waves become foam

Memory was getting to be an issue for Aunt Patricia. She didn’t argue with that fact overall; it was upon a field of particulars she did battle. Dates, how much she’d paid for her truck, who was with who for Christmas last year, on things like that she wouldn’t give an inch. Her mouth would set into a hard line and try to hold the certainty that her words could not. When this happened, she would argue with a lively, persecuted vitality, but she would seem old. Like a sea pine, bent hard and craggy against a wind that blew only in one grinding direction. But it wasn’t the wind she resented, after all, she had always known the wind to be vicious. It had never tried to pretend otherwise. What was worse was how kind and agreeable and earnest people could be when correcting her memory. All smiles while they took their shovels to her roots, to the only thing keeping her upright.   

To hedge against all that, she’d taken to the habit of running over the day with her niece. Mostly, they talked over the phone, but for the last week, Katarina’s college had been on break and so she had come to stay at the house. During the day, the two of them would drift between the ocean and the house and the beach or, on a rare whim, into town. Then, sometime in the evening, they’d sit outside and talk. But it was obvious that they couldn’t be inside for that. It made things feel too much like a test. They needed the wind, the rain, and the seaborne swells of March to smooth out the gaps between them. So, each night, around the same time, they’d strap on their coats and boots and take it to the back porch.

“Tell me about our day today, Katty,” Aunt Patricia asked that night. 

The young woman answered slowly, blinking into the rain, “Well, let me see, we had some tea in the morning. You had toast, Aunt, and I had eggs. We played rummy until around 11 AM, when we went down to the water. You looked for sand dollars. I think you found a few complete ones. I dug a hole during the low-tide and watched it smooth out. Around two, we came back for lunch.” 

“What was the air like?” 

“It was foggy, even with the wind.”

They were sitting in low, rusted camp chairs, facing directly into the weather. Wind, gusty and uneven, packed the air. It roared. Clean smelling rain burst around them. The denseness of the nighttime squall blocked out the sounds and smells of the nearby ocean. But they knew it was out there. Its churning hummed below the storm like the bellow’s breath of a vast forge.

“And in the evening?” Aunt asked, her words spoken into the lip of the thermos.

“Under Tate Point Bridge, getting wood for the stove.”

“Did we get much?” 

“Some, it’s been very wet all winter. You picked up some good driftwood though.” 

“I sure did. But that’s just for the bookcase. I never put any driftwood in the stove. It stinks and doesn’t burn well. It may look dry, feel dry, but it’s still got the ocean deep in it.” The old woman said slowly, tapping Katty’s arm with the thermos and handing it over. 

“That’s what you say,” Katty smiled, took the offering, and drank. The wine was warm in the cup, fizzing with the cuts of water in the air. 

“It stinks,” Aunt continued, “It’s got a smell that clings to everything in the house. Ghost wood, eh? All bleached and haunting like it is. Ghost wood, honey.” 

The storm rolled through and through, clattering the clips and loose buttons of their chairs—tiny bells, ringing out—and beneath, the roll of the climbing tide. 

Katty turned and looked back towards the house. There was some other, sharper sound. 

“Your phone is ringing.” 

Aunt sighed and went to answer. The storm slackened—quieted—so it could listen, maybe, just like Katty was trying to do. 

Suddenly, a sneaker wave of light washed over Katty from behind. She turned, squinting. Aunt was on the phone in the kitchen, talking with sharp and silent gestures. She was wearing a full body rain poncho and the rain was streaming off her, soaking the carpet.  

The storm got bored and flared up, and once Katty had finished the wine, it drove her off. Inside, she feigned disinterest, sweeping the water from off her jacket sleeves, but Aunt was looking right at her, shaking her head and gripping the phone as if it were a leech that had attached itself to her ear. 

“And he’s supposed to do that here?” Aunt said icily. Katarina pulled her boots off. Sand, dark, caked and battered looking, grated against her skin, chilled and prickling. “He isn’t Butch Cassidy and this ain’t the hole in the wall, Margaret. What do you think we got for him? He’s out there making messes for himself.” Katty jerked the second boot free and set it carefully aside. The wine swam lazily in her. 

