Reed's Beach

One

HE LOOKED THROUGH the eyepiece, tried hard not to squint for fear the moon might disappear. The sextant was heavy in his hands, and he watched as the moon above him fell to the horizon, brought there by his own hand as he moved the index arm down.

The moon touched the black line of the bay. Across the water lay Delaware; due west of him, he knew from the nautical chart in the house, the St. Jones River on Murderkill Neck. Each time he thought of that name, of the thin piece of land he’d seen yesterday afternoon from the dock he stood on now, he wondered how it had come about: Murderkill. Each time he imagined old Dutch fishing boats hundreds of years ago, a nameless body pulled in from just off shore, and the place-name that had followed.

He brought the sextant down, held it with both hands. Its weight somehow comforted him here in the dark, and in the cold. He looked out across the water, blinked at the wind in his eyes, felt them tear. He breathed in, the air cutting into him, and he felt comforted in that as well.

His son’s own name rose in him now. He felt the warmth of it in his throat, the tender feel of it ready to be uttered. He formed the word in his mouth, held it there a moment.

Then from behind him came the sound of the front door closing. He turned, saw he’d left open the sliding glass door onto the porch. He could see through the inside of the house to where his wife stood leaning against the front door, her straw handbag hiked up to her shoulder, a white plastic grocery bag in each hand. Light from the kitchen fell out onto the porch, cast sharp shadows on the boards.

Hugh! she called out, and he knew she couldn’t see him for the dark out here. The taste and feel of his son’s name was suddenly gone. He said, I’m out here.

It’s freezing in here, she said, and pushed herself away from the door, made her way toward him through the house to the kitchen. The table sat just inside the sliding glass door, and she set the bags there, hooked her handbag over the back of a chair.

Sorry, he said, and turned back to the bay, the sextant still in both hands. Forgot again.

He heard the soft pull of the door through its tracks, then her footsteps moving on the boards of the dock. A moment later she stood next to him.

He looked at her. Her arms were crossed against the cold, and she was staring out at the water. For a moment he believed she might say their son’s name for him.

But she said, There’s four more bags out in the car. Everything’s rolling around in the trunk. The kid at the Acme just tossed whatever he felt like into the bags. No rhyme or reason.

He nodded, took in another breath.

She moved close to him. They stood side by side, and she leaned against him, her head on his shoulder, her arms still crossed. She whispered, If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you three times, don’t leave the door open. It’s February, remember?

He said, How could I forget. He was silent, the only sound the silver push of the waves beneath them. He said, Won’t happen again.

Right, she said.

She uncrossed her arms, put one around him. She hadn’t looked at him. She said, Let’s go on inside.

But they only stood there.

Then he brought the sextant up again, found the moon, made it touch the line of the bay again.

He had been out here at the end of the dock each night since they had come down from Englishtown—three nights now—and stood with the sextant and made the moon do his will. The dock was more a small pier that jutted thirty feet out from the porch of the house. At low tide the water stopped just beneath the end of the dock, the pylons the dock and porch and house were built on all exposed; at high tide the water lapped beneath the house.

Tonight the moon was almost full, the right edge sanded away and soft, and through the eyepiece he could see the barest edge of the dark side, black against the blue night sky.

 • • • 

Neither the sextant nor the house were his, but belonged to his boss.

A cottage, really, Mr. Halford had said when he’d first told Hugh of the place. We’re down there every weekend rain or shine April through October. He stood at Hugh’s desk, his yellow bow tie as tight to his neck as every morning. Hugh was turned to the monitor, hands to the keyboard, so that he was looking up at Mr. Halford over the top of the screen. He hadn’t heard him come in, hadn’t seen him, his thick white hair, tan face. He had no idea how old Mr. Halford was, his skin taut yet aged somehow, smooth but worn. And now here he was speaking to him of a cottage, and Hugh had had to blink, swallow, afraid he’d missed part of the conversation with his boss.

He’d been at Hess for seven years already, had graduated from Middlesex Community with an Associate’s, gotten on at Hess as a programmer, and now it was seven years later, and he was still here. There’d been promotions: first to a program supervisor, then into payroll. Now he was on the seventh floor, his office one of the glass-walled cubicles he’d only caught glimpses of those years ago.

