“What did it say?”
“The note? Not much. But apparently there’s someone we should visit.”
He passed over the note. All it had was an address: 515 Sea Lane.
Amanda put on her parka. They walked up and down the hills until Larry stopped in front of a small cabin set deep in the trees. There were so many roads in the town of Eagle Cove that Amanda felt confused.
The door was opened by an old man—far older than Larry. A threadbare sweater hung off his shrunken frame.
“Hello there,” he said. “I’m the one who made the memorial stone.”
The hands of the old fisherman were as red as crabs, and scarred with the marks of pincers and nets whirling in from the deep. He sat across from Amanda and Larry in his pristine cabin decorated with seashells. Shells were even embedded in his stone fireplace.
His wife was represented by the blue plates she had collected, which were lined up on shelves across the room.
“I volunteered for that job,” he said, reaching for a pack of cigarettes. He coughed and lit one, sputtering against the cloud of smoke. As soon as he lit the cigarette, he extinguished it. “My method of quitting,” he said. He ruined the cigarette with his calloused fingers, and Amanda thought about how in the city, people would sell that smoke on the street.
His eyes were lost in a maze of lines from the sea. “It happens alot, in our work. You can’t even launch by our beach here. We launch in the bay down the highway. But we come back. Beyond those rocks where the sea lions gather? Some of the best fishing around. We would stake the waves. That’s code for pushing it. Getting just close enough to where the fish were without getting swept away to your death. If you get a pair of binoculars, you can see the fishing boats. They’re out there.”
His fingers played with the shreds of tobacco, and the smell filled the air.
“Over the years, I lost a lot. My cousin Sigrid, she died the night of the big Memorial Day storm. When we say big storm down here,” he said in an aside to Amanda, “we mean big.Most of the time, the weatherman tells us when a storm is coming. But down here, in my line of work, when the weatherman screws up, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be late to work in traffic or get a spattering of rain on your new jacket. It means someone dies. Or a lot of someones. That Memorial Day, it was Sigrid’s turn. She went down in her boat with three others. Our boat was only yards away, but I didn’t see her go down. That’s how hard the sea was tossing, how thick the spray. We were lucky that day. We ran for shore a few towns down. Went aground, and all was well. In the end. For me, at least.”
His fingers dropped the tobacco shreds. Larry and Amanda were quiet.
“That boy should never have been on the beach.”
“What do you do, if you see people ignoring the signs?” Larry asked.
“I pray” came the short, terse answer. The fisherman sighed. He looked down at the half-empty pack of cigarettes, and Amanda could see his mouth working in desire. He reached for one, then changed his mind. He stood up, stretching. Amanda saw that he had been sitting on a handmade cushion, embroidered with a fanciful starfish.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you my workshop.”
The workshop was in back of the cabin, under an interlaced canopy of pine trees dripping with vines. The sandy soil was planted with spindly-looking tomato starts. They didn’t look so good. The sharp beach grass growing nearby was doing much better.
The fisherman pushed the door open and pulled a string. A strong set of lights lit an immaculate workbench and a sturdy table lined with power tools. Larry could recognize a well-ordered craftsman when he saw one. Growing up, he had been around men like this, guys who would snort if you picked the wrong tool. Maybe that was why he hated even mowing the grass. He and Marjorie had hired it out.
“I started cutting gravestones after I retired from the boats. Just couldn’t do it after Sigrid.” His face looked stark in the bright light. He picked up a pair of goggles from habit. “She was special,” he told Amanda. “You know how some people are? It doesn’t work to tell others, because they didn’t know them.
“These here are my tools,” he said, pointing to chisels, files, and diamond saws. “I like to work by hand whenever I can. Makes it go slower. I tell myself it looks better.”
Amanda remembered the memorial stone, the way the tender words were carved into the natural-looking rock. It made more sense now, what he had carved.Lost in the sea but not from our hearts.
“Why did you volunteer to make the stone for Dennis?” Amanda asked.
“Because no one from his family ever showed up, saying Hey, this was my son or brother. No one even asked. At least not before you.” His hand fiddled with the safety goggles, and he put them back down. “Want to hear more?”
“Yes, please,” Amanda said. “What you remember of that day, if you don’t mind. What happened.”
He poured them iced tea from a pitcher, and they sat at the front of his cabin, on a stone patio he had cut himself. The table was as straight as a die on the leveled stone. He set down the glasses, and then moved his ashtray filled with tobacco litter and the pack of smokes next to his place.
“I used to smoke out here,” he said. “Always liked it that I could hear the ocean but not see her. It used to amuse the wife how I could tell how the fishing was just from the sound of the waves.”
He tapped the cigarette pack. “So. That day. We’ll start there. It was spring, I remember that. Just like now. The beach would have been empty. No tourists in town. I got the call from Gertrude, at the market. She was crying. Said a boy got swept away. Her husband was still alive back then. Brett Jarvis. That man was complete and utter trash. A drunk. He died some years back. Good riddance, I say. I don’t see it being good for their daughter, working in the market like that. She should be away, going to college or having an adventure, not cooped up in that market with her mother. Anyhow, I went down to help with the search, and the missus went, too, because that’s how it works around here. We’ve all been there. What if it was one of ours? When we got down there, the constable was already interviewing that fella. I guess he went in after him. Tall, gangly guy. Mop of hair. Maybe in his thirties? He was as wet as a noodle.”
“You know his name?” Larry asked.
“Nope, sorry to say. Might have seen him around, you know, at the gas station sort of thing. But never met him before.”
