They drove around for twenty minutes, row after row of parking spaces filled, and his father began to curse louder. His face grew red, as it always did when he got angry, and he began to blame his luck on his wife. "I told you we should have gotten started earlier!" he shouted, turning his face sharply toward her and then back to the windshield, searching for a parking spot. "Didn't I?"
Billy's mother said nothing.
"Give me another beer," his father snapped. At first, his mother sat motionless, but when his father repeated the command, shouting this time, she reached behind her to the red enameled metal cooler at Billy's feet and opened it to take out a can of beer. For a moment her eyes met Billy's, and she looked as though she wanted to say something, but when she saw the calm stare that was always on Billy's face, she just dropped the lid of the cooler and turned around to the front seat.
"Open it up," his father snapped when she handed the beer to him, thrusting it back into her hands.
She opened it and gave it to him.
His mother was beautiful that day. He had seen her modeling her new bathing suit in front of the full-length mirror in her bedroom before they left. Some small part of him had wanted to tell her that she was beautiful then, had wanted to run to her the way he knew she longed for him to, but the thing that always kept him from doing these things, would always keep him from doing them, intervened, and he merely went downstairs to gather his pail and shovel like his father had yelled at him to.
They drove around for another ten minutes, his father alternately cursing and draining his beer, and when he had finished the beer, they went out of the lot and back to the one they had passed before with empty spaces in it.
A young lifeguard in pale green bathing trunks and safari hat was just putting the FULL sign out.
"Goddamn,"
his father spat, giving his mother a dirty look.
They went back to the lot before that one, and after another ten minutes, they found a spot at the farthest end.
His father had another beer as they emptied the car. His mother told Billy to take his shoes off, and the pavement in the parking lot, sprinkled with windblown sand, felt warm and hard and slightly gritty beneath his toes. The air was even sharper now, almost cold, and a breeze came off the ocean and slapped the smell of water gently at him even here, up the slope, out of sight of the water.
He carried his shovel and pail, and a folded paper bag for seashells that his mother had insisted they take along. "I'll put all the nice ones in a jar, after I wash them off, and put it on the mantle in the summertime," she said, which only made his father laugh derisively. His father carried the cooler and a pale striped umbrella that had lain against the wall in the garage for a long time.
They left the parking lot, walking over the wooden railroad ties that bordered the sand, and up over the ridge. The ocean was there. It was vast, a world-filling thing that ate the earth in front of him from horizon to horizon. At the beach, it threw waves indifferently, but farther out it swelled and rolled and moved its giant flanks like a sleeping beast secure in its own power. It was cold and deep and uncaring, a heartless surging expanse of life, and it did something deep inside Billy. It touched that small place within him; the cold vastness of the ocean opened a place he thought could never be reached, and before he knew it, his hands began to tremble and tears were rolling down his cheeks.
He dropped the pail and shovel, and the paper bag, which the wind caught and lost in the parking lot behind them, and stood where he was, and an uncontrollable river, a tributary of the cold sea before him, streamed from his eyes to add its salt to the sand at his feet.
His father was ahead, unmindful of the two behind him, his nearly empty beer in his hand, his thoughts on the next one in the cooler. But his mother turned around and saw him. Suddenly she dropped everything she carried—the picnic basket, the beach ball—and hugged him as if he had just been born.
"Billy, Billy, what is it?" And then she was crying herself, not in sympathy so much as in joy and relief at the openness of her son, her son who was so often away from her, somewhere else, not bonded to her as she was bonded to him.
"Oh, Billy, what's wrong?"
And suddenly the moment was over. He stiffened in her embrace, and the river within him turned back in its course to run within him again. She looked at him as his tears dried, and he was just Billy again.
"I'm all right," he said, only a trace of upset remaining in his even voice.
"What the hell's going on?" his father shouted, returning with only his new beer in his hand, the dropped umbrella and cooler marking his progress ahead of them. As always, his eyes did not meet his son's.
"Billy . . ." his mother began, but then she said, "Nothing," and turned away to retrieve her burdens.
They went on, and they spent the day at the beach, and he swam, and collected a few shells with his mother, whose hand shook whenever she touched him, putting the shells in the pail that his father emptied out in the parking lot before they got in the car, saying they would spill in the trunk and get sand all over everything. And Billy stood and sat and stared at the water, and it did nothing to him the rest of the day the way it did at that first glance. It did nothing further to him because he knew what it was now, what it was to him, the vast swelling indifference of the universe against him, against what he had to do, what he knew deep in the atoms of his heart and blood and mind that he had to do. There was no comfort out there in the world for him, but he had to do it anyway. For he knew, even then, what was missing from him, and what the deep aching missing part of him would do when it grew strong, and he knew, just as a flower knows to create petals and a bee knows to buzz and collect pollen.
And when that moment of swelling self-pity had passed, he looked out upon the ocean and it was only water, a part of the intricate workings of the earth, nothing more.
He was on a beach . . .
