Miracle Beach (28 page)

Macy didn’t have those little luxuries.

She could scream and cry and kick and scream, and at the end of the day, she would still be alone. A tree falling in the forest.

And that saying? About a picture being worth a thousand words? Complete and utter bullshit. Because there, in that bin, were hundreds of pictures. And none of them told her a single thing other than what she already knew.

Nash and this woman. The woman and Nash. The girl.

Macy grabbed a wastepaper basket, discarded in the basement’s far corner. Without thinking about what she was doing, she grabbed handfuls of photographs and stuffed them into the garbage can. When what she forced in had run out of room and sprang right back out, Macy hauled the can upstairs.

There she walked to the kitchen, rinsed dregs of coffee from the “Shoreline Dental: A Smile a Day . . .” mug she had used that morning, dropped a handful of ice cubes into it, and fished a bottle of vodka from the cabinet. But the smile on the mug, which should have turned from gray to sparkling white when anything hot or cold was poured into it, stayed a dreary, noncommittal gray.

She walked back to the living room and sat down cross-legged in front of the fireplace. Then she put the photos one by one into it until the trash can stood empty. She lit a match, and she tossed it onto the pile.

There were photos of her. Her and Nash. Nash’s parents. Unfocused, drunken party pictures Nash had taken in college. Flowers in various stages of bloom from Victoria Gardens. Sunsets over Stories Beach and Miracle Beach. Landscapes with sharply focused foregrounds and backgrounds as soft as spun cotton. Macy watched the fire eat each one with hot black teeth—edges first and eventually the whole of them. Then she went back for more.

By the second load, Macy had slurped the remaining drops of vodka from the cup and had done away with more than half of the photos.

She started chewing the ice cubes into bits in hopes they had absorbed something, anything, that might work its way into her bloodstream, into her head, to help her make sense of all this. She knew there wasn’t any vodka left, or anything else might do the trick. Macy drew her finger deep around the inside of the cup and brought it to her lips, savoring the bitter sting.

The fire had been slow to catch on, and it would smolder and flare up in spurts. Macy lay curled next to it like a dog, feeling the heat and flipping through the pictures that had never been taken, that existed now only in her head.

There was Nash crying when it came time for the injections, saying that it hurt him to hurt her, and her response, each time, measured and even: “I want to do this—for you.” “For us,” he would correct her, and she would think of the voice on the phone and repeat, “For us.”

There was the one of his lips, soft on the jagged scars of her arms, whispering their quiet promise: that he loved her, no matter what, followed by her silent refrain of,
You don’t know what you’re saying
.

And then the pictures in her head of her own lips on the unadulterated skin of her baby’s stomach, like a sip of warm milk passing them by. Her baby’s giggle. Its tiny fingers reaching for hers, knowing hers, wanting hers out of any others. Then finding that same baby, years and years later, the same way she had found her mom—its skin still warm as milk, but leaking the color of crushed cherries.

And then, that baby—her baby—replaced by eight-year-old Glory. Spunky, gregarious Glory. Glory, the perfect mix of Nash and not-her.

She had forgotten to open the flue. Macy’s eyes smarted—partially from the smoke, and partially because her life could be summed up in movie taglines: She had been duped. It was all a sham. She had been reduced to that. To this.

There was one more load. If she had had two good, working arms, Macy would have simply picked up the Tupperware container and lugged the entire thing upstairs. As it was, she had to use the trash can, clutching it to her chest with one arm wrapped around it.

Macy thought about being done with it. She thought about letting the fire burn out, putting the lid back on the Tupperware container, going to bed, and waking up tomorrow. But then all of it—all of the potential reminders—would still be down there, lurking. No, there was moving on to be done. This would end tonight.

By the time the wastebasket was half-full, Macy wished she hadn’t gone back downstairs. The fervor had left her. Her heart wasn’t in it. They were just pictures, after all. She wouldn’t miss them—she hadn’t even known about any of them until that night—but by the same token, what good was all this doing? It didn’t make her feel one bit better, because it didn’t change anything. There wasn’t any changing to be done. This was her new life. She had no choice but to live it.

The wastebasket was almost full now, the Tupperware bin nearly empty. Macy reached in for another handful of photographs, but instead of grazing glossy surfaces like the last hundred or so times she had reached into the bin, her fingertips felt something rougher. Paper.

She brushed aside the remaining photographs and found the bottom of the bin scattered with thick envelopes, each one addressed to Glory Gibson. Each one postmarked December 31. Each one stamped, “Return to Sender.”

She opened a letter dated three years before. It was almost word for word like the one Glory had brought with her. She opened one postmarked the previous year. It, too, read nearly verbatim. Macy thought of Nash ending each year by sitting down in front of a blank yellow legal pad and pouring his heart out to a little girl he had never met. She thought of him folding up the sheets filled with his scrawl, folding it into thirds, and stuffing it into a long, plain white envelope. She thought of him starting each new year with the letter boomeranging back to him, and when it did, how it must have weighed heavy with disappointment in his hand.

