Miracle Beach (22 page)

She thought then about Jack. About how he would react, seeing those papers. Would he think her motives malicious? Or would he see her actions for what they were: a cease-fire? A truce. An acknowledgment that she wanted to be happy; she wanted him to be happy; and they had never quite figured out how to be happy together.

It wasn’t as if things had been bad. In fact, quite the opposite. They had had a good life. A darn good life. But Magda yinged where Jack yanged. She golfed not because she loved chasing that little white ball all over a lawn that was better manicured than one she could ever hope to have, but because it relaxed him. Yet he knew—he had to know—way deep down, that she didn’t really enjoy it. And he traveled, but only short trips that barely spanned a weekend, and only within North America’s borders. Where Magda saw opportunity and adventure and the chance to expand her cultural horizons, Jack feared being unable to order a whiskey and Coke in the native tongue and looking like the quintessential ugly American. “We have everything we could ever need right here,” he would say whenever she presented him with a pamphlet for a European cruise or a new eco lodge in Costa Rica. “Why do we need to go chasing halfway around the world to try to find something more?”

Floating there, half-naked in the middle of the night in water that made her feel disembodied, Magda hoped that Jack would see those papers and think that finally he, too, could just go ahead and be himself.

Magda’s car accelerated, cutting through the night. Her body felt wholly relaxed, as if she had just finished a daylong massage, and her mind had followed suit. For the first time in longer than she could remember, she was looking forward to tomorrow. First, though, she was looking forward to crawling between her freshly laundered sheets—one of the most underappreciated and underrated little pleasures in life—and falling fast asleep.

Without a towel to absorb the extra water, stray drops dripped intermittently from her hair, pinging off her shoulders. She ran a hand through her hair to ruffle some of it loose. She rounded a curve in the road and felt the car jerk as if it had tripped. She had been lost in thought, still reveling at her bravery in going swimming late at night, all by herself, and for a split second thinking that she couldn’t wait to call Jack to tell him about it. That was followed by another split second when she realized that this wasn’t something she could do much longer, if at all, and her mind went to a sad, reflective place.

That was when she heard the thud. The steering wheel lurched under her loose grip. Magda looked up, and for the briefest instant two beady black eyes met her gaze, right before she jammed on the brakes and the deer careened off the hood of her car.

Magda had never hit a deer before. In northern Wisconsin, where the deer seemed to outnumber people and were prone to kamikaze missions, this was like saying that she had never come upon a red light. Magda had always imagined how positively awful it would be to hit one, with their spindly legs, graceful bodies, and oh, so gentle faces. After reading
The Yearling
as a little girl, Magda had wanted a pet deer like other kids wanted dogs or goldfish, and she tried luring them to her parents’ yard by hanging carrots from the fence posts and stockpiling discarded cabbage from her father’s garden just outside the alley gate. All she ever got was a stern lecture from her father regarding the rabbit problem she had created.

Growing up, she’d notice the dead and bloated deer carcasses that dotted the roads’ shoulders, and she would say a prayer for each one. But as she got older, she prayed less for the deer and more to thank God that she hadn’t been the one to take one of their precious lives.

She’d be skipping that prayer tonight.

Magda’s hands shook as she pulled her car to the shoulder. Her breath came in raspy gasps. She didn’t have the first clue as to what to do. This kind of thing didn’t happen to her. Or it never used to.

Magda tried breathing deeply: in through the nose, out through the mouth.
Think rationally, think rationally.
What would she do if it had been a person? What would she do first?

Magda’s trembling hand found the door handle and she kicked the door open with her foot. She balanced herself between the car and the open door, willing her legs to stand firm, then took one more deep breath and marched toward the front of the car.

There, just on the edge of the headlights’ harsh glow, lay the deer. It had been slung like a large beanbag. One front leg was clearly broken, lying at an unnatural angle, its hoof pointed toward its hip. The other was twitching at odd intervals.

Oh, dear God. It was still alive.

A whining, squealing sound escaped from the poor thing—a cross between an asthma attack and an injured cat. It was eerily primal, and it unnerved Magda—out in the pitch dark by the side of the road all alone with a nearly dead deer—to her very core.

She knelt down, picked its head up, and laid it in her lap. She stroked the wet, matted fur. Blood ran freely from a gash in the deer’s neck. Magda placed one hand over it, trying to stop the flow, but it kept coming, dripping warm through her fingers.

Oh, God
. She sobbed, pressing her forehead between the deer’s floppy ears.
Oh, God, what have I done? What have I done?

Magda listened for, hoped for, the approach of another car, a person. Anything. But the night just sat there, silent. She could see that one house had a light on over the sink. She could almost make out the suncatchers that dotted the window. But the light was just for show. No one stirred behind that pane, and those of the surrounding houses looked inky black, like gaping holes. A wind moved through the tree branches above her, but nothing else did.

She didn’t know how long she stayed there, talking to the deer. Petting it. Apologizing.

Eventually, though, she knew there was nothing left to do. Its breaths grew increasingly labored. Its eyes more and more wild, even though its body seemed immobile.

The thing was beyond saving.

Magda laid its head back down on the ground and tried to close its eyes. She didn’t want it to see her, what she had to do. But as soon as she took her hand away, the eyes crept open again. They fixated on her.

She stumbled to her car, wiping away blood and tears and dirt from her face. The sweet smell of blood and the acrid scent of wild animal pelt followed like a shadow.

Maybe she hadn’t really been brave, way back when. Maybe that was just the way she liked to remember herself. What was so brave about driving cross-country or swimming in the dark, after all?

