downstairs in the basement were for appreciating, savoring at special moments, and that they were largely lost on Macy’s unrefined palate. But those special moments rarely, if ever, materialized. The wine collection was just that—a collection. A museum piece.

Now, though, Nash wasn’t there to lecture her if he found she had cracked open a bottle. He wasn’t there to say that they really should save this one or that for whatever reason. Now she had the whole damn cellar to herself. And she could sip or swig her way through it without anyone muttering one single word of disapproval. In fact, that was exactly what she was going to do.

Screw you
, she thought.
You want to mess around. Well, watch this.

Macy pictured herself selecting the most expensive bottle of wine, and if she didn’t like it, she’d simply pour it down the sink and open another. No matter that she hadn’t a clue as to how to pick out the most expensive bottle; she hoped the fanciness of the labels might help guide her.

Macy eased open the door of her bedroom, peering down the hall to make sure everyone had gone to bed. The house lay dark and quiet. Only the light above the kitchen sink spilled out into the foyer area and living room as she made her way toward the basement. Macy didn’t know what she had expected to find, but it wasn’t this. The silence put her on edge. She would rather the scene from her bedroom, or the chaos of the kitchen before that. Both better matched her mood.

She opened the door to the basement, expecting to have to feel her way to the light switch, and was surprised to find she could see straight down the stairs. And then she heard voices. Muffled voices.

Macy decided to leave the light off and pulled her hand back from the switch. She picked her way down the stairs one at a time, trying to make her footfall as light as possible.

From her perch, hidden behind a half wall, she could see that while she had been smashing everything that hadn’t been nailed down, someone had pulled out the couch in the basement for Glory and tucked her in with a raggedy stuffed monkey. Macy had no idea where the monkey had come from, but the girl was holding it tight to her chest and staring up at Jack. Someone—Macy figured it had been Sophie—had also found a night-light and an old T-shirt for the girl to sleep in.

“She said she’ll come by tomorrow—early,” Glory said. “She said she was just going to leave out the basement door.”

So Sophie had left her here. And then sneaked out.
Coward
, Macy thought.

Macy saw Jack nod absently. “You need anything, baby girl?” he asked her.

Glory shook her head. Jack patted her tiny feet poking out from under the blanket. “Okay, then. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Jack got up and moved toward the stairs. Macy held her breath, wondering what she’d say to the two of them if they found her sitting there.

“She doesn’t like me.”

Glory had pushed herself up in bed, still clutching the monkey.

“What’s that?” Jack asked her.

“She doesn’t want me here,” Glory said. “The Blue Angels lady—she’s mad at me.”

I’m not mad at
you, Macy thought, though she wasn’t wholly sure she believed that.

“It’s just a surprise, your being here, that’s all,” said Jack. “And some people don’t take too well to surprises. Macy’s very nice. You’ll see. Just give her a little time.”

“Okay. B-but—I just don’t want to go home,” Glory said. “I can still live here, right? Even if my dad doesn’t live here anymore? I mean, he told me I could—in the letter.”

Oh, my God
, Macy thought.
Don’t you dare, Jack. Don’t you fucking dare.

Jack walked over, slid Glory back under the covers, and fluffed the pillow behind her.
“Shhhh,”
he crooned to her, stroking her forehead. “Just go to sleep now. No one’s going anywhere tonight, or tomorrow. It’s going to be okay. This is complicated, and you’re just going to have to be patient with us while we grown-ups figure things out. Okay?” He smoothed her damp blond ringlets.

Macy exhaled the breath she had been holding.

It occurred to Macy at that very moment that the daughter she and Nash would have had might look strikingly like Glory. This thought came to her with no real confirmation that the child she had been carrying was a girl, and with no knowledge of Glory’s mom’s coloring or race. But the simple possibility of it—of their child looking like the beautiful one now tucked into the ratty old couch in her basement—would have brought Macy straight to her knees had she not already been on them.

“Grandpa?” Glory asked.

“Yeah, ladybug?”

“Can I give you something?”

“Right now?” Jack asked.

Glory nodded.

“Sure,” he said. “Let’s see it.”

The girl reached down under the bed and pulled out a plastic box. She rooted around in it, among what looked like spools of needlepoint thread, and pulled out a red-and-white bracelet.

She handed it to Jack. “This is for you.”

“Did you make this?”

She nodded. “It took me from California all the way to Washington to finish it,” she said. “It was for my dad. But he’s dead, and you’re my grandpa. And I never had a grandpa before. So now it’s for you.”

She reached out for Jack’s hand, set it in her lap, and tied the bracelet onto his wrist.

“Does it say . . . Hmmm—let’s see here,” Jack said, seemingly trying to make out words on the bracelet.

