The Infinite Tides (44 page)

He nodded and squeezed the bottle into his hand and began to spread the fluid across his face.

She turned from him and peered out toward the ocean and after a moment she said, “Look at Petruso.”

He looked up to where Peter and the two children ran back and forth in the surf, laughing.

“What do you see there?” she said.

“A very happy man.”

“Yes, because he maybe gets better job.”

“And because he’s here with you and the kids.”

“Not so much that,” she said. “More for job.”

“That can be an important thing.”

She sat next to him in the folding chair and then reached back and opened the cooler. “Beer?” she said.

He nodded and she handed him one and then opened one for herself and they sat without speaking for a long moment, both drinking, lost in whatever thoughts they each had in the twinned separateness of their lives.

“I know it is important,” she said at last. “He is a man. I know that work at Target is not for him. It is not what he is meant to do here. I know this.”

“It’s a shit job for anyone.”

“Yes, I know it’s shitty job.”

He looked at her and smiled.

“Shitty job,” she said again. She looked at him but she was not
smiling. “But how does job only make him happy. Everything else is same. What if he does not get this job? What happens then?”

“I don’t know. He keeps looking for another job.”

“He does not even look for this job. You make this happen. If he is unhappy then why does he not keep looking for new job? Anyway, he was not so happy at Golosiiv. He says he was so happy at Golosiiv but he is not scientist so he is complaining always there. He remembers different than I remember.”

Keith sat and watched the surf. Peter had jumped backwards into the water and the children were following him out in silence. He waved to them and Luda waved back. “Be careful!” she yelled. He waved again and turned his attention back to the children.

“I don’t know what to say,” Keith said.

“I know there’s no answer to question.”

There was a pause. The children were up to their waists in the water and Peter dove underneath for a moment and reappeared slightly farther out. The children set to splashing themselves in the surf, their tiny bodies bobbing up and down in rhythm to the waves.

“He’s lucky to have you,” he said.

“I know that,” she said quickly.

He smiled and this time she smiled back at him and he actually laughed and she too broke into a kind of giggle. “I guess we know where you stand,” he said.

She blushed. “Well,” she said, shrugging, “what do I say?”

He chuckled again. Then: “He knows that.”

“Does he?”

“Yes.”

“I do not think he does.”

He paused and then said, “I think he’s figuring it out.”

She sipped her beer and he did the same. After a moment she said, “I wonder what happens if he does not get job. He goes crazy and drunk and passes out somewhere because he loves another girl maybe.”

Keith was silent.

“I know he has crush on Starbucks girl,” she said. “I am not stupid wife.”

Again, he said nothing.

“I let it pass. I love him,” she said, “but he can be idiot sometimes.”

“Shit,” he said, “can’t we all?”

“Not like men. I apologize for saying, but men are idiots.”

He smiled. “Well, that’s probably true.”

“Make mountain out of molehill always.”

“Yeah, there’s some of that.”

“Too much,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And your wife, she leaves you for someone else?”

He did not answer.

“I apologize,” Luda said. “I should not ask these personal questions.”

“No, it’s not that,” he said. “I don’t know. I don’t know if it was specifically for someone else or just for other stuff. She had an affair while we were married.”

“Oh,” she said. “I did not know this.”

“Well, you do now,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter now. She’s gone and that’s how it is.”

“You love her still maybe?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t even remember that feeling at all now.”

“You love her when you were married?”

“I must have.”

“It does not make sense to love someone and then stop,” she said. “What does it mean that human beings can do this?”

“It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It should,” she said. “And your daughter too. Too much to lose at one time.”

“Feels that way.”

“You pray for daughter maybe?”

“Not really.”

“No?”

He shook his head.

“I pray for you both then.”

“Good,” he said.

“You think of her?”

“All the time.”

“Good thoughts?”

“Sure,” he said. “And some regrets.” Quiet. The beach shushing them. Peter and the children in the surf. “The last conversation I had with her was an argument.”