She closed her eyes then, and shifted into drive. She pressed her foot on the gas pedal, and felt the horrid crunch beneath the tires right into her own bones.

Magda Allen didn’t look back.

“YOU SMELL LIKE THE BEACH.”

Sophie’s voice floated to Jack as if it had traveled a great distance, and just barely nudged his thoughts aside enough for him to hear. But he turned his head and nearly ran it straight into Sophie’s. She had come up the back side of the porch and was leaning over him, her face moving to bury itself in the crook of his neck.

It had been a little more than a week since Glory had appeared on Macy’s doorstep, but it felt so much longer. Jack and Sophie had spent most of their waking moments together, attempting, and mostly failing, to manage the whole mess. It had created an intimacy between them that Jack wasn’t wholly comfortable with, and did absolutely nothing to discourage.

“SPF thirty,” he said, not looking up.

“I don’t think you’re going to need that.”

“Hmmm,” he said.

“Something wrong, kiddo? You look like you just lost your dog.”

“Nope,” he said. “Just my wife.” He knew it was inappropriate but he laughed anyway. For effect, he fanned the thick folds of yellow and white papers, which had arrived just before Sophie, in front of him.

“What in tarnation?” Sophie said. She squinted her eyes, turning her whole face into a question mark.

“Here,” Jack said, and jabbed her with the papers.

It wasn’t hard to miss the “Complaint for Divorce” looming bold and angry at the top of the page and Magda’s pointy signature toward the bottom.

“Oh, Jack,” Sophie said, reading and then rereading. She coerced the papers back into a reasonable pile and handed them to him. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

Sophie wore her customary uniform: a ratty, long-sleeved T-shirt, fraying jeans shorts, and, from the looks of it, even older sneakers. The kelly green bow around the bun in her hair matched the shirt, across the front of which previously glittery gold letters proclaimed, TWELFTH ANNUAL RIZZO ROYSTON MEMORIAL MARINA CUP. She was the only woman over fifty Jack had ever met who wasn’t afraid to bare her legs. They stuck out the bottom of her shorts like knobby brown twigs.

“Nothing much to say,” Jack said, wagging his head back and forth. “Sure didn’t see this coming, though.”

Sophie only nodded. She held one hand against her lips, fingers folded inward as if she were kissing her fingernails. She let out a loud breath.

“So I assume she doesn’t know about her?” Sophie asked. She was referring to Jack’s wife and his granddaughter.

Jack shook his head. “Magda doesn’t take well to surprises, and she’s been through so much already. I was waiting to get to the bottom of things first, to make absolutely sure.” Sure of what, he didn’t know. That Glory was their flesh and blood? That she wasn’t? He could see her in the backseat of Sophie’s parked station wagon loaded down with camping equipment, rummaging through a box in the hatchback. She had moved in with Sophie after that first night, sleeping on a hideaway bed on her sunporch.

“You sure get yourself into some pickles.” Sophie stood. “Still want to go?”

Jack nodded. He would have challenged Sophie on her pickles accusation, but it was all he could do to gesture.

They had decided on this trip soon after Glory arrived, though it had taken Sophie more than a week to clear her guiding commitments. Jack had been wanting to get over to the west coast of the island, and Sophie suggested they take a camping trip to Long Beach, a supposedly picturesque stretch that she liked to call a “real beach” (meaning that it had true white sand, as opposed to the gray gravel that coated most of Campbell River’s beaches) on the very southwest tip of Vancouver Island. It was supposed to be one of the great surfing destinations outside of Hawaii and Australia, and ever since Darrin Ott had sauntered into Green Bay West High School with his shoulder-length locks and seashell necklace and sun-kissed skin straight from California that made girls swoon at the sight of him, Jack had been mesmerized by the idea of surfing. Never mind that he couldn’t swim too well and had no desire to actually learn to surf. Regardless, Long Beach, with its surfer crowd, intrigued him enough to want to make the trip.

But the other—and, if they were all being honest, more urgent—reason for heading west for a few days was that Macy hadn’t handled Glory’s arrival all that well. They had yet to get hold of Glory’s mom. And to top it all off, before Jack could decide whether he should call Magda and tell her about the long-lost granddaughter who had materialized on Macy’s front porch, he had received divorce papers from his wife with equally scant forewarning. The timing for a getaway really couldn’t have been more perfect.

“Yeah,” Jack said. “Yeah, of course. This can wait. Just let me grab my things, okay?”

Sophie nodded. “Sure. But just bring what you need. I’ve got everything else.”

“Sure looks that way,” he chided.

Sophie rolled her eyes, but didn’t bite. “Where’s Macy?”

“Not sure,” Jack said. “Barn, maybe? Or town? I honestly can’t say I’ve seen her.”

“Well, I’ll just wait in the car with Glory. Get going now,” she said, shooing him toward the door. “We’ve got a few hours’ drive ahead of us and I don’t want to do it in the dark. Not on those roads.”

 

The last stretch of road unfolded behind them and Sophie steered the teetering station wagon into the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve. The dusk of early evening started to ebb into a cool summer night, and Jack could see why Sophie hadn’t wanted to drive much after dark. The road curved back and forth onto itself again and again over an almost three-hour stretch, its width scarcely enough to hold two midsize cars. The other side of the road butted up against a vertical rock face, while the side they had traveled dropped off after only inches of shoulder into a valley so lush and cavernous that it seemed as though the station wagon were flying above it all.

Jack and Sophie set up camp by light of the waxed-paper moon that shone through the trees. Glory had fallen asleep just as they reached the campground, and Sophie left her in the backseat— covering her with a sleeping bag to keep her warm while she and Jack shuttled supplies from the car to the campsite.