Sometimes

He finds himself writing a letter which does not begin conventionally, no To Whom It May Concern, no Dear Monica. He hasn’t any idea of an address. Japan, maybe. Barcelona. San Juan. Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle and hoping it will reach you. Probably there are lots of bottles thrown into the sea, this one not being so different.

Perhaps it is not the sea carrying sand away from shore so much as it is sand carrying the sea. Think of it, this constant dance. A never-ending lovers’ caress. Look south. See those block and stone monstrosities rising up like some crazed latter-day Poseidon demanding restitution for what is lost. Or perhaps more rightly that which is found and held too tightly.

She runs both ways, this shoreline. To the north, see? A vast jagged smile of water with a broken pier jutting out into the now blue, now green, now brown firmament, rotting pillars rough and serrated and black along both gums, foam speckling its lips as if some mad dog is intent upon raging against its master yet finds creeping solace in the peace of the moment.

This sand is not sand. Bend and look. Pick up a handful and examine closely if you do not believe me. Notice how the broken seashells worn down over vast eons of time mimic what you take at first for a sugary sand shoreline.

A highway follows along that shoreline where rows of houses have sprouted amid the red maple and the giant leather fern, the beach false foxglove, hazel alders and washerwoman, bushy bluestem and the ever-present spreading sandwort.

There. Perched precariously, an ancient single story wooden frame house hunkers like some demented prehistoric seabird on a piled nest of tangled crutches, of rotting lumber and crumbling concrete and wasted sandbags spilling their intestines. Rain drifts about the windows. A haze of early morning sea mist runs gray.

Jack is running a fever today from what he suspects is a touch of influenza. He feels simultaneously deranged and yet quite clear-headed. He looks forward to these walks along the beach each and every morning though he is not with the same pleasure relishing the thought of the rest of his day.

His in-laws are in town, intent upon bestowing their malice and hate upon a family which no longer exists, more forced talking, more feigned listening. He does not know why they still call nor does he understand the reason he answers. Monica has been gone two years ago come June, dragged under to a slow death by what Jack suspects was a lingering testament to her time spent coming of age in a household she both loathed and loved with equal abandon.

“Is that a lump?”

The gulls cry, sand-fleas swarm over drowned black and white surf birds, waves crack against the sand with the methodical regularity of a tick-tocking clock. The whole scene has a ring of long practice. The dawn takes on a ghastly substance, becoming solid. When you fall, fall in the direction of your work. Conserve yourself. The idea is to make a tree into a log, a log into a plank, a plank into a home. You broke my heart and told me lies, left me cold without goodbyes, oh, your frosty eyes…

No wonder two or three natives a month take that one-way dip. It is either drown or rot. The strange altered mood he feels extends out in front of him oozing its way ahead of his labored steps. He attempts to make eye-contact with the others he passes yet it is rare they reciprocate. Perhaps they sense the madness of the fluctuating aura surrounding him, now red, now purple, then subtly morphing back to the same shade of blue that colors the bowl covering the world this morning.

“Let me feel.”

Her fingers begin a frantic search beneath his. Has she never noticed before? Or is this a discovery of a thing new? A quiet riot of panic grips him where just below the navel he goes rigid as her eyes adjust to the same conclusion he has reached.

“How peculiar.” The alarm in her words is masked well but the minute quavering in her voice gives her away. That day you feel like soft wet sandpaper slightly irritating as you rub up against one another, the silent pliant toothsome teeth of time nibbling away at the both of you, pushing you apart, sea and sand, no matter how tightly you hold on. “You’re right. I better see my doctor.”

Jack remembers perfectly his first impression of meeting Monica, that it was not the lamp emitting the light but her. She stood motionless, her back to him, probably entranced by some vision from across the room. Her cheeks were wet with crying, wonderfully long sorrel blonde hair, she made him think of a burning candle. A breath breathed by a passing breeze is not the entire wind, neither is it the last of what will pass nor the first of what’s to come, a point plucked anywhere sets all the currents and gales vibrating delicately.

It is not an unpleasant land though swamps abound and sinkholes appear and grow like aggressive cancers seeking to kill that which allows them life. Seashells crunch beneath Jack’s bare feet callused against their sharpness by his years of wandering this shoreline. Times were when Monica accompanied him on these sojourns, he thinks perhaps that was what she most missed as she lay succumbing to the disease which will claim her much too young.

