fiction

by Julie Delegal

On Vilano Beach

It was the anniversary of my sister’s murder, and I longed to be at the ocean. Its osmosis had a way of pulling out the toxins and washing them away. Dispersing them. Laundering them clean in the churning waves. I yearned for the cold, reassuring splash of the Atlantic against my skin.

It would mean being away from my classroom a few days longer. Away from my husband, Frank. Away from our Jessie, too. She looked so much like my sister, Lauren, it hurt. On the beach on Vilano Island, buffeted by the roar of wind and sea, I could still talk to Lauren. I could still hear her voice. I knew it wasn’t my fault—her death—but I still wanted forgiveness, for not seeing the danger of him. For not understanding his desperation.

So, I packed a few clothes and vitamins and protein bars and ibuprofen. My arthritis was only getting worse. My husband, Frank, still frowned when I announced my periodic need for solitary escape. I’d come to learn it was a frown of compassion, and not of disapproval, as I once thought.

“Do whatever you need to do,” he always said. “I know it helps you.” Fifteen years before, Frank hadn’t flinched when I asked him about adopting Jessie. “She’s our niece,” he told me, taking both of my hands in his, as we stood inside our living room together, grandfather clock as our witness. “I’d be proud to raise her as my own—as our own—with you.” Frank was my rock. A big teddy bear of a man, yes, but my rock, all the same.

My favorite spot near the bottom of St. Augustine’s northern island was only an hour’s drive from our Florida home. That Sunday night, I set off for the dingy hotel with the ocean view. When I arrived, the room smelled of cleaning fluid, heavy and suffocating. I slid open the salt-encrusted window, which sat over a fake balcony, and let the clean, saline chill envelop the room. I sat on the bed, in the dark, braced and brisked, breathing in the scent of January’s salt air. After about fifteen minutes I closed the windows and set the heat on low. I texted Frank my I-love-you-good-night. Prepared for bed. Curled my pajamaed body into it. Tried to think of Frank’s Christmas traditions with Jessie. Watching A Christmas Story. It’s a Wonderful Life. The leg-lamp and angel-bell tree ornaments. The teeny-tiny sip of spiked eggnog. The marathon Monopoly game, with John Denver and The Muppets on the stereo.

That first night, I woke up in a cold sweat. Panicked, I had no memory of my dream, but as I peered through the darkness, there he stood: a man. He hovered just inside my hotel room door, shoes glowing red. I cried out, sat up, and switched on the bedside lamp. But no one was there. There was only the hotel door, locked and bolted, with its exit map posted under the dim glare of scratched plastic. I focused on catching my breath.

In. Two, three, four.

Out. Two, three, four. 

I reached for the plastic cup of water at my bedside, sipped, then breathed some more to slow my pounding heart. After a few minutes, I turned off the light again. As I lay my head on the pillow, my mind’s eye flashed. Red light on polished black shoes! 

I shot up in bed again. Jumped out of it. Turned on every light in the room. I slowly pushed open the bathroom door, wider . . . then all the way. The handle hit the rubber doorstop on the wall behind it. I flipped on the lights. The glass shower was empty. And there was no one—nope—no one, hiding in the closet, either.

My brain spent several minutes convincing my body that there was no man in my hotel room. I was safe. Shaken and terrified, but safe.

Who might this dream-man have represented? My sister’s murderer—my brother-in-law—had stood well over six feet with a large build. While he was serving in the Army, he learned how to self-medicate with beer and whiskey. Uncle Sam had been less than adept at teaching him how to manage his PTSD. Much less his alcoholism.

Damn him.

I shook him out of my mind. The threat that woke me—the evil image that launched me out of bed—stood shorter and less muscular. I turned the hotel clock toward me. Its red digits glared 3:34. I shifted my mind to my students. Pictured their faces. Pronounced each name out loud, until I fell asleep.

The next morning, the ocean sparkled, glorious, and I greeted it early. The winter sun fractured its surface into millions of mirrors, flashing white and gold on cerulean. The cold, clean Atlantic slapped my shins, followed by a swelling wave that drenched my rolled-up jeans and washed away my nightmare. Lifting the shoes in my hand to keep them dry, I veered beachward.

