Alice McDermott - After This

Some vestige of his race or of his sex made him think, whenever he looked out across the ocean: As it was before me and as it will be long after I’m gone. For the second time today, he touched his thumb to his fingertips. He could make it to the 1980s or 1990s, perhaps even to the next century, when the new baby would be grown, maybe with children of his or her own. But even with the best of luck, it would not be equal to the time he’d already spent.

He called to them. “Come up,” he said against the wind. “Your mother wants you up.”

The wall of sand the sea had made, the cliff, the collapse, seemed smaller now with their father standing on top of it, his hair raised in the wind. They scaled it quickly, in wide strides, their arms pumping.

He put his hand out to his daughter, pulled her up easily over the edge. And then bent to gather the shoes and toys, swinging the canvas straps of the two toy machine guns over his shoulder (surprised to find that some mistaken memory had caused him-momentarily-to be surprised to find they had no weight). Jacob, the oldest, ran to retrieve the cardboard lid while Michael, his brother, lifted the shoe box, shifting the contents-green army men, toy bayonets, machine gun, camouflaged jeeps-taking roll.

With his thumbs hooked over the lid, the boy carried the box up the beach, behind his father and brother and sister, feeling the drag of sand but feeling, too, that with a small effort he could overtake them.

Their mother stood at the base of the dunes, her hands seeming to cup her broad face as she waited for them.

“Back here,” their father said. “We’ll be out of the wind.” And once more gave his wife his arm. The children ran before them, the boys running up and down the sides of the dunes, sand slipping, as if they had no choice in the matter, as if the world itself were tilting, the little girl imagining shipwrecked and island-lost, and only her father’s cleverness (there were guns slung over his shoulder) to keep them safe and warm.

The plaid blanket was already spread in a gap between the dunes, the tufted pillow on it, the lunch hamper, and the teddy bear who had not been lost, not drowned in the wreck, after all. She threw her arms around it, an extravagant reunion. “If it weren’t for me,” her mother said dryly, smiling, “you would have left him behind in the car.”

Too soon to eat, they agreed, and her husband gallantly gave her his hand again as she lowered herself to the blanket, first onto her knees and then, carefully, onto the pillow. Straightening himself, he palmed the football like a younger man and called the boys to follow him out to the beach.

She leaned back on her palms, the wool prickly against her skin and already dusted with sand.

There was the now oddly distant knock of the waves against themselves and the softer yet similar sound of the football meeting their hands. There was her husband’s voice, Go out, now, Keep your eye on it, Good, and the voices of the boys, mostly complaining: My turn, Hey, Interference. The ball a kind of shadow passing before her, between them, across the sun itself or so it seemed.

Annie, her daughter, had claimed the corner of the blanket, sitting perversely, her mother thought, with her back to the ocean and to her father and the boys on the windy beach. The worn bear (cherished now that she had recalled its existence) on her lap. She was not speaking, but her lips moved and her eyes were clearly engaged in a conversation of some sort-she frowned, she shook her head-and despite the echo of the ocean falling down on itself, the slap of the football in their hands, and their voices, carried on the wind, it was this conversation as it played like light across her daughter’s features (she raised her eyes, made them smile) that absorbed the mother’s attention.

Mary Keane watched her daughter and felt as well the punch and turn of the baby not yet born and saw the similarity of the mystery of them both-the baby unseen, moving an elbow or a foot, the means to an end all its own, unfathomable; her daughter with the unseen life playing like reflected light over her face, her lips moving in a conversation forever unheard.

She slipped her hand under her belly, shifted her weight on the pillow, and looked up to see the boys returning, windblown, kicking up sand. Her husband behind them, boyish, too, with the red flush across his cheeks and the thinning hair scattered every which way across his head. The baby rolled, roiled, beneath her ribs and the beach grass shuddered in the wind. He sat beside her heavily, while the two boys fell on the shoe box full of soldiers, carrying it off to the foot of another dune-for this had been their plan all along, to restage Okinawa or Omaha Beach, continuing the war game they had begun last night in their room, across the sheets and blankets and pillows of their twin beds, in one of those hours of grace when they had not quarreled and their parents had not called to them to put out the light. They had named each member of their platoon-Murphy, Idaho, Sarge, Smitty-ambushed some Germans, and collected commendations from Patton himself. This morning when their father had come into their room to say, “We’re heading for the beach,” the dissolution of the plans they’d made to continue the push toward Berlin right after Mass was quickly compensated for by the possibility of dune and sand-Okinawa, Omaha Beach, North Africa and Rommel.

It was their father who had put the football in the trunk.

Now they scattered their men across the sand and among the bending stalks of sea grass. Their sister heard the changed pitch of their voices, the harsh and breathy pitch they used when they were speaking for someone else in an imaginary game. She rose to join them. The bear was still in her arms but once again forgotten.

“Can I play?” she asked finally, understanding, even at six, that the timidity of the question invited a single reply.

“No.” Looking to each other, not to her.

She watched them. The orders they barked were low and intimate, running under the sound of the wind.

“Can I have a man?” she asked.

“No,” again, but now their parents on the blanket together looked toward them.

“Boys,” their father said, a warning. And a single green soldier was plucked from the shoe box of reservists and replacements and tossed her way, through the air. She picked him up from the sand. The mold had shaped his features precisely, a strong jaw and a sharp nose, the little combat helmet and a sash of ammunition across his chest. Unlike the men her brothers preferred, this one had no rifle pressed to its shoulder, no hand grenade about to be thrown, but stood instead with his arms extended from his sides, palms out. His head was slightly raised, as if whatever he confronted was still at some distance, and was larger than just another man.

His name was Steve. Steve Stevens. And he was a scout, sent ahead. Alone.

She moved him through the sand, up over the boulders and hills that were the arms and legs of the bear.

John Keane, leaning over his knees, watched the children carefully, seeing that they behaved and then, reassured, allowed himself to lie back on the blanket. The sky was blue. They were nicely out of the wind. He placed his fingertips on his wife’s back, just lightly. The football had reminded him that he was not (he would have said) entirely pleased with the behavior of his two sons. It upset some notion he had of order, of rightness, that Jacob, the older, was the smaller of the two, the lesser athlete, the lesser student. It made something unkind, even cruel, about Michael’s efforts to outdo him. Michael’s triumphs over his older brother-and the self-satisfaction they brought him-came too easily. Jacob’s defeats seemed too indicative of a certain kind of future.