13
Jodie approached her father from behind but decided she’d hold off speaking until she was abreast him and he could see who it was if he failed to recognize the voice. She reached that destination but still held off speaking for several seconds as she stared out at the gray angry ocean in the middle distance, its chaos of flickering white caps like a swirl of fireflies in the deepening dusk. On the walk out, the atmospheric water—falling or suspended at a density somewhere between a heavy mist and a light rain—had soaked through her windbreaker’s hood and was now trickling through her hair and down behind her ears. It was cold but somehow comforting to be surrounded by this much moisture, almost like a fish—one with the water.
“Steph told me I’d find you out here,” she said finally, without looking down.
Her father was seated on the wet sand, perfectly centered between and hidden by three tall dunes that allowed only one viewing line—that of the unblemished ocean some fifty yards distant beyond a sloping beach that was invisible beyond the bowl of sand that surrounded him. “The Missus doesn’t know this place exists,” he said, his deep voice in centuries-old Elizabethan accent surprisingly audible above, or below, the wind and the surf and the drizzle.
Jodie couldn’t help but grin. She’d never in her whole life been able to sneak a lie past her father. He called her out on every one, from the most harmless fib—“Aunty June said I could pick one daisy for my hair”—to the gravest of deceits—“I heard the tire blow before the Jeep went into the creek.” As a child and adolescent, she spent so much time lying on the mainland that it took several days of Dad’s lie-busting each summer for her to break the habit. Now she lied a lot less and tended to subconsciously shed the habit soon as she hit the island’s ferry dock. But every so often one still slipped out in his presence, particularly when she was anxious or upset.
Her stepmother had met her at the ferry station and driven her back to their house on the sound side. Jodie had not asked about her father at the station or on the ride, hoping without much conviction that Stephanie would volunteer an explanation for Dad’s absence—he’d been called in to cover for a sick seaman’s mate or was in the middle of tinkering with the old Cadillac he kept under the carport. But when they arrived to an empty house, Jodie had growled with a familiar anger that had been absent the past few days, “Where’s Dad?”
Stephanie had shrugged, her body’s gesture of resignation tempered by her face’s scowl.
“You don’t know?” Jodie shouted.
“The only time I know is if he’s beside me in bed snoring, and even that’s hit or miss these days.”
Jodie came close to slapping her stepmother then. They had a history dating to an early morning shouting match at Mick’s Tavern following her father’s accidental announcement that he and Stephanie had been married for six months. Though they’d been living together for over a year, Jodie had secretly hoped this female interloper would one day disappear as quickly as she’d appeared. That was fifteen years ago.
But Jodie reined in her impulse to violence. “I’ll find him,” she said with disgust bordering on contempt. She dropped her canvas duffel on the boot bench, grabbed her resident windbreaker off the hook in the entry alcove, and headed out into the dimming afternoon.
Behind her, Stephanie yelled, “Good luck!”
She knew where her father was. She’d discovered his private hiding place the summer she was nine when he was still living alone with a revolving door’s assemblage of island tarts (some married, others not) sharing his bed and sometimes his cottage but always banished the day she arrived for her summer visit until the day she left. Over dinner the first night of that summer’s visit, she’d told him what Mom had told her on the drive out to the ferry that morning, that she’d soon have a half-sister—Brooke was pregnant (again) and had just heard back on the sex of the baby from a test they’d done. Her father had grown unusually sullen (for then) at this news; and, following dessert of a big bowl of homemade banana pudding (from Miss Lil, her grandmother), he told her to go “say hey” to Maw and Pap (Miss Lil and her husband Stuart, her grandparents living next door) “while I tend to some business.” She’d said, “O.K.” and headed out the door to her grandparents but veered off the path beyond the twisted live oak and waited till her father emerged from the house and followed him at a discreet distance to his hiding place.
And she’d followed him off and on every year thereafter till his drinking ramped up after she moved to the west coast and she’d stopped—partly out of respect for his privacy and partly because she was afraid what she might see if she followed. She was certain he knew of her discovery, thought she saw him smiling her way a few times in those early years. But he’d never invited her to join him, and she’d never intruded.
Until tonight. She looked down at him from where she stood. He had on worn jeans, a gray sweatshirt, and an open canvas coat. His head was uncovered, his hair wet, making his bald spot on the top more apparent; and his feet were bare and ghostly white where they protruded from the damp denim. At her approach, he’d slid the bottle encased in the sodden paper bag partway beneath his raised knees. She saw the bottle had its open mouth pointed upward, either empty already or some saved for later. She figured it was already empty or he’d have found a way to cap it. The sight produced a spasm of grief within that she’d not have thought possible a month ago. “But I’ve known,” she said, barely a whisper.
He nodded and said “Good” without looking up.
She sat beside him. The sand was shockingly cold. She wanted to lean into him, as much in hopes of warmth as to maybe bring him a little. But something halted her. She pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them to conserve what little body heat she still had. She lay her chin against her cupped hands and blew lightly into them. She was glad she still had on her hiking boots and couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be barefoot. “I missed you at the ferry station.”
“Me too,” he said.
She laughed. “You missed me or you missed yourself.”
“I couldn’t do it.”
“What?”
“Run to meet the bad news you’re bringing.”
“What bad news?”
“You tell me.”
Jodie sighed. To her ears, the sound exactly matched the wind’s. Maybe it was the wind, pushing in. “Mom has pancreatic cancer.”
“See!” he said, his voice animated at last—a victory for his foretelling.
“She almost died last week from an experimental treatment but didn’t.”
“Matter of time.”
“For all of us, Dad.”
“For some not soon enough.”
She understood just then with a clarity as if the clouds had parted and a brand new sun appeared in the east twelve hours early though in fact the grayness held tight and low as before—she understood then the full weight her father had lived under out here on the island since the day Brooke had left. And she also realized that weight had been inevitable, regardless of her mother’s, or her, actions.
She reached out blindly to find her father’s near hand. It was balled in a tight fist and pushed deep into the damp sand, to the hard-packed gravel layer below. He didn’t uncoil it at her touch, so she covered it best she could.
He stood suddenly and turned toward the island. “The Missus will have dinner waitin’,” he said as he rose toward the cleft in the dunes.
Jodie took two deep breaths, looked one more time toward the sound of the ocean, now blended into the universal grayness of night (no fireflies this glance), then stood and brushed off her damp jeans. She bent and picked up the bottle—empty, as she’d guessed—before following her father’s trail.