In October Darryl and Cheryl drove from Argyle, North Carolina, all the way to Wilmington, nearly eight hours, to surprise their daughter, Misti, who was a freshman at the university there, on her nineteenth birthday. They found her locked in her dorm room—dressed, but flushed and disheveled—with a scrawny wannabe surfer named Kyle. Kyle wore temporarily indecent board shorts and a T-shirt with “F**K**U” printed across the front. His hair looked casually windblown, an illusion spoiled by the mousse holding it in place. By the time he took hold of Darryl’s thumb and said, “’Sup, dude,” Darryl hated him thoroughly. He wanted to yank Kyle’s horny, pimpled little heart out of his chest and shake it at him before cramming it down his throat. Instead he said, “Nice asterisks, Slick.” (Darryl had randomly selected “Slick” from a list of diminutions that included “Buddy,” “Chief” and “Sport.”) Kyle blinked and let go of Darryl’s thumb. He either didn’t know what an asterisk was, or couldn’t believe that Misti’s dad had just called him “Slick.” Misti looked panic-stricken, and tried to catch Kyle’s eye. Cheryl touched Darryl’s arm and said, “Darryl.” Somewhere on the hall a door slammed. Kyle said, “Yo, Mist. I’ll check you later,” and didn’t look again at any of them. Darryl said, “What’s your hurry, Chief?” Then they took Misti out to supper.
Along a four-lane strip of car dealerships, big box stores, and Mexican groceries, Misti picked a seafood place ringed by a moat of empty parking spaces. Its only virtue seemed to be that it was a long way from campus. “Sweetie, I was hoping that maybe we could go some place nice, on the water,” Cheryl said. (She idealized the ocean the way mountain people often do: she said she never got tired of looking at it, but had never looked at it long enough to know if that statement was actually true.)
“You can’t get into those places on Friday nights unless you have a reservation,” Misti said. “And I gather you didn’t make a reservation.”
Her phone beeped and she tapped out a long text message while Darryl and Cheryl gnawed on breadsticks and watched. She snapped the phone shut and propped it carefully against the napkin dispenser, where she glanced at it every few seconds.
“Who was that?” Cheryl asked, pleasantly enough, trying to make conversation.
"Oh, that was just my friend," Misti said, almost biting off the 'f.' "You know. Slick."
Darryl excused himself and went to the restroom, where he confronted and killed a truculent, tidewater cockroach. He thought about leaving the carcass on the floor for the next diner to see, but calling Kyle both “Slick” and “Chief” had depleted his limited reservoir of vindictiveness. So he picked it up with a wad of toilet paper and commended it to the deep.
They had Misti back in her room by 8:30. She said she was going out for her birthday with her friends and had to get ready. Darryl wanted to ask her just what, exactly, “going out” meant—turning nineteen in North Carolina didn’t make you legal to go anyplace Darryl would’ve considered “out”—but he kept his mouth shut. Back at the hotel, Cheryl halfheartedly suggested they order a dirty movie, but Darryl instead watched a documentary about the haunted castles of Ireland until Cheryl fell sleep beside him on the bed.
The next morning Misti agreed to accompany them to brunch (strip mall, pancakes, no view of the water) but the whole time she glared at them from beneath the tunneled visor of a baseball cap. They wanted to take her somewhere fun for the day (the beach? the aquarium? had she seen the USS North Carolina yet?) but she said she had to study for a lab on Monday and gave them a perfunctory wave from behind the glass doors of her dormitory. Darryl hadn't slept well the night before—he had dreamed he was trapped inside a haunted castle in Ireland—and said he didn't feel like driving all the way back home. Cheryl suggested they head up the coast, take their time, see the Outer Banks. Though both of them had lived in North Carolina all their lives, neither of them had ever been to the Outer Banks. Nags Head was so far away from Argyle and so hard to get to that it might as well have been in Ireland. They sat in the car and looked at a map.
“What do those little red dots mean?” Darryl asked. He needed new bifocals and couldn’t read the print.
Cheryl squinted. “Ferries,” she said. “They mean you have to take ferries.”
Darryl scratched his head. He didn’t know anything about ferries.
“Oh, come on, College Boy,” Cheryl said. “I’ll drive the car onto the damn boats if you don’t want to.”
Darryl started the engine.