Nothing more than that, Mr. Halford was saying. Hugh nodded, eased back in his chair the way he’d seen others do when he was first brought up here two years ago. He put his hands behind his head, smiled, still with no idea what his boss was saying.

Hugh nodded again. Sounds like a nice way to spend the weekends.

Mr. Halford was quiet a moment, his smile still. He cleared his throat, folded the piece of paper in his hands in half. He lost the smile. He said, It’s yours, you want it.

Hugh blinked. Sir? he said. He brought his hands from behind his head, sat up at the keyboard again.

Walker, Mr. Halford said, and he cleared his throat again, moved to the front of the desk. He stopped, folded the paper in half again. Hugh, he said.

Sir?

Mr. Halford put his hands in his pockets, the square of white paper in the left hand disappearing with the move, and for a moment Hugh wondered if the piece of paper were only a prop to get him in here, to speak to him using his first name. This was the seventh floor, but there was the ninth floor, too, a place where the walls were oak paneled, pictures on the walls, carpet. Mr. Halford’s floor.

There’s no walking around this. There’s no getting away from it. He wouldn’t look him in the eye, Hugh saw. Mr. Halford, vice president of finance, could say his first name, but couldn’t look him in the eye.

Simply put, the wife and I want to offer you the place for a while. You and Laura. He turned from the desk to find the single chair pushed against the glass wall behind him, sat down.

Hugh turned from the monitor, laced his fingers in front of him on the desktop. Printouts lay in neat piles on either side of the blotter, piles suddenly thicker than they’d been before.

Mr. Halford’s eyes finally met his, and Hugh felt his own smile disappear, though he tried hard to hold on to some shard of it.

Leave of absence, Mr. Halford said. With pay. Mr. Hess himself approved it. He paused. He leaned forward then, his elbows on his knees, hands out of his pockets and clasped before him. Hugh wondered at how tight the bow tie was, how choked his boss must feel leaning forward like that. Not that Mr. Hess’s approval means anything in this matter. I would have offered you this myself even if he’d said no. He paused. All we ask is you come back up here a couple days a week, help hold things together.

Mr. Halford smiled, unclasped his hands. So, the place is down at Reed’s Beach, on the Delaware. Almost to Cape May. Just a strip of houses, really, all summer cottages. But a couple years back the wife and I weather-stripped the place, insulated it, put in those windows, you know, the double-pane jobbers. Forced heat.

He stopped, sat up in the chair. He put his hands on his knees. Hugh still tried to smile.

What do you think? Mr. Halford said.

Hugh swallowed. He lay his hands flat on the desktop. He said, I’m okay, Mr. Halford.

Son, Mr. Halford said, and now his eyes were on Hugh’s, cut into his in a way he’d not known before.

I have three boys, Mr. Halford said. I have three of them, grown up and gone. And believe you me, son, you are not okay.

Hugh felt his palms suddenly go wet. He said, It’s not the work, I hope. It’s not how my work is going, and now the piles of printouts were no thicker than they had ever been. His own words were only some sort of shield set to deflect what Mr. Halford was really saying to him: You are not all right.

Mr. Halford smiled, shook his head. Hugh, he said, I’m giving you the key right now, and he stood, reached into his left pocket. He pulled out that square of paper and a key ring with a single key.

We spruced up the place last weekend. The inside at least. He laid the keyring on the blotter, unfolded the paper. Brought you a map, too.

Hugh watched as Mr. Halford’s hands spread the paper flat on the blotter, heard words from him, his finger tracing the course of a road that intersected another road and another and another, finally stopping at a small box marked with an X.

But Hugh saw only lines there on the paper, numbers, a few words. Not a map at all, but some configuration of symbols drawn by a man who had three sons, grown and gone.

Hugh nodded and nodded, acted as though the words being delivered to him by this man were the most important he had received since the death of his only child.

He took the paper, folded it into the same square Mr. Halford had, as if in following those creases his boss had made he might know something of the touch of those three children, of a father who had seen them through. Then he stood, picked up the keyring, and put both the ring and paper in his left pocket.

Mr. Halford’s hand was out to him, and Hugh took it, shook hard.

He said, Thank you, Mr. Halford, and tried the smile again, felt a piece of it play across his face. I’ll give Laura a call right now, see what she thinks.

Dennis, Mr. Halford said.

Sir? Hugh said, and stopped shaking his hand.

