Miracle Beach (31 page)

My wife?
thought Jack. And then, like a switch had gone off, it dawned on him whom Sergeant Rodriguez had talked to. “Thanks, Sergeant. I’ll be in touch,” he said. He could still hear her as he hung up, but Jack didn’t have time to talk just then.

 

He found Macy in the barn’s tack room, sponge in hand, oiling a saddle. From the looks of it—several more saddles tipped on their front ends at her feet and a tangle of bridles on the tack trunk next to her—she had just started her tack cleaning. He suspected she was reaching for horse-related things she could do with only one arm, because she had cleaned tack two weeks before as well, and none of it had been used between then and now. The light was dim, and it took his eyes a moment to adjust when he walked in. She was singing, but stopped when she noticed him standing in the doorway.

“Jack. Hey! What are you doing here?”

“Trying to figure out what the hell you think you’re doing,” he said.

“Come again?”

“You heard me the first time, Macy.”

She looked at him, head tilted like a dog trying to understand a string of baby talk.

“You talked to Sergeant Rodriguez, didn’t you?” he asked.

Macy placed the sponge in a bucket at her feet. “I did,” she said.

“I can’t believe you. You let her believe you’re my
wife
? And told her we can’t take Glory in? What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I didn’t lead her to believe a damn thing, Jack. You gave her my number and she called it looking for Mrs. Allen. Last time I checked that’s still the name on my mortgage and all my credit cards. Besides, we
can’t
take Glory in.”

Jack stared at her. “Why not?” he asked.

“Well,
I
can’t take her in because as soon as this bad wing heals”—she flapped her slung arm feebly, like a baby bird testing it out—“I’ll be gone most weeks from Wednesday to Sunday. And because she needs someone to love her and I really don’t think that’s me. That’s not the kind of home life a kid like that needs, even if her last one was horrible. Sophie can’t because her schedule is more unpredictable than mine. And
you
can’t because you live on a boat, Jack. If I’m somehow mistaken on any of this, you go right ahead and let me know.”

“How dare you!” he shouted at her. “She needs a place to live. She needs family. She is my granddaughter, and this is our home!”

“No, Jack. This is
my
home. She lives in California. You have a house in Wisconsin. You two feel free to take your little Brady Bunch to either of those locations.”

“Well, this was her dad’s home. Doesn’t that mean anything to you, that she’s Nash’s daughter? Or are you so selfish that you can’t look beyond a simple mistake to see that? To see that she needs us?”

Macy threw her head back and laughed.

Jack could feel the blood pumping through his veins in quick, short bursts. His chest strained against the skin, barely keeping it from exploding. He wanted to take the pitchfork leaning against the tack room wall and smash it against the concrete until it splintered into a million little pieces.

“A simple mistake? Oh, that’s rich, Jack. You don’t know the half of it, and you sure don’t get to judge me for this,” Macy said. “You don’t get to sit there and tell me to just get over this and move on, or to do the right thing. Because you have no idea what the right thing looks like from over here.” Macy pointed toward herself.

“The right thing doesn’t have sides, Macy.”

She stared back at him, unblinking. He waited for one of her tirades that, like tropical storms, seemed to gather and unleash out of nowhere, disappearing just as quickly. Instead, she dropped the sponge in a bucket at her feet and stood up. “Let’s go for a walk,” she said to him. Her words were soft, as if she were talking to a frightened animal. She marched ahead. Jack had to double his pace to catch up to her.

She led him out of the barn and toward the southernmost pastures, closest to the tree line and, beyond that, the beach. Macy slid herself between the first and second boards of the fence. Jack, doubting he had the agility or adequate slimness to do the same, scampered up and over. He tried to strike a balance between quickness and bodily safety, but felt a twinge in his knee when he landed all the same. Again he had to quicken his footfalls to catch Macy.

They crossed the field, through ankle-high grass and horse droppings. Something in Macy’s determined stride, her shoulders set back, her head nosing out like a tortoise, leading the way, told Jack not to speak until spoken to. Or at least until she decided to stop walking.

They scaled another fence and came to the tree line. Jack was surprised that there was yet another pasture and tree line beyond that one. How quickly he had forgotten every foot of these fences after mending them with Macy back in June. Nearly three months had passed—months that felt now like they might as well have been whole years.

The briny smell of seawater filled Jack’s nose, and he could hear a faint rustle of water. They couldn’t walk forever. Eventually they’d run into the sea, and if the strengthening smell was any indication, they’d be running into it before long.

Macy slipped through one more fence and led Jack through a copse of trees. The ground beneath his feet turned soft and gave way a little bit with each step. And then they emerged onto a sandbar that a stream ran around and over. Jack caught glimpses of open water a ways beyond, which the stream emptied into.

Macy stopped, looked around, and headed toward a driftwood log. She settled with her back to it, not on it as Jack expected her to. She drew her knees toward her and circled them with one arm as Jack lowered himself next to her.

Still, she didn’t speak. That was fine; he would wait.

The stream ran, making metallic sounds like a wind chime carried over the breeze from far away. His ear was so tuned to the stream’s quiet music that he almost didn’t hear Macy say, “There was a baby, you know.”

Jack was about to ask her to repeat herself, or ask what she was talking about, but Macy kept right on talking.

“Nash and I were going to have a baby,” she said. She stared straight ahead, not even glancing in Jack’s direction. It was as though he were invisible, eavesdropping on a conversation between his daughter-in-law and the stream, the sand, the trees.

Macy inhaled deeply. “I was pregnant,” she said. “A handful of weeks before the accident we had gone to see Dr. Zip—our fertility guru—and found out.”

Jack had had no idea they had been trying to have kids, or that they had had problems. He couldn’t help but think that this bit of knowledge—that efforts were being made to produce a grandchild—might have helped Magda go a little easier on Macy over the years.

