by J T Kalnay
It is the start of our second January in Topsail. We had our first July, when we met and then went our separate ways. Then we had our first January. A month of getting to know each other and a month of intimacy. A month of opening and discovery and feelings that I did not know I had.
Then we had our first Costa Rica. I still am not sure that Costa Rica was real. That I wore what I wore and did what I did and saw what I saw. I am going back there this year and if it lives up to my memory then I will buy a house there. Salvaro has been helping me all year. I will go down two days early to look around, and then I will stay a few days later to wrap things up. Joe doesn’t know any of this. He just knows that I will be there before him and after him. He is good about not asking for details. I think he worries what the details will be, and that if he doesn’t know them he can imagine me in the way that suits him best. There is nothing bad for me to cover up, but there are secrets we all keep. I keep more than most. I even keep some from myself.
My ex was upset with my secrets. I think he was upset. Perhaps he was sad that there was so much I wouldn’t share with him. But he should have known that from our dating, from our beginning. I have always been quiet, and I made no exception when we were getting to know each other. So how could he have expected me to be any other way? If he’d have asked me about it I would have told him. I would have told him that I like to be quiet, that I like to keep to myself, and that I have secrets. They aren’t bad secrets, or secrets that would humiliate or hurt anyone, there are no mysterious lovers or crimes or fetishes. They are just secrets. Like the fact that I have been investigating buying a house near Hermosa and that Joe doesn’t know.
We had our second July together. When we already knew each other, and when my sister was able to move the family around so that Joe and I could steal our moments and hours together. And we had our first lighthouse long weekend. Like Costa Rica, I do not know who I was on that long weekend. I have yet to come to grips with having him the way that I did in the lighthouse, or having him at all. I cannot fathom my ways when we are together. So I will not examine the feelings I have or the sex we have. I will just experience them both, as controlled by our agreement, our accord.
In our contract he knows that all I have to do to end the relationship is to not be here.
I know that all he has to do to end the relationship is not to be here.
But I am here, and I see him approaching up the windswept beach. We will have another January, or at least another January morning. For he might be here to tell me that it is over, that he has found another, and that he can longer abide by our rules. He would tell me in person, he would not just leave me here wondering. That’s how he would do it.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” I answer.
“Come on,” he says. “It’s too beautiful for the porch.”
I agree, stand, and join him on the boardwalk then on the beach. This walk begins like our last one ended, seamlessly meshed together as though the end of October and all of November and all of December have not interposed themselves between our last walk at Oak Island and our first walk here.
This is the most amazing part of who we are. That we instantly fit back together, no matter how long apart and no matter how far apart and no matter what has happened. We don’t need to know what has happened. We only need to know that once again we are us and we are here and that everything is alright for the next while.
I feel chatty for some reason and start to teach him the geology of the beach. “The present is the key to the past,” I say.
“I beg your pardon?” he asks.
“The beach. Today’s beach is tomorrow’s sandstone.”
“You are a geology geek aren’t you?” Joe asks.
“Yes I am. So here’s a quiz. You see those shells? How old do you think they are?” I ask.
“A year? Maybe ten?”
I stoop down and pick through a few dozen shells and separate out three. “This one is likely a thousand years old, this one is probably ten thousand years old, and this one isn’t even a shell, it’s a fossil, and it’s probably ten million years old.”
“Ten million?” Joe asks.
“At least. Right off the coast there is a rock formation that has a very distinct chemical signature. When you find shark’s teeth here that are all black those are fossils too. And they’re probably about 6 million years old.”
“You know when I was a fundamentalist Christian I was certain the world sprang into existence in six twenty four hour days about six thousand years ago.”
“So you were Young Earth Creationists,” I answer.
“Yes. We were.”
“But not now?” I ask.
“No.”
We walk on in silence for a while looking for shark’s teeth.
“Did you ever notice that almost all the shells are lying cavity down?”
Joe
Our second January is coming to an end. Once again she will come to Wilmington with me to help with the Foundation, and to run in the race. This year I think she intends on winning. The weather is predicted to be much better so there will be a larger crowd. She is a year older but more determined than last year. I only notice this extra year in the tiniest details, just an extra line by her right eye, and an extra grey hair over her left temple. She is running as well as last year, maybe better, and she has mentioned the race more than one time. She has even checked the online registration to see if last year’s winner is entered. He is. We drove down to Wilmington twice to run the course, once we did three loops at a casual pace while she felt for inclines and figured the tangents for the corners. The other time she did a casual warm-up lap and then raced while I followed on my mountain bike.
Our second January has been as memorable as our first. We have walked and run and made love and drank coffee and have even sat on the balcony and talked. Not often, but we have talked. I have learned a little more about her and have told her much about me. I don’t think she needs to know these details, but I share them anyway. She has educated me about the beach. About why some of the sand “barks” and why some of it “sings”. She loves being a geologist.