First name’s Dennis, he said. Me. You shacking up in my place means you have to call me by my first name. He smiled, put those hands back into his pockets again. At least when it comes to matters involving our cottage.

Mr. Halford turned, moved for the doorway. There were no doors into the cubicles, the glass walls lending no privacy to anyone’s desk, and for a moment Hugh wondered how many of the other seventh-floor junior executives had witnessed this exchange, the handing over of a key and fingers moving across a hand-drawn map. He wondered, too, what they would make of it over lunch in the cafeteria.

Then the truth of what they would make of it came to him: His son had died three months and five days before, and now the vice president of finance was loaning him his cottage. Nothing more than that: only the truth.

Mr. Halford stopped, turned. He said, It’s the view down there will help you out. Seeing a different place. Being somewhere else. Not parking your car in the same damn driveway every night. He took a hand from a pocket and gave a short wave. He said, Get down there soon as you can.

Hugh waved back. Thank you, he called, and started to say that first name, Dennis. But Mr. Halford was already headed toward the elevators.

He felt the square of paper in his other hand, the hand still in his pocket. The key was still warm.

 • • • 

The groceries, Laura said. This time she turned from him, took two or three steps back toward the house, her steps dark and hollow on the boards of the dock.

He still had the sextant up.

She stopped, said, You know how to use that thing yet?

He was quiet, then said, I’ve got those books. He said, Give me time.

She said nothing.

He brought the sextant down again, the moon returned to its place high above the two of them, above this cottage and Reed’s Beach and all the earth. And above their car not parked in the same damn driveway as every night of their lives, but on the dirt road in front of this place, a car inside of which rolled loose food items some kid from the Acme had thrown into bags. No rhyme or reason.

That was when the word rose again in him. But this time he did not lose it in the voice of his wife calling out his own name.

He looked at the dark line of the water, scattered across it the small broken pieces of light a near-full moon gave out.

He said, Michael.

He heard no sound after his son’s name, not even the waves beneath him, moving closer to shore, the tide on its way in. He heard nothing.

Then, from behind him, he heard the word whispered, like an echo, but not: Michael.

He turned, saw his wife there, her arms still crossed against the cold. Behind her fell the light from the kitchen, so that she was a silhouette to him, a shadow.

But he could see her head was bowed, then saw how her shoulders quivered, and then all trace of the name was gone on the wind out here, and in the dark.

LAURA’S ONLY WORDS to him on the matter when he’d phoned her: When can we go? She’d had no responsibilities to fulfill, no job to leave. She’d quit at the hospital the day after they’d buried their son.

They left at six-thirty the Saturday morning after Mr. Halford had given him the key. Hugh had pulled closed the door of their home, tried the knob to make certain the place was locked tight. This leave of absence was designed, he knew, to try and heal what had happened to them, the open wound. But he knew he wasn’t through with it. He tried the knob one last time, and hoped he would never be through with it.

Laura was already in the car. She had her own keys, had the engine going, the heater on high, though he knew only cold air poured out. It was an argument they had carried on all ten years they had been married: whether the heater worked faster turning it on first thing or leaving it off until the engine had warmed up enough.

This morning he said nothing, only climbed in. Cold air shot out onto his legs, cut through his ankles. But he only looked at the house before them lit with their headlights. The rough gray clapboards soaked up the light so that the house and its dark windows, even the door he had just tried, seemed swallowed up by the gray morning. Snow lay along the foundation of the house, this, too, gray even in the headlights.

He turned, glanced at his wife, then behind him. Her hands were in her lap, gloves on. He said, We’re off, and laid his arm along the top of the seat, backed out.

She said, We’re off.

They took the Parkway down, stopped at Toms River and had breakfast at Friendly’s, then got back on the Parkway, the trees and grass and growth all brown and yellow and gray, the snow gone. Just past the Barnegat exit, they saw five deer grazing on the matted grass that lay along the highway, all of them bent to the food before them without looking up as their car passed by. They were fearless, he saw, made so by how thin they seemed: He thought he could see the outline of ribs, the bones in their legs.

Look, was all Laura said, and Hugh had nodded.

 • • • 

They made it to the Cape May Court House exit by nine, found their way along the streets and past the old court house itself, the map Mr. Halford had drawn spread now across his wife’s lap. Turn right here, she said at the end of the exit ramp. Then, Left on Route 9. Then, Turn right up here, onto 658.

