Empties

For as bad as Dad got, he never drank out of cans.

Bottles, not cans. Bottles by the six-pack, then the twelve-pack. In a single weekend he’d make two trips to Burley’s, that brick cube with no windows sitting between the auto parts lot and a caved-in barn, and come home with two twelve-packs, buying only what he could carry inside in one go.

Back when Mom and I still lived with him in the starter house on Clifton, other kids in the neighborhood had dads who would drink Budweiser out of cans, sleep it off, then take their boys out with BB guns to shoot holes through straw bales or scrap wood. Other dads crushed their cans—one of them could do it with his own bare hand, a party trick—then cart it all off to the transfer station or occasionally that recycling center next to Market Basket, back in the days when you could get a nickel a can for your trouble if the machine didn’t reject it. One dad gave all those nickels to his kids—this week to the girl, next week to the boy. His daughter told me once, “I wish Daddy’d drink more. Thirty lousy cents!”

Dad, however, was the exception. He told anybody who asked, and even the guys in the neighborhood who never asked, that cans couldn’t do things justice, were cheap. He said it with a little flourish of the newest bottle in his hand as if he really knew what not-cheap was.

Bottles didn’t leave our lives the way cans left other people’s. I practiced the numbers I learned in school by tallying up the bottles in a single cardboard tote, then all of the totes that had been arranged in a row, then how many of them stood on top of each other, because Dad always insisted on trying to stack them—each one filled, or rather refilled, with empty glass.

Then he’d bring home a giant discarded shipping carton for Kellogg’s or Nabisco and arrange totes into it like fitting together puzzle pieces, sticking the finished puzzle in the garage. Always neat, always displacing something that should have been there: the sedan; his toolbox; later, and elsewhere, the kitchen back door; the hall closet upstairs, which Dad said had nothing inside it anyway except junk and Mom’s old mementoes.

I’d tabulate how many bottles were in each tote by how many totes were in each carton for a grand total, starting on multiplication before the rest of my class. All together, those totes looked more solid than they were, filled with empties, not full bottles. But when I was five, I told myself I could climb that brick wall of boxes and totes in the upstairs hall, sit up there. I started up; the boxes came down. Nothing shattered, not with the dusty runner and me to break the fall, but the icy crash was just dramatic enough to bring Mom running from the kitchen while Dad yelled, “What’s that?” from his recliner.

Bottles missed my head and my chest, but one hit the baby finger of my left hand dead-center. It was numb for days. Even at five I saw this as my first near-death experience. I said the finger was busted and ruined forever, but the doctor only laughed and tousled my hair. “Kiddo, you’re too young to worry so much. The body is amazing—you wait and see. Lots of things heal on their own just fine.”

            As the bottles made themselves at home on Clifton, they made the house a fragile one. Every room rattled if you walked through it too decisively; every nerve was fragile, going from solid to fractured after a single mistake, no grace or give in between. If I came too close to any tote, there was an angry rattle, the crystal clear note of an accident waiting to happen. The glass seemed to remember things the same way I did.

            I knew between my parents there were tears, ultimatums. There were reasons. I knew I was one of them. I was the reason for the fight after he was supposed to pick me up from school the day she went to Worcester for work and I sat on a cold bench watching the sun go down on a bitter October day before agreeing to a ride home from a perfect stranger, which I thought at six years old would be safe because she was a woman and she was sorry for me. I gave her directions step by step, knowing which next turn was the correct one, no street names.

Dad was coming around the back of the garage when we pulled in, surprised only in the way of realizing how soon it was to dinner. “Kid! How was school?”

That night my parents said nothing at all. The lack of eye contact and shallow breaths told me what a fight this was. I crept away into the basement to the bone-teeth chatter of glass so I could sit in the dark and pretend I was in the very center of the earth, only to learn later in grade school that the very center of the planet was shielded by a molten outer core where nothing could possibly survive.

The bottles made themselves at home in the garage, then the patio, then the basement, then the end of the hall, even after the accident, then in that small space on her side of the bed when Mom left, then to the room one door down, since she took me with her.

