I found my grandfather at the edge of the dock. He was staring into the water, crouching knees to chest, the way a child would when inspecting a bug or some other such treasure. It struck me as the kind of position he should have progressed beyond, but something about his ligaments made it more comfortable for him to assume childlike poses—he liked sitting cross-legged or, on his sofa, curling into a ball. My mother encouraged him to try yoga, and whenever she did, he would pretend as if he were hearing of it for the first time. I think he preferred to keep busy with things he discovered himself; he liked being the only one who knew about a thing. Beyond that, no one could understand his interest in oysters, why he started growing them off his little dock on Long Cove. He liked the taste of a grilled oyster all right but gave away more than he ate, handing off bushel baskets to neighbors and childhood friends.
It was September, and the youngest oysters were small, no bigger than a thumbnail. They rested one on top of another, not unlike barnacles in the nearest cage. All together there must have been a thousand. My grandfather would wait another two years to harvest them, and in that time they would quadruple in size just by sitting there.
Standing nearby, my sister Lindsey pointed out that humans grow faster than that, and brandished her daughter Reagan as evidence. In two years, Reagan had gone from the size of a bean in her womb to a small person now determined to fling herself into the river while Lindsey made a show of physically restraining her, saying, “Come on, stop that, get away from there, come on, let’s go, don’t do that, get away from there.” To Reagan, Lindsey’s voice was clearly white noise. It crossed my mind that Lindsey might be too preoccupied with her daughter, to the point where she was willing to put down oysters to exalt her, but still, I took her point: there was something unsurprising about the oysters, the way they accreted over the course of seasons, gaining mass as algae and star grass and sediment washed over them with the tides.
“Look!” Reagan shrieked, and it sounded like, Luke! She was pointing toward an oyster cage, which my grandfather had begun hauling out from the river. White water spilled out from between its chain links and crashed down like a waterfall. My grandfather shook the cage up and down to empty it of sediment, before hoisting the whole thing up onto the dock so Reagan could inspect it. “What’s that? What’s that? What’s that?”
“It’s an oyster, it’s a shell, it’s seaweed, it’s a stick. Let’s go, get away from there, come on.” Taking Reagan’s hand, Lindsey turned and noticed me standing there. “Oh, perfect, you made it,” she said. Her eyes, meeting mine, conveyed something like relief. Stepping toward me for a hug, she explained that she’d recently given up caffeine.
Lindsey was always giving up something. Smoking, gluten, now caffeine. I anticipated a day soon when she would renounce alcohol, profess herself an alcoholic, because, after all, she was. We all had our dependencies—my father to nicotine, my mother to control. My grandmother, Nan, was harder to classify, but I imagined religious fervor was her drug of choice. Like all of us, she had been raised Catholic but in her forties converted to Evangelicalism before adopting, in her sixties, Buddhism. According to my mother, Nan meditated at least an hour a day. Before sunrise she would sit in a lawn chair facing the river, her gaze so indistinct no one dared to disturb her. I figured it was her intention to detach from whatever challenge my grandfather was presenting. He was the vine from whose branches all of our sins seemed to flow. When my mother was a child, he’d lost all of their family savings at casinos in Colonial Beach. I was young when I learned that—he told me and Lindsey directly, with a tone of confession. The casinos had been strategically located at the end of long piers, which stretched far enough over the river to be licensed in Maryland, where gambling was legal. In middle-age he replaced gambling with less expensive habits. I watched him trying new things: small game hunting, crabbing, oyster gardening. Having some kind of return—the possibility of winning—was crucial.
He once explained that mature oysters could filter up to fifty gallons of water every day, and for the same reason were almost solely responsible for keeping the bay and all its tributaries clean. At the time, he had been standing at his grill holding a pair of silver tongs, waiting for his latest harvest to pop open from the heat, while I’d stood nearby, shucking their hot shells. I had asked whether we should really be eating filterers of filthy water, to which he’d barely made the effort to shrug, uninterested in any concern at all.
While Reagan poked her fingers through the oyster cage, I pointed to it and asked, “Anything ready to eat?”
My grandfather shook his head, said nothing. I looked at Lindsey as if to say, I tried.
