He sat at the table, which was covered with a plastic-coated red and white checked tablecloth, and looked out the window. In his hand he held a lukewarm beer. Five empty bottles were lined up directly in front of him, five bottles on five checked squares. In the harbor a flock of Bufflehead ducks, tiny pierrot clowns, wove themselves between the orange winter-sticks and dived. Down towards the cove it was all iced-up, and the floes creaked in their miniature sea. It was a monochromatic kind of day, gray and bleached, at the end of February.
“I can’t even get drunk on this shit,” he told her, after she had sat down at the end of the table, facing the bottles and the door that she had just come through. The glass was smeared with brown yellow mud from last week’s plows. Piles of snow lay, suspended in their melting, at the end of the drive, a kind of sticky shaving cream clinging to the asphalt and the sandy stubble.
“Hey, where have you hidden Bill my favorite brother?”
“He doesn’t live here anymore.”
She felt very weary after standing on her feet all day yesterday. Her hands were cracked with dryness in their folds and a chunk of polish had been scraped off her thumbnail. Nobody had answered the phone.
At dead low tide the beach was a graveyard. Sand dollars stranded, slowly bleaching black to white. Moonshells, half-buried, abandoned by refugee crabs. Slimy sea worms wiggling in the tiny pools left by the outgoing tide. Livid green sea grass defiant in the wasteland. The defaced body of a skate, pecked over by seagulls.
The sea was calm. Nothing seemed to stir in the silence after the dawn, on the shore, or in the anaemic blue of the sky. But everywhere things were on the move. Tiny feelers were extended, grasping the faint scent of hope. Deep down in the sand, clams turned and turned and felt the pull of the earth as it rotated. On a rock a cormorant awoke and stretched out its awkward wings, and as it beat the air for the first time, the tide began to turn.
She came down to the beach alone. After the dogs and their walkers had been and gone, leaving behind the sharp imprints of their claws and their serrated shoes. The beach was criss-crossed with the strange tracks of mammals, crazed stitches in the silica.
The sun had risen and was beginning to settle into humidity. All around the air felt sticky and it was hard to breathe. It was a weekday in summer, when others were at work, drying their sweaty backs in air-conditioned offices. Out in the bay the boats were ignoring the “Go Slow” signs and kicking up a wake.
She strode across the sand quickly, aiming for the far end of the beach and a gap in the shrubs. A strong face, a face that would have commanded empires, a face that would have stood long ago on an escarpment and watched, impassive, as men fought and died in battle. It seemed incongruous – that face in this setting.
