That Old Cape Magic

managed to insinuate themselves. When Joy suggested they honeymoon on the Maine coast, Griffin convinced her that what they needed was a dose of the old Cape magic, that weakest of marital spells. In Truro they’d made plans for a life based on what they foolishly thought were their own terms, Joy articulating what she wanted, Griffin, tellingly, what he didn’t want (a marriage that even remotely resembled his parents’, as if this negative were a nifty substitute for an unimagined positive). Even as he rejected their values, he’d allowed many of their bedrock assumptions—that happiness was a place you could visit but never own, for instance—to burrow deep. He’d dismissed their snobbery and unearned sense of entitlement, but swallowed whole the rationale on which it had been based (Can’t Afford It; Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift). Joy’s contention that his parents, not hers, were the true intruders in their marriage had seemed ludicrous on the face of it, but he saw now that it was true. They were mucking about still, his living mother, exiled in the Mid-fucking-west (justice, that) but using seagulls as surrogates, his deceased father, reduced to ash and bits of bone, still refusing to take his leave.
    He’d tried. Joy probably wouldn’t believe him, but he
had
tried. Failed, sure, awkwardly and foolishly, but was he not his father’s son? He’d gone out a good twenty yards into the cold surf, turning his back to the waves as they broke, holding his father out in front of him with both hands like a priest with a chalice, as if keeping the urn dry until the precise moment of submergence were a necessary part of the idiotic liturgy.
He’s haunted you this whole year
, Joy hadaccused.
Right now he’s in the trunk of your car, and you can’t bring yourself to scatter his ashes. Do you think maybe that
means
something?
And so, by God, as soon as he was waist-deep, he’d put an end to the folly.
    Except that when he plunged the urn into the turbulence and positioned his thumbs under the latch that secured the lid, the sand beneath his feet gave way to the very undertow his father had always feared, and Griffin lost his balance. To regain it, he held his arms out to his sides like a surfer. Had he dropped the urn then, or had the next wave knocked it out of his hands? He couldn’t remember. One second he had it; the next it had disappeared into the churning froth.
Lost
, he remembered thinking as he lunged after it, feeling around in the surf with both hands like a blind man until the next wave, larger, knocked him flat. Regaining his feet, he thought,
My father is lost
. Hilarious, really. After all, he’d been dead for nine months. But he was
lost
only now, this instant, and somehow this was worse than
dead
, because
dead
wasn’t something Griffin could be blamed for.
    How long had he stood there, paralyzed, mortified by his clumsy incompetence, wave after wave leaping past him onto the shore?
Do something
, he thought, panicked, but what? How many times as a boy had he watched his father seize up in the middle of a room, a portrait of indecision, with no idea of where to turn, an angry wife tugging him in one direction, a pretty grad student who’d confused him with the romantic hero of some novel they’d been studying pulling him in the opposite? It was as if he’d concluded that if he remained where he was long enough, whatever he wanted most would come to him of its own volition. Griffin remembered willing him to act, to
do something
, because it frightened him to see anybody stand frozen in one place for so long, unable to take that first step, the one that implied a destination. Now, waist-deep in the roiling surf, the sands shifting dangerouslybeneath his feet, he finally understood. Because of course it was the
doing
that had brought him to this pass, and now, having
done
the wrong thing, the thing he never would’ve done if he’d been thinking clearly, there was nothing further
to
do but hope that chance, not known for compassion, would intervene in his undeserving favor.
    Which in defiance of both logic and expectation it finally did, the dreaded undertow returning his father’s urn in a rush of sand and water, banging it hard against Griffin’s anklebone, and this time his blind hands located it in the froth. He yanked the urn from the surf intact, its latches, somehow, unsprung.
    Found
. That was the word that leapt into his consciousness, like a synonym for
triumph
.
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