Matthew came to a stop.
“Mommy!” the boy said at Leni’s appearance. He jumped up, smiling so big it lit his whole face. “Did you know that starfishes have teeth? I seen ’em!”
Leni looked up at Matthew. “Our son,” she said, and let go of Matthew’s hand.
He limped toward the little boy, stopped. Meaning to bend, he crashed down to one knee, grimaced in pain, groaned.
“You sound like a bear. I like bears, so does my new grandpop. Do you?”
“I like bears,” Matthew said, unsure.
He looked into his son’s face and saw his own past. He suddenly remembered things he’d forgotten—the feel of frogs’ eggs in your hand, the way a good laugh sometimes shook your whole body, stories being read by a campfire, playing pirates on the shore, building a fort in the trees. All of that he could teach. Of all the things he’d dreamed of over the years, tried like hell to believe in when his pain was at its worst, this was something he’d never dared to even hope for.
My son. “I’m Matthew.”
“Really? I’m Matthew Junior. But everyone calls me MJ.”
Matthew felt an emotion unlike anything he’d ever felt before. Matthew Junior. My son, he thought again. He found it difficult to smile; realized he was crying. “I’m your dad.”
MJ looked at Leni. “Mommy?”
Leni came up beside them, laid a hand on Matthew’s shoulder, and nodded. “That’s him, MJ. Your dad. He’s waited a long time to meet you.”
MJ grinned, showed off his two missing front teeth. He threw himself at Matthew, hugged him so ferociously they toppled over. When they came back up, MJ was laughing. “You wanna see a starfish?”
“Sure,” Matthew said.
Matthew tried to get up, put his hand on the ground. Bits of shell stuck to his palm as he stumbled, his bad ankle giving way. And then Leni was there, taking his arm, helping him stand up again.
MJ raced down to the water, talking all the way.
Matthew couldn’t make his feet move. All he could do was stand there, breathing shallowly, a little afraid that all of this could break like glass at the merest touch. At a breath. The boy who looked like him stood at the shore, blond hair glinting in the sun, the hem of his jeans wet with saltwater. Laughing. In that one image, Matthew saw the whole of his life; past, present, and future. It was one of those moments—an instant of grace in a crazy, sometimes impossibly dangerous world—that changed a man’s life.
“You’d better go, Matthew,” Leni said. “Our son is not very good at waiting for what he wants.”
He looked down at her and thought, God, I love her, but his voice was gone, lost in this new world in which everything had changed. In which he was a father.
They had come so far from their beginnings as two damaged kids, he and Leni. Maybe it had all happened the way it needed to, maybe they’d each crossed their own oceans—hers of damaged love and loss, his of pain—to be here again together, where they belonged. “Good thing I am.”
He saw what those words meant to her.
“I wanted to stand by you. I wanted—”
“You know what I love most about you, Leni Allbright?”
“What?”
“Everything.” He took her in his arms and kissed her with everything that he had and all he hoped to have. When he finally let go, reluctantly, and drew back, they stared at each other, had a whole conversation in breaths taken and expelled. This was a beginning, he thought; a beginning in the middle, something unexpected and beautiful.
“You’d better go,” Leni finally said.
Matthew walked carefully across the pebbled beach toward the boy standing at the waterline.
“Hurry up,” MJ said, waving Matthew over to the big purple starfish. “It’s right here. Look! Look, Daddy.”
Daddy.
Matthew saw a flat charcoal-gray stone, small as a new beginning, polished by the sea, and picked it up. The weight of it was perfect, the size exactly what he wanted. He held it out to his son, said, “Here. I’ll show you. How to. Skip rocks. It’s cool. I taught your mom. The same thing. A long time ago…”
*
“HE ALWAYS BELIEVED you’d come back,” Mr. Walker said, coming up beside Leni. “Said he’d know if you were dead. That he’d feel it. His first word was ‘her.’ It didn’t take us long to know he meant you.”
“How do I make up for leaving him?”
“Ah, Leni. It’s life. Things don’t always go the way you expect.” He shrugged. “Matthew knows that, better than any of us.”