The Sky Beneath My Feet

Chapter 15


A Little Rain Must Fall





For breakfast, it’s convenience-store donuts and French press coffee on the tiny back porch of the beach house. In the light of morning, I find that Stacy’s beach house isn’t as modest as it seemed last night. While small, the house reeks of luxury, from the frosted glass blocks that enclose the shower to the marble tile that covers all the floors. Staying here is a bit like I imagine living on a yacht would be.

“I could get used to this,” Holly says.

On the refrigerator in the compact kitchen there’s a laminated set of house rules. It’s not unusual, according to her, for rich people accustomed to loaning out properties like this to post rules for their unsupervised guests. It seems a little strange to me, though.

“Beth, what are you wearing?”

Holly’s closet, unlike mine, extends to the resort wear category, thanks to which she sports a gold-fringed wrap over her two-piece and massive designer sunglasses. Meanwhile I’m turning heads with an oversized Ravens T-shirt of Rick’s, liberated at the last moment from the laundry pile (the clean pile, I’m pretty sure).

“Hey, I’m not trying to impress anyone.”

She smiles. “Mission accomplished.”

A strong wind blows over the ocean, chopping the waves. It’s an overcast morning, and there’s no one on the beach in either direction. The sand looks grayish white.

“Is it weird to you that nobody’s at the beach?” Holly asks.

“To tell you the truth, I prefer it that way.”

“And I guess you prefer it without sun too?”

I shrug. “You have to be careful with porcelain skin like mine.”

“Spoilsport.” She lowers her glasses and gives the beach a hard look. “Beth, seriously. I have a bad feeling about this.”

I lower my white plastics. “Looks like rain. So what? The ocean is full of water, so you’re bound to get wet one way or the other. Don’t worry about it.”

“Hmm,” she says, snapping the big sunglasses in place.

While I finish my coffee, she goes inside and tries to figure out how to turn on the flat-screen TV in the little sitting area adjoining the kitchen. There are about a thousand buttons on the remote, and I gave up fiddling with them. Besides, I don’t mind a few dark clouds and a little rain. I’ve never been a sun-and-surf sort of girl. Anything that keeps the beach crowd-free is a plus in my book. I had enough of crowds at the D.C. demonstration to last me a good long time.

Off to the left, a path of wooden steps descends down the slope to the beach, hemmed in on either side by weather-beaten rails. At the foot of the slope, there’s a sort of grass hut straight out of a 1950s tiki lounge. Taking my mug with me, I go down to check it out.

“Beth, come look at this,” Holly calls, but I’m already down the steps.

“In a minute.”

I’m sure the original plan for the tiki hut included stainless steel grills, slabs of granite, and a fancy outdoor shower, but erecting the structure was as far as they got. Under the grass roof, there are a couple of folding lounge chairs, but that’s it. The wind whips at the corner of the roof, stirring the grass like the fringe on Holly’s wrap. I like it down here.

“Beth, really. Come here.”

I climb the steps and join her in front of the television, where a local newscaster is talking over some storm-tracker satellite images.

“Guess what?” Holly says. “It’s hurricane season. Can you believe this? We drove fifteen hours to get to the beach just in time for a hurricane. Are we the stupidest people in the world, or what?”

Thinking back to the convenience store, the missing water and the empty shelves suddenly make a lot of sense. The guy behind the counter could have been a bit more forthcoming—but then, he probably assumed everybody knew. According to the weatherman, mandatory evacuation orders were issued overnight to a variety of locations, but my knowledge of the Florida geography is too sketchy for me to know whether we’re affected or not.

“How does the Sunday school song go?” she asks. “‘The house on the sand went splat.’” She slaps her hands together on the last word for emphasis. “I knew something was wrong.”