“What kind of argument?”

“She was brilliant at math but she wasn’t doing anything with it. It was disappointing.”

“She was disappointing to you.”

“Yeah, she was disappointing to me. She was spending her time cheerleading and hanging out with her boyfriend. I don’t know. It didn’t make sense to me. Still doesn’t.”

“Did it make sense to her?”

“Apparently,” he said. “But she’s gifted. Was, I mean.”

“Gift for astronaut work?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Mathematics. She was gifted at math. I mean probably genius-level gifted.”

“Yes, but why this gift?”

“I don’t know. She got some of what I have, I guess.”

“No,” Luda said. “I don’t mean this question.” She paused and then said, “This good thing with numbers. You say it is like gift but then you do not think it is like gift.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No,” she stopped again. “My English is not good. Not clear.” Again a pause. Then she said, “Gift is when you give something or you get something. This is not gift she has.”

He was silent for a moment and then he said, “Why not?”

“Because she has no choice. This is just how she is.”

He looked over at her. He knew he would have told anyone else to drop the topic entirely—even Eriksson—but for some reason he was willing to listen to Luda’s commentary. He did not know why this was so, but it was. “I don’t know if there’s a difference,” he said. “You have a talent and you use it. That’s how it works.”

“That is how it works for you,” Luda said. “Maybe not for your daughter.”

“That’s how it works for everyone,” he said. “Anyway, she worked hard at other stuff. Cheerleading and she had good grades. All A’s. But I just wanted her to really be great. She had that in her.”

“She sounds great already.”

“She was,” he said. “Shit, I don’t even know what I’m talking about. None of that matters now.”

“If it matters to you then it matters. You’re the father.”

“It was never enough for me. That’s the goddamned truth. It was just never enough. I wanted her to be better. All the time.” Something had collapsed inside of him and his eyes were welling with tears. “What a goddamn idiot I was,” he said.

Luda did not respond, sitting quietly, sipping at her beer. The ocean rolled in and streamed out again. Rolled in. Streamed out. After a moment she said, “You have other good memories, though. Not just argument and disappointment.”

He breathed deeply and slowly. When he regained himself he said, “Yeah,” and his voice broke and he was silent once again. He could feel her hand, his daughter’s tiny hand, curling into his own. God how much he wanted those days back. And every day to come after.

The sea rolled in far below them.

“This is good,” she said.

He was quiet. They both were. He tried to quiet the tears but they came nonetheless, running down his cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s fine,” he muttered, smearing the tears across his face. “Shit.”

“Everything changes. This is life.”

“I guess.” He sipped at his beer again.

“Girls love their fathers always,” she said. “My father work for Russian government and everyone hate him for this. But I love him. Maybe he is good man. Maybe he is bad man. I don’t know. I love him always.”

There was a slight breeze off the sea that came in gentle puffs and ruffled at the shade umbrellas. “I wish I could have made her happy,” he said at last. “Before it was too late.”

“She decides what is happy for her, not for you.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Stop with maybe. You and Peter are same. Both never happy here and now. Only looking for the next thing to do. You don’t even know where you are and what you have.”

The children were taking turns climbing on their father’s shoulders in the low surf, Peter’s body jumping up out of the water and the children flying backwards, laughing, into the waves.

“What do you want from your life?” Luda said.

Keith sat and watched them in the ocean. All three of them laughing, their voices rising out of the static hiss of the water as it rolled in gentle waves against the sand. “I used to be able to answer that,” he said.

“You forget. Everyone forget sometimes. Peter forgets for years. But then you remember.”

He was silent, his beer cold and wet in his hand. “I wanted to go back to work. Now I don’t even know.”

“You go back to work then,” she said.

“It’s complicated.”

“You talk to me of complicated?” She did not smile and there was an edge to her voice. “I leave my whole country to come here. What is complicated for your work? This makes mountain of molehill again.”

Far out at the horizon the colors matched so that there was a continuous field of blue from earth to sky.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to make you mad.”

