The Last Night at Tremore Beach

by Mikel Santiago

  It had been sent nearly two hours ago.

  “Ah, I didn’t see it. I’m sorry.”

  “There’s still time,” she said. “Do you think you could take care of it?”

  I was impressed at the way Judie could make a request on the order of, “Do this or I’ll kill you!” and make it sound like sunshine. Of course, I wasn’t about to explain to her that a concert pianist shouldn’t be lugging around his instrument just hours before his performance, that he should be relaxing with his feet up. This wasn’t Royal Albert Hall, after all; it was a fish market in Clenhburran, and I’d already agreed to help.

  “I’m not sure if it’ll fit in the Volvo,” I said. “I’ll have to try folding the seats up.”

  “Mrs. Douglas said her cousin Craig has a van we can use, but he lives in Dungloe. Think you could try it first, and then call me if it doesn’t fit?” She sounded stressed.

  “Of course,” I said. “I’ll handle it.”

  I said goodbye to her and the other ladies and hurried up the road.

  On my way to my car, I passed the group of guys still leaning unproductively against Chester’s convenience store. We waved to one another, but I had no time to waste. I hurried to Judie’s store, where I had parked my car. Just as I got there, I saw Marie step out of the store, and I had the sudden desire to turn and run in the opposite direction.

  It was the first time I’d seen her since my talk with Leo, and, actually, I hadn’t seen him since, either. The day after that catastrophic conversation, I’d tried to call him, but he wasn’t home. And then I left for Belfast with Judie and the kids, and I’d spent the next few days trying to forget about everything that had happened, thinking I should call him when I got back. The devastated look on his face gave me knots in my stomach.

  Marie was carrying a cardboard box filled with the corrected programs. She said she was on her way to drop them off at the fish market and asked where I was headed. I told her about the misunderstanding with the piano and said I was on my way to Mrs. Douglas’ to pick it up.

  “Okay, perfect,” she said, resting the box on the Volvo’s roof. “So you can drop me and the box off at the port, and I can help you with the piano.”

  I nodded, a little surprised. I’d expected her to be somewhat cold with me—or perhaps Leo hadn’t told her anything? I helped her put the box in the backseat. She sat in the passenger seat, and I turned around to head out of town.

  I didn’t know what, if anything, Leo had told Marie about our talk, so I avoided the subject altogether. She asked me about my trip to Belfast, and before I could tell her about sightseeing at the Giant’s Causeway, she told me Leo had mentioned my appointment with a sleep specialist.

  “How are you feeling? Do you think it helped?”

  It had been three days since I’d come back from my appointment with Kauffman, and I did feel better. I was sleeping better, for hours at a time, and my headache had faded into the faintest discomfort, which I only felt late in the day. A little aspirin did the trick, now. I told her Dr. Kauffman was convinced my pain was psychosomatic, and I had started to believe him.

  “Psychosomatic? So . . . it’s all in your head?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And is there anything new with your dreams? Those nightmares? Leo told me you had another one.”

  So he had talked to her.

  “Yes,” I said, trying to sound as normal as possible. “Kauffman theorizes that it’s an invention of my mind. Like being asleep and awake at the same time. Apparently, he thinks I get out of bed, walk around my house and garden and my brain invents a story around it.”

  “And what do you think, Pete?”

  “I just want to forget all this ever happened, Marie. I’m going to see Kauffman again to continue therapy after Jip and Beatrice go home. I’ll do whatever it takes. I just want my life back.”

  We’d reached the end of Main Street, where it intersected the state highway. I stopped to let two tractor trailers with French plates whiz by and then turned right.

  “Pete, Leo told me everything that happened,” Marie said. “About your conversation, about what you found on our bookshelf. About Daniel.”

  I felt myself tense up.

  “He also told me you thought this might be some kind of warning. A premonition.”

  I was supposed to turn right after Andy’s, but I completely missed the turn. I forgot about everything.

  “I’m so sorry for having snooped, Marie.”

  Marie touched my arm lightly, as though there was more she wanted to say. I looked for a place to make a U-turn.

