Once the Shore (2 page)

 

It was morning and she sat at her usual table closest to the stone ledge, occupied by the distant strokes of a swimmer in the outdoor pool. Beside her, at another table, a Canadian man was reading aloud portions of the news to his companion. The incident with the U.S. submarine caused the American widow to shift her attention. The bodies had not yet been recovered. An admiral gave a press conference and formally apologized for this tragedy, unable to give further information at this time.

Her husband used to clip articles out of the newspaper. Anything having to do with the Pacific. It was a type of hobby, she assumed, like collecting butterflies. He tucked them inside photo albums. He never showed them to her. She only knew about it because, cleaning out his study, she had opened one, thinking they contained pictures. Years’ and years’ worth of
collecting. She immediately shut the books. It was as though she had opened her husband’s diary and felt it wrong to do so, even if he was no longer present. “It just isn’t right,” she muttered to herself, returning the album to its spot on the shelf.

The waiter called Jim approached the diners with a tray of orange juice in highball glasses and when he placed two on the table with the Canadians, he lifted his hand very slowly, as though attempting to slow time. He furrowed his brows and rubbed his eyes and the widow stiffened her back as he passed and quickly took the order of another table without meeting their gaze. He had forgotten to slick his hair, she noticed, so it seemed dull under the morning sun.

She raised a hand. “Hello, Jim,” she said. “I’ve been up since four. And I called room service because your dining room is never open so early. You should look into that, you know.”

He tucked his empty tray under his arm and promised he would. She told him she had yet to see Tamra Mountain and he offered her suggestions on reliable drivers, who appeared at the entrance to the hotel every hour. To all of this she nodded vaguely, “Yes, yes,” she added. “Tell me what else you know of this place.”

Jim began to describe it as best as he could. If you were to think of the island in terms of circles, then the outer circle was mostly residential, including the cities and the resorts; farther inland were the farms and the forests, and at the center was the
mountain that stood behind them. She had only glanced at it through the taxi window on her way here. And although it was always visible, she made no effort to take the time to observe it. She wasn’t interested. Not in its presence or its impressive height or how most guests were determined to hike along its trails. For her, it was simply what identified the island. She had come to the right place. That was all.

“It takes no longer than one hour to get from here to anywhere,” Jim said.

“Anywhere,” she repeated, then smiled, although Jim didn’t join in the merriment.

She concluded the boy was tired—that he had been up late and needed sleep. She could tell from the redness of his eyes, the way his shoulders slouched. There was a question she wanted to ask him but decided it could wait. Instead, she pointed her head as discreetly as possible toward the Canadians and said, “Terrible business. I suspect you won’t look fondly on Americans after this.”

The expression on his face was that of confusion.

“My husband. He was here, you know. Many years ago. Not here, exactly, but over there.” She lifted a finger toward the coast. “Somewhere over there, I think. I’m not really sure, to be perfectly honest. But I can imagine it. And it would take exactly one hour. That’s what I think, Jim. Like you said. Exactly one hour and we’d find it.”

The boy asked whether he could get her anything else.

“Oh, I’m just fine,” the woman said. “And you work too hard. Get some rest.”

And here, before being conscious of it, she took his hand between hers and patted his knuckles. His skin was warm, his circulation excellent. She imagined the blood that flowed underneath these fingers, rivers of it, splitting like highway systems. How healthy he must be with such warm hands. He was a boy, she was certain, who didn’t grow cold easily.

 

It wasn’t hope he felt. That God was merciful. No, that was his parents, praying that their oldest son had found a piece of wood. Found the belly of a whale. He was, rather, unable to accept. There was a difference. Because for him, the event never happened. Not until the body was recovered. Until then, his brother was still fishing. On a boat in the Pacific casting nets the size of mountains.

