With All the Restlessness of Storm Clouds

With All the Restlessness of Storm Clouds Bill Wolak

The Dangerous Coast

Through the blackness Liam Rector sees a miniature screen pulsating brightly in the distance. He stretches out to the nightstand and paws for the buzzing object like an animal, jostling his water glass and the sports section of yesterday’s newspaper. Whenever he gets a call at this time of night -- or morning, whichever it actually is –- he has to make the automatic assumption that it’s the department calling, that there’s an emergency somewhere in the township and that he’s needed on the scene. A bleating phone in the darkness is one of the common hazards of being a volunteer firefighter.

But the voice on the other end isn’t a dispatcher –- it belongs to his ex-wife. Melissa’s voice isn’t one he particularly wants to hear, especially at this hour. Did you get word? Word. . .? About what? Luke is missing. Luke -- their son, their only child. He’s overseas, in Africa, on a study abroad program for his junior year of college. What are you talking about? I just got a call from someone, I don’t even know who it was. I thought maybe you’d heard something too.

You sure about this? You sure it wasn’t just someone pulling your leg for some sick reason?

Liam’s tongue is so swollen with sleep he hardly knows what he’s saying. The two beers he had at dinner last evening don’t help.

No. No joke. The American consulate’s been notified. The consulate. . ..What the hell’s going on? It must be something like kidnapping or terrorism, he thinks. What a fucked-up world.

By now he’s out of bed and, without realizing it, pulling his clothes on. There will be no more sleep tonight. It would have been much better had there been a fire.

In the background, Laura, Melissa’s successor and his second wife, stirs beneath the sheets. She’s by nature a heavy sleeper and has trained herself not to come all the way awake when her husband is summoned to a blaze.

In the meantime, his ex-wife is still talking, telling him a story. He’d travelled with a group of classmates to somewhere called the Dangerous Coast. I’ve never heard of the place. It was night, they all decided to go for a swim, and. . . . Were they drinking? He’s warned Luke about booze and dope. I have no idea -- does it matter? None of it makes sense. He switches on a standing lamp. Missing, he mumbles. He is irritated and confused. The nerves on the inside of his skull pound erratically. What is it, honey? He waves his hand at Laura and moves to the small terrace on the other side of the sliding glass doors, which have been left partly open to let in the balmy late summer breeze. An oversized, yellowish full moon is drizzling fuzzy rays over the earth. Here and there some of his neighbors’ lights are burning. Drowsily he takes in more of what happened from Melissa. Luke, on a break from the university, had gone for a weekend of sightseeing to a remote stretch of the East African shore. Around midnight, his boy, a co-captain of the university swim team and a strapping six-four, apparently led a charge into the surf, but within seconds something went wrong and his companions lost sight of him. Instead of swimming to his aid, they’d gone back to the lodge for help. By the time they returned, the weather had turned foul, and the local authorities were powerless to launch a search. Christ Almighty. So now what? Melissa’s voice, normally so cool and detached when it comes to her exhusband, begins to crack.

I’m not sure. It’s not altogether clear. What do you mean? How could she possibly not get all of the vital details, and get them straight, when the subject is their missing child? At that moment all the sore issues that fatally eroded their relationship crowd into his brain.

Tonight, rather than nurse resentments, he needs them to ebb quickly away.

Unconsciously his fingers wrap around the iron railing of the terrace. He feels unmoored. He and his ex-wife go on exchanging words, but everything around him feels more and more unreal: the ominous darkness of the Rhode Island night, that fat, lurching moon, the indistinct and somehow threatening black clouds scudding across the sky. It’s as if some long-feared curse, the fear of anyone who calls himself a father, has descended upon him out of the blue, and he’s suddenly afraid that he’ll never be able to shake it off, no matter how long he lives –- and Liam Rector isn’t the type to believe in curses.

But what is he thinking? Maybe Luke isn’t dead. Maybe he’s alive, somehow alive and clinging to a rock or a board or God knows what, and it’s only a matter of finding him out there in the waves. Something has to be done, and at once. All right, he says. We’d better get over there on the double. ~ ~ ~ At the eleventh hour, a decision is made that Melissa won’t go to Africa after all. The money for her travel -- money they don’t have -- would be best deployed by paying the professionals over there who know what to do. And there’s no time to discuss it.

