The Beach House

She was hoping he would leave her the beach house, counting on this actually, though he had told her he wasn’t going to. He’d said he would be leaving it to an organization that offered sanctuary to abandoned German shepherds, but that had to be a joke, right? The German shepherds wouldn’t be quartered in the beach house; rather, the shabby but invaluable property would be sold, the proceeds going to an organization that had to be fraudulent, unlicensed, a figment of her father’s imagination. Her father said that he loved her—he just wasn’t going to leave her the beach house, which to him had become not the beach house at all but, in truth, something else entirely. He believed he was going to pass soon, and he had been thinking about mighty matters. There was much to learn. He was exploring many teachings, and one avenue of thought had somehow led him to disinherit his only child—Amber, her name was, a name she quite reasonably detested.

“I grew up there,” she said. “I have memories.”

“You collected conchs, put them in boiling water, gouged them out with a fork and spoon, then displayed their empty homes on a shelf in your room,” her father said.

“Not all the time,” she protested. “You always mention that. It’s mean.”

Her father was sipping something green from a scratched plastic glass, which must have negated much of the good the beverage might have to offer. It had been prescribed for his blood. There was something not right about his blood. Or was it that something that had to move through his blood wasn’t the right shape?

“We’ve never even known a German shepherd,” Amber said.

“I had one as a young man. I brought him into marriage with your mother. You were around, but I guess you can’t remember him. Titus.”

“I was around?”

“Well, you were. It pains me that you don’t recall him.”

“Do you have a photograph?”

“No. He didn’t photograph well.”

She couldn’t remember any Titus. She suspected he’d invented this memory just now. But that was all right. Maybe she could argue his incompetency in court, if it came to that, but he was actually pretty competent, though he no longer read or drove. It hadn’t been so long since he’d enjoyed swanning around in his jacked-up ’92 Bronco, which was now swaddled in the garage. She wished that someone would steal it.

“You’re thinking about the Bronco, aren’t you,” he said. “Well, I’m bequeathing that to Walter.”

“Walter is ten years old.”

“He’ll be fine. Just the other day he said, ‘It’s perfect, sir.’ ”

“I was not thinking about that stupid truck. You can sell it for parts, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Parts,” her father murmured. “No, no, no.”

“That kid’s unreal.”

“Unreal!” He looked incredulous, but she felt it was an act.

“I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he said, ‘I want to know, to dare, to will, and to keep silence.’ ”

“Admirable, so admirable,” her father said.

“What kind of answer is that? He probably read it somewhere.”

Her father had swallowed the last of the green liquid but continued to hold the glass.

“When I was a boy around Walter’s age, there was a doctor who suspected I was schizophrenic. Don’t know what I’d done, probably just going through a phase, but they had a test back then. You had to pretend to drink water from a glass that had nothing in it. If you could do that, they’d say you were O.K. That’s what they want. They want you to pretend until you don’t know you’re pretending anymore.”

She hadn’t heard that one before, either, but she and her father had never talked much in the best of times. It was hard to converse with sick people. She realized she didn’t have the knack.

“Gimme that thing. It’ll stain if I don’t rinse it right away.”

A pelican woven out of something resided in the glass, permanently sealed in a layer of air within its double wall of insulated plastic. The pelican was small, of course, two inches at most.

“Last of a set of twelve,” her father called after her as she carried it off.

“I’m going over to the beach house for a while,” she said from the kitchen. “Do you want any help preparing for bed?”

“No, no, no,” her father said.

“Well, it’s all ready for you. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Outside, Walter stood, gazing at the contrail-striped sky. He was barefoot and wearing a work apron over his shorts and T-shirt.

“That looks uncomfortable,” Amber said.

“It’s fire-retardant.”

“I don’t believe that’s acceptable usage anymore.”

“It resists ignition,” he said, undisturbed. “It also has pockets.”

“What are you going to do with the Bronco, Walter?” she demanded.

“Cherish it.”

