Miracle Beach (5 page)

Magda watched the moon’s light dance over the tree branches outside their window, plating each leaf with a shadowy silver. She couldn’t see the moon, but she knew it hung somewhere in that night sky. Kind of like Nash, she thought. She could sense him sometimes. Even though she knew he wasn’t there with her, really, he was somewhere. Somewhere out there.

And then came the vapor-thin dreams of Nash that she conjured every night on the border of sleep: nursing him in the wee hours of the night, his little eyes focused on her and his tiny hands impossibly soft and warm against the skin of her breast. His first day of school, when he ran back to her from the bus stop, placed a hand on either side of her face, and said, “Don’t cry, Mommy. I’m going to have a great day!” Watching him shoot free throws in their driveway. Coming downstairs late at night to find a high-school-age Nash, head capped with thick waves of orange hair, hunched over his homework, lips moving silently. His senior state debate performance—how handsome he looked that night in the navy blue suit they had bought him from JoS. A. Bank especially for that occasion. His graduation from college, and how Magda had been struck for the very first time, seeing him in his cap and gown, by how much like a full-grown man he looked, and how surprised she was, all of a sudden, that he barely resembled the freckled, glasses-wearing little boy of only a few years before.

Somewhere, on the outer edges of those memories, Jack’s voice floated in and said, “I’m flying out to visit Macy next week,” and Magda settled deeper into Nash, not much caring any longer what the hell Jack did.

“ANOTHER DRINK, SIR?”

Jack consulted his Beam and Coke and waved the flight attendant off with a half smile, so as not to seem rude. He had finished more than half of the drink, but had sipped it so slowly that the melted ice kept the glass nearly full.

He had never been a big drinker, not even in college. But Magda still had a thing against Jim, Jack, Jose, or any of their kin. Not because she had a problem, or because she was the wife or daughter of someone with a problem. No, it was purely on principle. As long as he had known her, Magda had maintained complete control over every aspect of her life. Her sobriety was no different.

Another flight attendant was already standing over him with latex gloves and a garbage bag, motioning at his drink.
Jesus
, Jack thought,
they sure don’t give you any time to leisurely enjoy a drink anymore
. Then he realized it was probably just another moneymaking ploy by the airlines. It wasn’t enough that they sold you a box lunch for the price of a fancy restaurant dinner these days; they rushed you through a drink just to get you to buy another one.

But Jack aimed to please, so he held up one finger to the lingering flight attendant and nodded. She smiled at him. Magda wouldn’t have been happy, but Magda wasn’t there.

He figured that the occasional pile of vomit on the sidewalk or in the yard or in the bushes in front of their house, left there by the college students stumbling home from the bars, only helped to reaffirm Magda’s attitude toward alcohol. One Sunday, Mikey, their old chocolate Lab, trucked through a pile of puke and tracked it all through the house. Magda was pissed. But not as pissed as when one of those students stumbled to his Jeep at two a.m. and drove it right into their front porch, demolishing the latticework, the front steps, and Magda’s prized rosebushes.

Jack suspected she mostly abstained to prove that she could, to look the part of being just a little above everyone else. That was Magda—stubborn as a mule in heat. One night not too long after their wedding, Jack joked about her bad driving skills on the way out to dinner and Magda downright refused to drive for the next two years. Renewed her license when it came time, but never set one ass cheek in the driver’s seat. Made him sorry for mocking her. If she wanted, she could sure drive a point home. Drive a nail into his head, he liked to say. He handled Magda with kid gloves from there on in. She mistook it for respect, but it made her happy regardless. And that was easier for both of them.

Right about then, though, Jack would have taken hours of scolding from Magda over the constant yapping of the lady in seat 7D. He had been at the office at four that morning and put in a solid four hours of work on a new deal his concrete company was negotiating before his flight left Austin Straubel at nine thirty a.m. All he wanted was to grab a little shut-eye before they touched down.

At the same time Jack’s eyelids slid closed, he heard the woman in 7D say, “So that’s why I’m going. And you? Are you on business or pleasure this trip?” The words sounded like they were doing loop-de-loops from her mouth, as if she were trying to sound uplifting and urbane. Jack thought she sounded like a fruitcake.

He turned his head toward her, opened his eyes, and gave her a wide, thin smile before closing them again.

He didn’t want to be rude. He just didn’t know what to answer.

Really, if he was to be completely honest, Jack had booked this flight because when he tried to fall asleep at night, all he could manage to picture was Nash. Not Nash’s lopsided smile or the way he called him “Pops,” but Nash laid out in the hospital, the right side of his face blotched in the painful hues of black, purple-blue, and yellow, scales of old blood crusted in his hair and in patches over his face. Nash with tubes running in and out of him. Nash lying cold and clammy and stiff in the morgue, his eyes fixed on nothing, no longer able to see at all. The thought of morticians cutting him open, no blood rising up to meet the knife. The blood that should be bubbling up, that should be bright, neon red, resting in black puddles under Nash’s shoulder blades, his buttocks. Jack knew it was beyond morbid to think like this, but the images scuttled around like insects through a crack. He would try to clear his mind, to pray even, but nothing worked. There was no stopping them.

But how to explain that to the woman in 7D? How was he supposed to fit that into a quip of small talk that didn’t stray outside the bounds of normal, decent conversation? It was easier to let the woman think he was an asshole.

He thought back to the week before, to the phone call with Macy, when he had let her know he was coming. That was right after Magda had slapped him and walked out, right about when he figured that he couldn’t keep on like he had been. Macy had seemed appreciative and receptive—as soon as she learned that Magda wasn’t coming and wasn’t even aware of Jack’s plans—but her voice never registered anything approaching excitement.

