—
Today your absence struck me anew, as it does on occasion. I wish I hadn’t been too much of a chicken to choose you back when you tried to choose me. More than that, I wish I were brave enough to try to find you now.
—
M and I have retired and moved to Key West. I visited Boca Chica Beach today for the first time in over thirty years. You’ll think it ridiculous, I know, but I half-expected you to be there by our usual tree, your face glowing and your skin sun-warmed and sand-covered. You weren’t, of course. But maybe one day I will find you waiting for me there again.
26
•••••
My belief in an afterlife isn’t based on any sort of religious teachings. It’s more like a feeling that’s crept up on me over the years as I’ve experienced more life and more loss. Somehow, I know that Mrs. Nash and Elsie are okay. Probably not literally lounging on clouds while an angel plays a harp, but they are at peace and happy. And they are together. Or they will be—I don’t know the mechanics of it, exactly. So I might as well make it as easy as possible for them to find each other.
I grab a nearby stick and dig a hole. After a few minutes, I become impatient with my progress and claw at the moist sand with my fingers. A tiny crab emerges and gives me a dirty look. I apologize to it as it scuttles away. At last, I have a deep enough well to house precisely three tablespoons of human remains.
The small wooden box that now holds the baggie of Mrs. Nash’s ashes used to sit on her nightstand. When her sons were school-aged, she worked part-time as a secretary to a professor of Eastern religions. He brought her the box as a souvenir from oneof his trips to India, and she kept her daily-wear jewelry and hand cream inside. I would bury the whole thing, except it’s the only thing I have besides Elsie’s letters to remember her by. Also, to be honest, I am tired and don’t want to dig a bigger hole. I open the box, and the scent of lemons and jewelry cleaner wafts up before mixing with the ocean air and disappearing completely. Taking in a deep breath, I cradle the box closer in my lap.
“Hey, Mrs. Nash. It’s, uh, it’s Millie. But you... you probably know that.” I talk to the bag of ashes, but I know she’s not in there, not really. That’s not Rose McIntyre Nash. Those might be her remains, but her essence is somewhere and something else. Still, I’m sure she’s listening.
“I wanted to deliver you directly into Elsie’s hands. But that didn’t quite work out. So I think this is probably the next best thing. Elsie will find you here, if she hasn’t already. I’m pretty sure. If not, you can haunt me as revenge. Feel free to be spooky about it. I probably deserve it for taking a bit of you away from the rest of yourself and dragging you all the way down the East Coast. Anyway...” I choke a bit on the painful lump in my throat. “I’m delaying. I know. It’s just... it’s hard to say goodbye.”
I wait for the wind to whisper some secret wisdom in Mrs. Nash’s voice. Of course it doesn’t. So I laugh at myself, allowing a few tears to slip free from the corner of my eye. They fall with greater frequency as I slowly open the baggie and carefully pour its contents into the hole.
“You were my very best friend,” I say as I cover Mrs. Nash’s ashes with sand before the sea breeze gets a chance to blow them away. “And I love you so, so much.” When the hole is filled, I notice a fairly large brown and white spiral seashell near my foot. There doesn’t seem to be anything living inside it, so I lay it atopthe small mound of sand as a lovely little makeshift headstone and whisper, “Goodbye, Mrs. Nash.”
I sit for a long time, just existing in this place. After hearing so many stories about Boca Chica Beach, it feels almost sacred—nude locals and everything. My efforts to wipe away my tears with my forearms are futile; more keep replacing the ones I clear, blurring everything around me. The men smoking cigars on buckets are russet blobs, the dogs in the water are black smudges in a large streak of faint turquoise. All of it’s tinted by the pinkish orange of dusk. The hazy column that approaches me could be anyone on this planet, as far as my bleary eyes are concerned. But the way my heartbeat races and every nerve in my body prickles, I know it can only be one person.
“I hoped I might find you here,” Hollis says, sinking down onto the sand beside me.
The faint echo of Elsie’s words is enough to make me cry even harder, and as angry as I am with Hollis, I can’t manage to be anything except grateful when he puts an arm around me and guides my head to rest against him. His hand runs up and down my back, soothing me with his touch as I sob into the crook between his neck and shoulder.
“She’s gone,” I say when I run out of tears at last. “She’s really gone.”
Though that could mean many things in this context, Hollis doesn’t ask who “she” is or what kind of gone. All he does is kiss the top of my head and hug me tighter against him.
I loosen myself from his grasp after a few minutes and turn to face him. My anger returns, both over his betrayal and the way he doubted this endeavor from the beginning. “I’m still mad at you,” I say.
“I know, and you have every right to be. But I do want to talk. Whenever you’re ready.”
“I don’t know what there is to talk about. You were planning on profiting off two dead queer women. And off your... involvement with me.” I fold my arms, hoping they’ll form a barrier to keep whatever he says next from reaching my heart and settling there like sediment.
Hollis lets out a sigh. “I’m not going to lie to you, Millicent. The book did start out as that, yes. I found the stories about Rose and Elsie interesting. Traveling with you and learning about them was the first thing in a long time that made me feel excited about writing again. I started working on it Friday morning, and the words just spilled out onto the page. And I checked in with my agent, and he agreed that the editor I’m working with on my first book would probably be interested. Except the more I wrote, the more I realized I wasn’t writing Elsie and Rose’s story. Or, I was. But I was also writing ours. Including you in it might have started out as a kind of framing device, but then you... well, you became everything.”
Hollis pulls the red notebook from his back pocket and smacks it against his palm.
“On Saturday, while I was walking down Gadsley’s Main Street as you rode agonizingly slow along that parade route, I realized I could never publish this and emailed my agent to tell him the project wasn’t feasible. I knew I cared too much about you to betray you like that.”
“But you kept writing,” I say. “I saw you. And there’s... so much in there. Stuff I told you later. Stuff we did later.”
“Yeah. I did keep going. The words were still flowing, and it’s not like I had another idea. Producing something, even if it wasn’tdestined to be my second book after all, felt better than falling back into stagnation.” Hollis rubs his ear, his expression sheepish. “When I started, I did truly believe this was about Rose and Elsie. That their story was the perfect example of the bittersweetness of love’s inevitable end. I found myself trying to tell it in a way that made it seem like Elsie had no choice but to let Rose go. But I was really just trying to convince myself so that I could let go of you at the end of this trip and tell myself it was necessary too. And I could take solace in the idea that transience—not endurance—is what makes connections between people special.” He absently drags his fingertips through the sand, leaving a wave-like pattern in their wake, then meets my eyes again. “But the further I got into writing their story, and the more time we spent together, I started to see that the end isn’t always inevitable. I don’t know—and I realize now that it’s probably not my place to guess—whether Elsie felt that she could have made a different decision, at the time or in the future, or if she ever regretted—”
“She did. Regret it, I mean. Regretted not letting Rose choose her. She said so in her journal.”
“Journal?” he asks.
“Yeah. I met with Elsie’s great-niece. I’m not sure I liked her very much, but she gave me this.” I show Hollis the brown leather book. “Elsie kept writing letters to Mrs. Nash in it, all of those years. Kept hoping they’d find each other again.”
“Well, there’s your proof,” Hollis says. “Elsie and Rose loved each other this whole time, just like you said. Lasting love exists.”
