The surf stirred him awake. The waves were close to where he lay splayed out on a beach with a pounding headache, dried sand encrusted on his clothes. The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was a sand crab perched half in, half out of a hole two feet from his head. The sight of the creature’s two eyes fixed atop skinny antennae staring across at him made his disorientation complete. He closed his eyes and hoped that keeping them closed for a moment would bring greater clarity once reopened. Then he felt the cold ocean water on his bare feet. The tide was coming in.
He managed to lift himself to a seated position, facing the water. It was cloudy, the waves bringing in the tide were calm, the water behind them was still and gray. Slowly he became aware of his surroundings and, for several alarming moments, could not understand his place in the world. He could not recall the events that had brought him to this place and, more troubling, could not remember his own name. The blank slate of his mind brought him quickly to his feet, a move that made the pounding of his head unbearable. He dropped back to his knees, grabbing his head in both hands, and emptied his belly into the receding water.
He remained on his knees after the retching stopped, afraid of sudden movements, unsure of himself. When he raised his head and looked down the beach in both directions everything felt deserted. It was cool out, maybe early morning, which would explain the lack of people. But. . .where were the houses? There were a couple several hundred yards away to the left and a few small bungalows at least a quarter mile up the beach to the right.
Still, not a clue of where he was or who he was. He managed to slowly rise to his feet and take a few steps when he noticed a pair of flip flops in the sand. Were they his? He picked them up and studied them carefully, but there was no recognition. There was a wallet in his back pocket. He had felt the heaviness of it as he took his first steps. He removed it from the pocket along with a hand full of sand. It was soaking wet. There was money, drenched and matted together, and several credit cards. There was also a drivers license coated in clear plastic, which informed him that he was a six feet tall organ donor with brown hair and brown eyes who went by the name of Charles Patrick Reardon. He raised the license closer to his eyes to get a better look at the photograph. Suddenly he recognized himself and, along with that first flicker of enlightenment, came a brief memory of wind, rain and a blinding flash of lightening. He remembered the violence of the sound and the way the hair on his neck stood up straight in anticipation. He had fled the house and run out onto the beach for reasons that remained unclear. But now, as he searched the horizon, there was no house. How far had he walked? Couldn’t have been far. But it wasn’t just his house that had vanished. Where was the Nelson house and the Taylor place? He closed his eyes once more felt the throbbing in his head and began to rub his temples. When he opened his eyes again he noticed a solitary figure up the beach about a couple of football fields from where the Taylor place should have been that looked like an old man with a walking stick carrying a plastic bucket, headed towards him. Charles Patrick Reardon began brushing the sand off then ran his hands through his hair, trying to make himself look less like a drunken bum and more like a Hatteras Island beach house owner.
###
Jenny Reardon packed light for her post-Labor Day trip to the beach. She had thrown everything she would need for her long weekend in one bag, slung it in the back seat and hit the road. Charlie was away on business. It would be just her, a coveted four days without distractions, and after the front that was expected to move through Buxton overnight, the weather was supposed to be perfect. If the traffic was decent, she hoped to make it in time to watch the sunset on the sound.
After a couple of hours the lines on the interstate began to blur and pangs of guilt began to rise in Jenny Reardon’s heart. She thought about Charlie, picturing his face, the earnestness, his infuriating goodness. Twenty-five years of marriage had produced resentfulness bordering on contempt, but Charlie still worshipped the ground she walked on. According to virtually every friend she knew, Charlie Reardon was the perfect husband. . .rich, attentive, caring and easy on the eyes. Jenny found it hard to disagree, and she hated him for it. And now, here she was driving eighty miles an hour to the beach house that Charlie’s father had built on Hatteras Island to meet her lover for a weekend of infidelity. The pangs of guilt were, in an odd way, comforting to Jenny, evidence that she wasn’t an irredeemable monster. She knew that Charlie didn’t deserve it. She knew that she was acting on nothing more than a hedonistic urge, a desire to gratify some carnal longing that Charlie no longer was able to quench. The fact that she had chosen to seduce her husband’s best friend for this latest dalliance made the guilt more powerful, but not powerful enough to stop her.