One very long flight later, Liam and a few of his firefighter brethren arrive on a remote stretch of coast on the Indian Ocean, where he never dreamed he would find himself and has no desire to be. Peering out over the choppy waves, his heart sinks. It’s going to be impossible to find the kid out there, what with the wind howling and the rain pounding down in buckets. If Luke were standing next to him, he’d give him hell for even thinking of venturing into the water at night. But it’s too late for that now. There’s only time for a pathetic prayer for a miracle that he already knows won’t be answered. . . .

The next day the pilot of the private helicopter he’s commissioned for the reconnaissance locates Luke’s waterlogged corpse drifting in the blue current three kilometers to the south of the lodge. The sharks haven’t devoured him after all.

The body is hoisted in just as the inclement weather breaks. Liam stands alone on the bleached sand and looks out to the impassive sea, which has turned

inexplicably placid, as if nothing terrible could ever happen in its harmless depths. Death in such an Edenic spot doesn’t add up at all.

In a few minutes he’ll phone Laura, then his ex-wife, and inform them of the sad outcome of his journey, but for now all he can do is look out over a world that is devoid of meaning despite the bludgeon of its beauty. ~ ~ ~ Back in America, Liam remains trapped in a daze. There is an interment at the local cemetery, and a memorial service that hundreds attend, including Luke’s fraternity brothers, who’ve come up by bus from Virginia for the occasion.

After all of the gestures and ceremonies are finished, there’s a full stop -- nothing.

But for Liam and his ex-wife, Melissa, it isn’t over. There are still practical matters to wrap up, and even for a life cut so short, a life that didn’t have all that much time allotted to it -- he was just shy of twenty when he drowned -- there seems to be so much unfinished business.

The ex-spouses decide to meet without anyone else present -- no Laura, and no Brian, Melissa’s second husband. Neither would object to being on hand, but under the circumstances both are understanding. As Liam puts it, it really isn’t their business, and whatever needs to be dealt with should be handled by Luke’s biological parents.

Their first meeting happens at a Starbucks in a strip mall on the southern edge of Blackington. After some of the practicalities -- what to do with Luke’s clothes, funeral and travel invoices, etc. –- have been discussed, Laura folds her handwritten list and deposits it in her jacket. But neither she nor her ex makes a move to leave.

Right, says Liam as he looks through the window and across the street, a street he realizes his son will never walk again. He and Luke stopped here occasionally for fancy drinks when the boy was in high school and when he came home on breaks from college. It’s beyond devastating that they’ll never share the simple experience again. So. . . tell me what it was like. His ex-wife’s voice is like a spear piercing a window made of gauze. Until this moment they’d never talked about Liam’s doomed trip to Africa.

Well, you can probably imagine, he mumbles, his head sinking between his shoulders. He wants to talk about it and at the same time he doesn’t. But he knows that he owes Luke’s mother at least something.

Now I’m sorry I wasn’t there. God. I think about it all the time. Sometimes I even dream about it, like I know what it looks like or something.

What is he supposed to say? Is he supposed to sympathize? Is he supposed to forgive her? This is when Liam comes face to face with the understanding that Luke’s death is always going to be there between them, like a monster that refuses to retreat, that even though he was their creation in life, his presence will be even stronger in death. Melissa’s chocolate-brown eyes are glazed with pain. I keep thinking about what happened out there in the water -- I can’t get it out of my mind. . . .

Of course he gets it. And yet there are all those issues between them, issues he still can’t manage to sweep aside, the thorny after-effects of the long deterioration of a relationship. But his energy, his will, to hold onto them is beginning to flag.

. . .and what went wrong -- and what he was thinking at the last moment. Did he call my name. . . ?

She begins to dissolve. Liam looks away. What was going through Luke’s mind in those terrible final moments? Was he drunk? Maybe all the better, maybe it would have made death easier, less terrifying. He never got the chance to talk to the others who’d been there with him –- they were long gone back to the university in Johannesburg by the time he arrived on the Dangerous Coast and had already given their statements to the police.

