Miracle Beach (27 page)

“It’s a freaking code,” one of the wives had told Macy the following weekend, “and it goes something like this: Let cheating dogs lie. They all live by it.”

In the past weeks, Macy had found herself railing at an imaginary Nash, having full-on arguments with him in her head. She ached for an outlet for her questions. But she knew better than to turn to his friends.

She’d thought—hoped—that Tommy might be different. But what she hadn’t accounted for was that she wasn’t simply the jilted spouse. She was on a whole new plane: that of the jilted widow. And she knew that no one, even Tommy, would ever part with a single damn detail for two very good reasons: One, Tommy wouldn’t have done it even if Nash had still been alive; and two, Nash was dead, and neither Tommy nor any of the rest of them would stoop to sullying his memory just to provide Macy with peace of mind.

She wondered now, had Nash been alive, how much even he would have told her. How honestly he would have answered the questions that burned so hot they seared her from the inside out: Was it one single rushed quickie in a dank alley outside a club, or an evening in with Chinese takeout and wine followed by scrambled eggs and coffee in the morning? Had he seen her bedroom, or did they meet at a hotel? Did he turn away from her before he drifted off to sleep, as he did with Macy, or did he let her spoon against him and drape an arm around her? Did he love this woman? Did he ever tell her that? And just once, or how many times? Did he feel guilty? Did he regret it? Or was he planning to leave Macy anyway? Was he running away from Macy? Or was he running toward this woman, whoever she was?

Macy decided that even if she could go right inside the house and ask Nash every one of those questions, even if she could look him straight in the eyes and watch as he answered her, even then, she would never know what she wanted—what she needed—to know. But Tommy had given her an idea.

Tommy pulled into her driveway and shifted into park. He was reaching for the ignition, about to turn it off, looking like he had something he wanted to say. But Macy didn’t give him a chance. She didn’t invite him in. In a rush, she thanked him, poured herself from his truck, and almost ran to the house.

 

Basements unnerved Macy.

They were creepy, for starters. Not that she believed in ghosts—she was more afraid not to. Afraid that if she were up front about not believing, they’d try to prove her wrong. More than that, though, was all that space dedicated to storing “things” not in use, which translated loosely into things that had never been, or were no longer, useful. Things that would have to be sorted through, taken elsewhere, disposed of. A basement was the embodiment of future work waiting to be done, and she always had plenty to do aboveground.

Macy flipped on the lights illuminating the rickety basement stairs. They led down at an angle that, along with a myriad of other things in their house, most likely violated all sorts of building codes.

A bulb had burned out (or maybe had never actually worked) and the dim light only exacerbated the creepiness factor. Macy felt along each step. She held the wall with her right hand, since the only railing lined the left wall and she couldn’t grab it with her left arm, which hung limp and useless in the sling.

For years, she’d ignored the fact that their home had a basement, and that she had a husband who insisted on saving things like empty shoe boxes and a spare washing machine motor. Anything that descended below the first floor of their house, in her mind, ceased to exist.

When her grandfather died, then her father, Nash hauled their boxed things to the basement at Macy’s request. She told him she didn’t have time to deal with it all right then. He knew she meant she couldn’t deal with it at all. Probably ever.

“Whenever you get to it, you get to it,” Nash had said. “None of it is going anywhere.”

And there it all was, lining one whole wall. Boxes labeled “books,” “china,” “shoes,” and “files and papers.” A mismatched set of lawn furniture. The body of a lawn mower. A shelving unit full of tools waiting to be made whole—rake heads, buckets, shovels with missing or broken handles. Boxes of cassette tapes, psychic readings Magda had commissioned for Nash each year on his birthday. Magda liked to call them “astrological insights.” Macy liked to call them what they were: complete and utter crap.

Macy wanted to be anyplace but there, doing anything but what she was about to do. But this was the only option.

She started with a giant clear plastic Tupperware container capped by a purple lid. The cover gave way with a loud pop that made Macy jump, despite knowing full well that sound was coming.

