The Topsail Accord

by J T Kalnay

  “She loved the beach. Maybe as much as you love the beach. Maybe more. We would come here and she would do something on the beach for the entire day. She never wanted to leave. It was on the beach that I first suspected that something was wrong.”

  “We used to walk to the pier every day and then at some point when she thought I wasn’t paying attention she would sprint away from me and try to ‘win’ a race that only she knew about. She never let me catch up and win. Would declare ‘victory’ just as I was about to overtake her. But one day I caught up and beat her. I beat her the next day too. She would start to run and then would quickly slow down. After a week she stopped trying to sprint away from me. I could see that her color had changed too. Even though she had the prettiest tan and color from the summer I could tell that her color had changed. And then one day she just stopped in the sand and looked up at me and her nose was bleeding.”

  “She was scared. She knew something was wrong with her. She watched her nose drip onto the sand and looked up at me with the most scared eyes I have ever seen. She was pretty, and in the moment when she and I both realized that something was wrong, she was beautiful. She had that one beautiful moment on the beach, on the sand, here with me, not far from here actually, just down there, and then she died.”

  “It took until August. She just wasted away, losing weight, losing color. The nose bleeds came more often. We tried to find compatible people for bone marrow transplants, even though Colleen said she would never go through with it, that it wasn’t God’s will. I wanted to volunteer but parents are almost never suitable donors. And, when they tested me they discovered I carry the gene that causes leukemia. I didn’t understand it at the time, but now through the research and education at the Foundation I know that I have the inherited gene mutation that increases your risk for chronic lymphocytic leukemia. I will never have another child...”

  He drifted off on that statement, waited for Shannon to respond, to weigh in on whether that was going to be an issue. He drank from his coffee, gave her more time to respond.

  “My child bearing years are over abnormally early,” she said. “I had so many hormones pumped into me when my husband was insisting on having a child that it changed my chemistry and I went through the change at thirty eight.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I’m not,” she said. “At one time I wanted a child, but now I don’t. My nieces and nephews are what I have and what I want. I have a different purpose than being a mother. Aunt is fine for me.”

  Joe nods his head and continues his story.

  “By some miracle we found a donor, a suitable match. To do a transplant you basically have to kill the patient and then do the transplant. You have to kill all their bone marrow, remove it, and then put in the new. They kill it with radiation and chemo. Doses and doses and doses of radiation and chemo. They do it differently now, twenty years later, but it’s still essentially the same, selectively killing a part of the patient so that it can be removed and replaced. Some patients die from the radiation, or just give up. They lose their hair, they can’t eat, they are susceptible to infections, their life is as miserable as any life anyone could ever imagine. She went through all the preparation. We had a donor. And then Colleen refused to go through with it.”

  “What?” Shannon asks.

  “Colleen refused. Said it was against God’s will. Said that we shouldn’t have put Shannon through the radiation in the first place. That I was trying to do anything I could because I was responsible and that I had put Caitlin through Hell first by giving her leukemia and then by forcing her to go through the radiation to get ready for the transplant. She said that I was making our child suffer so that I could assuage my own guilt for making her sick in the first place.”

  “Oh my God,” Shannon says.

  “It was her God,” Joe says. “Or at least her preacher, her church. They were so fundamentalist, like they were trying to prove something. The entire time that Caitlin was being treated, getting ready, they kept telling Colleen that the cancer was some sort of punishment for some sin of mine, or of Colleen’s, or of ours. She became convinced sex was one of our sins so we stopped having sex. Soon there was nothing between us except this horrible conflict over Caitlin.

  I went to court to try to force Colleen to consent. I failed. The decision finally came down the day after Caitlin died. Colleen never forgave me. And soon she started to blame herself. We know how that ended. She killed herself exactly one year after Caitlin died. Her church refused to allow her to be buried in their graveyard because suicide was a sin. So I had Caitlin moved from the churchyard to where she is now. And I buried Colleen beside her. If you were allowed to bury people on the beach I would have buried her out here. But you can’t. You can only bury them on the mainland. That’s where I’ll be buried too, beside the two of them. Sometimes I think about being cremated and having them cremated, even now, and mixing our ashes and spreading them out there, on the ocean, so we can always be together. But, I can’t believe I’m saying this, I don’t want to be with Colleen forever. And I’m unhappy now that Caitlin is with her forever. If I could change one decision in my life, it would be burying Caitlin beside Colleen.”

  Joe stopped. He drank from his coffee.

  Shannon took his hand in hers, squeezed it lightly, then rested his hand in hers on her thigh. She drank from her coffee with her other hand.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he answered.

  “For what?” she asked.

  “No-one has ever asked me, really asked me, in a way where I knew they really wanted to hear the entire story. People know the facts, but they don’t know how I felt. So thank you.”

  She squeezed his hand the tiniest bit harder, and then just let it lay on her thigh, beneath her hand, with the dunes just yards away and the Atlantic just yards beyond that. As they watched, the dolphins breached and jumped and began to play just over the sand bar, sending splashes of crystal clear ocean water up into the brilliant sun to form fleeting prisms of light and momentary little rainbows.

