Miracle Beach (36 page)

“Lady,” the man said, finally pausing to look up at her, “this is a fish place, but we’re clearly not on the water. We’re in a strip mall. Maybe you’re looking for Dick’s? That’s a fish place, and it’s on the water.”

“No, he said Duke’s,” Magda said, as if she had something to prove to this man who had met her gaze only once.

Jack had called her earlier and said that something had come up. He’d asked her if she didn’t mind just driving herself to lunch. She told him no, that she’d be happy to meet him. Truth was, she did mind. Not the driving itself. It was a straight shot down the Old Island Highway into town, after all. But she minded what it seemed to signify, having to drive herself. His not picking her up as he had said he would.

She could have sworn that Jack had said to meet him at Duke’s. By the time Magda picked her way across the street and down the path leading toward Dick’s, she was hopping mad. The little detour to Duke’s had made her nearly ten minutes late. And she hated to be late. Even more, she hated to be wrong. And much more than that, she hated having to concede she was wrong even when she was clearly right, as she knew she was in this case.

Jack was already seated with a can of soda in front of him when she arrived.

“Nice of you to show,” he said.

She scowled at him, but held her tongue.

“I’m kidding you, Magda. Go on, sit down.” He got up from the table. “I ordered us each the halibut. You’ll love it. What can I get you to drink?”

“Diet something or other.”

“One diet something or other coming up.”

Early in their marriage there was a time when Jack’s little barely funny phrases, his puns that only he got a kick out of—or understood—endeared him to her. Eventually, they started to wear on her—right around the time when Nash began to find them endlessly amusing. In retrospect, Nash was probably just laughing at his dad laughing at his own jokes. But
she
was never the funny one. She could never get Nash to laugh like that.

In the days since he’d left, alone in her bed at night, it was the thought of Jack cracking himself up that would make her smile. That was how she remembered him. That was how she had pictured him.

And despite her annoyance with him now, she found herself smiling like a schoolgirl at his ribbing.

Jack hadn’t been kidding about Dick’s being on the water. It was literally a small shack atop a series of floating docks that bobbed on the ocean’s surface. Magda let herself go with the motion, gazing out at the sailboats on the other side of the cove. She wondered which one might be Jack’s. Wondered whether he’d invite her to go sailing with him. They could if they wanted to, wherever and for as long as they felt like. Jack had sold his business the week before, and she didn’t work. All they had was time.

Magda didn’t let the fact that neither of them sailed, or their pending divorce, stop her daydream. She imagined sunning herself on the deck of a little sailboat, Jack at the helm, the wind blowing through their hair. She imagined catching their own dinner, Jack fixing the fish just the way he always did, while she chopped and diced her way to a scrumptious salad. Then the two of them wrapped in a blanket on the deck, glasses of wine in hand, looking up at a night sky full of stars. They could make love right there, without another soul around. Or down below in the cramped sleeping quarters if the night grew too cold, the lack of room to move dictating their movements, keeping them close. Every day. Every night.

They could dock—if that was what one called it; she’d have to brush up on the language of sailing—in Mexico. Drink margaritas. Dance to a local mariachi band. Stroll the beach arm in arm with the squish of sand beneath their toes. It truly could be a great adventure. If only Jack were one who liked adventure, or margaritas, or even leaving the city limits.

Jack set a Diet Coke in front of her and then walked to the other side of the table, setting on it a traylike contraption with several doughnut-size holes in it, and in them, cone-rolled newspaper containing a mass of fried food—French fries and some sort of fish. Halibut, she believed he had said.

“This is rustic,” Magda said.

“This is fish and chips the way it’s supposed to be done.”

Canada continually surprised Magda with just how British it often seemed, especially Vancouver Island. From the spellings and signage the locals used—
colour
instead of
color
,
flavour
instead of
flavor
—to how kids there called their mothers
Mum
, to Victoria itself, which looked like it had been picked up and transferred from one isle to another. She had never seen a fish fry—because that was what this was, a Wisconsin-style fish fry, just wrapped up differently—packaged so, but apparently this was how they did it overseas, and that apparently made Jack prone to liking it, despite his refusal to ever actually go to Europe.

