The Topsail Accord

by J T Kalnay

  Shannon

  I leave Joe’s coffee shop and head west. I will drive west until Winston-Salem, and then I will turn north, back to Ohio. I will start by the ocean, drive through the hot, humid lowlands, and then climb slowly towards the west. When I turn north there will be the low mountains of North Carolina near Pilot Mountain to traverse, then the high mountains of Virginia to cross, and then the lower mountains of West Virginia. To Coloradans these may not be mountains, but to an Ohioan they are certainly mountains, especially in the rain. ‘If it’s raining, we must be in West Virginia’ is a common saying amongst Ohioans. It always seems to rain while driving through the mountains.

  I have driven this path many times before. Always sad that my time at the beach is over, but always happy to be returning to my home, and to my family. Beaulaville, Kenansville, Raleigh, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and Mt. Airy stretch out behind me. Wytheville, Tamarac, Charleston, Athens, and Columbus await me. I know where I will stop for gas, and for coffee. I know when my car will need gas and when I will need to visit Starbucks. I know these things like I know the sun will rise in the east. They are part of my routine, part of my habits. They are comforting and waiting for me and the same. They are always the same, and I like that.

  The only thing different this time around is that this time I am sad about a man. Not sad like when my ex told me about wanting a divorce while at his house on the Outer Banks. Not sad like that. Not sad about our breakup, if you can call the termination of a ten day acquaintance a breakup. But sad for Joe and the pain he has dealt with in his life.

  First the long, slow, excruciatingly painful death of his only daughter. Then the yearlong descent of his wife into madness. And finally her death at her own hand. I can only imagine. I don’t want to imagine. In a way I am glad that it is over, because I don’t know that I could be with a man who is still carrying around that much hurt. And I would never want to contribute to any hurt like that.

  With the mountains in my rear view mirror I see that I was going to use him as an experiment. That I was going to use his body to re-awaken mine. And then I was likely going to discard him. So our parting is for the best. For him, because he has been spared this new careless hurt I would bestow upon him, and for me, because at some point I would feel guilty for using him like that.

  Joe says he is no longer sad about Caitlin and Colleen and all of it. He says he isn’t, but he is. I could see it in his eyes, and feel it in his touch while he told me about them at the graveyard. His body was speaking so loudly that I could barely hear the words he was saying. His mind may be able to control his mouth to recite that he is not sad, but his heart and his body are unable to conceal the reality. I wonder if he even knows how sad he still is?

  I am lucky. The only even remotely comparable pain that I have felt was self-inflicted with my ex. I let it go on too long, gave up too much of myself, and chose to live with the abscessed tooth rather than have it pulled. Finally he ended it. It should have ended much sooner. Never again.

  More and more hours stretch away and finally I am pulling into my own driveway after twelve hours on the road. I almost stopped in Athens for the night, but the last cup of coffee kicked in and I made it home. Now my tiredness wars with the coffee. The tiredness will win. I shower then slip between my sheets completely naked, which I rarely do. As the caffeine and the fatigue fight it out my mind drifts to Joe, and my hands drift to my nakedness. This is something else that I rarely do. I drift away and then drift off, the same Shannon, but somehow different in a way I can neither see, touch, nor name. Different in a way I can only feel, and only for a moment.

  I sleep.

  My dreams are confusing montages of Joe, my ex, Danny, my sister, the family, and the beach, always the beach.

  Shannon

  It is August and I am walking slowly eastward along the sandy, mile long beach at Mentor Headlands with my sister Cara. We are walking towards the large, white, boxy lighthouse that guards the entrance to the harbor. Neither of us has spoken. Finally my sister cannot take it any longer.

  “So how’d you leave it with Joe?” Cara asks.

  “I told him not to call, not to email, not to bother me. I told him no hard feelings. He tried to explain, and I let him for a while, but he could tell I wasn’t buying it, so he stopped.”

  “He stopped?”

  “Yes. He stopped. In mid-sentence actually. Kind of did a little reboot, changed the subject, and didn’t return to his excuse.”

  “What was his excuse?” Cara asks.

  “It was almost believable. But even if everything he said was true, which I doubt, but even if it was all true, he still earned a dumping.”

  “How?”

  “Because he didn’t invite me in the first place. He didn’t tell me what he was doing. He didn’t tell me that his old girlfriend was going to be there. And he didn’t bother to call when he knew he was going to stand me up. Add it all up, and you get a man who doesn’t make the cut. I wondered a few times why a great guy like that would be single, but I don’t wonder it anymore.”

  “What did he have to say about the chippy?” Cara asks.

  “Her name is Danny. She’s a NASCAR driver if you can believe that. She’s from just off the island, and a little ways up near Jacksonville. Her dad was a Marine there the same time Joe’s dad was. So they went through junior and senior years at high school together. I guess they were quite an item.”

  “Were?” Cara asks.

  “That’s what he says. And, I have to admit, I did a little Internet research and that’s what the Internet says too.”

  “So what was his excuse?”

  “As far as I could tell, he said he stayed with a sick kid until it was too late to come back so he stayed over and overslept.”