The manager offered a leave of absence. His parents wanted him to fly back home. But Jim declined the offer. He continued to do his work. The staff was not yet aware of the circumstances. He made the manager promise. In this way, every day was like all the days. He wiped lint off his jacket. Tightened the knot of his black tie. Washed his hands before serving. His co-waiters called, “Hey Jim!” and he walked over to their tables to speak to the tourists about the scenic hiking trails and the best waterfall for swimming. There was much
talk, of course, about the submarine incident over dinner, but it was conversation that wasn’t directed in any way toward him. He lingered above them for a moment while pouring wine or refilling their water glasses and the more they talked, the more it seemed it had nothing to do with him at all. As though the event, once escaped from mouths, was no longer his, now fanned across the air in the realm of static.

When he could spare a moment, he often stood by the American widow because he had done so for what seemed like long before. Her shedding gray hair and linen outfits were a recurring fixture on the long porch where he, with a form of reverence, served plates of the country’s finest cuisine. She was the one who stayed long after the other guests retired. Her fingers tapped the stem of a wine glass or the candle holder as she addressed the scenery in front of her—she always ate facing the sea—all the while knowing that Jim stood behind her right shoulder as the busboys cleared the tables and the rest of the waiters took their cigarette breaks.

And he listened. Listened to her describe a photograph of a young man—younger than Jim—in uniform with a stern expression and his hair cut short (how she mourned for his hair when they cut it), and the large fields through which they walked, passing silos and a stable where they once snuck in and tried to feed carrots to a stubborn pony, who, instead, bit her knuckle.

He remained behind her, listening, without knowing
exactly why. Perhaps it was her voice. The calm of it. The sudden laughter. Or her scent: the smell of lemongrass. Or because it felt, facing that distant coast, as if it weren’t her voice at all but one that originated from the sea. He waited until she finished and only then did he respond by way of a brief comment or a simple nod and she would, as it grew to be her habit, take his hand between hers and tap his fingers.

“I have never been to your country,” he confessed to her.

“You will if you want to,” she answered. “I have no doubt.”

He didn’t tell her whether or not he wanted to; he wasn’t sure himself. It seemed this place would suffice. Or maybe it wasn’t an issue of sufficiency. Maybe going somewhere else was an act of remembrance, of where you were from. A world of mirrors in which you witnessed a countless number of things that could have occurred at home or anywhere. And maybe, just maybe, that in itself was worth doing now and again. Perhaps he already was. Like this woman who decided to come to this island of all places and now spent her days looking out at the water, at times with a finger pointed at a single spot on the horizon with the utmost certainty.

His brother used to take him out on a small motorboat their uncle owned. This was when they were all living by the eastern coast of the mainland, when Jim was eleven, his brother four years his senior. Their mother packed lunches for them, adamant in her rule that they should never stray far
from shore. They were to raise their hands, palms facing land, and if the beach were hidden from their view, then they had gone too far.

They never followed this rule. His brother went where he pleased. And Jim trusted him with confidence, the way he hooked his arm over the rudder and leaned back as though he were reclining on a chaise longue. He smoked unfiltered cigarettes he had stolen from their father and the scent of it reminded Jim of damp wood. When they were far enough away his brother stripped to his underwear and shut his eyes, the midday sun on his chest, which was broad, a man’s chest of which Jim was envious, as smooth and dark as the calm sea they floated over. He always took his clothes off on the boat rather than before they departed, as though he were only capable of doing so farther from the coast.

“We’re going to find the middle of this ocean,” his brother said.

They were pushing hard, perpendicular to the waves, and Jim sat near the bow, tightening his legs against the constant pressure of the water as it split beside the hull. He sat facing his brother, the shoreline receding behind the level of the older boy’s shoulders. They sped onward. Twenty minutes perhaps. Maybe longer. And then all of a sudden his brother cut the engine and elbowed the rudder and Jim reached for the gunwale as they spun, fast, the boat rocking, and then slowing, slower, in their sight a single straight line that divided sky and
sea, a line that traced their movements like the unraveling of a ball of string until, gradually, they were still.

