The irony of all this, Griffin realized, was one even Tommy, who’d once jokingly asked him to explain irony, would appreciate. Because Griffin had attempted to do in the Browning summer story precisely what his wife was now accusing him of having done in their marriage: he’d tried but failed to keep his parents out. Right from the start (of the story, of his marriage), despite his best efforts, they’d managed to insinuate themselves. When Joy suggested they honeymoon on the Maine coast, Griffin convinced her that what they needed was a dose of the old Cape magic, that weakest of marital spells. In Truro they’d made plans for a life based on what they foolishly thought were their own terms, Joy articulating what she wanted, Griffin, tellingly, what he didn’t want (a marriage that even remotely resembled his parents’, as if this negative were a nifty substitute for an unimagined positive). Even as he rejected their values, he’d allowed many of their bedrock assumptions-that happiness was a place you could visit but never own, for instance-to burrow deep. He’d dismissed their snobbery and unearned sense of entitlement, but swallowed whole the rationale on which it had been based (Can’t Afford It; Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift). Joy’s contention that his parents, not hers, were the true intruders in their marriage had seemed ludicrous on the face of it, but he saw now that it was true. They were mucking about still, his living mother, exiled in the Mid-fucking-west (justice, that) but using seagulls as surrogates, his deceased father, reduced to ash and bits of bone, still refusing to take his leave.
He’d tried. Joy probably wouldn’t believe him, but he had tried. Failed, sure, awkwardly and foolishly, but was he not his father’s son? He’d gone out a good twenty yards into the cold surf, turning his back to the waves as they broke, holding his father out in front of him with both hands like a priest with a chalice, as if keeping the urn dry until the precise moment of submergence were a necessary part of the idiotic liturgy. He’s haunted you this whole year, Joy had accused. Right now he’s in the trunk of your car, and you cant bring yourself to scatter his ashes. Do you think maybe that means something? And so, by God, as soon as he was waist-deep, he’d put an end to the folly.
Except that when he plunged the urn into the turbulence and positioned his thumbs under the latch that secured the lid, the sand beneath his feet gave way to the very undertow his father had always feared, and Griffin lost his balance. To regain it, he held his arms out to his sides like a surfer. Had he dropped the urn then, or had the next wave knocked it out of his hands? He couldn’t remember. One second he had it; the next it had disappeared into the churning froth. Lost, he remembered thinking as he lunged after it, feeling around in the surf with both hands like a blind man until the next wave, larger, knocked him flat. Regaining his feet, he thought, My father is lost. Hilarious, really. After all, he’d been dead for nine months. But he was lost only now, this instant, and somehow this was worse than dead, because dead wasn’t something Griffin could be blamed for.
How long had he stood there, paralyzed, mortified by his clumsy incompetence, wave after wave leaping past him onto the shore? Do something, he thought, panicked, but what? How many times as a boy had he watched his father seize up in the middle of a room, a portrait of indecision, with no idea of where to turn, an angry wife tugging him in one direction, a pretty grad student who’d confused him with the romantic hero of some novel they’d been studying pulling him in the opposite? It was as if he’d concluded that if he remained where he was long enough, whatever he wanted most would come to him of its own volition. Griffin remembered willing him to act, to do something, because it frightened him to see anybody stand frozen in one place for so long, unable to take that first step, the one that implied a destination. Now, waist-deep in the roiling surf, the sands shifting dangerously beneath his feet, he finally understood. Because of course it was the doing that had brought him to this pass, and now, having done the wrong thing, the thing he never would’ve done if he’d been thinking clearly, there was nothing further to do but hope that chance, not known for compassion, would intervene in his undeserving favor.
Which in defiance of both logic and expectation it finally did, the dreaded undertow returning his father’s urn in a rush of sand and water, banging it hard against Griffin ’s anklebone, and this time his blind hands located it in the froth. He yanked the urn from the surf intact, its latches, somehow, unsprung.
Found. That was the word that leapt into his consciousness, like a synonym for triumph.
Back at the B and B Joy was packed and waiting. If she noticed the condition of his clothes, she didn’t say anything, nor did she remark on the fact that, when he popped the trunk and tossed in their bags, his father was still in the wheel well. Her silence alone was an eloquent indictment. He considered telling her that he’d stumbled on the very place where his family had vacationed when he was twelve and as a result he at last knew how to go about revising “The Summer of the Brownings.” But why should she care?
They took Route 6 as far as Hyannis, then Route 28 to Falmouth, all of it in silence. His cell phone vibrated once, but he saw it was his mother and let it go to voice mail. He was simply too dispirited to talk to her, especially with Joy in the car. Old habits like taking her calls in private were the hardest to break. In Falmouth they transferred Joy’s bag into her SUV, an act disturbing in its symbolism, since both vehicles were bound for the same destination, their home.
They headed in tandem for the Bourne Bridge, Joy in the lead. What he needed to do was think about the future, to figure out how to get back to the place they’d been the night of Kelsey’s wedding. Hard to believe, but that was just twenty-four hours ago. It felt like a lifetime, as if he and Joy had been traveling, lost, up and down the Cape forever. Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection. According to his mother, he’d pitched a fit, refusing to get into the car when it was time for them to leave the Cape that Browning summer, but that wasn’t how he remembered it at all. As his parents were loading the car, the man they’d rented the cottage from had come by to pick up the keys.
“What’s this?” his father asked when he was offered a bright red folder.
“Next year’s rates and availability,” the man told him. “You get first crack and a hundred dollars off because you stayed with us this year.”
“I don’t think we’re interested.”
The man glanced at Griffin ’s mother, then, to see if husband and wife were on the same page about this, and finally at Griffin himself. “How about you hang on to it, young fella,” he said, perhaps sensing that returning to these same cottages next summer was what Griffin wanted more than anything in the world. “In case they change their mind.”
No one had spoken a word by the time they got to the Sagamore. Griffin ’s mother looked like she meant to say nothing all the way back to the Mid-fucking-west. His father’s thumb had seemed to heal, but the splinter had resurfaced, and he’d chewed on it until the thumb became infected. It was now swollen to twice its normal size, and when the car rumbled onto the bridge, perhaps remembering that this same splinter had elicited sympathy a fortnight earlier, he tried to show it to Griffin ’s mother, but she just looked away. He should’ve quit right then, but knowing when to give up wasn’t one of his father’s strong suits. “Am I running a fever?” he said, leaning across the seat so Griffin ’s mother could feel his forehead. “I’m burning up, aren’t I?”