Anne Korkeakivi - Shining Sea

“That’s so cute. He visited patients in their own homes?”

His grandmother died of polio the year he was born, and his grandfather died shortly after. He never met them. His father had one picture of them, a tall and somber couple. Cute is one of the last words he would have used to describe them.

“Hmm.”

“Look at this: March first, 1933. Ten a.m. Elizabeth Creedy. Oak Tree Hill. Bleeding. Miscarriage. Cod liver oil. Basket of seven beets.”

“Where did you get that?”

Mia shuts the diary. She pulls her knees in to her chest.

The diary must have been in one of Aunt Jeanne’s boxes, stuck behind the old evaporator he still hasn’t managed to sell. A few weeks after her funeral, Molly lugged them all up here in the back of her station wagon. Hang on to them, will you? Until I have time to go through them? That was about twenty years ago. They never seem to get around to it when Molly brings her family to visit.

Behind the old evaporator is also where Georgina stows her empty bottles.

“You find anything else interesting?” he asks carefully. Georgina has done pretty well since Mia was born, but she slipped up this winter. And then Mia was home before he could get the bottles over to one of the farther-away townships to recycle. At twenty-one, Mia is too old now not to notice when her mom hasn’t been sober; she must have gone looking for the evidence.

She stares at her knees. “Hidden, not interesting.”

What is there to say? It’s an endless battle, Georgina’s lifelong battle. His battle for her. They couldn’t hide it forever from their daughter.

“You did find the diary, though. That’s interesting.”

“Yeah, it is. It’s like this perfect little historical capsule. The illnesses, the payments, the tiny villages. It’s funny how you ended up back here. Almost exactly where they lived.”

Are we looking for your father? Georgina said in that laserlike way of hers when they started hunting for property in the area, all those years ago. He hadn’t realized it until she said it, but of course that was exactly what he was doing.

“Your mother and I thought New England would be a good compromise between England and California — we’d both get a little something familiar.”

“I’m glad you bought right here.”

“You wouldn’t want to have grown up a California girl?”

Mia smiles. She gets up, brushing hay from her jeans. “I did find one other thing.” She disappears behind the old evaporator and then reappears with a big bundle in plastic, lugging it between her two arms. “What’s this? It looks like there’s a guitar inside.”

His rosewood guitar, still carefully wrapped against the sea.

Thirty years, and he hasn’t touched it.

“Yeah,” he says. “There’s a guitar inside.”

She pulls a corner of the plastic open and wrinkles her nose. “It stinks.”

The smell of the brine returns to him; it swells in his heart as the waves once did around him. He’s an old man now. Such a different man. And still that scent drags him back.

“So what is it?” Mia says.

“Like you said. An old guitar.”

“Broken?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So why don’t you use it?”

“Just don’t.”

“But you’ve kept it.”

People lead these lives and then pray their kids don’t end up living anything like them. So they pretend their lives have been clean until either the lies catch up with them or the kids see through the lies. He doesn’t hide his past from Mia; he’s told her what seemed right for her to know. In a way, his past is her past, too, or at least her heritage. His father was a World War II prisoner of war who managed to survive hell in the Pacific, then died anyway when he was a boy, and his mother remarried and moved to Arizona. She is still going strong, but her second husband died from AIDS years ago. That’s why Mia’s much older cousin went into AIDS research and why her grandmother became such an important fund-raiser for AIDS research in her state when not overseeing the volunteer programs at her local library. His older sister stayed behind in Los Angeles and is still there running a renowned — and expensive — artist’s retreat on Venice Beach with her third husband. His younger sister works and mostly lives in Africa, but he’s not sure exactly where — he left, and when he got back, she was gone. He never really got to know her as an adult. He had two brothers who went to Vietnam. One came back and worked as an army doctor until retiring a couple of years ago in Texas. The other didn’t.

After college, he split for Europe and spent some time bumming around, which is when he met her mother. And he met a man there with whom he rowed from Scotland to Ireland. They encountered a terrible storm, and the man died, and he wrote an album about it, with a song that became very successful.

That has always seemed like enough for Mia to know. Because, on the other hand, his life is his and no one else’s. There was no reason to tell her what he was doing when he met her mother on a dance floor on the Spanish island of Mallorca. Or about why he left for Europe — about how he had a friend growing up he spent all his time with who also went to Vietnam and came back alive but still didn’t survive. All these years later, it’s still hard to think about.

“Can I look inside?” she says.

“If you want.”

She hunts around for a pair of gardening shears and slits through the bundle. His old guitar case, faded but still pristine, emerges from the multiple folds of stiffened, yellowed plastic. She lays it on its back and opens the clasps.

The warm rosewood glow has dimmed, and there’s a hint of rot around the sound hole. Diminished and, yet, still beautiful. The hours he spent crouched over this guitar, so many years ago. In their house in California and then in the one Ronnie bought in Arizona. On countless squares and train platforms all over Europe, busking. On the beach in Scotland where he met Rufus.

Mia looks at him, waiting. He picks it up and plucks a string. The sound is awful. He plucks again. The brittle string snaps.

“Is this the guitar you wrote the song on?” Mia says.

He shakes his head. “This is the guitar I wrote the song about.”

“You’ll have to change the strings. Maybe there’s one…” She turns back to the case, flipping open the pick box. “Hey, what’s this?”

She pries with her finger and slowly pulls out a small faded photo.

With the door shut, the air in the barn is still, timeless. He could be anywhere, anytime, back fifty years ago jumping off a pier in Santa Monica alongside his best friend. Or flipping burgers, grease spattering onto their arms. Or swimming in a muddy lake while Joan Baez sings in the distance.

“That’s you! Carrying the palm leaf. Look, you are all there.”

He takes the photo into his calloused hands. So many years lie between the Palm Sunday when Eugene snapped it and this day, here. His father was still alive. But then some were lost. And some more were born.

“Not all. Your aunt Sissy wasn’t even born yet.”

“Oh, yes, she is there, too. Look at Grandma.”

There’s his mother, so young, her lips painted red, her hair prettily curled, her stomach round and hard in the last weeks of pregnancy. Sissy was born barely more than a week after this.

He touches the photo with a blistered finger. “You’re right. We’re all here.” They had just gotten home from Palm Sunday mass. Eugene was waiting on the doorstep. “Even my best friend. He was the one who took the picture.”

“Your best friend? You mean as a kid? What was his name? Where’s he now?”

He hasn’t done everything right in his life. He’s done a lot that was wrong. The first half of his life, he felt like a marionette with strings pulling him in every direction. He wanted to be a hero, like his dad, then failed every test he was given. But he’s a husband and a father, and he has just put up almost 6,500 gallons of syrup. In the end, he’s done at least that.