They had barely cleared Wrightsville Beach when Cheryl began to cry. Darryl wanted to cry, too, but he was driving the car. He felt like he had woken up to discover that someone had cut out a vital organ while he slept; inside his chest ached a black wound where his little girl had used to live. Sure, he and Cheryl had suffered when they dropped Misti off at school in August, but that day Misti had clung to them and sobbed and said going to school so far away was a huge mistake, she was so sorry, she didn't want to be a marine biologist anyway and could she please go back home with them. They had held her and stroked her hair and whispered, shh, shh, oh Sweetie, don't cry, everything's going to be fine, you're going to love it down here, just you wait, you've always been good at science. And even though they had left Misti standing in the dorm parking lot with her hands clamped over her mouth (and they both had fallen apart the second Misti was out of sight) she had still been theirs. Now, suddenly, she wasn't—or at least it felt that way. In her room Misti had looked at Kyle the same way she had looked at Darryl when, as a toddler, she hadn't been able to get toilet training quite right. He and Cheryl had never said one cross to word to Misti about the accidents—not even when she smeared poop all the way down the Playland slide at McDonald's—but she had been terrified of disappointing them anyway. Now she didn't want to disappoint Kyle. Kyle was 130 pounds of unoriginal persona and indiscriminate sperm cells, and Misti had known him—what—a month? Darryl had loved Misti her whole life.
That day they made it only as far as Morehead City. (Nags Head, they discovered, is hard to get to even when you start in Wilmington.) They turned off the highway and started toward Atlantic Beach to look for a room, but the maze of T-shirt stores and miniature golf courses and go-kart tracks disheartened them before they reached the ocean. They returned to the highway and checked into a squat, modern, misnamed bunker of a motel called the Swashbuckler's Galleon. Darryl flipped the TV to the haunted castle channel (that night it was England) while Cheryl took a shower. When Cheryl's shower stretched past ten minutes, Darryl knew that she would come out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her teeth brushed, her hair smelling of strawberries, expecting him to have sex with her. Sex was how Cheryl dealt with stress and crisis. She said that nothing cleared the fog out of her brain better than a good orgasm. (Not that she thought there was any other kind.) But Darryl didn't want to swab out Cheryl's brain. He resented her expecting him to. He wasn't on call. He didn't do command performances. He had problems of his own. Touching Cheryl was the last thing he wanted to do. In fact, he might never touch her again. A small, unvoiced part of him had always been a little appalled by sex with Cheryl—the low-rent lack of reserve; the hirsute, musky ripeness of her body; the searchlight nipples, the porn star exhortations and curses. Sometimes she was simply too much. All the Swashbucklers in the Galleon would have been able to hear her when the fog started to break.
Darryl hopped off the bed and hurried down to the deserted pool before she got out of the shower. He sat in a damp deck chair and listened to the filter hum and glumly swatted no-see-ums. Eventually he saw Cheryl pull back the curtain of their room and look around until she spotted him. She was still wearing a towel. Darryl shook his head. Cheryl watched him a moment, then flipped him the bird. He flipped her one back. He gave her time to put on a nightgown and calm down, then went back to the room, which luckily had two beds.
Darryl and Cheryl had met when Darryl started work at the Argus, then a somnolent weekly newspaper in a shriveling town. Cheryl set type for the paper, pasted up pages, yelled at the pressmen and carriers, and tenaciously covered the tail end of Mr. Putnam, the paper's owner, editor, and publisher, whom forty-plus years of community journalism had rendered bitter, cynical, and alcoholic. Darryl arrived, fresh out of J-School, having read All the President's Men six times, but knowing almost nothing useful. Cheryl, on the other hand, could fix any piece of machinery in the office, type the entire court report in less than two hours, and once laid out a twenty-four-page Wednesday-before-Thanksgiving paper while simultaneously arranging to bond one of her brothers out of jail. She had a mouth on her like a pirate's parrot and wantonly called Mr. Putnam "Mr. Puddin'," when nobody else in Argyle would have dared—especially late on Tuesday nights, when Mr. Putnam, down in his cups, was slow finishing his stories. ("Mr. Puddin'!" she would yell from the back shop. "Get your worthless ass back here and bring me some copy.") She called Darryl "College Boy," and treated him like dirt until, as a result of a months-long, near-constant state of panic, he became proficient enough to at least not slow things down. Once he achieved a nominal level of competence, Mr. Putnam drank more and came in less, which left Darryl and Cheryl to put out the Argus largely by themselves. During slow times they worked sixty-hour weeks. Other times—say, if the Little League playoffs fell during property reevaluations, or something big caught fire during a murder trial—they hardly ever went home. Darryl drove all over western North Carolina covering high school basketball games, singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" to keep himself awake.
