James Callan

Meet me at the beach

My neighbor’s daughter vanished just before Christmas. Like a magic trick, she seemed to poof right out of the air. Emily smiled back at us all from the local paper, holding her plump dog and holding our gazes. We were saddened by her warm cheer, frozen solid in the print. We studied her happy face, half concealed by her hair which was blown across her cheeks by the wind. We held the papers close and peered over her shoulder to the beach beyond, its blue water blurred gray and out of focus, the place where she had last been seen. Among the dunes, they found her mobile phone buried in the sand. Her last text: Meet me at the beach.

As a community, we hoped she would reappear. We prayed that Emily was okay. But after a week, most of us gave up what little hope remained after the first 48 hours. Our minds lingered on her disappearance, the malignant magic trick that took Emily away. But we no longer waited for the missing girl to magically reappear, we simply wanted to know how the trick was pulled off, and most of all, who had been the magician.

As Christmas loomed, the bright lights and ribbon-tied packaging diverted our thoughts, and refocused our attention. We’d say Merry Christmas to each other, and Happy Holidays without a hint of guilt, sometimes slightly hushed, looking over our fences to ensure Emily’s parents weren’t around. As their next-door neighbor, I was perhaps the most careful of all. I’d emerge from my house looking miserable. I’d slump across my lawn to retrieve the mail, and let my shoulders sag while holding my eyes open in the wind so they’d glaze over, wet with discomfort which I hoped looked like sorrow. I resented Carl and Lisa leaving their Christmas lights off for the rest of the season. My own house seemed to mock their grief with its obnoxious luminosity, and its many-colored, festive bulbs. So I too forfeited my expression of holiday spirit. I too slept in the dark.

Often, I’d dream of Emily. I would be holding her, front to back, breathing in the pleasant smell of her shampoo, her hair over my face just as it was arranged over hers in the newspapers. In these dreams, she’d turn over to face me. She’d smile, mostly, excited and sincere. But sometimes her face would suddenly distort. Her eyes would go wide or she’d bear her fangs in fright, the streetlight coming through the window exposing us both in bed, or sprawled out on the beach, a driftwood fire reflecting like a beacon off of the orthodontic artistry smeared across her corrected bite. I would bury her face in my own to hide it from view, from being seen or found. Against my lips, her braces would excavate my face, tally red scratches down my chin. The pain was acute, yet it made me feel more alive than ever before.

One night, while dreaming of Emily, my stubble got caught in the metallic mess festooning her grin. No matter how I turned my head, any movement I made pulled out my hairs to sting my face, waking me, when in reality I had been holding Katheryn, my wife. Longing for what was now missing, I called out Emily’s name into the darkness of my bedroom. I held my breath and waited. Next to me, Katheryn stirred. Then, after a time, she snored. I let out my own heavy breath and smiled, unwitnessed in the gloom.

Thinking of that time leading up to Christmas, I’d toss and turn at night. I’d grip my pillow and will my mind to believe it was more than goose feathers in a linen sack. Eventually, I’d fall asleep, and dream some more. I’d be whisked away to a cold, wintry beach, and there, I’d always find her. Sometimes she ran right into my arms. Other times, she ran as fast as she could out into the cold, December sea.

Sometime after Christmas, weeks into the new year, I was up on the roof laboring to dismantle the Christmas lights which mostly remained unlit over the winter. From my vantage I saw Carl, next door, haggard and drawn. His flesh was gray, almost blue, his bare stomach and chest the same color as his damp, denim trousers. He sat on his doorstep, lifeless and bland, like the local papers that are thrown across the lawn to lie until they’re found, largely ignored, often unread. He was as lifeless, I thought, as his daughter on the cover of those papers from last month. Then I felt guilty for thinking it. I scolded my mind for going there. I shook my head in disgust at my own frank cruelty, my insensitive comparisons.

“Carl!” I called out to him from across our fence.

He looked at me high up on my roof but did not answer. When our eyes met, I felt a fraction of the death that I knew had taken his daughter. It was cold, like winter. Those eyes were bereft of light, like unused Christmas decorations. “Come on over?” I urged. “I’ll make you a coffee.”

