Beach Read

“I DON’T WANT TO hear it,” I told her.

“I know,” Sonya said. “But I’ll have failed your father if I don’t make sure you do.”

I laughed harshly. “See, that’s the thing. You shouldn’t have had my father to fail.”

“Shouldn’t have? If you started at the beginning of your father’s life and predicted the whole thing, and how it should have played out, based only on where it started, he might never have found your mother. You might not exist.”

My insides thrummed with anger. “Could you get off my porch, please?”

“You don’t understand.” She pulled out a piece of paper from her jeans pocket and unfolded it. “Please. Five minutes.”

I started to unlock the door, but she began reading behind me. “I met Walt Andrews when I was fifteen, in my language arts class. He was my first date, my first kiss, my first boyfriend. The first man—or boy—I said ‘I love you’ to.”

The key stuck in the lock. I’d stopped moving, stunned. I turned toward her, my breath caught in my chest. Sonya’s eyes flicked to me anxiously, then back to the page.

“We broke up several months after he went to college. I didn’t hear from him for twenty years, and then one day, I ran into him here. He’d been on a business trip an hour east and had decided to extend his stay in North Bear Shores a couple days. We decided to get dinner. We’d been talking for hours before he admitted that he was newly separated.

“When we parted ways, we both believed we’d never see each other again.” She looked up at me. “I mean that. But on his way out of town, your father’s car broke down.” She studied the note again. There were tears in her eyes. “We were both broken at the time. Some days what we had was the only good thing in my life.

“We started visiting each other every weekend. He even took a week off and came up to look for a house. Things were moving quickly. Effortlessly! I’m not saying any of this to hurt you. But I genuinely believed we had our second chance. I thought we were going to get married.” She stopped talking for just a beat and shook her head. She hurried on before I could stop her.

“He put in to transfer to the Grand Rapids office. He bought the house. This house. It was in terrible shape back then, just falling to pieces, but I was still the happiest I’d been in years. He’d talk about bringing you up, about moving the boat up here and spending all summer on it, the three of us. I thought, I’m going to live there until I die, with a man who loves me.”

“He was married,” I whispered. My throat felt like it was going to collapse. “He was still married.”

Gus is married, I thought.

The emotion was ballooning through me. I wanted to hate her. I did hate her, and I also felt her pain mixing with mine. I felt all of the excitement of a new love, a healing one, a second chance with someone you’d almost forgotten about. And the pain when their real life came to call, the agony of knowing there was history with someone else, a relationship yours couldn’t touch.

Sonya’s eyes scrunched tight. “That didn’t feel real to me until your mother’s diagnosis.”

The d-word still sent a shock wave through me. I tried to hide it. Went back to messing with the key, though now my eyes were so thick with tears I couldn’t see.

Sonya kept reading, faster now. “We stayed in touch for a few months. He wasn’t sure what was going to happen. He just knew he needed to be there for her, and there was nothing I could do about that. But the calls came less and less, and then not at all. And then one day, he sent an email, just to let me know that she was doing much better. That they were doing better.”

I’d stopped with the door again, without meaning to. I was facing her, mosquitoes and moths whizzing around me. “But that was years ago.”

She nodded. “And when the cancer came back, he called me. He was devastated, January. It wasn’t about me, and I knew that. It was about her. He was so scared, and the next time he was passing through for work, I agreed to see him again. He was looking for comfort, and I—I’d started something with a friend of Maggie’s, a good man, a widower. It wasn’t serious yet, but I knew it could be. And perhaps that frightened me a bit, or perhaps a part of me would always love your father, or maybe we were just selfish and weak. I don’t know. And I won’t pretend to.

“But I will say this: that second time around, I had no illusions about where things were going. If your father had lost your mother, he wouldn’t have been able to stand the sight of me, and I wouldn’t have been able to believe he truly loved me anyway. I was a distraction, and I might even have believed I owed him that much.

“And when he started fixing up the house, I knew, without him ever telling me, it wasn’t for us. And it happened again, as your mom got her health back. The visits came further and further apart. The calls slowed and stopped. And that time, I didn’t even get an email. I can stand here and tell you that we had good enough intentions. There are no easy answers here. I know I shouldn’t be allowed to be heartbroken right now, but I am.

“I’m heartbroken and angry with myself for getting into this situation and humiliated to be standing here with you …”

“Then why are you?” I demanded. I shook my head, another furious wave crashing over me. “If it was over, like you say it was, then how did you have that letter?”

