I took to spending a lot of time on the beach. I couldn’t abide being with people. One day I tried to rejoin the fishing, but that was no good; they were too hard. Another time I wandered by the ovens, but I left; poor Kristen had a look that pierced me. Even eating with Pa made me feel bad. Everyone’s eyes questioned me, or condemned me, or watched me when they didn’t think I was going to notice: they tried to console me, or to act like nothing was different, which was a lie. I didn’t want any part of them. The beach was a good place to get away. Our beach is so wide from cliff to water, and so long from the coarse sand at the rivermouth to the jumbled white boulders of Concrete Bay, that you can wander on it for days without crossing your path, hardly. Long furrows from old high tides, filled with brackish water; tangled driftwood, including old logs with their octopus roots sticking up; sandflea-infested seaweed, like mounds of black compost; shells whole and broken; sand crabs and the telltale bubbles they leave in the wet sand; the little round white sandpipers with their backwards knees, charging up and down the shingle together to avoid the soup; all of these were worth investigating for hours and days. So I wandered up and down the beach and investigated them, and was miserable, or empty.
See, I could have not told them. Of course I could have refused to have anything to do with the whole plan right from the start. That is what I should have done. But even after I went along with it, I could have kept to myself what I had found out about the landing, and none of it would ever have happened. I had even considered it, and came close to doing just that. But I hadn’t. I had made my decision, and everything that had happened—Mando’s death, Steve’s flight—all followed from that. So it was my fault. I was to blame for one friend’s running away, another’s death. And for who knows how many other deaths that had come that night, of people who were strangers to me, but who no doubt had families and friends grieving for them like we grieved for Mando. All of it came from my thinking; from my decision. I would have given anything to change that decision. But there’s nothing as unchangeable as the past. Striding up the river path to home I recalled what the old man had said there, about how we were wedged in a crack by history so our choices were squeezed down; but now I knew that compared to the way the past is wedged in there, the present is as free as the open air. In the present you have choices, but in the past you only did one thing; regret it with all your power, it won’t change.
If I had been smarter, Mando wouldn’t have died. Not only smarter—more honest. I had lied to and betrayed Kathryn, Tom, Pa—the whole valley, because of the vote. Everybody but Steve, and he was on Catalina. What a fool I had been! Here I thought I had been so clever, getting the time and place out of Add, leading the San Diegans up to the ambush.
But it was us who had been ambushed. As soon as I thought of it that way it was obvious. Those folks hadn’t just been defending themselves on the spur of the moment—they were ready for us. And who else would have warned them but Addison Shanks? He knew we knew about the landing, and all he had had to do was tell the scavengers we knew, and they could prepare for us. Ambush us.
Well once I thought of it, it was as obvious as the sun in the sky, but it really hadn’t occurred to me until then, walking up the river path and brooding over it. They had ambushed the ambushers.
And the San Diegans had set us farther north than them so that if anything went wrong, we would be the last over the bridge and would take up the attention of the enemy while the San Diegans escaped. Thrown in the road to trip them.
We had been twice betrayed. And I had been an incredible fool.
And my foolishness had cost Mando his life. I wished fiercely (now that the funeral was well past) that I had died and not him. But I knew that wishing was like throwing rocks at the moon (so I was safe).
Wandering the beach and thinking about it a couple days later, I got curious and went up Basilone to the Shankses’. I didn’t have anything in mind to say to them, but I wanted to see them. If I saw their faces I would know if I was right or not about Add warning the scavengers, and then I could be shut of them for good.
Their house was burned down. Nobody was around. I stepped across the charred boards that were all that was left of the south wall, and kicked around in the piles of charcoal for a bit. Dust and ash puffed away from my boot. They were long gone. I stood in the middle of what had been their storage room, and looked at the black lumps on the ground. Nothing metal. It looked like they had emptied the place of valuables before they fired it. They must have had help moving north. After what I had caught Add doing, as soon as they heard of my survival they must have decided to move north and join the scavengers completely. And of course Addison wouldn’t leave us such a house.
The north wall was still there, black planks eaten through and ready to fall; the rest of the wood was ash, or ends and lumps scattered about. The old metal poles of the electric tower were visible again, rising up soot-black to the metal platform that had once held the wires up. I felt as empty as always. It had been a good house. They weren’t good people, but it had been a good house. And somehow, standing in the charred ruins of it, I couldn’t bring up any feeling against Add and Melissa, although I could have easily moments before. It couldn’t have been any fun to fire a good home like this and flee. And were they really that bad? Working with scavengers, so what. We all traded with them some way or other. Even helping the Japanese to land, was that surely so bad? Glen Baum had done it in that book of his (if he had done any of it), and no one called him traitor. Add and Melissa just wanted something different than I did. In ways they were better than I was. At least they kept their promises; they had their loyalties intact.
I dogged back into the valley, lower than ever. Stopped at Doc’s: Tom sick, asleep and looking like death; Doc hollow-eyed at the kitchen table, alone, staring at the wall. I hustled down to the river, crossed the bridge, stopped at the bathhouse latrine to relieve myself. I walked out as John Nicolin walked in. He glared at me, brushed by me without a word.
So I went to the beach. And the next day I went back. I was getting to know the troops of little sandpipers: the one with one leg, the black one, the broken-beaked one. The tide moved in, drowning the flies’ dining table. It moved back out, exposing the wet seaweed again. Gulls wheeled and shrieked. Once a pelican landed on the wet strand and stood there looking about aloofly. The shorebreak was big that day, however, and he was slow to get out from under a thick rushing lip; it thumped down on him and he tumbled, long wings and beak and neck and legs thrashing around in a tangled somersault. I laughed as he struggled up, all wet and bedraggled and huffy; but he walked funny as he ran to take off and glide down the beach, and when I was done laughing I cried.