Great Big Beautiful Life(47)
She chuckles and jerks her head toward the opposite wall. “I might have just the thing.”
I follow her to a much smaller mosaic, no larger than five inches by five inches, the slivers of glass so small they must’ve been pieced together with tweezers and a magnifying glass, and—unlike every other piece I’ve seen of Margaret’s—composed of amber, red, translucent gold, a tiny tight spiral that almost looks like a galaxy.
“Two hundred and fifty,” the shopkeeper says.
Then I see the tiny penciled title at the bottom right corner, just inside the frame. Beside Margaret’s assumed initials, her own in reverse, in her own handwriting: Nicollet.
“I’ll take it,” I say.
15
Normally I don’t have trouble sleeping, but Thursday arrives, for me, well before the sun rises, and no matter how many times I turn over beneath the top sheet, the bed feels too warm, and I can’t drift back off.
Around four thirty, I finally flick on the bedside lamp, the buttery glow hitting the tiny framed mosaic sitting just beneath it.
Nicollet. The one you’d give it all up for.
But what does that mean for Margaret? Twenty years ago, she walked out of her life and became a different person. Why?
What the shopkeeper-cum-gallerist said comes back to me: She was trying to find something. Or maybe get somewhere.
Voice croaky with sleep, I whisper, “What are you trying to find?”
I slide out of bed and get dressed.
* * *
? ? ?
The hotel is back in the other direction from Little Croissant, but I’ve got plenty of time to kill before I’m set to meet with Margaret, so I drive through the wee hours of the gray morning with my windows down, the sea air cycloning through the car.
It’s a good day, I think.
I’d wondered if Hayden had also relocated from the hotel, but when I pull into the quiet parking lot, I spot his car right away.
After parking, I lean into the back seat and dig through my backpack until I find a Sharpie, then pluck the green tea from the cup holder, poised to write on its damp side.
I debate for a second which missive to leave for him and settle on jotting down my phone number. That seems like a decisive reply to the question he left on mine: Friends?
I run it up to his door and make it back to the car before six a.m. A full two hours before I need to be at Margaret’s.
“Now what?” I say aloud.
The sound of the waves crashing against the shore behind the hotel answers me.
I’ve been so absorbed in the Margaret of it all that I actually haven’t been down to the beach since my first couple of days here—and that was at the peak of the afternoon, when the tourists nearly outweighed the sand.
Now I leave my stuff in the car, roll the windows up, and take the wooden walkway between the Grande Lucia and the next resort over, through the dunes and down toward the water. A sign warns of venomous snakes in the dune grass, and I find myself treating the walkway like a tightrope, sticking to the very center, just in case.
The tall pockets of wispy grass dwindle as I get closer to the water, and then drop away entirely, the platform ramping downward toward open beach.
At the end of the walkway, I slip my sandals off and step into the sand. It’s surprisingly cool between my toes, though the air is already dense with humidity. The first glow of the rising sun is peeking over the gray-green waves, seagulls cutting stark silhouettes overhead as they squawk across the sky.
A silver-haired woman in a wind suit is my only company, trawling along the lip of the tide with a metal detector. I perch atop a long, thick piece of bone-white driftwood, enjoying the stillness and the quiet, trying and failing to take a few phone pictures that might come close to capturing the feeling of energy and possibility that emanates from all around: the beach, the water, the sky.
On my phone, it’s a blur of blue-black pixels.
The most beautiful things never hold up on a screen.
That, I think, is why I became a writer instead of a photographer. I’d had a phase, back when we were kids and Audrey was still sick. For the first couple of years that I was aware, really aware, of what she was dealing with—and of the very real possibility that we could lose her—I remember spending all my time worrying. And then one year, for Christmas, my parents gave me a camera.
And instead of useless worrying, I began instead to catalog her. To stockpile every happy memory for later. Like if I had enough pictures of her, of our whole family, then I’d be able to reconstruct her if I had to. Or maybe I’d capture enough of her soul to keep her here.
Except I was bad at it. Terrible. So to supplement my visual log, I began to journal too. I stopped worrying so much, channeled all my frustration and helplessness into documenting. And whenever I was scared, I’d go back to my favorite entries and reread what I’d written, and I’d feel like I really was there.
All the emotions and sensations of the moment would rise, an echo, or a kind of time travel. With writing, you could always add more. More, more, more until you got to the heart of a thing, and after that, you could chip away the excess.
With photography, you had to get it right the first time. I didn’t have the patience for that. Or the faith in myself, if I’m being honest. I liked the security of revision.
She was trying to find something. Or maybe get somewhere, I think again.