“I don’t know!” she cried out, tears welling instantly in her eyes, falling in quick, steady droplets down her face. “Maybe he wanted you to have this place but didn’t think your mom would have the strength to tell you about it, or didn’t think it was right to ask her to. Maybe he thought if he’d sent the key and letter straight to you, there’d be no one to stand here and convince you to forgive him. I don’t know, January!”

Mom wouldn’t have ever told me, I realized immediately. Even once Sonya had, Mom hadn’t been able to talk about it, to confirm or explain. She wanted to remember all the good things. She wanted to cling to those so tight they couldn’t fade, not loosen her grip enough to make room for the parts of him that still hurt to think about.

Sonya huffed a few teary breaths and swiped at her damp eyes. “All I know is when he died, his attorney sent me the letter and the key and a note from Walt asking me to pass along both to you. And I didn’t want to—I’ve moved on. I’m finally with someone I love, I’m finally happy, but he was gone, and I couldn’t say no. Not to him. He wanted you to know the truth, the whole thing, and he wanted you to still love him once you knew. I think he sent me here so I could make sure you forgave him.”

Her voice quavered dangerously. “And maybe I came because I needed someone to know that I’m sorry too. That I will always miss him too. Maybe I wanted someone to understand I’m a complete person, and not just someone else’s mistake.”

“I don’t care that you’re a complete person,” I bit out, and right then I understood that was true. I didn’t hate Sonya. I didn’t even know her. It wasn’t about her at all. The tears were falling faster, making me gasp for breath. “It’s about him. It’s all the things I can never know about him or even ask him. What he put my mom through! I’ll never know how to build a family, or what—if anything—I can trust of what I learned from them. I have to look back on every memory I have and wonder what was a lie. I can’t know him any better now. I don’t have him. I don’t have him anymore.”

The tears were really pouring now. My face was soaked. The dotted line of pain I’d been living with for a year felt like it had finally split open down my center.

“Oh, honey,” Sonya said quietly. “We can never fully know the people we love. When we lose them, there will always be more we could have seen, but that’s what I’m trying to tell you. This house, this town, this view—it was all a part of him he wanted to share with you. And you’re here, all right? You’re here and you’ve got the house on a beach he loved in a town he loved, and you’ve got all the letters, and—”

“Letters?” I said. “I have one letter.”

She looked startled. “You didn’t find the others?”

“What others?”

She seemed genuinely confused. “You haven’t read it. The first letter. You never read it.”

Of course I hadn’t read it. Because that was the last new bit of him I could ever have, and I wasn’t ready for that. Over a year since he had died, and I still wasn’t ready to say goodbye. I was ready to say a lot, but not goodbye. The letter was at the bottom of the box where it had sat all summer.

Sonya swallowed and folded her list of talking points, stuffing it in the pocket of her oversized sweater. “You have pieces of him. You’re the last person on Earth with pieces of him, and if you don’t want to look at them, that’s your call. But don’t pretend he left you nothing.”

She turned to go. That was all she had to say, and I’d let her get it out. I felt stupid, like I’d lost some game whose rules no one had explained. But at the same time, even if I was still reeling from the pain after she’d driven away, I was standing.

I’d had the conversation I’d been dreading all summer. I’d gone into the rooms I’d kept closed. I’d fallen in love and felt my heart break, and I’d heard more than I wanted to hear, and I was on my feet. The beautiful lies were all gone. Destroyed. And I was still upright.

I turned to the door with new purpose and went inside. Walked straight through the dark house to the kitchen and got the box down. A layer of dust had coated the envelope. I blew it away and flipped the loose tab up to pull out the letter. I read it there, standing over the sink with one yellow light turned on over me.

My hands were trembling so badly it was hard to make out the words.

This night. This night had almost been as bad as the night we’d lost him, or the night of his funeral. In any other situation, all I would’ve wanted would have been my parents.

Dammit, I did want my parents. I wanted Dad in his ratty pajama pants folded on the couch with a biography of Marie Curie. I wanted Mom moving around him in Lululemon, obsessively dusting the picture frames on the mantel as she hummed Dad’s favorite song: It’s June in January, because I’m in love.

That was the scene I’d walked in on when I’d surprised them that first Thanksgiving I’d been away at U of M. When a wicked wave of homesickness had prompted me to make the last-second decision to come home for break after all. When I’d unlocked the front door and stepped through with my duffel bag, Mom had screamed and dropped the Pledge on the ground. Dad had swung his legs off the couch and squinted at me through the golden light of their living room.

