He nodded slowly and lowered himself into one of the rusty metal chairs on the back porch. It was only then that the oddity of his initial question struck me. How had he known that Laura was not in the house, not sleeping in her bed like his wife was? I know that the question rose in my mind that morning, but only in a child’s mind, quick, glancing, devoid of further investigation. It was not until I’d related the whole story of that morning to Rebecca that the answer actually occurred to me.
“He had expected to find her waiting for him on the porch,” I told her. “And when he walked out onto the back porch and saw she wasn’t there, he knew something was wrong.”
“What did he do?”
“He had another cup of coffee.”
And another and another, while the sun rose steadily and my mother slept mindlessly, and I wandered in the backyard, glancing apprehensively toward him from time to time. Something had gone wrong, and I knew it; some mysterious and confusing element had entered into our lives. I could see it in my father’s face. For even though his features remained very still, I could sense that wheels were spinning wildly behind them.
My mother got up at around ten that morning, but she didn’t join my father on the back porch. Instead, she mechanically made breakfast for herself, the usual boiled egg and toast, then walked out into the living room and ate it absently, as if it were merely tasteless fodder, fit for nothing but the maintenance of life.
I went out to play in the backyard. Mr. Lawford’s spaniel spotted me and ran over for another round of tussling in the grass, and this occupied me fully for quite some time. The strange dread I’d felt vanished in the frolic, and so it was not until I saw my father come to his feet that I even noticed that he still remained on the back porch.
He stood very tall, a lean man with wavy black hair, the checked shirt billowing slightly as he came out into the yard. He didn’t notice me at all, but walked directly to the edge of the yard, the place where it began its sharp decline toward the beach.
I walked over to him and stood at his side, looking down, as he did, toward Laura.
“Laura came back about an hour later,” I told Rebecca, “but not by way of the road. She came up the beach instead, and she was alone.”
Alone, because she must have known that whatever lie I’d come up with to tell my father, it surely hadn’t included Teddy.
Standing beside my father, I could see her moving slowly, her head bowed slightly, as if she were looking for shells. She was barefoot, her brown leather sandals dangling from one hand, as she waded through the weaving lines of white lacy foam.
“There she is.”
That was all my father said, and it was no more than a whisper, three words carried on a single, expelled breath. Then he returned to the house, without waiting, as I did, for Laura to make the hard climb up the stairs along the sandy hill to our cottage.
She was out of breath by the time she reached me, her long hair slightly moist with sea spray. She wasted no time in getting to the subject:
“I saw Dad up here.”
“He went back into the house.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That I didn’t know where you were.”
“Good. Thanks, Stevie.”
“Where were you, Laura?”
She didn’t answer me, but only walked directly back to the house and joined my father on the small back porch. While I played in the backyard, I could see them sitting together, their faces gray behind the screen, smoke from my father’s cigarette drifting out into the summer air.
A few hours later we all went down to the beach, trudging cautiously through the deep sea grass, my father lugging a huge picnic basket, Jamie dragging along behind, looking as morose as he had the preceding day.
Teddy came bounding down a few minutes later. My mother invited him to have one of the ham sandwiches she’d made, and he accepted without hesitation. For a time, he chatted amiably with us all, although his eyes often fell upon Laura with a deadly earnest. Neither of them gave the slightest impression of having met earlier that morning, but I remember having the distinct impression that my father knew that they had. Perhaps Laura had told him while the two of them sat behind the gray screen. Or perhaps he’d sensed it in the looks that sometimes passed between Teddy and Laura while we all sat together on the blanket my mother had spread over the sand.
It was very hot that day, and not long after lunch, Laura, Teddy, and I all went into the water for relief. My mother, who never swam, gathered everything up and wandered back to the house, leaving my father alone on the beach. He sat there for several hours, his long legs sticking out of a dark blue bathing suit, watching us distantly, with that strange attitude of concentration which I’d only seen in the basement before, and which I associated only with the assembling of fancy European bicycles. And yet it was there on his face, that look of intense study and attention.
It was not directed at me, of course, but at Laura and Teddy as they moved farther and farther out into the sea. Glancing toward them from time to time, I would see hardly more than two heads bobbing happily in the blue water, although I am sure now that my father saw a good deal more.
Rebecca looked at me quizzically. “What more did your father see?” she asked. “I mean besides what was obvious, two teenagers attracted to each other.”
“I’m not sure, but I think it was something about life.” I remembered Rebecca’s earlier remark about what she was looking for in these men. “Maybe something unbearable,” I added.
I could see my father’s face as it had appeared that day. Although in his youth he’d been a pale, skinny boy, middle age had filled him out a bit. He was still slender, of course, but his face had aged into an unmistakable handsomeness, his sharper features less bird-like, the eyes more deeply set and piercing. His curly black hair framed his face well, and when the wind tossed it, as it did that afternoon, it gave him a wild, curiously appealing