Yeah. I think about it all the time too. Melissa nods. Nevertheless, he still has this wild urge to blame his ex-wife for what happened, even if he knows it’s absurd. Suddenly he gets up.

I have to go. Laura wants me to pick up a few things from the supermarket. This intrusion of another reality -– a lie, but it’s beside the point –- breaks a slowly gathering spell that he doesn’t want to succumb to.

The ex-spouses agree that they’ll have to meet again, because there are still matters to be settled.

Liam sweeps up his empty cup. He can feel Melissa’s dead eyes on him as he drops it in the trashcan and walks out to his car. ~ ~ ~ She had been the first to find someone else. The marriage was over, Liam had moved into a spartan studio apartment on the outskirts of Blackington, and within months Melissa was seeing Brian Wykowski, who ran a lucrative landscaping business in the eastern part of the county. Everything had happened so quickly. At the time Melissa was thankful. The divorce had been relatively amicable, and within just a few years she spawned another family, Luke’s two half-sisters, Morgan and Penelope. Since everyone lived in close proximity, visitation, shared custody, schools, and so on were a snap. Liam and Melissa had decided, in the interest of Luke, to keep it all as civil as possible. The fact that as far as each of them knew there had been no infidelity in the marriage -- merely incompatibility and boredom -- had helped. Afterwards Luke grew very close to his father. It wasn’t that he had any animosity towards his mother; it was more that she’d naturally become preoccupied with her new husband and children, and whether or not she fully realized it, she had stolen time away from him, her eldest. Melissa told herself that it was the best of all possible worlds and that it would all somehow work out. For several years it did. ~ ~ ~ But back then she could never have dreamed of the guilt she was bound to feel after Luke died. Overnight, something inside of her has crumbled. Climbing out of bed every day has become a struggle. There are young children to tend to, as well as her job as a real estate agent, but it all seems to have become pointless. Her pain is unrelenting. What she can’t stop obsessing over is that Luke’s tragic death is somehow her fault, though she understands on a rational level that it’s preposterous -- she wasn’t in Africa and could have done nothing to prevent what happened. But maybe, she thinks, had she done something different when he was a child, had she paid more attention, had she kept him with her instead of letting him go and live with his father. . .

To her credit though, Melissa doesn’t crack completely, she convinces herself that she will refuse to fall prey to her gloom, and she isn’t about to commit suicide. On the other hand, she doesn’t know how she’s supposed to live.

In the evenings, after her husband turns in, she jumps online and over and over watches the tribute that Luke’s high school friends assembled for his memorial service. As image after image of her perfect, handsome, smiling, dead son roll by, accompanied by the rollicking track by a progressive rock band she doesn’t know the name of, she breaks down all over again and accuses herself of not deserving to be a mother since she was unable to save her boy from a lethal African current. ~ ~ ~ The only thing that interests Melissa now is seeing her ex-husband. I wanted to give you this. I thought you should have it. Liam hands his ex-wife a bracelet made of royal blue cord tied into multiple knots.

After convening at a few different spots over the past several weeks, they’re back at Starbucks. It’s late on a Tuesday afternoon. The place is nearly empty except for a few oblivious high school students whose books and backpacks are scattered around the legs of their tables and chairs.

Melissa recognizes the bracelet. Her son had the habit of wearing those funny things, sometimes in bunches. She’s seen them on other kids too -- it’s a teenager’s thing, a cool bauble.

I figured you probably didn’t have one. Thanks -- I didn’t. He left a few at the house before he took off for Africa. You’re lucky, answers Melissa. You’re so lucky that. . . Am I, says her ex-husband. Well, I don’t mean lucky in. . . in that way. Liam is weary. For the first time, he’s devoid of the antagonism that he’s so often harbored towards his ex-wife. Part of it is that he can no longer be too angry or resentful at someone who is so thoroughly broken -- and Melissa, he knows without

doubt, is as broken as he is. Another part is something else. . .something he doesn’t have words for.

Because the why of it all has come to haunt him. Just look at those kids over there: aside from the petty cares of a school assignment or what to wear to a party, they don’t realize how fortunate they are. They’re alive -- inexplicably alive, while his own son, a raw gem of a human being, is dead, drowned at night in a godforsaken corner of the world.

