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Loblolly

I spent the 4th of July at the shore that year, waiting to find out if I was going to die young.

On the Tuesday before, I’d had my ultrasound.  It was not until I was lying there with cold jelly on my stomach and my own grainy kidneys floating on the monitor that it had occurred to me to be scared.

The technician moved the wand over me, pausing from time to time.  After a few minutes he stopped and put the wand back.  He cleaned off my stomach with a towel.  He told me we were finished. 

“Your nephrologist, Dr. Blomstedt, right?”  I nodded.  “He’ll call you in a week with the results,” he said.  “It takes just a little longer with the holiday.”

“Thanks,” I said, and got dressed in the dark.

Outside the hospital, walking back to my car alone I couldn’t breathe.  In a week I’d know if what killed my aunt, my uncle, my grandfather — what was killing my Dad even then — was in my body too.

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Bob was always good to me, and he knew I needed distraction.  So he drove us to Rockport.

I hated driving when he could be doing it instead.  He was wonderful at it, but he was never better than on a trip to Rockport, stepping into the easy rhythm of those roads. 

He’d been driving and walking and riding in that rhythm since he was a boy, and I loved to watch him find the turns a second before they appeared.  He’d pilot the car as if in his sleep, finding his way through the shoals of the place, leaving a broad wake of air behind us as he drove. I felt safe in the slipstream of him: flying down the path he made for me.

He’d take Tregony Bow to the water, along the rock beaches to Penzance Way, down the red asphalt to the curve of road along Loblolly Cove and onto the dirt access road that brought us to the parking lot.

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Loblolly Cove was a small, nondescript bay ringed with a stone beach.  A road curved just beyond the rocks, cutting it off from a marsh and the distant summer cottages up Penzance Way.  The family used it like a backyard.  In the summers Big Bob and his second wife Sue would park the Volvo and unpack a thermos of martinis, bags of carrot sticks and popcorn, beach chairs and their dogs, and walk all the way out to the shore.  They’d sit in the twilight and look at their sailboat.

Big Bob had been anchoring his sailboats there for years, and he owned one then.  But it seemed the family had rented or owned a sailboat when Bob’s mother had been alive as well.

When Bob’s mother died, he was 12.  She’d had cancer for a long time, since he was 6, and she went peaceful and slow, dying in the bed she’d shared with Big Bob.  The last time Bob spoke to her, he was on his way out to the movies with a friend.  He kissed her goodbye, and she said “I’m of a more puritan soul.” 

In later years he came to realize that she’d meant to comment on his leaving at what she thought was a late hour.  But the phrase was the only saying of hers that he quoted in the four years we’d dated.

After she died they scattered her ashes in the Cove.

Once someone had left a pair of her old sneakers on the shore there and the waves had begun to wash them out.  “Your mother wants her shoes back,” Bob’s dad had told him.

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That holiday when we drove to Rockport we were only stopping at the Cove to look around.  We parked the truck in the town residents’ lot, even without a summer sticker, and stood there smelling the air.  It was overcast, cool and humid, like the sea was crawling up over the boulders on the peninsula.  All around the dirt parking lot beach roses had made a hedge.

We walked out to the place where the hedge gave way to a view of the Cove, looked over at the water for a minute and then walked back.  Crossing through the parking lot, we doubled back to the east side of the point, and climbed the big grey boulders towards the open sea.  The view lacked all the sheltered comforts of the Cove, but Bob knew it was my favorite part, and so he lead me over the rocks.

We’d driven there weekend after weekend over the years, usually at night to keep our terrible old cars from overheating.  Some days Bob made me practice the route, and since he’d taught me to drive, I’d let him murmur, “It isn’t good if you feel like you’re hurtling,” softly under his breath as I made all his old turns too fast.

Ending up in that lot, we’d drag sleeping bags and flashlights out of the trunk and find that flat boulder with a view of the lighthouse, eat cold green apples in the dark, and fall asleep until the chilly dew came at dawn.

But, that holiday, we sat on the rocks for a moment, quiet but not restful, and tried to edge around the silence that had fallen between us since the ultrasound.  Giving in to it, we fled the rocks and drove through the bright day to the summer place.

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Bob’s family had never been wealthy. They were a troupe of frugal Yankees who saved their pennies to buy things that made them inadvertently look rich.  To list the assets that Big Bob and Sue commanded – the ski cabin in Vermont, part share in the summer place in Rockport, the boat, the house in Amherst – you’d never picture the people they were. 

They were unpretentious, believing fundamentally in thrift and patience.  Bob’s dad seemed to cut his own hair, and he’d proudly announce that his latest wardrobe acquisition had come from the town dump.  You could see the rough edges and the home-spun, can-do quality in everything they had.

The place in Rockport was a series of uninsulated cabins that had been built by hand as family members grew up and had families of their own that needed accommodation.  There was a dirt road, there were outdoor showers and a windmill for power.  And, though you could walk to the beach, the property sat on the wrong side of the main road, hunched in the scrub woods like a hermit.