“It’s very nice of my father to be giving it to you, but registration and insurance will cost your parents a fortune. Also, the government will probably ban vehicles like that soon.”

Walter shrugged. “I have five cavities,” he announced.

After a moment, she said, “Are you going to get them filled?”

Walter shrugged again.

“You probably should get them filled.”

With that, they parted ways, and she drove ten miles to one of the parking lots that served the beach. She paid the fee, then walked for twenty minutes to the house. It was securely fenced in with stout chain link, inaccessible from the tall condominiums that flanked it. She’d almost been arrested once trying to saunter through their lobbies to the sand. She gazed at the humble structure, attempting to establish a channel of recognition. Were those conch shells still inside? She shuddered. She turned and faced the ocean, assuming a position of contemplation and petition.

A turtle staggered from the waves, wearily dug a shallow hole, and commenced to drop her lovely eggs. Amber had no wish to witness this; she could no longer bear to watch struggling nature. She shut her eyes, feeling that the very act of not looking was helping the turtle out in some way. She became aware, however, of a crowd gathering, forming a circle around the event. She heard someone say, “It’ll take a few hours, you know.” An A.T.V. swung down the beach to disperse the mob, after which various protests broke out.

Less than a month ago, she and her friend Janine had been here, the weekend of the dolphin-pod grounding. People had tried to shove the dolphins back into the water, but they’d just floated in again. Sleek and smiling, they would not swim away. This had gone on through the evening. People lit tiki torches; they linked arms; they sang “Hallelujah.”

“If I hear that frigging Leonard Cohen song one more time, I’m going to strangle somebody,” Janine said.

How hopeless everything was, Amber thought.

The bed denied him entry. Where had she learned to make a bed like this? He pulled weakly at the top sheet, noticing that the dog had taken up residence in the corner again tonight. Its dark face was about a yard in length. It watched him impassively as he wrestled with the linens.

The next morning, she said, “Hi, Dad, how was your night?,” a query that naturally warranted no response.

Her father was bathed and shaved and wearing his stylish black lounging gown. He did not appear ill. In her experience, ill people appeared a great deal more ill than he did. He was looking out the window at birds fluttering around an empty feeder. The birds were always more interested in it when it was empty.

“Are you going to pay to fix Walter’s teeth?” she asked—casually, she hoped.

“What’s wrong with his teeth?”

“Cavities.”

“I do not know what constitutes payment for what I have done or not done, and neither do you, but at the moment, which we know is fleeting, I have no plans in that regard. He’s a nice little fellow. When I first met him, he barely spoke. I determined that he liked words but in isolation, as individuals. He didn’t like them gathered together. He seemed to feel they got dumber gathered together.”

“I was with you when we moved in, Dad. His mother brought over that awful fudge.”

“Can’t recall the fudge.”

“To welcome us to the neighborhood. It was just awful.”

“We’re talking about fudge?”

“I saw Walter last evening. He was affecting one of those worker aprons.”

“Yes, I ordered one for him. It’s a little large, but he likes it.”

“Does Walter know we have a beach house?”

“Why would he know that? That’s nothing to know.”

“Dad, I’m going to look into this organization you’re giving the house to. Do due diligence. I fear you’re the victim of a scam.”

“Open that drawer over there. Take out that large folder. Everything vetted and done. Examine it closely. Take a copy.”

She flipped through a bound sheaf. As a legal document, it certainly looked unassailable, but that was the way lawyers always made these things look. The deed to the house was in her father’s name only. The organization for abandoned German shepherds was referred to as In Passage, which sounded so sinister and culty. What were they up to? They didn’t have to say, apparently. Somehow they’d been accredited anyway. “I’ll take a copy,” she said, but shut the drawer without removing one.

“How old are you, dear?” her father asked.

He was on the verge of not knowing who she was at all. It was sad what happened to the aging mind.

“I’ll be thirty soon,” she said quietly.

“You’re thirty-four!” he thundered. “You will not be thirty! You even give the wrong year to the astrologers you’re forever seeing. Do you realize how foolish that is!”