  “It’s okay, Pete. I’m not going to lie, it hurt. But we understand. Leo was very sad the first day, but then he thought about calling you. I told him to wait until you got back. We know you’re a good man. We knew it from the first day we met you. Remember that day? We dropped by unannounced and made ourselves at home, basically pushed our way in. And you looked at us like, ‘Who are these crazy old people?’ ”

  I laughed hard, and so did she.

  “It’s hard for us to make friends,” she said. “It gets harder every time. Maybe it’s old age, or maybe it’s our nomadic lifestyle. We’ve become a lot more cautious with people, and it’s hard for us to open up our hearts. I’d like to think you’re one of those special few.”

  “I’d like to think so, too, Marie.”

  “Good. Well then, let’s forget about all this. Leo may be a little harder to win back, but it’s nothing cracking open a beer won’t fix. And as for your nightmares . . . well, let’s hope that doctor is right, and it’s nothing more than some kind of hallucination. But if there’s anything else you ever want to know about us, anything at all, just say so.”

  “Anything?” I asked, trying to joke around—although there was, actually, one other thing on my mind.

  “Yes. Whatever it is, Pete.”

  I thought about bringing up the thing about the Fury and the missing couple, but it felt like a bad idea. I wanted to repair my friendship with Leo and Marie and leave that episode behind.

  We arrived at the Douglases’ cottage in silence. It was a resplendent white house whose yard was covered in gnomes, plastic dragonflies, and other weird knickknacks. Keith, their oldest son, was waiting for us. Collecting dust and cobwebs in the living room was the piano. It was an electronic Korg with eighty-eight keys, foot pedals, and a beautiful stand around it that was, thankfully, detachable. It would probably sound decent, I thought.

  We folded the Volvo’s seats back, and Keith helped me carry the keyboard, the stand, and a stool to the car. After three tries, we finally got it to fit, with the keyboard lying diagonally.

  We drove back to town, and Marie and I didn’t broach the sensitive topic again. We talked about the weather, the movie, anything but that. It was my turn to have them over for dinner, and I promised to do it before the kids returned to Amsterdam.

  I parked the car as close to the port as possible, next to a barrier that closed off the street. (“CLENHBURRAN MOVIE NIGHT. Apologies for any inconvenience.”) I got Donovan and another kid to help me carry the behemoth to the red carpet the Blake Audiovisual guys had set up in front of the screen.

  One of the techs was testing the projector and the sound equipment, and music was playing over the speakers. He came over when he saw us walk up with the piano.

  “Did you bring the cables? We need one for each stereo channel,” he said.

  “Cables?” I said. “I thought you’d have them.”

  The guy sighed and wiped the sweat off his forehead. We needed two cables, each at least six feet long, to connect the piano to the mixing board. We looked inside the stool, where there were only two songbooks, one of Clayderman scores and another of Beatles songs for beginners. Mrs. Douglas had never needed to plug her keyboard into an external speaker so she had never needed the cables.

  “Let me see what I have in the truck,” the kid said.

  No luck. They had microphone cables, but tho
se wouldn’t work for the keyboard.

  “Nobody told us to bring cables. You think you can find any?” he asked.

  “I have a set at my house,” I said, checking my watch. It was 6:15 p.m. “If I hurry, I can be back in less than half an hour. We’d still have some time for a sound check.”

  “Bring two, if you have them. Otherwise we’ll have to broadcast in mono,” he said.

  I ran to the car. When I was inside with the windows up and out of earshot of any townies, I was free to shout out what was on my mind.

  “How the hell did you let yourself get talked into this goddamn mess?”

  I fired up the car and raced out of town.

  I reached home in less than fifteen minutes. At that time of day, the ocean seemed aflame. The large, orange sun, only a couple clouds at its heels, radiated at full strength. The beach was empty, and out at sea you could see a couple of sailboats. I thought about Jip and Beatrice and their voyage on the lagoon. I prayed they hadn’t thought to do something crazy like go out into the open water.

