Miracle Beach (3 page)

That was where she headed now. Their house was only about a half mile from the college, from Magda’s favorite spot—a grassy, parklike area in front of the student union close to the Fox River. She liked that it was private, despite being part of campus, yet there was still plenty to watch—the crew team practicing, students running along the Main Street Bridge. Magda usually liked to sit with her back against one of the large oaks and slide her bare toes through the grass, but a picnic table nearby provided a good alternative option on days when the ground was wet.

Today she climbed onto the tabletop and brought her knees to her chin, wrapping her arms around her legs. Carvings scarred the picnic table’s surface. Jagged hearts, oversimplified beer mugs, and roughed-out pornographic carvings among an alphabet of initials. She labeled each carving in her mind: Lovesick. Drunk. Perverted. All of the above.

Magda let a finger trace the grooves like diminutive canyons, the serrated edges worn smooth with time. She remembered Jack carving their initials, framed by a heart, into a tree at the top of a mountain he had dragged her up during a trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula back when they were first dating. Jack’s carved heart had looked just like a cliché come to life. She made the mistake of saying that, only to watch Jack’s face harden, then fall after he thought she had looked away. She had vowed to be more careful with him then, to watch her tongue. And she had, for the most part. Except for today. Though, if she were being honest, her words weren’t the problem. It was that she was fresh out of words, and had used her hand instead.

Magda’s eye caught something to the right of her foot. Initials. NA+MA. She reached down and let her fingers follow the grooved letters, Nash’s and Macy’s initials. Or maybe not. Macy always signed her name Macy Armstrong Allen, or Macy A. Allen. She said it was a safety check, that if anyone ever stole her checkbook or credit card she could prove it wasn’t her signature, because most people wouldn’t include the middle initial or name. Magda thought it was because she was a snob.

Almost one year before, Nash and Macy had visited Jack and Magda over the Fourth of July, which coincided with Nash’s thirty-second birthday and Macy’s thirty-fifth. To celebrate, Jack and Magda had thrown them a real bash. They were so excited to have their son home for a holiday for once. Macy always seemed to have other plans at Christmas or Thanksgiving, which she didn’t even celebrate. There was always a horse show she just couldn’t miss, and Nash never wanted her to spend the holidays alone, so along he went, leaving Magda and Jack with only each other. It was a far cry from the holiday visions of family that Magda had conjured while pregnant with their only son.

Magda, determined to make their visit memorable, invited all of Nash’s old friends from high school, college, and the bank where he had worked in Milwaukee. They put up a white tent in the backyard, had Pierre’s do the catering, and even hired entertainment—a small jazz band with a lead singer who was just the most darling little blonde Magda had ever seen. They rented a small dance floor, and Magda hung strings of white lights inside the tent and on the bushes around the backyard. She bought tiki lights for along the patio and the walkway leading to the back gate. She floated candles in the pool. Everything looked positively enchanting.

Only one year ago.

Magda remembered standing off to one side, near the bushes at the edge of the yard, watching Nash sway Macy awkwardly around the dance floor. At one point Nash stepped on Macy’s toes and Macy chucked him on the arm, holding her own arms stiff to keep him away from her. They had laughed at each other, and then Nash took Macy’s face between his hands and kissed her lips, and then her forehead, lingering there and closing his eyes. Macy fell into the circle Nash’s arms had made around her.

As much as Magda hated to admit it, as much as she had suspected it wouldn’t last, she had to admit one thing: Love looked a lot like that.

It was what she had always wanted; it was what she didn’t think she had ever quite gotten right.

She had walked over to Jack then, thinking that if you couldn’t have that feeling on a night like tonight—a night that felt and looked like romance incarnate—when could you? She pictured twirling with him under strings of soft white lights and the even softer stars above, the rough skin of his hand gentle on her cheek, his arms solid and strong around her. She wondered how long it had been since they had danced. How long it had been since they had even embraced for more than the cursory good-bye or hello. They weren’t unusual, she and Jack. Magda knew that. They had worked hard building a life together and raising a son. Theirs had never been a relationship like in the movies, but if there was ever a time for a little magic, surely this was it.