They both dream of children. They talk two and then three. Later, when they bury first Daniel and then Christopher, the talk withers and then dies away with their boys. Oh, but you’re still young, the in-laws say, as if that in itself might make the loss less. Salve injuries too deep to ever heal. The breath of memory still sighs over such instances, setting the entire web to shaking, people fade to dream each other’s dreams, of days gone and nights passed, of hard suns crisscrossing back and forth, forth and back.

Other fools in the rain parade by this morning some of them smiling, some frowning, some with no expression at all. Are they, like him, no longer able to distinguish between wet and dry? This or that? Life or death? It doesn’t seem to matter what or how Jack is feeling. These walks always bring him a grin. Sometimes, he feels guilty for even this slight happiness. What right has he?

The sea claims her six inches every year. He grins sheepishly thinking how dirty that sounds, how obscene, how inappropriate. Some houses are so close to the ocean that you wonder at the intent of the builders until you realize how old they are. How probably even more ancient ruins have long since dissolved into the eternal surf pounding beneath their foundations until they could no longer hold on. Just let go.

It is the whole mother-killing agreement. That’s right. Truth does not run on time though time may run on truth, the scenes gone by blending with those yet to come, whirling together in the blue of the sea, sometimes green, sometimes brown, spreading unending waves upon the surface. So no worries, old man. Take it a breath at a time. Focus, and look.

“How peculiar,” Monica mutters disjointedly through her morphined haze of semi-wakefulness, looking at that which he cannot see but dearly desires he could. Is it a dream she’s having or a thing more substantial? Life may be rounded by sleep but dreams cannot be tied up in neat simple bows. Reality is a damned sight holier, greater than the sum of its parts.

“What, Monica? What is it you see, sweetie?”

The medicinal silence of the room hums. Jack is dimly aware of footsteps in the hall outside the door, the mythical footsteps of the ogre come to feast upon the flesh of mortals. He thinks he hears soft singing issuing from the empty bed next to Monica’s, a rare fairytale bird’s succulent warbling.

“Daniel. Why, there’s Christopher too.”

In sleep, her face relaxes, settles, that confident tucking away of the corner of her mouth, the nurse speaking in soft happy words saying how Monica probably does not recognize him but how she hoped he would come. As if he hasn’t been by her side this entire time. As if he has somehow settled for less. Looking down upon a bloated body, a sharply ruined face, a frizz of hair, all of it adding up to what little is left of Monica. Jack has seen the faces of dying people before. The face of his father, his mother, even the face of a woman he was afraid to love.

He is not surprised.

The word settle has always has an ominous feel, like a certain vague fatigue, the pious fearful drop in the pitch of their voices as they mention Daniel, Christopher, Monica, Jack feeling that teasing is not now so much in order as once it was, that he himself has brought with him the scent of dreary odors faintly stale, here amid the bustle of success, the enigma of energy, which is quite daunting and a little disturbing, he who was once welcomed with hugs and feigned robust pleasures, which is why he loathes these continued assemblies.

“So how goes the business, Jack? Well?” Homer is not Monica’s father, she has made that much crystal clear over the years. He is a short squat bald man with a shiny sweaty head and beady eyes, pig eyes is what comes to mind, always sizing up the opposition, for Homer is at war. His clothing is meticulous as is the car he drives, the house where he lives with Monica’s mother, even the city he calls home. They visit her parents once a year while Monica is still alive, Jack has not been invited back since her passing.

Instead, he receives a call every July from Homer asking if Jack can meet them at the Fusty Pelican for lunch. Ruby, Monica’s mother, is a mouse of a woman, so tiny Jack wonders if people sometimes probably step upon her by accident. If asked a question, Ruby always looks to Homer first as if to obtain his acquiescence to speak. She is a mirror of what Monica might’ve become in another thirty years, a brittle good-looking woman with deeply-set brown eyes forever searching out the good in others.

Jack nods agreeably to Homer, tells him how he has sold the business, how now he spends his days walking the beach, looking for bottles, shells, death. Only he leaves those parts out, the parts about looking for bottles and death, especially the part about looking for bottles containing notes inside them. Homer is a practical man who loathes the self-indulgence of the idle, however, so the news of Jack’s retirement does not light up his face in any sense.

