Waves

I broke the surface and gasped, catching my breath and slowing it to easy pulls of air. A seagull flew past, and I bobbed for a moment in the water watching him head to the horizon. I turned and swam to shore. The water pushed against me, my own waves lost to the bigger tides, and I rode the current inward when I could. I walked up the beach and flopped down on the towel next to Lo. She was a quarter of the way through the novel she brought, some perfect-for-the-beach story of romance found and lost. No doubt some tragically profound ending to induce tears in the reader. I lay on my side and admired her until she lowered her sunglasses and glared.

           “What?” I asked.

           “You’re objectifying me. Again” she said.

           “I have nothing better to do,” I said but sat up and looked back at the ocean. I took in the cries of the birds, the crashing of waves in and out, and the endless water, glistening in the spring sunlight.

           Lo’s mother no longer wanted the condo, now that her husband had passed, but Lo helped me convince her mom to allow us to stay there for a week before she sold it. It would probably sell quickly and leave Beverly with a nice sum for her retirement, and if she were a nicer woman, I might consider that a good thing. As our relationship stood now, I, the bastard man who stole her baby girl from the high school sweetheart she should have married, could care less, as long as the woman never moved in with us. Lo made promises but whoever understands the bonds between children and parents?

           After an hour, Lo and I returned to the condo and then ventured to the city center, a short walked down artfully cracked concrete where restaurants waited. We ate fish and drank white wine. I watched the waitress drop a dish and the older couple she was serving look distraught and disagreeable. I liked the ocean but not these people here.

           “You’re doing it,” Lo said between sips of her wine.

           “What am I doing?”

           “You’re judging people.”

           I shrugged. “What if I am?”

           She sighed. “It’s not worth it.”

           The headache started, the one developing this past week when we talked about things, real things, not joking around things. “I’m sorry. I didn’t grow up around people like this.” I regretted saying that instantly.

           A hurt look crossed her face. “Well, I guess I’m sorry I did.” She tapped her wine glass, considering. “No, I take it back. I’m not. I’m not sorry.”

           “Well,” I said.

           “It doesn’t matter how much money someone has, David. Everybody has hard times.”

           “Hard times don’t mean you get to treated people poorly.”

           She sipped her wine and I watched the television over the bar.

           “I’m taking a nap,” Lo said when we arrived at the condo, and she closed the door to the master bedroom. I opened a beer and sat on the patio. We were ten stories high, and the beach was right across the street. I watched the mid-day traffic, the scattered stream of the BMWs, Cadillacs, and Teslas broken up by work trucks, their beds filled with racks of tools and ladders, their cabs full of men. I felt like crap and deserved it. I went into the bedroom. She was lying on her side under the sheet, the overhead fan lazily stirring the air. I kicked off my shoes and crawled next to her. She rubbed my back.

           “You still upset,” I asked.

           “No.” She paused and opened her eyes. The dark blue flickered at me. “But you need to deal with this. Maybe you need to talk to him.”

           “I know.” We fell asleep and didn’t wake up until after dinner time.

           I changed our plane tickets the next morning. I told Lo she could go home, that I could take of this in a day, be on a flight back west the next morning, but she insisted. “I want to be there for you. You do the same for me.”

           “Yeah, well, your family isn’t crazy like mine.”

           She smiled, that thin look where her teeth didn’t show but I knew she was thinking. “All families are crazy, just crazy in their own special way.”

           “Now who’s judgmental,” I said and she kept smiling.

           “Sometimes it’s judgement. Sometimes it’s just true.”

           We tried to enjoy the last day on the beach, drinking beer from the cooler, mixing whiskey with the sodas the association’s boy kept in his own cooler. Lo told me he wouldn’t care, that people with enough money won’t get told to stop drinking on a beach, and this section was private anyway, but I still kept it hidden in the cabana. Something about it too forthcoming, too obvious.  We ate out that evening and I watched spring training games while she stared at the setting sun reflecting off the clouds and water, an orange glow that enveloped the earth before fading into night. We walked back under the stars, the street lights failing in their mission to blot them out, and we finished a bottle of port on the water’s edge, sinking our toes into the sand one last time.

