Miracle Beach (11 page)

On their first wedding anniversary, Nash had started a tradition she had grown to secretly relish. Each year on their anniversary he would bring home two splits of champagne. Macy would come in from the barn to find the mini bottles chilling in a bowl of ice (they had never registered for a champagne bucket, never anticipated that they would need one) on the back porch, flanked on either side by a glass flute, paper tablet, pen, and a sandwich baggie. They sipped the sweet bubbly in a silence broken only by the scratching of their pens moving over the paper. That first year, Macy wrote the vows she would have written for their wedding, had Magda not insisted on tradition and had Nash not been so quick to appease his mom. She had continued her vow writing each year after, changing what she wrote to reflect what had happened that year. Last year, her note had said, “I promise to love you when you run out of gas at two a.m. on the way home from the Quinnie when you surprise me by showing up in Langley with chocolate cake and roses for my birthday as I exit the ring from a perfect round, for the way my name sounds when you say it and the way my hand feels in yours. I promise to love you in the morning when I’m crabby and at night when you snore. I promise to always love you, even when I might not feel like it, and I promise to try to be a person who’s always easy to love. I love you, and I love our life, more than I ever thought I could.—M.”

She never knew what Nash wrote. After they had each finished their notes, they would slip the folded paper into a baggie and stuff it into their respective bottles. Then, using leftover wine corks and candle wax, Nash would seal each bottle. The wax dried and hardened as they walked to the beach, near where Macy sat. They would stop at the water’s edge and roll their pants to their knees, and then walk into the ocean on a sandbar that stretched hundreds of meters out. Sometimes they would stop with the water at their knees. Sometimes it reached midthigh. They would count together, “One, two, three,” and toss their bottles into the air, toward the setting sun.

Standing there—the waves tugging at her legs, the sun dipping lower and lower in the sky, Nash’s arm around her shoulders and his lips whispering against her hair, “To us. To another year”—had become Macy’s favorite moment of every year. If she had known she’d have such a finite number of them, she’d have talked Nash into doing it more often. She’d have made him linger there, long after the sun had gone down. She’d have noted exactly how his breath felt against her forehead, exactly where his hand rested on her shoulder.

God, she wanted him back. She would take a minute. She’d settle for a second. Just a glimpse of his smile. Just a flutter of his skin on hers.

She hadn’t ever believed in ghosts or psychics or religion or afterlife. Yet how she wanted to just then. She scanned the beach, and then the horizon.

A breeze picked up. A branch cracked somewhere in the distance. A foal nickered to his mom.

It wasn’t fair that Nash could be parted from her by death, while she sat on a windswept beach on their anniversary, alone. Still tied to him. Maybe forever tied to him. And what about her? What was she supposed to do now?

The other glass of wine remained at her feet, untouched.

She remembered the jolt of electricity as Nash kissed her after the officiant gave him permission; the softness of Nash’s hand on hers as the two of them stood at the edge of the reception, marveling at having all of their favorite people in one place; missing her parents terribly at that very moment, and Nash, as if he read her thoughts, pulling her to him and telling her that she was now his to take care of, officially.

So take care of me, then
, she challenged him.
If there was ever a time I needed taking care of . . .

Macy leaned back on the sand. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, she half expected—or maybe she just wanted—Nash to be leaning over her, stroking her cheek with the backs of his fingers, a concerned expression on his face.

Macy’s phone rang. She cursed herself for not leaving it back at the barn. She silenced it, but it rang again only a minute later. She looked at the caller ID. It was her sister, Regan. She knew that Regan would keep calling back. Her sister had an aversion to voice mail that Macy had never deciphered—leaving them or picking her own up—and if Regan deemed something urgent she would press “redial” until the person on the receiving end relented. It was a metaphor for how Regan ran the rest of her life. Macy pressed the green telephone icon to take the call.

“Hi,” Macy answered.

A din of noise greeted her on the other end. Garbled snippets of talk radio competed with shrieks of kids. Regan was always either trying to simultaneously conduct her three kids in an art project and make dinner, or she was rushing one of them to or from a lesson, game, or playdate. Regan was essentially a single mother, with a workaholic ghost of a husband. Except Craig worked for Goldman Sachs. He was an incredibly rich ghost.

