Washed Up | Vera Hadzic
The beach at Patience Bay isn’t any good for swimming. The sand is clotted with sharp rocks and snarling branches that have been knocked off nearby trees, and the wind riles up the sea so that it becomes netted with weeds and garbage. Besides, the water is usually cold.
I come here more and more as it gets harder at work. It’s my grandmother’s business, the one that my dad abandoned when he became a lawyer. We left the small town on the cliffs for the city, where I grew up surrounded by walls of sound. That’s why Patience Bay is comforting to me. Though it’s only a small strip of beach, the crashing cymbals of the waves never stop. They shatter against my ears and make me feel less alone.
My favourite thing about Patience Bay is that it vomits up objects which have been carried down by the current. Grandma used to say it was something of a crossroads. She told me, when I came to visit as a kid, that the present and the future intersected there. My old bedroom in her house still has a shelf with all the knick-knacks I dug out of the wet sand. A compass with a crack in the glass, a baseball bled of all its colour so that it’s as pale as a skull. I used to make up stories for them, imagine how they’d be used in the future. Now, I know better. They’re either swept up from the nicer, softer beaches, or chucked from the black-fleshed cliffs. They certainly don’t come from the future, no matter how romantic it sounds.
Grandma was always romantic about the sea. When she was eighteen, she and her boyfriend rolled up their sleeves, purchased a rundown boathouse, and began renting out boats – kayaks, canoes, small fishing boats. On sunny days, the business is the hub of the town for anyone who wants to enjoy the water. When I was eighteen, I left the city, came back here. After Grandma died, my oldest cousin Tango inherited the business. His name’s Thomas, but Tango’s what we call him because he’s obsessed with military phonetics.
Patience Bay is most useful to me after long days at work. While my head swirls with words, it’s calming to let sand cake my shoes, to hear the tumult of the waves. It’s not customers that make my brain feel like a whirlpool. It’s Tango. Every day, he drones about how we’ll expand the boathouse, get new docks, buy some of those big, nice boats to rent out for high prices. He thinks we can rope in the lawyers and the businessmen from the city, that if we think bigger, we can scrap the dingy kayaks and canoes that we rent cheap. His imagination is full of stiff white hulls and plump leather seats, busy motors that hum like bees and wakes so wide that they curl up the sea like a scroll.
“You’re from the city, Lora,” he says to me. “You know what they like, don’t you?”
He spends his days on the phone with contractors, investors, fortune-tellers for all I know. “Yes, our establishment is at 12 Tide Road. That’s Tango – India – ”
In her will, Grandma left me a compass, to help me find my way. I put it on my shelf in her house, next to the cracked compass I fished out of the sea so long ago. When I get back from Patience Bay, I hold a compass in each hand, weighing them as though my hands are scales. One is shiny, its red arrow gleaming like a ruby: the other is crusted with old muck, with years.
But beneath the grime, I’m certain the two compasses are identical.
Tango has brought his things into Grandma’s office. As I move by, fetching customer records or keys to unlock the boats, his feet are on her table. “No, I’ve moved,” he says. “I got a new house up on the cliff. The address? Sure. It’s Foxtrot – Alpha – Charlie – you getting this?”
He displays his sports trophies, and the baseball that won the high school championship decades ago when he hit a home run. We all expected him to play baseball in the city. I wish he had.
“Give ’em that one, Lora,” Tango says to me as a family looks for a canoe. “The Edna. Write it in the log. That’s Echo – Delta – ”
Edna was Grandma’s name. When I walk on the beach, afterwards, I think of all her stories about the future, the power of the sea. How she could feel the tide in her veins. Didn’t those stories bring me back here, even after I had stopped believing them?
I step on something. The spit of the sea still bubbles on it, but I pick it up, look at it. A knife, so rusted by the salt and the water that it looks like it has a blade of amber, washed up like so many other things on Patience Bay.
I leave the knife on my shelf, take the shiny new compass from Grandma instead. The boathouse is closed, so nobody sees me grab the baseball from Tango’s office. The water rocks the decks, and the sleeping kayaks sigh with the lull of the sea. I don’t hear a single motor tearing up the water.
The knife comes from Tango’s kitchen, after I drive up to his new house. He’s on the phone as I step up behind him. When I wrench the knife out of his back, the blade glitters amber-red. Afterwards, from the edge of the black cliff, I see Patience Bay, waves capped in whispers of moonlight. The beach looks like a smudge of chalk on a blackboard. I drop the compass, the baseball, and the knife, watch them get swallowed up by the sea, eaten up by the current. Lost, for some past version of me to find.
Vera Hadzic is a writer from Ontario, Canada, currently studying English literature at the University of Ottawa. In the past, her writing has appeared in Bywords.ca, Fever Dream, Crow & Cross Keys, and Kissing Dynamite. She is a staff poet for gossamer lit and edits Wrongdoing Magazine, and can be found on Twitter @HadzicVera.