  I backed the car into the driveway so I could make a quick getaway. I went into the house and headed straight for my box of gear in the living room. I had cables, chargers, an external hard drive, and a host of other gear to connect my MIDI player to my computer so I could record my music. I found what I was looking for right away, a pair of thick cables that were exactly what I needed, and wished I’d thought to bring them that morning.

  I tossed the cables on the passenger seat and started up the car. I was determined to make even better time back to town with the sun at my back. The sooner I got there, the more time there would be for a sound check. I was worried the Korg would take some tinkering to sound right. I had one hand on the hand brake, the other clicking in my seat belt as I floored it. But, to my surprise, the car had the opposite idea. I’d left it in reverse, and it shot back at full throttle. Before I could take my foot off the gas, I felt an impact.

  CRACK!

  The engine stalled, and the car came sputtering to a halt.

  “Shit!” I swore, as I pulled on the hand brake. “Haste makes waste. . . .”

  Only as I was unbuckling my seat belt to see what I’d hit did it wash over me what the only possible, sinister, answer could be. “C’mon, this has to be a bad joke,” I murmured to myself.

  My fears were realized the second I opened the door, stepped out of the car, and walked to the back. It could only be “that.”

  The bumper had rammed into the fence, about a yard and a half from the gate, snapping four wooden slats in half. The impact had ripped them right out of the ground and dragged them across the dirt.

  The fence . . .

  If anyone had seen me in that moment, I imagine they would have thought I’d lost my mind. I stood there, quietly in shock at this minor—yet major—domestic demolition. For some reason, I pictured Dr. Kauffman telling me all of this was just a product of my subconscious. “You saw this image somewhere before, you internalized it, and now your mind has brought it back to the forefront.”

  You sure about that, doc? I personally don’t remember ever running over a fence in my life.

  Except this one.

  I squatted down next to the trampled section of fence and studied it. It was exactly as I’d seen it in my nightmares, the white, broken slats laid in a row, like piano keys. It felt like I was looking at the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle. The final message.

  I started to try to fix it, as if by doing that I could easily undo everything. I kneeled on the grass and tried to straighten a couple of the slats. But that pile of wood and splinters wouldn’t stand. It was hopelessly destroyed, broken.

  I heard myself say, “C’mon, Peter, it’s just another damn coincidence.” But it didn’t matter. Deep down, I knew I’d stopped listening to “rational” explanations. I jumped in my car and peeled out of there, with the vague notion that maybe this ought to be my last night in this town.

  “CAN WE SLEEP at your place tonight?”

  Judie looked surprised.

  I had just finished the sound check and everything was ready to go. Every seat was full, and it was standing-room only in the makeshift auditorium. (A lucky few sat on an improvised terrace Chester had set up in front of his store.) It was a perfect summer night for a movie. There was barely a breeze, and a canopy of stars in a clear, dark sky surrounded the screen, where photos of actors from the 1950s and 1960s played in a slideshow from Judie’s laptop.

  “Yes, of course you can stay, Peter,” she said. “Is something wrong?”

  “No, nothing. It’s just that we’ll probably finish late here and . . .” (not that that ever stopped us from driving the fifteen minutes back to the beach on any other night) “well, I just think it’ll be more comfortable for the kids.”

  “I understand,” she said, “of course. I actually love the idea. Plus, the hostel’s empty today. But . . . are you sure everything is okay with you?”

  I was tempted, really tempted, to tell her the truth. Remember the fence that always appears broken in my dreams, Judie? Remember how you said you thought it might mean something? Well, it’s broken right now, exactly how I saw it in my dreams. I’ve seen it. It was a premonition. And if the fence is broken, then everything else is going to happen, too. Marie, the men in the van. Everything. Do you hear me, Judie?

  But I didn’t say that. I kept it all to myself. Why? Judie had enough to worry about that night, and I didn’t want to add to it with my own Twilight Zone fantasy. Maybe she would try to rationalize it: “Okay, so the fence is broken. It could be that you broke it subconsciously. It could be that, in the back of your mind, you’re trying to make all the pieces fit.” Dr. Kauffman would probably agree with her.

  Or maybe the fence wasn’t even broken at all. Maybe I’d imagined it. As the night went on, I started to convince myself of that.