Did you ever find out why he wore this thing? No. Did you ever ask? No. Neither did I. We fell down on the job, didn’t we? I guess you could say that. Maybe he wouldn’t have wanted us to know. Maybe that, too.

~ ~ ~ It’s more than a regular thing between them now. Hardly a week goes by without Liam and Melissa coming together, mostly at coffee bars over beverages neither of them remember drinking by the time they leave. The arrangements for the next time are fixed with merely a word or two. Wednesday? Okay. At three? Make it three-fifteen. It’s as if they’ve begun an illicit relationship -– an affair even, except that what’s drawn them together is so electric, so explosive, that the thought of physical contact is nearly abhorrent. And yet something definite, something nearly palpable and unmistakable, has sprung up between them again. ~ ~ ~

And if you had to do it over again, Melissa says one afternoon near the end of the following summer. She’s just returned from a family vacation on Cape Cod, and she and her ex-husband haven’t seen each other in over two weeks. If I had to do what over again? I mean, was all of this. . . this pain -- worth it? Liam shakes his head. His eyelids drop like curtains. You could say that it would have been better if we never seen each other even once in our lives, right? Wouldn’t we have to say that, honestly?

He is merciless. He has to be. At this stage there is no room for equivocation. A wan smile plays over Melissa’s still-attractive features. Her fingers encircle the tall white coffee cup. The sight of a foreign engagement ring and wedding band suddenly strikes Liam as surreal.

It was so strange at the Cape. Being surrounded by the sea, I mean. Every time I looked at it even for a second, and I could hardly avoid it, it was almost more than I could bear. I had to wonder what I’d been thinking, going up there. If I thought I was getting away. . .

This is something else he understands. Even though Blackington is close by the Atlantic, he does his best to stay away.

Maybe next time you should head in the opposite direction -- to the mountains or something, he suggests feebly.

How can you avoid the sea? Is it really possible to avoid it forever? ~ ~ ~ Near the end of October they convene after lunchtime at the municipal park not far from Liam’s condo. The air is crisp and cool, a harbinger of what’s to come. Once in a while a jogger or dog-walker passes the bench where they sit, otherwise the park is deserted.

Melissa sighs. He would have been twenty-one today. Do you think I didn’t know? Two whole years have passed. A scab has begun to harden over the gaping wound caused by Luke’s death. Every day is no longer unalloyed torture, hours of prolonged agony. Moments, yes, but it’s not what it was before.

You wonder what he would have become. Or decided to become. Well, we know he loved Africa. Even if he knew what was going to happen, that probably wouldn’t have changed.

As it is, he’s forever frozen in time at the age of nineteen. I’m curious whether he would have ended up in the foreign service, like he set out to do. Or if he would have changed his mind and gone over to the other side -- the Peace Corps, or something like that. . . .

Who knows. Happy birthday, Luke, wherever you are. They sit motionlessly while a stiff, chilly breeze out of nowhere musses what leaves are left on the trees.

What do you think. . . about where he is? I don’t know. I read an article recently that when you die, your spirit, or soul, or whatever it is, explodes into thousands of particles of energy and gets, like, absorbed into the atmosphere or something like that. Hm, grunts Liam. I think about this stuff all the time now. I never gave the afterlife that much thought before, only what they taught us in Catholic school. Meaning we’ll never see him again. What? If he exploded into millions of particles or whatever. We’ll never see him again.

I hope that’s not the case, because -- But it is true, he wants to add. Instead, he does something he hasn’t done for so long he can’t remember the last time: he reaches out for his ex-wife.

She looks down at his hand, with its millions of blondish hairs like animal fur, and after a moment of disbelief, takes it and holds on. ~ ~ ~ Unusual clusters of thought make appearances in each of their brains: Melissa, without even noticing, begins to dissect what’s wrong with her marriage to Brian. It isn’t difficult to come up with at least a few things, because the shine always wears

off the apple. Moreover, there’s something almost primordially innocent about a first marriage, something that can never be replicated the second time around, even if the first was less than ideal.