While she has told me about the beach, she has still told me little about herself. I try not to pull her teeth to get details from her. So each detail she shares I savor like the rare morsel that it is. She gives so little of the rest of her, even while giving all of her while here. There is Shannon here and there is Shannon there and there is Shannon in Costa Rica and at a lighthouse. They barely seem like all the same Shannon, and if I had only seen her in one place I might not recognize her in any of the other places. I wonder how many more Shannons there are. There must be at least Shannon in the lab, Shannon in the field, Shannon with the adult family, Shannon with the kids, and Shannon the oil and natural gas millionaire. But they are not signatories to the bargain and so I leave them be.
The one thing we have talked about, quite surprisingly, is her ex. His name is Rick. He came to see her at her lab just before Christmas. To drop off a gift for her nephew, a gift that Shannon could attribute to some other family member or to herself so that her nephew would not feel the loss of his uncle. Shannon was touched at his kindness, and took a few minutes to talk to him. For once he had not touched on their breakup, and had focused only on the family. She could tell that he genuinely missed them. Even while she reminded herself that he had made his choice and that she had lived with it.
“I don’t know why we couldn’t talk like that when we were married,” she said.
These are the types of things I have heard from many divorced people before. Usually right before an attempted reconciliation, right before an impending disaster. I doubt that she will reconcile with him.
“I told him I was in a relationship,” she said. “He didn’t need to know the details. But, if he has Google, and I’m sure he does, I’m certain he has read something about us, and will likely read more after this year’s dinner for Caitlin’s Foundation,” Shannon sai
d.
“I can ask the press to leave you out of it,” I said.
“No. It’s okay. It’s okay if he reads about me and knows that we have been together for a year or more.”
I let it drop. Tried not to fixate on her ex being in her lab, talking to her, and her participating in the conversation. I recall how she described his obsession with her after they had split, and after his second, or maybe it was his third, marriage had ended.
Was he lonely now that his children had grown and had friends of their own? Lives of their own? I stopped myself from thinking any further about her and her ex. I returned to the preparation for the Foundation dinner and for our weekend in Wilmington. How quickly ‘traditions’ come into being.
This year there are only children in the early stages of waiting for transplants. There are no children in imminent peril, and no children who have made any wishes to be granted. There are only children for whom the danger is still an evil ill-defined thing lurking in the darkness.
Danny will attend because it is part of who she is. She loves the Foundation, and she works as hard as anyone for it. Her determination in the Foundation matches her determination on the track.
We have both aged. She has relinquished some of her rides to a younger driver and team member. She knows that her days on the track are numbered, and has thrown all that extra energy into the Foundation. The Foundation is something that will never tell her she is too old, or that someone else can do it better, even if I personally have asked her to make an unfair deal, a request she denied. With the children and the donors and everyone surrounding the Foundation her experience and touch cannot be replaced. I think that she is as important to the Foundation as I am, probably more.
Shannon and Danny seem to have arrived at some détente, some working relationship where they can be polite and not distrustful. I have told Shannon everything about Danny, questions both asked and unasked. I have left out only the details that a gentleman would leave out, not that Shannon asked for any of those details.
So tomorrow we go to Wilmington, and we will do the rounds and the dinner and Shannon will run (and maybe win) her race and then she will drive back to Ohio and to her rocks and to her searching. I will spend a few days with Danny and then return to my home on Topsail. My home that Shannon has never visited. She has never come over, though I have invited her. And I have never visited her cottage. I have never been invited. I wonder if we are neighbors and do not even know it? I doubt it. I would have seen her car or she would have seen my truck or my car or would have seen me riding my bike. Still, there is something crazy romantic about the thought that we have been together during the days at her beach house and then have been secret neighbors at night. No, it is unlikely.
I suspect that she lives very near to her beach house because I have never seen her car at the beach house. Of course she might park it inside, under the house. But if she doesn’t, then she must walk there in the morning and then walk home in the evening. It can’t be very far. It might be the house across the street. But I know that this is one of her secrets, and so I let it alone, unwilling to accidentally discover the truth and destroy her secret. I will not stray over the boundary, not even inadvertently.
Shannon
I am here in Costa Rica before Joe and I will be here in Costa Rica after Joe. I realize that condition is likely true both locally and globally because of our age difference. Salvaro took me to look at the two houses, and I loved the pink house. I am going to buy the pink house. Joe doesn’t need to know. Salvaro knows that I intend on keeping this secret from Joe. He isn’t sure exactly why I am going to keep this secret, and neither am I. But I am a secretive person and this is one more secret that I will keep. Perhaps ‘secretive’ isn’t the right word. Perhaps ‘private’ is a better word. I am a private person and this new house will be part of my privacy.
