Miracle Beach (26 page)

Macy waved the bartender down. She didn’t recognize him, fortunately. “Tommy here?” she asked.

The bartender shrugged. “Dunno.”

“But his truck is parked outside.”

The bartender shrugged again before turning to the cooler behind him and retrieving a can of Lucky. He cracked the beer and set it in front of a guy on the opposite end of the bar with a low-pulled camouflage baseball hat before coming back to talk to Macy. “Sorry,” he said. “Tommy doesn’t say where he’s going. He just goes. And sometimes he comes back.”

“I’ll wait, then,” Macy said.

The bartender shrugged again. Macy wondered if it was some sort of tic with him. “Suit yourself,” he said.

She chose a booth that faced both the DD’s entrance and the kitchen door, to the left of the bar, so she could see if Tommy materialized.

Cher’s voice boomed over the speaker system, too loud for the quiet conversations and jostling of the early-evening hours. She was singing about someone being the lonely one and wondering if the listener believed in life after love.

The lyrics struck Macy as odd. Life after love—as if it had an expiration date. As if there could distinctly be a before and an after instead of the shadowland that so often stretched between those two words. Because unless something happened in a split second—a car crash, a dropped glass, power going out or coming on—before and after didn’t apply. Especially not to love, which, if someone was lucky enough to even recognize it, looped in on itself so often that cause and effect, before and after, blended into an imperceptible haze. A person might as well try to separate fog from air.

Macy felt a tap on her shoulder, and turned to find the bartender holding a shot of tequila. “From them,” he said, setting it on the table in front of her and pointing to the bend of the bar, where a handful of men roughly her age whom she didn’t know had camped.

One of them saw her look over and called out, “Hey! Nice bum, where ya from?” They were young—much younger than her. Twenty at most. Full of themselves.
Just wait ten years
, she wanted to tell them.
You live another ten years, and then we’ll talk
.

Macy smiled a weak smile as she delivered the standard return line, “Campbell River, wanna giver?” and downed the shot. She didn’t drink much anymore, and she definitely didn’t drink tequila. The taste of it made her whole body recoil.

Before long, the bartender had returned with a bottle of Kokanee. “From Big Jim,” he said. “In honor of Nash.”

Macy followed the bartender’s finger, which pointed at a very large man indeed, who had completely obscured the barstool beneath him. The man raised his can of beer in Macy’s direction and nodded solemnly. Macy mimicked the gesture.

She ran her finger through the water on the table that her beer had sweated off, then reached for a napkin to put under her drink. That was one thing that always drove her crazy and never seemed to bother Nash in the least—wet rings on the coffee table, kitchen table, bedside table.

At least Nash’s bedside table was always strewn with books, and he’d place his glass of water or the occasional beer he brought with him to bed on top of those. Lately, though, it had been
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
on top of
The Expectant Father
, which hung precipitously off the edge of his previous reads, like
Alexander Hamilton
.

When they were first married, Macy used to read along with him at night. She never had enough stamina or follow-through to actually pick out and read a book herself, especially the thick-spined biographies and autobiographies that Nash was drawn to; but each night she would lay her head on his chest and let the words plod along the page to the rhythm of his muffled heartbeat, and the snippets of stories that came her way were just right. Like commercials. Just enough.

She had stopped when the pregnancy and parenting books arrived on his nightstand. “Aren’t you excited? Or even a little curious?” Nash had asked.

“My broodmares don’t have books. They all seem to get along just fine,” she told him.

In reality, she just didn’t want to know. Because if she had let herself imagine it all, she might have brought a tiny little being into the world who deserved so much better.

Another shot arrived, and then another, and then a can of beer. Each from a different patron, but with the same message: “In memory of Nash.”

In memory of Nash. She wondered what kinds of memories each one of them had of him. She wondered what they knew. She wondered whether any of them knew any of the things that she didn’t.

She also wondered whether she’d be able to walk out on her own volition if she didn’t eat soon. “Can I order some food? Chicken sandwich and fries?” she called after the bartender.