            The day we left, she didn’t even time our exit for when he made another run to Burley’s. She handed me the lighter shoe boxes marked MEMORIES, giving me lamps with twenty reminders not to trip myself up with those trailing cords. She carried the heavy things, boxes she had packed with pots and pans and cups and silverware. I didn’t ask if we were leaving anything for Dad—I knew what she would say. Sure we are: we’re leaving him the bottles.

Dad was in the living room recliner, the curtains drawn and the time dusty and uncertain inside. I knew the TV was off by the absence of blue light on his face. Dad’s cigarette crinkled in the smoking hand, and a Miller Lite slowly bled dry in his bottle hand. Apparently everything that I could still see as I traveled back and forth would be left to him. Travis McGee paperbacks. Bills stuffed back into envelopes. Cheap grip-and-grin picture frames on the walls with a wedding photo, a staged family portrait, a baby choked in a blue blanket who I’d been repeatedly assured was me.

When Mom went to the door with nothing in both hands, there was no final shriek-crash of the storm door that had never closed properly. She pointed from me to the massive white van, and I stepped away at last from the threshold of the living room, where my watchful silence had been met by a similar oblivious silence inside.

            I pulled myself into the empty seat up front in the moving van, the first time I’d ever done so. Mom couldn’t tell me to get in the back where I belonged; there was no room. The world was open up here, and the view seemed ten times higher than any car I’d ever been in. I watched out the window as familiar streets passed by, knowing I couldn’t give anyone the directions to wherever we were going.

*

Yesterday a stranger called to tell me Dad was dead. A groggy voice, a man probably, a friend of my father’s. Father was the word he kept resorting to, given the gravity of the moment.

“I’m sorry to say your father’s dead. Your father was Mike Davenport?”

The question hit me harder than the statement. Not because it instantly put Dad in the perfect tense, a realm out of reach of the rest of us, but because it implied somehow I could renegotiate the proposition, as if in fact Michael Davenport was not and had never been my father.

“I borrowed his phone to tell people. You’re under ‘Son,’” he explained to me, which answered the question that he had thrown out there anyway, just to make absolutely sure.

The rest of the day I must have been in shock. But it wasn’t what I’d come to know of as shock. From the outside, this shock may have even had a veneer of calm, pragmatically checking things off a list I hadn’t known to write as recently as that morning.

I put things in an overnight bag. I called Mom, who already knew, because Stephen had answered her cell when the same groggy stranger got to her in his rounds. She didn’t tell me how she had lived on in Dad’s contacts, assuming the stranger had revealed this. Ex, maybe. That Bitch. Or maybe less sensational, more delusional—more like him. Honey. Wife.

Except for Mom, who I thought deserved to hear the sound of my voice at a time like this, texts covered the basics for everyone. I told the boss, who made the usual “with immense sadness” announcement to the all-staff group chat on my behalf. Told the neighbor, making it his turn to keep an eye on my house, when last month it was mine while he spent a week in Bermuda.

Since there was no earthly possibility Dad’s phone had a Son’s Better Half in his contacts, I told her, too. And because her phone settings were all geared toward privacy, like mine—no read receipts, no typing indicator—I wouldn’t know the moment she found out.

What moved and acted like calm on the surface was more of a steady, intense fixation of mine on a fact that had been so inevitable for so long the greater shock should have been that no groggy stranger had called to deliver this news years ago. As I put my bag in the empty passenger seat, then the binoculars and the small cooler, my mind’s eye stared incessantly at one memory. I stared through it as I drove east, retracing my original evacuation route to a safer refuge inland. But this wasn’t the memory I had locked in since childhood—the one that, until now, was always frontloaded footage, ready to repeat on a loop the instant the name Michael Davenport resurfaced: my father backlit by the blue haze of fluorescent lights in the kitchen back on Clifton, wobbling down to his knees to swat at the broken glass that had exploded across the linoleum. Arranging a bloody pile of shiny glass puzzle pieces, and all the while the other hand, the unharmed, uncaring right hand looked on, refusing to let go of its cigarette. “Standards,” he’d tell me, acting out the scene again and again. Hair hanging in his eyes, voice blundering behind his bleeding left hand. “A man’s got to have standards.”