           We arrived at O’Hare shortly before noon and took a rental car to a hotel.

           “Do you want to walk around?” Lo asked. “You haven’t been here in years. And I’ve never been here.” I remembered. She sensed my hesitation and continued, “No one is going to remember you.”

           “Okay.” I slipped on my sunglasses as we passed one of two banks, this one with a facelift since I had last lived in this town. I stopped at the corner and point at the largest store in town, the grocery. “That’s where I worked in high school.” I kicked at a pebble in front of me. “I hated it.”

           We went back to the hotel and I took a nap. Lo woke me at 3 and we drove and parked in front a ranch house. I held onto the wheel tightly to keep my shaking hands from showing.

           “You don’t have to go inside,” she said and rubbed my forearm. “We can sit here for a while. We can drive somewhere else. We can drive back to the hotel.”

           I shook my head. “I think I have to go there.

           “Know what you’re going to say?”

           “No. I just…” I shrugged and held out my palms. “I’ll say whatever I have to say.”

           “Do you want me to come in?”

           It was the question she hadn’t asked directly, and I was glad it was finally said. I had dreaded it, because I hadn’t had an answer to the question earlier. Now I sat and stared at the same familiar yellow siding, a bit more aged and tattered on the edges, the roof missing several shingles. In my memories, the house loomed as a mansion, larger than life – because it was, I now realized, as I sat and stared at that metal front door.

           Some bad news you hear and all you can think is: good. Serves the person right. My father learned how social media works a year ago, found out he was dying six months ago, and last week told me the news. I reacted more to the social media discovery than the impending death. I didn’t reply to his message or the ones that followed. It seemed an unnecessary coda or a bill in the mail for something I had already paid. Truthfully, I had hoped he was already dead. So I bought plan tickets south, the opposite direction he repeatedly asked me to go, and started our vacation at the condo.

           Once, I left my glasses at school when I was nine. I was walking home, past the old bowling alley with OSB where the front windows used to be, when I remembered. I returned, found an open door, and discovered my glasses where I had left them in the gymnasium. Unfortunately, the glass in the right eye was shattered. I trudged home with the broken glass and half-empty frames hidden in my pocket.

           I ate dinner with my mother and father. My mother ate like a mouse, hands folded in her lap if not holding onto a utensil, her mouth drawn in a thin line even when chewing. My father came home late and sat down, drained the first beer my mother poured for him, tapped the empty can for another, and was nearly down with it before he noticed. Then he stared at me and swallowed the last of the lager. He motioned for another. My mother stood and went into the kitchen.

           “Where are your glasses,” he asked in a low growl.

           “Dad?” I said.

           “Your glasses. Those things that help you see. Those things I paid for out of my paycheck.”

           “Oh.”

           “Oh?”

           “They – they – they….they broke. At school. I…I forgot them in the gym and…I…they… they’re broken.” I tried to explain that I could pay for them, that I’d make it up to him, but he didn’t listen. He shoved his chair back and grabbed me by the back of my neck. He dragged me to the front door.

He turned off the porch light in the autumn dusk. “Put your hands here.” He pointed at the door frame. “If you make a sound, I’ll do it again, until you stop making sounds.”

I placed my hands on the door frame and then he stepped back. It was not the swinging of the door, or the pain that radiated up my hands through my arms and into my chest and head that I remember. Nor the silence that hung in the air. It is the look on my father’s face that stayed with me. The snide curl of his lip like a comma, the teeth gleaming in the light, the pleasure he gained from the pain he inflicted. I now knew what my mother went through every moment of her life with him. Even when he was gone from the house, his anger lurched from room to room, following her as she cooked dinner, whispered on the telephone to her mother, or bent over the sewing machine in the den, the volume muted on the television. She worried he might come home early, hear the lusty soap opera stars opine their love, and this would spark his terror.

