His mom starts her fidgeting up there in shotgun.
His dad, driving, is trying his best not to weird out, because weirding out will send his mom into one of her tailspins.
But his dad just can’t hold back any longer and he halts the car on the shoulder of the run-up to the bridge. His sturdy fingers jitter across the crest of the steering wheel.
“Right here?” his mom says. “If you don’t keep going, Richard—”
His dad. WWII Airforce vet, fearless riverman, Brainiac scientist, flaking out just minutes before his beloved ocean rolls into view.
In the rearview mirror, Lenny watches his dad’s eyes seeing something much different ahead than just the high-arching Cooper River bridge.
“It’s the height, Lizzy.”
The Cooper River, Lenny has been told many times by his parents, empties into the great Atlantic Ocean. And the great Atlantic is their final destination. They are so close.
But here they sit. From Lenny’s vantage point in the back seat between his two older brothers, both sleeping, the bridge appears to grow straight out of their windshield, like an Up escalator that disappears into the sea-misted sky. He can’t make out where it might come down.
Shaking her head the whole way around the car, his mom switches seats with his dad. Once her hands take charge of the steering wheel, she swivels to look back at Lenny and his brothers, but she focuses in on him. He realizes too late that he should’ve closed his eyes, faked sleep.
Without taking her eyes off Lenny, she floors the car into traffic, gluing his head to the back of the seat. His brothers bump back too, heads roiling with car slumber.
Lenny doesn’t think his mom will turn her attention to the traffic until he gives her his full attention, but since she’s not looking at the road, he can’t pull his eyes from it. Just as it seems the car will shoot straight into heaven, she turns and focuses on the bridge. She’s singed to the steering wheel, relentless on the gas pedal. His dad is bolted to the dashboard by fingers that would rather be feathering a fish to shore.
Lenny used to think that his mom could bend any road ahead to her will, but he knows better now. Her will barely outruns her danger. Some days it doesn’t, though, and her danger wins.
Still, he can’t help but believe in her now, with the air thundering through their open windows. She will deliver them safely. Forget the height, the speed, the arc of the bridge—forget the undercut beneath, that endless void, just a huge nothingness plunging directly into the strength and force of the Cooper River.
Going over that bridge, Lenny wishes he and his brothers, the three of them, could feel like one again, like they used to feel. But his brothers, Jude and Frank, they no longer believe, and they slump forward, dreaming. They miss it all. Afterward, if Lenny tells them about flying over the bridge, they will not think it’s important. Or they will look for ways to make the important part seem bad.
But his mom believes. Accelerating, rising up and up and up, in the rearview mirror, his mom’s face looks for all the world like she is watching paradise unfold before her.
#
His brothers are still asleep when their mom drives the car clear off the road, coaxes it down the long, hard-packed sand spit, and coasts to a halt.
“The Atlantic Ocean,” his dad announces. He reaches across the front seat to nudge the car’s gear into park.
“Put the brake on, Lizzy,” he whispers.
His mom shakes her head.
“No need,” she says. “Tide’s headed out.”
She laughs like this is a joke she’s told many times before.
Lenny strains for a better look, but mist is all he can see. Mist opening, closing, drifting in and out among the oddly-rolling, snow-capped peaks.
“Looks like mountains,” Lenny says, watching the columns of sea spray sort themselves out over the waves.
His dad cranes around, grins at Lenny.
“Buddo, when you get back home, you know what you’re gonna say?”
His mom turns the wipers on once, twice, to clear the droplets, then cuts the engine, finally creaks the brake to the floor.
His dad settles back in his seat, stares out the front windshield.
“Well, Lenny, you’re gonna climb up on top of old Rosey Face or Chub Ridge, and you’re gonna look out into the distance at those mountains, and you’re gonna say, ‘looks just like the ocean!’ Damnedest thing.”
His mom chimes in softly on those final two words.
Damnedest thing.
Lenny’s dad stretches his arm across the back of the car seat, slides his hand under her curly knots of hair to settle on the back of her neck. She doesn’t relax, but her thumbs stop needling the underside of the steering wheel.
The snowcaps roll and disappear into the sand. Jude and Frank stir on either side of Lenny.
Jude pushes the pads of his palms into his eyes, then sweeps his fingers back through his coal-black curls. Stares out his side window.