  At exactly 7:30 p.m., Mrs. Douglas grabbed the mic and gave it a nervous tap, tap, “Can everyone hear me?” The crowd buzzed then fell into a hush. I stood off to the side of the stage with my arms crossed, trying to focus on what I was about to play.

  “Good evening, neighbors and guests,” Mrs. Douglas began. “Welcome to the first annual Clenhburran Outdoor Movie Night.”

  There was clapping and cheers, and Mrs. Douglas smiled.

  “A few months ago . . .” she said, having to raise her voice. “A few months ago, when our friend Judie Gallagher proposed this idea, the ladies of our cultural organization almost burst out laughing. It was crazy: Set up a theater outdoors? In Donegal, no less . . .” There were a few chuckles in the crowd. “But at the same time it rang of idealism and adventure, and we loved that. And it looks like Lord Almighty agrees, because He’s given us a beautiful summer night to kick off the event. So let’s take advantage of it before He changes His mind!”

  More laughter and applause: Mrs. Douglas had them eating out of the palm of her hand. I looked out to the crowd, but the spotlight in my eyes only let me see into the first few rows. Night was falling, and I worried whether the children had returned. The O’Rourke kid had said they’d be back “before dark,” but what time was that exactly? I told myself they were fine; they were probably sitting in the audience right now, waiting to watch their dad play.

  “We’ve chosen two films to kick off the event. A short film and a feature-length film. Judie has prepared a short presentation on each,” Mrs. Douglas said, handing the microphone over to Judie.

  Judie had changed into a tight little black dress at the last minute. She’d put up her hair and decorated it with a red rose to match her lipstick. She took the mic and smiled at the crowd.

  “Thank you, Martha. Good evening, friends . . .”

  There’s no way of knowing whether you actually experienced what you think you did. I thought back on Dr. Kauffman’s words from just four days ago. No one saw you do the things you remembered doing. All of these things could be constructs of your mind, Mr. Harper. . . . These things are often confused for “lucid
dreams” or “astral voyages.”

  What if this were just another vision? I wondered. What if I hadn’t really broken the fence, at all?

  But I’d felt it with my own hands. And I was sure there would be some kind of white paint on the Volvo’s bumper. I decided right then that I would go back that night to make sure. Maybe I’d call up Leo so he could see it with his own eyes, as well. And Dr. Kauffman, too. Better yet, why not call up all my friends and family. And the whole damn police force. And the national guard . . .

  “Peter?”

  I snapped out of it and saw Judie and Mrs. Douglas staring at me, gesturing for me to hurry to the stage. I shook my arms out and stepped out onto the stage.

  “And now, without further ado, our illustrious neighbor, Mr. Peter Harper!”

  The port broke into a thunderous ovation. It was the first time anyone had clapped for me in a long time. It was like having your favorite dinner for the first time in years.

  I walked to the microphone and said something like, “Good evening, friends.” I’ve never been much of a public speaker, and I tend to be brief. I said something about how good an idea this outdoor movie night was and how happy I was to be invited to play. Then, Judie asked me a couple of questions about my career. I focused on her beautiful face and managed to say something funny. Finally, I sat down to play. The moment I rested my fingers on the keys, I was able to push away all the other thoughts in my head. And, actually, I played amazingly well. It wasn’t a complicated piece, but that night, my fingers seemed to radiate energy. I took solace in the piano and felt like hiding between the keys and staying there forever. The audience must have felt it, too, as they exploded in a fantastic, standing ovation when I struck the final chord and drew my hands away from the keys.

  I don’t really remember what I said after when Judie handed me the microphone. But I do remember the crowd shouting “encore!” At that moment, smiling at Judie, I realized how important it was that I be there that night, reacquainting myself with the public. This moment, this audience, those hundred or so people applauding, this was why I played music. Not FOX, not Pat Dunbar, not the TV stars. That was all smoke and mirrors. My self-pity, my misery, my self-imposed house arrest had made me forget the real point of my chosen profession: to tell a story with music. And a story without an audience is a party without guests.