I loved that place, his family and the people he grew up with as if I’d inherited them too, as if I could step into their lives like I’d been born with the right to them. 

My family couldn’t have been more different, and my birthright had more to do with squalid hipster apartments and hash parties than summer houses at the ocean.

In Bob’s world, the kids were all clean, with straight teeth, large vocabularies, and good manners.  In his world friendships ran long and deep and safe.  For fun they climbed hills with their guitars at night and sang folk songs without irony or beer.

My summers with them were a blur of cozy innocence, even when we were in college.

We put on plays in church gardens.  We boiled corn and went skinny-dipping.  We drank boxed white wine at someone’s parents’ house.  There was minor and innocent sexual intrigue, strip poker; once or twice we smoked pot.

But we all lost our virginities tenderly and with people we liked.  We ate dinner with each other’s families and visited each other’s campuses.

Except that no one came to my house and no one mentioned that I spent a lot of time at hospitals and funerals.  I kept close to them all, with the idea that maybe no one would notice and I could slip into their lives by simply following behind the steady pull of them.

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Bob’s family was all in Rockport for the holiday, bunking in cabins, walking to the beach.  In the morning there was a parade through town dominated by fire trucks and kids in costume.  Big wheels and red wagons rolled by and people grabbed for candy thrown from the decorated parade cars.

At night we had dinner together in the largest cottage, at a long table in the center of the living room with the big fieldstone fireplace and the home-made plexiglass wall rolled back to leave us open to the wet coastal breeze.

They cooked lobsters.  Mine was pregnant.  

As I took apart the claws, Sue asked about my test. 

Looking down at my plate I said I’d know soon, the doctor said it might not show anything - polycystic kidney disease was a long haul killer, and the evidence of it might not show up for years.  Most of my family was dead in their early forties.  I was 22.  No one knew how long it might be before I lived with dialysis, transplant, aneurysm.  Or, I could find out that the cysts were already strong and multiplying, ready to catch me early like they had my aunt.

I tried a half-hearted phrase about the thing, about the way the illness worked what it had done to us, all we’d lost.  I couldn’t keep it up.  That story seemed wrong in that room, seemed off.

I’d been to Loblolly Cove enough, telling things.  Sue knew that part.  And somehow, I thought I could dodge it f I didn’t say anything.  I’d sail right past my whole family even, and settle down in the shadow of that fireplace, with the salt air on my skin.  The quiet would save me.

I pretended not to feel the knot of fear behind my sternum.  Two days left till I heard.

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After dinner Bob and I got into the truck and went to town.  We parked on a narrow street that backed up from the harbor.  The tourist shops and little diners were closed for the night and the place was warm with silky ocean air. 

People crowded the street in small groups and we joined them, walking to the town beach.  We rounded the corner and from behind the side of a hotel you could see the light of the three-story bonfire.

Each year on the 4th, the town built a pile of scrap lumber, railroad ties, and building parts, topped it with an outhouse and set it on fire on the sand.

In the harbor people anchored their boats to watch it burn, they set off illegal fireworks they’d bought over the state line in New Hampshire.  Their blooms hung reflected in the water.  Everyone watched for the moment when the outhouse would fall from the top of the fire, and the suspense kept us waiting, held together.

Bob and I found a place to sit on the long rock jetty.  I looked at his face in the light.  The cherubic boyishness he’d always had was starting to fade.   His sweet eyes had a compelling hurt behind them sometimes, one that you couldn’t avoid if you knew him long.

No one in my life knew better what kidney disease would mean for me.  And no one else had made it so clear that they’d stay for whatever was coming.

But, that moment was a slipstream; I was in the wake of something larger moving.  It was the comforting pull of a known road, maybe, a rhythm I’d ridden since I was a child.  I’d always thought that I could pull away, towards Bob’s life, the future clean and shiny.  There would be boat sneakers, thermoses of martinis, and summer evenings waiting to see phosphorescence in the wake of a craft I wasn’t sailing.

But, in that moment, the lumber slowly burning away on the beach, I knew for the first time that there was a larger gravity exerting its force on me again.  The pull of my own family, the messy complex possibilities for loss, was the thing I felt just then. 

And this time it was clear: no matter what the answer about my future, that pull finally had me.  I was the object in motion.  It was my slipstream Bob rode.  I couldn’t hold him to it; he’d be behind that wake and out to sea, while I pushed on alone.

Kids leapt past us on the jetty, sparklers lighting up their faces.  In the glow I saw a boy that could have been the pink-cheeked twin of Bob at six.  And in that moment I thought “I’m of a more puritan soul.”  I knew I’d have to leave him to his life – the summers, the cabins, the family, and whatever troubles were coming his way.  I knew my own, and somehow I knew they’d never fit him.

“Look,” he said, “the outhouse is going.”

And, with a shatter of sparks, it hit the beach