He remembered the three of them on that small beach: Danny, at fourteen, watching his parents mussel. Really his mother had musseled, and his father, as he put it himself, had supervised. His mother, wearing blue running shorts over a black bathing suit and green rubber boots, had stood in the mounds of seaweed-covered rocks. She parted the strands of seaweed to expose the rock, like hair on a giant head, pulling mussels from beneath, the same way she picked lice from his head when he was nine. His father was shirtless; his endless body hair glistened with sweat. Danny had always wondered how anyone could have so much hair not on their head. He had wondered when he might have chest hair and if his father looked this way at fourteen, a teenage yeti. His father’s beard was a three days’ growth, and he wore the same faded pair of madras swim trunks he’d worn every summer that Danny could remember. His father stood knee deep in the water, facing the sea, smoking his pipe, his back to Danny. They talked, his parents. They seemed always to be talking.
“Should we move the mooring into the cove, or is it better off the float?”
“Should we buy Gwen a new car or get Tom to pass his on to her? What about a trade-in?” Danny had thought about the stones under his feet.
His father turned from the water, wanting to show Danny how to build a cairn. The forest edge was rough and brambly, webbed by lichen in the low branches of the underbrush, looking decayed, brittle, flaky. Knitted with the desiccated trunks was soft, flat moss, a thin overlay with the tapered fingers of roots that surfaced, the ancient hands of the trees coming up, knuckles first, through the forest floor. The trees themselves seemed to pull at the earth, drawing the moss up their trunks where the trees pull up the hem of their skirts away from the damp. It was at the edge of this that they needed a cairn, his father had said, something to mark the trail.
“A trailhead must be marked, the place where the sea stops, where the highest tide cannot reach.” His father said this in a low, booming voice that he projected to the back of some imaginary theater.
“Oh, God,” said Danny, turning on a heel to go back to the water’s edge. His father threw a small rock at his leg.
“We’ll make a trail,” he said. “This will be the start, a trail to the ridge and then out to the point.”
Danny had liked this better. He needed more ways to travel, more places to go. And he liked watching his father collect the perfect stones.
“Like this,” his father said, “round but a bit squashed. No, bigger.”
They hunted together through the large stones at the high-tide mark, kicking aside tangled bunches of seaweed; the dry ones crunched, the wet ones squelched.
“How’s this one?”
Danny and his father made a pile of stones to choose from, and his father began, explaining as he went. They each began a cairn about four feet apart. Danny could hear the pipe click in his father’s teeth. The smoke swirled up into the pine boughs. The tobacco smelled of Sunday afternoons and naps on the couch, and what he imagined Morocco must smell like—ivory, vanilla, cloves, cardamom, ladies with veiled faces.
“Start with the largest,” said his father, “then work your way up. The weight should keep them steady.”
Danny’s stones kept toppling to the ground in a tumble of clunks and taps and a quick jumping of toes. His father’s tower grew higher, and Danny felt at once proud and defeated.
“Keep at it, my man. Hey,” he whispered, “what should we do for your mother’s birthday this year?”
“Either Constantinople or rafting down the Amazon,” said Danny. They always ate lobster on her birthday; they celebrated it here every August. Just the three of them.
“I’ll book the raft,” said his father. “You bring the life jackets.”
Danny had made a pile of rocks that looked nothing like the articulated corpuscles of his father’s cairn.
“Your mother’s really the master of this,” he said. “You should get some direction from her.”
“I’m a little busy,” Scarlet said. They had forgotten how easily their voices traveled over water. There was strain in her voice as she yanked two handed on her cultivator.
“And I have one word for you,” she continued. “Piranha.”
“What would a vacation be without the local fauna,” called his father.
“Bob Willoughby, biologist extraordinaire. I’m pretty sure your interest extends only to those species that can be boiled and eaten with butter,” said Scarlet.
“I have unexplored depths, Mrs. Willoughby,” said Bob. He stood, brushed his hands on his suit, and said, “Our work here is done. The trailhead of the mystical path is marked.”
They will know where to begin, but not where to go. Danny left his father to admire his handiwork, and began to pitch stones into the cove, practicing his throw. He felt in this posture he looked more manly. He’d been practicing. His father made his way over to his mother and rested his hand on the small of her back as she bent over to pull up mussels.
“Time for a swim,” said his father. He moved off the rocks. The slick seaweed and sharp barnacles never seemed to affect him. He walked like he was descending the stairs in the great room. Then into the water with his pipe still clenched firmly in his teeth, he began a smooth backstroke. The water is so cold, Danny couldn’t understand how his father could bear it, how he could keep his legs moving under him, keep himself from settling on the floor of the cove forever. Swimming here feels like a fight. But not for Bob Willoughby.
Scarlet had brought her bucket and stood next to Danny and they watched his father swim out toward the mouth of the cove. A stone warm from the sun lay in his hand.
“When I met your dad he taught me how to really swim.”
From out in the water came his father’s voice, remarkably clear despite the distance. “Damn straight,” he said. “And preferably without suits.”
“Gross,” said Danny. “Don’t talk like that around me.” But they always did.
His father emerged from the water, all that hair in jet rivulets down his chest and stomach, a great walrus of a father who lumbered from the sea. Danny had thought of his own pale thin chest under his T-shirt. I need more sun, he had thought, and more testosterone. He had imagined himself doing pushups and drinking egg yolks. None of which sounded appealing. His father set his pipe on a bed of seaweed and went back in to dunk himself under. Then he returned to shore, picked up his pipe, and said, “Ablutions and libations, in that order.” And with that he grabbed the bucket full of mussels out of his wife’s hand and headed toward the house. Danny was theirs, hers. She put her arms around him as they watched his father walk away through the woods, a towel draped over his shoulder, the bucket swinging heavy in his hand.
“How lucky I am to have a son like you,” she said.
He wondered if she said this to Tom too.
“Oh, yeah?” He said. But he knew he was lucky too. He had suspected that to her he was different from the others. Sometimes that felt good. They looked out at the ocean together, at the town and at the whole universe that seemed to swim and sail past their little cove.
“I love you the way you love summer vacation,” she had said.
“Thanks, I guess.”
She had taken the stone from his hand and, whipping her arm, had hucked it far out to the center of the cove. She had a good arm. Had had.