She reasoned with herself thusly while careening down interstate 95. “This will be the last time. I will never leave Charlie. I would be a fool to risk getting caught. I just need to get this out of my system. I’ll tell Rick tonight that we have to break it off. He’ll understand. Neither of us want a divorce. It’s just sex. We’re just bored, starved for thrills. It’s just a mid-life crisis thing. Just this one last weekend and I’ll go back to being the grateful and loving wife that Charlie deserves...”
When she pulled into the driveway she noticed that Rick had parked his SUV by the trash cans at the end of the street, an unnecessary precaution since Charlie was in Detroit. She wondered how long he had been there. The pangs of guilt had instantly been replaced with pangs of another kind as she grabbed her bag off the back seat and hurried up the steps and into her lover’s waiting arms.
###
Charlie Reardon was in his Detroit hotel room after the first day of his four day business conference when he called his wife. She had seemed scattered and stressed the day he left, preoccupied with her schedule. She had told him that she might head down to Hatteras for the weekend, and he had encouraged her to do so. He called to make sure that she followed through. They talked for fifteen minutes or so, the type of conversation that career married couples excel at...lots of breadth and very little depth. He loved the sound of her voice, and listening to it made him miss her. Then the idea had come to him. Why was he sitting through a dull conference when he could be spending a weekend with his wife at the beach? He would surprise her. He booked a flight home and soon found himself making the drive down 95 with a surprising lump in his throat.
He loved Jenny, but there was something missing. He could feel it, although identifying it had proven more difficult. She was pleasant enough, always kind with her words and attentive to his needs. They seldom argued, rarely had any major disagreements. But she seemed distant at times, strangely bored with her life, a life that Charlie had moved heaven and earth to arrange for her maximum comfort and pleasure. He had first noticed the distance when Miranda went off to school. Jenny had not taken that life phase particularly well at first, but eventually seemed to warm up to their empty nest. Still, the spark that had always been present between them had disappeared. Charlie intended to get it back. As he made the turn onto Route12 he could see the menacing clouds in the distance and the lightening ripping through the sky to the east.
He passed Rodanthe and Salvo, the little villages that dotted the thin barrier island of his childhood. By the time he entered Avon, the clouds were a freakish black and the temperature had dropped twenty degrees. The lightening bolts flashed out tentacles that resembled spider webs, and the resulting thunder seemed to shake the road. Charlie suddenly became thankful that he had acted on a spontaneous impulse for once in his life. He was sure that Jenny would be anxious in that huge house by herself in such a storm. But as he reached the outskirts of Buxton a great uneasiness entered his body, a crawling chill starting in his chest and racing out into his extremities. He felt perspiration forming on his forehead. As he pulled into the driveway he noticed Jenny’s Acura in its spot. When he killed the engine, the rain began to fall. Just as he was preparing to throw the car door open and make a break for the house, Charlie was startled by an inexplicable memory of the only person who he had ever hated. . .his father.
Patrick Reardon’s image was in the reflection of the windshield when the lightening flashed, his omnipresent grin and shining dark eyes freezing Charlie in place. It was exactly the way he had remembered it from that afternoon fifty-one years ago when he had walked into his parents’ bedroom and discovered his father having sex with Billy Cunningham’s mother. Billy had been Charlie’s best friend, and Billy’s mother was the team mom of their Little League team. Charlie had always been fond of her. She was pretty, had a happy voice, and he had always liked the way she smelled. . .like rose petals. But now she was naked and writhing around on his parents’ bed with his father, smelling not at all like rose petals. When they finally noticed him standing at the door Mrs. Cunningham had let out a high-pitched scream, but Charlie’s father had just smiled at him and narrowed his dark eyes. “Run along Charlie. Daddy is having some grown up time.” He was gone from their lives in less than a month, this having been just the latest in a series of “grown up times”, Charlie’s mother had eventually offered by way of explanation. The reappearance of this horrible memory as he sat in the driveway of his beach house about to surprise his wife made the uneasiness and chill of the moment feel even more sinister.