  “I’ll bet I know why...” Cara says.

  “That’s what I figure too. But Danny says no.”

  “You talked to her?”

  “She called me to try to explain. He clearly put her up to it.”

  “You’re right. That’s a guy who doesn’t make the cut. He gets his chippy to call you and beg for mercy?”

  “Yes. He doesn’t measure up. So let’s drop him. I have.”

  “Dropped,” Cara says.

  We walk all the way to the lighthouse and then stand and watch the waves. These Lake Erie waves do not roll in like the waves on a calm Atlantic morning. Especially here near the break wall. These waves are always jumbled together, interfering with each other, cancelling out or doubling or tripling in size in irregular and unpredictable ways. The lake pushes its water up the shore a bit and then the water fights its way back into the shore through the millions of small, flat, rounded rocks that divide the water from the sand. The bottom drops down ten feet only a few feet from the shore and there is no sand bar so there are no breaking or gently rolling waves. Just water rising and falling in incessant chaos. People drown fifteen feet from the shore here every summer. A mother is careless and does not watch her child who stumbles into the deeper water and is whisked under and then found hours later. A swimmer gets stuck in an undertow and disappears and then is found the next day a mile away. This is a dangerous beach, and the lake can be dangerous, going from calm to storm-tossed and back to calm in twelve hours.

  Even so, it is our little slice of peace and quiet and togetherness in our otherwise busy and separate lives. We have walked this beach tens of hundreds of times. Although thousands of people visit this beach every year, we consider it our little secret. And to millions of Ohioans it is a complete secret. Very few suspecting that Lake Erie has such miles long sandy beaches, so many lighthouses, and such glorious sunsets.

  “It’s funny,” I say.

  “What?” Cara asks.

  “We walk at sunrise on the beach at Topsail, and here we always seem to walk at sunset.”

  “It’s the best time at both places,” Cara answers.

  “It is glorious,” I say.

  The sun sets into Lake Erie in a riot of
red then orange then salmon. It passes through one set of August thunderheads on the horizon and then reappears just above the horizon and below the clouds. In an instant of flaming red it is gone. The temperature drops instantly and the little onshore breeze stops. We walk back to our cars in the twilight then dark.

  “See you Saturday?” Cara asks.

  “At Cedar Point beach?” I ask in return.

  “See you then.”

  Before Cara can leave I take her hand. She sees something in my eyes.

  “I’ve been thinking about Topsail and here,” I start. My sister waits patiently. “For when I’m old, after I die. I want to be cremated. You know that. But I can’t decide about my ashes. When I am here I want my ashes to be spread here. When I am there I want my ashes to be spread there. I don’t want to go half and half just in case that would make me a ghost or something.”

  “Between now and then I am sure you will be able to decide,” Cara says.

  I love that she never dismisses my concerns, or tells me not to worry. I love that she always listens and even if she doesn’t understand she still respects what’s on my mind.

  “See you Saturday,” I say.

  Joe

  “So you let her go?” Joe’s sister asks.

  “I didn’t have any say in the matter,” Joe answers.

  “Men always say that,” she says. “And they’re almost always wrong.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She came over here to pick up trash with you on Friday before going home right?”

  “Right. You were here. You saw her.”

  “Yeah I was. If she didn’t want to be persuaded that you weren’t a complete jackass then she wouldn’t have come over.”

  “Once again, what are you talking about?”

  “If it was truly completely over in her mind, she wouldn’t have come by. She wouldn’t have walked with you and picked up trash. And she certainly wouldn’t have held your hand by the graves.”

  “You don’t know her. I think she would. I think she did.”

  “You’re wrong about her.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I do. Anyway. What are you going to do now?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How can a moron like you be worth a hundred million bucks?” she asks.

  “People like coffee.”

  “That’s got to be it,” she says. “Regardless, I don’t think that doing nothing is the right approach.”

  “I don’t get you. When I met her all you could do was tell me not to get involved, tell me how wrong she was for me. Now, barely two weeks later, you think I’ve made a big mistake letting her go. But, here’s the flaw in your logic. It wasn’t up to me. She’d made up her mind to go and she wasn’t going to be persuaded otherwise.”

  “Doubt it.”

  “Listen. If she didn’t believe Danny she wasn’t going to believe anyone.”

  “Danny? What’s Danny go to do with this?”

  “I had Danny call her to try to explain it.”

  “You didn’t!”

  “I did.”

  “You are a complete and utter moron.”

  “I’m kinda tired of you calling me a moron.”

  “Moron, moron, moron, moron,” she answers.

  “Fine,” Joe says. He tosses the dish rag in the sink and heads out around the counter on his way to the door.

  “MORON!” his sister yells at his back as he busts out through the door.

  She watches him walk across the parking lot and then start running to cross the road to his truck.

  “I’ll just have to handle this thing myself,” she says.

  She picks up the phone and dials a number from memory.