“Can it be?” he said. “Is that my darling daughter? Pirate queen of the open seas?”

They’d both run to me, squeezed me, and I’d started to cry, like I could only fully comprehend how badly I’d been missing them now that we were together.

I felt broken anew right now, and I wanted my parents. I wanted to sit on the couch between them, Mom’s fingers in my hair, and tell them I’d messed up. That I’d fallen in love with someone who’d done everything he could to warn me not to.

That I’d let myself go broke. That my life was falling apart, and I had no idea how to fix it. That my heart was more broken than it had ever been and I was scared I couldn’t fix it.

I gripped the notebook paper in my hands tightly and blinked back the tears enough to start reading in earnest.

The letter, like the envelope, was dated for my twenty-ninth birthday—January thirteenth, a solid seven months after Dad had died, which made everything about this feel dreamy and surreal as I started to read.

Dear January,

Usually, though not always, I write these letters on your birthday, but your twenty-ninth is still a long ways off, and I want to be ready to give this, and all the other letters, to you then. So I’m starting early this year.

This one contains an apology, and I hate to give you a reason to hate me just before we celebrate your birth, but I’m trying to be brave. Sometimes I worry the truth can’t be worth the pain it causes. In a perfect world, you would never know about my mistakes. Or rather, I wouldn’t have made them to begin with.

But of course I have, and I’ve spent years going back and forth on what to tell you. I keep coming back to the fact that I want you to know me. This might sound selfish, and it is. But it isn’t only selfish, January. If and when the truth comes out, I don’t want it to rock you. I want you to know that bigger than my mistakes, bigger than anything good or bad I’ve ever done, and most completely unwavering has been my love for you.

I’m afraid what the truth will do to you. I’m afraid you won’t be able to love me as I am. But your mother had the chance to make that decision for herself, and you deserve that too.

1401 Queen’s Beach Lane. The safe. The best day of my life.

I ran up the stairs and thundered into the master bedroom. The tablecloth was still tucked up under the clock to reveal the safe. My heart was pounding. I needed to be right this time. I thought my body might crack in half from the weight on my chest, if I wasn’t. I typed in the number, the same one scrawled in the top right corner of the letter. My birthday. The lights flickered green and the lock clicked.

There were two things in the safe: a thick stack of envelopes, wrapped in an oversized green rubber band, and a key on a blue PVC key chain. In white letters, the words SWEET HARBOR MARINA, NORTH BEAR SHORES, MI were printed across the surface.

I pulled the stack of letters out first and stared at them. My name was written on each, in a variety of pens, the handwriting getting sharper and more resolute the further back I flipped. I clutched the envelopes to my chest as a sob broke out of me. He had touched these.

I’d forgotten that about the house, somewhere along the way. But this was different. This was my name, a piece of him he’d carved out and left behind for me.

And I knew I could survive reading them because of everything else I’d survived. I could stare it all in the face. I staggered to my feet and grabbed my keys on the way out the door.

My phone’s GPS found the marina with no trouble. It was four minutes away. Two turns and then I was in the dark parking lot. There were two other cars, probably employees’, but as I walked down the dock, no one rushed out to shoo me away. I was alone, with the quiet sloshing of the water against the dock’s supports, the gentle thunk and shpp of boats rocking into the wood.

I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I knew that I was looking. I held the letters tightly in my hand as I moved down the length of the dock, up and down the off-shooting pathways.

And then there it was, pure white and lettered in blue, its sails rolled up. January.

I climbed unsteadily onto it. Sat on the bench and stared out at the water.

“Dad,” I whispered.

I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I believed about the afterlife, but I thought about time and imagined flattening it out so that every moment in this space became one. I could almost hear his voice. I could almost feel him touching my shoulder.

I felt so lost again. Every time I started to find my way, I seemed to slip further down. How could I trust what Gus and I had? How could I trust my own feelings? People were complicated. They weren’t math problems; they were collections of feelings and decisions and dumb luck. The world was complicated too, not a beautifully hazy French film, but a disastrous, horrible mess, speckled with brilliance and love and meaning.

A breeze ruffled the letters in my lap. I brushed the hair from my teary eyes and opened the first envelope.

Dear January,

Today you were born. I knew to expect that for months. It was not a surprise. Your mother and I wanted you very much, even before you began to exist.

