Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [105]
At Philbin Beach, we’re close. He asks if I want to keep going, and I say yes.
“Come here.” He’s standing on the rubble of rocks under the cliffs. “Give me your hand,” he says, pushing his own against the face. I move in over whale-colored boulders and touch. It’s wet, weeping almost—Spring’s pulse hidden within. I look at him, and he can tell what I’m thinking. “It’s alive,” he says. He runs his finger along a flaky ridge and dabs my forehead yellow. Then his own. There, I think.
It’s cold, but the sun is strong, and he’s talking about moraines and fossils, the Ice Age and clay. I smile and press my back against a dry patch of cliff and listen. What’s a moraine, I ask, and he tells me. It’s the end place, the farthest reach of ice, the finish of advance and retreat. He points to a round, banded rock rising from the water. It could be from Vermont—even Canada—dragged here as the ice scraped south thousands and thousands of years ago, carrying sediment and till. And in the cliffs—pieces of ancient whale and shark, a polished tooth, a rib, a jaw, a shard of wild horse, a wisp of camel. When he was younger, he used to come here with friends, and they’d strip down and paint their bodies with the clay. Warriors.
I look at him—his face is shining—and stretch my arm across the crumbling rock to find him. The words fall over me. I let them. The stories the bones tell. The life that was here.
I have a dream about John. It’s one I’ve had for years. At first after he died, it came all at once, for days in a row, but now it’s less frequent. It’s always on a beach at dusk——the light low, the colored sky deepening. It could be Montauk, where I’m writing this book, or Zack’s Beach on the Vineyard, or the great wide swath at Cumberland, or even California. But there are cliffs in the dream, red cliffs. Like in the tale he told when he first took me to Gay Head Lighthouse. Red from Moshup’s whales. Black from the soot of his fires.
I look up. He’s there—coming toward me, hands pushed in his pockets, grinning so wild it makes me laugh. “How are you here?” I keep saying. “How are you here?” He doesn’t answer. He looks at me, proud to have come this far.
Better not waste time. I know from before that I don’t have long. I think he can’t touch me, but he does and he’s warm. We sit together on the sand and watch the water. And next to him, in the dream, I feel I am most like myself. Then we walk fast and talk fast. All the things only that person can know. I point to a small boulder down the beach. “When we reach that rock, you will leave me,” I say. As if it is too much, too selfish to have him this long, and I don’t want any surprises. I tell him how my life has been, things he may not know, secrets. But he knows everything. “What my friends tell me,” he says, and we leave it at that.
When we’re close to the rock, I turn to ask him something. But he’s gone, already in the water. I see his back, a long lean dive breaking the surface of gray-green. “Hey—come back,” I shout. “Goodbye, you didn’t say goodbye.” Sometimes I yell, angry, “You forgot to say goodbye!” Then I laugh; it’s just like him. But after a while, when the trail through the water disappears, I just stand there.
I don’t know when, I tell myself in the dream, but he will come back when I least expect it, and it will be on a beach like this one.
From the shallows, Moshup watches. In legend, he watches his children and, to keep them free, turns them into sharks. I believe he watches John. And he watches the girl, he sees the girl. But if you were looking, you would see a woman alone on an empty beach, heavier than she once was, speaking to the waves as if they hear her.
The next day, we leave, and whatever spell’s between us is still there. It’s been seven months since August,