Their rambler was a short walk off the bank. With Lindsey and Reagan, I went back up along the footpath of moss and sandy dirt and found our mother, with Nan and Aunt Kari. They had come outside to sit in the shade of a wide magnolia.
“Hi,” I told everyone, “hi.”
“Hi, hi, hi,” Reagan repeated, twisting out of Lindsey’s grip and flinging herself at my mother.
“You didn’t have to come,” Nan said, standing to give me a hug. She was convinced all family visits were an inconvenience.
Nan had taken to wearing a swimsuit at all times of day. Sometimes it was accompanied by sweatpants or a visor. For now, it was just the polka dots—yellow, pink—and her thin legs, browned by summer sun.
I took a seat beside my mother, who asked about my job at the restaurant, my apartment, my paintings. We chatted a bit before Lindsey nudged me and asked, “So what’s your strategy?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing what she meant.
“Your strategy,” she repeated. “About him. You’ll get him to talk how?”
“He can do what he wants,” I said. “I don’t care.”
I guess my only strategy was not to have one: I intended to ignore the fact of our grandfather’s silence, in hopes of making it seem boring and not worth keeping up. If I failed, I couldn’t be perceived to have tried.
“That’s right,” Nan said, shaking her head sadly but also in acceptance. “He can do what he wants.”
It was my private suspicion that my grandfather’s silence was a performance, an art piece of sorts. He wasn’t a stranger to wanting attention. My grandfather liked simple things—a quiet house on the river, a long, monogamous marriage—but he also liked a show. A little surprise. On their fiftieth anniversary, he had convinced Nan to get a tattoo. They’d arrived at their party with TRUE LOVE FOREVER inked over their knuckles.
At first, Nan had thought he was having some kind of stroke, that part of his brain had begun to deteriorate. It pained me to imagine. He was willing to nod, or shake his head, but to anything requiring more than that he would simply act as though he hadn’t heard. Aside from this, he was basically normal. Every morning he ate his usual breakfast of eggs—whisked with skim milk, microwaved—and coffee. In the afternoons he would bike a half mile to the town square, and at night he went to sleep without trouble. After a few days, Nan worried he was giving her the silent treatment, that he was angry, that he was sad. She called my aunt, who called her sister, who was my mother, who called my sister. They each drove the distance to my grandparents’ house and took a turn trying to crack him. His commitment to silence was attended by a sense of mystery and a feeling that, with a concerted enough effort, someone would be able to solve it.
Aunt Kari went first. As Nan later described it, Kari conducted what amounted to a thorough medical exam. Though she had only completed a year of nursing school, she was often relied upon in our family as a medical professional. She asked if he could hear what she was saying, and he nodded. She stuck a line of masking tape down the hallway and asked him to walk along it. She asked him to stick out his tongue, shined a flashlight down his throat, asked if he was in any pain, and he shook his head. “Looks normal,” she declared then, almost in disappointment, slumping, but by then Nan seemed calmer, as if she had caught on to something. “He’ll talk,” she said with a sigh, “when he’s ready.”
My mother refused to accept this. She went in for high drama. She arrived with a bang, flying in through the front door, throwing down her bags, demanding some answers. “What the hell is going on? Is this some kind of joke?” To this, my grandfather stood and gave my mother a long hug, from which she broke free. Crying, she begged him to please say even just one word. Why wasn’t he acting like himself? Nan’s attempts to settle her only upset her further. By the time she gave up, she had accumulated a small monument of crumpled Kleenex.
Reportedly, my sister took a lower-key approach. Lindsey arrived with a bottle of El Dorado, spun the cap off it, poured two glasses, offered him one and, sitting side-by-side on the dock behind the house, they drank. Around them the sunlight faded. I knew exactly what those sunsets were like. I had seen them many times over the years, bright pink over the river, the calm that falls over the water as if it were settling in for the evening, becoming as smooth and still as glass, the subtlest ripple of the surface like the chest of someone sleeping in peace. Lindsey had been determined to not say anything. It was her intention to wait him out. He could be stubborn, but she was his granddaughter, and stubbornness was in her genes. She had assumed he felt a certain softness toward her and might confide in her the way he hadn’t with anyone else. They had each drunk two glasses in silence before her frustration came out. When she poured herself a third, he gave her a meaningful look. His eyes were big and dark, almost the color of the river, but only once you’re submerged five feet under the surface of it. It was a gentle look he gave her, a smile without a smile, then he too poured his third glass.
