My first guess was the bunker, since that was the only dry place for miles around, but there was no one there. Even the mother cat and her kittens had disappeared. I shone my flashlight over the gray walls, the obscene drawings and carvings that, in the glow of the flashlight, suddenly looked prehistoric.
When I left the bunker, my back bent, my head bowed, a pair of shoes appeared in the glow of the flashlight. My fear lasted only a moment. I didn’t need to raise my head or shine upward. I knew who belonged to those feet.
Wet and windblown, the collar of his coat held together with both hands and his hair plastered around his face, was my father. He looked at me, shook his head, and then motioned toward the bunker.
When we were crouched down across from each other, our backs to the wall, the flashlight like a cold campfire between the bottles and cigarette butts on the ground, he pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his coat pocket, fished out a rain-soaked Lucky, and lit it. The cigarette went out after two puffs. He looked at it for a moment and then tossed it away.
“What,” he said, “is going on here?”
I took a deep breath and began telling him what had happened in the last few hours, how we had found Coe on the beach, that I had skinned and roasted a hare, that we had eaten, and how, later that night, I had been woken up by the front door blowing open and shut. I said nothing about the parachute or my grandmother.
My father listened silently and when I’d finished, told me that he had arrived on the last train, got lost in the rain, warmed up in a café with coffee and a glass of cognac, and finally, around midnight, had arrived at my grandparents’ house. The door stood open. There was no one downstairs, my mother’s room was empty and the bed unslept in, I was sound asleep. So he had gone back outside, in search. Seeing as how he didn’t know the surroundings as well as I did, he had wandered around for a long time in the wet darkness before ending up at the bunker.
We sat opposite each other and stared at the wet sand between us. My father seemed to be thinking. The thumb and middle finger of his left hand massaged his temples and his eyes were closed.
“You go back,” he said after a while, “I’ll keep looking.”
I didn’t think that was a very good idea. Two would see more than one, and I knew the dunes far better than he did. Besides, I was wide awake and could never fall back to sleep knowing that my entire family was roaming around, through wind and rain, in the dead of night. My father nodded thoughtfully. Then he shook his head and beckoned.
It’s funny how you can always see the surf, even on a rainy night. The crests of the waves, when we got to the beach, looked like pale ghosts trying to escape from a hellish darkness, and you could clearly hear, even in the pouring rain, their deep, muffled groans. My father’s hand lay on my left shoulder and every now and then, as we walked along the tidemark, he steered me so that the beams of the flashlight fell here, then there.
We plodded left, so that we would be walking against the wind and rain, and walked half an hour without seeing anything but sand and water and darkness. Then, when we could just make out the lighthouse at the mouth of the harbor, we slowed down and turned our backs to the wind. My father drew his hand through his wet hair, brushing it out of his eyes.
“Why don’t we walk back through the dunes?” I yelled against the wind. “We’ll be sheltered from the rain, and it’ll give us a chance to look around there.”
But the dunes weren’t much better than the beach. We had a hard time finding the path, and once we did, the sand was so soft and wet that it was another hour before we spotted the bunker. I shone my flashlight, which was growing steadily weaker, inside, and then we headed back for the house.
Downstairs, in the sun lounge, the lights were on. The glow from the windows beckoned to us, and suddenly I felt how cold and wet and tired I was. I shivered in my windbreaker. My face was numb and my legs were so wet that my trousers chafed my skin. We went up to the windows and saw Coe sitting in an armchair, slumped, his head hung low. My mother sat in front of him on the ground, her hair loose and dark with rain. For a minute, maybe less, we looked at this strange tableau. Then my father raised his hand and tapped on the glass.
Four
SOMETIMES A CHILD—ELBOWS ON THE WORKBENCH, chin cupped in his or her hands, eyes locked on the ball—asks me if “it” is for sale.
“It,” I say, “it is mine.”
Nine boys and two girls, all of them of exotic ethnic descent, all of them speak the kind of hip urban lingo that keeps reminding me of rusty barbed wire. Eleven faces that look up and wait for me to tell The Story, the story of How It Was and How It Began. It. I pick it up, weigh it, and feign deep thoughts that have drifted off, far away, long ago, a different world, when we were good and the summers long and hot. Sticky tubes of glue are being dropped, brushes laid aside. Mouths open, eyes glaze over. Behind those eleven faces an eyebrow curves in a woman’s
