Huron Shores, Michigan Evenings

I

She sat on one of four benches at the Soda Bar, bathing in the first night’s dusk, her eyes between the fading waters and a hardcover of Franny and Zooey. The rightmost bluff began where the parking lot ended, choked by wildflowers and dipping toward the connecting Great Lakes that could have each been oceans.

When the sky’s colors were completely ruined, Olivia returned for her grandmother’s, her bare feet cautious of nails in the boardwalk. The first fire on the beach was crowded by those unfamiliar to Olivia, but she, after more minutes of walking, recognized the teenagers surrounding the second.

Its warmth reached her when she grew closer.

She greeted those that she knew and introduced herself to those she did not, asking Molly Webb and Cameron Elliot of their junior years just as they had asked of hers. The sand was as deep near the dunes as it was cold, gnawing at her feet, steadily swallowing her down, and Olivia reasoned that those around her had not aged much. Some had changed their hair––Theresa Bailey had dyed hers from a brunette to a lemon blonde, and Jasmine Decker had chopped hers to a shoulder-length. Dennis Gilmore might have been an inch or so taller. Alan Livingston had a sharper Adam’s apple, Tim Sellers had thicker arms, Kathleen Sellers had a bigger chest.

One of the oldest in the group gave Olivia a fifth of Wild Turkey that she soon sipped on while she listened to their talking and their laughter, her face becoming raw in the firelight’s heat. When she said her goodbyes around eleven, such skin on her ached for that warmth.

Closer to the cabin were expanses guided only by moonlight over the beach. Along her route stood one of the public docks where single-motor fishing boats and kayaks moored, although all were empty and lifeless on the water. She glanced to their wooden figures as she passed.

Halfway through, sounds from the water came to her––kicking, naked feet and hands disrupting a black surface.

She stopped.

To the right, wet bodies trailed from the shoal. One spoke prominently, the other chuckling as it trailed behind. Olivia listened from the distance until she assumed that they were gone, but, continuing toward her grandmother’s, she abruptly caught it beside her.

“Jesus,” she said, her heart rate in her throat.

It stepped around her in the darkness, beginning once more in the opposite direction. “Olivia?” the voice then called.

She turned. “Yeah?”

Oranges from a lighter appeared over Victor Moreno’s olive skin, his angular face, his squint toward her. “I didn’t think you’d be here until later in the summer,” he said.

“Oh my God––I didn’t recognize your voice,” she laughed, hugging him briefly. “Who was that you were with?”

Victor glanced toward a direction somewhere in the blackness. “No one.”

She glanced as well. “Well, you weren’t here last year. I figured you moved or something.”

“I was in Europe,” he said. “My cousin goes to college over there, so I was visiting for a bit.”

“I bet that was cooler than up here.”

Victor shrugged. “I don’t mind up here.”

Swelling, the cicadas continued around them while they spoke––screeching shells from the vacuum of trees opposite the boardwalk. From his backpack, Victor soon removed cigarettes that the two shared at the base of the dunes, the lake’s edges licking over the sand.

“How’s your dad?” he asked her. “My aunt told me about what the doctors have been saying.”

“He’s okay,” she said. “Good days and bad days, I guess.”

Victor nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” She turned and forced a smile. “Thanks.”

“Are you guys still in the same place?”

“Yeah. For now, at least. My dad has trouble keeping up with it, I think,” Olivia said. “I do what I can when I’m home, but… I don’t know.”

Toward the lake––the smooth, hollow mammoth––Victor exhaled the smoke.

By the end of their shared hour, the moon only a fragment in its debris of stars, she wanted to kiss him, but the teenagers parted.

Carefully, she entered her grandmother’s house from the back deck, quiet as she moved over hardwood and Persian rugs. The home seemed to be one that shrunk when Olivia’s age had climbed to a double-digit––when her prepubescent memories of its size were found to be wrong. It was that kind of timeless, well-kept collection of rooms with no hallways, smelling of lavender in some parts and pine in others, with bedroom carpet thick enough to bury toes in. Porcelain figures watched her breathing, sleeping mass from behind the glass paneling of an armoire.

And she dreamt of walking through the one-stories and ranch-styles, deeper into hemlock and maple––alabaster siding with cherry shutters, tidy landscaping, Americana ornaments beneath porch overhangs. At the final turn, the forests opened for small bluffs and dunes of golden hair, naked to the winds and erosion, she stripped down to wade into the surface that looked to be oil. She was then beside her father in the master of the Wisconsin house before the carpet had been torn up for hardwood. She kept his hand in hers for a while, pill bottle carcasses across nightstands and skin without much color.

When she left, he lost sight of her.

II

The sun of the second day died.

