Seasons' End

by North, Will

  ***

  YOUNG ADAM WANDERED along the beach beyond the boat ramp to the place where the sand gave way to crushed oyster shells he’d learned were ancient remnants from before the time of American settlers. It was a special place for him, a place that, on account of his discovery about it at the history museum, he liked to claim as his own. He came here often during the summer. He loved to skip oyster shells across the water and watch the boats swing out of the inner harbor where the yacht club was and beat for the open water of the outer harbor and the Sound beyond. He especially liked the sailboats—the sloops and ketches and yawls and schooner rigs. It was his older sister, Justine, who taught him how to tell one from the other and who also got him to recognize the difference between the snub-sterned newer fiberglass boats and the older wooden boats with their low, sleek cabins and graceful swan-tailed sterns arching out over the water like a second wake.

  But he didn’t honestly expect to see many boats on Labor Day morning, despite the clear sky and light breeze from the north. The rich people, Justine told him, were the ones with the fancy yachts, and the rich people were leaving because the season was over. For the next ten months, those graceful boats would lay at anchor or in their berths at the club, bobbing like driftwood. It didn’t seem right to Adam; they were living things, in his mind, meant to race across the surface of the outer harbor, heeled over with the downwind rail buried in the water, sails taut and snapping, wakes frothy, like the whipped cream that came atop his hot chocolate at the Burton Coffee Stand. One day, Adam promised himself, he would have such a sailboat, and it would never be left like an orphan at a yacht club dock. He’d sail it all year. He’d call it, he decided, Silver Heels, for the froth it left behind.

  In the absence of sailing craft on this Labor Day morning, young Adam attended instead to a gull busily poking among the mussels that encrusted the side of the concrete boat ramp. After a bit of jerky effort, the bird prized one mollusk free. Then, its find clutched in its beak, it rose high above the parking lot on its stiff white wings, hesitated a moment, and then dropped the shellfish to the pavement below. Immediately, it dove to the asphalt to yank the fresh meat from the shattered blue-gray shell. When it had finished, it returned to the boat dock and repeated the process.

  At school, Adam’s favorite teacher had said that human beings were distinct from other living creatures because they alone made tools. But it seemed to him that the gulls on this island, at least, were clever enough to use the asphalt as a shell opener. That was pretty cool and way smart.

  Much as he cherished this place, his special place, Adam knew he was hanging around here to avoid going home. He was happy sitting quietly in the warming morning sun and watching the light sequin the open water. But it was a struggle to keep away the scary stuff from the night before. It was a struggle not to hear the voices, the shouting, the anger.

  Adam had been asleep, wrapped in a quilt on the chipped white wicker day bed that faced the water on the upstairs sleeping porch, open to the night, when the noises awakened him.

  sixteen

  “DO YOU HONESTLY BELIEVE, in that booze-pickled, hopelessly narcissistic brain of yours, that I don’t know where you’ve been?”

  It was Adam’s mother’s voice. She was on the brick patio below where Adam slept.

  “You’re drunk.” His father.

  “Damned right I’m drunk. And I intend to get drunker!”

  The boy heard ice rattle into a glass.

  “And besides, who are you to talk?” This was his mother again. “You can barely walk. How’d you even get it up?!”

  “Shuddup.”

  “Let’s see, now. Would that be, ‘Shuddup, I don’t want a noisy confrontation?’ or ‘Shuddup, I don’t want to hear the truth?’ or ‘Shuddup, she’s nothing to me,’ like all the others? or ‘Shuddup, you’re nothing to me and never have been?’” She was splashing something into a glass.

  “Just shuddup. You don’t know what you’re talking about...”

  “Oh, don’t I? Maybe you’re right! I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised; I probably don’t even know the half of it! Not a tenth of it! But what I do know sickens me. You wanna know what I know? I know what I smell, and the next time you decide to fuck one of the neighbors, have the smarts to take a swim afterwards to wash off her signature perfume. You reek of that woman’s cloying ‘Lauren.’ It’s revolting.”

  More sloshing into a glass.

  “You’ve had enough.”

  “Enough? I’ve barely started!”

  His mother laughed, a harsh, rasping sound the boy didn’t recognize. “Here’s a little bit of fashion insight for you and that whore: did you know that glamorous “Ralph Lauren” was just a little schmuck from the Bronx whose real name was Lifshitz?! Started out peddling neckties out of suitcases. Classy, huh? But it figures she’d drench herself in that swill; she thinks ‘cause it’s expensive it’s chic, like she’d even know, because let me tell you, you bastard… Peggy March isn’t even ‘“Lauren’” perfume; she’s drug store toilet water, and I don’t mean the stuff that comes in a bottle!”

  “You’re disgusting…”

  “I’m disgusting? Oh, that’s rich. No, I take that back. Wrong. That’s what shrinks call projection, that is. You’re the one who’s disgusting. The thing is, I can’t even imagine what you see in her, apart from those pneumatic breasts—which, by the way, are as phony as ‘Ralph Lauren.’ But wait! I get it now! You’re as much a fake as she is, and you don’t even have silicone to blame! You’re like a two-dimensional theater scrim, an illusion of depth where there is none. You’re all show and no content. Inside, you’re like a vacuum chamber; it’s a wonder you don’t implode…”

  There was a crash, followed by more derisive laughter—again, his mother’s.

