The Whore's Child

he’d drifted off June had touched his arm gently and suggested he put on sunscreen, but there had been a cool breeze off the water, and he was enjoying the feeling of his skin tightening as it dried in the sun. His skin felt warm now, but he still felt no urgency about waking completely. How pleasant it was just to lie there with his eyes closed, thinking of June’s warm embrace—her acceptance of him—in the waves, listening to the surf and the voices and laughter carrying all over the beach.
    He opened one eye. When he’d fallen sleep, he and June had been
alone.
But no longer. A few yards away a young woman had just released a Frisbee, and he followed its flight toward the water; a small dog leapt into the air, caught it in its mouth and trotted back. The girl was wearing a T-shirt and a tiny black bikini bottom, the smallest he’d ever seen. No, she was wearing
no
bikini bottom. At which point he remembered he’d fallen asleep naked himself, and sitting up straight, he saw that he still was. Also that June’s beach chair was empty.
    She’d gone for a walk, of course, or a swim. Except that he didn’t see her in the water, and when he looked for the beach bag, he saw it was no longer sitting beside her chair. Surely she wouldn’t have taken the bag if she’d just gone for a walk. And it was unlikely she would’ve taken a walk, now that their stretch of sand was populated, however sporadically, by naked people. The beach was still not crowded; the nudists, mostly young and in couples, had bivouacked at discreet distances. The only person who wasn’t young was a gray-haired man with an enormous belly, standing at the water’s edge and looking out to sea. Apparently he occupied a nearby blanket, and from this Snow was able to see in his mind’s eye what must have happened. As the man, clothed, had come up the beach toward them, June would’ve looked up from her book. She was certain to have put her own suit back on by the time the first stranger appeared around their spot. She’d probably flashed the man a noncommittal smile, an acknowledgment of their similarities in age and attitudes about public nudity. Perhaps the man even smiled back as he disrobed. Lord, Snow thought.
    Then an even worse scenario occurred to him. Perhaps June, too, had fallen asleep under the seductive sun, only to awaken suddenly, as he himself had done, naked and surrounded by beautiful young bodies. He imagined her on the verge of tears, feeling humiliated and old, struggling awkwardly into the bathing suit, losing her balance in the sand, convinced that everyone was staring at her. Hastily, she’d have pulled on the mesh cover-up as well. But why hadn’t she woken him up? Because she never did, not even when things were bleakest for her. She’d given him no sign the morning of her breakdown; she simply hadn’t been there when he returned home. And while their physician, an old friend, had claimed that a relapse was highly unlikely, Snow also knew that to battle depression, you must first spot its early warning signals. But what if there weren’t any?
    Shading his eyes with his hands, Snow stood and gazed up the beach in the direction they’d come, half expecting to see his wife’s fleeing form. In the glare, the sand stretched on forever.
    Hastily drawing his bathing trunks back on, he told himself that the most important thing to do was to find her as quickly as possible. She was probably weeping quietly in their car up by the lighthouse. It
had
been June he’d heard weeping last night in the Captain Clement, he was suddenly, irrationally, certain.
    The top of the lighthouse was just visible from where he stood, an impossibly long way off, it seemed to him, since he’d have to retrace his steps up the beach and locate the boardwalk that snaked leisurely up the cliffs. Again he noticed that at their rocky base, maybe a hundred yards down the beach, there was that other concentration of bathers, and he resolved that there had to be another trail to the summit. A shortcut. Steep, perhaps, but more direct. Depending on how much of a head start June had, he might be able to intercept her.
    Regardless of which route he took, he would have to leave the chairs. He hadn’t managed to carry them all the way here, so he certainly couldn’t pack them up the side of the cliff on the path those other bathers must have used. Leave the