She settles on the edge of the small couch, the remote in her hand, staring wide-eyed at the coverage. I have to smile. The storm is just outside. If she turned her head a little to the right, she could see the black thunderheads on the horizon, the churning gunmetal ocean, the occasional swooping gull bright white against the backdrop. Instead, she’s glued to the screen, watching a meteorologist’s commentary on some time-lapsed images of what’s happening before our eyes.

Meanwhile, I feel strangely energized by the coming storm.

By energized, I mean that my skin starts tingling from the feet up. I begin to feel pent up in the little house, so much so that I have to go onto the porch just to feel like I can breathe again. The humid breeze, though hardly cool, raises goose bumps on my flesh, visible tremors of anticipation. I imagine towering waves crashing down, sandstorms whipped into the sky, fat raindrops breaking like hailstones on the roof, even though the actual scene is relatively calm: just darkness in the distance, an empty stretch of sand, and a preternatural brightness to everything, as if the ground is somehow giving off light on its own.

“Beth, you shouldn’t go out there.”

“I’m just going to have a look.”

I go back down the steps, past the tiki hut, my bare feet sinking in the smooth, fine sand. It must be high tide. The frothing waterline seems so near the edge of dry ground. The first wave to hit my feet sends cool spray up my legs. A thrilling sensation. I walk a few feet farther out, until the waves reach my knees. The whole idea of people throwing “hurricane parties” suddenly makes sense to me. We’re so accustomed to nature as a passive backdrop, something to look at or build on or destroy. When wind and water and sky rear up and announce their presence, we’re either afraid (like my friend) or weirdly intrigued. Something within us speaks to something in the storm, saying, It’s nice to know you’re there.

When I wander back to the house, the sand now plastered to my wet skin, Holly opens the glass screen door with a flutter of relief.

“Thank God you didn’t get sucked in,” she says. “I thought for sure you were gonna be swept out to sea, Beth. And I thought Rick was the crazy one in the family!”

“You should go out there. It’s exhilarating.”

“The good news is, it’s been downgraded. It’s not a hurricane anymore, just a tropical storm. It’ll touch ground farther down the coast, but we’ll still get a bucketload of rain.” As she relays the news, disappointment creeps into her voice, the same disappointment a panicked housewife might feel having to report that the escaped inmates from the prison have all been rounded up. Fear, too, can be exciting. People are funny that way, prone to regret, even when the thing we regret is the aversion of disaster.

“If it’s just a storm,” I say, “then you ought to come out. There’s a little grass hut at the bottom of the steps. You can at least venture that far.”

She looks dubious at first, but after leaning over the railing to examine the hut, she finally gathers some glossy magazines, a Diet Coke, and a tube of sunscreen (just in case). We pad down the steps and settle into the lounge chairs.

“Let’s at least drag them onto the beach,” I say.

But she prefers the dubious shelter of the grass roof, so we leave the chairs where they are. While the wind whips the pages of her oversized magazine, snapping them like sails and wafting sample perfume fragrances through the air, I recline the back of my chair, enjoying the calm before the storm.





Before I met Rick, before law school was more than a dream, before my parents divorced and my brother’s drinking almost wrecked his life, when I was a college freshman with just a semester under my belt, I went on a journey. No, not a journey: it was more of an odyssey. Not an odyssey so much as an obsession. Grief must have played a part, though I remember at the time feeling very calm, very detached. Finding the Quaker meetinghouse where Miss Hannah had taken me, the one with the square hole in the roof, appealed to me as an intellectual puzzle.

At least that’s what I told myself.

Never much of a navigator, I asked my father for help with the map. He had a road atlas, but the page devoted to Maryland offered too little detail, so we went to the service station for a foldout of the state. He opened it up on the curved hood of my old Beetle—that thing couldn’t outrun a lawn mower and the paint was so flaked you couldn’t tell what color it was meant to be, but I adored it anyway.

“Now let’s have ourselves a look,” my father said, smoothing down the map. “You think it was somewhere up north?” He traced his finger up the line of I-83 past Cockeysville all the way to the state line. “How long a drive was it? You wouldn’t have gone as far as Pennsylvania, I don’t suppose.”