  “Well, isn’t that typical. You’re crude enough to take a swing at your own wife but too drunk or incompetent or both to pull it off! I can’t believe how pathetic you are; look at you, you can barely get up!”

  Adam heard the clink of a bottle on glass again.

  “Thank God for the honesty of gin!”

  Another pause and then Adam heard a shriek.

  “Let go of me!”

  “‘Let go of me?’ Like you’d ever let me near you anyway, frigid, fuckin’ ice queen…”

  A struggle and another crash, then his mother’s angry voice again.

  “Ice queen? Oh gosh, when could that have begun? After your first infidelity? Your second? Your umpteenth?”

  “Bullshit! I’ll tell you when. August 2001, ‘xactly. Two died and so did this marriage. When that happened, you crawled into a hole and disappeared. Wife? Sorry, mine’s gone AWOL.”

  “Oh, so your infidelities are my fault?! Like they only began with Two’s death? How many holes have you crawled into since then, eh Tyler? Fuck you! Fuck you and everything you’ve spoiled. I can’t believe I ever believed in you, you feckless, unfaithful bastard! I don’t need you, I don’t want you; I have gin, and that’s a damned sight more reliable than you are. More than you’ve ever been.”

  Glass on glass and then another scuffle, followed by a scream of surprise. “Let go! You’re hurting me!”

  “Don’ you ever count Tyler Strong down, bish. You want gin? Fine, have it all…!”

  A muffled scream. The sound of choking.

  Adam bolted from the summer porch, dashed through his parents’ adjacent bedroom, took the back staircase two steps at a time, threw open the back door, and ran off across the front lawn, curving toward the beach. He knew the way; he’d done it before.

  His parents often fought. Late at night, usually. Nothing new about that. Then, in the morning, they acted as if nothing had happened. It was confusing. Sometimes it was hard to know which reality was real: what he’d heard, or what he saw later. Over time, he’d learned to listen and watch and trust only what he experienced, not what he was told.

  But tonight was different. Tonight was crazy.

  He reached the
beach, flew over the tops of several massive driftwood logs white as cadavers in the moonlight, hit the sand, and kept on running when he heard a shout.

  “Adam! You scared the shit out of me!”

  He stopped. “Sis?”

  Adam’s big sister, Justine, was wrapped tight in a blanket in the lee of a big log with someone Adam couldn’t see. There was a tiny flare of orange; it looked like they were smoking.

  “Smoking’s bad for you, sis.”

  Adam sometimes had trouble thinking of Justine as his sister. She was fifteen years older, for one thing. She’d been his live-in babysitter until she left home, when he was three, but he only knew this from his mother; he had no memory of her care. What he did know was that when she reappeared in his life during the summers when the family moved to the island where she now lived year-round, she’d become his best friend. He didn’t exactly know why she loved him so, but he thought maybe it was because she’d been there when their other brother died—the ghostly Two, the boy who wasn’t there but was everywhere: in framed pictures, in conversations cut short when he entered the room, in angry fights like tonight. Two; the boy who died but lived forever, as real and tangible and immortal to some people as the ebbing and flowing of the tide in the harbor where he’d been killed.

  Adam knew how Two had died and that Justine had been at the wheel of the speedboat when it happened. He knew this because Justine told him. That was one of the cool things about his sister: she was straight with him. Not like his parents. Whenever he asked about Two, they changed the subject so quickly you wondered if you’d even asked. When he told Justine about that, she’d said, “They hide it from you because they hide it from themselves.” Adam thought that made a ton of sense.

  It was hard for Adam to stay connected to Justine except in the summer, and the older she got the harder that became. Part of the reason was geography: she was on the island but he was in Seattle ten months of the year and she didn’t visit much, except sometimes at Christmas. The other reason was that it seemed like she’d been in trouble a lot and Mom and Dad hardly spoke of her. He’d picked up enough between the lines to figure out that she’d barely made it out of high school, had been admitted to Seattle University only because grandfather Harlan made a personal appeal via his church to the Jesuits who ran the school, and she had been thrown out only a year later, though Adam didn’t know why. Now she had her own place on the island and worked at a bar in the village. Mom didn’t approve of that either but Dad didn’t seem to care. “She’s old enough to make her own decisions, even bad ones,” is what Adam heard him say one night.

  The strange thing, when he thought about it, was that his sister, who was supposed to be a screw-up, was the only one who seemed to make sense in the family, the only one who treated him like he had a brain, the only one who told the truth—and he loved her more than he knew how to say.

  Justine disengaged herself from the nearly inert body beside her and dashed across the beach toward the boy. She was wearing a black Harley Davidson T-shirt long enough, but not quite, to be a dress. The silver-winged insignia flashed in the light from the houses. She lifted and spun him in an affectionate, dizzying circle until they collapsed on the sand.

  He wriggled free.