  “Caitlin loved the dolphins,” Joe said.

  Shannon

  I love my new routine. I have my sunrise and my coffee and my reading. Then I have my exercise on the beach with Joe and then my shower alone. We have decided that showering together is too much work for not enough return. Also, showering alone heightens the sexual tension and prolongs the gratification. And then there is the gratification...

  I thought no man would ever notice me. I am small, not so pretty, with no figure to speak of, and with lines growing daily in both length and depth around my eyes. My black hair has touches of gray that my vanity rinses away once a week. I was sure no man would ever notice me. I was sure they could sense that I had failed my husband, that my marriage was a failure, that I was a failure.

  My sister tries to tell me that being a divorced woman is not a failure. But she is on my side, and she is not objective. Even though half of all marriages end in divorce, I’ll bet that if you asked divorced women the overwhelming majority would say that divorce is a failure. I’ll even bet that if you asked divorced men, some of them would say that divorce equaled failure, or that they had failed because they were divorced.

  So I was sure no man would notice me, that no-one would notice me. That I could live out my days in my obscure lab doing my obscure research and loving my family as they grew. With the money from the gas and oil wells there was no need to ever go out in public again. No need to ever have a paying job. No need to interact with anyone other than who I picked and chose. And I was certain that I already knew everyone I wanted to know.

  Then I met Joe.

  He noticed me.

  Things have not been the same since. Especially not this January. I have had more sex this January than I think I had my entire married life. Well, I know that’s not true, but I have had more good sex this January than I have had in my entire life put together. Even so, I am leaving after the
weekend.

  We are going to Wilmington, where I will spend two nights with Joe in a hotel and then I will drive home from there. He will drive himself home. So we will drive separately to Wilmington, do things for Caitlin’s Foundation, and stay in a hotel for two nights. We will sleep together and we will be together.

  He has told me that he loves me. I have not reciprocated. Not because I don’t love him, perhaps I do, perhaps I don’t. But because I don’t want to tell him something that he does not need to hear. If my actions and presence don’t say enough, then there are no words that can tell him anything different. I do not owe him any profession of love.

  He knows who I am and he knows what we have, what we don’t have, and what we will never have. I will see him in Januarys and in Julys. It will have to be enough.

  I can tell he is thinking of something else. What, I do not know. I will listen, and perhaps even consider whatever it is he has to say. But I will not accept any claims, any responsibilities, anything that will change who I am and the life that I have created. Still, I will listen, if he can ever spit it out. I can tell it has been on his mind for days now, perhaps even since the evening I arrived. But he won’t spit it out. Maybe I’ll ask him what he’s been trying to say all month. Maybe I won’t.

  Joe

  We have two more beach mornings left and then we go to Wilmington for our final weekend in January. Probably our final weekend together until July. But with Shannon you never know. Because she is independently wealthy and fiercely autonomous she feels free to change and guard her schedule as she sees fit.

  I know that she misses her family and I know that she misses her lab. So, after the race in Wilmington and after our two nights together in the hotel she will drive home from Wilmington and I will drive home alone. It will be better to have her leave from Wilmington than from the beach house because this way the bitterness of her good-bye will be attached to Wilmington and not to her beach house. There are only good thoughts and memories associated with her beach house. Only arrivals, no departures.

  Our first real good-bye, not like the good-bye in the graveyard, our first “I will miss you and I hope to see you” good-bye will be from the hotel. Maybe I should book us into a different hotel so that my regular hotel isn’t ruined for me.

  Then again, visiting my hotel while she is away will remind me of the good-bye. Yes I may flagellate myself that way if that is the only feeling of her I will be able to retain.

  Shannon and Joe

  “Good morning,” Joe says.

  “Good morning,” Shannon answers. “The race is on Saturday, so this morning I’m going to do a mile easy, a mile at race pace, and then a mile easy. Tomorrow I’m just going to do three or four easy.”

  “I’m in,” Joe says. “For the easy parts.”

  “I want to run on the road, not the beach,” Shannon says. “To get used to pavement again. It’s different from sand.”

  “Not on the beach?” Joe asks.

  “We can walk on the beach later,” Shannon answers.

  “Okay,” Joe says. “I’m going to ride my bike then so I can keep up.”

  Something has changed. She has put the race ahead of their morning run on the beach. She did it so easily, without even consulting him. Once again he realizes that she can do this. He accepts it.

  After they have showered and made love and had breakfast they quickly return to the beach. Both seem to sense that they should spend as much time on the beach today and tomorrow as they can before Wilmington and the Foundation and the race take over.