As I ambled my way north, I remembered running up the beach with Lauren. She was maybe eleven. I could almost see her turning cartwheels over the bright orange coquina sand.

You got the graceful genes, I silently told her. I could barely pull off a somersault. The seagulls laughed at me.

Farther up the beach, I spotted a fisherman standing between two white plastic rod receptacles, both slanted toward the sea. The fishing poles within them also leaned eastward, unmoving—he had not cast them yet. Winter beachgoers both, we waved at one another.

I had been about thirteen years old when Uncle Tommy brought Lauren and me down to Vilano for surf fishing. That would have made Lauren seven. When it came time for us to learn how to clean the fish for cooking, she’d been okay with him scaling it from tail to gill. Uncle Tommy had then made a slant cut under the gills, flipped the fish over, and made the other cut, beheading it. Lauren gasped—but she stayed on, brave and still, to watch him. It was the slice of the whiting’s soft, white belly that had gotten to her.

You were so little, and so squeamish. I said to the wind, all those years later, in my silent way. You ran away crying. 

Yes, said the water, lapping at my feet. I sure did. Lauren could never bear the thought of hurting any living creature—or a dead one, either, for that matter.

At that moment on Vilano Beach, fifteen years after Lauren’s husband took her life and then his own, a large V of pelicans soared toward me, nine—no—eleven of them. Their leader flapped its wings once, twice, three times, its immediate followers gliding on its wake, then flapping. The birds alternated, flapping and gliding, gliding and flapping, like piano keys under expert, trilling fingers. As they lowered their flight path over the ocean, they formed a line, flying single file. Reverent, I stopped walking and turned to watch them make their procession. For Lauren. I allowed my eyes to fill with grief, and my feet sank into the sand, now ankle deep. I stood firm as the receding wave pulled me oceanward, grooves of rushing water digging east against my barefoot stance. I let myself sink in. Deeper.

I wiped the tears from my cheeks. The cold air scraped my face. That night, I called Frank and told him about the pelican procession. “There’s a poem in there somewhere,” he said, reminding me I was his favorite poet, favorite English teacher, favorite person.

And so it went, the first day and the second day. My maritime restoration: resting, walking, and allowing the Atlantic to baptize me again. I was calmer, if sad. I thought more about her than my anger toward her husband. I spoke to my sister, and the water and the wind, the gulls and the pelicans, they answered for her. But they bestowed no forgiveness.

I should have seen it coming, Lauren, my silent words protested. You should still be here.

Maybe she’d been too embarrassed to tell me about her husband’s darkest moments, all those years ago. Maybe she just wanted to vent and not hear her know-it-all sister dispensing advice.

I should have listened better.

Maybe, just maybe, there was nothing any of us could have done to stop him. I forced out a heavy breath and hung my head.

Now you’re getting it. What makes you think you alone had the power to stop the kind of evil that latched onto him? The kind of evil that breaks young, once-innocent men? The voice was neither my own, exactly, nor Lauren’s. But it told the truth. And after fifteen years, after raising her daughter, our Jessie, the truth was still unfathomable. Lauren was gone.

I still miss you. She still misses you.

•

“Did Daddy make Mommy sick, too?” Jessie had asked us that January. She was eight, responding to our age-appropriate explanation, “Your daddy was very sick when he and Mommy died.” We wanted her to grow up knowing the truth about her parents, to the greatest extent advisable. The counselor told us to keep our answers short, to narrow our responses only to what she asked, and to reach out for help along the way.

“Yes, he did make her sick,” I’d told her. Lovesick, I thought then. Lauren had been as sick as any enabler in any family where soldiers come unspooled, and addiction does the rest. “But we are so thankful you stayed safe and well,” I told our Jessie.

“Because I was at Janie’s slumber party?”

“Yes. You were right where you were supposed to be.”

After the murder-suicide, I kept out pictures of Lauren and Jessie, but I packed away my framed photos of the three of them into a box with a few other things. I planned to give them all to Jessie. One day.

