The man lifted the heavy mask off his head and set it in the grass. Then he turned to look at Allie. For the count of three or four, his gaze burned into hers, their eyes remaining locked. Then he looked off toward the ocean.
“She left me.” Surprisingly, his voice rang out strong.
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“That came out wrong,” he said, still gazing out to the horizon. “I don’t mean she left me as in she walked out on me. I mean she left all of this. Everybody and everything. She left the world.”
Allie thought she followed his meaning, but didn’t feel sure enough to speak.
“She died,” he said a moment or two later. “It’s still hard for me to say that.”
“I’m so sorry. How long has it been?”
“Thirty-seven days.”
“Wow. That’s not much time to get used to a thing like that.”
“No.”
For a long minute or two he said no more. He was eyeing the statue now. Critically. Not as though he didn’t like it. More as though it needed something else to be okay, but he couldn’t pin down what. Then he shifted his eyes to Allie’s face again.
“Where are my manners? Lemonade?”
“Thank you,” Allie said. “That would be very nice.”
The man disappeared into the house. Allie wasn’t sure if she had been intended to follow. But she didn’t feel comfortable going into a strange house with a strange man, so she chose to believe he had meant for her to wait.
She wandered among the sculptures, staring into the tiny, knowing eyes of the dolphins and whales. Their bodies had been formed with long, flowing strips of iron with plenty of air in between. Allie could see the ocean right through their massive forms, which seemed appropriate.
Allie walked up to the man’s iron wife. She stood with her arms extended, open wide, as if to embrace the world. Her head was thrown back into the wind. She looked blissful. Allie wondered how it would feel to approach life that way. She wondered if it was even possible to do that while you were still alive. Maybe you had to wait until you’d left the earth and someone immortalized you in iron.
A movement caught Allie’s eye, and she looked over to see a glass of lemonade extended in her direction.
“Thank you,” she said, and took it. “Was she really like this?”
She expected him to ask for a definition of “this.” He didn’t.
“No. She was much more.”
They stared at her in silence for a moment.
“Jackson,” the man said.
“Allie.”
“And this is Bernadette.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Not nearly as sorry as I am. But I had thirty-three good years with her, and that’s not nothing. That’s worth some gratitude.”
Allie sipped the lemonade. It was surprisingly tart, but still good. It tasted like it had been made with honey instead of sugar. But she would deal with that.
“Is this what you do for a living?” she asked.
Jackson laughed. “Hardly. I’m retired.” For a moment she thought he had no plans to say more. “I wish I was a retired sculptor. I’d like to go back and rewrite my history.”
Allie watched his face in the silence. He looked as though he might be trying to do just that.
“But you can’t undo the past. No, I was in finance. For a very long time. Decades. One day I woke up and realized none of it was real.”
“None of . . . what? Finance? Finance seems pretty real.”
“Well, it’s not. Let me tell you. It’s not. It’s just a value we agree to put on things. It used to be numbers on a piece of paper. Now it’s numbers in digital memory.”
“But the numbers represent real money. Right?”
“There is no real money. Not anymore. The banks just make it up. We just create these numbers, more and more with every year that goes by. We use the numbers to keep some people up and other people down. Used to be there was a gold standard, but you’re too young to remember that. The government used to own gold, and paper money represented it. But what does it represent now?”
“I don’t know,” Allie said, not sure whether or not she was listening to a reliable narrator. “What does it represent?”
“Whatever the people in power want it to. I had to get away and work with something real. I had to live in a place nature made, and use my hands to create something that isn’t about to turn to dust.”
He looked into Allie’s eyes briefly, and made a conversational turn she could almost see coming. She didn’t know where they were headed, but they were departing their current location. She had heard as much of his inner thoughts as he planned to reveal.
“So where are you and your grandmother headed?”
“Just . . . up the coast. We haven’t really talked about how far we’ll go.”
“How much time do you have?”
“Well, that’s the thing. We don’t really know. How far can you go?”
“Just about to the Canadian border. And I would recommend it.”
“That sounds like a nice adventure. But my grandmother doesn’t have the nerves for this coast route.”
“It’s not quite this hairy all the way up. It is in a lot of places. Not straight through. I think she’ll get used to it as she goes.”
“Maybe,” Allie said. But somehow she didn’t think so. “So you can drive all the way to Canada on this road?”
“Yes and no. North of California it turns into the 101. It’s not all on the coast. And you don’t exactly drive to the Canadian border. Because it’s in the middle of the Puget Sound. You can go up to this place called Cape Flattery. Nice up there. You have to walk out to it on this series of boardwalks. Native land. That’s the northwest tip of the U.S., right there. Or you can stop someplace like Port Angeles and take the ferry over to Canada.”
“We don’t have passports. I mean, not with us.” Part of her felt she shouldn’t speak for Bea. Another, bigger, part of her felt it was a pretty safe bet.
“To Cape Flattery, then. That’s the best of the coast.”
“That would be a great adventure. Thing is, my grandmother’s not the adventurous type.”
“Up to you to wake her up, then. Figuratively speaking.” Then he turned abruptly toward the house. “You can just leave the glass on the table.” With a flip of his head he indicated an iron table on his patio.
Then he was gone. Back inside his home.
Allie sipped the tart lemonade and wondered how many times Jackson and Bernadette had sat at that iron table. Maybe eating dinner, or drinking tea, or watching the sun set over the dark blue horizon.
Then she wondered what he would do without that, now that she was gone.
When that proved too sad, she wondered how she would talk Bea into driving up the coast all the way to Cape Flattery. By the time she arrived at the inevitable conclusion that she probably couldn’t, that it was impossible, the strain had caught up with Allie, and a nap sounded like a good idea after all.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Spray Paint, and the Stretching of Worlds