This afternoon I navigated around semis and roadkill on 495, always looking in mind’s eye at Dad rinsing out a bottle and carefully wiping it off. My six-year-old self stood at the counter mashing bread and peanut butter into a crunchy wad, watching Dad shake water out of the bottle and peer inside as if expecting to see something now that he had drained it completely.

*

I don’t remember exactly when Dad started it. If it was before he lost his job at the garage, or after—before or after he lost the house—before or after he had to start all over, once the old bottles and totes had been carted off by the haulage guys with the repo company, as it was reported to Mom by one of our former neighbors.

I only did it with him after he had moved. When all of the variables aligned just right—if I had nothing going on after school, and if the day was dry, and if I was in the right mood, and, perversely, if I was in the wrong mood and wanted to piss Mom off—I’d bike down to the Bad Neighborhood so I could visit Dad.

Usually he was outside, hunkered down in a buckling lawn chair that wasn’t his, his feet in socks but no shoes. A spiral-bound steno pad was balanced on his knee, an uncapped cheap pen from his old garage tapping against his lip—oblivious to the fact that the pen was the wrong way around, stabbing dots of inky stubble along his chin. Within reach were the empties, rinsed out, air-dried, all ready to go. Plus a bag of brand-new metal bottlecaps with their cheap shine like kids’ toy money, and the red two-handled manual bottle capper, which required balance and evenly applied pressure to crimp the caps on tight.

Sometimes he’d had a head start by the time I got there as if we’d been planning on this. He wouldn’t look up, all businesslike, not asking what I wanted to be doing with the first afternoon I’d stopped by in three weeks, given that his was all booked up. And I’d sit nearby in a kid’s pink plastic chair too small for my butt, donating my blood to mosquitoes while Dad wrote the messages and I packed them in.

I would roll up a note, shake it into the bottom of the dark glass, cap the bottle, set it aside. I’d never asked him why he had opted to seal them with bottlecaps and not corks. Corks—classic, maybe even classy. Caps made these look like lies, hollow promises: a bottled beer with nothing inside but scrap paper.

There were neighbors on all sides in four squat apartment complexes. They’d watch him drink his beers with one hand and write his notes with the other.

He came prepared, by his standards. A stanza of Emily Dickinson in one. Others, a snatch of Bob Dylan, Jack Johnson. A Hungarian proverb, or something from Proverbs. And then he had his originals, which you could tell from the cross-outs and hesitations, improvising banalities. Sleep on it, it’ll get better tomorrow.

Whatever it is, it can’t last forever.

Longer, sometimes. I suppose that because you’re human you’re going through something right now. Being human too, I understand something about that. So wherever you are and wherever I am, we have that in common.

His neighbors never said anything. He never said anything back, not even a joke or not-joke simply to ward off their assumptions when their families were grilling or gathered on their balconies or working on their cars, or drinking out of cans and looking over our way sometimes.

And somehow it wasn’t for me to say. I was the Robin to the pot-bellied Batman, just about to hop back onto my bike to pedal like hell for the Good Neighborhood, or the Anywhere-but-Here Neighborhood. I’d wait the same as everyone else in his fellow apartments, waiting on absolutely anything.

About a dozen times he wrote a message with a kind of dramatic painstakingness before jamming the pen into the spiral binding of his notebook and patting around for a dry bottle himself. He’d shove the paper in, not rolling it like I’d learned to do. For just that moment he had no more hands or mental room to think about the bottle on his left that he was drinking from.

“No peeking, kid.” He’d shoot me an all-knowing grin, a hammy actor grasping at mysteriousness. “This one’s for you.” Then he’d struggle to seal the new cap he stuck on it before dropping yet another old brown bottle too hard into one of the boxes, as if he or I would be able to tell the difference between that entire dozen in a second or two.