He came to my door, shirtless and blue, and I said “Jesus, Carl. Here, take my coat.” I draped my windbreaker over my neighbor’s sunken frame. He was inanimate, like a coat rack, neither protesting nor showing thanks. He simply allowed me to cover over his semi-naked body, which I did rather awkwardly, flinching when my warm fingers grazed his cold collarbone. I put on some coffee and became keenly aware of the silence of my kitchen as neither of us spoke. The room filled with the sounds of the coffee machine dripping, hissing, and steaming. Each time Carl moved in his chair, which wasn’t often, the nylon of my borrowed windbreaker chafed together as loud as an avalanche. When the coffee had finally brewed, I offered Carl his cup. I winced as I read the text across the bright yellow ceramics: Life Begins After Coffee.

“How are you holding up, Carl?” I managed after burning my lips on my first sip. “How is Lisa?”

Carl cradled his coffee but otherwise ignored his beverage. “She cut off her hair.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Lisa,” He told me. “She’s as bald as a cue ball. Even her eyebrows. Her body hair. Everything.”

I didn’t know what to say. I hid behind my coffee and sipped. I am ashamed to admit it, but I thought about Lisa’s hairless body parts, the mound between her legs as bald as a baby’s. I turned red, hoping the steam from my cup masked my inability to cope with my botched attempt at condolences.

“It’s just her way of dealing with it,” he explained. “I, myself, do weird things to process our loss.” I nodded, drinking more coffee. I understood where Carl was coming from. I too had suffered loss. I processed my neighbor’s on their behalf. I had abstained from lighting up the street in festive lights. I did that for Carl, for Lisa. For Emily.

Carl went on to tell me the weird things that he does when the loss of his daughter becomes too much to bear. He fantasizes about tattooing his hands black. Fingers, knuckles, palms, both sides, all the way to his wrists. He explained to me that when things get really bad, when it gets to the point where another single breath of air seems as if it would kill him–which is ridiculous, of course, because we need to breathe air to live in the first place–he goes as far as to drive and park outside the nearest tattoo parlor. You have to make an appointment, he tells me, otherwise he would have done it already. Numerous times over. If you could just waltz in and say, tattoo my hands, Carl would now have two-midnight black mitts where his pale, freckled arms ended at the wrists.

“Why black hands?” I asked, proud of myself that I had found my voice, driven by curiosity. But Carl shrugged. He told me he had no idea. That it is doing something. And that is better than nothing. “Why shave your hair?” He asked the black surface filling his mug, contents which had gone tepid. “Why punch a wall? Why eat? Why breathe? Why stop feeding the dog?” I had noticed their Labrador had gone from chunky to slim and vowed I’d leave the poor beast the bones of my fried chicken and grilled steaks if I found the chance. Then Carl started crying into his cup. “Why hold onto hope?” He asked me and looked me straight in the eye. “It’s the hope that keeps us going, Tom. But it’s also what hurts the most. It’s the hope that tears away at our souls.”

I diverted my eyes and swallowed. I reserved my own hope. Not so much for Emily. I am a realist. But I hoped Carl would finish his coffee and go away. I was devastated by his devastation. On the surface, I was happy being sad for him, but not like this. This hurt. Suddenly, it was all too much.

Carl did not drink his coffee. He did not go away. He went on and on. He cried on my shoulder and trickled snot from his nose onto my sleeve. I stood frozen, listening to him vent his sorrow, which was heavy and hard to bear, deadweight burdening my frame of mind, hefty like a corpse. He told me about Emily’s half-eaten burrito in the fridge. The meal she couldn’t quite finish six or seven weeks ago. How the cheese had turned green and the beef had gone gray. How the smell was taking over the kitchen each time he or Lisa opened the fridge doors to retrieve the milk or orange juice. How their daughter’s scarlet lipstick marred the glutenous wrap where she last nibbled at its edge. How he and Lisa couldn’t bear to throw it away. How it held Emily’s DNA. How she may walk through the door any moment and say, “Hi Mom and Dad. I’m hungry.”

I thought that might be the worst of it, but Carl kept going. By now, my right sleeve was wet with salty tears and slick snot down to the elbow. I was a germophobe of sorts and the whole thing had me feeling queasy, more than a little ill at ease. Carl held me like a lover, like how a small child may cling to his mother, and buried his head into my breast. I worried about my B.O., but then I checked into reality and realized decorum, even hygiene, would be overlooked under these tragic circumstances. I listened to Carl as he poured out the contents of his broken heart over the front of my sweatshirt.