No one expected me to make any progress with him. Between my grandfather and me, there was no special connection. There was no special disconnection, either, except the natural kind resulting from distances of age and geography. Now that he wasn’t talking, we had more in common than ever. For my whole life relatives had observed that I didn’t say much. “He’s shy,” my mother would always explain on my behalf. I figured my quiet seemed like stupidity, and in some way it probably was. I had many thoughts, but they struggled to find their way out. I might have imagined that as his only male descendant I would have a particular kind of influence, but he always preferred Lindsey to me, and if she had failed, then I figured so would I.
I went anyway. The drive took about three hours. Before setting off, I checked my phone, and a black cloud passed over the sky of my weather app. It looked like a glitch, but maybe smoke, maybe an omen of a dark thing coming. The actual sky looked fine: blue, as usual, with wispy white clouds, though fires had been burning in California, three thousand miles away. I recalled that last summer the fires had gotten so bad that smoke journeyed from that end of the continent to this one, obscuring the eastern horizon, scratching my throat.
I intended to stay one night, on the couch. I dropped my bag beside it. The house smelled of salt and wet dog. The couch was covered in dog fur, remnants of Lucy, my grandparents’ mutt, an untrainable nightmare for whom they had expressed uncomplicated love, who had died two months prior. I wondered if my grandfather’s silence wasn’t an expression of grief. He had buried Lucy at the foot of a nearby wax myrtle. “No more dogs,” he’d vowed after that, and I wondered if he was grieving not only Lucy but all the dogs he resolved not to love.
He hadn’t always lived by the river. With two young daughters, he and Nan had moved around Richmond, spiraling farther out of the city, from townhouse to apartment as rent escalated, but there seemed to be some boomerang effect for many people his age, that if you grew up near the water, you were fated to return to it, and that’s what he did. He never owned property until a decade ago when, without preamble, he bought the rambler five miles from the neighborhood he’d been raised in. It had been vacant since the nineties. It was a white one-story house in a quiet neighborhood—more a road than a neighborhood—alongside the river. Mostly retirees lived there, or people who only came on weekends.
The last time I came was with Tala, in June. We’d been together about three months by then. She kept calling my grandparents’ house a “lake house,” and I feared she would be disappointed when she saw it. It was her first and only time there, a hot weekend—too humid to spend much time outside, except for short dips in the water—so we passed two days in the sun room. Wryly Tala asked if there were any baby pictures to be seen, and Nan smiled. She kept her photos in loose collections of folders and shoeboxes secured with rubber bands. Flipping through, we saw me and my sister at Reagan’s age, in sandboxes, gnawing the mouths of empty beer bottles. We saw cousins of cousins, kids I’d never seen before, with their feet dug into the mud off the river bank. “You don’t know them?” Tala asked, and I shook my head.
“Oh, there’s Reggie,” Nan said, pointing to a young man in army fatigues, my grandfather’s brother.
“Who’s that?” Tala asked, curious.
“Reggie,” my mother repeated, then gave a deep nod to convey some secret knowledge was passing between herself and Nan, “before.”
“Before what?” I asked, realizing I’d never learned how he died.
Through a big grimace, my mother explained that he’d been shot to death—“a holdup, a freak thing,” as she put it. Next to me, Tala listened in silence, twisting her black hair absently around her finger. “He was twenty-three,” my mother concluded, before returning the photo to the shoebox and selecting another.
I could have pressed for more information, but Nan had already put another photo in front of me. It was of her and my grandfather. “This one,” she said. “This is the one. You look just like him, don’t you think?” The photo had been taken before they were married, but not long before. I saw myself in it, in him. “In the eyes,” Nan said, leaning back to study mine. Though sepia, it was obvious his face was flushed, from either the sun or happiness generally, and he stood beside Nan, who looked like a little girl hoisting up an enormous striped bass as long as her legs. Nan seemed to have no attachment to the photo, so she gave it to me. She had reached a point in life where she was constantly trying to get rid of things. I took it home, lost it.