She thought of Glory then, too. What would have happened to her if Nash and Macy had moved—to another house, another farm, another city? Had Glory even thought about the risk that she had taken—not just jumping on a bus at eight years old, but putting every last shred of faith in one single letter? Probably not, Macy decided. Impossible-seeming things, for whatever reason, were always easier to take a chance on. It was the normal, day-to-day risks that rendered a person immobile, wholly unable to do a damn thing.

Macy went about gathering the letters, sorting them by date. Seven in all. Until, at the very bottom of the bin, one envelope remained.

At first it looked like the others—long, white, marked, “Return to sender,” and addressed in Nash’s scrawl. But this one was postmarked July 15, just over three years ago, to the day. And it was addressed to Katherine Gibson.

Macy lifted the edge of the envelope and slipped her finger under it like a letter opener. Halfway through the letter’s top, Macy realized an actual opener might have been a good idea. She felt the sting before she saw the thin line of blood materialize on her finger. She brought it to her mouth and sucked on it to stem the blood from bubbling up. It stopped bleeding, but kept right on stinging.

Macy wrestled the letter out of the half-open envelope and unfolded it. Like the others, it was on lined yellow legal paper. Unlike the others, it was one single page.

She started to read.

Macy’s breath caught in her throat. She couldn’t seem to make it go in either direction—up and out, or in and down. Her heart pounded. She felt as if a fist had closed around her stomach. She realized, with a start, that the letter in her hands could answer all of her questions, and at the same time, it could unravel even more of her and Nash’s relationship. She didn’t know if she could read it.

Reading those words—all of them on that page—could fundamentally change everything about how her world with Nash had looked. She knew only so much just then, and maybe that was best. It was as though she were standing on the bank of a river, and if she crossed, she couldn’t ever come back. Her view would forever be altered. Because there was a chance that if she knew more, if she knew everything that she had thought she wanted to, she might have to acknowledge that the last ten years of her life were only one version of reality—only
her
take on it. And it would be like losing Nash all over again. Only this time, she wouldn’t have fond memories to buoy her. This time, it would be like lashing concrete blocks to her ankles.

Macy folded the letter and the envelope and tucked both into the back pocket of her jeans. Then she took the letters to Glory and placed them in the plastic bin. All alone, splayed against the bottom, those letters looked expectant, like they were waiting for something. She thought of how Glory clung to that one letter from Nash, how the girl took it everywhere with her, transferring it from pocket to pocket each day, fingering it to make sure it was still there. Macy had seen her do it many times over in the two weeks since Glory had arrived. And if one letter could offer such hope, such promise, what might a complete set—one for every year of Glory and Nash’s overlapping lives—do for the girl?

Macy snapped the lid back on the container, sealing the letters inside. “Maybe someday,” she said out loud, to no one in particular.

 

If Gounda hadn’t been dead lame, Macy would have tied a lead rope to either side of his halter—since she couldn’t saddle or bridle him with only one working arm—and ridden him out through the back pastures, even if it was nearly three a.m. She would have felt his sure stride beneath her, his muscles working, carrying her, calming her. And out there, where she could hear the water just beyond the tree line, as far from her house and that basement as she could have gotten, she would have pulled the letter from her back pocket and read it by the light of the moon.

But Gounda was lame. In fact, he was nearly three-legged at the moment. And so Macy did the next-best thing she could think of: She went to the barn.

The horses would be sleeping, some lying down and some standing up, and Macy didn’t want to jolt them awake by flipping on the overhead lights and flooding their worlds with brightness out of nowhere. Instead, she felt her way to the tack room and turned on the inside light, keeping the door open so illumination filtered out into the aisleway. Then she turned on the lights in the wash stall and the bathroom, all in a line along the left-hand side of the barn. The result was a dim glow that fell across most of the walkway, but didn’t reach to the stalls on the opposite side.

She looked in the stalls along the right-hand side. In the first was a six-year-old mare, a dappled gray Holsteiner named Zanzara that Macy was bringing along through the lower-level jumper ranks. She was thoughtful and brave, but had a stubborn streak running through her a mile long that Macy didn’t altogether mind. Next was Kingston, a sorrel with a spotted blaze. He was a half brother to Gounda, and Macy hoped that in a handful of years, he’d be able to step into Gounda’s shoes as her next top mount. In the stall next to Kingston was Brouhaha, or “Brew,” as Macy called him, a Dutch Warmblood stallion that Martine had found and imported for her. And across the aisle from Brew stood Gounda. He didn’t nicker, but his eyes followed Macy. In the stalls beyond were a couple of horses that Macy had taken on to sell for their owners. They’d be going home now that her show season was over.

Macy breathed deep, letting the sweet smells of hay and manure fill her nose. There was something magical about this place. One step inside and the rest of the world fell away. A million miles away. It was her center, another spine. And as she stood there, the thick fog she had found herself trying to wade through in the basement dissipated. Thoughts clarified, as if she were adjusting one of Nash’s camera lenses. There really hadn’t ever been a choice. Not for her.

She reached into her back pocket and fished out the letter. Then Macy laid herself down in the middle of the aisleway, knees bent into an upside-down “V,” in a weak patch of light. And she began to read.