He turned around but didn’t walk back toward her table. “We don’t have chicken sandwiches. Only chicken strips. Or burgers.”

That sort of lack of ingenuity always stunned Macy. Couldn’t they slap the strips on a bun with some tomato and lettuce and call it a chicken sandwich? But she was in no mood to argue with convention. “Cheeseburger,” she said.

Her food showed up at exactly the same time Tommy Morgan did. She spotted him first and trained her gaze on him until he looked over at her. She motioned to him and he waved at her, his brow furrowed.

She saw him ask the bartender for a beer and then he started toward her. When he arrived at her booth he stood in front of it for a moment, his head cocked like a dog might. “What are you doing here?” he said, not unkindly.

Macy couldn’t answer his question directly, because she didn’t know.
Because I’m lost
, she thought.
Because I’m barely hanging on. Because someone needs to tell me what to do or what to think, and before, that was always Nash, but Nash is gone now. And as it turns out, he was a cheating bastard, too.
She had no reason to think Nash would have been any different.

“I thought you might have a minute to talk,” she said.

He bobbed his head, lips pursed, as if to indicate that how long he had depended on what the topic was going to be. Tommy Morgan had always been a person of painfully few words. He said most of what he needed to with his eyes, his shoulders, and the carry of his six-foot-four-inch frame. Those around him tended to get the message. But she had regularly marveled at how animated both he and Nash were in each other’s company, belly laughing and knee slapping and conversing like a couple of teenage girls. Once apart, they each reverted back to their stoic, quiet ways. It was as if each of them held the secret key to the other. They had been two parts of one whole, even if to her, Tommy had always been intimidating and Nash had felt like a flannel blanket on a cold, cold night.

“I was hoping you could tell me . . . about Nash,” Macy said.

Tommy took a sip of beer, placed the bottle on the table, looked up at her. “You knew him better than anyone, Macy. I don’t think there’s much I could tell you. Other way around, maybe.”

Macy shook her head from side to side. “I don’t think so.”

“What’s this about, Macy?”

She steeled herself. She breathed in deep, held the breath for a second, and exhaled. She met his eyes. “I know there was someone else,” she said.

Tommy chuckled, though not as if she had told a bad pun, not in good humor. This chuckle echoed with disbelief, exasperation, annoyance.

“Come on, Macy. Don’t do this. There’s no need.”

She stared at him.

“There was no one else.”

She kept staring.

“I’m serious.”

Macy kept looking at him.

Tommy shook his head, sighed, and held up both hands in a conciliatory gesture.

“So what if there was?” he asked. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Not now.”

Macy bit her lip. The hell it didn’t. Easy for him to say. He didn’t have to hit the reset button on his life four months prior. He hadn’t had to keep hitting it over and over again. “It matters,” she said softly. She willed the tears threatening the edges of her eyes not to spill over. Not in front of him.

She calmed herself by placing both of her shaking hands on the table. “Did you know he had a daughter?”

Tommy had just taken a sip of beer. He swallowed hard, his eyes as big as a cartoon character’s on springs. “Shit,” he said, almost in disbelief. It was directed at the table, not her. He repeated it, this time with more oomph: “Shit!”

“So who was she?”

“I don’t know.”

“Goddamn it, Tommy. He was your best friend. He had an
affair
. He had a goddamned
daughter
. And you didn’t know?” Macy slammed her open palm against the table. “Bullshit!” she said. “How could you
not
know?”

“How couldn’t
you
?” he shot back at her.

Macy set her jaw. She breathed out through her nose. It felt as though he had just clocked her with a roundhouse. And she thought at that moment of the phone call. The breathy, singsong voice on the other end. And she was right back there—her insides seizing up, letting the phone drop softly, leaving it to dangle by its cord. Padding out the back door of the barn, cutting across the rear pastures, and ducking into the woods that separated them from the Oyster River before the woods spit her out onto a tiny triangle of beach littered with oversize driftwood weathered white by salt and sun and wind and waves and rocks.