  They walk hand in hand towards the pier. It is cool, gray, a raw Atlantic day, as different from the previous days as is possible. They are dressed in layers, thermal underwear, jogging suits, then wind suits. They have hats pulled down over their ears and gloves tucked up inside their wind gear. They are careful not to get their boots wet because the Atlantic is cold this morning. It is a deep slate gray, with spits of foam being whisked off the top of the chop that has replaced the regular waves. There are no seagulls, no pelicans, no dolphins this morning. There is winter and the raw Atlantic. Foam that has been swept off the waves rolls in the wind on the shore and piles up against the dune or anything else that gets in its way. The foam is cream colored with brown flecks and we islanders know this foam portends a long blow out of the north east.

  “Will you tell me about your ex?” Joe asks.

  “What do you want to know?” Shannon answers.

  “I want to know how he loved you wrong, or what he did wrong.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can love you right,” Joe answers.

  “There is no right or wrong way to love someone,” Shannon says. “We don’t get to choose who we love, we don’t get to choose how we love. Love simply is love. It is, and it is what it is. If you try to force it, to make it something else, to try to take it any way other than the way it comes to you, then it will die quickly and painfully. Love is love. You can’t love someone wrong. You can’t love the wrong person. Because our loves come to us fully formed and are not malleable. Sure we can treat people poorly or we can treat people nicely. We can respect our lovers and our loves, or we can disrespect them. But we cannot change the thing itself. It just is.”

  “I don’t agree,” Joe says.

  “With what?” Shannon asks.

  “That we can’t change how we love.”

  “If you try to change how you love someone, you aren’t being real. You aren’t respecting or even accepting what is between you. There is between people what there is between them and no amount of wishing or acting or trying to change will ever change what is between people.”

  “I don’t agree,” Joe says.

  “Please don’t try to change anything between us Joe. Please just let it be what it is.”

  “What is it?” Joe asks.

  “It’s you and me and this beach and January and July. That’s all I can give you, that’s all of who I am, that’s all of who we are.”

  “What if we could be just a little more?” Joe asks.

  “How little?” Shannon answers.

  “Just a little. Just a week or ten days in the sun in March or April, near the end of your winter. Wouldn’t it be nice to take another week or so out of your winter, especially right at its end?”

  “Yes I suppose it would. But I don’t want to add two more days of driving to my schedule. Every year the drive down becomes just a little less bearable.”

  “I actually thought we could meet somewhere sunny, like Costa Rica, or Mexico. Go surfing, lie in the sun. Make up our own little April week. Our own new routine. Somewhere that isn’t here. We know what July and January are here. We know those work here. Perhaps we can create an April somewhere else. Somewhere you don’t have to drive. And if it doesn’t work somewhere else, it won’t wreck what we have here.”

  “Is that it?” Shannon asks.

  “And then one more week? Maybe in October. I was thinking about a lighthouse week.”

  “A lighthouse week?”

  “Yep. A lighthouse week. I’ve heard you mention several times that you like to walk with your sister near the lighthouses in Ohio. And you know how much our day at the lighthouse here meant to me. So I was thinking a lighthouse week. I’ve always been fascinated by lighthouses. We could visit a different lighthouse every year. I could pick the surf April and you could pick the lighthouse October.”

  “This is interesting,” Shannon says. “I hadn’t thought of an arrangement quite like that.”

  “But you had thought about January and July?”

  “Yes. I had. I like the idea of January and July.”

  “January and July with me?”

  “January with you. July with my family and with you.”

  “Do you like the idea of April and October?”

  “I don’t know. Let me think about it today and tomorrow. I will tell you one way or the other before we leave Wilmington.”

  “Deal,” he says.

 
; “Do I have to pour out some coffee?” she asks.

  “No,” he says. “We can just pretend.”

  They both mimic pouring coffee in the sand.

  “Now take me home and see if you can think of some way to warm me up,” Shannon says.

  “I have just the idea, it involves some internal warming.”

  “Now you’re talking,” Shannon says.

  She puts her gloved hand in his and nestles against his side to escape the wind coming off the ocean. It is the first time she has sought his protection.

  As they approach her beach house Joe realizes that even though she did not directly answer his question about her ex, she answered it more completely than he ever would have imagined.

  Shannon

  I drive across the bridge so I can take the inland road to Wilmington. It is too windy to drive the coast road. A gust catches my car as I crest the bridge. It pushes me halfway into the incoming lane. Luckily there is no-one else out on such a raw day or Joe may have been wondering why I stood him up. At least he would know that it wasn’t because I was with Danielle the race car driver. I can’t believe he calls her Danny. There is nothing that says “boy” about that girl. She is all girl. And we are going to see her in Wilmington, doing work for the Foundation for Caitlin.

  I respect Joe for telling me up front, and for not even considering having Danny stay away for this visit to Wilmington. She has worked hard for the Foundation, and at times has been the face (and figure?) of the Foundation. So Joe would be doing exactly what I would not want him to do if he asked her to stay away just because I was going to be there.

  If she is truly his ex-girlfriend, from many years ago, then there will be no issue. If she is still in love with him, or if he is still in love with her, I will see it, and there will be no surfing vacations, no lighthouse vacations. But there will still be Januarys and Julys. Even if she is still in his bed when I am not, I will still want January and July with Joe on Topsail Island. That is a deal I will take.