“Jacquie, sit
down
now! Sorry, Mace. I’m up to my eyeballs in sugar-crazed kids.” Before Macy could tell her not to worry about it, Regan continued on, talking right over Macy as she had been doing their whole lives. “Anyway, the girls are starting riding lessons—aren’t you proud? They need helmets, and there are just so many choices that I don’t know which one to get for them. I figured I’d check with you to see which ones would be best.”

“I don’t know,” Macy said. “I’d—”

“I mean, do I go for the most expensive one? Does a pricey helmet really offer that much more protection than a cheap one?”

“I’d have to check,” Macy said. Regan had lived in Manhattan for six years and New Jersey for another thirteen. The region’s fast pace and brash directness that Macy found so charming in others, her brother-in-law included, took on a judgmental air in Regan.

“How can you not know? Seriously, Kevin—get that out of your nose!”

Macy liked to think that this—the parallel conversation Regan constantly had with her kids and anyone on the other end of her phone call—was the reason they didn’t talk often. In reality, when Regan gave birth to Kevin, nine years ago, it had simply become a convenient excuse for them both not to have to try so hard anymore.

“I mean, isn’t this what you
do
for a living?”

Macy explained that she hadn’t bought a new helmet in a few years, and pointed out that it had been much longer than that since she’d been in the market for a kid’s helmet.

“I’ll check and get back to you,” Macy said. She didn’t want to start an argument with Regan. Not today.

“Okay, but their first lesson is a week from Monday, and I’ll need some lead time to order them or pick some up, though I don’t know where you get riding helmets in New Jersey.”

“You can order them from—”

Macy fell quiet, sure that the squabbling of her two nieces and nephew in the background and Regan’s yelling at them to stop had drowned her out. Macy compared the chaos of Regan’s house with the relative silence of her own. If only she had been as brave as her sister. Macy found herself stifling a sob that had risen out of nowhere, hot and thick at the back of her throat.

“Something wrong, Mace?” Regan asked.

She doesn’t remember
, Macy thought. It was inconceivable to her how this day that had loomed so large and threatening on her own horizon could be just another twenty-four hours to everyone else. This day that Macy had feared and steeled herself against and planned down to the minute was, for her sister, another in a long string of days in which dinner and e-mail and refereeing kids and researching riding helmets took top billing.

“No,” Macy said. She took a sip of wine. A tiny bug had landed in the red liquid, fluttering hopelessly. Macy dipped a finger in and lifted it out, though it was probably already a goner. “Can I say hi to them?”

Macy had met her nieces and nephew only a handful of times, and long ago, when they were much younger. She sent birthday presents and holiday cards. She tried to call them regularly. But those gestures were a cheap substitute for actual visits. Regan wouldn’t take them to British Columbia. She said it was too expensive to fly the whole family west, and Macy would bite her tongue as Regan switched subjects to their Hamptons share or Craig’s promotion or how they were thinking of moving back into the city but just couldn’t afford a place with space enough for all of them. The last time Macy had seen the kids, four years ago, she had discovered the real reason. After a late-night talk over strong gin and tonics that Craig had mixed for them before going to bed, Regan looked at Macy and said, “You remind me so much of her.” Then she added, “Too much,” quietly and with her head turned away from Macy. Even at a whisper, those two words were an accusation leveled at Macy like a pair of arrows. The next year, when Martine suggested going east for the Hampton Classic, Macy begged off. “It’s just another horse show,” she told him. “Nothing worth going all that way for.”

“The kids? Oh, maybe later, okay? I wanted to call quickly, while I was thinking about the helmets, but I’m just getting dinner on the table, and you know how hard it is to get them all to sit down and eat at the same time.”

Macy didn’t, actually. “Regan, can’t I say hi to them while you’re finishing up? Maybe put them on speakerphone.”