What I didn’t know to expect is that today, I would feel like I’d been born too.

You have made me a new person: January’s father. And I know this is who I will be for the rest of my life. I’m looking at you now, January, as I’m writing this, and I can barely get the words onto the page.

I am in shock, January. I didn’t know I could be this person. I didn’t know I could feel all this. I can’t believe someday you will wear a backpack, know how to hold a pencil, have opinions on how you like to wear your hair. I’m looking at you and I can’t believe you are going to become more amazing than you already are.

Ten fingers. Ten toes. And even if you had none of them, you’d still be the grandest thing I’ve ever seen.

I can’t explain it. Do you feel it? Now that you’re old enough to read this, and to know who you are, do you have a word for the thing that evades me? The thing that makes you different from anything else?

I guess I should tell you something about myself, about who I am at this very moment as I watch you sleep on your mother’s chest.

Well, nice to meet you, January. I’m your father, the man you made from nothing but your tiny fingers and toes.

ONE FOR EVERY year, always written on the day.

January, today you are one. Who am I today, January? I’m the hand that guides you while you take your clumsy steps. Today, your mother and I made spaghetti, so I guess you could say I’m a chef too. Your personal one. I never used to like to cook much, but it has to be done.

_____

Happy second birthday, January. Your hair has gotten so much darker. You wouldn’t remember being a blonde, would you? I like it more this way. It suits you very much. Your mother says you look like her grandmother, but I think you take after my mother. She would have loved you. I’ll try to tell you a bit about her too. She was from a place called North Bear Shores. That’s where I’m from too. I lived there when I was your age. I was a nasty two-year-old, she used to tell me. I guess I screamed until I passed out. But that was probably at least in part due to Randy, my oldest brother. A bit of a jackass, but a lovable one. He lives in Hong Kong now, because he is Fancy.

_____

January, I can’t believe you’re four. You are person-shaped now. I suppose you always were, but you’re more so now than ever. When I was four, I wrecked my tricycle. I was riding down a pier toward the lighthouse at the end. My mother had gotten distracted by a friend and I thought it would be neat to ride right off the pier, see if I was going fast enough to stay atop the water. Like Road Runner. She saw me at the last minute and screamed my name. When I turned to look at her, I yanked the handlebars and smashed into the lighthouse itself. That’s how I got that big pink scar on my elbow. I suppose it isn’t so big now. Or else my elbow is quite a bit bigger. Last week you cracked your head on the fireplace. It wasn’t too bad—didn’t even need stitches, but your mother and I cried all night after you’d gone to sleep.

We felt so bad. Sometimes, January, being a parent feels like being a kid who someone has mistakenly handed another kid. “Good luck!” this unwise stranger cries before turning his back on you forever. We will always make mistakes, I’m afraid. I hope they will get smaller and smaller as we get bigger and bigger. Older, really; we’re rather done growing.

_____

Eight! Eight years old and smart as a whip! You never stop reading, January. I hated reading when I was eight, but then again, I was terrible at it, and both Randy and Douglas used to tease me mercilessly, though these days Douglas is as gentle as a butterfly. I imagine if I’d been better at reading, I would have liked it more. Or maybe vice versa. My dad was a busy man but he was the one who taught me how to read, January. And since he’d started, I wouldn’t let my poor mother have anything to do with it. Well, when the time comes, I’m teaching you to drive, she used to tell me. Your favorite book right now is The Giving Tree, but God, January, that book breaks my heart. Your mother is a bit like that tree and I worry you will be too. Don’t get me wrong. That’s a good way to be. But still. I wish you could be a bit stonier, like your old pop. Only for your own good.

You know, when I was eight, I shoplifted for the first time. Not condoning it, of course, but the goal of this is honesty. I stole gum from the old-fashioned candy store on the main drag in North Bear Shores. I loved that shop. They had these great big fans to keep the chocolate from melting in the summer, and on days when my mother was occupied, my brothers and I would stroll down there to get out of the heat. I never found it much fun to go to the beach on my own. Perhaps now I’d feel different. I haven’t been in a while. Your mother and I have been talking about taking you soon.

_____

January, you are thirteen and braver than any thirteen-year-old should have to be. Today, I don’t know who I am. I am your father still, of course. And the husband of your mother. But January, sometimes life is very hard. Sometimes it demands so much of you that you start losing pieces of yourself as you stretch out to give what the world wants to take. I am lost, January. Remember that lighthouse I told you about? I think I told you about it. Sometimes I think about you as that lighthouse. Keep your eyes on January, I tell myself. She won’t lead you astray. If you focus on January, you won’t go too far off course. But maybe I was so focused I ran smack dab into you.