In one of the photos, they were at the airport. He was wearing fatigues, meeting one-month-old Jessie the first time. Before the day I packed away the picture, I had always noticed his height. His large build had thinned over the course of that first deployment. He was clean-shaven in the image, easily subtracting three years off his twenty-year-old visage. A gentle giant, I always thought, considering his enormous shoulders curving softly downward to receive his baby. In the picture, Lauren, a few years older than he, smiled up at him, while his attention was fixed on baby Jessie. Amazement and fear flashed in his eyes, and the camera caught both. A gentle giant, indeed. A sweet, young, terrified giant. 

On the day I stowed away the photo for Jessie, though, I noticed something else in his eyes. When I looked at the image of his face that last time, I saw the beginning of something shutting off. Dissociating. The same scared new dad now struck me as a man retreating, slightly, into himself.

Had I missed it from the beginning? Had his desperation always been there, just under the surface?

The Christmas Day before the January of their deaths, we’d all been at our house, with our parents, Jessie, and my fellow teacher, Marguerite, who’d been a holiday-dinner orphan that year. Most everyone retreated to the living room. Mom sat sipping her after-dinner pinot noir. Uncle Tommy always opted for coffee. Jessie sat cross-legged on the carpet, playing a game of Battleship on the coffee table with my dad, who sat hunched forward on the couch.

I entered the kitchen, my hands full of plates, just as the refrigerator door swung closed. That very same moment, my brother-in-law yanked a beer bottle away from Lauren.

“Ow,” she cried, her back to me. “I’m bleeding.” The bottle’s jagged cap had cut her.

As I sped toward the sink to deposit the plates, he shot me a pleading, defeated look. He stormed through the back door to the yard, sat at our patio table, twisted off the bottle top, and took a long swig. I watched as he lit a cigarette. His hands were shaking.

I stopped spying through the kitchen door’s window and faced Lauren. “Jesus. How many has he had?”

It was the wrong question to ask. Lauren glared at me as she held the wrist of her injured hand.

“Here, let’s get you cleaned up.” I walked her to the sink and turned on the tap. It was hard to see how deep the cut went. “Splash it while I get the peroxide.”

We sat down at the table. I cleaned up the gash and began to wrap her palm. When I looked up at her, she had tears in her eyes.

“Is that too tight?” I asked.

“No. It’s not you. It doesn’t hurt.” She stared beyond my shoulder. I looked behind me and saw only the kitchen cabinets. She was in her own world. A despondent one. Weary.

“Talk to me, Lauren. What’s going on?”

She sighed with the depth of someone twice her age. “This last deployment. He came back . . . different. He can’t sleep. He won’t . . .”

Marguerite began to walk into the kitchen, then, seeing us huddled, discreetly backed out.

Lauren looked down at the table and shook her head.

After a moment, I spoke. “PTSD and alcohol don’t mix.”  

“No shit!” Lauren snatched her hand away from me. “Do you think I’m stupid? Or are you now an expert on PTSD? Like you are on everything else.” She pushed back in her chair, springing upwards. “And before you ask, he’s already on the waiting list for counseling at the V.A.” 

“Lauren.” I grabbed her forearm before she could walk away. “I’m sorry. I’m just con—”

She tore away from me and went out through the back door. I resisted the urge to spy on the two of them. As soon as Jessie sank Dad’s last battleship, she and her parents got ready to leave.

At least Lauren and I had said our I-love-yous when we hugged each other goodbye. It was the last time I saw her alive. “Just call me,” I whispered, and I held her a few seconds longer than usual. She returned my hug.

When we spoke on the phone, a few days later, we talked about Jessie, who was planning to attend her first overnight birthday party. Lauren sounded better than she had on Christmas Day, and foolishly, I did not probe further.

Concerned, I had tried to say that day in the kitchen. I had not been concerned enough. Is anyone, ever?

