Towards an Eventual Shore by Anne Guidry

They weren’t the ideal audience. Edward was half-blind and Charlotte had never been to a football game before. Not that anyone in the crowd seemed to notice. It was a difficult place for anyone to be conspicuous. Edward had lost his glasses earlier that afternoon, and so to him, everything appeared only as colorful shapes moving through a thin film of wax paper. Charlotte was in the position of having to tell him the details of something she didn’t remotely understand herself, and so her narrative conveyed an absurdly choreographed battle scene.

“What now?” he asked her.

Her narration was nothing new to either of them. It was what they had spent most of their lives doing – narrating the scene at hand, tossing the details back and forth. They had written novels together, mostly mysteries, since their earliest days of being together, navigating through the narratives of the world, adopting stray stories in place of the children they didn’t have until Danny was finally born. By then, Charlotte was in her mid-forties and they were the authors of three mystery novels and Charlotte was a published poet.

Charlotte craned forward, hands clasped neatly in her lap. But before she could answer Edward, the young man next to them leapt from his seat and bellowed down at the field, “Oh, come on!” he shouted. “What game are you watching, ref?!” He threw his hat forcefully on the seat below.

Edward squinted in the man’s direction and touched Charlotte’s arm. “Everything ok over there?” he whispered. Charlotte looked. The man was already bending clumsily over the seat to retrieve his hat, swatting it against his leg, and returning to his own seat. When he caught her staring at him, he shoved his glasses higher on his nose and smiled apologetically. He seemed to be caught between genial nonchalance when he talked to them, and adamant fury when he turned back to the game.

“Who are you?” he’d asked them jovially when they arrived, taking the seats normally occupied by Charlotte’s sister and her husband. Charlotte had told him about her sister’s son, Breck, second-string fullback if she remembered right. She couldn’t be sure about the position, all of them sounded like medical terms or a meat butcher’s menu as far as she was concerned. But Charlotte didn’t mention that to the man, who interrupted her when he heard her nephew’s name. “Oh sure, sure!” he said emphatically. “I know him, good player. Little shy on the field, but good player.” That’s what they’d heard, she told him, so they were here to see it in person because Breck’s parents couldn’t make it to this game. She was curious as to what he meant by “shy on the field,” as if one could timidly throw oneself headlong into someone else. But she didn’t ask.

He told them his name was Mike. He towered above them, a bulky presence, but polite and amiable. “This is my seat, every game,” he told them. “Always notice if someone new shows up,” he smiled. During most of the game, he kept headphones clipped to the sides of his head, with a short radio antennae sticking up on one side. He was listening to the radio broadcast of the game, he told them, so he could hear all the calls clearly. Somehow, he’d never caught on that Charlotte and Edward were completely lost to the ongoings of the game. Every so often, he’d lift up one earphone and chuckle socially, “Ever seen a save like that before?”

“No, sir!” Edward enthusiastically agreed, although Charlotte’s description had left him with the impression that this particular play was no different from any other, and ended with all the players entwined in a knotted pile over some unlucky fellow with the ball. Edward knew something of football, but only the general objectives of the game. He couldn’t help but think it was more entertaining from his own unique point of view, which was Charlotte’s point of view. As a writer of mystery novels, Edward knew that suspense was a precious thing, something that wore out if used too generously. He wasn’t inclined to believe the man sitting next to Charlotte, who seemed to think that every play determined the fate of the world.

To show support, and disguise their status as newcomers, Charlotte and Edward wore purple and yellow sweatshirts, the colors of Breck’s team, and tried to imitate the cheers inflicted on them by the surrounding crowd. “Ohhhhhhhhh….” Yelled the crowd, holding their hands out in what appeared to be the shape of a C until one player tossed the ball to another from underneath his legs and all chaos broke lose. Sometimes, Charlotte tried out some of the cheers her sister had catalogued for her before they went, although they sounded as ridiculous now as they did when she had practiced them in the kitchen of her sister’s house. “Way to be!” She shouted. “Look alive, Cats!” Her sister’s cat had looked at her incredulously from where it stood on the kitchen table, eye-level with her, and blinked. Who is this ridiculous fool? its gaze seemed to say, although the cat itself had a flattened face and marbley eyes that were pushed too close together.

“Nooonono,” her sister laughed. “Not so quietly, you’re supposed to really let loose or else he won’t hear you at all. You’ll see.” And she told Charlotte about the infamous fan who normally sat next to them, with the blockish headphones and the radio antennae.