“No. No, I didn’t say that now did I? I understand, Margaret, but I am here to tell ya that that’s no way to turn things around. What do you mean why? Because it’ll feel like a reward; or some kind of vacation. And don’t try to guilt me with that ‘he says it’s what he wants’ blabbing. Dudn’t much matter what he wants, does it? Or it shouldn’t anyway!” 

Anger welded Aunt in place. Katty circled. Busied herself, watching in the windows. 

“Whatever, Margaret, do what you was always gonna do. I’ll see him tomorrow. Fine, you too then,” and the call ended. Aunt turned and trotted away towards the front of the house. She came back in a thick set of pajamas, with the gray and charcoal curls of her hair hanging like seaweed. 

“John’s coming to stay for a while,” she said lowly, and with a flick of her eyebrows.

“John?”

“Yep, honey… John.” Aunt started husking dry bits of stove wood with a hatchet. Katty, treading water in the pause, opened the stove door and prodded the burnt-through pieces for ember. From behind, Aunt spoke again. 

“He’s killed someone.” 

Katty turned. 

“On accident—whatever that means,” Aunt spat, “But he must’a been high or drunk or something because he plowed that car of his over the railing on a long straight-away. It went down into one of them ditches south of Tillamook. Friend was with him.”

“Is John OK?

“He’s fine, I gather,” the older woman said, hammering the axe head, little by little, through the cracking wood. “I mean, fine as he ever is these days.”

“That’s awful.”

Both women nodded. Both, each suspected, for different reasons. 

They got the stove going. The windows rattled against the wind. Katty shut off the lamp and they watched the small flames grow. 

“He was high. He’s a murderer,” Aunt whispered. 

“Is that what Margaret said?” 

“Oh, god no. Margaret was tellin’ me how he’s being run out of town. Stitched up by the law. Woe is him, woe is her baby. She treats that boy with the care of caramel, and he still finds ways to burn himself.” 

“She’s probably worried about him.”

“I would be too. They’re investigating him. Margaret thinks there’ll be a trial eventually.” 

“Was he intoxicated?” her words were stiff.

“High? Drunk? He says he wasn’t. But what the hell else would he say?”

“He might not have been.”

“Guess the cops’ll sort all that out. Some of the tests they did came up positive but they don’t know if it’s from that night or not.”

“He’s not in jail though?” 

“No. Hasn’t been charged with the worst of it all. Not yet, but it’s brewing. So Margaret’s tryin’ to get him outta town for a bit. Can you believe, honey, that he said he wanted to come here of all places. Ridiculous. Boy’s not been here in five years and now I’m supposed to roll out some kin’a carpet for him with this blood on his hands. It’s all the sudden just supposed to be like it was when you all were little? Back to it? No way, honey. Not for me. He’s gotta face what he’s done, not hide out in the dunes.” 

The flames threw shadows across their faces. The cold of the storm came from through the cracks of the plaster and as if from another world. Aunt reached for the hatchet anew, and Katty went to change clothes.

When Margaret and John came the next day, there was little of the grim ceremony Aunt had been steeling for. Margaret out maneuvered her, hollering “Little Katty-Kat, my lord, look at you all full grown!” and leaping out of the paint-chipped sedan, fresh-firing that flare-gun smile of hers, with a voice already half out of breath. John was slower in the coming, dwarfed by the duffel swinging off his skinny frame as he slid out of the passenger seat. Her and Katty chatted hastily on the front lawn—Katty was good, yes. In town for the rest of the week. Oh, everything at school was going great, she just had the free time to come down, Aunt and her had thought about doing some clamming. Family’s good. All good. Good. Good—and all the while Margaret’s eyes clung to the young woman like a life-vest, knowing that too long a glance at Aunt would pull her under. John was slower in the coming, dwarfed by the duffel swinging off his skinny frame as he slid out of the passenger seat.

But as soon as the reservoir of pleasantries had been exhausted, Margaret hustled back to the car—waving, calling, laughing, and leaving. In and out like a storm blown through. 

“Put your stuff on the couch, John. You can have the pull-out, Katty’s already got the spare room,” Aunt said heading back inside. 

John nodded, following. He smiled a little for the first time as he looked around the house. “Same as ever,” he said. 

“No it ain’t. Lots moved around,” Aunt said, tottering to the kitchen and throwing open cabinets, “You just think that cause you ain’t been here for a long stretch.”