“It’s really not the best time. When you have kids you’ll understand,” Regan said. It was one of her go-to phrases. Macy had no doubt her sister loved being a mom and that she was good at it. But she couldn’t help suspect that part of what Regan loved about motherhood was pointing out how busy, demanding, and full her life was in comparison to everyone else’s, Macy’s in particular. She had assumed, clearly in error, that her status as a newly minted widow might exempt her from Regan’s barbs for the time being.

“Fine,” Macy said. She rested an elbow on one knee and her forehead in her hand. She noticed that the bug she had rescued from her wine was still perched on her jeans leg, trying to get its wings working.

“Macy, don’t sulk. It doesn’t become you. Oh, shit, Claudia just smeared hoisin sauce in Jacquie’s hair; I’ve gotta go. Talk soon!”

And then she was gone.

Macy shut her phone and tossed it on the blanket beside her. She watched the bug on her leg flutter and struggle. It did a quick spin, and suddenly lifted up, up, up, until it blended into thin air and she could no longer see it.

Macy scanned the water, left to right, straining her eyes for the glint of light off a bottle. But the sun hung low in the sky, and it bounced rays off the water so that even if a giant vanity mirror were floating out there, much less an empty champagne split, it would be nearly impossible to tell from her perch.

She picked up her glass of wine, and then, thinking that her walk might take a while, poured herself a little extra. Macy walked toward the water and stopped where it met the sand, suddenly aware that she was bringing glass into the water and feeling like maybe she shouldn’t. But whole ships went down in these waters, she reasoned with herself; a little broken glass wasn’t going to hurt the ocean any.

Once Macy located the sandbar she walked out onto it, her direction steady and unhurried.

You’re a madwoman
, she said to herself.

But what if?
she answered.

Each year, on their walk down to this spot and out into the water, champagne splits in hand, Nash would tell Macy one message-in-a-bottle story. Macy never gave them much thought, instead chalking them up to his encyclopedic memory for totally useless information.

There was the Swedish sailor who, tired of the unchanging views of water and his shipmates, wrote a note “to someone beautiful and far away,” threw it overboard, and married the daughter of the Sicilian fisherman who found it.

There was the Japanese sailor who was shipwrecked on an island with forty-three others and no freshwater, and realized, as he watched them each die from starvation and dehydration, that none of them would never see their families again. So he carved the story of what had happened to them on thin pieces of coconut tree bark, found a bottle in the ship’s wreckage, and set his rough, knife-hewn notes adrift before he himself passed away. More than a century later, the bottle turned up—on the shore of his tiny Japanese village.

Then there was the story about two friends walking around a lake in Wisconsin. They had just buried their friend Josh, who had completed a tour of duty in Iraq only to return home and die in a car accident. They asked each other why. They railed against the senselessness of it all. And then one of them spotted a bottle bobbing on the water’s surface. A vanilla bottle. Inside the bottle was a note that read, “My name is Josh Baker. I’m ten. If you find this, put it on the news.” It was from the boy version of their friend, recently put to rest. Josh’s mom had confirmed it to them, and then to the media outlets. She remembered him dumping her whole bottle of vanilla out when he was a kid, said her house smelled like it for weeks.

Nash would pepper the stories with interesting facts—that bottles are the most seaworthy vessels, capable of sailing unfettered through hurricanes and storms that would capsize anything else. That you couldn’t predict the direction a bottle would travel, even if two were dropped together: like the two bottles sent off the Brazilian coast, one drifting east and washing up on a beach in Africa, and the other heading northwest to Nicaragua. That the United States Navy used floating bottles to conjure detailed charts of the oceans’ currents. Or that Queen Elizabeth I’s fleet of ships had used them to send ashore information about enemy positions and that “Uncorker of Ocean Bottles” was an official post in her court.

But it was the stories that Macy clung to now: A shipwrecked Japanese sailor’s bottle reaching his native village a hundred and fifty years after he set it afloat. A vanilla bottle finding its way to the very people who needed it most, at just the right moment. Was it really so much for Macy to ask that just one of the notes Nash wrote to her wash back up here on Miracle Beach? Things like that clearly happened throughout the world. Was it too much to ask that it happen to her, just once?