On her last day at Punta Monterey Beach Resort, Samena arrives to the shore just after sunrise, earlier than usual. A thick fog covers the bay, so it will stay murky for another hour or so. Samena doesn’t mind; she likes the mystery. Most of her novels had been suspense, with a few failed attempts at romance. Wrapped in an oversized towel stolen from her hotel cabin, she wanders onto the beach barefoot, hoping to find seashells hiding in the sand. Early birds don’t just get worms, Samena thinks, laughing at her own cliché. Cool mist swirls around her face.
Her foot falls upon something hard in the softness. She stops, pulls her toes back, and carefully bends over to pluck a perfect nautilus shell from the damp sand. Even in the dim light, its pearlescent white and beige glisten.
Well, Howard,” she says to the fog, “was it the
Fibonacci sequence these follow? A golden spiral or some such?” She smiles at
her feigned ignorance, crinkling her nose in a way she found cute when she was
younger. Now, it scrunches her face into a mess of wrinkles. “Oh darling, I’ve
screwed up and gotten old.” Her grip tightens around the nautilus.
Her husband Howard, a retired physics professor, died
from skin cancer three years ago, after a few errant cells left his epidermis
to visit his liver. He once taught Samena how to calculate the load a bridge
could hold for a novel she was writing. She once taught Howard how much
forgiveness a heart could hold after he’d slept with a research assistant named
Jackie. Such an unremarkable girl.
His death left Samena alone with
their small fortune and a wayward son in debt and on drugs. Some sort of speed,
she’s sure of that, but at eighty-three she no longer cares about unnecessary
details. Fifty-five should be old enough to get his act together. They’d done
their best. Nannies. Tutors. Private schools in upstate New York. Even several
stays at those expensive rehabs down in Florida. She often wonders if they’d
just made things worse.
“Brennan is coming to put me in a
home today,” she tells the fog. “Says I’ve gone mad.”
Their only child decided Samena’s two
years living in a hotel’s beach cabin proved her incompetence. He’d sobered up
long enough to convince a judge to agree. Later this afternoon, he would come
to collect her.
“Don’t worry, Howard,” Samena says.
“I’m prepared.”
Something wet wiggles against the
palm of her hand, and she flips the nautilus over in time to see brown
tentacles retreating into the shell’s opening. A rush of warm joy swells
through her.
“I didn’t know you were in there!”
She brings the shell to her mouth and kisses the smooth surface. “Holmes wrote
a poem about you,” she whispers, then tosses the nautilus into the waves.
Buoyed by such luck on her last day
here, Samena jogs briskly back to her cabin, stopping for a moment to tease
Howard one final time. “You didn’t say a thing, darling. I could have killed
the poor creature.”
***
By noon, the sun has heated the bay enough that the
fog has lifted. Samena curls herself on a deck chair, watching waterspouts
spray up in the distance, followed by the backs of blue whales. Two seagulls on
the beach below fight over something in the sand. Brennan should be coming
soon, but Samena doesn’t mind. She has her plan.
Breathing deeply, briny air fills her
lungs, tinged with the taste of seaweed. The bay seems to stretch on into
infinity, rippling like a mirage near the horizon. Reaching into a crystal
candy dish she filled with pills, Samena fishes out another Valium, placing it
carefully in her mouth. She lost count somewhere around twenty-five. A child’s
voice calls from beyond the dunes, searching for his mother. Maybe she’s gone
into hiding, Samena thinks, then swallows down the Valium with a large sip from
her fourth glass of chardonnay, a 2012 Michel Gahier she adores.
She closes her eyes and listens to
the waves lapping the shore. In. Out. In. Out. A soft breeze caresses her face.
Somewhere far away, a seagull cries. Her body feels light, floating.
Samena clears her throat.
“Howard, I’m ready.”
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