Above them hung a quiet—save for water lapping against the hull, there existed no sound, not even of a bird or of a distant horn. And all around them lay the ocean, a great wide ring of it with just that thin line of the color gray with the boat its very center, and his brother then stood and raised a hand to his brows in the manner of a salute and said, “There. We’ve done it,” and Jim followed his brother’s gaze and where there was once the shore there was now water and where west once lay was now north, east, south, any one of them. How many rotations the boat had spun Jim couldn’t recall.

The panic came in the form of an arc: slowly rising until the boy felt his chest clench and the joints of his legs loosen, and when his brother began to laugh in triumph, hopping and whooping, he knew then what it was to be afraid. It was the feeling of diminishment. And he didn’t know what to do so he sat there gripping the sides of the boat as his brother, in his underwear, dove into the water and surfaced and shouted for him to come on down, he said, come on down, and Jim would not, shaking his head, his jaw set and his gaze fixed at that gray line. He heard his brother’s breathing and then he saw, in his periphery, what resembled a fish jump up into the air and bite down on his wrist and all at once that line tilted and he felt the cold and the warmth and he shut his eyes and opened them to see that the sky was now a glowing haze of thick water.

This was when he screamed. Opened his mouth as the sea entered the passage of his throat and he heard the dull vibration of it against his ears and then he felt a rising, a lifting as water gave way to the heat of the sun, and all he saw then was a pair of thick, dark arms that enveloped his chest and he leaned back and listened to a soft laughter and felt a palm press against his soaked hair and heard the words, I was just playing, I was just playing, it’s all right now, everything is fine. And then a hand appeared in front of him and within the thumb and index finger there was a compass, suspended just above the horizon.

“Here’s our sun,” the older boy said.

Jim reached up and took hold of it and, as the sound of the engine returned and they headed west, slowly this time, he fell asleep in the arms of his brother.

They reached shore at sundown.

“You’re not going tell anyone?” his brother said, waking him. “Promise? You won’t tell anyone?”

He remembered walking up the beach, his clothes still wet, and the look on his brother’s face which, to his surprise, seemed so young then, so much younger than himself, his eyes as wide as a child’s, his shoulders not so confident anymore, and he couldn’t help but smile.

He promised. And then they held each other’s hands for a moment, the way a shy couple would do, and by the time they returned home to their mother shouting about their whereabouts and ordering them to their room until their father came
back to give them a proper punishment, the afternoon was already far in their memory, where it took the shape of not only a grinning secret, not only the conspiracy of two brothers, but of a campaign against the sea.

 

The Spaniard lived in a cave. That was the rumor she had heard from the boy Jim. For how long no one was certain. But lately he had been coming to the resort property to receive leftover food in exchange for God knows what. She saw him once, against the slope of a distant hill, with a walking stick, and she pointed at his figure and that was how the boy responded—that he lived in a cave. The American widow drew a mental picture of this man, outfitted in bearskin and smelling of lard, perhaps, or week-old fish. Hairy. She quickly dismissed this fantasy. It was, after all, the cave she was interested in.

“There are many,” Jim said.

“I’m speaking of ones close to shore,” the woman said.

“Many there as well.”

It was evening, the candles lit. Her hand covered the folded newspaper on the table. A single body had been recovered, a man in his forties. The search continued.

She wondered if, among the missing, there were husbands. And she thought of the wives and whether they caught themselves in the late afternoons unable to remember what they had been doing or were going to do. She thought of the waiting. Of images of the sea that, years ago, dominated her dreams, all
the more terrifying in its emptiness, vast and quiet and gray. Of how she prayed for her husband’s safety, for his return, and how, in his absence, her love for him grew through memory, in constant repetition, images circling so that the effect was that time paused. And yet, time did not because a single day turned into another. She slept, woke. It was a feeling of both immobility and motion. This was waiting. She knew it well. And it was how the wives of the fishermen spent their days, she was certain, with the conviction that they were alone, regardless of the publicity, the news, the interviews, condolences.