*

This afternoon I reached the Oceanside two hours later than I’d expected. The concierge didn’t recognize me—he was newer, about my age—and got by with only a few spare lines of chitchat after taking stock of my face. “They’re saying traffic will be this way all summer. This construction. I tell you. If only they’d think about how this will hurt the industry. And then you factor in peak travel…”

I’d always taken advantage of the austerity of my older sedan, choosing to be truly unreachable when in transit, and messages had piled up. Generic condolences on the work group chat. A cluster of rapid-fire texts from Mom about my plans that I’d sent her earlier for the simple service. She refused to believe there was no process for the modern equivalent of a pauper’s grave, cases when you had people with no living relations, or as good as. Everything’s not on you, she promised. It wasn’t like this was me or Stephen.

Then there were texts from the only number I had pinned to the top of my messages.

I’m so sorry.

And I’m sorry for the silence. Airplane mode to Barcelona. Then I tried calling, but you must be driving.

Can I call?

Should I come back?

I pocketed my phone and put my things in the second-story room, looking out. The ocean vista was predictably more pockmarked than my last view of it: blocked in, piecemeal, by new construction crowding closer and closer to the shoreline. One of these enterprises looked like a rebuild, probably from the remnants of the hurricane.

I’d only made the full overnight trip with Dad twice. Usually he had opted for a daytrip, and I’d done that too, plenty of times.

It always began with me finding him for some entirely different reason. I never found him not at home. I’d let myself in through the unlocked door and tiptoe through the kitchen as if I was at risk of being mistaken for an intruder until I could appear in his line of sight and explain myself. He’d be half-asleep with a beer breathing deeply in lax fingers, the remote and cigarette cohabiting in his other hand. Ten seconds, maybe more, to pair my face with my tentative voice, and he’d jolt upright through rusty muscle memory, oily sweat beading on his forehead.

“Kid!” he’d start up. “Good thing you caught me! In another twenty minutes—” but wouldn’t finish. Much as he hadn’t finished the tin of chicken pot pie hazy with fruit flies in the kitchen, or remaking the sleeper sofa, or brushing his teeth, which he flashed at me as he shucked off lethargy and pulled on an oversized, overzealous haste.

“Anyhow, come in, come in,” he’d go on, ushering me closer with his cigarette hand, dropping the remote. The beer, of course, never went anywhere. “And just in time. The truck’s all—”

“Sorry,” I’d say. “I can’t stay.” Just needing the long-ago mechanic in him to figure out, for free, the cause of that death rattle in my hand-me-down hatchback. I’d say, “I had a quick question—I would’ve texted, but I guess you lost your old number.” Dropping in to confirm his social security number and the deplorable state of his finances for the FAFSA I was filling out for college in the faint hope of some grant money. I’d say, “This’ll only take a minute.” Stopping by, stupidly, to say to his face that Mom was remarrying and never even planned on telling him.

It didn’t matter. In five minutes I would be in his truck—I would be driving, naturally—as the frame creaked under the weight of boxes and boxes of bottles in the bed, icy unease shivering through the rear window as I made a hole in the relentless traffic headed east.

Dad remained faithful to a system that seemed as rigid and inscrutable to him as to me, as if he himself were only following orders. “A dozen here, at most. The others can go out farther down the beach.”

            If there were crowds, we’d wait. Twice at the height of vacation season he reserved a single room with two beds at the Oceanside and he would strategically pick our moments. In the offseason we could go during the daylight. He might have loved his fellow humans on paper, but being up close with anyone was a different animal. He was a different animal. Socked and shoed even as close as the water’s edge, where I watched his immense caution from my periphery as I hurled bottles.

“Dude, c’mon,” I’d prod him. By that point I hadn’t called him Dad in years, not to his face. I’d tried Mike, but he had looked startled—we were in his truck at the time, forced to share the same air—as if I’d confessed to knowing something all this time that he thought he had kept so well hidden. “No one’s around. Nobody cares.”

“People care.”

“Not the way you want them to.”

He also had a thing about putting them in the water—setting his share of bottles into the waves with an absurd degree of delicacy, like putting single roses into a vase. They would jostle among themselves close to the shore at his feet, the lapping water promptly offering them back to him.

To me, the only way to go about this was full force, absolute conviction. I’d wind up and pitch a nice clean arc into the waves, showing off the ball skills he’d never seen for himself during weekend games, which he didn’t notice all over again. As soon as his back was turned to start off to the truck, I’d grab any of his bottles that refused to leave the shoreline and hurl them out where the current could clutch them and lead them off to wherever they were supposed to go.

Dad was always on the alert, wracked with the dread of being apprehended by the law. What we were doing did break the law, if not a bylaw or local ordinance—littering at the very least, maybe disturbing the peace. I’d never checked.

The closest either of us came to being caught red-handed was by a concerned citizen in his eighties, croaking and waving his walking stick in what was supposed to be a menacing manner a good hundred feet down the beach. The real heavy lifting was done by his Cocker Spaniel that bolted our way, spraying sand everywhere and running loops around us, barking hysterically. We were under no real threat, but we were under scrutiny, and that was enough. We bolted up the beach, and for thirty seconds we were actually on the run, legitimate partners in crime—me laughing until I cried, Dad stone-cold sober, for once.

*

            My family history wasn’t the safeguard it should have been. I’d been dead drunk at least half a dozen times. Once, apparently, so drunk that I tried to grab some random man in a bar who punched me in the jaw. The bartenders gave me an ice pack and two cups of coffee. One of them was sure I’d called the guy “Dad” and that I’d gone in to hug him. I was too mortified and nauseated to tell her how unlike my real self this would have been.

            According to a neighbor from way back when I was living alone at the cheap townhouse outside of Springfield, I’d been drunk enough that at eleven o’clock at night, only two-thirds of the way through a nor’easter, I’d gone out to get a head start shoveling out my driveway and walked right into the path of a regularly recurring snow plow. The neighbor was waiting out another night of old-age insomnia and taking in the snowfall when he saw my third near-death experience as the plow veered wide and the driver woke me up by laying on the horn.

The neighbor—retired, divorced, diabetic; that was all I could remember—brought me inside for instant coffee and sympathetic nods, explaining what I had been doing in a way that we could both stomach. But I was still drunk, so I started asking stupid questions. “Where’s my shovel, then?”

            “What?”

            “Where’s my shovel, if I’m shoveling? Where’re my gloves?” I was investigating myself and couldn’t answer anything to my satisfaction. “How come I didn’t let the plow pass by first? Why’d I want to cross the street anyhow?”

            The old neighbor patted my hand and looked at a light spot on the wall where there must have been a framed picture for years, gone now. He asked me if I was doing anything special for the holidays.

            The only bottles Dad ever handed me were filled with steno pad paper. He always waited to uncap a new beer on the road until we had put the coast behind us, headed back west, and was all the thirstier from that lost time. It didn’t cross his mind to offer me one or ask what I thought about it. He never told me to remind him when I would be legal. What the college scene was like, if I’d tried any bona fide keggers. He did ask, over and over, if I knew the way to the Oceanside in case he had to make a reservation.

            Today I looked around my room on the second floor and saw that new management had gone for simpler, cleaner visuals. Indeterminate off-whites for the trim and walls instead of that prematurely dated periwinkle; indestructible beige blanket, not the white (stained) Sixties-style bedspread that had been the mainstay before. Redesigned stationery, a modern aesthetic with vague lines that created the gestalt of a wave, nothing connected or complete.

            I checked for new texts. Nothing from Mom. Two more from Son’s Better Half.

            Maybe your texts were only an FYI. Or are we talking again?

            I promise I’m not “hairsplitting.” Just trying to make sure I don’t cross one of those lines. You know they’re like infrared to me.

            I left my phone in the room and walked the quarter mile to the beach—eyes up, waiting for the first clear panorama of the ocean, but constantly distracted by the litter along the boardwalk. Empty cigarette cartons. Tiny plastic bottles drained of flavored whiskey. Soda cans, seltzer cans, beer cans. No glass.

The late afternoon busyness up and down the beach felt like a Saturday midmorning. A few families had seriously invested and staked out their real estate with the entire raft of accessories: picnic basket, chairs, cooler, massive beach umbrella as dangerous as a bayonet if it got unstuck from the sand by a sharp breeze and bolted through the crowds.

I slipped my shoes and socks off, rolling up my trousers three times, knowing the cuffs would get wet anyway. What I’d learned from all of those trips here was that there was no staying neat on the beach. I could never drive Dad back to his apartment and get into my own car and arrive late at Mom’s for dinner and deny going with him to the coast, because there would be something about me, a dead giveaway. A deep dampness that hadn’t dried yet. The stench of salty seaweed. Sand, sand everywhere; even in my hair sometimes. You went all in or didn’t go at all.

Which had made Dad in his sandy shoes and sopping socks that much more incomprehensible. However far away he’d place himself to set bottles gingerly into the Atlantic;  waves were unpredictable, even at the tail end.

I walked the soggy sand wherever it had been changed by the tide, letting the world coming at me decide how to navigate around this body steadily moving through space. The kids and dogs dodged at the last possible second. One boy was too clumsy, yelping when he bumped into my ribs as if I’d kicked him. There was one old man pacing the beach, hands clasped behind his back, fully dressed except for those porcelain bare feet. There was always an old man on these beaches, as far as I knew. The dog was optional; the solitude was not.

There was more trash on the beach than I could ever remember, in spite of all conscious efforts on my part to sweep my recollections clean of any dusty nostalgia. Styrofoam cups and fast food wrappers eaten away by the elements. A needle, which when I got closer I realized was merely the interior tube of a pen, so I left it there. And cans, of course. Cans, light yet sturdy and unable to shatter.

My long shadow intruded on the sunlight of one young couple, not through any fault of their own. There was something arresting about them. He was armed with a high-end digital camera, and she had a book splayed across her chest but wasn’t even pretending to read, both of them laughing shamelessly, denying nothing.

“You guys ever see a message in a bottle around here?” I asked.

They resurfaced from the privacy people carve out of public spaces. For a moment his face was lit so fully by a rogue ray of sun that I could see the eyes behind the aviator lenses, how they narrowed on me.

“Message in a bottle? Is that even a real thing?” The way he called back reminded me how far away I actually was; they were on dry land, while my pursuit of the very edge had put me ankle-deep in fine sand and icy water.

She added, still smiling at him, “I sort of thought that was a kid’s storybook thing.”

“Right.” I nodded and lifted a hand to release them back to their own private world. “Right, thanks.”

Dad had never reported seeing anyone wading into the water to rescue a bottle. Whenever I returned with him on another trip, I’d search the half-dozen spots on his regular drop route, discerning no signs of us ever being there before. Driving back once with an early autumn sunset drilling into my eyes, I said over the angry hum of rush hour, “Public Works must come in and grab all those damn bottles the second we drive off, throw them straight into recycling. Bottles in, bottles out, one big goddamn waste of time.”

“They’re not supposed to stay.”

“I’m not talking about the point, there is no point. This is simple physics. How many bottles have you chucked into the ocean by now? There’s no chance they’ve all been sucked into shipping lanes and carried off to Cape Horn or wherever. Some of them are just bound to drift back to shore, maybe go absolutely nowhere.”

That wasn’t my final trip, but it was close enough. It took me one more try, returning to the scene of the crime on those same beaches, seeing no single tangible sign that Davenport and Son had done even as much as sully a scenic spot with some shattered glass.

I didn’t return to the Bad Neighborhood after that, for every reason. The first of which was that no matter how I’d started a new visit, every last time I would find myself fifty miles away, glaring through the light off the ocean.

*

And to think it was me who made damn sure that none of those bottles remained. There was one in particular whose fate I refused to ignore, good and stuck, thanks to Dad, and I should have left it that way. He had tried to drop the bottle into the receding tide from high up. The bottle fell wrong with only one plausible outcome, an explosion against the rocks, but instead it found a once-in-a-million hole in one surrounded by granite as jagged as shark teeth.