“She got those lamps last week,” Katty said pointing at the shades that had a Louis Lamore style rodeo playing out in the embroidery, “Nice, huh?” 

John nodded, “I think Uncle Mahlon would have liked that.” 

Aunt slammed a cupboard in response, “I’m making tea. Want some, honey?” 

“Sure, Aunt,” Katty said. 

She nodded and took the bags down from the jar. 

John huffed his bag onto the couch. The house had always been small, but it hadn’t seemed it until Uncle Mahlon died. The edges had hardened since, somehow; the slack taken up—and now, three years since, it felt like no one but Aunt could take five steps in any one direction without kicking into some piece of sepia-stained something. She looked in place there—wearing a mottled brown cardigan overlain by a thin, purple windbreaker. Her pants were paint-stained. Shin-high rubber boots ground down the sand that was perpetually sprinkled all over the kitchen. 

Katty always borrowed clothes when she came, so her style of boots was the same, and she took pleasure in each step’s peppery feel on the linoleum from the years of sand stuck to the soles. The cap was hers though, set low over her eyes, dark hair braided out the back, with Aunt’s old fingerless gloves singed from the stove at the knuckles. Her brow was freckled in the pictures on the wall—deep speckled and sun-kissed—but with winter full-on, the spots had faded to near the point of invisibility. 

John stuck out—dressed like those kids that hung back ‘round the ’76 all day—pants too big, cheeks too sharp, and sweat staining the crown of his camo beanie—touching his face too much, with blue, skipping eyes that’d gone gray behind the morning curtains.  

He and Katty stood beside the tumult of Aunt’s tea preparations. Without comment, she had begun boiling a pot of water and shaking various half-empty pasta boxes. 

“Thinking stroganoff,” she announced. 

“I always did love your stroganoff, Aunt” John said. 

She didn’t answer. 

John cleared his throat, “Hey, Aunt, is it OK if I smoke on your porch?” 

“No. Smoke out in the dunes away from my chairs if you’re gonna do any of that. But bring back the butt. I don’t want to see any of your trash on my beach.” 

John smiled limply and slid out the backdoor. 

“You OK, Aunt?” Katty said when he was gone.

“Sure, honey. Why do you ask?”

“Just seems like you’re treating John a differently.” 

“Sure I am. Why should I? John’s treatin’ himself differently. You see his eyes? How they were all clouded up? Lord, it’s a sin what that boy’s done to himself.” 

“His eyes seemed the same to me, Aunt.” 

“Boy ain’t firing on all cylinders. Even now. When he was a kid, when you both were just little, he was always moving and talking and going on and on about the sand fleas. Look at him now. I ain’t seen life in him for a while, and everybody’s sayin’ he’s fine, he’s through it all. By god the way that sister of mine babies him. And I’m supposed to join in on the lying? After what he did? Last straw. I can’t have that John moving in on the precious space I got left ‘round this house, and certainly not all’s I got left up here,” she tapped her forehead.

“Come on, Aunt.”

The older woman pushed deeper into the cupboard, “You start to take account of things when space’s limited, Katty. And they tell me my space is limited. Got no room to remember no murderer.”

“You don’t know if any of that’s true.”

“I know he killed that other boy one way or another. Read about it last night on the internet.” 

“It was an accident.”  

She stopped. “Accident? That boy choosing to get high outta his mind ain’t no accident, honey, and I know that if your Aunt Margaret says he might have been this or might have done that than sure as the hair on my head that that’s about as close to an admission as she’d ever give.”

Aunt changed the subject and for a while they forgot that the morning was much different than any other, but eventually, with lunch almost ready and the tea all drank, Katty went out to see if she could spot John, leaning on the waterlogged railing that overlooked the beach. Just past the porch, the land broke into rolling dunes, each covered in long, swaying tufts of seagrass. They whipped in the morning wind. Blades. Fast and clean.