Here is a man ninety one years old yet still commutes daily into the car dealership he has owned for sixty some years. As long as Jack has known him, Homer has never taken a vacation other than to make the two hour trip here. Ruby sits at the table with an air of quiet spineless resignation as Homer rattles off the sales numbers for last month as if in an attempt to lure Jack back to some semblance of reality.

Monica was Ruby’s only child. She was charged with carrying out not only Ruby’s last request but Homer’s as well. Now, since nobody else is left standing, that task has fallen de facto to Jack. You would think as much money as Homer has the man would hire an attorney to oversee his last will and testament but no. He has pointedly made certain Jack is assigned the duties, as if somehow determined to mine every last ignominy from his son in law.

“Hell, Jack, you’re not that old,” Homer says, smacking his lips, greedily sucking his fingers one by one after delivering a sauce-laden jumbo shrimp to his mouth, slowly shaking his head in disapproval, eyes fastened on his plate, not in denial of the meal but of Jack. “Walking the beach every day is fine for bums, but a man like you? Jack. You’re still a young man.”

Ruby is now smiling wanly at Jack with a dim dull gleam in her eyes which seems to say: see? Three martinis and see? Do you understand now what I have to put up with? What I have endured all these years? He does not feel sorrow for the woman, only rage bordering upon hate for how Ruby doomed Monica to the same fate by marrying such a man a Homer.

Jack always thought the boys would bury him, not him them. He does not remember any of the funerals. Oh, he knows he was there. But then again, what exactly does that mean? To be there? Daniel drifted off in his sleep. Nobody could say why. An infection his body couldn’t throw off is what the coroner said, his body maybe weakened by a lifestyle built upon the quicksand foundation of drug abuse, abetted by a father who did nothing but play the enabler, a mother in denial. These last two declarations are more figments of Jack’s imagination than actual accusations yet he does in no way deny them.

Christopher, who died beside the highway, run down at two o’clock in the morning while on his motorcycle barreling across town doing ninety miles an hour on his way to nowhere. Mild-mannered, under control, he must have watched as the speedometer mounted despite all he could do to restrain it, the monster beneath him revving up of its own accord, rushing through the night, white lines flickering by, the wind billowing his cheeks, sneaking behind his glasses to make his eyes tear.

Now, here they are again, if only in the memories of an old man. Jack licks his lips, tastes the salt, allows his tongue to linger there for a long moment. The wind comes from the southeast pushing up white-capped waves which run diagonal to the beach rather than perpendicular, or perhaps this particular stretch of sand is itself on a diagonal. The oily surf hisses as it is drawn back into the depths. Clutches of tiny web-footed long-legged birds rush from the waves then turn to hurry back, pecking furiously into the sand with long narrow beaks before the next frothy wave chases them again.

“Dad. Did you ever put a message in a bottle and toss it into the ocean?”

“No, Daniel, never,” Jack says, wondering why he did not think of such a thing before. Why the memory returns now. Let’s try it, says Christopher. Tomorrow. Now, here they are. The four of them walking the beach, heading to the old pier, their mother lingering behind, stooping to pick through shells washed in by the tide, searching for the pretty ones. Both boys carry tucked under their arms tightly corked bottles with messages they’ve penned folded and poked inside, thick heavy red glass which just last night contained expensive wine imported from Italy or perhaps France, Jack can’t remember.

Jack believes there is no permanence, all is but vanity and vexation of spirit. He rises early each morning, quiet not to rouse wife and boys, forgetting for the instant they are no longer able to wake. The face in the mirror doesn’t seem to know what or where, or to even much care, only stares back at him with thirsty eyes. He walks along a beach which feels like a prison cell, walls of green, a floor of crushed shells, a ceiling of clouds so low at times he must bend to keep from striking his head upon them. It is very still but for the soft delicious wet hissing, the air tasting of giant mint, the salt wind stinging his eyes.

He supposes it is all part of life and death, that you can’t have the one without the other. He thinks how one day he might come across those same bottles, now barnacle-encrusted, green with age, wine-scented messages sent from sons long gone, watches the surf bubble as he walks. Jack doesn’t cry, he hasn’t allowed himself to cry in years. To stop those scalding memories from melting in his nose and throat and eyes he forces himself to imagine what it was like back when, until the pain, the guilt, the loss are replaced by something different, something larger, more expansive.

He turns at the old staircase submerged in the beach, only its top steps visible, last remnants of a pier which once stood sentry here, heads back, noticing through the mist the swing of a fishing pole, a baited weighted hook sailing into forever.