They of course didn’t have reservations for the Cedar Island ferry, and, even though the traffic at the terminal seemed light, the woman selling tickets still made them wait until the last minute in the don’t-you-people-know-you’re-supposed-to-call-ahead line before she brusquely waved them on board. The deckhands directing traffic weren’t glad to see them, either—they obviously didn’t think hauling tourists back and forth was an adventure, even if the tourists did—and performed their jobs, Darryl thought, with an attitude falling somewhere between boredom and contempt. Cheryl didn’t seem to notice. She was fascinated by the disreputable-looking gang of seagulls flapping along behind the boat. She bought a bag of potato chips to toss to them, an act which, in a matter of seconds, magically summoned seagulls from all over eastern North Carolina.
“You shouldn’t do that,” Darryl said. “Feed the seagulls.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re nasty. They’ll mess up the cars.”
“So what? It’s just bird poop. It’ll wash off the next time it rains.”
“Well, maybe these people don’t want bird poop on their cars.”
Cheryl snorted. “Then they don’t have enough to worry about.” She stared hard at Darryl. “And you don’t, either.” She ate a few potato chips. “I’m going to the front of the boat,” she said.
“Bow,” Darryl said.
"No," she said. "You bow."
Darryl had been at the paper maybe a year and a half when, without understanding why, and to some degree against his will, he began to hover in Cheryl’s vicinity whenever he was in the office. Probably, he told himself, it was because the only other single female he ever got to talk to was the sixteen-year-old scorekeeper for the Argyle High Lady Scots, and her father was a deputy sheriff. He tried to stay away from Cheryl (she had recently divorced a big-armed heavy-equipment operator named, scarily enough, Donnie Payne) but gradually his resolve disintegrated and he spiraled into a progressively closer orbit. He caught himself trying to smell her shampoo. He tried not to stare at her breasts, but they possessed dark powers and tracked him around the room wherever he went. (Cheryl wore tank tops so tight he could see the flowers embossed in the lace of her brassieres.) She tolerated his hanging around as long as he never, ever laid a finger on her scissors.
Without thinking about it much, they began pasting up single pages in tandem, their arms occasionally touching as they worked. Some nights, the paper done, they stretched out on the maroon shag carpeting in Mr. Putnam’s office and drank beer and talked about their families (his father was an Episcopal priest, her brothers grew marijuana in the national forest) until they both dozed off. Late one Tuesday, just as they were about to finish laying out the jump page, Darryl closed his eyes and leaned over and stuck his nose in Cheryl’s hair. She stood very still for a moment, then carefully laid her scissors down on the light table. She said, “College Boy, what the hell,” and reached up under her tank top and unhooked her bra.
On Ocracoke Island Darryl wondered why anyone had ever thought that settling on such a provisional scrap of land was a good idea. It was beautiful, sure—sea oats and sand dunes, just like the postcards—but in one place he could actually see the ocean on one side of the road and Pamlico Sound on the other. The Lost Colony probably hadn’t gotten lost at all; more than likely it just fell in.
Cape Hatteras seemed only marginally more substantial. Darryl knew that as a good North Carolinian he was supposed to experience something resembling patriotism when they visited the lighthouse (the nation’s tallest brick lighthouse!) but what he felt mostly was vertigo. He negotiated the spiral staircase without looking particularly ridiculous by staying away from the railing, but once they reached the observation deck—a catwalk, really—he could make himself move only a few terrifying steps away from the door. While they were climbing the stairs, the sun had dimmed behind a thin gray scrim of cloud. Small wraiths of mist hurtled no more than a hundred feet above their heads toward the mainland. Darryl had to keep his back pressed against the wall to avoid being sucked into the void. A bemused park ranger moved over and made room for him.
Cheryl gamely marched up to the rail and faced into the chilly breeze whipping in from the sea. “I never get tired of looking at the ocean,” she said.