Katty, over the course of her nineteen summers, had gotten to know the rhythm of the wind on the Oregon Coast. How, in the morning, it was fresh and mischievous, glancing off her, rippling her jacket, and tugging at her hat; how by midday it matured, blowing low and constant, with the sand whipped up into a low-lying shimmer she could feel flowing against her boots; how at night it roared from the throatless depths of the black and distant night, bullying the dunes into fresh shapes to be discovered each morning—covering and unveiling a thousand times beneath the glow of the moon-dipped clouds.  Katty searched for John in the new-cut pathways, listening to the snap of seagrass and smelling the salt of the waves. From above the beach, she could feel the waves snarling as they crested. Their foam scattering. She spotted John about fifty yards to the south, crouching over an upturned crab. As she came up, she could see that its belly had been eaten away. All shell now. 

“She’s worried about you,” Katty said. 

John looked up and smiled, “I know. So’s everybody.” 

“Are you doing OK?” 

“Ya, ya. I guess. I mean, they’re telling me I’m gonna have to come in for more questioning and there might be a trial. The cop swore I was on something.” 

Silence. 

John laughed hollowly, “I wasn’t, by the way—the tests they did, or whatever, it was all bullshit.” 

“I didn’t say anything.” 

“Well, you’ve been around Aunt Pat for a bit here. Her opinion has a lot of gravity,” he paused, “Aunt think I was high?” 

Katty cleared her throat, “Maybe.”

“Maybe, Katty?” 

“Well, your mom denied it, so Aunt’s going to think it’s true.” 

“That’s a hell of a way to live.” 

“She hasn’t changed on that.” 

John chuckled and nudged the dead crab with his boot. After a moment he nodded and turned to the surf. 

“How far you reckon we could swim out right now?” 

“I’m just out to visit with Aunt. I think she’s been lonely. I mean, it’s good to see you too though. I bet Aunt thinks the same thing, in her way. I don’t think I’m going to be doing any swimming while I’m here.” 

“Not even like in the old days? Don’t wanna try to beat the record? How far’d we get back then? I can’t remember exactly, but I know I could still swim down and touch the bottom. Never got far enough away to be really out there.” 

Katty pointed vaguely out to where the first foam would show as the waves rolled in. “About there is what I remember.”

“Bah, you were just a kid then. I got much farther.”

“I don’t know. It’s been a while.”

“It has, hasn’t it? I… I didn’t want to put Aunt out by coming,” John said shifting, “Everything has been so fucked up the last few days. I thought a bit of walking or swimming would help, you know? I kept thinking about how much time we used to spend in that water. Days like today, cold as today? Shit, wouldn’t have stopped us before.”

“I think you’ve forgotten how cold it really is out there. This time of year, with the wind and everything, the pull is real strong and you’re so skinny,” she said hearing the cut of the words only after she’d said them. 

John screwed up one side of his face, “You and Aunt Pat are like two little peas. It was an accident, Katty.” 

“John, I didn’t—”

“—Total accident. I was tired, and I probably wasn’t paying close enough attention and, shit, I mean I feel fucking terrible. Everyone’s treating me like some kind of murderer. I lost my best friend. People don’t see that. They just wanna shove some drugs or booze or something in my hand to make it all my fault. I lost my best friend and nobody’s said shit. I don’t even get to be sad back home. How the fuck am I supposed to make this better for people? It seems like that’s why they want me in jail. Lockin’ me up will solve it for them, will it? I don’t think so, so why do I gotta be put on the line for all that?” 

“Did you tell the police that?”

“What do you think I’ve been tellin’ ‘em? Same thing I’ve been telling everybody. The truth. It was an accident.”

The morning wind came again with its false promise. It offered to take what Katty and John were holding. Katty knew all about that. She let the dregs of the morning pass her by. But John was less prepared. His load was heaped at his feet and not heavy like he thought it’d be. The wind kept scooping handfuls of what was there and hurling it down along the surf, catching it in the dunes, in the water, and in the pines. It spread and spread over what they saw and, swept off like that, trailed them in their steps back to the house. 

They ate Aunt’s stroganoff with the TV on loud—crowding out any possibility of conversation. Aunt hated having the TV on while they ate. Always had. She had railed against it when Katty and John were little constantly. But today, just as they all sat down at the table, she’d stood again, walked into the side-room, and turned on, and came back over without comment. 

After eating, they went back to the beach. None of them suggested doing so. Cascading signals just fell together one after the other, like a tide itself, sweeping them all out towards the sand. Katty sat near the sliding door. Aunt snugged on a thick-fabric knit-cap. Katty commented on the cloud cover. Aunt set the kettle on. Katty took up her boots. Aunt did the same.