He looked at the town as they moved through it: convenience stores, gas stations, a supermarket. There was traffic, too, and people on the streets, all of them bundled against the cold. The sky was cloudless yet filled with a haze that made the air look even colder, and it seemed to him there was too much going on here, too many people out and places to buy food and liquor.

Then they were out of the town, moving west on 658, a two-lane road suddenly lined with bare trees and pale scrub pine, and he breathed out.

Only then did he hear the giant silence inside the car with them.

Their son had been dead for three months and eight days. Since then, they had never ridden in the car together for longer than it took to get to Laura’s parents in Matawan, a good twenty minutes; now they had been together inside the car for almost three hours, and there had come from the back seat no child’s voice reading aloud books and showing the pictures to him in the rear-view mirror, no whine asking how long it would be before they would get there, no thin snore as their child slept away the trip.

Turn right on 47, Laura said, and he searched her voice, those few words, for some trace of his child’s voice. But he found nothing.

 • • • 

This was how each day thus far had played itself out for him: a million small and sharp revelations, pieces of the world he walked through cutting into him each moment. Nothing he saw was what it seemed, but held inside it a piece of his son.

Already that day there had been the silence from behind him, that absence that made his son’s presence even larger. And there had been the people on the street, so many of them walking and moving, driving cars, as though there had been no death anywhere on the face of the earth, no one lost to any of them. And there had been the gray house they had left behind them, their home, and an upstairs bedroom in which had lived their child.

They had not touched the room since their son died, left the bed just as he had made it, the spread merely thrown over bunched and wrinkled sheets, the pillow crooked at the head. The small blue desk was littered with colored pencils, scraps of construction paper, a bottle of white glue. His blue canvas bookbag hung on the back of the chair.

Each morning he entered the room, looked things over. He did not know what the project his son had been working on was, and each morning he knew the construction paper and pencils would never find their intended order, never find which pencils would be applied to which pieces of paper, what would be glued to what.

So that each of his days began with its own self-inflicted wound, the small cut into him made by his own presence in the room. He could do as his wife did, he knew, and not go into the room, never mention the colorful materials across the table, the lay of the sheets and bedspread. But he went into the room regardless, finding in his moments there, before coffee and the forty-five-minute drive into Woodbridge and the Hess building and his glass cubicle, a sort of orientation for the day, a reconnaissance of the loss he hadn’t yet endured.

He felt his foot ease off the gas, felt the car slow down, the trees and scrub pine fall away. Turn right on 47 was all she had said, but before this moment, before this alien road and whatever cottage lay before them, he knew he would have been able to find evidence of his son in her voice, somewhere inside her the hidden pitch and timbre of their son.

Across the highway stood a yellow road sign, black arrows pointing left and right. This was where 658 ended, 47 their only choice, and neither right nor left seemed to him any choice at all. Around him were houses he did not recognize, landmarks for someone else, not himself.

Laura said, Looks clear. She turned to him. No cars, she said.

He looked at her.

She reached a hand across the seat, touched his arm.

He could not feel her touch through the coat he wore, only knew she was touching him by what he saw: her gloved hand, his sleeve.

He said, I don’t know if this is a good idea.

He felt her hand then, the small squeeze she gave. Then her hand was gone, and she turned to her window.

She said, This is the best idea.

From behind them came the dull blast of a horn. Hugh looked in the rearview mirror, saw the grill of a pickup truck, two men with billed caps.

This was no place he knew.

 • • • 

They passed a few farmhouses, white clapboard with screened porches, pickups and Camaros out front, cars up on blocks behind them. They passed the Mosquito Control Center on the left, and the campground.

Then came the small green street sign, Reed’s Beach Road. He signaled left, and turned onto a dirt road.

Pine trees lined the road that snaked off before them, no beach to be seen at all. Then the trees stopped, and the road ran through marsh, on either side of them the flat plain of high grass for what seemed miles. Before them, maybe a half mile away, lay a strip of cottages, rooflines cutting up into the horizon.