He was right. She probably shouldn’t be seeking out astrologers and providing them with the wrong coördinates. The latest one had told her that her anxieties concerning her future destitution were more or less unfounded, but it was some other individual being addressed and not Amber at all, an individual who wasn’t even paying for the information. The astrologer had a goiter on her neck. Every week, she charged a little more—she was probably saving for an operation to remove that frightful goiter.

“Don’t think she’s unaware of the situation you’ve put her in,” her father was saying. “Your behavior is compromising her integrity. She has no intention of removing that growth, and if you go to her today you’ll find she’s no longer available. She won’t be there. Business closed. Colorful sign gone.”

“She took down the sign?”

“You should try to think more clearly, Amber,” her father said.

For him, watching her mind in motion was like going to the movies. She didn’t know how he did it.

“You scared me, Dad. You yelled at me.”

“I’m sorry, dear. I’m not at my best in the morning. Give me a moment. Would you like to talk about the beach house?”

“Yes.”

“Breadth, length, depth, height.”

“What?”

“Depth, breadth, height, length.”

“Those are just measurements. It’s sixteen hundred square feet, plus screened-in porch, now boarded up, two bedrooms, one bath, shower-tub combination, not my favorite, small by today’s standards, but its meaning, its significance, lies elsewhere.”

“Where?”

“Why don’t we go back, Dad? It’s still livable, though it won’t be for much longer. It needs to be lived in! Why pay rent on this place? You’ve been paying rent for years. Why did we even leave and come here? I remember I cried.”

“These are my final weeks, Amber. You don’t seem to be taking them seriously.”

If she could just get them back in the beach house. Get the utilities turned on, clean the windows, open the windows, greet the sunrise, set up his bed. . . .

“Death doesn’t coexist with life in the past or the future,” he was saying, “only in the present.”

“Your present could just as well be happening there. Mine, too.”

“You want to coexist with death in the beach house?”

“Not particularly, not if you put it that way, no. Why are you putting it that way?”

“You really can’t remember Titus?”

Did everything depend on this, then? This Titus, an animal that didn’t photograph well?

“I’d like to have breakfast now,” her father said.

But there was no milk. Going to the store was out of the question; the day had just begun. She had some milk at her own place, right next door, an apartment over the garage, with the annoying Bronco beneath her. It had more toiletries than she did. Sprays and polishes. Scents.

She returned with the milk. There really wasn’t very much of it.

Her father was standing at the kitchen counter, a bowl of shredded wheat before him.

“Shredded wheat,” he pronounced. After a few spoonfuls, he said, “This milk is delicious. Has an interesting finish.”

“I was afraid it might be a little off, just slightly.”

“Sometimes the days are worse than the nights,” he said.

Occasionally, they got a little back-and-forth going, but it was seldom productive.

“I saw your mother in a dream the other night. She was sitting at a table in what used to be St. Boniface. Undeniably her. Dark healthy hair pulled back. Bangles up to her armpits. Big white teeth. Gesturing to me urgently.”

“That’s too obvious to be significant.”

“Yes, it’s embarrassing.” He studied the bowl full of sog before him.

“Or maybe she was waving someone else over, someone behind you. That happens sometimes—I’ve witnessed it happening.”

“There’s never anyone behind you in a dream, Amber.”

St. Boniface Episcopal was a restaurant now. It had been decommissioned. Not decommissioned—that was what they did with battleships. Desanctified. She couldn’t afford to go in there unless she found a hundred-dollar bill on the street. For a time, after her mother left, she and her father had attended services at St. Boniface, until she had suddenly fixated on the sacrarium, the special sink connected to a pipe that she’d heard delivered the leftover bread and wine of the Sacrament to the lychee tree in the courtyard, the largest lychee tree on the peninsula. She had inexplicably freaked out over this simple drain, or perhaps it was the idea of it, the idea of it most of all.

“That lychee tree told me a joke once,” her father said. “It wasn’t original. It was the one about three Episcopalians changing a light bulb.”