John remembered the feel of the ritual but not its rites. He stood nervously by the door, gripping the handle and trying to look distracted. 

The final signal was Aunt’s thermos, wine swapped for a bitter, black tea. Second she’d thrown the water in, she was off. John scrambled to get out ahead of her while Katty followed with a few sand-clearing stomps on the porch. They went like that all the way. Up and over the dunes; through the rowdy seagrass and down the other side with long, sliding steps. This beginning of sorts, the cool fresh moment of re-greeting the ocean, had always been when they were most alone together. They followed that old pattern without comment. 

Katty went over the wet sand to the north. 

Aunt scuttled about between the incandescent whites of shell or flesh or feather that lolled grimly on the sand. 

Only John was different now. He kicked at the dunes, keeping to their edge. Katty could remember him, years ago, always moving towards the power of the water. He hit it hard. Like the skinny breach of a whale. As if he’d continue on and on and on and on to Hawaii or Japan. The beach, the thing that Aunt picked over and examined in minute detail, was just his runway. He built his speed only to slam himself against the first wave that rose above his knees. He thrashed forward, beating the hurled power all to foam. 

Now, he edged away from the water. He kept to the dunes.

Katty stopped as a long finger of high tide approached her. She knelt down and let it wrap around her boots, running rough and salty and cold against her dipped hands. She loved the ocean too, but for the water not the power. All that movement in green-blue molasses. Waves have no agenda. They don’t seek to spend their force on anything, they just are. She would swim under them, feel the force pass by, and come up awash in cold. The shiver of the North Pacific waters would obliviate her senses; would grip her numbly, and time and again she would shake them loose, go, and dive again. 

It became afternoon, and Katty turned back towards the house. John met her. 

“You loosen up some of that stroganoff on your walk? It’s sitting with me like a rock, don’t think I can eat that stuff anymore. Not like I used to.” 

“Well, we’re going have it again tonight. Aunt cooks for days, not meals.”

John smiled, “Ya, ya. I’ll take one for the team. So what about that swim later? You’re probably right about what you said earlier, but we can survive a quick dive, can’t we? I’m reacquainting myself to the idea of the cold like you suggested.”

“That’s not what I’d meant.”

John shrugged, “But it sounded so much like a challenge. Anyway, that water never really warms up much. You know that. Could be just this cold in June and we’d a gone back in the day.” 

“June you got the sun.”

He nodded, “June you got the sun, but we got the stove, and you can even take the first turn in the shower. Just a quick dip. Pump some blood into the veins, ya know?” 

Katty laughed. John was edging towards someone she recognized.

“You wouldn’t get out past your shins.”

“Oh ya? Don’t think I can? Well this will be just a taste then!” he skipped backwards towards the water, flipping her off as he went. He whipped around and broke into a jog. The wind gathered interest in him. It flared up. It parted the air and pushed him forward. 

It, for a few strides, masked all sound. But when it slackened, in after came aunt’s voice, hoarse and loud. 

“No!” she shouted from down the beach, “No John! Damnit, no!”

He slowed.

“Don’t you dare, God damnit! Stay outta that water!”

John and her looked at each other.

“Aunt. What… what’s the problem?”

“Just stay out of it. Keep clear,” she seemed to be searching, hovering under the slow flap of her wings, “Don’t want you tracking in sand and gettin’ it everywhere.” 

“Track in sand?” 

“Yes! Stay clear. Get back up there! You can’t just come here and do whatever the hell you want, this ain’t no vacation! Stay out! You are waiting here. So wait!” she shook with the last words. Broken bits of shell crumbled from her grip. Small cracking sounds dropped to the sand. Then, overwhelmingly, the wind rose back up. John had lost his momentum but not its favor. It pushed him towards the sea. He stumbled slightly, bracing, looking over at Aunt. Her lip quivered and she stomped back towards the house. 

That evening, another meal, the TV on again. Little springy tufts of stroganoff peaked out over the crockery.

“Katty,” Aunt said, “What should we have tonight while we take our evening battering? I think another storm is set to come in.”

Katty dished herself some gray noodles, “Well, you’ll have your thermos. I was thinking maybe we get out some of the cheese too. Keep it in the butter tin so it stays dry between bites.”

“Probably too wet for the crackers.”

