Miracle Beach (21 page)

“Please,” Magda said, gesturing to the chair opposite her. “Please sit down.”

“I think I’ll grab a drink first,” Peter said.

Instead of walking over to the bar, he came around to Magda’s side of the table and pulled out a chair next to her. He trailed a finger, letting it brush her forearm as he walked by.

Magda stiffened, then thought to herself,
Oh, Magda, he’s an old friend. Loosen up a little for once.

Peter returned, holding a glass of red wine by the stem with two fingers. “It’s good to see you again, Magda,” he said.

It was good to see him, too, she had to admit. She had always liked Peter. They had played Kick the Can growing up and had been each other’s dates for prom and homecoming because neither had wanted the fuss and complication that came with asking someone else. But Peter had gone off to law school at Notre Dame and had kept right on going. Magda had run into him one year in the pop and juice aisle of Cub Foods—she had a screaming toddler on her hip and he was home visiting relatives for the holidays. They promised to get together for lunch or drinks sometime, knowing full well that it was just something to say.

Until now. Magda looked at the man reclining in the burgundy leather chair across from her. He was a rough sort of handsome. Tall. A few pounds over sturdy. Dark hair, balding around the crown of his head but longer toward the back. Dark suit, purple tie. Crisp white shirt with the long type of collar that gangsters in the movies always seemed to wear. He looked expensive. Not at all like the gangly-limbed, braces-wearing boy of her youth.

He took a long sip of his drink, put it down, and smacked his lips a bit loudly for Magda’s taste. He leaned forward and clasped his hands on the table. “So you’re sure about this, Magda?” he asked.

It was asked without judgment. Merely a formality, as if he asked each of his clients that very thing.

Was she sure? It was a good question. How could one really be sure about such things, after all? All Magda knew was that she had made a decision and she was going forward with it. That was that. The only thing she could be sure about was that this was the most spontaneous thing she had ever done, and she was increasingly proud of herself for doing it.

“Final answer,” she said. She gave him a wide smile.

Peter pushed three piles of papers toward her. “Okay, then. Go ahead and fill these out—all the areas I’ve highlighted. And sign by each ‘X’ I’ve circled.”

Magda nodded and started to work her way through each stack. Most of it was basic information: name, address, Social Security number, date of birth, date and place of marriage, so on and so forth. She looked up at Peter. He had draped his arms across the back of the chair, right ankle resting on the opposite knee, right foot tapping out a rhythm in his head.

He caught Magda’s stare. “Everything all right?”

“Oh, yes. Yes. Of course. Just taking a breather,” Magda said. Truth was, the more boxes and lines she filled out, the more final everything seemed to get. She felt jumping beans inside her where nerves used to be. She was going to start her life, once and for all. After years of hemming and hawing and making do, this was it. This was her beginning.

When she finished, she piled the papers into one neat stack and pushed them back to Peter. He paged through the documents. “Have to make sure all the ‘i’s are dotted and ‘t’s are crossed,” he said.

Magda watched him intently, holding her breath.

“Everything looks good. All in order,” Peter said, sweeping the documents into his briefcase. He looked at Magda while he buckled it. “I have to say that I was pretty surprised to get a call from you.”

“Me too,” Magda said. She felt heat sear her cheeks. What a ridiculous response. Why couldn’t she ever think of charming—or, at the very least, appropriate—things to say? She would think of just the right thing tonight, just before drifting off to sleep. That was the way it always was. She was sophisticated and witty and tough as nails in her almost-dreams, but never in real life.

But if she thought about it too much, gave the thought of leaving Jack too much air, it might just up and start breathing on its own. At least by keeping it quiet, by not talking about it, she could manage it. This act, the freedom it brought along, was hers and only hers, and she wanted to keep it that way. So she smiled up at Peter, and in the nicest possible way, asked him if they could possibly talk about something else. Magda was sure they could fill the space of a dinner with enough conversation after not seeing each another for oh so long.