Inside she found layer after layer of paper: old mail still unopened, addressed to Nash’s apartment in Milwaukee. An essay titled “Adam Smith and Pareto Optimality” written for an Intro to Economics class with a glaringly large “C+” scrawled in green ink at the top right corner. Receipts in no apparent order, for items of no particular worth. One for Best Buy for $201.09, and another for McDonald’s for $5.62. Pamphlets that defied classification, ranging from “Weatherproofing Your Home for Better Energy Efficiency” to “Duck Boat Tours in Wisconsin Dells” to the Royal BC Museum’s “Eternal Egypt” exhibit in Victoria that they had taken Nash’s parents to see three years back.

Good God
, she thought.
Who saves such things?

The second bin—this one an all-over opaque blue—held a handful of concert and hockey tournament T-shirts that, from the looks of it, Nash had long ago outgrown. She picked one up. It was green with yellow lettering. Packers colors, that much she knew. Hell, anyone who had longer than an hour layover in Green Bay could come up with that bit of trivia. But the front showed a medieval knight in full armor atop a horse, charging at something over her shoulder with his lance leveled at whatever it was. Words above and below the knight announced, GREEN KNIGHT SUMMER HOCKEY CAMP. The seams along the sleeves and neck had come apart with use, leaving dime-size gaps. Macy drew it to her face. Inhaled deep. Nothing.

The T-shirts had been loosely folded over a menagerie of knickknacks that she imagined lining the shelves of Nash’s boyhood room. Matchbox cars, Transformers, GI Joe figurines.

More bins, more useless bric-a-brac collections in each. Finally, one bin remained. It had been labeled, “For Sorting,” with Nash’s scrawl in black marker on duct tape. And if the rest were any indication, nothing here would tell her anything. These were useless remnants of Nash’s life. Remnants of Nash.

She hoped, suddenly, that that was exactly what she would find. Then she could simply close the lids, store the boxes, and stop looking. Stop wondering. Stop waiting.

The lid of the last bin gave way just as the others all had: with a loud pop that seemed to announce the opening, though Macy had long ago stopped jumping at the sound.

She looked in to find a sea of photographs.

Not in envelopes or boxes. Not bound by rubber bands. Not separated into orderly, ready-to-file piles. They were like snowflakes, huge pieces of confetti, looking like a mess packed in together, and each one holding the story of that brief snippet of time. Nash used to say that that was what drew him to photography in the first place, the thing he couldn’t let go of: that he was responsible for capturing the moments that people would otherwise miss, never to remember them or even know they had forgotten them. He had started out doing weddings before moving on to shooting advertisements and working now and then for a smattering of travel publications. Most would see it as climbing a few career rungs, but when asked about his new assignments, Nash’s voice would register a sad note. Unlike many photographers, he never seemed to approach weddings as a means to an end. “I get to be a part of the happiest day of these people’s lives,” he’d tell her. “And if I do it right, well, isn’t that probably one of the best things I could do with my life? Give them something to remember it by?”

Now she wondered whether Nash would say the same thing about their wedding day—whether it was one of the happiest days of his life. She used to hope so. Now she’d settle for top three. Top five, even.

The basement’s dampness had worked its way into her, and she shivered. Macy wished she could carry the bin upstairs, spread the contents out in front of the fire, and surround herself with these images. But it was too heavy to maneuver, one-armed, up a steep set of stairs. And so she pulled up a lawn chair, tugged the cord on another bare bulb for extra light, and started sorting.

Nash was the rare young photographer who didn’t prefer digital cameras and processing. He used them when it made sense for him to do so, mostly on official shoots that required quick turnaround—those for advertising inserts or Web sites or weddings. When he photographed her, or the landscape of the island, or gatherings with their families or friends, he’d do things the old-fashioned way: in his darkroom.