They reached the piece of land the cottages were built on, and he eased the car to a stop, the road splitting off to the left and right. At the fork sat a square building, clapboards painted yellow what looked maybe a hundred years ago, a rusted tin roof, one window. Double doors and a porch were at the left end of the building, above the doors a hand-painted sign, letters in red on a white background: Dorsett’s Marlinspike General Store. At either end of the words were rope anchors nailed and shellacked to the sign. Inside the window hung an old plastic 7-Up sign, a light inside it blinking on and off.

Their headlights were still on, pale light shining on the yellow clapboards. He wondered if he had left them on through breakfast in Toms River, and thought then of his own home those many miles behind him, and of the light from the same headlights cast on a house in what seemed now a different country.

Laura said, Marlinspike.

He said, Which way?

She was quiet, and he saw from the corner of his eye her gloved hands lace together in her lap, covering the map. She let out a deep breath, a signal, he knew, but one he did not care to pick up.

She said, Left.

He reached down and turned off the headlights. He turned left and away from the store, inched the car along a dirt road that seemed to have been scraped into place only a week ago: On either side of them lay a row of heaped dirt three or four feet high. On the other side of the heaps were the houses, nothing like what he’d imagined. They were ramshackle things, buildings made of rooms piled one on top of another and beside each other.

There were no cars on the road, and he could hear beneath them the crack of ice as they moved through frozen puddles. One house, the first on his left, butted up to the mounds of dirt before it; on a clothesline beside the house hung a single beach towel, I Discovered the Eighth Wonder of the World printed across it in a faded purple. The towel whipped in the wind, and he wondered how long it had been hanging there. Another house, this on the beachfront—he could see pylons now, caught glimpses of the gray sheet of the bay between these houses—appeared to have been nailed together overnight, the wooden walkway to the front door sagging, the doorway itself out of line, leaning to the right. A piece of plywood covered the bottom half of the front door, a blue happy face spray-painted on it. Another place, this one to his left, was only a trailer with a screened porch around it.

Laura said, Mr. Halford’s vice president of finance, right?

He still took in the cottages, saw one with green asphalt shingles for siding. He said, Yep.

Wonder if he had to take out a loan for one of these things, she said. He turned and saw her smile.

Then she pointed ahead, said, There it is. Last one on the right.

He looked, saw up ahead where the road ended in piles of dirt even higher than those beside them now. And he saw the house, the last one on the right. Beachfront.

Now this is more like it, Laura said.

It was a cottage: a porch with railing, pylons, a walkway over the mounded dirt to the door. Gray clapboards no different from their own.

He pulled up alongside the house, left the engine running, and leaned forward to take the place in through the windshield: three windows and the front door faced the road, the window frames and door painted a forest green, and the shingles on the roof were green, too. The roof shot up at a high angle, the roofline parallel to the water. There were two downstairs windows on the side of the house, an octagonal window at the very peak.

Laura opened her door before he could shut off the engine, was up the steps of the walkway and on the porch before he could climb out. Then she disappeared around the side of the house, her footsteps quick across the wood.

He followed her, walked along the porch to the back of the house. She was already at the end of the dock, her hands on the railing before her, eyes out to sea.

She looked over her shoulder at him and smiled, her hands still holding tight to the railing. Water lapped beneath them, and already he was logging in the items around him on the porch and dock, those things that belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Halford: a forest green Adirondack chair, a conch shell the size of a football, three crab traps in front of the sliding glass door. A single duck boot, no laces, was jammed between two railing banisters. A hibachi, rusted through where the charcoal was supposed to go, sat next to a blue and white lattice lawn chair.

Somebody else’s history, he saw. All of this was somebody else’s history, and now here they were, dumped in the midst of it in order to figure out their own history. He wondered why he hadn’t refused his boss’s offer, simply shrugged and never stood to shake Mr. Halford’s hand. No, he could have said. He could have said, I know I am not all right, but I will be, and he could have smiled at Mr. Halford, smiled right on through the lie he could have given.

He stopped at the sliding glass door, leaned over the crab traps, and peered through the glass into the house: a table, kitchen appliances, cupboards. Anybody’s guess what each of these meant to their owners.

Then the five deer came to him, their rib cages, the fact they had not looked up at them as they had driven past. He searched that image in his head, pored over it for some shred of the death of his son, and for a moment, he believed he had found something, had drawn some line between the two, the starving deer and the loss of Michael. He could make anything become something to do with his child.

But then he lost it, felt it break up like thin sheets of ice beneath him: