After Surfing Ocean Beach. Mary Soderstrom

came down the hall, then paused in front of the door. He tapped lightly. “Annie,” he said. “I’m sorry ...” I flushed the toilet and pulled back the shower curtain so I could step in. After that, I let the water run and run and run over me. I did not hear whatever he did then.

      Rick

      I made all the right turns driving to Point Loma from the place where Lil was moving. I even remembered where to pick up the road that takes you over to Interstate 5 at Carlsbad on the coast, but I must have been operating on automatic pilot, following directions that had entered my head more than ten, fifteen years before, the last time I’d been in the North County. Not even the sight of the surf rolling in, glimpsed when the road dipped down by the beach, took me out of the welter of half-formed images and overwhelming fears that had taken possession of me.

      I came to my senses where the freeway cuts down Rose Canyon and arrives at Mission Bay. The roads had been rerouted since the last time I was there and I nearly missed the turnoff that takes you across the causeway and onto Sunset Cliffs Boulevard. From there the way was automatic again. But I knew I could not greet Lil until I sat and thought about what I had done.

      This early on a December Sunday there were only a few dog walkers on the stretch of the beach where I parked the car. I got out because I still hadn’t peed, and as I relieved myself in the sand, shielded from view by the car door, I thought about taking off my shoes and walking on the beach. The sand is very fine here, with grey grains so small that they feel like silk running through your fingers. In the morning light it looked only slightly darker than the water and the remnants of fog that hung over the beach, but I knew that interspersed with grey were enough black grains to intensify the shadows on sunny days. Thinking about it, I could feel how cool the sand would be, how all the bones in my feet would loosen, how I would be anchored to the earth at the place where earth meets sea.

      But when I tried to step out, to walk just a bit, my knee screamed at me. I decided I couldn’t deal with it and with what had happened at the same time so I retreated back into the car.

      This stretch of shoreline is like home to me. I’ve got four watercolours my mother did of the cliffs a little further south hanging in Chez Cassis. Gus was around while she worked on them, while his mother did her astrological charts. He and I would climb over the rocks where there were tide pools full of anemones and scuttling crabs and long strands of seaweed. We knew where the caves were and where the best anemones were. We’d take sticks and poke them into the centre of their flower-like bodies and dance around when they would contract into stone-like lumps. We’d jump from the edge of the rocks to the soft sand below, we’d find driftwood and try to start fires with matches stolen from our cigarette-smoking mothers.

      But the broad beach in front of me with the long line of waves rolling in fascinated my mother, too. I remember hearing her tell my father that it wasn’t a waste of her time to lie on the sand and let me build castles, because being connected to the rhythms of the ocean cleansed her body and her spirit. They were big words, which made an impression on a small boy: I must have been aware already at that point that things were not going as they should.

      The beach just south of here—Ocean Beach proper—is where Gus took me surfing when I came back to Point Loma from my exile in the boys’ school. I’d been away for my sophomore and junior years, and I’d hated it. After I married Caroline and went back east and got to know people who’d grown up there, I discovered that there were schools where academic excellence was considered as important as sports or meeting boys who would form an old boys’ network in ten years’ time. But the school my parents sent me to wasn’t a Western version of Choate or some other Ivy League prep school, nor was it a Jesuit or Christian Brothers school, where there was a centuries-old tradition of dedicated teaching.

      No, what they put me in was an imitation military academy, which advertised itself as making men out of boys. There were drills and parades and uniforms and teachers you could only address after saluting and whom you had to call “Sir.” There were also a lot of boys who were having problems adjusting to a new stepfather or who had parents who travelled a lot or, as in my case, had death hovering over their families. Some of the boys were cruel, some of them were stupid, none of them came from Point Loma or Ocean Beach, and I had very few friends.

      I was bad at everything except the school work (which wasn’t very challenging to anyone who could read with ease) and target practice. The school had two rifle ranges: one outside where we used three artillery pieces left over from the First World War as well as .22s; and one underneath the gymnasium where we shot .22s and handguns. I liked the smell there, and the feel of lying on my belly and shooting at a target, with the weapon rebounding against my shoulder, the sudden noise that stopped my breathing, the satisfaction of hitting something far from me with what might be deadly force.

      During those years I lived for the summers and holidays, even though the house was heavy with my mother’s illness. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer when I was fourteen, but her health problems had begun before that. By the time I was ten, her arthritis had made it hard for her to walk along the shore or carry her easel and watercolours. She tried to ignore her sore and swollen joints—perhaps to protect me—but I didn’t mind fetching and carrying what she couldn’t handle herself. She was funny, she was cheerful, she was affectionate. None of which my father was.

      But then she went into remission and, through one of those quirks that medicine can’t explain, the arthritis all but disappeared too. Both she and my father knew that it wouldn’t last, but they didn’t tell me. They just asked if I wanted to stay in San Diego and do my last year of high school at Point Loma.

      I said yes without thinking twice. It couldn’t be worse than the boarding school, I told myself when I had a chance to think about what it meant—coming into a place where people had been together for sophomore and junior years already, where I’d have to try to make friends again.