Macy realized, looking into the strata of images below her fingers, how little she had actually seen of his work. She understood, maybe for the first time just then, how intensely solitary their worlds were. Hers in the barn, Nash’s behind the lens. They’d reconvene at the end of the day and meld their lives back together again, but she didn’t have the faintest idea of how he went about doing what he did. She knew Nash knew the difference between a halter and a bridle, or a vertical and an oxer, but not much more. At one show, she was riding two sorrel horses back-to-back—youngsters she was slowly bringing along. One had a solid blaze down its face, while the other had brown spots that broke up the white. Nash turned away to take a phone call while Macy switched horses. When he hung up the phone and looked at her, he couldn’t have been more confused. “What did you do with its spots?” he asked. She and Martine had laughed then. She smiled now, thinking back on it.

Through her fingers ran pictures of her getting Gounda prepped to go into the ring—a series of her fastening the billets, tightening the girth, oiling his feet and face, brushing his bushy black tail, and finally, Macy giving him a private, quick kiss on the soft skin just above his muzzle. There was another that she lingered on—Macy atop Gounda just before their number was called, waiting in the chute, backlit by the bright lights of the arena and the vibrant jumps beyond, all the colors of a rainbow. Macy was a study in concentration. Slumped shoulders, one hand resting on the giant horse’s seal brown withers, eyes closed, and chest inflated with a long inhale. Gounda’s ears focused forward, his eyes open wide.

There were others, no rhyme or reason to the order in which they found her hands. One, seemingly retouched, of Nash as a boy. Freckles loud as ink stains across his nose and cheeks. He wore blue corduroy bib overalls and a giant pile of leaves, and a laughing smile so big that his eyes had narrowed to make room for it.

Another of Magda and Jack in black and white, bent toward each other over a cribbage board, painted Italian tiles in the background tethering the image to the Allen family kitchen in Green Bay.

And on. And on. One after another. These lost moments, captured by Nash’s eye. By his fingers.

And then Macy’s stomach turned in on itself.

Staring up at her, in her right hand, was a woman she had never seen before.

The photo wasn’t the person-on-the-street variety of which Nash was so fond—where he would stake out a spot at an outdoor table or bench and catch people as they went about their days, fixing an out-of-place lock of hair in a storefront window, tucking in the tail of a shirt, staring off at someone else they either knew or didn’t. No, this woman knew she was being photographed. And unlike Macy, who was always embarrassed at being in the crosshairs of the camera lens and either challenging it head-on or slinking away from it, this woman clearly knew how to pander to the camera. She had tilted her eyes up at it and her chin down. It was a coy, knowing pose.

Her black hair had been shorn into a tight bob that hugged her ears. Milk chocolate freckles dotted her nose, thin and white as bone. Her lips, parted ever so slightly on the right side, glistened. Raggedy Ann meets Glamour Shots.

And there were others.

This woman, with bony elbows on a Formica table, fingers folded in against her cheeks, looking off to the left, a runny egg, slice of bacon, and half-eaten piece of dry toast in front of her.

This woman on a striped couch somewhere, skinny knees busting up through ripped jeans, holding a glass of white wine and laughing unabashedly, all teeth and joy.

This same woman, reclined back with legs crossed and one hand reaching up toward the camera, sprawled on a quilted blanket spread out over white sand. She wore the same jeans as in the other photograph, ripped in both knees. She also wore Nash’s favorite UW—Madison sweatshirt, which was, at that moment, balled under Macy’s pillow.

Buried between these photos was a paper napkin from a restaurant called Genghis Cohen in West Hollywood. On it, words unfurled in a scrawl distinctly feminine, and distinctly un-Nash: “I’m struck by the lightning of seeing you after you’re gone,” it read. It was signed by three tiny letters: K-a-t: “Kat.”

K-a-t.

Macy’s head pounded.

To know something theoretically was one thing. To see lines and letters sloping distinctly on a napkin, or blue eyes staring back at you, wearing the same sweatshirt you had been sleeping with every night since your husband had died? That was something altogether different.

A woman not in Macy’s particular situation—a woman with a living, breathing significant other—could approach this in another way: yell, scream, cry tears that she hoped would inflict guilt and pity in the betrayer. Ask “why” and “how” and “how was she?” over and over again, ad nauseam. Monitor future phone records and receipts to ensure that what had happened once would never happen again. Use the transgression to leverage assurances of love.