He awoke in the room with the rippling ceiling. It undulated like the surface of the ocean, long bars like waves. He heard a distant hum, the lap of water against shore.
He closed his eyes, then reopened them. Voices talked at him. The waves rolled across the ceiling, one after another, water slapping against beach.
"Can you hear me?" a voice said distinctly.
"Yes."
A face moved over him into the water. He knew the face, knew the name that went with it, but it turned away from him and he heard it say, "At least he's alive."
He heard two other voices, saw two other faces he knew.
He was in Christine's room, the one with the peach-colored walls and white lacquered furniture. Knick knacks and dolls. Everything was the same, except that the stuffed animal he had seen that first day, with sunglasses and a Mexican sombrero, was gone.
"How do you feel?" Mary Beck whispered. Her voice was small, filled with concern.
He said nothing, but when he tried to sit up, there was a terrible weight on his body and he found that he did not want to move his head from the pillow.
Billy looked silently up at the three of them—the man, woman, and child. He wanted to close his eyes again. A weariness, the ocean, weighed down on him.
There was awkward silence. Jacob Beck stood over him. "Rest," he said.
He put his hand on Billy's head, and Billy closed his eyes.
As before, a routine came to Billy's life. But this time it was different. Each morning, when he awoke at seven, either Jacob or Mary was there to help him sit up in bed. The first week, he could barely do that without gasping in pain, but he quickly learned to numb his mind to the fiery bolt that ran through him below the waist whenever he moved his torso. When he didn't move, it felt as if the lower part of his body had been filled with gravel, leaving a weak, dead feeling around his bones.
At first the doctors thought his spine had been severed. But there was nothing physically wrong with his spine. It was only when an EEG was performed that they discovered that, in effect, his brain had received a severe shock, the cause, as well as the results, unknown.
When all of the speculation was over with, Jacob Beck was met with a shrug and told that either the boy would recover the full use of his lower body or he wouldn't. It was recommended that he be placed in a stable environment and treated with simple physical therapy, which might stimulate his limbs or, at least, keep them from atrophying.
After the first week, when he had mastered the art of sitting up, Billy lowered his feet to the floor. Jacob and Christine were there to help him. He felt the hard rush of gravity strike into his legs. It was as if someone hit the bottoms of his feet with sledgehammers. He felt supporting arms pulling him up as he passed out.
When he awoke, he was alone, and the afternoon sun, lowering through his window, made the peach-colored room look almost orange. Throwing back the covers with an effort, he swung one leg over the side of the bed, then the other, using both his hands to lift each one. In a moment he was balanced on the edge of the mattress, his hands pushing him up gently, then he let himself down to test the floor again. The pain was like a thunderclap, and when he awoke, he was being lifted painfully back into bed by Mary Beck, who was alone in the house. Jacob and Christine had gone to the store, and Mary was hysterical, thinking that Billy had killed himself or that she had killed him lifting him off the floor.
When she had settled him back under the covers, she sat on the edge of the bed. "I know what you did for me in the park," she said gently, staring into his copper eyes. Her hand no longer trembled when it touched him, stroking his forehead. "I know what this gift of mine means now. My Aunt Stella was right." Tears were forming in the corners of her eyes. "I only wish I could help you with it, Billy."
"You can." Billy's soft voice only exaggerated the power of his words. "Maybe that's what you've always been afraid of."
"But you—" she began.
"I can't. A long time ago I found that there are things I can do, and things that are missing from me. And that's something that I don't have. But you're whole."
As Billy spoke, he slowly forced open a window of truth in her. By the time his soft words were finished, the portal stood wide, letting cool fresh air—and light—into her. She felt like the sun itself.
"Oh, Billy," she sobbed, laying her hands on him, seeing the weak, dull glow, the horribly twisted patterns of luminescence that were his legs, feeling herself reach out beyond her hands, taking the light into her hands like a mother lifts her baby, stroking it, singing to it, shaping it.
She was sobbing with joy and revelation when she was finished, and in her weeping baptism she cried the word "Mother" for the first time as a loving benediction devoid of fear or loss.
On that day, Billy began, with weakness at first, to stand on his own legs again.
In another week he was supporting himself through a short pair of parallel bars that had been installed in Christine's room, next to the bed. A few days later he was using a walker, moving to and from the bathroom by himself.
He asked Jacob Beck to find the address of his friends Rebecca and Marsh. When Reverend Beck produced it, Billy thanked him and put it under his pillow.
That night, he used the walker to bring himself to the white lacquered desk, and wrote a letter. There were six carefully worded pages, and he folded them carefully and sealed the envelope, addressing it and asking Reverend Beck to mail it for him. The next day he quietly asked if the letter had been mailed, and when Beck said yes, he said nothing more about it.
The days wore on.
He began to walk, at first with a cane and then without. His unaided movements were stiff at first, the progress of a man on stilts, but gradually his limbs regained their fluidity. He was nearly whole again. Only a deep gnawing ache that sometimes assaulted him was all the reminder he had of what he had been through.