“We’re on the sand, Mother,” he says, spitting out the fake laugh he seems to reserve just for her. He turns and glances behind them. “There’s no road back there, Mother. Seriously.”
Lenny avoids looking at Jude, but he can imagine the sneer smeared across his brother’s face.
Their mom straightens in her seat, more rigid now than is safe by Lenny’s estimate. It’s one of the storm signals he keeps his eye on. He wishes there were some machine to measure which way her winds were blowing, send him out an alert.
Their dad turns and scans the back seat as if counting his sons, making sure they are all there. Finally, his calm eyes rest on Jude.
“Yes, we are, son,” he says. “On sand. Precisely where your mother was aiming.”
He glances over at her.
“Precisely where we like to be,” he says.
Her head tilts, chin up, like she’s trying for a better view of the breaking waves, although it’s often hard to tell what his mom is actually seeing.
Jude continues staring out his side window. As if the sand, and not the ocean, were the big deal.
Frank partially unfolds, knocks Lenny’s knees aside for more room.
“Look,” Lenny says to Frank, but thinking maybe Jude is the one who needs the hint. “The ocean’s out there, in front.”
Frank sniffs his hands, as usual, then pulls himself up to see, his elbow using Lenny’s chest as leverage. He places his chin against the back of the front seat, where he can sniff at their dad’s arm.
Jude reaches across and pokes Frank in the head with two fingers. Frank looks over and Jude indicates Lenny with his thumb.
Frank drops his head on the seat back, like maybe he’s finally grown tired of doing Jude’s dirty work.
Jude waits. Lenny sucks his belly in tight to prepare. They both know Frank will absolutely do Jude’s dirty work.
When the reverse elbow jab arrives to his belly, Lenny tries to breathe through it, hoping not to rattle their mom. But he can’t stop his eyes from watering.
“Dickhead,” Jude stage-whispers toward Lenny, clearly not on board with not rattling their mom.
Sure enough, their mom tenses, which is their dad’s cue to start talking.
“It sure is, Lenny. Ocean’s goddamn right out there, in front of us. Now I can say this—”
“Dickhead.” Jude repeats, louder. He’s talking to Lenny but he’s looking at their mom in the rearview mirror. “The ocean is out the side too. See for yourself.”
Lenny’s still trying to breathe deep and doesn’t want to look out Jude’s window, so he looks out Frank’s. Sure enough, the mist and the ocean and the sand all blend together, out the front, and out the sides.
Jude thumps Lenny on the back of the head. “We’re on a spit, stupid.”
Frank’s eyes widen and he smiles, but Lenny thinks it’s not because of Lenny’s dumb mistake. He thinks it’s because of the ocean.
Lenny wants to rub his head where Jude’s strike still stings, but that would be an open invitation for more.
Their dad shifts, gives their mom’s hair an adjustment, then slips his arm from the back of the seat down in front, out of sight. He must’ve touched her, because she leans toward him.
“You boys know your mom and I honeymooned right near here?”
Sure, they know. It’s a worn-out story. Lenny is relieved Jude doesn’t say so.
“Yep, your mom is quite the wave rider. I’m just saying, she’ll beat your butts all the way to shore.”
They know that story too.
His dad leans into her.
“Lizzy?”
Jude thumps Lenny again, harder. Still watching the rearview mirror.
Their dad’s breath stirs her ringlets across her ear. He reaches over, removes both her hands from the steering wheel.
When she doesn’t fight him, like now, it amazes Lenny how brave his dad can be. When she does fight him, Lenny has difficulty not thinking of his dad as dense.
Jude settles, a small grin on his face, a hopeful grin. Like he could be at a movie show. That hopeful grin of Jude’s is a different kind of signal, but just as dangerous as any of his mom’s.
Their mentals.
That’s what his mom calls it. Meaning hers and Jude’s. Lenny guesses she knows what she’s talking about. Certified shrink, his dad likes to say. Roaming up and down their mountain hollers caring for anybody asking for care. A few not asking.
Sometimes Lenny stares at her diploma hanging on their farmhouse wall and wonders why she can’t just take care of herself. Or Jude.
“Lizzy?” Now his dad is stage-whispering. “Lizzy, the sooner these boys learn to body surf, the sooner we start whipping their butts.”