Jack had been standing with two members of his regular golf foursome, slapping backs and downing beers while debating the Packers’ pickups in that spring’s draft. The band had just struck the first notes of Van Morrison’s “Moondance.” Magda placed a hand on Jack’s arm and smiled up at him. “I’d love this dance, Mr. Allen. May I?”

“You know I don’t dance, Magda,” he said, laughing as if she had told a joke. “Never have, prolly never will.” Then he turned his back to her and inserted himself right back into the conversation, which had moved on to debating whether Brett Favre would or wouldn’t stay retired.

“The man just didn’t want to dance,” Magda’s best friend, Ginny Fischer, had said to her later that night. “It’s not like he said he was leaving you.”

But Magda couldn’t help but wonder—then and now—whether that wasn’t exactly what he had been doing.

 

Magda tried to get comfortable on that picnic table, sitting on the top and leaning back on her elbows, but they dug into the wood. Then she moved to the bench, only to find the same problem with her derriere, which she would have thought had more than enough padding.

Now a handful of college students had started to make their way down the hill toward her. They were about to commence a cookout, by the looks of it, and surely didn’t need a sad old woman ruining their party. So Magda stood up and brushed the tabletop debris from her back cheeks, straightened her jeans and blouse, and grabbed her flip-flops. They weren’t the most practical things to walk in, but as soon as the weather inched anywhere near sixty degrees, Magda couldn’t stand to have anything else on her feet. Her favorite thing about summer was that her toes were finally freed from their sock prisons.

In her head, the scene from Nash’s funeral played on repeat as she walked the familiar route back to the house. She couldn’t believe that Macy had insisted on having the funeral on the island, anyway, when Nash’s home had always been Wisconsin. Where his parents—his parents!—still lived. It was where Jack had taught Nash to swim. Where Nash and his friends spent summers riding their bikes to the Dairy Queen down the street, sitting on the pier behind it all afternoon, daring one another to jump into the Fox River to see if the water would melt their skin like urban legend said it would.

It was where Nash, after hockey practice one night close to Christmas, had convinced his entire Squirt team to go caroling with him on their way home. By the time he showed up, almost two hours late, Magda had been beside herself with fright and sent him straight to his room. Days later, she found out from one of the other mothers what had happened. When Magda had asked Nash why he hadn’t just told her why he had been late, he shrugged and said, “I broke the rules.”

That was her Nash. And who could blame Magda, really, for being upset that he was now, forever, thousands of miles away? Her heartache and anger had mixed and calcified into a sort of organ inside her. She should have been able to drive a short distance and sit by his grave site. Instead, she was relegated to the banks of the Fox River, watching a group of college students unpack a haphazard-looking picnic and attempt to light a grill. If Magda had wanted to place flowers at his grave site, say on his birthday, or on any day she felt the need to tether her grief to his final resting place, she’d have to pay hundreds of dollars for an airline ticket and fly more than four hours each way. Macy had insisted they move back to British Columbia after the wedding because her barn was there, her trainer, her horses. It was all her, her, her. And now, because of Macy and her stupid horses, Nash was dead.

She had only whispered it, at the wake, to Macy’s sister. She knew she shouldn’t have, but not because it was untrue. She had caused a scene, and that was one thing a lady never did. But all these people hugging Macy, touching her cheek tenderly, offering to help in any way they could.
What about me?
Magda had wanted to scream. He was
my son
! But the people kept on coming. Wrapping their arms around Macy, helping her play the victim when it was her own damn fault. And all day they kept on coming, repeating only generic consolations to Jack and Magda—“I’m so sorry for your loss” or “Nash was such a wonderful young man; I’m sure you’re proud of him”—because hardly anyone there knew them.

And then there was Macy’s sister, Regan. Sitting in the alcove near the bathroom after it was all over, on a stupidly bright paisley love seat with a gob of tissues in her hand, eyes puffy red, cheeks slick. She caught Magda’s eye.

“Oh, Magda. Are you holding up okay?”

Magda had nodded.