And they did. They covered what their old classmates were up to, who was still in touch with whom, Green Bay’s real estate market, the upcoming mayoral race, and, of course, the Packers. Before Magda knew it, dinner was over, she had sipped her way through most of another gimlet, and she and Peter were still reminiscing. Magda felt tingly all over. Not only from the gimlet. But from remembering the old her, too: the girl who lobbied to join the all-boy debate team; the one who belted out Sinatra’s “My Way” at the school talent show without a hint of stage fright; the her who took a road trip to California, by herself, the day after their high school graduation, because she wanted to see the ocean before she got roped into a job as someone’s secretary. The tingling made her shudder. That girl was back.

“You okay?” Peter asked.

Magda nodded. She had spent her summer wallowing, trying to act like nothing was wrong. Like someone Jack would want to come home to.

She had waited so many nights for the phone to ring, for it to be Jack. Only to hear that he wasn’t ready. Well,
she
was ready. How about that? She was tired of waiting and she was going to do something about it.

Peter got up from the table and made a sweeping gesture across the dining room. “Looks like we’ve got the place to ourselves,” he said. “How about a dance before dessert?”

She could hear elevator music drifting faintly through the dining room. It didn’t seem the danceable kind.

“Oh, I don’t think I could,” she said.

“Oh?” Peter raised an eyebrow. “Have your legs quit working?” he asked.

“No.” Magda chuckled. “No, of course not. There’s just not any music, and I don’t think I remember the last time I danced.” While her mouth protested, Magda’s stomach flipped. It had been so long. So long since someone had flirted with her. She wondered how many women Peter had slept with, then decided she didn’t want to know. She had heard through the Green Bay grapevine that he had been married five times. That was three more than the number of men she had ever been with. But if one of the middle wives, with whom she had seen him pictured within the
Press Gazette
after they donated a chunk of change to one of St. Norbert College’s capital campaigns, was any indication, his tastes ran toward twiggy, beautiful blondes. That he would flirt with her in the first place struck Magda as both preposterous and exhilarating.

“It’s like riding a bike,” Peter said, pulling on her hand. “C’mon, I’ll show you.”

Magda let Peter tug her to her feet, let him pull her close to him, his arm tight around the small of her back.

“Just like homecoming,” Peter said.

Magda threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, Peter. You are something else.”

He was weaving them through the gathering of tables, his feet knocking hard against Magda’s. He might look the part, Magda thought, but he sure hadn’t gained an ounce of coordination over the past three decades.

“
We
were something else,” Peter said. His whisper skipped past Magda’s ear, leaving a vapor trail of alcohol in its wake.

Magda pretended she hadn’t heard him.

“We were, Magda. We had chemistry. Doing
The Glass Menagerie
—do you remember that?”

She couldn’t tell if he was kidding.

“You played my
brother
,” she said.

“I
know
,” said Peter. “Almost incestuous,” he hissed, then chuckled.

Magda’s normal reaction would be to push Peter away. It would be the proper thing to do, after all. But where had that gotten her, exactly? Since she had walked into the Kroll’s that day and saw Jimmy Wallis gently stroking a hand that wasn’t hers, she had reformed herself. Not that she thought she was to blame, per se, for Jimmy’s philandering, but a specific doubt had always nagged at her: If she were just a little thinner, a little more together, a little more proper, then maybe boys would see her the way Jimmy Wallis had looked at the prim blonde sitting across from him that day. But it hadn’t ever really worked.

“You are, for all practical purposes, a free woman, you know.” Then Peter started to sing, his voice falling off-key and stepping back on, like a drunk walking a curb.

She could still see glimpses of the Peter she knew as a girl. Cute in a gangly way. A mischievous grin that made whomever he aimed it at an instant accomplice in whatever he happened to be planning. Kind, witty, a whiz at geography. So cocksure that she often forgot he wore thick glasses and, for a spell, braces. She supposed that those same glimpses were there in her, too. Probably in everyone.

“Let’s go
swimming
,” she whispered in his ear.

“Swimming?” The word tumbled from his mouth like a boulder.

