Envious Moon(49)

We didn’t even know what day of the week it was. The beach filled up around us like some kind of time-lapse photograph. At first we were alone but by midmorning blankets were right next to blankets, umbrellas as far as you could see.

“It must be Saturday,” I said to Hannah.

Not that we cared. The day was midsummer hot for September. Clear blue skies and no horizon. We slept in the hot sun with our warmed legs touching. We ran down to the water and charged into the ocean, splashing around, spraying each other like children. We kneeled in the shallow waves and let them roll over our shoulders. We kissed and tasted the salt water on each other’s tongues. We walked into the parking lot and bought hot dogs and Cokes from a vendor for lunch. Then we slept some more.

We were like kids on vacation, young lovers home from college. I saw how others looked at us, our playfulness, and I knew they envied the intensity of our love. We wore it like clothes.

In the afternoon the beach emptied as it had filled, one family, one couple at a time. Soon we had most of our section to ourselves and by early evening, we were the only ones left who were not jogging or walking dogs. I recognized some of the same dog walkers from the morning and it was as if the day had been book-ended by their stroll.

We watched the sun fall out of the sky with Hannah sitting between my legs, my arms wrapped around her waist. I kept kissing the nape of her neck, where her soft hairs were. She tried to stop me, teasingly smacking at my hands. But I wasn’t going to give in. I had no way of knowing how many days, how many hours, how many minutes, we had together. In front of us the sun had left the day and the sky was the rosiest of pinks. The air cooled around us. I pulled her back on top of me, and she tried to wriggle free, but I wouldn’t let her go.





It’s something to watch your little girl become a woman. It seemed to happen overnight. One day she’s riding her bike in the driveway, skinning her knee, watching cartoons on Saturday morning. Then the next day boys are picking her up in cars. Hannah somehow seemed to leapfrog those awkward years most girls go through when they are teenagers. Her skin was always perfect. She never needed braces. She got tall without picking up bad habits, like stooping her shoulders when she was around boys. She moved with a grace that made other girls want to be like her. Want to be near her. She made friends easily but she was just as happy being by herself. Mostly, I admired the way she was around boys. She could take them or leave them. They didn’t define who she was. She didn’t spend all her time trying to please them at the expense of herself. God knows, plenty of grown women, myself included, have yet to figure that out.

It was her idea to go to Miss Watson’s. I suppose we always knew she would go away to school. We gave her the option of some of the coeducational schools but she wasn’t interested. I know Jacob was anxious to get her out of the house, away from me and my depression. He was right to do it, though things got worse for me while she was gone. The weekends she came home I did my best to clean myself up. I made sure the house was spotless. I resisted having a drink until the afternoon. I opened all the curtains and let the light in. I bought flowers and put them around. Jacob would come home early and the three of us would go out to dinner, like normal people. And it’s funny, but Hannah was what kept us together. She was the light of Jacob’s life, more important than anything, and I loved her very much, in my own way. It’s different with mothers and daughters. It can be hard sometimes. But those nights when we had dinner, she would tell us all about school, about her friends, about her teachers, about dances they went to. She’d tell funny stories about her friends’ parents, and it never occurred to us that her friends couldn’t do the same thing to us because they had never met us. Hannah didn’t bring them home and that makes me very sad now. She didn’t want to bring someone into our house.





We crossed into Rhode Island after midnight. Driving along the coast in the dark, every set of headlights behind me made me nervous. Cars with roof racks outlined against the night might have been the roof lights of a squad car. The tranquility of the day had given way to the uncertainty of the darkness. I spent as much time staring into the rearview mirror as I did with my eyes on the road.

We came through Westerly and with the streetlights shining onto the road I saw that we were not being followed. I relaxed a little bit and brought Hannah close to me in the cab. It had been hours since we last spoke, though there was no tension between us. It was as if all that had needed to be said had been said, and now we were doing precisely what made sense. We were going home. As much as that was possible. Besides, we were both sun-weary from the day at the beach, a feeling that was both pleasant and exhausting at the same time. I could still feel the sand between my toes.

We came onto Route 1 and there was less traffic here, and I drove slowly, carefully obeying the speed limit. Soon we passed the giant water towers and the road became one-way toward the sea. We were the only vehicle. I rolled down my window and that familiar smell, of brine and of seafood, of marsh and of bay, came into the truck. It lifted my heart to smell it, and I reached over and squeezed Hannah’s thigh.

“Almost there,” I said.

She didn’t respond.

I came through the old neighborhood the back way, past all those fishermen shanties, all of them dark at this hour. I killed the lights on the truck and we moved silently by the small houses with their fishing equipment piled in the yards and driveways. Sad little houses on concrete blocks.