Comforting words, particularly when spoken in the high-pitched cadence of a shaven-headed monk, but hours later it had seemed like nonsense. Sarah wasn’t a wave. The water had killed her.
We stood ten feet from the shoreline, Amy and I each holding a vanilla ice cream cone with rainbow sprinkles and a maraschino cherry. Sunlight skimmed the top of the water as the gulls flew low, squawking and trolling for fish. We had hoped to be alone, but it was close to eighty degrees and the bright almost-summer sun was like a sign on the dunes reading “Hey, we’re open. Welcome back!” There were mothers with kids playing in the sand, seniors in baseball caps counting off their daily steps, a familiar-looking guy in a town uniform picking up beer cans, another guy scraping bird shit off the lifeguard chair. Just another day at the beach.
I wanted to say something touching or wise, but every thought that strived for the elegiac crash-landed in the boneyards of the trite and the tedious. Maybe, after all this time, there was nothing left to say.
“This might be the last time I do this,” Amy said. “At the hospital Sheri keeps talking about closure. No matter what I say, the answer is closure. Closure this, closure that …sometimes I want to scream, ‘how about some closure on the goddamn closure?’ But I think she’s on to something. No more secrets, Donnie. No more being stuck. From now on, we move forward, right?”
“Right,” I said, but did I mean it? Had anyone asked, I would have sworn on a Bible signed by God Himself that I wanted Amy to “let go” of the past, but now that the possibility seemed real, I felt apprehensive. I’ve been playing the role of Donatello-Who-Loves-Amy-Who-Fell-Asleep-And-Let-Sarah-Die for my entire adult life—I had all the lines memorized; I inhabited the character with such intensity even Stanislavsky might have raved. But who exactly was this Donatello character without that?
Time to find out, I thought. Suddenly the diamond ring in my pocket felt juvenile and stupid.
A trio of sandpipers popped in front of us, poking around chirping poo-tee-weet. I’m sure Amy thought it, too—Sarah had loved running after them, flapping her arms and making bird-sounds, running in crazy circles across the sand.
We finished our cones, and I took Amy’s hand.
“I feel like I should say something.”
“No, you don’t,” Amy said. “Let’s just walk for a while, okay?”
The damp sand felt cool beneath our feet as we headed north, the sun behind us as we followed the shoreline. I thought about Sarah—what else could I think about? The first time I met her, she was only two. Amy was babysitting at Laura’s house, and she told me to meet her there during my break. I was only fifteen but already working at the Jaybird; I told Uncle Dan I needed to do homework and ran the six blocks to meet up with Amy, thinking we’d make out on the couch while the kid—I didn’t even know yet if “the kid” was a boy or a girl—slept upstairs, out of sight. Yet when I arrived I found a curly-haired blonde girl in red pajamas sitting wide awake on the sofa holding a teddy bear and snacking from a Dixie cup filled with Cap’n Crunch; it was Amy who was napping, her head propped against the cushions, her mouth half-open, snoring lightly.
“Hi,” I said, bracing for the two-year-old to pitch a fit over some strange dude standing in her living room, but instead she waved and said, “Hi,” right back, like she’d been waiting for me, as if I came through the front door to see her every night. She offered me some cereal and shook Amy awake, and for the next hour the three of us played teddy bears and stuffed kangaroos; we played Hide and Go Seek, and Tag, and Sarah climbed on my back for a Magic Unicorn Ride, Amy finding an empty toilet paper roll and taping it to my forehead for the full unicorn effect. When it was time for me to leave, Sarah looked up with those two-year-old eyes and called me Duck for the first time.
“Duck, don’t go,” she said, and suddenly I felt wanted. Had I been anyone but the boy who’d been left on the stoop in a pizza box, the moment might have carried little weight. But I was that boy. I don’t remember when I realized that I loved her, but I knew it with more certainty than I knew almost anything. My family was Uncle Dan; that was it—until Amy, Sarah, and I formed a family of our own.
As we walked along the shoreline, the crowd began to thin until suddenly it was just the two of us. Beach towns are like that sometimes—everyone clusters within these invisible boundaries, as if worried they might turn a corner and find the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the ocean like at the end of Planet of the Apes. I was grateful for the solitude, not that I was thinking “great thoughts.” I tried to focus on Sarah, but my mind was like a box of unedited film loops, all these jumbled brain waves about Amy and Kelly and Sarah, Uncle Dan and Nancy, even my meeting with George about The Revolving Heart. All I knew was that over the next few weeks I had
