Delancey was somewhere over the Pacific destined for Tokyo. Ten days for work. Price was left alone with their two-year-old daughter and while she had scheduled two mornings with a sitter, he viewed it as a flaccid attempt to placate what she knew was his growing frustration with the frequency of her travels.
He drove the winding, narrow road lined by redwoods out to the beach in Bolinas with exaggerated skill and took long swallows from an ice-cold pint resting between his legs. At his daughter’s insistence the “Wheels on the Bus” played on repeat. The carnival madness beat against his hangover-tightened head with a cruelty he felt he deserved. While a deplorable character he no doubt was, drinking and driving would not be his undoing. For as long as he could remember he’d simply been good at that. In the distant youth of his 20s he’d often driven drunk for sport. Those memories, like so many others, only proved destructive if he focused on them long enough, but he’d learned long ago how to avoid such pointed introspection.
As he waited for a ham and cheese croissant at the beachside cafe, he fought to keep from staring at the barista, a towering blonde who couldn’t have been more than 25. He thought about the barista before he arrived at the café; he thought about her often. “Drop dead gorgeous” was the term his friends might have used back in high school. Other crude declarations would have been made.
Now, Price merely saw her as a fantasy more distant than any memory of his past.
One recent morning, he’d stood in his bathroom and masturbated thinking of her. He imagined himself behind her, the two of them standing before a mirror. But when his imagination reached the point where he could envision what the sex would actually be like, he came, paltry and wheezing, onto a towel.
He could never please her.
The strength of his erection, once a source of pride, felt like less than half what he remembered in his prime. He could not believe the weight he’d gained. The outer shell he presented. He still gazed upon the world with the naivety of his youth. As if he were not the current version of himself. Were all men this way? Or was he different in that it had never left him?
Their fingers briefly touched as the barista handed him the grease-soaked paper bag that held the croissant, but she paid him no attention before returning to the register.
At the beach pantry, Price picked up a four pack of IPAs and snacks for his daughter which he loaded into his backpack cooler and covered with ice.
Walking onto the beach a lightness fell upon him because the beach had its own rules, and he could drink without concern and watch his daughter run freely with a level of comfort he could not count on elsewhere.
He chose a spot, put down the cooler and set up his chair. He spread out a blanket for his daughter and opened her pop-up sunshade. He removed her sand toys from the netted bag that held them and walked down to the ocean to fill her bucket with water.
Comfortably in his chair, he watched her play in the sand and wander back and forth to the ocean, with such carefree aimlessness that, for a moment, he forgot his many burdens.
When he eventually unlocked his phone, Delancey had called twice and though he knew his not answering would upset her he also knew talking to her would upset him, and that he could blame his not answering on the lack of service. Besides, there couldn’t have been anything of importance to relay other than that she’d landed in Tokyo.
The sun was high, but the marine layer that lingered until the early afternoon made the conditions mild and pleasant. It reminded Price of a trip he and Delancey had taken to Iceland early in their courtship.
They’d gone for a month in summer, when the daylight never ended, and while it was light twenty-four hours a day, there was a moment—late at night, or more accurately, early in the morning—when what could be noticed of a sunset dulled the constant light as if by a scrim, and a haze briefly lowered upon the field of vision. That light refracted the sun’s rays, which spread out kaleidoscopic against the haze, and though no traditional sunset colors painted the clouds, its cold and distant beauty dwarfed any sunset Price had seen.
Watching his daughter play in that haze, he could not help but see the strange parts of both he and Delancy in her movements and her features.
Bolinas was an off-kilter, Bohemian beach town. A retired surfer’s paradise. A trying to hide from the world kind of place. Price felt very at home there and had once told Delancey, very seriously, that he’d like to move there and live in a little cottage with a view of the ocean. The thought of being so far from her job in San Francisco, and so isolated, had been so foreign to her that she laughed in his face.
The beach was littered with driftwood teepees and the giant rock wall that lined most of the beach rose several hundred feet. Just beyond the inlet that separated Bolinas from Stinson Beach, and poured into and out of Bolinas Lagoon, surfers bobbed waiting on the tide.
Price looked down, feeling his daughter’s tiny hand in his. Her strawberry blonde hair shimmered in the sun. Her gaze seemed almost vacant, but it wasn’t that. She was staring out at the surfers and the expanse of the ocean and Stinson Beach and the mountains that seemed to rise directly up from the sand as if she was learning in real time how beautiful the world could be.
At some point, Price reached into the cooler and realized he was fishing out his final beer.
It was not lost on him that his drinking was a dark cloud that hung over the relative harmony of his domestic life. Or that in the darkness he saw light in the world through his daughter. It crippled him, though, when he remembered himself as a child. He still saw himself as that innocent boy. Coddling mother. Scared to death of life. Maybe that boy was all he’d ever been and the years of denial and failure to launch, and the relationship ruins and the drinking were just ways to mask his inability to be a person. He’d never chosen to be one, after all, yet he believed himself to be the most important one alive. What he could not believe were the signs of deterioration his body showed. He could not believe, like he could not believe when he was a boy—quiet but screaming inside, lying in his childhood bed—that he would die.
Price’s daughter wanted to stay, but his beers were gone, and her shoulders and cheeks showed signs of pinking. He packed up their things and chased her toward the beach access. Weighed down, he labored to keep up.
As their distance widened, the sound of her giggles trailed off until they were no longer discernible against the ocean breeze.
He quickened his pace, his shoulders burnt. He badly needed to urinate. He craned his neck, trying to see over the seagrass and behind the windswept live oaks, but saw no sign of her. It was unlikely that she was hiding. That wasn’t something she often did. Plus, she always gave herself away when playing hide and seek because she could not stop laughing from her hiding place.
Was he unable to hear her laugh?
No. She would be waiting patiently beside the car, Price assured himself.
When their car entered view, she was not there and a panic froze him that was suddenly, frighteningly real.
His heart pounded. The thick salt air seemed to tighten around him.
He shouted her name while weaving among the cars in the parking lot.
There wasn’t another soul around.
Beyond the parking lot was only the lagoon, which was mostly mud because the tide was out. An ominous fog hovered over the water.
Price felt tears well as he frantically scanned the area. He let out one last stifled scream before crumbling to a seat against another car. He closed his eyes and could think of nothing else to do but pray.
He opened his eyes at the slight sound of gravel moving, and his daughter stood before him cocking her head from side to side curiously. In her hand she held a small bouquet of wildflowers.
His first instinct was anger, and he reached out to chastise her, to shake her, but the flowers, and her eyes that showed sign of tears, melted him, and he pulled her close and squeezed her tightly.
After securing her in the car seat, Price took a moment to breathe. He could see his own reflection in the window and his daughter through it. The coastal background of palm trees, sea grass and dunes, reflected in such rich detail it was like a painting come to life. He wished he could take a photo of exactly what he saw, but knew it was a moment that a camera simply could not capture.
Wilson Koewing is a writer from South Carolina. His books JADED and QUASI are available from Main Street Rag/Mint Hill Books and Anxiety Press, respectively. His latest short story collection ROLLING ON THE BOTTOM is available from Cowboy Jamboree Press. He is currently at work on a short story collection titled THE MELANCHOLY OF DAD and his debut novel WEDDING CRASHER, MARIN COUNTY. His fiction and essays have appeared in Wigleaf, Pembroke Magazine, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Gargoyle and New World Writing. He lives and writes in Marin County, California.