Your mother too. I know this year has been frightening for you, but please know that some way or another, your mother and I are going to find our way back to ourselves, and back to each other. Please don’t be afraid, my sweet baby, my daring pirate queen of the open seas. Somehow everything will be okay.

_____

I got my first kiss when I was sixteen, January. Her name was Sonya and she was stringy and serene.

_____

Your birthday isn’t for a few more months, but I have to write this now. Today, you are leaving for college, January, and I’m afraid it might kill me. Of course I can’t tell you that. You would feel so guilty and you shouldn’t. You are, by all accounts, doing the right thing. You have always been so smart. This is where you belong. And it’s not forever. But when you wake up this morning, and we start driving north, I won’t be looking at you in the rearview mirror. And when you read this (??? When will that be???), think back to that day. Will you even notice that I can’t look at you? Probably not. You’re so nervous yourself. But if you do remember, now you’ll know why. I worry I might turn around and drive the three of us back home if you show any ounce of hesitation. I want to keep you forever. Who am I without you?

_____

You should be in graduate school, and we all know it. Fuck cancer, January. You’re an adult now so that means by the time you read this, you should be well acquainted with the word Fuck and we both know you’re already too closely acquainted with the word Cancer. Well, fuck it. I have to be honest, January. I feel like our lives are imploding and a part of me wants to shove you far, far away until the implosion stops.

I told you I’d be honest with you, so here it is. If I write it here, I know I will not be able to take it back. Someday you will read this. Someday you will know.

I am cheating on your mother. Sometimes I feel like I am comforting myself and other times it feels like a punishment. Still other days I wonder if it’s all a big F-U to the universe. “If you want to destroy my life, I can destroy it worse.”

Some days I think I am in love with Sonya. Sonya, that’s her name. I was in love with her once, when we were kids. I think I told you in your sixteenth-birthday letter. That was the year I kissed her. I’m sure you don’t want to hear that. But I think I need to say it. I’m in love with a version of myself that can’t exist in this hell. Do you think I’m terrible, January? It’s okay if you do. I have been terrible at many different moments in my life.

I want to go back to being the man your mother made me: her new husband. The man you made me: your adoring father. I’m searching for something of myself I lost, and it’s not fair to anyone.

If I could have the past back, those beautiful years before the cancer came back, I would pounce. I’m going to fix this. Don’t give up on me, January. It isn’t the end.

_____

January, today you are twenty-eight.

When I was twenty-eight, my beautiful wife gave birth to our child. On this day. January thirteenth, widely regarded as the best day in the history of days. Sometimes I think about what your children would look like. Not your and Jacques’s specifically, though that would be fine too.

I picture a girl who looks like January. Maybe she has ten fingers and ten toes, but even if she doesn’t, she will be perfect. And I think about the kind of woman you will be for her. The kind of mother.

When I think about this, January, I usually cry. Because I know you will do better than I did, and I am so relieved by that thought. But even if you don’t, even if you make the kinds of mistakes I made, I know you, January.

I know you so much better than you know me, and I’m sorry, but if there had to be an imbalance, I can’t say I regret it going this way.

Remember your first breakup? I mentioned it in the letter for your seventeenth birthday. You were devastated. Your mother called in to your job at Taco Bell and pretended to be you, too sick to come in.

In that moment, I was so in love with her. She knew just what to do. The way she took care of you. There are no words.

She knows, by the way. She knows everything I’ve told you. She’s let me take my time telling you. I worry she’s ashamed, that she thinks everyone will pity her, and you know how she hates that. She’s not sure you need to know. Maybe you don’t. If that’s the case, I’m sorry. But I guess I wanted you to see the whole truth so you would know.

If you think the story has a sad ending, it’s because it’s not over yet.

Since I started these letters, I’ve been a million different things, some good and some ugly.

But today, on your twenty-eighth birthday, I feel like the same man I was all those years ago.

Staring at you. Counting your fingers. Wondering what it is that makes you so different from the rest of the world. I don’t know when it happened, but I’m happy again. I think, even if things don’t stay like this, I will always carry this moment in me. How could I ever be sad, having watched my baby grow into the woman she is?

January, you are twenty-eight, and today I am your father.