The Tower Keeps Nothing

Dee counted the days the way sailors count knots, not because the number mattered, but because not counting felt like drowning. Sixty-three. She'd said it out loud in the car, to nobody, the way she'd started doing sometime around day forty, when the silence in her own head got loud enough to need company.

The tower had been there longer than her sobriety, longer than her marriage, longer than the version of her that used to drink gin out of a coffee mug at nine in the morning and call it seasoning her tea. Some pirate probably built it, or some rich man pretending to be one, round and stone, tucked into the cliff like a held breath, ivy dragging over its shoulders. She used to come here with her father. He'd stand exactly where she was standing now, flask in his jacket, and tell her the tower had a spiral staircase inside that connected to a tunnel, that smugglers used to run rum up from the boats at night. She never checked if it was true. Some stories you don't want confirmed or denied. You just want to keep them.

Her father was seven years dead. Cirrhosis, though the obituary said "after a long illness," which was the family's way of drinking-shaming him even in the past tense.

The tide was out, and the sand had gone that particular wet-slate color that shows up right before dusk, when the light gives up trying to be gold and just goes soft and gray instead. Dee's jacket, denim, beat to hell at the cuffs, a jacket she'd owned since she was twenty-six and too drunk most nights to remember buying it, kept catching the wind wrong, billowing at her back like it wanted to be a sail. She had a backpack slung over one shoulder. Heavier than it should've been for a walk on the beach.

She hadn't planned to bring the flask. That was the truth she'd tell her sponsor later, or try to. She'd found it in a shoebox in the closet while looking for a battery charger, and instead of throwing it in the trash like a person with sense, she'd put it in her bag. Some sick little errand her body was running without her permission. Full. Still full, capped, the whiskey inside probably gone syrupy after all these years, waiting.

She hadn't opened it. That mattered, she told herself. That had to count for something, carrying a loaded gun around all afternoon and not once putting your finger near the trigger.

The waves came in low and unhurried, more suggestion than assault, sliding up the sand and pulling back like they were testing the temperature of something. Dee watched the tower instead of the water. Easier. The tower didn't move. It had watched God knew how many people stand exactly where she was standing, brokenhearted, half-drunk, grieving, in love, all of it, and it never once told anybody what to do about any of it. She used to think that made it useless. Today it felt like the only kind of company she could stand.

Her phone buzzed in her back pocket. Marisol, probably checking in, because it was a Thursday, and Thursdays used to be bad. Thursdays were the day her father called her, when he was alive, always around six, always three drinks in by the sound of his voice, needing someone to agree with him about something. She didn't answer. She let it ring itself out and watched a cormorant work the tide line, stabbing at something invisible in the foam.

The wind picked up. Somewhere behind her a kid was laughing at something, one of those pure, unselfconscious laughs kids do, and it landed strange against her ribs, this small good sound in a place she'd built into something so heavy.

She took the flask out.

It sat in her palm, dumb little brick of metal, warmer than she'd expected from being pressed against her back all afternoon. The cap made that small metallic sound when she twisted it, a sound her body knew the way it knew her own name, and for one long stretch of seconds she just stood there with it open, not drinking, not not-drinking, the smell of old whiskey rising up thin and sweet and terrible.

Then she turned the flask over.

It came out slow at first, syrup-thick, dark against the wet sand, and then the tide came up to meet it and took it, folded it into the gray water without ceremony. No fanfare. No orchestra swell. Just whiskey going where whiskey goes. She watched until the flask was empty and her hand was shaking, not from wanting it, or not only from that, but from the specific exhaustion of having carried something for seven years and finally setting it down somewhere it couldn't follow her home.

The tower didn't do anything. Of course it didn't. It just kept standing there, the way it had for a hundred years, patient as stone, and Dee found something almost funny in that: that the thing she'd needed all afternoon wasn't an answer. Just a witness. Something old enough and quiet enough to hold what she couldn't say out loud yet.

She screwed the empty flask shut out of habit and put it back in the bag, because some things you carry a while even after they're empty, and that's not the same as losing.

Her phone buzzed again. This time she picked up.

"Hey," she said, and her voice came out steadier than she felt, which was, she was starting to learn, most of what sober actually meant. "Sorry. I was at the beach."

Marisol asked which one.

"The one with the tower," Dee said, already turning to go, the wind at her back now instead of her face. "I'll tell you about it."