She takes two deep breaths. A good sign. She’s trying. Trying to calm her body with her own shrink brain. Trying to transport herself, she would often say, to another field, another pasture. Lenny, she would say, there’s another field in front of you, just keep searching for it.
Suddenly she tugs her hands from their dad’s and in one swift motion pulls her peasant shirt up and off over her head.
Their dad grins. Shakes his head like the swimsuit she’s wearing underneath is a miracle. She lifts up off the seat and scrambles out of her long skirt.
“Oh buddy,” their dad says, pulling his t-shirt off and tangling himself up trying to reach his door handle.
“Oh buddy.”
He wrenches the door open, reaches back inside the car to pull the keys from the ignition.
The steady drum of the ocean engulfs them. Of course, it had been there all along, but the silences inside their car, the deafening holes where Lenny thought real family words should be, those had, like always, drowned everything else out.
His mom catches Jude’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
This is the signal Lenny has been waiting for. If his mom is backing Jude down, and he’s pretty sure that’s exactly what she’s doing, maybe she’s on the rise. Maybe she’s pulling her body up and into the next field. Which means, maybe, for now at least, they can breathe.
Released is how he thinks about it, even though he hardly knows anymore when he’s been caught.
As he tugs his own t-shirt over his head, Lenny hears his mom’s car door open. Then both back doors.
“Last one in is a rotten dickhead!”
Her words shoot up into the air to mingle with the roar of the mighty Atlantic, which, just seconds later, hits him warm and salty and full in the nose before rushing off sidewise.
The ocean lifts his mom up and quickly away from him, down surf, disappearing her for entire moments at a time, while Lenny tries to gain his footing. The water is tricky, running back at him, over his head and up his nose, racing away then back twice more before he can catch his breath. The undertow runs one way, then the opposite. Then the opposite again. The waves chop, back off, suck inward, gather speed then die without warning.
Lenny cannot get enough.
His mom’s calloused hands feel steady against his ribs as she teaches him to ride a wave. He grips her wrists where she holds him, the rough, stringy scars along the underside of her forearms like grippers in his palms. When he was a little kid, she’d let him sit by her on the piano bench, legs swinging, and when her slim fingers stalled out over the keys he would carefully run the tips of his own fingers over her wrist scars while she closed her eyes and rested. Sometimes she’d claim that he was helping her feel scars otherwise gone numb.
She lifts him like a board and slides him into his wave.
“Timing’s everything,” she yells, releasing him toward shore.
But Lenny catches on too quickly, and she moves on to Frank, who can’t hold his breath long enough to reach shore.
Lenny drifts away from the group as he watches Jude flounder under her coaching. She probably knows that Jude is faking, making her work harder, making himself the boss. Over and over again, purposely failing.
Lenny tries to high step a series of revolving waves so as to close the distance between him and his mom, but when he cannot make progress he wedges his feet into the sand. Eventually she gives up on Jude and drifts out beyond the breakers and into the ocean lull.
His dad calls to her. He’s waiting on The Big One.
When The Big One arrives, they all watch him disappear beneath it, disappear, disappear, until finally those hands resurface, leading his long, soldier body directly into the beach. His shoulders shed white salt fizz as he sits up in the shallows and looks back out at their mom to make sure she’s seen.
She calls out to him, laughing, her whole body, it seems to Lenny, finally releasing to the ocean.
“Richard! You stopping just for air?”
His dad cups his hand to his ear like he can’t hear her over the crash of the waves.
Suddenly she swivels to find Lenny fighting the undertow, still holding his position.
“Swim, little fish,” she yells. “Swim! Quit digging those heels in the sand! Let loose!”
She turns and strokes out fast with the current. Frank and Jude follow, swimming hard in what Lenny understands is a useless effort to catch up. His dad rises from the shallows and race hops, wave after wave, always so hopeful, his dad, always slanting in her direction.
Lenny watches them telescope out, further and further, as if he’s peering through the wrong end of a powerful pair of binoculars. The current persists against his back, but he holds steady.
So that’s how it is, he thinks, watching them grow smaller and smaller.
Then slowly, one muscle at a time, Lenny relaxes his toe-grip on the ocean floor, where the sand is already reimagining his footprints.