She had settled herself onto the gray sand, her back against one smooth, white log and her feet propped up on another. It had been spring in Campbell River, and cool. A halfhearted rain had drizzled down all morning, and although the sky had cleared, that same rain seemed to rise like steam up from the ground, dampening Macy’s legs and seat.

She could still see them, even now: A family of ducks waddled along the forest’s edge, not fifteen feet from her. Mother in front, six ducklings behind, father behind them, and bachelor uncle off to the side. Macy had studied them, the plainness of the mother with her brown feathers, the hapless ducklings, the brilliant emerald heads of the father and uncle. Handsome. They all toddled along dutifully until a branch broke somewhere in the woods. The mother, father, and ducklings had looked around frantically and closed ranks, but the uncle spread his wings and skimmed back toward the river. His decision to leave was instantaneous, its rashness alarming.

That night, Macy had drawn Nash on top of her, taking his face between her hands the whole time. “Look at me,” she had said to him sternly. “Look at me, handsome.”

She had known. Tommy was right about that much. She had let herself pretend, when Nash would tell her he loved her while he traced a finger lazily over her scarred arms in bed at night, that he was telling the truth.

“Did he love her?”

“We didn’t talk about that kind of stuff,” Tommy said. “Neither of us were really heart-to-heart-type guys. That was his business. I wasn’t about to butt in.”

“How convenient for you,” Macy said. She looked away, more shocked than usual at how Nash could have been friends with Tommy.

“Listen, he loved you, okay? I don’t know if he loved her, but he did love you. Isn’t that enough?”

Macy glowered at him. She didn’t know. What was enough?

 

Tommy had offered to drive her home. He said he’d have someone drop her truck off in the morning. It was a hard deal to refuse. Even though Macy hadn’t so much as sipped some of the last drinks sent her way, it seemed that her body’s processing of alcohol had pulled far ahead of any roadblocks the cheeseburger and fries were able to erect. She had to squeeze an eye shut to see only one of Tommy.

While their conversation at the bar had worn Macy down, it had had the opposite effect on Tommy, like a door crowbarred open. As he steered his truck along the winding Old Island Highway, he reminisced about Nash—how he loved playing practical jokes on the rookies, like putting ink on the brow bands of their helmets or bringing them doughnuts dusted with baby powder; how he’d laugh the loudest and hardest at his own jokes, but if someone got him back, he’d “give ’em a high five and congratulate ’em on a job well-done.”

Tommy laughed, to himself, at the memory. Macy stared past him out the window at the moon lighting up the Strait of Georgia like a stage. The Tragically Hip belted “Bobcaygeon” from the speakers. Nash had adopted the Hip as a favorite band. He was more enthusiastic about them than any Canadian Macy had ever met, tracking their concert schedule the way she imagined some Americans followed the Grateful Dead. Macy wondered whether Tommy had played that particular CD to remember Nash, because she had done the very same thing once she could finally bear to listen to music again.

“He was such a pack rat, wasn’t he?” Tommy was saying. Macy had lost the thread of the conversation, but couldn’t help but agree with him. No one saved useless items quite like Nash.

“This road, right?” Tommy asked.

Macy nodded and yawned. It felt like months ago that she had headed out for sweet-and-sour chicken from Thrifty’s deli.

No one could save useless things quite like Nash
. The words bounced around inside her foggy head.
No one could save quite like Nash.

He was right. And what if Nash hadn’t just saved useless things?

It was an interesting position to be in—the jilted lover, the scorned spouse. She’d seen it happen with friends over the years, and then again with the girlfriends of several of Nash’s hockey teammates. Even if the girlfriends knew, even if they tried to confront the infidelity, no one would say a word to substantiate their intuition. One of the girls had asked Macy once, directly, if her boyfriend, who everyone knew was cheating on her, had been unfaithful. Macy told the girl the truth. The next day, Nash lashed out at her. “Why would you do that?” he said. “It was none of your business!” It didn’t make a bit of difference what Macy said in her own defense; Nash’s response was the same.