  “They’re fighting again,” he said.

  “There’s a surprise…”

  “No, Sis, I mean really; I think they were, like, you know, punching and shoving and stuff.”

  “They were probably just falling down drunk. Nothing new there.”

  “Yeah, Dad said Mom was drunk, but it sounded like he was the one falling over. She was really angry.”

  Justine reached out an arm and pulled her little brother in like a salmon on a line.

  “So what were they fighting about, baby brother?”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Right. Right. We had an agreement. Sorry.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So?”

  “Mrs. March.”

  “Peggy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about her?”

  Adam looked out at the star-studded water.

  “Okay, never mind. I get it.” She gave him a hug and they both stared at the water a while.

  After a few moments she said, “Can I tell you something I’ve learned?”

  “Sure. What?”

  “Adults? Parents? They don’t know as much as we think they do. They’re not like teachers in school who know all the stuff in the textbooks. Parents are basically just making it up as they go along and hoping for the best. And they make a lot of mistakes.”

  “So who knows stuff?”

  “Hardly anybody. I think we’re meant to discover it ourselves.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you have to come to your own conclusions. You have to pay attention to what’s happening around you and then decide things for yourself. I don’t mean to say Mom and Dad are stupid. It’s more like they’re…I don’t know…what? Cartographers, maybe. Know what that means?”

  “They make maps.”

  “You amaze me.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Okay, so they’re map-makers, right? But they’re like the first cartographers—the ones who really didn’t have a clue what the world looked like and were guessing, based on legends and hearsay and stuff, because they still wanted to help voyagers, keep them from sailing off the edge. So parents…it’s like they draw the imagined boundaries of what they think is known, or acceptable, or legal, or something, but then you have to explore the blank spots all on your own. You have to fill them in, figure out what’s really right or wrong, true or untrue, come to your own conclusions.”

  “Like Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yeah, Holmes; I took a book of his detecting from Old Adam’s bookshelf.”

  “You can read that?”

  Adam shrugged. “Mostly. Anyway, so this Holmes guy, he’s so cool: something happens, right? Like a murder? And he looks at the evidence, but he doesn’t accept the conclusions of other people—you know, like the police. No way. That’s just like his starting place. Then he starts thinking—‘deducing,’ he calls it—and he throws out the stuff that maybe other people think is important but it really isn’t, and then he lasers in on the stuff that’s left. But here’s what’s the coolest thing about Holmes: when the stuff that’s left makes no sense, he doesn’t let it go, even when people make fun of him. Uh-uh. He’s got this thing that what’s left has to be what’s right and the only problem is you haven’t figured out yet why it’s right. In one of his stories, he says something like, ‘When you rule out the stuff that cannot be, whatever’s left, no matter how improble…’”

  “Improbable?”

  “Yeah; I looked it up. It means ‘unlikely.’”

  “Right.”

  “So, ‘whatever’s left, no matter how unlikely, is what must be.’ You ever read him?”

  “Adam, he’s not a real person, you know…”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get that. But he should’a been.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Wanna know what else I learned from him?”

  “Sure.”

  “I learned to pay attention.”

  “Huh?”

  “You know…listen to what’s going on. Pay attention. Not zone out. Sometimes he solves things without ever leaving his chair. And you know what else?”

  Justine nodded and smiled. “You tell me.”

  “A lotta what people think and say makes no sense.”

  “No way!” She had to suppress a giggle.

  “Way! It’s like, they say things or think things and you can’t figure out how they got there, you know? And I’m like, ‘Where’s your evidence?’”

  She wrapped her little brother in a hug as warm as a duvet. “You blow me away, kid,” she said into his neck.

  He twisted away. He loved her hugs, but maybe not here in public, right here on the beach. Even in
the dark.

  “Hey, I have an idea!” Justine said.

  “What?”

  “It’s way late and I’m beat. I’m thinking it would be cool to sleep at the judge’s house, to be with Old Adam. How ‘bout you?”

  Adam nodded toward the shape under the blanket. “What about…?”

  “What about ‘What about?’ You’re my main man, Adam; let’s us both go up and see if we can get some rest. It’s been a long night. Damn these end-of-summer parties.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You like the fireworks?

  “They were okay. Not as good as fourth of July, though.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But I don’t get it; what’s the point? Just because we’re leaving?”

  “I don’t get it either, really. You know what I think?”

  “What?”

  “I think they end the summer with a bang because they know nothing but months of gray and mist lie ahead. It’s a ritual, like they’re trying to make explosions that’ll get the sun’s attention.”

  Adam looked back at the water. “Sounds like Dad ended it with a bang.”

  Justine started giggling and could hardly stop, thanks largely to the dope she’d been smoking.

  “You’re too little to know anything about that,” she said when she caught her breath.

  “I’m not little.”

  “No, you’re right. I’m wrong. Know what? Sometimes I think you’re older and smarter than me.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “Yeah. Right. See what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “You will, Adam. You will. Let’s go.”

  They left the shape in the blanket by the beach and clambered up over the driftwood to the lawns above. Hand in hand, they ran to Old Adam’s place, as if before a storm.