He beat me with a belt when I was late for dinner, thew me against a wall when I forgot to mow the lawn, punch me in the face when I missed my curfew, but I remember the first time more than any other. I thought of his face from that night when I ran away the night I graduated from high school, when I spoke with my mother on the phone and I heard him yelling for her in the background.

           He answered my third knock, the one I told myself would be the last, with a cigarette in his mouth, which fell to the ground as his jaw dropped open. He tried to speak, his gaping mouth only uttering air, a flurry of breathing.

           “I don’t need to come in,” I said. “I just want you to know. I’m still alive. I’m married. I work a good job. And I’m mostly happy.” I flexed my wrists. “Sometimes my hands ache. Sometimes I have trouble lifting things with my arms. I remember what I did. And I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.” I paused and looked at his eyes. I realized how small and insignificant he was. His life was a cardboard box, waiting to be tossed into a trash bin or burned in a pit. It looked like something large and worthy until you came close. Then you saw how weak and unable to hold anything he was. While I stared, he spoke

           “I’m sorry your mother passed. I didn’t…” and here he paused. “David, I didn’t go to the funeral because I didn’t think it would be right.”

           You chased her to an early grave. She managed to work up the courage to divorce you and live her last few years out of the scepter of your evil, but you created demons that drove her to death. I didn’t say those words in the moment, and there are late nights I’ve still regretted it. Instead I just nodded. He continued. “And…” His eyes moistened and a tear ran down one of his cheeks. “I’m sorry for those things I did to you. I know. I know it wasn’t right. I guess I knew then even, I don’t know.”

           “Why did you do it?”

           “I don’t know.” He stared at the ground past me, and I realized that his life was already burning down, nearing its end soon, and that it had been on fire since he started. The fire burned so much he really didn’t know why he did the bad things to others. And he might never know why, because he didn’t want to. Things like that – people have killed themselves for less.

           “Okay.”

           “I mean. I’m sorry for…hurting you.”

           I looked again at the broken-down house and at the shell of the man who played father to me for years. “I can’t ever forget it.” I set my mouth. “I forgive me.” He opened his mouth again, but no words, and tears started to form. I waved them away with a twist of my hand, and the pain boomed through my wrist. I winced as I spoke. “I don’t forgive you for you. I forgive you for me. Because it doesn’t matter if you’re really sorry. It doesn’t matter if you’re not.” I gestured inside the house. “You might live it again, given the chance – beat me, Mom…” I swallowed. “Or maybe not.” I shook my head. “But I don’t want to live the rest of my life without telling you this: I forgive you.” I nodded to myself, and realized I was only looking at the house, that no matter his expression I did not need to see it. “I forgive you. And,” I said, with a sigh, “I’m going to go now.”

           We drove back to the hotel. Lo started to tell me I missed the parking lot as I drove by, but instead stopped. She always knows, always seems so good settling into her seat, waiting and seeing. I did not stop driving until I pulled into the parking garage. I stopped at a liquor store and grabbed a six-pack and we walked down the lake. We sat on a bench and pulled our jacket sleeves over our hands against the cold beer. The water pushed against the concrete wall, and moved back out to the lake. We finished our first drink each and she leaned her head upon my shoulder before she spoke.

           “Better?”

           I thought for a moment. “No, I don’t know if it’s ever going to be better.”

           “Do you think you can live with that?”

           I looked at her and she gazed back at me. I did not think about my father beating me or screaming at me then. I thought about my wedding day with Flo, about the little moments on Saturday mornings when we lay in bed, waiting for a storm outside to pass and the light to shine through the bottom of the blinds. I thought of how beautiful she looked now in the wind and cold, huddled against me. Even though the jackets, even through the brisk spring chill and wind, she emanated warmth and light.

           “I think so.”

           We stayed there for another hour, watching waves move in their hypnotic and ever-living fashion, and then drove back to the hotel. Our flight was early, back home to the west. I didn’t want to miss it.