They were back in the living room.

“I have a luncheon date today, Dad.”

“Luncheon. Time flies.”

“Let’s talk more about the beach house before I leave. I felt we were getting somewhere. I’ll be homeless without it, Dad.”

If she had to share it with death, she would. Maybe it wouldn’t be that much of a problem.

“One day you painted your room black. Those beautiful cypress boards.”

“You always mention that, Dad. I’ve apologized, but you’d told me it was mine to decorate as I wished. We can flip the boards around—nothing could be easier. That’s the first thing we’ll do.”

“The beach house is worth a great deal, isn’t it?”

“Yes, yes,” she said.

Her father was silent. Slowly, he passed his hand over his hair. This usually meant that he was travelling to a place immune to her presence, a place that indeed contradicted her presence. She might as well go to lunch.

Outside, it was still Florida. Smoke from the burning cane fields inland seasoned the air. He stepped into the yard clutching a book—it hardly mattered now which one. The dog did not accompany him. No reason was provided. But it was possible that he’d been given other assignments, once it was clear that the hoped-for ideal in this case would not be realized.

Amber and Janine were seated in a booth at a divey establishment called the Lorelei. At the bar were two men whose conversation could be heard from where they were sitting.

“Did Ted Kaczynski have a deck of tarot cards in his cell?”

“You asking me? I’d say he did.”

“Did he know how to use it?”

“Probably more than most unimprisoned people do.”

“I bet they didn’t let him keep it. I bet they taunted him and threatened to take it away and then they did.”

“You’re probably right, the bastards.”

The women listened attentively, but the bar hounds said nothing more.

“I am still just so upset,” Janine began, as she usually did. Her situation was even graver than Amber’s, having already come to pass. Her mother, unbeknownst to all save a financial adviser, had taken out a reverse mortgage and exhausted its returns in no time. She’d then died. “On the dot,” as Janine had put it. Janine had inherited nothing.

“That was a nice house,” Amber said.

“I should have been more suspicious. I thought she was being careful with money. I told you, she’d take a couple of squares of toilet paper and fold them up for dinner napkins. I thought she was living within a budget. I hated going over there for dinner.”

“But she was a wonderful cook, wasn’t she?” Amber said.

“She was, but those little squares of toilet paper . . .”

“You could have brought over some cloth napkins,” Amber said, but she was thinking of Ted Kaczynski’s tarot deck. What could it possibly have shown him, except the Ten of Swords over and over? The jailers had probably done him a favor.

“What do you mean?” Janine said. “How would that have helped?”

At the Lorelei, they limited themselves to a single carafe of wine and a plate of French fries, now consumed.

“I would just so love to get soaked,” Janine said, “and remain soaked until somebody becomes concerned and arranges a stay in one of those restful rehabilitation facilities.”

“But who would do that for you? Those places are expensive.”

“I have an aunt who sometimes helps me out. It’s more about her than about me, though. It’s always on her terms. She’s been in rehab a few times. She’s even had electric-shock treatments, which she said helped her a lot.”

“I’ve heard those things are very hit or miss,” Amber said earnestly.

“Yes. No, I’d pass on that.”

One of the bar hounds left.

“I don’t think they knew each other,” Amber said.

“We didn’t want to accrue,” Janine said. “Our parents accrued, and when they died, which is sad but everyone has to, it would all pass down to us, and we would turn it into something better for us than accruing.”

Amber agreed. “All we want is to be able to live our lives.”

“But times have changed. They’re using everything up themselves, or they’re giving it to something wacky like your father’s doing. Nobody’s providing for us anymore, that’s a fact. We are of that age. We didn’t see it coming. It’s like a plague or something—it may eventually pass but not in time for us.” She sighed. “It’s your turn to spring for this swill, isn’t it?”

From her jacket pocket, Amber removed a small notebook with a tiny eraserless pencil attached to it by a dirty ribbon. The pencil always gave her the creeps, but it was handy. She peered at a page. It was on record: it was her turn.