Now, when Charlotte shouted the cheers, she thought of being in her sister’s kitchen, the cat, and the photographs of Breck and her own son Danny as children, their barely flightless energy as young boys vacationing in Maine. Breck was always charmingly fit to his name, stocky and thickset. He was fond of heaving large rocks over to the shore and launching them as far as he could into the water, which was not very far, and always ended up soaking himself and whomever was nearby. Danny, more agile and athletic, was more likely to skip rocks along the surface.

When they were very young, Charlotte remembered one particular cloudy day at a rock beach in Maine, when Danny and Breck had wandered off to a tributary stream that led into the ocean. They had been missing for a while and she was beginning to get worried when she heard Danny’s voice wafting out from between a small enclave of trees that surrounded the stream. She stepped into the glade to find Danny crouching on a boulder in the middle of the stream, singing pop radio love songs about the sadness of life and the broken hearts that could never be repaired. “I can’t liiiiiiiiive, if livin is without you,” he sang, “I can’t giiiiiiiive, I can’t give anymooooore…” and Breck had grinned mischievously at her from the opposite shore, where he stood in his underpants, and began plowing through the water. Danny opened his eyes and looked at her. She rarely saw him so still. He had been frowning in concentration, trying to remember the words to the songs, but when Breck splashed nearer, he dove off the rock into the water, playing in to the chase.

In her kitchen, Charlotte’s sister had placed an enlarged photograph of the two cousins during one of their vacations in Maine. They must have been nine and ten when it was taken, toothy smiles, pre-adolescent faces round and partly shadowed in an early evening sun.

“Way to look alive!” Charlotte shouted, and imagined she was shouting into the framed faces of Danny and Breck, buried in sand and grinning next to the Atlantic Ocean. Beside her, Edward tried a few of the cheers himself, although they felt unnatural to him and he was more than happy to let the man with the headphones carry the cheering for their row.

“What now?” he asked Charlotte again, leaning back after a few failed attempts at cheering. The players were now gathering on the field in some formation she’d never seen before. Could they do that? She tried to look for Breck, but the players were too far away for her to make out most of the numbers on their uniforms. When she was in college, she seemed to remember the stadiums being much smaller, though she had never sat inside one until now.

“What’s the ref doing?” Edward asked her.

“Waving a flag?”

“What color?”

“Yellow and white. I think something just happened…a foul…I think a foul just happened.” Charlotte began to boo along with the man sitting next to her. Edward shifted beside her, a little uncomfortably, and wished he could see for himself what was going on.

When they first met, Charlotte and Edward would argue tirelessly about subjects of minute importance and it was a habit that continued as they lived together. What time had the mail-carrier arrived that morning? When was the new city zoo opening to the public? Who was the last person to live in the house across the street before it was condemned? And so on, and then they’d lean back, sigh, and smile at each other afterwards with the blissful satisfaction of children who have scaled the repelling wall, reached the highest block, and glided safely back down again.

They were unlikely arguers, though. Neither of them was a very articulate speaker. Instead of finishing each other’s sentences, they would more often nod them safely along to their trailing conclusions, considerately, and then adamantly oppose each other. It was a mystery to Charlotte how anything got written at all, they were so delighted to disagree with each other.

“That’s the only way anything does get written at all,” Edward would say. “Through not…through disagreeing, you know, over something or another.”

They wrote in a way that didn’t make sense to anyone who’d never done it before, but somehow seemed to work for them. Edward would write a section in his chair by the window at home, hunched over the desk and scrawling slowly on the paper. When he finished his part, he gave it to Charlotte, who took the story out of the house and into the world, in a brightly lit bakery and café or the busy Juice Stop store. Charlotte wrote urgently, impatiently prodding the story to go somewhere, and when she returned, Edward would pull out the lines that followed a sequence and carve a shape into her sprawling scenes.

The only time they argued in a way that left them dissatisfied was two years ago, when Danny had decided to join the military. That time, they could find no disagreement between themselves. Both were opposed to him going, choosing an air force academy over a state university, where he would have gotten a merit scholarship. It was Danny who dissented.

