by Miles De Rosa
Bodies
They washed early onto the sand. Fog crawled across the water. Seagulls scraped over the dunes. Surf lapped at their hair.
A woman pushed a stroller, baby cowering at the darkened sky, and gazed onto the beach. There was something at the water’s edge. Scorched wood dug into the soft sand. Sleeping bags lay hidden in the reeds. Balls of plastic wrap blew down the shore. No cars passed. It was quiet and cold.
A wave crashed onto the beach and covered the figures. The woman wasn’t sure what she’d seen. She kept walking along the shore and at eight, she turned around. When she got home, her husband was already gone.
Interrogation
They called Gracin from class. She had been waiting. She slung her bag over her shoulder, a head turned, a chair squeaked. The balls of her feet caught the linoleum as she went.
There were grief counselors quartered in a curtained corner of the lunchroom, but this was not that. The principal’s secretary had called for her collection. The secretary kept a watchful eye outside her window. She watched the students as they mingled in the hallway, who they moved with and who they didn’t.
Gracin sat with curled posture in a blue plastic chair. Hands shook wild, painted nails picked clean of black polish, she stared at the dirt between the tiles. She hadn’t cried.
There was a cop in the room, standing on the back wall in the left corner. The vice principal leaned back on a filing cabinet, a pair of aviators hung from his breast pocket, he smelled like cigarettes. The principal, sitting skinny in the center of a slick back chair, smelled like coffee. There were puffy purple bags gripping the bottoms of her eyelids and a battered, sorrowful look stapled to her to the top corners of her forehead. Her hair was pulled taut into a ponytail, not a strand out of place. She had ironed her lapel. She leaned forward and Gracin slouched, impressed by the woman’s poise.
“Are you okay, Gracin?” she asked and Gracin knew, somewhere in her eyes, that she was the first student the principal had asked that question to all day.
“I don’t know.”
“Have you cried?”
“I haven’t done much of anything.”
The police officer looked at Gracin with his pen pressing into a pad of paper. He had bushy eyebrows that covered his eyelids. They made Gracin uncomfortable. She wondered how anyone ever looked him in the eye without getting distracted.
“Do you know if anything unusual happened that night?” he said.
Gracin shifted in the chair. “They were going to go to the beach. They each told their parents they were sleeping over at the other one’s. We sleep over at each other’s houses all the time. Then Roxy went to pick Ari up. She had a bunch of sleeping bags and sandwiches and firewood in the back of the truck. They were just going to the beach.”
“How do you know?”
“I went over to Roxy’s house after school.”
“But not the beach?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“They were going to drop acid.”
“Oh,” said the principal. She leaned back in her chair and placed her elbows on the armrests.
“Do you know if they did?” the cop asked.
“I’m not sure,” Gracin said.
She had known since she heard about their bodies on the beach. It’s why she didn’t want to go in the first place—she would want to know what the ocean felt like. Her skin would fade, and then her body; stars vibrating through the purple haze, she wouldn’t want to leave. She would’ve never gotten out of the water.
Transit
Ari’s dad took the train to work on Tuesday. He stood packed between woolen bodies, stared vacant at the faces of the people in front of him.
He didn’t need to go in, but he couldn’t be at home. There were too many pictures he couldn’t look at. Rooms he couldn’t go in. The hallway was a battleground. The living room was a graveyard. Every few hours his wife would ask him why he wouldn’t talk to her and he would look at her without an answer.
When he got to the office, no one knew why he was there. They looked at him like a ghost. No one spoke to him. Sunken eyes reflected back at him on a dark screen. He didn’t work. He sat, leaning, bouncing back and forth in his chair, running his thumb over a rubber band ball and staring at the ceiling.
He’d found out about the acid the night before. His wife spent time at the kitchen table cradling an empty glass in her palm and talking through her feelings of estrangement. There was an extra degree of distance forced open by that detail. He hadn’t responded and she snapped at him. “I knew my daughter,” he replied. “I loved her. And talking about the fact that she’s gone, or how we feel about it, isn’t going to bring her back.”
