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29. A Wintery Beach Tells a StoryEighteen Years Ago

A Wintery Beach Tells a Story

At Windbreak, I walk the beach.

I start at Loon Point, and I walk east first, as though I'm the jogger. Then I walk down to the Velasquez property and turn back in the direction of Windbreak, as the Coopers did, envisioning the night from that vantage point. I study the exact area where my father was discovered, on the high sand, fifteen feet from the entrance to the rickety stairs, leading up to his property. I look up at the bluffs, take in those stairs from below, take in the next-door neighbor's high wall, my father's gentle palisades.

I try to re-create it. The pattern of it. The order.

What exactly happened that night? If someone pushed him, then where did they go, if not down those stairs, landing on this beach too? Did they jump the fence separating Windbreak from the neighbors? That would have been captured. If they went out Windbreak's front gate, that would have been captured too. Unless someone knew how to erase what was seen.

"Nora?"

I turn around and see an older man in a Yale baseball cap, a white mustache matching the hair peeking out from beneath the cap. Two large dogs are running in wide circles around him.

He looks vaguely familiar to me, but I'm having trouble placing him until he puts his hand to his chest by way of introduction.

"I thought that was you," he says. "Ben King."

I smile at him as I remember. This is Ben, my father's friend from college. The reason my father found himself on Padaro Lane three decades ago. The reason he saw Windbreak in the first place.

"Ben, of course," I say. "I'm sorry I didn't recognize you."

"That's okay," he says. "It's been a few years. I think you were finishing college."

"Then it was many more years ago than that."

"They all start to bleed." He smiles, offers a gentle shrug. "I was really sorry to hear about your father. I hope you're hanging in okay."

He blushes in the way that has become familiar to me. In that way I've noticed so many of us do when we try to offer sympathies, as if naming the grief will conjure it up, will be the thing responsible for adding to the pain that otherwise could be forgotten. It makes it feel all the kinder to me when someone takes the risk and does it anyway.

"Thank you," I say. "I appreciate it."

"Are you staying here for a bit?"

"Just the night, I think."

"Famous last words," he says. "This place grabs you fast."

I give him a smile. And he waves goodbye. Then he starts heading down the beach, picking up a beach stick, throwing it to his dogs. They race out ahead of him, working to catch it.

I watch him for a moment, this man who is so relaxed and happy. Isn't this who my father wanted to be? A man not unlike this one, not worrying where his next meal was coming from. In a cliffside house with his old life (the old versions of himself) shed, far behind him. But that couldn't be my father's story of who he wanted to be, could it? Not when he loved as intensely as he did. Not when he brought Joe along with him. When he kept all his families close. Not when he was nothing if not loyal.

No. The story was closer to something else. Something about a man holding on with as much force as he also tried to flee. But to what? Which is when it hits me.

Cece. Cece ended up in this storied corner of the coast, hadn't she said her husband was still here, not too far from Uncle Joe? Not too far from my father?

I pull out my phone and do a search for her ex-husband. Davidson Salinger. A sales record listing his address as Sand Point Road. A five-minute drive. Davidson Salinger, a Los Angeles native who graduated from Yale University, where he met his first wife, Cece Kayne.

Yale. This shouldn't be a surprise. Cece had said that she and my father went to school together, but I assumed she'd meant Midwood High. Why did I assume that? Because she had said they grew up near each other. Hadn't she also said that?

I walk back up to the house, taking the steps two at a time, closing and locking the gate behind myself, and running the length of the property to the house. Until I'm inside the house, closing the door behind myself.

The house is freezing, and there are no lights on yet. I've called Clark to come by and turn everything on. He has to do it from a locked power breaker. I have to learn how to do it myself.

But suddenly I don't feel like waiting. I head to the living room, head straight to the bookshelves, pulling several things down from the personal shelf: some of the playbills, the yearbooks, several of the photo albums. I move it all by the window, and into the light and the heat from the late afternoon sun.

He has one yearbook from his senior year at Midwood, one marked the Yale Banner , from his senior year there. I check the index in the Banner first, searching for any photographs of my father. There are none except for his senior portrait. I start going through the photo albums instead. Some of them are dated in the front, and I look for any that take me back to the late 1970s, when he was finishing college.

The second album I go through has a large group photograph in it. Several of his male friends are in it, but not Ben King. Not anyone else I recognize on first blush, except for my father, looking strong and young, his arms crossed over his chest, his smile large and wide. And looking so much like Sam that it startles me.

I turn the page and see another group photograph. My father is in the center, several friends circled around him. In this photograph, I recognize two people. On the far left is my uncle Joe. And, on the right, the only woman in the photo. A young and very beautiful Cece Kayne. She is standing near my father, but someone else has an arm around her. Maybe this is Davidson Salinger. Maybe it is someone else entirely.

Either way, Cece is leaning toward my father, even though this man is leaning toward her.

I pull the photograph out of the album, staring at all of their faces, holding them in my hand.

I hold it closer, hold him closer, wondering what it is that I can almost see.

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