Danny arrived late in his parents’ careers, when a habit of living had become inevitable to them. He grew up an only child, but his parents’ stories gathered around him like ghost siblings. They were the subject of every dinner conversation. They were beside him on Edward’s desk when Danny crouched on the chair and knelt over his own drawings. They were on the yellow legal pad in his mother’s lap, when she sat beside him in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. “Why don’t you bring that book over here and we’ll read a story?” she asked him, but he was always too restless to stay in one place long enough to listen. Charlotte would set the book down and watch him, active and solitary, contently unaware of her as he hammered a plastic hamburger into the carpet with a plastic carrot, or began dialing numbers on the rotary phone with the receiver still on the cradle.

Danny would surprise them sometimes. He would sneak into the room where Edward was writing and stand quietly and still in the doorway, watching him write. Then, before Edward had realized he was there, Danny would yell as loud as he could, “HEY!” and Edward would jump and turn around. Danny would laugh wildly, pull his t-shirt up over his belly, and Edward would get up out of the chair and chase him through the hall, into the dining room.

When he came home from school in the afternoons, Charlotte would scoop him up and set him on her lap. “How was your day?” she’d ask and he’d push his feet against her stomach and arch his back until he wiggled himself free and pushed himself off before she could ask him if he had remembered to go to the nurse’s office for his Ritalin.

Sometimes Danny took up all the space in the room. His energy was boundless. He’d tear through the rooms of the house, sliding on his socks through the doorways, scattering the stillness of their house into every direction. Other times, when Charlotte looked at his eyes, they were cloudy and unreadable.

When he was in tenth grade, Danny began staying out late, taking Edward’s car and driving the highways with his friends. Near the end of that year, Charlotte and Edward looked up from the dinner table one evening to find that his skin was slightly sallow and his voice was crisply hoarse. They hadn’t noticed when these things had started to change, the pronounced veins in the muscles of his forearms, the way he clenched and unclenched his teeth, or the way his skin stretched tighter over his biceps.

One Saturday night, a groggy-looking policewoman knocked on the door of their house and Edward, who was always a light sleeper, stepped downstairs in his bathrobe and opened the door to the question: “Are you the father of Daniel Welsh?” To which he must’ve replied that he was, but hardly remembered what the officer had told him in that moment and only later discovered that Danny had been found three blocks from their house, trapped in Edward’s upturned car with the engine still running and the radio still blasting. Danny spent one week in the hospital and emerged healthy and whole and capable of deciding, two years later, that he would join the military.

After Danny announced his decision, Charlotte and Edward spent half a night arguing about it, Danny having left them hours before, sitting at the dining room table. That argument left them empty, at a loss for words, for the fragments of sentences that usually came so readily to them. The house was more silent than it had ever been. Edward went to bed early for the next few nights, and spoke curtly, in short, clipped sentences that needed no reassurance on Charlotte’s part to reach their conclusions.

When Charlotte looked at the scoreboard above the field, she saw a collection of numbers that periodically changed with each new play. They were demarcations of time and measurements of comparison between the two teams – that much she knew. She had no idea what they were measuring, though, and so when Edward asked, “How are we doing?” Charlotte could never be quite sure how to reply. She took her cues from which color sweatshirts were cheering the loudest. Mike, nearly always indignantly protesting every play and call, was too difficult to follow and she felt it would be a betrayal if she admitted to him at this point in the game that really they had no idea what was happening.

“How are we doing?” Edward asked.

“I can’t quite make it out…” Charlotte answered, as she had when Edward pointed to one indecipherable word in the first letter Danny had written them. Each of them took turns squinting at the small, tightly spaced print on the page, and realized then that they were not used to reading his handwriting. With his letters, Danny sometimes attached several photographs. One of him stooped in the entry way of their plane with his parachute strapped to his back. Another of the vacated stone structure that his squadron was using for temporary shelter. Another of a remarkable, arid sunset in Afghanistan. He didn’t always have to handwrite his letters, but it became a habit. Probably, it reminded him of home, Edward suggested hopefully.

Before he left, Danny’s hair had grown long and stuck out in messy tufts around his head. In the years since they had vacationed together in Maine, Breck had grown bulkier and wide, while Danny had grown slender and reminded Charlotte of a sapling, with his long, thin limbs and messy sprout of hair, which, in the photographs, was now trimmed close to his scalp.