The clock hit five; people left the office without a word. The fluorescents clicked and he sat lifeless in the dark until his legs carried him to the train station.
Pale light shone down from the streetlights and illuminated the graffiti on the sides of the
buildings. He hated it. He thought it made the city look dirty. But Ari loved the graffiti. She told him once she thought it breathed life into lifeless space. That it was a human way of imparting some individuality onto the concrete. He hadn’t understood. He realized, the graffiti passing by outside the window, that maybe he had never known his daughter at all.
Roxy’s dad was en route somewhere in Colorado, staying at a truck stop slouched over in the driver’s seat of his eighteen-wheeler. His phone was sitting in his lap and a call from his exwife in California woke him up.
“Roxy’s dead.” She said it as soon as he picked up the phone.
“What?” There was a light above his windshield. It was yellow and it was blinding. He rubbed his nose. Rubbed his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“They found her body on the beach on Saturday morning.” Her voice was distant.
He sat for a moment and stared into the light to wake himself up and tried to picture his daughter in his mind. He hadn’t seen her in years. The only picture he could conjure was her first day of school, small and innocent, backpack hanging down below her knees, pink bows in her hair, clutching the leg of her mother. It was a picture he kept in his wallet. “Do you want me to come home?” he asked.
“I don’t want to see you, Don. I just thought you should know.”
The line clicked dead. Don opened the door and stepped onto the concrete. He walked to the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. He pissed without washing his hands. When he got back to his truck he pulled the picture of his daughter from his wallet and poked a small hole in the top of the photo. He pulled a piece of string from the failing upholstery of the driver’s seat and fastened it around the rearview mirror. Then he pulled a small bag of powder out from the median and laid a line on the dash. He snorted it fast, pushed the keys into the ignition, and drove onto the highway.
Confession
The principal sat in the wooden box. She had no idea how to tell the students, or why it had to happen to her, and she had to keep reminding herself that it didn’t really happen to her. It happened first to the girls and then to their parents and then to their friends, the rest of the students, anyone else who may have known them. And then it happened to her.
“I don’t know how to deal with death,” she said. Gray and muted light poked through the holes in the confessional. The priest shifted on the other side.
“Have you been confronted with that recently?”
“Two of my students died. They drowned.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. How old were they?”
“Eighteen.”
“Tragedy.” For a moment they sat in silence. The principal watched the dust drift through beaming light. “It’s almost impossible to deal with tragedy.”
“I don’t know what to tell the other students, or what to say to them if they come to me for help.”
“Tell them no one ever dies in the eyes of the Lord. Tell them that they will live forever.”
“And if they aren’t religious?”
“Could you have done anything to prevent their death?” the priest asked.
“No.”
“Then in the eyes of God you are clean. Exempt from their tragedy. Let it be theirs. They will hold onto it forever. Allow yourself to move on. And when you remember them, remember them fondly, in the kingdom of heaven.”
“And if they aren’t in heaven?”
“Let them be forgiven.”
Ashes
Roxy was placed on her mother’s bedside table in a black urn bought cheap and cleaned thoroughly. Roxy’s door was left open. Light would pour in from the windows and through the open door. The city was still alive outside; she couldn’t sleep. In the nights after Roxy’s death, she would wander into her room, stand in the pale light. She would push her forehead against the cold glass. Study the people moving beneath the window.
She could barely afford the apartment. She didn’t need two bedrooms anymore. But the thought of moving was unconscionable. Where was she supposed to keep her daughter’s stuff?
When Roxy was old enough to know what death was, and to comprehend that someone would want to die, and why, and how they might do it, she told her mother if she ever were to die, she would want to die jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Her mother told her that was a terrible thing to say. And then she told Roxy this: no matter what, you are going to die. Whether it’s your choice or somebody else’s. So let it be somebody else’s.
