“Maybe. Probably we should’ve procured some sort of permit. Good thing my silence can be bought with a couple bottles of Shiner and a perfectly dug fire pit, huh?” She grinned and I laughed, which felt really good.
June wasn’t a month that required a fire for warmth—not by a long shot. The heat of the day and the never-ending humidity felt like sitting under a lukewarm wet towel, even if the south wind off the gulf was cool. But Pearl had always liked campfires on the beach. Sometimes, back in high school, I’d catch her staring into the flames like she’d been hypnotized. So I used the shovel to dig a pit, and now we were parked on a blanket between the open cooler and the blaze.
She lay back and looked straight up. “God, I’ve missed this sky, all crammed full of stars. I could be here all night, tracing constellations.” Stretching a finger to connect the pinpricked dots overhead, she said, “There’s Ursa Minor—the Little Dipper.”
I had a splintered memory of my mom, holding me on her lap, using my finger to outline skeleton patterns in the sky—Ursa Major and the sea serpent and Leo, my birth constellation.
“Most stars fade out in big cities because of light pollution—all the headlights and streetlights and landscaping lights. So much artificial prettiness at the expense of real beauty,” she said. “Nothing makes me feel how small and insignificant I am, how fleeting life is, like the sky and the ocean. And here they are, in one place.”
“You want to feel insignificant?”
“I want to feel what’s true. And the truth is our lives are short and so often they seem to mean nothing. Even lives that seem important, like scientists who discover cures to horrible diseases or humanitarians… If we step back and view human beings—all of us—as part of the history of the universe, do we matter?” She paused, sighing. “Do you think when we’re dead, we’re dead, or that we become something else? It seems so pointless otherwise.”
Leaning back on my hands, I stared into the dark where the water lapped at the sand. “What does?”
“Life.”
I pushed my alarm aside. Pearl wasn’t suicidal, just muddled over weightier matters than most people contemplated or worried on, because they couldn’t really be solved. That, I got. It was the place we’d always met. “Those are some big questions. Pretty sure lots smarter people than me have argued over those things for a long damned time.” I smiled down at her. “No one seems to have reached an agreement, near as I can tell.”
“Yeah, I know.” She turned on her side to face me, folding her arm under her head. “But what do you think?”
I chuckled and glanced at the empty bottle just behind her on the sand. She was a little two-beer lightweight who got all metaphysically curious when loaded instead of drunk-dialing an ex like everyone else. No surprise there. “What difference does it make what I think? My opinion doesn’t matter in anyone’s grand scheme of things.”
“It matters to me,” she said, dark eyes probing mine as if I had the answer to her philosophical uncertainties and she meant to dig it loose.
I pondered her question, unsure it had an answer and even less sure I was capable of finding it. “Okay. Well. I think life is like a test on a subject we came in not knowing much about. We do the best we can, and we find out after it’s over how we did. Or maybe we don’t ever find out. But when you say my opinion matters, doesn’t that eliminate the option of life being pointless?”
“My life, because your opinion matters to me, or your life, because yours is the opinion that matters?”
“Both.” I paused and she waited for me to gather my thoughts. “What if all humanity is like a mechanical creature—made up of millions of parts, all working together, but sometimes not? Parts break or wear out or malfunction and have to be replaced by other, newer parts. And that keeps the whole thing going indefinitely, as long as new parts exist to replace the old ones.”
She flopped onto her back and sighed. “But we’re still just interchangeable parts then. We’ll eventually wear out and get replaced and not matter.”
I grinned and shook my head. “You’re making a sorry case for pointless with that pity party. None of us live forever—we all learn that early on. But maybe you’re one of the important parts. Maybe my dad served his purpose when he fathered me, and I served my purpose when I pulled you out of that ocean you keep wanting to dive back into.”
She was quiet for a heartbeat before turning her head to look at me. “That’s not true, Boyce.”
When she didn’t say anything more, I lit a cigarette and dug my toes into the sand at the edge of the blanket. The breeze pulled the smoke out over the water where it dissipated into the darkness.
“You’re trying to figure out where you fit,” I said. “That’s one of the cool things about you. The fact that you care about things like what kind of difference you can make and how to make it. That’s why I can’t believe people like you, people like Brent, would be born into the world for no reason.”
“I didn’t—I didn’t mean he—”
“I know you didn’t. Maybe I can’t be impartial where you and Brent are concerned. I’ve always been a self-centered son of a bitch, y’know. Everything eventually comes back to how it affects me.” I took a drag and smiled down at her. “Looks like that includes your existence, sweetheart.”
Pearl
When Thomas brought that enormous lightning whelk shell in with the morning paper, I knew Boyce had left it for me. I hadn’t seen him or heard him leave it, and I wasn’t psychic. I just recognized his shirt—a green baseball tee with dark green three-quarter sleeves. He’d filled it out better than any boy on the actual baseball team would have, and the green in his eyes, usually indistinct from across the lab table, glowed when he wore it.
I had no idea what it meant that he left that shell on my front porch. At fourteen, the motives of sixteen-year-old boys baffled me in general, but Boyce—kissing me cross-eyed one night and acting like it hadn’t happened a few days later—left me bewildered.
Crusted with barnacles and marsh weeds, packed full of sand, the shell would have been an odd gift for anyone but me. I loved it, apart from Boyce and his intentions. But I loved it all the more because he gave it to me. I spent the day digging the sand out of the deep aperture and scrubbing the outer whorls and crevices with an old toothbrush. Once it was clean, I polished it with mineral oil and set it on my desk.
“I wonder who put that shell on our front porch and why?” Mama asked at dinner.
I shrugged and stared at my plate.