“It says, ‘I love you,’ ” Glory said, saving him the struggle of deciphering it.

“Oh, Glory. This is so special. Thank you,” Jack said. Macy thought she heard his voice break. But he reached down and took the girl’s face in his hands and said as sure as anything, “I love you, too. And I’m glad you’re here.”

Jack kissed her forehead, turned out the light next to the girl’s foldout bed, and then turned back toward the stairs. Macy eased herself up and silently took two stairs at a time, carefully closing the basement door behind her. She hurried toward her room.

Even from the hallway, Macy’s bedroom looked like it had been the scene of either a rowdy party or a crime. Fragments of glass and ripped pieces of photographs littered the floor like confetti. Some drawers hung open. Others had been ripped clean out of the dresser and thrown about the room. And in the middle of it all was a mound of clothes that her once-husband had worn. As Macy stood there, hand still on the doorknob, surveying the scene, she wondered if he had worn anything in this pile when he fucked some other woman who was now Glory’s mom. She’d never know that one random fact, and she couldn’t decide whether that made her feel better or much, much worse.

Macy felt her hand close around something hanging on the doorknob. She slipped it off, and by the soft glow of the hallway night-light could see it was a bracelet just like the one the girl had given Jack, blue and yellow, with the words
Blue Angel
woven unevenly into it.

MAGDA SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE HOLDING A STEAMING MUG of water. A lemon wedge bobbed near the top. She had read several interviews with celebrities who claimed that hot water and lemon were the key to weight maintenance. Supposedly it took away cravings. Magda figured it couldn’t hurt to try. So far, she had yet to see the effects.

The morning sunlight—more of a gray haze than real light—filtered through a frosty coating on the sliding glass doors. It seemed as if fall were starting already. Only in Wisconsin could you go from can’t-breathe-hot-and-muggy to frost in a matter of days. The rest of the country was still in the throes of summer, but the early August mornings in De Pere were sneaking toward winter. Magda usually dreaded the snow and cold, but she didn’t mind the recent turn in the weather. It had been a hot, hard summer. She was ready for a change.

The house lay quiet, the frost on the doors cocooning her. She thought of the
Storm Stories
episode on the Weather Channel she had been watching last night when Ginny called to prattle on about her problems with Frank.

Magda had thought about disconnecting the phone before the show started—it was a good episode: avalanches and tornadoes, her two favorite natural disasters—but she didn’t want to miss Jack if he decided to call. She didn’t much care for floods or earthquakes, except for the History Channel special she’d seen a while ago,
Modern Marvels: Engineering Disasters 5
, in which an oil rig on a lake in Louisiana dug into a salt mine beneath it and created a whirlpool so powerful that it sucked down into the salt mine the entire lake, the handful of tankers on it, and more than sixty surrounding acres of land—all because of a fourteen-inch drill bit. Even the flow of the river that fed the lake reversed directions. It actually started flowing
north
from the Gulf of Mexico into the lake and created a massive waterfall. Magda had never seen anything like it. She was so fascinated by the whole debacle that she ordered a copy of the episode and kept it in her bedside table for safekeeping. After all, who knew when they’d air it again, if ever?

Last night, the Weather Channel’s
Storm Stories
was just getting interesting—two skiers had been covered by the avalanche and a reenactment had been set up to demonstrate what it was like to be buried under tons of snow and what smart tactics the buried skiers had used to survive—when the phone rang.

Not again
, Magda thought when she heard Ginny sniffling on the other end.

As it turned out, Ginny had checked Frank’s cell phone, found a strange number listed under
Fishing
, and in a very un-Ginny-like moment, mustered the gumption to call the number and berate the floozy who answered. But honestly, what did she expect from Magda? And at that hour, besides?

So when poor Ginny started wailing, yet again, about how she didn’t know what to do about her disintegrating marriage, Magda snapped at her, “For the love of all that is holy, Ginny, just do
something
, will you?”

Then Ginny, obviously hurt, and classically passive-aggressive, made up an excuse about forgetting a load of laundry in the washer and having to run and get it out right that second. Magda had chugged the remainder of the glass of white zinfandel she’d been sipping and two more after that, all the while cursing Ginny’s meekness, Jack’s selfishness, and her own brashness. “You can attract more flies with honey, darling,” Magda’s mother used to tell her. But the saying had been lost on her. She couldn’t for the life of her imagine why you’d want to attract flies in the first place. Not until she had a child of her own did Magda learn that her mother had gotten the saying all wrong, and that she was supposed to be attracting bees. Regardless, she had tried hard and failed to apply the general theory to her life many times, the previous night among them.