“Ya, I think so.”

“What should be in the thermos, honey?”

“The usual.”

“Ah. Of course. I think something like the Merlot would be best. Don’t you?” 

“I can’t tell the difference, Aunt.”

“Wine,” John joined late, “That’s new. I see why you visit.”

“She visits, John, because I invite her.”

“Bit chilly in here, ain’t it, Aunt?” Katty asked. 

“You want me to get the stove going, honey?” 

“I could do it.”

“No, no. You eat. It’ll just take a second.” 

She slid out of her chair and over to the newspaper-lined wood bin. She tore at the printed pages, clattered up some pieces of kindling, and swung open the grimy, wrought-iron door of the stove. When it was all set she grabbed the hatchet.

“John, you can watch the TV in the other room while Katty and I are outside.”

“Are you going for a walk? I would come with.”

“It’s not a walk,” Katty said, “we just sit out there and talk the day. It’s a nice way to close things out, right Aunt?”

“Oh. Well, can I sit out with you two?”

“You don’t have any rain gear,” Aunt said brusquely. 

“There’s lots laying around.” 

“But none of it yours. I don’t want you wearing out my things.” 

“Wearing out your things? It’s Uncle Mahlon’s. I used to use his old stuff all the time.”

“That was when he was around to say it was OK. I know you haven’t seen it for yourself until today, but he ain’t around anymore. In fact, as I recall, you didn’t come round any when he was sick neither so don’t try telling me there was some kind of deathbed permission granted. I wasn’t born yesterday. Nor the day before neither.” 

John leaned back. Aunt, to his right, was looking stiff-faced to the wall.

Katty cleared her throat, “John came and visited Uncle Mahlon, Aunt.”

“No, he did not.” 

“Yes, I did. I saw him at the hospital in Tillamook. You were there. So was Katty.” 

“No. Don’t try that on me. I remember,” Aunt brought the hatchet down on a hunk of pine. It cracked apart. She grabbed for another after pitching both splits into the stove.

“John was there, Aunt. He and Margaret came. We all went together.” 

“Like hell. I’d remember. You know how? Because I would have been seeing two sick ole’ wretches that day. Your Uncle, all cleaned out by the cancer had his excuses, where are yours, John? They wouldn’t have let you out of the building if you’d have gone in your state, they’d have committed you. Ain’t no way you were there.” 

John looked over the table at Katty. The hatchet clacked away.

“I was there,” he said.

“No.”

“Yes, yes I was. We took a picture. I’m sure we did. Katty, do you remember taking a picture?” 

“I do.”

“See!” 

“Stop it! Stop it right now, God damnit!” Aunt hollered, hatchet shaking in her hand. But there was no malice, no hot rage like they knew from her. Desperate instead. “I can’t have you talking like this, pushing in on things. I can’t have you coming in and doing that. I need to remember it how I remember it. Now I got all this!” she threw down the axe, “And it’ll be bouncing around up here for God knows how long! Knocking things loose. Don’t you know there’s nowhere else I can go when you do this?” 

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t want to remember this John,” she said, “Not this. Not this now. Everything you got hanging off you, all you’re tangled up in. I don’t want this mixed in with those memories. It’ll get ruined. I can’t have it be ruined anymore! I need it to stay like it was.”

“Aunt, Jesus, it was an accident,” but over these few words, John faltered. Like the air had shifted on him. He pushed his voice across the table so forcefully that the conviction fell right out of it. After a long moment, he tried again, “You think I wanted any of this? I feel guilty, of course I do, but how was I supposed to know it would happen. We… we… we’d done it thousands of times, Aunt. I wasn’t even that tired… that, you know, out of it. It was bad luck! Just bad fucking luck for everybody, but I’m part of that. Everybody. I got hurt too. You think I wanna keep thinking about it? I can’t stop. It just tears at me. What am I supposed to do? Huh? Why can’t I go back? Or, or, something… start to go back? That’s just it now? It’s all done? This is me forever. That’s what you’re saying! That’s what I’m hearing you say. That it’s all done, sealed, and I’m this way forever to you. Whatever, Aunt. Whatever the hell you want to do. Good luck in your little fucking time-capsule.”

“Why’d you come here, John? Why’d you come?”

“I thought you’d help me. I was wrong.” 