A week after the body washed up on the beach, her mother strapped Roxy’s urn into the passenger’s seat. She drove to Golden Gate Park. Parked on the cliffside. She clutched Roxy to her belly and she stared at the water. It’s unrelenting push and pull, a never ending force. A heartbeat at the center of the planet.
There was no way to know. She just had to keep reminding herself, she believed her daughter, and that was not a mistake. But it’s a terrible feeling. And she would do anything to go back, a loop in time, and alter a stitch, one minor moment, to keep her daughter home that night.
She sat fiddling with the lid, turning it in place. People passed behind her. She could feel the wind from their tires as it scraped the back of her neck. She heard the voices of the people walking to the overlook. There was laughter.
The sun went down. The cars disappeared. She uncorked the urn and poured it between her legs. Some of it, she swore, had reached the choppy waters below. She pulled herself from the dirt and breathed. It was where her daughter had always wanted to be.
Funeral
The mothers spoke in hushed tones under high ceilings as the guests filed in. There were men in muted suits and women in colorless dresses. No light came down through the stained glass windows. The pains were dark with fog.
“Talk to your daughter,” warned Ari’s mom.
“Gracin wouldn’t do something like that.”
“I didn’t think Ari would,” her mother said. “Now she’s gone.”
Gracin’s mom didn’t go to church. This was her first time in this particular building. She liked the sculpted ceilings. She liked the color of the casket. She liked that the priest mingled, that he shook hands with the grieving people, that he nodded but didn’t smile.
Ari’s mom wore a straight-lace black veil and a black dress. Gracin’s mom had never liked her. Their family never went on vacation. Not because they couldn’t afford it, but because it seemed like they didn’t believe in it. It was no surprise that Ari was so adventurous.
In the seventh grade, the three girls had a sleepover at Gracin’s house. Gracin’s mother woke up early and heard yelling coming from the small backyard. She looked out the window. There was a tent pitched with a tarp and some zip ties. The girls had dug a hole in the lawn, laid rocks down in a circle, and piled sticks collected from the base of a tree growing on the sidewalk. They lit a fire and nursed it early into the morning. The next day Gracin was exhausted. She hadn’t gotten any sleep. But she couldn’t stop talking about the girls, her new best friends.
“I’m not worried about Gracin doing acid,” Gracin’s mother said. “Especially not anymore. I’d only ask that she doesn’t do it at the beach.”
“Yeah, I think that’s the hardest part.” The fathers stood against the wall holding small plastic cups of sparkling water beneath the church windows.
“What do you mean?” Gracin’s dad was a big man with a big belly and big arms and a big neck and small eyes that sat deep in the center of a big bald head. He gripped a plastic cup and leaned down, peering over Ari’s dad—a skinny man with pointy elbows and bony fingers—like he was trying to find something on the top of his head.
“She wants to talk about her. She wants to talk about the fact that Ari’s dead, the way she died, that we are going to have to relearn how to live. She wants to talk about how all she wanted to be was a mother. She wants to talk about how everything is falling apart. She thinks God is speaking to her through the weather. Her parents wouldn’t make the trip down for the funeral and she thinks they’re disappointed in her. All she wants to do is talk.” He took a sip of his perrier and looked away. “I’m tired of fucking talking.”
“You didn’t want to be a father?”
“I was twenty-five. I wanted to get laid and make my parents happy. I loved my daughter. I still do. If you think I wouldn’t break one of these windows and drag the shards down my wrists if it would bring her back, you’ve got it wrong. But nothing will bring her back. Certainly not fucking talking about it.”
“What have you been doing to cope?”
“I worked eighty hours this week. And I’ll work ninety next week. And maybe a hundred the week after that. And if that doesn’t fix me, I’ll drink until I can’t stand up.”
They stood in silence for a moment. Gracin’s dad looked at the stone ceiling. He looked at the organ pipes on the back wall. He looked at the casket and thought about his mother’s funeral. She had died a year earlier. When he finally started talking about it to his wife, he couldn’t stop. But it took time.