“Your family does this weird thing,” Tala noted after that. “They’re very withholding.” She was still wearing her black bikini beneath a pair of paint-splattered overalls. We had just gotten back to the studio apartment—both a studio, where we painted, and an apartment, where I lived, where Tala sometimes spent the night. In a corner, she had staked a canvas she was working on and, spread over an old bedsheet, some palettes and brushes. Opposite hers, I kept mine. She took a seat up on the linoleum countertop, tied up her hair, and said, “It’s like they care too much about what you think to tell you who they really are.”
I considered this. My family did have a tendency to let slip some new information about their lives or histories, almost incidentally, right when I was beginning to think I knew all there was to know. Last year my mother revealed that Aunt Kari’s husband Mike had had another kid—I had a secret half cousin. When I asked why she never mentioned this, my mother asked why she ever would have; Mike’s secret offspring didn’t have any technical relation to me. And after Tala dumped me, my father tried to console me by explaining that when he was my age, he, also, had been dumped. For the first time, I understood that my mother wasn’t the only woman he’d loved. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but no one had ever mentioned Barbara before. My father revealed that their breakup hadn’t been easy. It hadn’t not been a blowup. He said it felt big at the time but then again, so did everything, when it came to your first love.
As that morning progressed into afternoon, we congregated in the backyard and soon began to talk about him as though he weren’t there. Sitting in a circle, we performed, effectively, his eulogy.
My mother, with typical drama, recalled how verbose he had been—God, the stories he would tell! You couldn’t get him to shut up. At that, I stole a glance at him, and he seemed to be smiling at the memory, as if he too were bidding a private farewell to the person he had been.
Aunt Kari commemorated the love she’d witnessed between him and Nan, what she called self-sacrificial commitment. Clearly touched, he took Nan’s hand, displaying the letters on their knuckles, still fresh with ink, almost aggressively bold, velvet black.
Lindsey said she’d never heard the story of their meeting, and my mother assured her, “This is a good one.”
Nan crossed her legs in preparation of the telling. She said they met during Vietnam. She’d been an administrator at Fort Benning, and he the worst recruit the United States had ever drafted. From the moment he touched down at basic training he hadn’t spoken a word that wasn’t in French. Instead of “Sir! Yes, sir!” he shouted, “Oui, monsieur! Oui!” His level of French was that of someone who’d taken three years in high school, thus what he was able to express was limited. A drill sergeant blackened his eye before he was detained in the on-base stockade and slapped with an Other Than Honorable Discharge. Nan was assigned to handle his paperwork and came to meet him on his first afternoon in the jail, where she fell under the impression that he was a Frenchman mistakenly conscripted into the U.S. Army. They shared what she called “a sweet kiss” and, imagining that if she were successful he might take her back with him to Paris, or Nice, or wherever in France he was from, she became determined to bring him justice. Eventually she hassled her supervisor with enough passion that an investigation was conducted which turned back that, no, he was not a Parisian but rather an utter moron. “By then I already knew,” she concluded, “that he was my moron.”
My sister laughed, but I only smiled. Now that my grandfather was no longer telling his stories, they seemed to be growing on their own, becoming more incredible in his silence. Around us, the air was humid and still. In the front yards stood dogwoods, magnolias, poplars, their yellowing leaves so perfectly still they began to look fake.
Later that afternoon, when my grandfather went for his daily bike ride, I decided to follow him. I thought that if I could trail him throughout his day it might tell me something about what was going on in his mind. Once he was at a good distance, pedaling on his old red Schwinn, I took its twin and set off. Were he to look back, I would wave, pretend that I was trying to catch up to him. He never looked back.
He biked at a steady pace. The bikes were for children, I realized, noticing how his knees rose toward the handlebars before noticing the way mine did the same. He was unexpectedly swift, and I felt winded. Spanning ahead the road was flat, faded asphalt, and in it were crushed pebbles and remnants of shells. Dried pine needles collected on the shoulder. He crossed the bridge over the river, up into the town square, where there was a post office, a few old houses, a boarded-up restaurant, a small church, and a gazebo in the middle of the town green. Someone was walking a dog. He raised a hand to whoever it was. A pickup drove past. It was such a quiet place that my grandparents always remarked on the passing cars; they knew whose was whose, and more than two cars during any outing was considered heavy traffic, a bother.