  Shannon

  Roller coasters and other rides soar hundreds of feet into the air above the narrow spit of land sticking out into Lake Erie at Cedar Point. A two mile long beach stretches from southeast to northwest along the lake side of the two hundred yard wide peninsula at the end of the isthmus that separates Sandusky Bay from Lake Erie. The newly restored Cedar Point lighthouse sits as the center piece of the cozy cottages at the point of the peninsula.

  The roller coasters and other rides are behind them and over their right shoulders as they walk southeast into the rising sun.

  “You see we don’t always walk at sunset in Ohio,” Cara says.

  “Very true,” I answer. I feel like my usual quiet self this morning. Walking, saying little, sipping coffee, and loving the quiet company of my sister, my best friend.

  We walk another fifteen minutes in quiet.

  “What?” I ask.

  “What what?” Cara asks back.

  “I can tell that you want to say something. What is it?”

  “You’re not going to believe it.”

  “Try me.”

  “Danny is coming to visit my lab.”

  “Danny who?”

  “38D Danny. The philanthropist, NASCAR driver, alleged ex-girlfriend of Joe Danny.”

  “You’re right, I don’t believe you. She’s at least a 40D, maybe DD.”

  Cara laughs in spite of herself. I join in the laugh.

  “Are you serious?” I ask.

  “I’m afraid so,” Cara answers. “I can’t duck it. She’s got a check for a million dollars for my research. She asked to present it to me in person.”

  “I guess she really wants to talk to you.”

  “I think Joe is probably behind this,” Cara says. “He’s got a hundred million dollars. I’m guessing he can afford to send a million dollar telegram.”

  “What are you going to do?” I ask.

  “Me? I’m going to smile, take the check, make polite small talk, and then do some more research with the money. The more important question is what are you going to do?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah you. Are you going to come and find out whether what she has to say is worth flying to Ohio for? Flying all this way to deliver a million dollar check?”

  “She didn’t ask to see me,” I say.

  “I’m your sister, so don’t take this the wrong way, but you are such an idiot sometimes.”

  “How exactly could I take ‘you are such an idiot’ the wrong way?”

  Danny Comes To Town

  “Thank you very much for the donation,” Cara says.

  “Thank them,” Danny says. She points to the father and the brother of the girl who had so recently passed away in Wilmington while Danny and Joe looked on helplessly. “It was their idea.”

  “Who are they?” Cara asks.

  Danny tells her the entire story.

  Cara is forced to listen and smile. As she listens, she realizes that Joe’s whole story is true. Not only true, but touching and heart wrenching and crushing to hear. A man who lost his own daughter waited until the very end with these people he had only just met to comfort them, and to back up Danny who needed his strength to see the child’s final wish through.

  Cara walks over to the father and hugs him. She feels the raw fresh version of Joe’s twenty year old pain in the man. She hugs the child’s brother. Feels him trying and failing to not tear up, to not look weak.

  “There was three hundred thousand raised at the benefit for my girl,” the father manages. “Danny matched it, and so did the coffee feller. Then NASCAR rounded it up to make a million. We appreciate everything they done for her in Wilmington, we really do, but I’m an ounce of prevention guy. So we’re hoping this money will help you figure out how to stop it from happening to other people in the first place. The doctor in Wilmington said you’ve got something that might work. Not just for leukemia, like killed my girl, but for other cancers too. We’re hoping this will help.”

  “It will help. I will make sure it helps,” Cara says. “Do you want to see what I’m working on?”

  “Yes ma’am,” the brother answers.

  Cara signals one of her lab assistants to bring over the handheld scanner and a mouse.

  “This
mouse has cancer. Not the same cancer that your sister had, but it has cancer.”

  “How does a mouse get cancer?” the boy asks.

  “We took cancer out of a human and put it in the mouse so we could try to help people,” Cara explains.

  “I’ll bet some people don’t like it that you give cancer to mice,” the boy asks.

  “You are correct,” Cara answers.

  “It’s okay with me. If it’s going to help somebody else get better,” the boy answers. “How’s it work?”

  “If you can hold the mouse I’ll show you,” Cara asks.

  The boy does not reach for the mouse.

  “Will I get cancer if I touch the mouse?” the boy asks.

  “No you won’t. But why don’t we just let my assistant hold the mouse okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “This scanner will tell us whether this mouse has cancer. All the green that you see is tissue that doesn’t have cancer. If you see any red or black, then that might be cancer.”

  She passes the scanner over the mouse starting at the nose and proceeding to the tail. Near where the tail meets the haunches there is a small red mass with a black border.

  “I see it,” the boy says.

  He reaches up and takes the scanner from Cara. She lets him, happy that he is going to scan the mouse himself. Instead the boy walks over to his father and starts scanning him. He works meticulously over every square inch of exposed skin.

  “You’re clear dad,” he says. He hands back the scanner.

  And with that the father and brother have had all they can take of the lab, and of the hospital. They are anxious to be outside, away from the reminders of pain and illness and death and dying.

  Danny waits behind. She hands a business card to Cara.

  “There’s some phone numbers and websites on the back,” she says. “Please consider calling those numbers and checking those sites so that you can satisfy yourself that Joe was doing exactly what he said he was doing with these people and that your sister might want to consider cutting him some slack.”