“His name was actually Zipinski, but he liked to call himself ‘Dr. Zip.’ Kind of cute. Every time we saw him he would whirl into the exam room, kind of like Kramer on
Seinfeld
, and say, ‘The Zip has arrived! Let’s get rolling on this, shall we?’ He wore tie-dyed shirts under his lab coat and listened to Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead in his office. He sang along to ‘Uncle John’s Band’ at the top of his lungs one day during my appointment. I’m not the biggest Dead fan, but it put me at ease.”

She told Jack, then, about the endless, endless shots. The syringes of Gonal-F and Lupron that Nash had to stick straight into her leg every single night before bed. How she would squeeze her thigh between two heavy coffee-table books of photography to create as much loose skin as possible, and how it usually worked, but once in a while the needle would prick her muscle and she would scream and twist away in pain.

The injections were to prepare her for an operation to harvest her eggs and then reinsert them, fertilized, into her uterus. After that came the estrogen replacement shots, which had to be inserted, with a two-inch needle, intramuscularly, right into her ass. Nash would literally have to sit on her back and lean on her legs to give her the shots. And regardless of whether the shots went well or poorly—meaning relatively pain-free or intensely painful—she could hear Nash sniffling in the bathroom afterward. She said that Nash would try to hide it by running the water, but she knew, and she resented him for it. “I was the pincushion,” she said.

And when Nash wasn’t sticking a needle the length of a cigarette into her muscles, she was on strict bed rest so as not to prevent the embryo from implanting. Flat on her back.

“So I should have been over the moon at the news, right? Nash sure was. You should’ve seen it, Jack. I could barely see it on the ultrasound. Just a pinprick of light on the screen. A little pulsating star. And Nash kept saying, ‘That’s our baby. That’s our baby.’ He had both arms around me, rocking me. He was so excited. And I couldn’t stop crying. He thought it was because I was happy.”

Jack looked at her. He opened and closed his mouth. There were questions he wanted to ask, things he needed to know. Never before had he realized how little you see of someone else’s life. Even when that someone was your own child. It was like a glacier, like the ocean. Everything but the surface hidden from view.

“You would have been a great mom,” he said. But even as the words came out, he knew they were all wrong. Their aftertaste hung acrid in his mouth.

“No offense, Jack, but you don’t know me. Not like that.”

He thought of Glory—alone, lost. Not unlike Macy in a lot of ways.

“Maybe I don’t. But I know you’re strong, and you have a good heart. You’re smart and loyal. You didn’t ask for this hand to be dealt to you.” He saw Macy nod in agreement out of the corner of his eye. “But right now there’s a little girl who didn’t ask for any of it, either.”

Macy parted her lips to speak, but Jack held up a hand. “I don’t want to talk about it right now. Even without everything you just told me, I don’t blame you for being confused and all sorts of pissed off. Hell, I’m surprised you’ve held it together as well as you have. But that little girl is the last piece of Nash that any of us have left.”

A silence settled over them, not uncomfortable. He could sense Macy relax into the moment. Jack heard the rustle of water, the cry of a gull. Neither of them made a move to go.

Jack broke the quiet first. “I’ve been pushing you on this,” he said, “and I’m sorry. Just think it over; that’s all I’m asking.”

Macy nodded. Then she said, “Don’t be sorry for me. I don’t deserve it.”

Jack shook his head. He put a hand on her shoulder. “We all deserve it,” he said. “Every one of us.”

MACY STARED AT THE CEILING OF HER BEDROOM. THE NUMBERS on her alarm clock read 5:27.

If she were at Thunderbird Show Park in Langley, where she should have been right about then, she’d be preparing for the day—for the chance to make Jump Canada’s Talent Squad. Maybe she’d just be getting to the barn to feed. Maybe she would have given Gounda his grain and hay already and she’d be sitting on the tack trunk outside of his stall, zipping on her half chaps to the melody of his chomping and nose blowing. Or maybe she’d be waiting for Gounda to finish his breakfast, too nervous or preoccupied to eat any herself, standing on the hillside overlooking the Grand Prix course, studying the maze of jumps as the sun inched up.

Whatever she would have been doing, it sure as hell wasn’t this.

But the fracture in her collarbone hadn’t yet fully healed, and Gounda was nowhere near sound enough to ride, much less compete. And so, she lay there and stared at the wrong ceiling.

Macy knew that sleep had gone for good that morning, so she maneuvered herself out of bed and began the process of dressing. Pulling on jeans and a T-shirt, and over it a light fleece sweatshirt for good measure, had once been something she did without thinking, almost reflexively. But now, with only one usable arm and one requiring constant vigilance against jostling, getting herself dressed had become something Macy had to diligently strategize: Which jeans had a zipper instead of a button fly? Which shirts were liberally cut or had enough of a stretch to them so as to not require her to lift her bad arm too far from her body, or up in the air? Which fleece was roomy enough to fit over her sling so she wouldn’t have to resling her arm after the morning chill burned off and she no longer needed the extra layer?

At the back door, she slipped on the paddock boots that zipped up the front instead of tied, even though they weren’t as comfortable. Then she made a quick stop in the barn to ensure all of the horses had water and threw each a flake of hay to tide them over until the morning help got there. Usually she’d muck stalls while the morning help fed, filled water buckets, put fly sheets on, and turned horses out for the day. To her, mucking stalls had the effect that, for most people, coffee produced; she didn’t feel centered if the rhythmic repetition of lift, sift, and toss wasn’t a part of her day.

Macy left a note that read, “Sorry—useless these days. Hope to have both arms back in working order soon. Please hand-walk Gounda for ten minutes and let him graze a bit. Thanks, Macy.” Then she hopped in her truck, felt the engine rumble to life, and started down her driveway.