I shrugged. “Maybe an hour? We were on the highway a little while, then on some country roads. There were a couple of little towns. We were talking the whole time, and I wasn’t really paying that much attention.”

“That’ll make it hard. What were you talking about?”

“My future. How I need to make something of my life. That kind of thing.”

“Like she made something of hers.”

I detected a note of irony in his voice. “Well, she did.”

“Yeah, I know. She never let anybody forget about it, did she?”

I’d always known Dad didn’t care too much for Miss Hannah. He’d never warmed to anybody on my mother’s side of the family, or their associates. When it was time for holiday visits, he always came down with a mysterious illness or had to work a few hours late. In Miss Hannah’s case, however, he was particularly annoyed. I sensed this throughout my teens, but never understood why.

“You didn’t like her, did you?” I asked him.

“I wouldn’t say that. I felt sorry for the old broad.”

“You felt sorry for her?”

I found the idea deeply shocking. In my eyes, Miss Hannah had always been a woman to admire. She was certainly no object of pity. She would have laughed at the very notion.

“Look, one day you’ll understand. She could’ve had a life, that lady. A husband and kids, a family. She could have done all right for herself, being a doctor. She wouldn’t have had to be alone.”

“She wasn’t alone,” I said. “She had friends like me.”

“Good. I’m glad you feel that way. All I’m saying is, when you catch the do-gooder virus, you lose a lot more than you ever gain.”

“Do-gooder?” The term sounded so old-fashioned, it made me laugh.

“You know what I mean. You couldn’t be around ol’ Hannah for ten minutes without her sizing up your life, weighing you and finding you wanting. ‘Nice house,’ she’d say. ‘Nice kids. Nice car.’ And then she’d let you know that that house, that car, they cost ten little orphans their lives. You chose the house and the car, she chose the orphans—it was a zero-sum game with her.”

“There should be more people like her,” I said stiffly. To be honest, I was ashamed of my dad at that moment, for saying such unkind things about such an amazing person.

“If there were more like her,” he said, “the world would end. There’d be no more children born, just orphanages to put them in. No more living. No more being happy.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it?”

He leaned down as if to study the map, but I could tell he wasn’t paying it much attention. My father never liked getting into deep conversations. Not with me, at least. A knock-down-drag-out fight with Gregory was more his idea of fun.

The truth for my nineteen-year-old self ran something like this: Miss Hannah, by her very excellence, made men like my father uncomfortable. Not only had she made something of herself, but her accomplishments outshone his and made him feel small. Accepting a woman as an equal he had no problem with. As a superior? Not so much.

I’d never heard Miss Hannah say anything unkind or judgmental. Maybe I come by the art of projecting myself onto others honestly.

That afternoon he drove up I-83 with me, veering off toward Monkton, then doubling back in the direction of Hampstead, always asking whether anything looked familiar. Nothing did.

“Are you sure it was north? Maybe she took you out toward Reisterstown, more to the west? There’s a meetinghouse out in Westminster, though I never heard of it having a hole in the roof.”

The next day I tried again, following his advice. I didn’t take him along, though, not wanting him there when I discovered the place. He was bound to try to ruin it.

When I found the meetinghouse in Westminster, a white plank structure, I was filled with disappointment. Fortunately, in the greasy spoon across the street, I ran into a couple of old-timers who knew the area quite well and took an interest in my quest. They argued over the map and put a half dozen Xs in various spots from Manchester to Taneytown, New Windsor to Walkersville.

Gas was much cheaper back then, and I used plenty of gallons. Over the course of my Christmas break, I acquired a frustratingly good knowledge of central Maryland. I went to every Quakerrelated site within fifty miles. The search proved hopeless.

On Christmas Eve morning, I planned a quick drive northeast to Jarrettsville, where a librarian who’d helped me look up possible locations had said she remembered a brick one-story church that looked a little like a dentist’s office. Could that be the one? I had to sneak out early because my mother had given an ultimatum the night before: the quest had to end or it would spoil her Christmas.

