A Hole in the Universe - Mary McGarry Morris [111]
Taking only back roads, she had to keep slowing down. With every turn, she expected him to protest or at least ask where they were going. When she came onto the beach road in Hampton, she rolled down the windows. The tide was low, the warm, boggy marsh smell that filled the car almost obscene with its rich, rank ripeness.
“Isn’t that wonderful?” She took a deep breath, but he didn’t answer. “You’re not mad, are you? I thought you needed a change, that’s all. You know, seeing the same thing all the time, the city streets and all the same people.”
“Oh no, I just can’t believe I forgot this.” He strained to see over the white seawall along the curving shoreline road. “I forgot all about the ocean. I always tried to remember things. Things in rooms, rooms in other people’s houses, their yards even. Kids’ bikes, the way I used to walk to school, where everyone sat in homeroom and all the other classes. And my mother’s clothes. I used to try and remember even what dresses she had and the songs my father used to hum to himself when he was working on something. Like something for my mother, he’d go”—here now, Gordon hummed “Here Comes the Bride” so sweetly that she ached for him—“or if it got really complicated and he was having a hard time, he’d always go”—he hummed a frantic rendition of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.” “It was like an exercise. A discipline. Because remembering was all I had left, and if I forgot, I’d be losing part of . . . I don’t even know what.”
Yourself, she thought as his voice trailed off. She pulled into the public parking lot in Rye. The tide was out a great distance, exposing large rocks she didn’t remember seeing before. She and Albert used to walk on the beach at night when they first started dating. Did he take Katie here? she wondered in a flare of jealousy. But what did it matter? She had never been happier than now, at this very moment. Gordon was the dearest, most honorable man she had ever known. And there was no more beautiful place than this, this beach at dusk. Bands of pink and lavender glowed with the horizon across the wet sand. Behind them, the rose-colored sunset streaked the sky with fiery light. Straggles of people walked and jogged along the beach. Two boys took turns throwing a tennis ball that a bearish black dog chased, crashing time after time into the surf, then galloped back, wet fur flapping. A small yellow plane was flying up the coast. It dipped over the low waves then lifted suddenly, skimming the treetops on Straw’s Point before it disappeared.
“I forgot about those, too.” Gordon pointed out to the Isles of Shoals, where the first darkness loomed behind the distant islands.
She suggested they get out and walk, and he surprised her by saying yes. She left her shoes in the car, but he kept his on. They were halfway down the beach when the first rim of moonrise appeared over the water. Astonished, Gordon stopped. “Look at that! I never saw that before,” he said. All along the way, others paused to watch the bloodred ascent until it was finally full in the pale night sky. They began walking again. She tripped a little and caught his arm. Apologizing, she pulled back. “That’s okay,” he said quietly.
“I thought I was going to fall.”
“Better hold on, then.” He lifted his elbow. “There’s a lot of holes.”
“Kids dig them,” she said, easing her hand into the crook of his arm.
He must have been eleven or twelve the last time he saw the ocean, he said.