One morning, when Grace is feeding the children, she hears, through the screened window, the surf smash against the rocks two streets over at the beach. It isn’t that she has never heard the surf from her house before; it’s that it seems especially noisy this clear summer’s day, a paradox that perplexes her.
With Claire walking beside her and Tom in the carriage under a small umbrella Grace rigged to the hood of the carriage, she visits the beach. She can’t get any closer than the sidewalk opposite the seawall, breeched every time a tall wave comes at it. She has never seen the surf so high. She notes that the residents of the houses that sit directly across from the seawall have come out to stare. Claire jumps up and down and shivers with delight and fear. Just as it seems that a wave will send its spray so high that it will cross the street and catch her, it pounds the wall and slithers away in the undertow.
A woman Grace has never seen before stands beside her and says, “If it takes the house, I got nothing.”
“It won’t do that. There’s no wind.”
“It isn’t even high tide yet,” the woman, in a green housedress, points out.
If Grace paid any attention to the tide chart that Gene pinned to the inside of the cellar door, she would know this. “There must have been a storm out to sea.”
“Beats me. Scary as hell though.” The woman seems to have a small head, but it’s an illusion because it’s covered in pin curls. She must have bad eyesight, though: Few women would wear glasses outside the home. Hers are oval in slender gold frames. “You live on the street, too? I haven’t seen you around,” the woman asks.
“I live two streets back.”
“Oh well then, you’re all right.” The woman stares at Grace’s children. “George and me, we couldn’t have them.”
“I’m sorry,” Grace says, taken aback by the revelation. “If you wanted them, I mean.”
“I wanted them all right. As for George, I can’t say. He’s long gone.” Arms crossed, the woman asks through thin, tight lips, “You like your husband?”
“I do.”
“You hang on to him. Life’s too damn hard without one.”
Grace watches her retreat into her house. Will she board up her windows? Fill sandbags? Should Grace have offered to help? How the woman must hate her and her house safely two streets back with a husband and two children in it.
The surf rises as high as the trees behind her. The spray wets the road. What are these messages from elsewhere? It’s impossible at this moment not to think the sea menacing. To give it a mind, and an angry one at that.
In the evening, when Grace is making dinner, Rosie calls to her over the side fence to tell her of the accident. When the waves settled, two men and a young boy, maybe seven or eight years old, visited the beach to fish. One of the men went into the water to untangle his line and was swept out to sea in a riptide, a not uncommon occurrence after a storm. The other man ran for help while the boy screamed and did jumping jacks on the sand.
“The fisherman drowned, and the lifesaving service is waiting for his body to wash ashore,” Rosie says. “Nobody in town knows the men.”
“And what about the boy?” Grace asks.
“It was his father. Awful, isn’t it?”
A few minutes later, after Rosie leaves, Grace stands with a potato and a peeler in her hands, her wrists resting against the lip of the sink, and cries. She didn’t for Merle, and yet she does for a fatherless boy and a man she has never known. The sea claimed its prize after all.
“What’s wrong?” Gene asks as he walks into the house.
“Onions.”
She can’t tell Gene about the accident without fear of tearing up. Gene will register once again that she didn’t weep for his mother.
Gene’s grief is as Grace imagined it. He hardly speaks at the dinner table. Even Claire has stopped chatting to him. Usually, he will say one sentence to Grace, as if fulfilling his husbandly duty. More often than not, it’s an odd fact she can’t do anything with.
“You can go a mile a minute on the Turnpike.”
“That’s fast.”
Gene doesn’t respond. He’s done for the evening.
Rosie says, “Give him time. When Tim’s father died, it took him two years to get back to normal.”
“My mother, too,” Grace says, rounding four down to two. “But these are important years for Claire and Tom.”
“Gene doesn’t interact with them at all?” Rosie asks.
“Nothing.”
Rosie dips her fingers into the sand. She’s fully clothed and has on a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses while she sits under an umbrella. Even so, she can only stay an hour on the beach. Today the waves run like children up the sand.
“How is he in bed?” Rosie asks.
Grace blushes, hoping her tan hides her embarrassment, her despair, her relief. “The same,” she says.
“Tim was a madman. It was all he wanted to do.”
“Proving he was still alive,” Grace says.
“One part of him was alive all right.” Rosie flops back onto the sand, stretching her arms over her head. “I couldn’t walk for months,” she cries, making it clear she loved every minute.
Grace finds this nearly incomprehensible. Is Rosie to be envied or pitied? Envied, if it makes her as happy as it seems to. It’s an arena in which Grace can add nothing, Gene not having been near her in more than two months.
Grace decides it’s her duty to help to relieve her husband’s grief. She gives herself a sponge bath in the washroom and dresses in her cotton nightgown. She lies on her stomach in the bed and draws the nightgown high up on her thighs. She has left the top sheet to dangle from the foot of the bed. This is as clear a signal as she can possibly give her husband without discussing the matter.
She can hear Gene’s tread on the stairway. He walks into the room and stops short. He seems to be looking at her, but she can’t hear the sounds of him undressing. No belt unbuckling, no stepping out of his shoes, no sliding of cloth along his legs. She bites her lip and puts her face directly into the pillow. She’s aware of him sitting on his side of the bed, the mattress depressing, then the sounds of the belt, the shoes, the pants. He lies beside her and brings the sheet up, making sure it covers her shoulders, almost but not quite touching her with his fingers. Then the slight tug on the sheet as he rolls away from her.