With hardening feet, Olivia closed the Salinger novel back into itself and started for the cottage. From her back pocket, she pulled out the metal flashlight she had taken from her grandmother’s kitchen drawer, using it when the boardwalk’s edges were no longer discernible. Soon, she climbed down and continued along the beach, her painted toes sinking. The sand solidified and bronzed as she neared the water. On the right came a collection of kayaks, and further down––detached from those secured to the dock––floated a single rowboat. Its wood converged at the front like a canoe and flattened at the stern, floating on the calm surface. Olivia aimed the flashlight briefly to it as she passed, looking to where its frame had been splintered behind the corpse that it held, a rifle or shotgun resting over its torso and still aimed toward where most of its head was ruptured at the neck.

She let the flashlight and novel fall, engulfing herself in the night as she vomited over the beach.

Gasping and crawling away from the shore.

With wet palms, she soon struggled for the light and stumbled at an attempt to stand once she retrieved it, further retching.

Slowly, trembling, Olivia fought to inhale.

With the light again in her grip, the thought of looking back to it––of imprinting more of it in her––made her stall.

Voices came at some point, but they were distant. She assumed that they were from a fire at one of the far cavities on the leftmost shores––more popping embers like those she had visited the previous night.

The eventual decision to look back to it brought Olivia more of its intricate, vermilion detail. It wore a jacket of thick material––too thick for a summer on the Upper Peninsula––with pale green slacks. Both feet were as bare as hers, and most of the fingers from the left hand still rested over the stock of the gun. The right hand had slipped from the barrel.

Olivia, staggering, moved a few steps closer, trying to keep the light away from where it had been torn apart, and leaned in for a small pamphlet of black leather on the boat’s floor. She stepped quickly back, her cheeks wet, and continued back along the sand toward the dunes until she dropped down. Beneath the flashlight, she used the nail of her trembling thumb to peel back the cover of what she had taken.

Her breathing remained erratic.

I was too rash, and this is left. Front coat pocket. Do with it what you think best. I’d hope you don’t think of this as me, because I like to think it is not.

At the end of the cursive was a smaller, spiraled signature that Olivia could not make out, although it looked as though it began with a “U”.

She swallowed hard and returned to the boat, rounding its side, still unwilling to look directly at it. In the jacket’s pocket that was closest to her, Olivia felt two folded masses. She counted them beneath the flashlight––each stack contained one hundred bills, and every bill worth one hundred dollars––and let some of them fall to the sand.

And this is left.

Sobbing, Olivia gathered the seven or so that she had dropped. Those seven bills alone, she thought, would have been enough for at least one of the surgeries, or for some of what the bank still wanted. One of her uncles had told her father that he would cover it, although that uncle, Olivia knew, had medical bills of his own. Mortgages of his own, addictions of his own, children of his own.

She wiped her face and cleared her eyes to read the following page of that notebook, but there were only jagged strips from removed pages running along the book’s spine. She found no further writing.

And, beneath a moon too gaunt to allow her anything outside of what the flashlight produced, Olivia stayed on the sand for some time. Distant calls of conversations and howling eventually faded, leaving Olivia––from what she could tell––alone on the black shore, her inhales deep and her exhales tremoring.

After returning to her feet, she approached the boat for a final time and once more heard a kicking in the water, and, cutting the flashlight, she tossed the notebook back. It must have hit the body, she thought––the leg or the torso, maybe––as its landing was muffled.

She ran.

Her strides felt lethargic, her balance faltering within the cavities of the hollowing beach. Her exhales grew heavy, more tears washing to her chin and neck, her arms wild in the sprint.

From the water, something else thrashed, then accompanied by spoken voices, and Olivia continued sprinting with her naked feet throwing sand up, gasping, wiping at her eyes so she could see the porchlights when they came.

The sounds from behind called out.

Olivia turned left, moving away from them but striking the side of the boardwalk with her foot and peeling its skin open along the top. She shrieked and landed hard on the wood, dim under an ailing moon, and they neared. Water fell from their bodies.

They called out again.

Olivia pushed up, leaving the fallen flashlight.

The boardwalk ran for another two minutes before it branched left and climbed toward her grandmother’s back deck. In the warm interior, Olivia’s foot emptied throughout the kitchen. She slipped and caught herself on the dining room table, a chair overturning and clattering to the floor. In the bathroom, she submerged herself in the tub after it had been filled, watching all that ran out of her circle the drain––discolorations that were as vermilion as it had been. Cicadas sounded from the dune grasses.

III

She, delicately, stepped across fallen pine through the limbs of emerald maple, breathing it in, descending slopes of daylight. Clothes left her skin and folded over the sand. The oil gathered around her toes, her ankles, calves, thighs, stomach, breasts, collar, nose, brow––once her eyes sunk below it, she expected something more to come, but, almost weightlessly, she found nothing.

They studied her from the armoire’s glass.