As I started up the Bug, the passenger door opened and Gregory slipped in. He wore dark glasses and a denim jacket with a hoodie underneath. I heard a sloshing sound as he settled himself, liquid shaking in a bottle. I’d seen him the day before with a flask-shaped bottle of brandy, and now he must have had it hidden inside his coat.

“Where are you going, Eliza? What’s the deal?”

“I’m not going anywhere until you get out.”

“Come on, I know what you’re up to. Take me with you. I promise I’ll behave.” Before I could protest, he added, “If you don’t, I’ll tell them you’re leaving.”

“Fine,” I said.

The whole way, Gregory needled me about the search. I could tell from his breath that he’d been drinking. Hair of the dog, I figured. Strange as it sounds, I never made the connection between his drinking and him being an alcoholic. I was a college student. Everybody drank. And compared to some guys I knew back at school, he seemed to have it under control.

“Why are you so obsessed with finding this place?” he asked. “By now, it’s bound to be a disappointment. You’ve built it up way too much.”

“I just want to find it,” I said. “If I can.”

“You should have paid more attention to where you were going.”

“No kidding. At the time, I didn’t know she was going to die.”

Saying it out loud: a bad idea. Tears started to stream down my cheeks. Even in his state, Gregory could see it was no good for me to drive. He made me pull over so he could take the wheel.

“It’s all right, Liz. Don’t cry. She lived a full life, you know. It’s not like she went before her time.”

“I just wish I could have been there.”

“I know you do.”

Neither one of us was surprised when the Jarrettsville lead turned out to be a bust. All the one-story brick buildings we could find that looked like dentist’s offices really were dentist’s offices. Once again I had failed in my quest.

“I’ll help you out if you want,” Gregory said. “I’ll ask around. Maybe some of Mom’s friends might know . . .”

“There’s no point. It’s over. Let’s just go home.”

Wheeling the car around, he reached over and ruffled my hair, like I was a little kid. I swatted him away half-heartedly. He squeezed my jaw, trying to make me smile.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s not so bad. You’re gonna be all right.”

And even though we hadn’t found what I was looking for in Jarrettsville, the farther we drove away from it, the more I felt I was leaving something behind. Even if I could have talked to Gregory about spiritual things, I wouldn’t have opened up to him that day. What I was leaving wasn’t just my childhood or my happy memories of the departed Miss Hannah. I was pulling away from the closest moment I’d ever had to a physical experience of the divine.

When you get older, when your memory starts to slip, you look back and realize that all the years you spent in anticipation were in fact your best years. While you were looking forward to better things, they were already the best, and from now on life would only go downhill. That’s how I felt at that moment.

Giving up on the search meant surrendering the most profound intimacy I’d ever known in my nineteen years of existence.

From here on out, I believed, I could only grow farther away.





I must have nodded off on the beach.

When I open my eyes, I’m staring at the sky through a bald spot in the grass roof, a gap that wasn’t there when we arrived. Holly’s chair beside me is empty. One of her magazines lies facedown on the sand, anchored by the Diet Coke bottle. Her fringed wrap is coiled around one of the chair legs. She must have gone back up to the house—but no, sitting up on my elbow, I see her down by the water, kicking the waves with child-like abandon.

“You finally caught the bug,” I mutter aloud.

The dark clouds loom closer, but the sky above burns especially bright in compensation: a pure, clear blue. I shed my sunglasses, taking in the stretch of hot white sand. I feel comfortably lethargic.

Sinking down, I gaze at the sky through the gap in the grass hut’s roof. Around the edges, a few stray blades shimmer in the breeze. As I watch, a bird flashes past, too quick for me to make out anything but the blur of a wing. Every strong gust seems to push the gap a little wider, exposing another inch or two of sky. It’s the movement that keeps my attention, the intermittent expansion. Otherwise I would have looked away already.