•

On Vilano Beach, grief’s spiral swirled around the same tender places. The gyre was broadening, though. Softer, more lilting notes entered the melody that had been Lauren’s life. At the end of that second day, the sunset shifted into long shadows and light, glimmering on gold coquina. The low-cast gleam played tricks on my eyes. For a moment, I could see my little sister’s bare feet in the air, finishing a perfect one-handed round-off. Her laughter bathed me like the sound of the crashing waves. Lauren had always been the playful, dreamy one. The sensitive one. I was more pragmatic. The critical one. Except when I felt her there, on Vilano Beach.

On the third and final day of my retreat, I slept late. While I’d been spared any more nightmares, every joint in my body screamed out the morning forecast: rain. Looking through the dirty window that sat above the fake balcony, I saw it wasn’t raining, just overcast. Dark gray clouds had swirled against lighter ones and stuck there, as if inside an upside-down bowl. My cool, clear, blue-sky beach days had succumbed to a low-pressure system, as had my arthritis. I downed half a protein bar so I could swallow some ibuprofen. 

That morning, I texted Frank, packed my car, checked out of the hotel, and went down to the beach one last time. I zipped up my jacket against the icy-damp wind. Archipelagos of yellow-white seafoam dotted the beach, pushed by the wind like hockey pucks over the slick, dark, rust-colored sand. Walking north from the bottom of the long barrier island, I spotted a lone pelican perched among the foam puffs at the water’s edge. When was the last time I’d seen a pelican standing on the beach? Had I ever?

As I approached the bird, I crossed toward the dunes to give it space. It attempted to spread its wings—but its right one only drooped. I stood and watched it, pity undulating through me, as it hopped forward a few steps into the ocean, so it could float. I pulled out my phone in time to snap a photo of it trying to spread its wings again, and then I walked farther up the beach to find a set of homeowner stairs where I could sit. Cellphone in hand, I wondered if St. Augustine had a bird rescue.

I looked up Florida’s fish and wildlife folks, but when I called, no one answered the phone. So I tweeted them the photo of the injured bird. I’m not sure why I thought the creature had been shot. Perhaps it was because I recalled past family vacations on Vilano Beach, in large rental homes with real porches and balconies, where the huge, pterodactyl-like birds flew past at eye level—or lower. I’d always thought they’d be easy prey for an errant boy with a BB gun.

You don’t know for sure the pelican’s been shot. The voice came clearly. It was Lauren’s. It might’ve been a fisherman’s hook, or any number of things.

Human beings can be awful, I answered her silently. You give people too much grace. You gave him too much—I stopped myself mid-thought. It wasn’t her fault. Or mine.

A young couple came walking south, toward the spot in front of where I sat. The woman, a fit, buoyant brunette in bicycle shorts, stopped and asked me, “Are you all right, ma’am?”

Her walking companion, whose bony, bare feet protruded from under his jeans, stood two inches shorter than she did. He stopped long enough for me to see him roll his eyes. He walked ahead of her, dragging his jeans-bottoms through the sand, and then he slumped his shoulders—perhaps upon realizing she wasn’t following him. He stopped several yards away, to wait for her. Turning to face us, he shook his head.

I turned my eyes back, from him to her, wondering if I looked like a frail old lady. A ma’am she might need to be concerned about. “I’m fine,” I said. “I was just trying to figure out how to help that injured pelican.” I pointed my head south. “His wing looks broken.” I didn’t say I thought he had been shot. “Looks like he’s making his way down to the jetties.”

“Ooh,” she said. “I don’t blame him, in this weather.” She wore a light jacket, half-zipped, over an exercise bra with bike shorts and sneakers. She zipped up the jacket the rest of the way, the wind outlining a curved bicep underneath.

She’s an athlete. She was an energetic, freckle-faced woman in her late twenties, maybe early thirties. I wondered what she did for a living. I wondered why she was with the barefoot, jeans-clad man, who was now shifting his stance, now looking back, now looking away, hands stuffed into his jacket pockets.

“I tweeted the Florida Division of Wildlife,” I said. “They wouldn’t pick up the phone for some reason on a Wednesday morning.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Twitter? Wow.” She rocked back and forth, from one sneakered foot to the other, eyeing the man.

“Is he your boyfriend?” I asked, staring at her un-ringed fingers.