“I didn’t think you liked fish fries.” A note of accusation had sneaked into her voice without her intending it to.

In Green Bay, there were two things people did with regularity—Friday fish fries and cheering on the Packers. These were activities so tightly woven into the local social fabric that you couldn’t help but partake. If one didn’t, it might be easier to move elsewhere. But Magda had rarely been able to get Jack out for a fish fry (“Fried fish?!” he would say, always. “Can you honestly think of anything more disgusting?”), yet here he was, happily sucking down breaded halibut like Long John Silver himself.

“There are a lot of things I didn’t know I liked until lately,” Jack said.

He tossed two fries into his mouth, brushed his hands together to rid them of salt, and rocked back, kicking his legs up on a spare chair. “So, what now?” he asked, though Magda wasn’t sure he wanted an answer. He bit his lower lip, seemingly lost in thought.

She wanted to tell him that she took it back. All of it. “Are you sure we’re doing the right thing?” she asked.

Jack nodded, but he didn’t look at her. “I need to tell you something,” he said. “I’m adopting Glory.”

His words hit Magda like a punch. What about her? Why only him? Had he been planning this behind her back?

“Now, don’t get all excited,” Jack said. “Let me explain.” And he did. Glory missed her mom, but after Jack had explained to Glory that because her mother was going to jail, she’d be placed in a foster home in California, she had solemnly agreed to let him adopt her instead.

“I’ll still have a mom, though, right?” Glory had said to Jack, and he had told her that she’d have a mom forever and ever, that nothing could change that.

Across from Magda, Jack fiddled with his napkin, folding and unfolding it. Magda didn’t like the looks of this. It meant that he didn’t know what to say, or how to say it. It meant he was uncomfortable.

“Magda, I really do think we’re doing the right thing—for a lot of reasons. But there’s one other reason, too, that I haven’t told you about.”

Magda cocked an eyebrow at him.

“I don’t want to leave here. And if we don’t get divorced, Glory will end up in foster care.”

“That’s ridiculous, Jack. Where did you come up with that?”

“It’s the law. If we’re not divorced, then we
both
have to adopt her. And with us living in different countries, her case would be tied up in administrative international wrangling for years. And in the meantime, she’d be in California’s custody.”

Magda reeled from the unfairness of it all. Her son and now this. She had prayed hard her whole life. She had gone to church. She had read her Bible.

“It stinks, Magda. I know it does. But the legalities aren’t going to change anything at all. It’s only a piece of paper—a legal loophole we’ll close. You’ll be able to see Glory whenever you’d like. You have my word.”

Jack’s word might as well have been engraved in stone. He didn’t make promises lightly. This she knew.

“Do you remember how Nash used to try to race the light?” he asked her.

She remembered it well. Magda had simply meant to share with a six-year-old Nash what she had learned in her astronomy class one night, and mentioned that light traveled at a certain speed. Every night after acquiring that newfound knowledge, when they’d turn on the light in his room at night Nash would try to race it to his bed, dismayed for a good part of his growing up as to why he never won.

Magda laughed. “What about his Superman year?” she asked, which got a big belly laugh from Jack.

“Who could forget!” he said. And he was right. Magda was certain that Nash’s kindergarten teacher at Notre Dame as well as their postman and a whole slew of others remembered Nash’s fixation with the Superman costume, since it had been the only thing he’d wear that entire year. It showed up in his school picture and their family portraits at both Christmas and Easter, although fortunately, by that last one, they had been able to convince him to at least take the mask off.

“Do you remember the night he wore it into our room?” Magda asked Jack, and they both smiled, thinking about the time when Nash had changed from his pajamas into his costume in the middle of the night, and, backlit by the hallway light, a miniature Superman appeared in their doorway, scaring them half to death. “I forget what a quirky kid he was sometimes. He turned into such a great young man.”

“He sure did,” Jack said. His face grew solemn. “You did that, Magda.”