Dad immediately moved on, leaving it behind—but that was cheating, if not being cheated, somehow. So I’d made my way out along the rocks and succeeded in teasing the bottle free, rising to return to solid ground before I’d trust my pitching arm to launch it into the open waves. Then I slipped on the mucus-slick algae on the uneven rock.

A pocket of my cargo pants ripped clean off. I scrabbled, caught myself, frozen mid-exorcism: head screwed to one side, back arched, limbs spider-legged at all angles. I didn’t notice at first that the bottle had escaped me, but only to skitter away intact into a soggy crevice. Later that night I would discover a dozen scrapes and cuts and bruised ribs; in the moment, I was eyeing a stone stiletto stabbing just past my nose—my second near-death experience. I was keeping count now.

When I crawled my way out, guided by both shaking hands, I had that bottle jammed into my torn shorts, because it was doomed to survive or die with me.

I had never thrown anything with that much rage. Then I watched from the sand as it plopped pathetically a third of the distance of my usual range, turning over slowly in the water and begrudgingly drifting away.

Dad was waiting up the beach from me. I approached reluctantly and peered into his face to gauge how much he had seen, how much I should say. But he had stopped at the top of the dunes with his face turned toward the freeway, which we could hear but not see—likely the exact way he had been standing all that while when he couldn’t forget there was half a six-pack tucked away in the footwell of his truck.

This afternoon I considered saying something to the old man as he passed close by on patrol. He must know about the bottles, if any; he hadn’t lifted his eyes once from his bare feet. I waited for him to notice me, notice my own bare skin making itself known in his periphery. But his mind was someplace else entirely, and his feet stuck to his appointed rounds.

On the phone earlier, the groggy stranger had said he’d known Dad for a good five years. This hadn’t seemed to hold up upon questioning, or at least those years had done nothing to resolve his fundamental ignorance regarding Michael Davenport:

“Was he sober at any point? Did you say he was trying to quit?”

“You know how it is.”

“But was he able to get out, travel? Did he drive to the beach? He used to do that often e—”

“Didn’t say much one way or the other.”

“Was he ill for a while? Did he think he had more time?”

“It was just kind of one of those things.”

My big toe missed a shard of glass by a miraculous millimeter, less. I stooped to work it loose. Clear glass—scored and chipped by the forces that had abandoned it here. Not the brown glass, or occasionally green, that was painfully familiar.

His heart, the hospital had told me. His heart, not his lungs or liver or kidneys. Somehow I couldn’t accept this yet. How it could be an organ that he hadn’t pummeled with such determination each and every day with a bottle in one fist, a smoke in another.

*

The sun was on a downturn, so I walked back to the Oceanside to retrieve my phone. Twelve unanswered texts. More condolences. And Mike Davenport’s Son’s Better Half had called twice, leaving a voicemail with the second.

I was back on the beach by the time the sands had mostly cleared of people. The sun had cleared off as well, but it left some of its own litter behind among the evening clouds. I looked among the rocks rather than at the latticework of shadows overhead, stopping for every solid, silhouetted object that didn’t appear to belong. I listened to the message again while holding the phone away from my ear, as if she were here, standing somewhere behind me.

“I know where you are, I think. You used to talk about him. When we first met. But, baby, you don’t have to find them first. You can have absolutely nothing to say yet, or even know what to say before you say it. But you do have to tell me that much. Does that make sense?”

I waited out the pause, same as I would have if she had hung back a few steps, waiting for me to turn around. The phone provided pressure and warmth, a placeholder touch in my palm that I didn’t want to disappear.

“Don’t forget,” she said suddenly, “there was never absolutely nothing in those bottles.” An unexpected laugh, a hairline fracture through the words. “I mean, hell with the notes. There was always air.” A quicker pause, hesitation. An old parting tried to make its way out—I love you; I miss you—but she stopped short as I continued walking away. “Just call when you want, okay?”

            I slowed, but I kept going. I told myself the last of the daylight was still enough to reflect off the surface of glass. Time enough had passed for a few of those bottles to circle the entire world. Something would end up right where it first began. The city couldn’t have confiscated them all. Something was still out there.

Another ten minutes, I told myself, and then I’d make my way back.

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