Instead, I keep looking. My attention shifts from the edge of the hole to its center, to the impossibly clear blueness of the sky. It’s not natural to really look at something. The urge to glance away is hard to resist. If you discipline yourself, though, if you relax into the gaze, things that ordinarily wouldn’t hold your interest for more than a second can reveal extraordinary depth.

I lie there, feeling the wind blow the hem of my Ravens T-shirt wide, feeling the dry sand on the soles of my feet flake away, more aware of myself, of my body, of the fact of my embodiment (I don’t know how else to say it) than I have ever been. The blue sky is textureless, infinite, throbbing in the familiar way of my youth. I lie before it the way Miss Hannah sprawled on the wood pew, submitting to the vision.

The longer I look, the nearer the sky is. And it changes on me, losing its innocent hue, darkening and deepening. Sometimes it appears so abstract—unmediated color—and then a bird will streak past or a bit of gray cloud will pass along the edges, shocking me into the realization that the sky is much farther away than I fancy.

Then the cloud is gone and I’m floating again.

Sometimes the sky looks liquid too, and I imagine that instead of looking up I’m gazing down into a bottomless, swirling sea of bluish-purple black, and the only thing preventing me from falling is a kind of reverse gravity that pins me to the roof of the world.

You’re crazy, you know that? I tell myself.

And though I don’t speak the words out loud, I hear them as if I had. As if I’d whispered into my own ear. Apart from my voice, there is nothing but silence: no wind, no wave, no sound of Holly on the beach. No drums beating or crowds howling, no resentful whatevers, no evasions or lies. No smack of hand on cheek, no nothing, no noise.

But oh, this silence isn’t empty, not at all. The silence is very full.

It was always there, I realize, from the moment Miss Hannah first showed me until now. I’d searched and searched for it, but it hadn’t gone anywhere. It was never so far that, with a little looking, it couldn’t be found.

If only I had searched in the right place.

A low rumble fills the air, a physical sound (again, I don’t know how else to say it), a sound I feel on my skin. It is not a voice. It is not saying anything. Or if it is, the message is merely this: I am here. I am present. Then the rumble grows a throaty, ragged edge and I recognize it as thunder. Through the gap, the sky is molten gray. I sit up and see Holly, her water-freckled skin gleaming in the last light, running toward me with a smile on her lips, her hands held over her head as if to fend off heaven.

“You’re gonna get soaked if you stay down here!”

She snatches up her things and rushes toward the steps. I throw a leg over the side of the lounge chair, forcing myself up. The hiss of rain fills my ears, the drops speckling the ground all around me. I imagine what it would be like to peel off the T-shirt and run into the surf, alone and sylph-like with the storm.

But then I really would be crazy, right? Instead, I follow Holly up the stairs, arriving soaked and laughing as she slides the glass door shut behind me.

“Is this wild or what?” she says. Meaning the two of us, not the storm outside.

“You got wet. I told you so.”

“If our husbands could see us now, huh? They’d pretty much freak out. What am I saying? I’m freaking out. This isn’t my idea of a holiday at the beach.”

“But it’s good,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says. “I think it is.”

As we stand dripping on the marble tile, towels clutched around our shoulders, I tell Holly that I don’t want to stay.

“I need to get back,” I tell her.

Whatever I was looking for here, I just found it. And there’s something waiting for me at home. I didn’t get a sign under the hut or anything. I didn’t hear a voice. By why should I have to? Why should God have to speak for me to know what he is saying? Couldn’t he also be present in silence?

Just by looking, I was suddenly able to hear, and now I think I know what needs to be done. My father had been wrong—he had to be. It isn’t a zero-sum game. Having a family doesn’t mean I can’t help. There’s something I can do, and I intend to do it.

“Okay,” she says, processing. “But can we at least wait out the storm?”

“There’s no rush,” I say, not believing it at all.

Inside, I know I won’t rest until I’m back.