I had thought he would circle the town green and go back. But my grandfather continued past the church and down the road another half mile before turning abruptly left down a lane so narrow and tree covered that I almost missed it. I took the turn more unsteadily than he had and, rounding it, didn’t see him. The lane was winding; all the curves were blind. Along it were a few prefab houses, plain but with precisely kept front yards, overshadowed by tall white pines. Eventually the trees gave way to a wall of corn, impassive green stalks on either side of the road. The sun flooded in and strained my eyes. I hooked another blind turn and saw the bike—a flash of red—in a ditch about a hundred feet ahead. It was sideways, its wheels still spinning even as the bike itself was still.
I slowed to a halt. Just beyond the bike, on the far side of the ditch, was my grandfather, crouching exactly as he had been on the dock, knees to chest, at the foot of a small cross—two intersecting wooden bars, painted white—that had been dug into the earth. The cross was unaccompanied by wreaths or bouquets. It was the kind you could drive past a million times without seeing it. From the distance it seemed as if the paint was splintering, maybe molding. It looked old.
For a moment I observed quietly, one foot on a pedal, the other on the road. The high sun gave the place the feeling of a dream. There were no shadows beneath anything. It was peaceful, momentarily, but then full of little itches, gnats buzzing around my head, sweat rolling down my underarms, a mosquito suckling the back of my knee. I stood there until my grandfather dipped forward and touched his forehead to the earth.
I might have audibly exclaimed, let out a sigh of surprise, maybe disgust. I pushed off and rode back to the house where I found my mother in the kitchen. She was slicing a lemon and arranging its little disks in a pan of filleted perch. I asked how my grandfather’s brother—her uncle—had died. When the shooting happened.
She was matter-of-fact about it.
“I don’t remember,” she said.
“How old were you?” I asked.
“Young,” she replied airily.
I hadn’t expected her to give me any straight answers, so I’d already planned my countermove. “I should talk to him about it,” I said.
Uneasily, she swallowed. Surely she wanted her father to talk, about anything, just not about death. It would be easier for everyone, she seemed to think, if she could tell me the story herself.
“I was a kid,” she began, setting down the knife. The blade gleamed with juice. “My uncle Reggie was out with your grandfather, at a casino, I think at Colonial Beach.” I had been through Colonial Beach a few times and pictured it: empty piers, lone gulls, faded shopfronts where you could imagine people once roved rowdily, generations ago. Like a dried cocoon, something had been inside there once. “At some point,” my mother said, “there was a dispute, I mean about money. Your grandfather and Reggie were driving home when another vehicle apprehended them. A man, some thug, had some issue with your grandfather, and Reggie tried to intervene. And he was shot. He didn’t die right away. He went to the hospital, was there for a little while before he passed. I remember when Nan told us. She said, ‘Something happened.’ I remember we visited him in the hospital once. He didn’t know we were there, must have been asleep. I remember the shooter was apprehended and no one else got hurt, because of Reggie,” she said, “because of what he was willing to do.”
I noticed the walls then—how starkly bare they were. No shrines to the dead or to the living. Clean, I could imagine Nan saying, without any frames cluttering them.
“It’s hard,” my mother said. “I never heard much myself.”
Once everyone was asleep, Lindsey and I rifled around the house, in the refrigerator, the cupboards, for anything that wasn’t light beer, but my grandparents weren’t much of drinkers, and there was no liquor to be found.
I suggested a trip to the ABC store, but only if she paid. I felt liquor wasn’t worth what it would cost.
“I can’t,” she said. “I only have my credit card, and Stan will see.” Her husband had begun monitoring her alcohol consumption, I gathered.
We discovered a few Mike’s Hards in a cooler in the garage. The cooler seemed to have been forgotten, its lid covered in dust and belly-up ladybugs. The bottles were warm. We figured that, in a spirit of experiment, one of the grandparents had bought them for the other. We grimaced at the first sip. There was something perverse about the warm sweetly bitter lemonade—something enjoyable. It was as if, at our grandparents’ house, everything could be different from what it would be anywhere else. We pulled lawn chairs to the front yard, and with a few twigs picked up from the foot of the nearest pine, I started a fire in a fire pit that was just a few stones in a circle of sand. The fire didn’t last and was, in minutes, a pile of loosely arranged smoking sticks, but the smoke kept away the mosquitoes until the night fell thoroughly enough that they disappeared on their own. The only life left was ours.