“The other day,” Ari’s dad said, “I woke up in the middle of the night. My wife wasn’t in bed. So I got up and I saw there was a light coming from the bottom of the stairs. I walked down about halfway and stuck my head out and looked into the dining room. She was sitting at the table with a scrapbook, all these baby pictures, first day of school pictures, prom pictures, spread out all over the table. She was crying. I should’ve gone down there. I know I should’ve. But I turned around and went back upstairs and fell asleep.”
Gracin’s dad didn’t know what to say. The small man didn’t look up at him. He stared straight ahead. He didn’t blink. He pressed his thumb into the rim of the plastic cup.
“I think I stopped being my wife’s husband the moment my daughter died. And I think in a few months, when all this calms down, I am going to leave her. I am going to take my things and load them into my car and I am not going to stop driving until I find somewhere quiet.”
Gracin Alone
I don’t remember much from the funeral. The pews were uncomfortable. The priest spoke but I wasn’t listening. There were a lot of people there I didn’t know. Members of Ari’s congregation, coworker’s of her parents. Some of them came up to me like they knew me and they spoke like they knew Ari and I remember that upset me.
No one mentioned Roxy, besides to say Ari wasn’t alone when she died. That upset me too. The funeral had felt like a chance to grieve both losses, but it was like Roxy had never existed. Ari’s parents never liked Roxy much, that wasn’t a secret. But I was hoping for something more than a circumstantial mention. Roxy didn’t get a funeral.
The night after the funeral was quiet. I laid in my room with the space heater on. I’d kept it on all week. The room sweltered. I could feel the sweat itching at my pores. Yet the hair on my arms raised. I couldn’t get myself warm. There was a deep chill in my bones.
I sat at the bookshelf and picked through books the girls had given me, books I’d promised to read in time, and promised to give them my thoughts. It hurt to open them, but I did, even read pages from a few, and put them all in a pile at my bedside. The pile sat there for months. I read them slowly.
In that bedroom I had a ribboned bulletin board pinned with polaroids and printed pictures from disposable cameras. Us at the beach years earlier, camping in my backyard that first night they slept over. Dirt smeared over our faces. Bags under our eyes. We were all smiling. I ended the night in bed pulling pictures from the board, studying them under lamp light. Cataloging their faces, the colors painted into their hair, changing as the years went by.
I cried for the first time then. Body in bed quietly convulsing for hours until I exhausted myself and fell into a heavy dreamless sleep. It was months before I woke up.
The school held a vigil in the courtyard. They taped pictures to a concrete wall. Laid flowers at the base. Hallways were quiet. Classrooms dead. Everyday people came to me. They laid their hands on my shoulders, against my back. These were cautious gestures.
After a few weeks, people left me alone. The numbness faded; the loss was overwhelming. I found empty classrooms to sit and eat. I donned headphones in the hallways. I held books beneath my desk in class. Teachers pulled me aside to discuss my participation, my grades. After a while, they left me alone too. The world kept moving. I was in the same place.
It took months but eventually the pain abided. Spring arrived, the sun came out. I began talking to people again. There was a girl named Ava who lived in a small house at the base of the hills. She didn’t read much. I began going to her house every friday. We would walk to the traffic circle. We would sit on the stone fountain and she would sketch trees and flowers in a black leather sketchbook. I sat on the concrete and watched cars yield and intersect, round and round, the sound of engines spurring, water landing in the basin beside. The streams never stopped.
Both of us were getting ready to go away to college and we lost touch soon after. She talked a lot, mumbled almost, about future plans and leaving home. I didn’t talk much. She never asked anything from me. Her presence was a simple comfort I will never forget.
It’s been ten years since their death and still there is a hole. It sits a layer beneath the ebbing pain of their loss, buried below my stomach. For years, I didn’t understand why it wouldn’t leave me.