Darryl turned his head slowly toward the ranger. He didn’t want to make any sudden moves. “You must get tired of hearing people say that,” he said.
Cheryl shot Darryl a look over her shoulder.
“Nah,” the ranger said. “I get tired of people spitting over the side.”
While Cheryl gazed stiffly into the distance—proving for Darryl's benefit that she did not, thank you very much, ever get tired of looking at the ocean—he studied the half-mile long track over which the lighthouse had been dragged several years earlier to keep it from toppling into the Atlantic. Someday the ocean would threaten the spot where the lighthouse now stood. Eventually there would be no place left to move it to. They were all going to die and there was nothing they could do about it. Darryl edged back toward the door.
“Weather coming,” the ranger said.
“Tell me about it,” Darryl said.
Darryl and Cheryl were married in a civil ceremony in South Carolina because the idea of their families mixing at a formal wedding was simply too painful to contemplate. When they came back from their honeymoon in Myrtle Beach, people made fun of them because their names rhymed. Cheryl told them they could kiss her white ass, but she wasn’t really mad. Darryl tried to explain to everyone that well, technically, it was only a close rhyme. The hours they worked at the paper weren’t any better, but at least now, late on Tuesdays, they could lock Mr. Putnam’s door and clear the fog out of Cheryl’s brain. Mr. Putnam, God bless him, left them the paper when his liver gave out. Darryl became editor and publisher; Cheryl promoted herself to production manager.
Real estate boomed in the mountains around Argyle. Florida Yankees moved in by the Town Car load. Golf courses spread like mold through the valleys, and gated communities climbed up the ridges. Argyle grew a by-pass, and a Super Wal-Mart sprouted like a toadstool alongside it. Ad revenue skyrocketed. They hired a couple of kids straight out of J-school who didn't know anything useful and took the paper bi-weekly. They took out a loan that caused muscle spasms in Darryl's neck for the better part of a week. They built a bigger building and bought a new press. Cheryl had a baby. She picked the name Misti Renee and stuffed the baby into a sling and went back to work. They hired another kid from J-School and two more ad salesmen and somehow, miraculously, the Argus blossomed into the Daily Argus. Misti learned to walk by holding onto the receptionist's desk. She hummed happily underneath the light table. Darryl walked through the building and wondered, who are all these people?
They drove into the fog—an honest-to-God, Graveyard of the Atlantic bank of fog—just north of Avon. Cheryl rolled down her window. Darryl could hear the surf smashing itself into spray somewhere close by, but he could not see it, a sensation he found unnerving. He imagined a bridge out, a causeway unfinished, a flimsy barricade, the road disappearing into the sea. He wouldn't be able to stop in time. He leaned closer to the windshield. He couldn't see where he was going.
“Roll that window up,” he said.
“Nope,” Cheryl answered. “I want to hear a foghorn.”
When Darryl reached for the master switch on the console, Cheryl stuck her arm out of the car. Darryl bumped the switch a couple of times, nudging her arm with the glass.
“Darryl,” she said calmly. “Trust me. You do not want to do that.”
Actually, that was exactly what he wanted to do. He wanted to roll Cheryl’s arm up in the car window. He wanted to jam the switch forward until it broke. Cheryl reached over with her left hand and placed it on top of his right hand.
“If Misti lets that weasel get in her pants, it’s all your fault,” he said, surprising himself, knowing as he said it that it was the most unfair thing he had ever said to anyone.
Cheryl lifted his hand off the console and dropped it into his lap. “I don’t know what your problem is,” she said, “but if you touch that switch one more time I will backhand you in the mouth.”
Darryl placed his hand on the steering wheel. He felt a laugh fluttering irrationally inside his chest. Now that he’d gotten this thing rolling, he found that he didn’t want to ride it all the way to the bottom. He suddenly wanted to see Cheryl walk out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel. He wanted her nipples to lock him in their transfixing gaze. He took a deep breath.
Cheryl held up her index finger to cut him off. "Right now," she said, "you just need to shut the hell up. All I wanted to hear was a foghorn."