Her hand fluttered in his direction as if brushing him off and so he said nothing more.

After a time Peter called up to them from the surf: “You two come!” He waved to them and Luda waved back.

“You know what I want, Astronaut Keith Corcoran?” she said at last. “Right now what I want?”

He turned to look at her and she smiled at him and their eyes met. “This,” she said and she continued to look at him but her hand extended out toward the sea, her husband and the two children out there in the surf at the edge of an ocean that stretched out forever to a horizon that was no horizon.

“Come!” Peter called to them, to her.

She looked back to the surf. “OK,” she called back. The wind blew the dark hair from her face and she smiled, the sun on her skin, on her body. She sat forward and pulled the T-shirt over her head and pulled down her shorts, standing there before him in her bathing suit, her body smooth and curved and he looked from the shape of her to her face where it floated above him in the sunlight. “This is what I choose,” she said to him. She smiled. “Not what I have to do, but what I choose. Is that not what we have?”

He squinted up at her, into the brightness of the sun, the beautiful dark eclipse of her face. Then she turned and walked down toward the water, her form straight and tall and the curve of her hips and the black of her bathing suit, her skin the color of snow. She tiptoed into the sea slowly and Peter thrashed out of the water to meet her there like some thick-bodied oceanic god come out of the coral to meet his goddess at last, and he held her hands in his and drew her into the water slowly, the children leaping around them in a circle, jumping into and out of the water, returning to the beach, then to the water again.

The day had become warmer and after a time he indeed drew a towel around himself and changed into the swimming trunks Peter had brought for him and removed his shirt and lathered the remainder
of his body with sunscreen. He stood for a moment contemplating the sea and then adjusted the shade umbrella. “Come in, Keith Corcoran,” Peter called to him.

“Soon,” he called back. Peter waved to him. Luda’s head bobbed from farther out in the ocean, then disappeared under the surface, reappeared again, the children crawling about on the sand like crabs. After a moment, they came running up the beach and rummaged in one of the bags for some plastic pails and shovels.

“We dig,” Marko said to him.

“Good idea,” Keith said. “The tide is coming in.”

“Good,” Marko said.

They both ran back down to the surf and sat just a few feet above the line of foam where the sand was yet dry and began to dig.

Keith turned his phone back on and after it was done powering up it vibrated and he looked at the screen. Eight missed calls, seven from various numbers at Houston and one number that came through as “unknown.” He dialed his voice mail. There were only two messages, the first from Jim Mullins, asking him to call back with a sense of urgency that was surprising: “Keith, I really, really need to hear from you right away. Right away. Please. As soon as you get this, please call.” He wondered momentarily what the emergency could be, thought that they were moving the things out his office and somehow needed his authorization to do so. Then he skipped to the next message.

“Chip, Eriksson here,” the message began, the voice a conspiratorial whisper. “Listen, I don’t know where you are, but we need you here at Houston right now. I’m serious. Call me right away. Or Mullins. Get here right now. It’s important.”

There were no more messages and Keith clicked the phone off and set it quietly on the blanket in the sand and sat looking at it, the beer still in his hand. Then he set that too on the blanket and looked at them both as if they might hold some secret message that he could decode if only he stared long enough.

Out at sea, Peter bobbed in the water, Luda nearby, the two children
on the beach now, digging their hole in the sand with pieces of driftwood. Everything had grown silent, the surf continuing to roll in but only as some distant faded hush.

He looked up at the sky. The burning sun above them all, its motion as if it were rotating around the earth. And then he could see himself in the Destiny Module again, the planet scrolling below him through the round porthole window, his head clear and his eyes bright and shining as he watched the blue swirl of an ocean that he knew was this ocean and was somehow also this moment, because everything else had dissolved: the measurement of distance in units of time or light or space or via some other methodology he did not know. There was no future. There was only where he had been and where he was now, and such locations were not measurable by any method but that of humanity itself.