Charlie looked through the windshield at the house and noticed there were very few lights on, unusual for Jenny who always switched on every light in the house the minute the sun went down. Charlie glanced at his watch. Maybe she had gone to bed, but it was only 8:45. He opened the door and ran up the long flight of steps at the front of the house which led to the most prominent and admired feature of the place. . .their wide and well-appointed 360 degree wrap-around porch. He had watched many a storm just like this one from the shelter of this porch when he was a kid, he thought as he reached the front door. Something stopped him. No, don’t walk through the front door. Walk around to the back and enter through the kitchen. That’s probably where she was anyway.
Reardon’s Walk was a sprawling house, built in the late 60s by Charlie’s father and finished just before the divorce. The rooms were huge with tall ceilings and windows that were so big it took almost an entire sheet of plywood to cover them when a hurricane came through. Jenny loved the natural light that the windows allowed in the house and refused any attempt to cover them with even the sheerest of curtains. Now Charlie Pearson stood at a window that could have used a curtain, frozen in disbelief. There was the love of his life having sex with Jack Kelly, coach of Miranda’s softball teams, his regular golf partner, and the only guy on earth who Charlie would call in a crisis at two o’clock in the morning.
Both of them were oblivious to his presence, making this the second time in Charlie’s 56 years that he had interrupted a grave betrayal. This time he fought the urge to crash through the glass, grab a piece and slit Rick’s throat. Instead, he found himself walking slowly down the back deck steps and down the path to the beach, the way lit by the increasingly violent lightening. The rain picked up again, the wind lashing it sideways. When he reached the beach he followed the lightening to the water’s edge, his anger building, a fury rising in his chest. Then he found himself running down the beach screaming at the top of his lungs, no one hearing him, no one feeling his pain. Then a bolt of lightening...and now an old man asking him his name. The walking stick he carried was a broom handle with a nail coming out the end, used to pick up trash off the beach. His bucket was half full of beer cans and empty chip bags. He wore an old wool baseball cap pulled down low over his eyes. “You ok, Mister? You look a bit rough. You didn’t spend the night out here did ya?
Charlie ignored the question, asking one of his own. “Are you a renter or do you live around here?”
The old man lifted the brim of his hat and grinned, “Am I a renter? Naw, I live in Buxton. I come down here to the beach every morning and clean up the mess that those crazy kids leave all over the place. They act like the beach is a trash dump. They come down here with their surfboards and them transistor radios and leave their beers cans and cigarette boxes strewn from here clear up to Rodanthe. If their folks knew how they were carrying on, there would be hell to pay.”
Charlie had to interrupt the old man’s speech. What was it he had said about transistor radios? “Listen, I had a rough night and I’m a little confused. If this is Buxton, where is Howard Nelson’s place? Shouldn’t it be right about there?”
The old man answered with another smile. “I guess you did have a rough night. I’ve lived on this island for the last thirty years and I’ve never heard of Howard Nelson. You sure you’re ok?”
Charlie once again scanned the shoreline looking for something familiar and saying aloud to nobody, “Our place should be right up there...” pointing to an empty space in the high dunes.
“You say you have a place here, do ya?” The old man looked hard into Charlie’s eyes. “What’s your name, Mister? I know pretty much everybody on this island and everyone knows me.”
“I’m Charlie Reardon”
“Never heard of you though...”
Charlie glanced down at the old man’s bucket and noticed a wet newspaper. “May I?” he asked as he reached in to grab it. When he unfolded the paper he read the headline out loud...James Meredith Intergrates University of Mississippi. The date of the Virginian-Pilot was September 30th, 1962. . .one year before Charles Patrick Reardon’s birth.