“Why?”

“Because you used to.” 

“Things ain’t the same as they were. You better start realizing that. You can’t just turn around and have it all be behind you. It’s there. It’s there, and you can’t pretend it ain’t.” 

John’s arms were limp at his sides, “You get to but I don’t?”

Aunt Patricia stared by the stove. The paper and wood and scorch marks sat cold. Flame, or any movement for that matter, wasn’t possible for a few moments.

She left. From her room, the sounds of her far seeming, banging out in a hurried rhythm. When she came back, she was in her rain gear. 

“Aunt,” Katty started, but the air rejected it. It was too early. The word broke up and sprinkled to the floor like tracked in sand. Aunt brushed past, light the stove, scooped up her plate, and slid out to the porch. Silence set in the room like cement. They had to move or be stuck there forever. 

“I’ll talk to her.” 

“Why?” John’s voice was venomous but limp. All fang but with no muscle to bite. 

“Well, I mean, I think she’s being pretty cruel to you.” 

“Do you think she’s right?” 

“About what? About visiting Uncle Mahlon? No, I told you, I remember you being there.” 

“No. About not being able to go back.” 

“Go back to what?” 

“To how things were.”

“That’s always true, isn’t it? Isn’t everything just forward?” 

“She doesn’t seem to think so. Isn’t that the whole point of whatever it is you two are going to do tonight? She always liked to pick over things like that.” 

“Maybe before. Maybe when we were kids. Now, well, you know, it’s so she can remember things. She wants to focus.” 

“And she just gets to choose what to focus on, but not the rest of us? The rest of us just get dragged down by the one thing whether we want to or not?” 

“I don’t know, John. But… well…” 

“What?” he asked.

They still hadn’t moved. The words weren’t enough. The cement quickened. 

“It seems like, well, maybe facing things will help you. If you do want to not get dragged down by the one thing, it seems like you probably can’t just have it weighing on you forever. You seem tired, John. Already.” 

“And you two are the experts now?”

“You asked me.” 

“Well shit, yes, but because I thought maybe you’d understand. Fuck, Katty. You just said she was being cruel.”

“She can be cruel and, I don’t know, right? I’m trying to help.” 

“Oh? Well it dudn’t look much different than all that!” He threw his hand after Aunt out into the gloom. The fire she’d lit was all smoke. It was burning over the print of the paper and snuffing itself out. The logs weren’t taking. Distracted, Katty went over and threw in an odd couple pieces of the driftwood set nearby. It hadn’t been meant for burning. The faded gray wood nestled into the fire and sat unscathed for a moment like the hollow-boned memories of water they were. But before she spoke again, they took. Ugly burners. Thick white smoke. Meager heat that wasn’t worth the smell. 

“You need to do something, John. You seem sick. I think you know as well as we do it’s not new, either. Aunt has a lot going on right now, and I’m sorry she’s not showing up for you how you’d like, but memory or no, I don’t think that’s what you even think you need right now.”

“Don’t tell me what I think.”

“OK.” 

“You don’t know anything. What’s it, a few quarters of college and now you’re some fucking life expert? That your degree?” 

“I don’t think I am an expert, John.” 

“Christ. Fuck it. I’m outta here tomorrow. You two do whatever the hell you were always gonna do. Have your sit out in the rain and talk some more shit about me.” 

He rose and went into the back room. Katty closed the stove, sealing the rotten heat and smoke all up the pipe and into the clutches of the wind raging outside. 

After, she changed into her rain gear and pulled up the chair alongside Aunt as the storm poured over the dunes. Tore at them. Snarled. Set its claws up their sleeves, down their necks. Poured rain from its open mouth. 

“You want me to go over the day, Aunt?” 

“I think we can let this one go, honey.”

“John’s really upset.”

“Good.” 

“You don’t really mean that.” 

“Why wouldn’t I? He killed his friend on account of him being all messed up. If he wasn’t upset, I’d have harsh thoughts for him.”

“Harsher, you mean.” 

“I mean harsh. I ain’t told him nothing he didn’t need to hear.”

“Maybe.” 

“He’s your big cousin, honey. I know you don’t wanna see him having a hard time. Truth is, with or without us, he’d be having a hard time. I’m old, I get to be mean, long as it serves a purpose,” as she spoke, she reached over and set her hand on Katty’s knee. “We gotta snap him out of it, honey.”