Walter had not even been born when they had moved out of the beach house and into the undistinguished rental. That was how long it had been. It was appalling. In no time, the child would have his driver’s license. The first year, the rule would be no driving at night. This he would ignore. Meanwhile, her father would be gone, and she’d be without shelter, crouched on the street, fortunate to be in possession of a day-old sandwich.

Her father was sitting outside at a picnic table made of plastic bottles that would otherwise have ended up in the ocean. Benches had been affixed to it by bolts. The color, an unlikely tulip red, had been imposed on it throughout by some method. He was still wearing the stylish gown.

“You just missed Walter,” her father said. “Our word of the day is ‘noumenon.’ That is a thing as it is in itself . . . an example being . . . God.”

She was almost certain that “noumenon” had been the word of the day more than once. He was probably showing off for Walter.

“You shouldn’t be out here, Dad. It’s too hot. You’re not even sweating—that means you’re too hot.”

“Walter told me his parents would like to take possession of the Bronco now. They know someone who’s ready to purchase it, as is, for a reasonable price.”

“As is?”

“I said that, too, in precisely the same manner. I’m quite aware what those words imply, but in the case of the Bronco they’re irrelevant. The money would be placed in Walter’s education fund.”

“You’re kidding. An education fund?”

“Ridiculous, of course, but Walter assured me that the Bronco would not pass into another’s hands.”

“That’s good, I guess, but perhaps you might want to question some of the decisions you’ve been making recently, like perhaps you’ve been putting your faith in the wrong people.”

“My faith in people is very small.” He had untangled his long legs from the apparatus that was the picnic table and was standing, swaying slightly. “I’d like to have Walter’s parents rubbed out. Would you be able to do that for me?”

“Rubbed out? You mean murdered? I don’t think so, Dad. Why don’t we just move away from them, move to the beach house. . . .”

He had struck off across the lawn, in quick, erratic steps. She realized that something was happening, that this was when what happens begins. Still, she couldn’t seem to hurry after him for a moment. The door opened and settled shut.

In the kitchen, she exclaimed, “When did you fall! How long have you been lying there!”

“Not long, though that’s hardly reassuring. I’m just jarred. Jarred,” he said doubtfully.

She pulled him upright, and he managed to access the ugly chair he so favored.

“I didn’t hear anything snap. I had put my head in the freezer compartment for a bit. It felt so good.”

“You mustn’t do that when you feel hot. It’s bad for you, and it messes up the ice-maker.”

“I took a tumble, but I feel quite conscious. More conscious, possibly. Nothing is before or after. Important to realize, Ember.”

“Amber, Dad, Amber.”

“What were your mother and I thinking, right? A name like that . . .”

“Dad, I’m taking you to the hospital.”

“Certainly not there.”

“I’ll call the ambulance. If you come by ambulance, they see you sooner.”

“I, too, want to get on with it, but let’s just remain here for now. You really do feel incapable of rubbing out Walter’s parents? It’s important to help the next generation along.”

“I’m your next generation, Dad.”

“Sometimes it’s for the best to skip one now and then. . . . Well, maybe Walter will do it. He has good judgment.”

The time was coming, the time had already come. Amber desperately wanted to go into the next room. There had to be something to do in there. She felt a little shaky, considerably shaky. Her father seemed calm. He was speaking nonsense, of course, but he didn’t seem agitated. He looked pretty much the same as he always did. She wondered if she should ask him if she could go into the next room or tell him that she was going into the next room.

“Ember, would you get me a blanket? A lightweight one. The striped one the dog chewed.”

There weren’t any dog-chewed blankets in there, of that she was certain, but, “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

He closed his eyes. His head felt refreshed from the freezer still, his thoughts moving in an orderly fashion, like children in a snaking line, holding hands and following their teacher out of a building where some dangerous event was commencing. Like little children, his thoughts, innocent, trusting, and afraid. But who was this teacher? She was new to him. He was a transfer. This was his first day. ♦