Misti was not allowed to touch Cheryl’s scissors, either. Misti took gymnastics. Misti took ballet. Misti learned to read by climbing onto the light table and sounding out headlines. Misti joined the swim team, but she didn’t like it. Misti grew taller than the other girls in her class. Darryl put up a hoop in the parking lot and he and Misti shot baskets after school. Misti played center for the Lady Scots. She was All-Conference her senior year. Some guys from Ohio offered Darryl and Cheryl three million dollars for the Argus and they sold it. Darryl took up fly fishing, which he wasn’t very good at. Cheryl worked part time at a fudge shop owned by her aunt. Darryl and Cheryl drove Misti to Wilmington and left her standing in the parking lot of a dormitory with her hands clamped over her mouth.
They didn’t reach Nags Head until after dark and then had trouble finding a room in the fog. Every time Cheryl managed to identify one of the vaporous buildings as a motel, Darryl had already driven past its entrance. “If you don’t slow down,” she said, “you’re going to miss the spooks in Scotland.”
Traffic lights swam at them out of nowhere, each as unexpected as a UFO. Darryl had no idea where he was going, only that it wasn’t toward Argyle. “About back there,” he said.
Cheryl didn’t look at him. “I’m about starved,” she said. “Keep a lookout for a Hardee’s or something.”
She would forgive him, just not yet. He was lucky she hadn’t knocked his teeth out. That he had kept his teeth all these years when he so obviously didn’t deserve them seemed a minor blessing. He kept his hands on the wheel at 10 and 2 and savored the domestic missions moment. Find me a Hardee’s. Find me a room. Stay with me until I die. It was all the same thing, really.
He had begun to consider turning around for another pass through Nag's Head when the words Wade-n-Sea materialized in sizzling pink neon high above the roadway to their right.
Cheryl leaned forward and stared up at the sign. “That’s got to be a motel,” she said.
“Or maybe God needs a copyeditor.”
“Just shut up and slow down, Darryl.”
He managed to steer the car into the parking lot of an ancient, red-brick motel. Three low wings of eight or ten rooms lay moored in the fog in a U around the sign, and beneath the sign glittered a small, dazzlingly bright swimming pool. Three pickup trucks with fishing rod holders welded to their front bumpers were the only other vehicles in the lot.
When Darryl rang the bell in the office, a desiccated old woman with skin that had been cured the color of nicotine opened the door behind the counter. Through the doorway he saw an even older man slumped in a wheelchair, his mouth agape in what seemed to be a permanent expression of disbelief. The wet light of a muted television wavered on the wall behind him.
The woman studied Darryl’s face with the wariness of someone who had been held up more than once. “That’s my husband,” she said. “I try to bring him home on weekends.”
“Do you have a room available?”
“You saw the parking lot. How many do you want?”
Darryl smiled. “How about one?”
“King or double?”
He chewed on his upper lip, considering the ways the evening might go. “Double, I guess.”
“That’ll be eighty-five for the night. Who’s the other bed for?”
“My wife. She’s in the car.”
The old woman pushed a registration slip toward him. “Well, enjoy it while you can.”
“Excuse me?”
“The Wade-n-Sea. This might be the winter the nor’easters finally finish us off. The next time we close her down, she might not open up again. New moon, we already get water up in the front rooms. Can’t rent ’em anymore.”
“Will you rebuild?”
“Nah. The beach is gone. Government says whatever falls in the ocean on this side of the road stays in the ocean. I guess we’ll take their money. Let ’em have it. Move to Burlington. We got a daughter there. You ever been to Burlington?”
“I’ve passed by it on the Interstate.”
“Well, it ain’t much of a place if you ask me. Shit. Computer’s down again. Don’t know why we even got a computer. Pay me tomorrow.” She placed a key on top of Darryl’s credit card and slid the card across the counter. “Number four, two doors down, this side. No smoking. No parties. No loud music. No unregistered guests. No glass bottles by the pool. No exceptions.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I smoke in here, but it’s my motel, so don’t even bother complaining to me about that.”
“I won’t,” Darryl said. “I promise.” He turned toward the door.
“So what are you going to do?” the old woman asked.
Darryl frowned. “About what?”
“Tomorrow. While you’re here.”
“Oh,” he said. “I don’t know. Wright Brothers Memorial, I guess. The beach if the fog clears out. I don’t know what else there is.”
The old woman put her hands on the counter and leaned toward him. “Jockey Ridge,” she said. “Now, that’s a thing worth seeing.”