“Any progress?” she asked eventually.
I thought she was asking about our grandfather, but she meant about my life.
“Ha ha,” I said.
“I’m serious,” she said. “What’s new?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m the same.”
She accused me of being my mother’s son, to which I said nothing.
“No word?” she pressed. “From Tala?”
“Not since the last time you asked.”
I only noticed Lindsey had been tense now that she no longer was. She seemed pleased. Neither Lindsey nor my mother had ever developed any liking toward Tala, and I struggled to understand why.
“You know it’s not your fault,” Lindsey reminded me.
“I know.” But the truth was that it mostly was.
I imagined I could have punched her, pushed her to the ground, and still she would have found a way to care for me. This I took as evidence—not that she loved me, but that I was serving some functional purpose for her. I often wanted to ask her exactly what it was but couldn’t get the words out. When she left it was with the stated intention of giving me space to decide how I felt about her, and two months later, I had to admit her plan was working. I missed her. A few days after she left, I called my parents, who called Lindsey, who called me to ask if I wanted to talk about it, but I had nothing to say. It hadn’t been a long relationship, but somehow that made it harder to think about, worse to lose. I still lived in the studio, which seemed smaller without the things she’d kept there. In the corner where she used to paint, I had put one of my own canvases. I’d begun layering murky colors, brown, navy, silver. The subject had yet to emerge.
Comparatively, Lindsey’s life couldn’t have looked better. She was occupied by only new things. In a matter of years she had acquired a boyfriend, a husband, a new house, a baby and, most recently, a newer house, clearly meant to be filled with more babies. I imagined that to own a house like hers required marrying someone like Stan, who was working a job that no one, not even Stan, could really describe. Once, he had mentioned a PowerPoint. Upon meeting him he struck all of us as very nice, with a full, clean beard, good posture, not a single actual fault.
I couldn’t get the energy to ask about him and instead asked, “How’s the house?” because even an inanimate dwelling somehow seemed more lively than Stan.
“Fine,” she said.
“The neighborhood? You like it?”
Lindsey winked into her bottle.
She then told the story of a neighbor with some problem, she wasn’t sure what, something of the mind, who lived in an old split-level at the end of her street and whose freezer had become so full of leftover lasagnas that he couldn’t close it. The lasagnas had begun to thaw and stink up the whole house, and there had been a neighborhood initiative to help the man bag up all the lasagnas and throw them out.
“Awful,” I said.
“No, it was nice,” she said. “To see people come together.”
“Awful for him, I meant.”
“He has neighbors, that’s my point,” she said. “It’s a good neighborhood. We help each other out.”
She seemed to be conjuring a set from a TV show. I wondered if that’s where she thought she lived. I wondered if that’s where I wanted to live.
“Your neighbor doesn’t have an aide?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess not.”
“He needs an aide,” I decided, “and a nurse.”
“Okay,” she said. Then after a moment: “But who will pay for this man’s aide and nurse?”
I shrugged. “The government.”
“And who will pay the government?”
“The wealthy.” I caught her eyes, cracked a smile. “Not me! I’m poor.”
We shared a laugh beneath which was the suspicion that I could have been a wealthy taxpayer if only I had chosen to be, and who knows, maybe I could have been. I had done decently enough in college, as in, I had gone, and graduated. Surely I could have done something like Stan. That had always been the expectation, that although I was shy I would one day justify my shyness by revealing that it was the trait of a quiet genius, and “genius,” to my family, meant wealth—triple sevens. “You just wait,” my grandfather would say. “Mark my words.” But I didn’t desire money. Of that I was certain. Maybe it was the anxiety of the desire that I didn’t desire—the clamorous, constant looking ahead.
For some reason, considering all this made me optimistic. I felt that I was facing up to something, even if I didn’t know what. The universe seemed to be expanding right there in the dark. I suggested to Lindsey that we get drunk together more often, and she told me she wasn’t drunk. She raised her bottle, and I raised mine.
It was a warm night, so in the front yard, I flipped on the garden hose and filled a blow-up pool our mother had bought for Reagan, a huge pink donut. Bugs, dead and alive, circled in the water as I filled it. With our lemonades, and in full clothes, we joined them, relaxing into the water where we hardly fit at all, our arms and legs dangling out, threatening to destroy the pool’s integrity, flatten and deflate it. Because we were no longer children, I wanted to cry, but Lindsey was laughing, and I was crying but laughing to cover it up. Then she was just crying.