Charlotte and Edward saved all of Danny’s letters. Sometimes, when she couldn’t sleep at night, Charlotte would go downstairs and take the letters out of the drawer in Edward’s desk where they were stored along with drafts of new novel. She would turn on the small green desk lamp and flip through to the ending of every letter, and stare at his careful cursive signature, which was familiar to her and had not changed much since he had scrawled it on the top of his handwritten essays that he’d written in elementary school. Charlotte tried to imagine all the places the letter had been – the chapped hands of the postal clerks, the sunlit clouds, cascading like ancient cliff dwellings outside the windows of the plane. She tried to imagine who else, if anyone, had seen the signature she held. She tried to imagine what Danny saw after he looked up from sealing the envelope. But Charlotte, who made a career from the products of her imagination, could imagine nothing.

During halftime, Charlotte and Edward were surprised by an entire brass band that had somehow concealed itself in the bleachers section adjacent to their own. From out of nowhere, a small army of gold and silver instruments emerged from the surrounding crowd and began to play.

From the moment of their arrival, they had been assaulted with the place, the crowds of teenage college students swarming around them, and the unlikely collection of older alumni and parents of the players, who manned their own cheering sections for every game. Edward saw them as a sea of purple and yellow figures that merged together and drifted lethargically apart. By the time they left, he thought if he never saw those two colors again, it would be too soon.

The brass band rang out in a loud reverberating march song, accompanying a troop of dancers that ran and cartwheeled out onto the field with painted faces and gold fringes on the cuffs of their uniforms.

“Yes!” Someone cried out drunkenly, “I love this part!”

Charlotte began to describe the dance, but Edward declined to hear it, having gotten enough of an impression of the place to know what it would look like. Besides, the person rapping on the bass drum was standing on the other side of the aisle from Edward, and he couldn’t hear a word Charlotte was saying. So they sat down amidst the standing crowd of fans and the deafening proximity of the brass band and waited for the sound intensity to reach a decent level again.

The first summer after Danny left home, Charlotte and Edward had gotten lost on a kayak trip. They were only going from one side of the bay to the other, but had somehow lost their way among the collection of small islands that peppered the coastal inlets of Maine. Neither of them had really been afraid, both more excited than not at the idea of being lost at sea.

As they drifted towards an eventual shore, a light fog descended. Edward pulled out a compass, but had forgotten what direction they were supposed to be heading. Charlotte, preferring to be outside, wasn’t impatient for their return. They sat in the kayak, Charlotte at the helm and Edward in the back, and listened to the waves lapping lightly against the side of the boat.

It was then that Charlotte had told Edward about the letter Danny wrote to himself before he’d left. Danny had found an online site in which people could write emails to their future selves, letters that wouldn’t be delivered until however many years later the sender wanted them to arrive. “Dear Future-Me,” his letter began, though that was all she saw of it before he had caught her reading over his shoulder and shooed her from the room to write in private. She always wondered what he had written. Or when it would be delivered.

After the halftime show, Edward decided he’d had enough and Charlotte agreed that they’d been there long enough to show support for Breck, who probably couldn’t see them anyway.

“Ok, take care, folks!” The man with the headphones happily bid them goodbye. They made their way slowly through the reluctant crowd. Edward paused on the steps that separated two sections of the bleachers, hoping they could catch a glimpse of Breck, wave before they left.

“Can you see him?” He asked.

But all Charlotte saw, which was all Edward saw, was a swarm of purple uniforms and gleaning yellow helmets that charged into similar figures of white and green at the blow of a whistle.

In the parking lot, they pulled away from the stadium and the hiss of the crowd, onto the dark of the highway, whose sparse traffic and dimmed streetlights offered a welcome contrast to their previous environment. Charlotte switched on the radio and tuned it to a classical station. They were both too drowsy to speak, lulled by a quiet orchestra and the passing waves of light and shadow. Charlotte was thinking about a few lines from a poem she wrote, when she used to be a poet. After Danny was born, she had written a poem whose title she could no longer remember, something about “clear, shatterable things, the tip of an icicle dagger, sharp and dissolving – or an unmarked surface of snow in the sun – or someone else’s frozen breath.” It wasn’t quite appropriate, in the warmth of the fall, but still they were the lines that occurred to her.

She turned to look at Edward in the passenger seat. He had closed his eyes and was resting his head against the seat. The fine wrinkles at the corners of his eyes were slightly smoothed, making him look more serious and austere than he usually did. She reached over and took his hand in her own, and he curled his fingers lightly around hers. They remained that way until Charlotte pulled into the driveway, where she slowed the car to a quiet stop and squeezed Edward’s hand. “We’re home now,” Charlotte said, softly waking him.