He told me about the unwrapped presents under the tree. The ones for Emily remained untouched. She was well past believing in Santa, had been for years, but her mother still marked the paper labels “From Santa.” They remained under the young pine which had died sometime in the days nearing February. The unopened packages were a symbol of loss. They sat there on the carpet, half-buried by brown pine needles and drops of golden sap.

Beautiful, big things, brightly wrapped and tied in festive bows. Icons of grief, snowmen, and candy canes, a family torn asunder. Treasures within: makeup, jewelry, gift cards to American Apparel and Forever 21. It was Emily’s senior year in high school, so her parents finally got her a new phone, anticipating that she’d want the newest specs while away from home–the upgraded camera to document her first year in college, the unlimited plan to better keep in touch with them while out of state.

Carl explained all of this to me while falling apart in my arms before finally, suddenly, calming down. He went sullen, almost dead, as his grief ran on a tank that had just gone dry. He picked up his coffee, brought it close to his lips, then set it back down, untouched and completely chilled. He removed the windbreaker I lent to him and set it on a hook by the front door. Shirtless, he walked out of my home and halfway across my lawn. His gait was slow and broken, like a zombie, like a man who was dead drunk, or dead, or someone who wished that they were one or the other, someone whose daughter had recently gone missing, was probably dead.

I reserved plenty of sympathy for the man, but I was glad to see Carl on his way. His visit concluded, and I assumed I’d be back up on the roof to complete the job I had left half finished. All the unlit Christmas lights sat there, pointless, snow-covered merlons now out of season. I thought I’d seen the last of my guest that afternoon, but Carl turned to look at me, almost angry and told me one last thing that he does to process his loss.

“I go to the beach where Emily was last seen,” he said, controlled, but suggestive of rage smoldering from within. “I walk in the water, up to my waist, and stand, facing out to sea. I let the cold current change me, morph me, make me a part of the ocean, an extension of the water. I drown my spirit. I hold my soul under the waves until it stops fighting back. I breathe in the fresh, coastal air, but I am one with the sea. After that, I am no longer truly alive.” He glared at me in a way that made me wither. His anger radiated off of him like a fever. He steamed in the cold, winter air, a vengeful demon. “Then I wait,” he told me. “I wait, Tom,” he said, emphasizing my name in a way as if it was the worst of profanities.

“Wait and do what?”

“Just wait, and feel the foam lick at my chest. I feel the sand and rock under my feet and the odd creature slithers through my ankles.”

“And this helps?”

“Nothing helps. Not until the end. So I wait some more until the cold has taken every bit of rage from me that it can until tomorrow. Then I do it again. And again. And again. Until…”

“Until?” I stood in the doorway and waited, hardly daring to breathe. Something about Carl’s delivery was ominous. His words carried cryptic messages. In truth, it felt like some sort of unspoken, elaborate threat.

He looked me in the eye as if to say “I know it was you.” But then again, maybe that was just my own guilt making something out of nothing. Either way, I felt exposed. I felt like I had been caught in the act of some nefarious crime. Carl’s eyes were like fire as he said to me, “Until I find who took my daughter away from this world. Until I break him down, cell by cell, to disperse into the cold depths. Until he too has been removed from this world, to become one with the sea.”

“Or, until Emily comes back,” I said with as much hope as I could muster.

Carl looked to the ground, clenching his fists that one day may be tattooed black, that one day may clutch around my throat. His exposed chest was going blue again. His flesh had become the same colorless hue as his eyes. He turned his back to me and walked across my dead lawn to return to his own. Even as I watched the back of his head, I swear, I could feel his eyes still on me. Still accusing, cold, and cruel as the sea.

Back inside, I tossed Carl’s cold coffee down the drain. I watched it spiral, black and grainy. I reached for my phone, swapping to my special SIM card which I had reserved for her, only her. Looking through old texts, and outdated conversations, I found it and read aloud: Meet me at the beach.

Behind me, the windbreaker fell off the hook by the door. In the quiet, it made a sound like an avalanche. Concealed beneath its shiny, nylon fabric, I thought to see some truth now wholly exposed. I turned, startled and fearful. But it was nothing.

No one was there.

James Callan is the author of the novel A Transcendental Habit (Queer Space, 2023). His fiction has appeared in Carte Blanche, Bridge Eight, The Gateway Review, Mystery Tribune, and elsewhere. He lives on the Kāpiti Coast, Aotearoa New Zealand.