I remembered the darkness that had passed over my weather app, the glitch or the omen, and readied myself for whatever was about to emerge through Lindsey’s tears.
It was nothing too horrible, and I was relieved. Her daughter wasn’t dying of cancer. Stan wasn’t cheating on her. She was only overwhelmed, she said.
“I keep thinking of how our time on earth is finite,” she said. “Like eighty years on average—we’re all very average.” How long she had been stewing over life’s brevity I could only guess, but I imagined it had something to do with Reagan, whose short burst of life, even for me, called attention to the short burst of everyone’s. “If you want something,” she went on, “you have to say it. You have to speak up for yourself.”
I thought her sermon was beautiful. I told her she was a beautiful person, inside and out, and that I hoped Stan would always recognize this.
“Maybe he just got bored,” I said of our grandfather. “Maybe talking bores him now.”
She entertained this. “He does get bored of things.”
“Maybe it’s a spiritual exercise.”
“A vow of silence,” she ventured.
“That’s what I mean,” I said.
“Nan doesn’t seem too bothered,” she said.
“She doesn’t,” I agreed, then after a minute: “They’re weird.”
I thought she and Stan were also weird. I thought my parents were weird too, and certainly Kari and her husband Mike, with his secret child, were as well. It made a lot of sense, from that view, that they in turn had found Tala and me weird.
I told Lindsey what I’d seen earlier: our grandfather prostrate over someone’s roadside memorial. I said I assumed it was his brother’s.
“No,” she said. “It’s not his brother’s. It’s his fiancée’s, his first fiancée’s. You don’t know this? He was engaged before Nan.”
I closed my eyes.
“He goes there every day,” she said.
I leaned back in exhaustion, and confusion, and the pool collapsed under my weight, water sloshing out over me into a puddle in the grass, where I also suddenly was, staring up at the stars which had never appeared to me more like the dust of shattered glass on a roadside. “Everyone knows?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “When they moved back here, he started going. I don’t know if he planned it, or if it just played out, or what. He’s been making these pilgrimages—that’s what they’re calling them, pilgrimages. I don’t know if that’s like a joke. I really don’t.” She went on, “They were high school sweethearts. He proposed, and they were engaged—engagements were shorter back then. They were going to get married. And then she was killed, and he was drafted. Car wreck. That’s all I know, that’s all.”
Instantly I could see them: a blond bob for her, a slim figure beside his, floating in the river, toes peeking through the surface. I wondered where they had left off, what business remained unaddressed, conversations never ended. I wondered when, in the middle of all this, his brother had died. I thought of my grandfather, throwing all of his money into slots. I thought of how, without us doing anything to incite them, horrible things could accrete, one on top of another.
From the backyard came a clatter. We fell completely still—I felt as though I were falling through myself. A shuffle of feet on the back deck, a voice.
With her eyebrows raised, Lindsey mouthed, “What the fuck,” as if fearing the worst, maybe an intruder, a burglar. But to me, it just sounded like someone was awake.
Quietly I stood, wet clothes sticking to my skin. She stood, and followed. The air cooled as it moved around us, as we crept over the yard, over the dandelions and plantain weeds.
We edged along the side of the house, peered around the corner, and in the moonlight saw two figures, the hunched forms of our grandparents, disappearing down the path to the dock. They had the posture of burglars in a cartoon, progressing down the footpath on their tiptoes. They were naked, a fact I didn’t immediately comprehend, until, in the moonlight, I saw the undeniable plane of my grandfather’s back continuing uninterrupted toward the dark slash of a butt crack. Then he, it—the crack—disappeared. There was a splash.
We listened for a minute, but they weren’t saying anything. I felt the urge to disappear but lingered another moment. Through the trees we saw ripples of moonlight where they were treading, disturbing the water. I wondered if they were disturbing the oysters nearby, resting on top of each other in their cages. I thought of all the sediment and seaweed that would never stop washing over them. I thought of the shells we shucked every winter, where, inside, their fat hearts were waiting to be scooped out and eaten.
