Beach Read(88)

My hands were trembling so badly it was hard to make out the words.

This night. This night had almost been as bad as the night we’d lost him, or the night of his funeral. In any other situation, all I would’ve wanted would have been my parents.

Dammit, I did want my parents. I wanted Dad in his ratty pajama pants folded on the couch with a biography of Marie Curie. I wanted Mom moving around him in Lululemon, obsessively dusting the picture frames on the mantel as she hummed Dad’s favorite song: It’s June in January, because I’m in love.

That was the scene I’d walked in on when I’d surprised them that first Thanksgiving I’d been away at U of M. When a wicked wave of homesickness had prompted me to make the last-second decision to come home for break after all. When I’d unlocked the front door and stepped through with my duffel bag, Mom had screamed and dropped the Pledge on the ground. Dad had swung his legs off the couch and squinted at me through the golden light of their living room.

“Can it be?” he said. “Is that my darling daughter? Pirate queen of the open seas?”

They’d both run to me, squeezed me, and I’d started to cry, like I could only fully comprehend how badly I’d been missing them now that we were together.

I felt broken anew right now, and I wanted my parents. I wanted to sit on the couch between them, Mom’s fingers in my hair, and tell them I’d messed up. That I’d fallen in love with someone who’d done everything he could to warn me not to.

That I’d let myself go broke. That my life was falling apart, and I had no idea how to fix it. That my heart was more broken than it had ever been and I was scared I couldn’t fix it.

I gripped the notebook paper in my hands tightly and blinked back the tears enough to start reading in earnest.

The letter, like the envelope, was dated for my twenty-ninth birthday—January thirteenth, a solid seven months after Dad had died, which made everything about this feel dreamy and surreal as I started to read.

Dear January,

Usually, though not always, I write these letters on your birthday, but your twenty-ninth is still a long ways off, and I want to be ready to give this, and all the other letters, to you then. So I’m starting early this year.

This one contains an apology, and I hate to give you a reason to hate me just before we celebrate your birth, but I’m trying to be brave. Sometimes I worry the truth can’t be worth the pain it causes. In a perfect world, you would never know about my mistakes. Or rather, I wouldn’t have made them to begin with.

But of course I have, and I’ve spent years going back and forth on what to tell you. I keep coming back to the fact that I want you to know me. This might sound selfish, and it is. But it isn’t only selfish, January. If and when the truth comes out, I don’t want it to rock you. I want you to know that bigger than my mistakes, bigger than anything good or bad I’ve ever done, and most completely unwavering has been my love for you.

I’m afraid what the truth will do to you. I’m afraid you won’t be able to love me as I am. But your mother had the chance to make that decision for herself, and you deserve that too.

1401 Queen’s Beach Lane. The safe. The best day of my life.



I ran up the stairs and thundered into the master bedroom. The tablecloth was still tucked up under the clock to reveal the safe. My heart was pounding. I needed to be right this time. I thought my body might crack in half from the weight on my chest, if I wasn’t. I typed in the number, the same one scrawled in the top right corner of the letter. My birthday. The lights flickered green and the lock clicked.

There were two things in the safe: a thick stack of envelopes, wrapped in an oversized green rubber band, and a key on a blue PVC key chain. In white letters, the words SWEET HARBOR MARINA, NORTH BEAR SHORES, MI were printed across the surface.

I pulled the stack of letters out first and stared at them. My name was written on each, in a variety of pens, the handwriting getting sharper and more resolute the further back I flipped. I clutched the envelopes to my chest as a sob broke out of me. He had touched these.

I’d forgotten that about the house, somewhere along the way. But this was different. This was my name, a piece of him he’d carved out and left behind for me.

And I knew I could survive reading them because of everything else I’d survived. I could stare it all in the face. I staggered to my feet and grabbed my keys on the way out the door.

My phone’s GPS found the marina with no trouble. It was four minutes away. Two turns and then I was in the dark parking lot. There were two other cars, probably employees’, but as I walked down the dock, no one rushed out to shoo me away. I was alone, with the quiet sloshing of the water against the dock’s supports, the gentle thunk and shpp of boats rocking into the wood.

I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I knew that I was looking. I held the letters tightly in my hand as I moved down the length of the dock, up and down the off-shooting pathways.

And then there it was, pure white and lettered in blue, its sails rolled up. January.

I climbed unsteadily onto it. Sat on the bench and stared out at the water.

“Dad,” I whispered.

I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I believed about the afterlife, but I thought about time and imagined flattening it out so that every moment in this space became one. I could almost hear his voice. I could almost feel him touching my shoulder.