“We did it together,” she answered.

Jack reached across the table and squeezed her hand. How different that simple gesture suddenly felt. It struck Magda as wrong, or at the very least surprisingly intimate. Even though they had shared a bed for the past thirty-plus years, it was as if they had been transformed into strangers with the help of a few legal documents.

“I want it back,” Magda said, looking down at their intertwined hands.

“So do I,” Jack whispered.

Magda wanted to throw herself at Jack’s feet, circle her arms tight around his ankles, and beg him to stay. But she could finally see the Serengeti, the Dead Sea, the Arc de Triomphe, and Christ the Redeemer. She could still be a grandmother to Glory. So much promise had suddenly graced her life, though she couldn’t help but mourn the loss of her partnership with Jack—the one person witness to almost her whole life’s history.

“We just want different things, Magda,” Jack said. “We have for a while now. Hell, maybe we always have. This life we made is too small for us. We hold each other back in all the wrong ways.”

Magda nodded. She agreed. She agreed with it all, every last word. But it felt as if she were getting everything she had ever wished for and giving up everything she had ever asked for in one fell swoop. If someone were actually sawing her in two, the agony could not have felt more real.

As if on cue, the sky opened up, pelting them with drops that felt as big as gumballs. Magda reached for the windbreaker she had brought with her and started to tie it like a kerchief, to protect her hair, before thinking better of it. She let the jacket drop to the table. Jack smiled at her knowingly. He motioned for her to come with him toward shelter, but she stayed rooted in place. Magda smiled back at him. Then she closed her eyes, tilted her head back, and let the rain soak her straight through.

 

In the days that followed, Magda slowly, deliberately went about the business of leaving the island.

She couldn’t do it all at once. It was something to be worked up to. And she worked up to it for weeks on end. She meandered the streets of Campbell River, imagining Nash here the whole time. Nash running to the post office. Nash leaving the house when Macy did morning chores to have coffee and perhaps a doughnut at Tim Hortons. Nash picking up milk and eggs and the generic white-cheddar macaroni and cheese from the Thrifty store that he loved so much.

She knew he did these things. But not when. Not how. This boy whom she had carried in her own body and known so well for so long—how he slept, how he ate his cereal, how he’d swing his right leg furiously and aimlessly all at once when he was still too short to reach the ground from her kitchen chairs—she could have given you a list of his idiosyncrasies and traits a mile long. Now? She knew that list would be much, much shorter.

It happened to every mother, she knew. Kids did what they were always supposed to do: They grew up. They grew up and moved out and became people in their own right whose histories you could recall so thoroughly, down to the day or minute, even though you weren’t quite sure where they were yesterday or the day before that, or what they were planning to do next week or for their next vacation. She knew this. Yet the thought that she didn’t know what Nash’s routine had been here, where he went or how he ran errands, the fact that she didn’t have a picture of him doing any of these things to recall, or the fact that she could only guess what he got at Tim Hortons and not know what it actually was—these things made it seem as if he had been taken from her all over again.

But trying to remember him here did her good. It connected her to him in a way she hadn’t expected. As did the truce she seemed to have formed with Macy.

She hadn’t been asked to come to Macy’s for dinner. The day after her lunch with Jack at Dick’s, she simply showed up early with some crab fresh off the boat that someone had been selling behind Discovery Pier, a bottle of white wine, and some bakery bread. Finding Magda on her front step with these items, Macy hadn’t said anything to her. But that meant, too, that she hadn’t said anything snide to her, and so she followed Macy inside, unloaded her groceries, and the two of them commenced cooking dinner in silence. Macy drank a bottle of Kokanee; Magda sipped some of the wine, using a splash here or there for the crab. Together their chopping, cracking, and sizzling formed a quiet, comfortable symphony to which they worked. And that evening, as conversation whirled around them at dinner, Macy raised her can of beer and nodded at Magda, who touched her own wineglass to it.
To the cooks
, Macy seemed to say.
To us
, Magda thought. No one else had even noticed, but it was a start.