I never imagined as a girl that I would own two houses in Ohio, one of them a renovated Coast Guard station, that I would own three houses in North Carolina, a grand beach house for the family, a modest cottage for myself, and a house I lend to the turtle rescue people and to universities that want to study the beach. I never dreamed that I would own a home in Costa Rica. I was making a decent living as a geologist before the gas and oil. But the gas and oil are obscene. They shouldn’t be so obscene. Someone should have understood my data long before I did. They didn’t and so we were able to buy the mineral rights for thousands of square miles for pennies per square mile. No-one believed there was oil or gas down there, and even if they did, they thought there was no way to retrieve it.
So I have billions of dollars that someone else could and probably should have had. In some ways I have come to terms with my billions, but in other ways it is simply impossible. No matter how much money I try to give away there is always more money. So I will buy this pink house, and pay for some security and for a discrete staff and I will vacation here alone, read alone, write papers alone, and go surfing on the low tides with Salvaro and his visitors, maybe sometimes just with Salvaro.
He gets my deal with Joe, but warned it will be harder than I think. I don’t know what he means, and he hasn’t tried to further explain. I would consider him a Buddha-like thinker but for the fact that he is ruggedly handsome and fit. I will think on that.
Joe
Last year I got here first. This year she got here first. And she is going to stay a day after as well. I think she likes Costa Rica. And I think she likes how she feels in Costa Rica.
It’s odd that she really does seem to be different people in different places, at least during the day. But at night I have no idea who she is because we almost always sleep apart. She is one way in Topsail when her family is there in July, and she is another way in Topsail in January when her family is not there. She isn’t a lot different, but enough different that I notice. Am I that different from July to January? And what is she like at night? Is she one hundred percent the same at night? Does she wear the same pajamas every night? Drink the same glass of Merlot every night? Sleep on the same side of the bed every night? Wake up at exactly the same time? I know her in January and Costa Rica and July and lighthouses, but only by the day. Even at the lighthouses, where we share a hotel room, I never wake with her in the bed, she is either up before me, or sleeping on the couch, or in the other room. So there are months during her year about which I know nothing, and there are hours in her day and nights about which I know nothing.
I know that she is different in October at the lighthouses, more of a researcher, and yet a tourist at the same time. This is when I really see the inquisitive side of her. And then there is Costa Rica. She is a wanton woman in Costa Rica. There is no other way to describe it. For a few hours she is a creature of the sea, married to its tides and waves and rhythms, and then she is an insatiable lust-filled animal for the rest of the day. An animal who would be at home as a predator in the jungle that sits just yards from the bungalows that are perched on Salvaro’s hill. When we eat in Costa Rica she will try anything, even though in the States she eats with a pathological regularity for the days and meals. But here she is nearly equally pathologically irregular.
After dinner in Costa Rica she is a dominatrix. She feels some need to control me, and she does so in a most enjoyable way. I submit, as I have submitted to so many other things while together. Se feels this need to control me, and so I yield.
Shannon and Joe
“Those waves,” Joe says.
“Yes,” Shannon answers.
“Not too big, not too small, spaced apart, with long breaks from left to right, and then a shoulder to turn back over,” Joe says.
“Exactly,” Shannon answers.
“And exactly at sunrise, with the sun coming over the mountains. I swear some of the shadows that reached out into the water were at least a mile long,” Joe says.
“Maybe five miles long. And then to watch those shadows leave the ocean, retreat over the beach, and then pull back up into the hills.”
“It’s probably like that every morning,” Shannon says.
“Even if we’re not surfing at sunrise tomorrow, maybe we should paddle out again just to see it,” I say.
“I’m in,” Shannon says.
Shannon and Joe
“Everyone will be here in an hour,” Shannon says.
“We have the ocean to ourselves right now,” Joe answers.
“It’s so calm right now, with the tide slack or maybe just starting to go out.”
“Yes.”
Joe lays on his white surfboard and Shannon sits astride her red one. They look at the first tinges of pink that kiss the sky beyond the rain forest draped mountains. They cannot see the main house where Salvaro lives, but they can see the big hill shrouded in greenery that rises behind it and the orange roofed bungalows that cling to its verdant sides. They can see the billboard for the canopy tour on the even bigger hill closer to town from Salvaro’s house.
As the first morning’s rays light the beach, they mark the black sand and the large bizarre shaped driftwood that has washed ashore from some distant, unknown forest.
“It seems like the jungle and the ocean are fighting over the beach,” Shannon says.
“Fighting?”
“Like they both want control of that little ribbon of black sand,” Shannon says.
“Oh,” Joe says. “Whether you call it rain forest or jungle, it seems a little sinister to me,” Joe says. “I can’t ever get completely comfortable here.”