Against his better judgment, Liam begins to replay scenes from his sex life with Melissa, so intense at the beginning, so deeply satisfying, in fact, for years, until everything went sour over something he still doesn’t wholly understand. Maybe, if they’d hung in a while longer, if they’d both learned to forgive and forget and accept that staleness and arguments and impasses are part of every equation involving two people, the outcome would have been different. But would it have changed Luke’s destiny?

Where can any of these speculations lead? Nowhere. Liam knows it. But a tragedy of such gargantuan dimensions produces an unbreakable bond, and that’s the problem. Like two people hanging on for dear life from a rope bridge spanning a bottomless chasm, he and Melissa are bound together forever in a way that no one on the outside can ever understand. The memory -- the trauma -- will prevent them from ever being rescued from each other. . . .

None of it can adequately be put into words, which presents an enormous difficulty for Liam and Melissa: there’s no one to talk to but each other, and even then the communication is so often nothing but a pregnant silence. ~ ~ ~ It’s summer there now, he remarks just after the new year. Liam and Melissa have been driven back inside Starbucks by the harsh weather. The trees have long been stripped of their leaves and line the streets of Blackington like aging, emaciated scarecrows. Snow has already fallen twice, and the asphalt of the avenues has taken on a calcified sheen.

Melissa understands what “there” means. She’s been thinking about “there” ever since that awful day, the day that changed everything forever, trying to picture it clearly in her mind, scanning images of the Dangerous Coast online, still dreaming of it at night.

I need to go, she announces. You were there. It seems only right that I should make the trip too.

He has nothing to say to that, in the way one can’t argue against an indisputable fact.

Will you come? Will you come with me? It’s a long, long way -- halfway around the globe. We’d be on the plane for twenty-four hours. What do you expect to come of it? I don’t know. But I need to go. . . .because it will only dredge up everything all over again. And maybe it’s best left --

It’s already dredged up. It’s never been buried, not for a second. And why does something have to come of it?

He waits a long time before answering. The new spouses back at home have long since figured out that something unusual has happened. Something like this, a trip to Africa, won’t help. I don’t know, he says. I really don’t know. It seems only right, doesn’t it? After all, we are his parents. He isn’t here anymore. At some point we have to face that. Sometimes I wonder if we really have.

~ ~ ~ It’s a pristine day when they arrive at the lodge on the Dangerous Coast. After checking in, they make their way outside, kick off their shoes, and Liam leads the way to the spot on the beach where he himself stood two years earlier searching in vain for traces of his missing son.

Here? asks Melissa. Is this where it happened? Right about here. All around are scenes of almost indescribable beauty, as if they’ve landed on another, perfect planet. There are wide swaths of green, the cliffs and hills are imposing and majestic, and even though she’s not much of a traveler, Melissa questions why she’d never thought to come here before Luke died, simply because there are such places in the world. . . .

Down the beach a pair of massive cows rest on their forelegs, like beachgoers sunning themselves. After a slow gander in the humans’ direction, they turn away, as if they’re tired of being stared at.

And the sea, that indifferent giant that swallowed Luke alive, murdered him, is blue and tranquil. It still seems impossible that what lies beneath the gently soughing waves could have done something so brutal, so irreversible. Well, now you’ve seen it. You’re here. On account of the heat they can’t stay in the sun forever. But before Liam has the chance to suggest that they leave, Melissa drops onto her haunches and pulls her hood over her head like a nun in prayer.

She flattens her hand over her brow and peers at the glittering water. Why is she doing that, Liam wants to know. Is she waiting for him to rise from the depths and swim back to land? He feels a pang of annoyance towards his ex-wife, but it quickly dies away.

What do you want to do? I’m going to stay. I know it’s crazy, but I feel close to him here. After a while Liam too lowers himself to the sand and drapes his arm over her shoulders.

It doesn’t sound crazy. It doesn’t sound crazy at all. And they stay like that, without speaking, until the sun itself disappears behind them.

Mark SaFranko

Mark SaFranko is a writer of short fiction, novels, plays and music, as well as an independent film actor. Novels include Hating Olivia and No Strings. Recent short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.