“I’m not sure it’s working. He said he’s leaving tomorrow.”

Aunt seemed to pause, but it was hard to tell in the tumult. Maybe she was just bracing. 

“He should.” For a moment, Katty thought the wind had swept the rest of the words away, but when it slackened, nothing followed. Aunt’s hand hadn’t moved. It stayed, patting every now and again. 

“You think he’ll be OK?”

The wind rose. Katty lowered her eyes as it drove against them.

Aunt’s hand tightened, her nails digging into her niece’s pants. 

“Aunt?” Katty looked up in time to see—just barely—John’s pale figure scampering out into darkness. She’d missed him as he ran past them. He was shirtless and rushing over the dunes. Only a few more steps, and then gone.

“What the hell does he think he’s doing?” Aunt shouted. “John! John! Get back here!” But the words were all pushed back into her throat. There were other voices in the air. Louder. 

“He’s gonna swim.” 

“What?” 

“He’s going to swim! He was talking about it earlier today,” Katty said. 

“Right now?” 

They hurried after him, over and down the dunes. The light faded at their backs. No glimmer—no stars—and the blackest black of the Pacific horizon. 

“Where’d he go?” Aunt yelled. 

Katty didn’t know.

They broke away from one another. The sand went from deep and shifting to hard and wave compacted. The rain rose thick. Katty had to constantly wiped her face to keep her eyes open.  

Then, she saw him. 

His pale skin out waist-deep water, tearing forward. 

“John!”

He kept on—back twisting and raking against the waves—and she went after. Her boots filled with water and sand, so she tore them off.  

John was swimming now. Hard. Just there. Just ahead. White water strokes beating back at the black of the night. Fast at first, but slowing. Katty rushed after, ducking the waves, timing them. Forward. Forward. Kicking in their wake. The water dragging and the water passing while little by little the ground disappeared.   

By the time Katty reached him, John was panicking. He was struggling to keep his head above water now. She wanted to shout ‘Swim!’ at him; wanted him to aim his energies in the right direction and strike for shore—just this time; just this once—but his eyes were flat, and his limbs moved slow and weak and stupid until he saw her and then he was pushing her down, trying to climb onto her shoulders; trying to get his head above the waves as they came and came and came and came—to save himself, to breathe, to find a ledge he could grab and hold fast in the roiling of the storm. Even underwater she could hear his gasping. She wrestled him free, and he struck at the space between them, eyes wild in the light they caught from shore. 

Another wave came. 

Katty dove. 

She rose. 

John’s flailing slowed. 

She paddled over, waited for the next surge and grabbed him just as its force rose around them and swam as hard as she could. John’s ungainly body hanging somewhere in the oblivion at the end of her grip. 

Finally, she could feel the void thicken below her. John behind her, sputtering and stumbling.

Aunt must have heard or seen or sensed them out there. She waded into the water up to her own waist and pried John free from Katty’s frozen fingers. 

They staggered back to the dunes. Slow up, and slower over. 

Sand and water and salt and flabby clothes and sound flopped onto the brick floor near the stove. John was still gasping, body blue. Aunt threw more fuel into the stove. The fire waved up. The ghost wood burned. She toweled at John and draped a blanket on his shoulders, her voice sounding distant when she said, “Katty, get in the shower and blast the heat.” 

The young woman didn’t move. Just stood and watched the fire. Numb. 

“Katty. Now!” 

As she went through the house, the warmth came back into her, white hot, waving orange flags billowed from the stove. The air was humid, evaporating off thin skin and soaked towels. Aunt was holding John’s head on her lap, rocking on the floor, sweeping at his salt-soaked hair.  

“You were such a swimmer. Like we’d plucked you from the water the day you were born and that’s where you always wanted to go back to. Such a swimmer. You remember how I taught you how to kick in the water? Remember?” her hand swept his hair, “Pretty soon you were out there teaching me. Weren’t you? Weren’t you? Those waves couldn’t ever keep you before. You were something else. You hit them hard and beat all that everything to foam. Wudn’t a wave around that could knock you off course. Eh? Remember? Those waves ain’t going nowhere, honey. They’ll be there. When you’re back, they’ll be there waiting.”