“If it’s too weird, or if it gets to be too much for either of us, I’ll be on the first flight back to Wisconsin,” he had promised Macy. “I miss him in a way I can’t quite put my finger on. I need to try to be close to him.”

“Jack, it’s only been a couple months,” Macy said. “I’m still getting my bearings. We all are.”

“Nine weeks,” Jack said.

“Nine weeks,” Macy repeated. “And you really think this is a good idea? That it’ll help?”

“I can’t think of anything else to try,” he said.

“It’s hard to know what to do,” Macy said. Her voice had been steady and much more distant than the thousand-plus miles that separated them. It wasn’t the warm response he had hoped for. Although with everything that had happened, he could hardly have blamed her. “Okay, then,” she had said. “Okay.”

But what he couldn’t come close to telling the nosy woman next to him, what he hadn’t told Macy—what he hadn’t told anyone—was that he had started to think that maybe Nash wasn’t really dead after all. That he was simply still in British Columbia. Jack would walk through his living room and past Nash’s Little League team portraits and pictures of Nash as he grew, looking so impossibly alive that Jack had a hard time believing that he wasn’t.

And so, even though he knew it wasn’t rational, Jack still couldn’t help hoping that Nash would be there, waiting as always, when he walked off the plane.

 

A cool Vancouver breeze flapped through Jack’s button-down shirt as he stepped through the terminal doors and walked to the general passenger pickup curb. After hours of stale airplane air, and after weeks and weeks of relentlessly hot weather back home, it felt refreshing. Lately, in Wisconsin, the humidity made it feel as though a thin sheet of rubber had settled down over everything. Cool and brisk was a welcome change.

It wasn’t long before Jack heard the low rumble of Macy’s truck approaching. It was one hell of a truck, one he wished he could justify owning—a one-ton diesel dually, black, with an extended cab, a long box, leather interior, and a GPS system. It was a man’s truck, but Macy handled it with ease, and her demure frame even gave it a touch of elegance.

She whipped into a curb space Jack would never have thought to try, reached over, and freed the door handle.

“Jump in!” Macy said, throwing the door open. “They get pissy around here if you stop for long.” She hadn’t even shifted into park.

“Just push that shit aside, or throw your stuff on top of it. Nothing breakable,” she added, adjusting her rearview mirror.

Jack barely had time to throw his suitcase in the backseat and haul himself up into the front seat before she took her foot off the brake.

Macy looked younger than he remembered, which wasn’t what he expected. He had this memory etched into his mind of his four aunts sitting around his mother’s kitchen table one Christmas a year after his father had died. “This last year has carved caverns into her face,” his aunt Joyce had said, talking about Jack’s mother.

But Macy didn’t have any caverns. Not even furrows. Her cheeks glowed ruddy from the summer sun. She had her sandpaper-colored hair pulled back in a low, loose ponytail—her usual style—and it, too, seemed to have its own sheen from within.

Her body looked smaller, too—not a drastic change, but slightly more toned, more streamlined than Jack remembered. Her arms poked long and lean from the sleeves of her red T-shirt, the rest of it clinging close to her torso, the slight bulges she had always carried below her bra line and just above her waist now gone. She looked good, he thought to himself, really good. And then he scolded himself for thinking of his former daughter-in-law—or was she still his daughter-in-law?—in even close to that way.

The thought sneaked past his lips anyway, though. “You look great, Macy,” he said.

“It’s amazing what a tragedy or two will do for your waistline,” Macy said, realizing too late the change in her usual audience. She shook her head and slapped one hand against her forehead. “God, Jack, I’m sorry. That was stupid. I’m not used to being—”

“No sweat,” Jack assured her, hoping to sound equally flip, hoping to keep all the apologies and seriousness at bay for a bit longer.

“—around people lately. Shit. I’m sorry.”

She steered with her right hand. Her left elbow rested on the window ledge and she had pressed the fingers of her left hand hard against her temple. Jack reached over and squeezed her elbow. “It’s okay. No problem,” he said.

She nodded at him and smiled a sad smile.

“You really didn’t have to drive all this way to get me,” Jack offered, changing the subject.

“Jack, ‘all this way’ is a whopping couple of hours. And if nothing else, it gave me a break from the same old tired conversations every time someone drops off a casserole.”

“Lots of food?”

“My place could pass for the Hamburger Helper test kitchen,” Macy said. “I’m only one person. My freezer is overflowing and I’ve had to throw a lot of it away, which made me feel bad. And some days I needed to not talk about how hard my life was or how I was doing, so I wouldn’t answer the door. And this really nice gesture on the part of a lot of people ends up racking me with guilt,” Macy said. She shook her head, then pointed a finger at Jack. “So you’re my new line of defense.”

Jack laughed. “I can do that. You’ll tell me, though, if I’m inconveniencing you at all.”

“Oh, I’ll tell you. But during this little visit of yours, I think we need to say what we want and do what we want without worrying about making each other happy or angry.”

“Honesty,” Jack said matter-of-factly.

“Honestly?” Macy asked.

“What you’re talking about is honesty. Being honest with each other.”

“Absolutely,” Macy said.

That was, perhaps, his favorite thing about Macy—her directness. He admired that in a woman. So many—too many—were wishy-washy or passive-aggressive. They’d tell you they didn’t care or that everything was fine, and then brood secretly and fervently. But not Macy. No one ever had to wonder where she stood on an issue or what she was thinking. Jack remembered asking Nash what made him give up his search for a banking job and instead pursue his love of photography. “Macy told me to do what I loved,” he said. And each passing day over the last decade or so of getting to know Macy, and watching Nash flourish in his new career, Jack had felt pride in his son, and gratitude for his daughter-in-law, that had grown. She made his son happy, and as Magda always said, “You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child.” He smiled.