“What’s Jockey Ridge?”
"Sand dunes. Big as mountains. You climb to the top and run down 'em. Whee."
“Thank you. We’ll take a look.”
“Check out time’s eleven, but go ahead and sleep late if you want. What the hell. Soon as we sell this place I’m gonna sleep a long time.”
The walls of their room were paneled in knotty pine, but the wood had darkened so much over the years that it absorbed most of the light emitted by the 40-watt bulbs in the lamps. The green carpet smelled vaguely of mildew overlaid with mothballs. The pink tile and fixtures in the bathroom looked original, but the toilet didn’t flush properly. At least everything seemed reasonably clean.
“Which bed do you want?” Cheryl asked.
Darryl waited to see if she was joking, then pointed at the one by the window. The blinds glowed softly with diffuse pink light.
Cheryl plopped onto the other bed and reached for the remote. “Sorry, Slick. No haunted castles tonight.”
"But it's Scotland."
She turned on the television. “Boo,” she said. “How’s that?”
When he started awake, he heard the shower running. It was after midnight. On television the haunted castle psychic, wearing a headlamp, stooped through a low doorway followed by the haunted castle cynic, an attractive but bitter little woman in a black turtleneck.
Darryl smiled.
“Do you feel that, Shelia?” the psychic asked. “That cold air. My God, the temperature’s plummeting like a stone. Do you feel it?”
“How do you know it’s not a draft?” Shelia asked, wrapping her arms around herself. “I don’t think castles are insulated very well.”
The psychic strode farther into the room. “William?” he called out. “William, are you here with us? Can you make a sound, William? We mean you no harm.”
When the water stopped running in the bathroom, Darryl hopped up and found the remote and turned off the television. He took off his shirt and T-shirt, then his pants. He looked at himself in the mirror, then put his T-shirt back on. He lay down on Cheryl’s bed and propped his hands behind his head.
When Cheryl came out of the bathroom, she was wearing sweatpants and socks and the long T-shirt she normally wore over her swimsuit. Her eyes were dangerously bloodshot.
Darryl swung his legs off the bed and reached for his pants.
“I can’t believe what you said to me,” Cheryl said. “Nobody’s ever said anything like that to me before, not ever.”
“I’m sorry,” Darryl said, looking desperately around for his shoes. “I tried to apologize but you just wanted me to find you a Hardee’s.”
“You think just because I lived in a trailer for a year and a half I’m a slut?”
“What?”
“You think Misti’s gonna screw every boy in Wilmington because I like to go to Gatlinburg to see the Christmas lights?”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, ” Darryl said. “What are you talking about?”
“You do, too, know what I’m talking about. You think because I like to, what else, listen to the race on the radio, that I don’t have any morals.”
“I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything like that. Do you know where I put my shoes?”
“That’s exactly what you said. Well, let me tell you something. The race is a hell of a lot better than that classical PBS shit you pretend you like and make everybody else listen to, and I’ve only had sex with two people in my whole life and I married both of them so you can just stick your shoes up your Carolina blue Episcopal ass.”
“Cheryl, you’re not making any sense, and, for the record, you don’t have to bring Donnie into this.”
“Don’t you dare tell me I’m not making any sense, and, for the record, I’ll talk about Donnie Payne if I want to. I know you think I’m stupid. I know you think my armpits smell bad and my boobs are too big. I know you laugh at my clothes behind my back. You always have.”
“I have never laughed at your clothes.”
"Liar. You think I don't know why you give me all that preppy L.L. Bean crap for my birthday? And you want to hear about Donnie Payne? I'll tell you about Donnie Payne. Donnie Payne liked my clothes and Donnie Payne liked the way I smelled and Donnie Payne flat out loved my boobs, and if Donnie Payne hadn't got drunk and run around on me with Carmen Skipper I'd still be married to him. I wouldn't have pissed on you if you'd been on fire."
“Cheryl, don’t say that.”
“And I’d have been better off, too. You’ve been looking down on me from the moment you walked out of Mr. Putnam’s office in that stupid necktie and I’m done with it. I’ve never done anything but bust my ass my whole life and I’ve tried to be a good mama to Misti since the day she was born and look how it’s all turning out. It ain’t fair, none of it. So, fuck you.”
