“Michael, come on,” she urges, tugging at my hand. “I want to show you something. I promise we’ll be careful.”
I follow her over the barrier, out onto the point, carefully watching my steps on the slippery surface. As a single parent, I can’t be cavalier about this kind of thing. Laurel has a lifetime of confidence with this place, while I have a year’s worth of tragedy and oppressive doubts.
Out toward the tip of the point, tourists stand taking photographs of the sunset. Laurel holds my large hand, firm in her smallish one, appreciating the view. With a sweeping ocean vista surrounding us, I understand what she wanted me to see: the raw beauty of her brother’s world, the world that nurtured and raised him, almost as surely as his own family did. Further out in the water, sea lions are gathered on a slip of black rock, and they bark, splashing in and out of the water.
The high tide causes wave upon wave to slam the point, ocean spraying upward on the rocks and onto us. A chill settles over me, even now in July.
“This is his world,” I say, my words almost lost in the briny wind.
She smiles, a wistful, appreciative expression. “He certainly loved it here.”
“Does it hurt you?” While it was his world, it was also theirs. “To come back here? To see it again and know he’s gone?”
“Oh, no. It always makes me feel close to him,” she answers without hesitation, staring out at the horizon. “I can think of all our memories, the happy times. I feel young again here.”
I laugh. “Laurel, you are young.”
“I’m young enough, but life marches on.” She gets a faraway look in her eyes. “We were born the same day, the same hour, he and I…yet he will never grow old. That’s very odd to me.”
My mind fills with her painted image of Alex, arms outstretched to the sun, standing on the beach. “Like in the painting,” I say. “He never ages.”
She searches my face, then answers softly, “Yes.”
“Still haven’t figured that painting out, Laurel. Been thinking on it, turning it over in my head,” I explain, and she listens, settling on the rocks at my feet. “But maybe I just don’t get what you mean about it singing for me.”
“When the time is right,” she answers, taking my hand. “You will.” She draws me down to the ground beside her. I find myself facing her, both of us sitting like a pair of teenagers at a bonfire, knee-to-knee and cross-legged. Smiling at me in that soothing, almost-beatific manner she possesses—the way that used to always make me feel strange and warm inside when I needed comforting—she waits for me to speak.
I draw in a steadying breath. “I want Andrea to know the truth.” She stares back at me, one hand frozen by her face, tucking the wayward strands behind her ear.
Her lips part, a soft “Oh” sound escaping, but nothing else.
“I think she needs the truth,” I continue. She only blinks at me, silent until finally I begin to laugh. “Look, Laurel, I wasn’t trying to totally blindside you or anything. I figured this would be good news—or whatever—in your mind…”
She interrupts me, still looking stunned. “I only want what’s best for you both.” She sounds numb and mechanical, like those words are rehearsed.
I pose a question that’s been growing inside of me during the drive here, a question that’s forever bobbed just below the surface between us. “What about what’s best for you, Laurel?”
“I didn’t do this for me.” She gives me a fragile smile. “I did it for Alex and for you.”
I remind her of the obvious. “Yeah, but Al’s gone now. Maybe it’s not the best thing anymore. Not best for any of us.”
She bows her head. “I’m not sure Andrea ever needs to know the truth,” she says in a soft voice. “I was wrong a year ago. I’ve told you that.”
“You also told me it would be my decision to make,” I say, thinking of her words last fall. Words she sent in a letter, words included with one of her apologies. “That I was her father, and I’d be the one to make the choice. Remember that, Laurel?”
She says nothing; only stares back at me with an unsettling blankness in her expression.
“I’ve had to think pretty hard about what your brother would’ve wanted,” I continue. “How he’d have wanted things to play out with our daughter. We had no contingency plan, no strategy in case one of us died.” I pause, staring at her meaningfully. “Which leaves this shit up to me.”
She gazes out at the vast ocean. “I think Andrea is doing better,” she says, then looks back to me. “She’s involved, interested in things again. Michael, you’ve done such a great job with her. I don’t see why you need to—” She hesitates and then with a sudden gasp, covers her mouth and begins to cry. Not faint tears, or delicate ones, but a loud, horsy sob escapes her throat.