Hot summer nights like this one, when they were young, were spent at Lost Dauphin State Park, on the other side of the Fox River. They roasted marshmallows, drank beer, and leaned up against each other next to campfires, drying themselves from occasional dips into the river. Most of the other girls would only dip a toe into the water, afraid of messing up their hair or of what the opaque water might hold, but Magda—Magda loved it. She loved the way the surface shimmered black and silver, the way it felt against her skin, the freedom of lying on her back in the middle of a river in the middle of the night. No adult she knew did things like that anymore, and suddenly, she couldn’t comprehend why.

“Swimming,” she said. “Down by the old state park. Just like the good old days.”

Peter held her at arm’s length, trying to gauge her sincerity. “Skinny-dipping?” he asked.

“No, silly. There are houses there now,” she said. “It’ll still be fun, though. Promise.”

She was genuinely excited about the prospect of going night swimming, though it seemed as though she was the only one. Magda saw a cloud settle over Peter and guessed this wasn’t where he had seen his evening headed.

Peter made a grand show of looking at his watch. “Aw, Magda. I didn’t realize how late it was. I need to be up for a deposition in Shawano early tomorrow.” He pulled her into an awkward hug. “I’ll get these papers filed for you first thing on Friday. Let’s do this again soon.”

Magda knew that she wouldn’t see Peter King again unless she was paying him. And that was just fine.

 

Magda pulled her car into the gravel parking lot, which was little more than a widening of the road’s shoulder. The air hung heavy and still, without even a rumor of a breeze, and she had driven down Lost Dauphin Road with all four windows down. The wind in her hair, the fact that it was after ten o’clock at night and she had nowhere to be and no one waiting on her to be there—it all felt scintillatingly good.

She looked in both directions before crossing the road to the shore of the Fox River, even though she would have known without looking that a car was on its way by the swath any headlights might have cut through the dark.

A thin line of young-looking trees stood guard on the river’s bank. Not much privacy, but no matter. Magda unbuttoned her blouse, slipped her capri pants over her hips, and kicked off her sandals. The moon fell on her like soft stage lighting, and made the river’s still surface look like a giant serving tray. She picked her way over gravel and through long licks of grass and weeds. At the river’s edge, she dipped one foot into the water and found the temperature to be nearly warm to the touch. Magda took a few steps in and then dived under. She surfaced, flipped to her back, and looked up at a star-studded sky.

The water was the same temperature as the night air, giving Magda the distinct feeling of floating, almost apart from her body. Freedom, she thought. This was freedom at its most basic level. Primitive, natural, solitary. Suddenly she didn’t feel so far from her teenage self, the “her” defined not by her relationships to other people—friend, wife, mother—but by what she wanted out of life. And what she wanted, at that exact moment, was to pucker up and suck the very marrow right out of it.

There was so much she could do, so much she could explore. So much she could learn.
Do. Learn. Explore. Discover. Do.
The words lapped at her like gentle waves. She could finally visit Greece. And not just visit, but stay: six days, six months, six years. It no longer mattered. She could pick up tomorrow and see the Eiffel Tower. She could eat pasta carbonara in Rome, paella in Valencia, pad thai in Bangkok. She had always, inwardly, fancied herself a child of the world. But outwardly, she had been tethered. She had been the mother to a child she had loved as if he were the whole world. She had partnered with a man who had been most interested in bringing the whole world to her, in creating their own little life together. Each of those roles had had little to do with what she longed, in her heart, to do. It seemed almost silly when Magda ran through it in her head: trade a good man for a few good international trips? But it was more than that. She and Jack were different people at the core. Both good. Both trying to do the right thing. But different. Magda longed to feel the wind at her back. Jack longed to build a shelter to block it all out. And Nash had been their compromise. But now Nash was gone. And Magda had, as best as she could tell, a little more than a quarter of her life left to live. If not now, then when?

Magda felt the water on her skin, but only barely. Only when she fluttered her arms for balance, for buoyancy. She gave thanks that Peter had declined her invitation. Out here, floating aimlessly in the wide expanse of the Fox River, she regretted the flutter of excitement she had felt at his touch back at the Wisconsin Union. Or maybe, she didn’t regret
it
, but the fact that she had originally assigned it to Peter King instead of to where it really belonged: to her rediscovered self’s sovereignty now budding within her.