Six months ago I got married. At the altar my mind was clear and bright and when the rush wore off, sitting in a flimsy plastic chair, an undercutting emptiness overthrew me. I got up and danced until my feet throbbed. Ari and Roxy were not there dancing with me. They should have been.
The hole comes from this: they are gone and I am still alive.
Beach
It was wet but it wasn’t raining. Ari ran out to the pick-up truck and threw a bag into the back full of saran-wrapped sandwiches and two sleeping bags. It was humid and hot and dark; the moisture in the air stuck to their skin. The wind blew slow. On their way to the water they turned the music all the way up and sang songs they knew the words to, Roxy left a hand on Ari’s thigh.
They ate the sandwiches Roxy had packed to settle their stomachs. Then they put the tabs on their tongues and laid in the sand, sheltered by the reeds, looked at the stars and talked, the time slipping by seamlessly. It hit them and they looked at each other and Roxy smiled a big, goofy smile and started to laugh. They stuck their hands beneath the sand and felt every rock eroded, every crashing wave, every drop of water forever crashing on the shore and—the water!
They leapt up and sprinted to the surf. The salt stung their eyes. It dried their lips. They thrashed among the shallow waves and felt as though their skin was falling off the bone. As if they were nothing but a piece of something.
Ari started to shiver and so they trudged up the dunes, sand collecting between their toes, back to their hideaway within the reeds. Roxy told her to get out of her wet clothes and grabbed a towel from the bag and dried her off. She laid down on her sleeping bag spread out over the sand, the air felt warm against her skin. She felt woozy, nauseous even, like her stomach would leap from her throat.
Roxy got up and ran up the beach and up the stairs without a word, and when she came back, she carried a collection of duralogs and a lighter. Ari stood and the two of them walked to the center of the beach. They dug a hole in the sand. Anchored the logs in the pit and lit a fire. It danced with the wind. They sat there watching it, the lay down next to each other.
Ari rolled her head over and Roxy was staring at her. Roxy made a slow approach, scored by glances, a soft hand laid. A rolling body. They were not looking at the stars anymore.
They finished and fell onto their backs and looked at each other, basking in the fire’s warm glow, sand sticking to their bodies, and started to laugh.
Roxy pulled her body from the ground. She slid her clothes back on, step by step. She wobbled in the wind as she stood. There was something down at the end of the beach, she couldn’t see it, but she knew it had to be there, so she sprinted down the coastline. Ari popped up after her and they ran over the wet sand, packed down, feet slapping like damp newspapers on window panes, they reached the edge of the beach. Rock formations rose over the water. They grabbed the rugged edges, they stuck their feet into the divots they could find, they pulled themselves to the plateau.
Gentle waves lapped against the rocks. Ocean spray landed in their hair. Ari nestled herself into Roxy’s arms. Roxy peeled the wet hair off her forehead and kissed her between the eyes.
They stared at the horizon and they felt very small, but very significant, because they were sitting in each other’s arms. And it was bigger than both of them.
On the way back down the beach, they could see the fire had blown out. Roxy wanted to look at the sky. Ari was cold. She was starting to shake. The ocean felt too big for her. Too eternal. She wanted to go back to the car and sit with the heat on and listen to music softly over the speakers. She wanted walls. She wanted a space with limits.
But Roxy whined and smiled and spun and laughed and pleaded and so they laid down in the surf. Let the crashing waves cover their feet. It was a crisp feeling. They held hands. Ari looked over at Roxy and shivered. Roxy smiled.
The next morning, a woman pushing a baby carriage passed by their bodies on the beach but she wasn’t sure what she saw. She thought when she got home she would tell her husband about it, because it was peculiar. Two objects pushed up on the beach like that. Maybe sea lions, she thought, washed up from a fight on the rocks somewhere. Whatever it was, he would probably know. But when she got home, he was already gone.
About the Author
Miles De Rosa is a 22 year old writer from Califfornia’s Bay Area. He loves the books and records in his room and anything else willing to keep him company. He lives in Baltimore with his two roommates, and their cat Goose, who keeps him company too.