“Will you look at me!” Macy’s sister said. “Here you are, makeup intact, and I’m a mess. I’m so sorry, Magda. Can I do anything? Get you anything?” She reached out and touched Magda’s shoulder. Magda knew the gesture was out of kindness, but it still made her feel sick.

“Your sister did this.” The words had tumbled out before Magda even knew what she was saying. But she couldn’t have stopped them regardless.

Macy’s sister stared at her, mouth agape. “Magda, you know that’s not true,” she finally said. “It was an accident.”

“And now this time . . .” Magda continued on as if Regan hadn’t said a word. Her voice faltered, just for a second. “This time, it’s for good.” Magda looked hard at Macy’s sister, opening her eyes wide and cocking her chin, as if to ask Regan if she understood. She could feel the blood vessels in her face and neck straining to explode. She could feel herself redden.

Macy’s sister had stood up then, one of her hands working the tissue in it into a firm little Ping-Pong ball. Magda could tell that Regan didn’t know what to say to her—a woman who was technically family, but whom she had met only once before. This woman who had lost her only child, her only son. Regan looked as if she couldn’t decide whether to take Magda into her arms or lash back at her. Before any decisions had been made, or acted upon, Regan had caught sight of Macy, looking as if she would crumple right in on herself, like she might melt from the grief. She had somehow heard the whole exchange.

“How could you say that, Magda? How?” Each time Macy repeated the word
how
, it sounded more and more pleading, and grating, to Magda’s ears.

Magda didn’t answer her. She had simply turned and walked out.

 

That was two months ago. It was the last time she had seen Macy, the last time they had spoken.

In those two months, Magda had replayed that scene in her head, willing herself to regret what she said. Was she overly harsh? Perhaps. But wasn’t she also right? And shouldn’t—couldn’t—someone cut her just a little tiny shred of slack? She was his mother, after all. He was her son.

Was.
That one word, three tiny letters, had become a cannonball capable of bringing Magda to her knees.

She plodded along North Broadway toward home, remembering by rote the places in the sidewalk that rose unexpectedly like mini seismic faults, and the places where it suddenly dropped off. She never had to look down to check the topography of her path. If she had, Magda likely would have missed the tiny, wilted, and nearly obscured Estate Sale sign at the corner of Fulton Street.

There were only three things that made Magda more instantly sad than those two words: semi trailers full of cattle, their noses jutting out all pink and wet and hopeful in spite of the EAT MORE MEAT sticker on the back; elderly people eating alone; and bloated animals left on the sides of roads. Because estate sales meant only one thing: the person who owned that house died, and their things that they loved and valued in life were sitting somewhere unwanted, waiting to be scavenged.

Just those two words—
estate sale
—in a newspaper or on a sign would cause Magda’s chest to constrict, her lip to quiver, her hands to shake. She weathered those two words much the same way others did news stories of child or animal abuse or war. Regardless, she always went. She always went in.

The house could not have been more nondescript: white vinyl siding and two stories tall. It had precast cement front steps and a wrought-iron railing spotted with rust. Faded green-and-white-striped fiberglass awnings capped each of the two front windows, which looked out onto Franklin Street like a pair of sad, lidded eyes. Magda drew a deep breath and stepped through the front door, greeted by a musty haze and a perky young woman with long brown ringlets.

“Take a look around and be sure to let me know if you have any questions,” she said to Magda. “There are some great finds to be had!” Then she winked.

Magda wanted to slap her.
Great finds
.
Show some respect
, Magda thought. But she just nodded.

Magda wandered the first floor—sitting room, dining room, kitchen. She brushed her fingertips along the backs of two Queen Anne chairs, an end table, a Zenith floor radio that looked like it had been purchased only the day before. And although she knew it was silly, Magda apologized to each:
It’s not that you weren’t wanted. I’m sure they didn’t mean to abandon you.
Either this person hadn’t had children or the children hadn’t taken a single item from the home. Silverware, cups and saucers, even a vase on the dining room table, created the impression that the former occupant had run to the store for a carton of milk in the middle of cleaning out their cupboards and would return at any minute.