She shrugged then moved her shoulders in a left-right motion, then right-left, then left-right again. I think the question remained up for grabs—his boyfriend status was either yet to be determined, or about to be ended.

“I’ll go check out the bird,” she said. “We work for the county. I’m sure I can get someone here to take care of him.”

I watched her jog away. What a confident, kindhearted, helpful person she was. A brunette version of our Jessie, but older. The young woman bouncing down-beach was the kind of person who made you feel better about the world—so ready and willing and able. Was she a first responder? A paramedic? A police officer?

I decided to sit for a few minutes before rising to walk back down to the island’s south end, where I would take my final leave. In that moment, the vista belonged only to me, with no one in between my spot and my ocean. I shared it with Lauren. After breathing in the scene of the great Atlantic’s grey-toned turbulence—its feisty attitude—I did a couple of leg stretches and set off to leave, to end my retreat.

As I walked, I met up with the couple again. I smiled at the young woman, and again, she stopped to speak. He didn’t.

Stone-faced, he walked past me. I couldn’t help but stare at his feet, which peeked out from under his wet jeans hem. A few stray bits of orange coquina clung to the bony, hairless top of each foot. He stopped several yards ahead of her.

Just like he had before.

“You were right,” the young woman said, interrupting my staring. “The pelican is hiding in the rocks. It’s drawn a small crowd—it won’t be alone. And I did find the right people to call.” 

“You’re a good person,” I told her, smiling. Then I crossed my arms and stood toe-to-toe with her. “You and he,” I turned my chin to indicate the man several yards behind me, waiting for her. “Are you first responders?”

“Yes, ma’am.” She reappraised me, eyebrows raised. “We both work for the sheriff’s office.”

The hairs on the back of my neck stood vigilant. A single thought seized me: He has a gun.

Adrenaline drenched me—colder than the wet January wind whipping my hair and stinging my eyes. I blinked, and the red glow of shiny shoes flashed in my mind. Evil—threatening me from inside my hotel door! They were the shoes from my nightmare: black, polished police-uniform shoes. In those shoes—in my dream—a diabolical presence had stood. A deathly, demonic force now wearing blue jeans, now walking barefoot. 

The nightmare that once jolted me awake, was now jolting me alert. I had to warn her about her partner.

But I could barely breathe. The threat of him, behind me. The sight of her, in front of me. The vertiginous tilt and whirl of my blood—I spread my sneakered feet apart and bent slightly, to keep from collapsing. 

Lauren! 

“Ma’am? Are you all right?” The young woman—who was not Lauren—asked me. I blinked at her, reorienting my body in time and space.

“I’m fine. I just need to catch my breath,” I said, straightening my back. Strengthening my resolve. “Young lady, you’re going to think I’ve lost my mind. But I’m going to say it anyway, in case no one else has.” I slowed my breathing. “That man is not for you.” Moving my head in his direction, I did not break eye contact. “If you’re dating him, break up with him. Today. Make sure you’re safe. He has a gun, right?”

Her eyes widened but she did not move away. In the microsecond before she pasted on her deferential helper’s smile, her ma’am face, a shiver passed over her open mouth. It may have been a stuttered moment she took to compose herself, to consider what to say to the strange old lady she met on the beach.

But I didn’t think so. I still don’t think so. It was nearly imperceptible. But I saw.

She pressed her lips together and raised the corners of her mouth. She looked at me with clear eyes, light brown, like her freckles. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, and then she jogged away from me.

As she approached her boyfriend-not-boyfriend, he held out his hand to her. She skirted

toward the ocean, splashing in the ankle-deep water.

Soaking her sneakers.

Avoiding his reach.

---

Julie Delegal is a former freelance journalist living in Jacksonville, Florida, where her writing skills also helped build a law firm. Her self-published debut novel, SEEN, earned a handful of indie publishing recognitions, including the Eric Hoffer First Horizon prize. These awards inspired Julie to pursue her Master of Fine Arts degree at the Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. Julie enjoys vacationing with her three adult children, container gardening, home design, coquina beaches, and her Moyenne poodle.