The Wade-n-Sea sign was so tall that from the parking lot Darryl couldn’t even see the letters. The steel stalk simply seemed to disappear into an electrical, pink cloud. Darryl thought briefly about climbing it. Out of sight overhead the neon spat and hummed.
On the far side of the swimming pool the old woman waved a long-handled skimmer through the water, while beside her the old man slouched in his wheelchair. Occasionally he lifted an arm and pointed. Despite the blue light shimmering upward from the water, the fog rendered their forms incorporeal. Darryl tiptoed carefully across the parking lot toward the pool, bent slightly at the waist, staring at the ground. He didn’t have on his glasses and didn’t want to step on anything that would hurt his bare feet. He hadn’t been able to find one of his shoes.
“Everything all right in there?” the old woman asked.
“Ma’am?”
“The room. Everything all right with the room?” She pulled the skimmer out of the pool and tapped the mesh twice against the white gravel behind her just off the walkway. Dead and dying moths, maybe hundreds of them, bobbed and fluttered on the surface of the water.
“Oh, yes, ma’am,” Darryl said. “The room’s fine. Except maybe the toilet. The toilet doesn’t flush very well.”
“Not enough fall,” the old woman said. “It was like that when we opened the place in ’51. Nothing to be done. I got a plunger you can use.”
“We’re good for now, I think,” Darryl said, reflexively touching his back pocket. He had stopped carrying a reporter’s notebook when they sold the paper, but still tended to classify people according to whether he thought he could get a feature out of them. Old people were good bets because, even if they had nothing else to say, you could still get most of them to talk about the way things used to be. Old guys at fruit stands had been his secret weapon against slow news days.
Darryl pointed up into the fog. “Tell me about your sign,” he said.
“It’s grandfathered in,” she said, “if that’s what you’re wondering about. You can’t build them that high anymore. People have told me they’ve seen it from three miles out, but that’s probably bullshit. I never went to look.”
The old man raised his arm.
“That one?” she asked, dipping a moth out of the water. “Oh, look at that. That’s a big bastard.” She tapped the moth out on the grass. “A few years ago some nice gay fellows tried to get it declared a national historic something-or-other, but nothing ever came of it. I think they liked it because it was pink.”
Darryl touched his back pocket again. He didn't have a newspaper to write for, or even a notebook to write in, but decided to go ahead and interview them anyway. He thought he'd been tired of the newspaper business when they sold the Argus—all those sordid AP stories about Clinton's sexual predilections, the feature one of his young reporters bought him about an "authentic mountain dulcimer player" who actually had an MBA from the University of Miami—but now he knew better.
“Of course, the amazing thing about that sign,” the old woman continued, “is that none of the hurricanes ever broke the neon. We’ve never had to replace a single tube. We’ve replaced the roof four times and we’ve been flooded more times than I can count, but the damn glass never broke. We’ve been on several news shows about it.”
“That is amazing.”
“The gay fellows thought so. They have a bed and breakfast up the road in Kitty Hawk. It looks like a nice enough place, but I’ve never gone inside. We tried a continental breakfast for a while, but it was a pain in the ass. Every morning people cleaned us out and took all the food back to their rooms, even those tiny little boxes of cereal, so we said screw it.”
The old man slapped his hand once against the arm of his wheelchair, then pointed at the water. The old woman turned toward him and put her free hand on her hip before looking again at Darryl.
“Tell me something,” she said. “Are you planning on swimming in this pool tomorrow?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t think so.”
“Then the hell with it. I’m not going to worry about it anymore.” She dropped the skimmer onto the sidewalk and turned to face the old man. “I said I’m not going to worry about it anymore.” She turned back to Darryl and pointed at two deck chairs. “You want to sit down?”
“Sure.”
“Jorge should’ve had the cover on by now, but he’s a lazy prick.”
“Jorge?”
“Well, I shouldn’t have said that. He’s not really a lazy prick, I don’t guess. He’s married to Dolores. He works full time at the Holiday Inn and just moonlights over here. He still needs to get his ass over here and put the cover on, though. Remind me to get on Dolores about it tomorrow.”
The old man slowly raised his head and mumbled something.
“Listen at that. This one over here doesn’t like Mexicans. He thinks they’re taking over the world. Of course, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Nags Head is running out of Mexicans. I don’t know where they all went. Some of the big places have started shipping in Russians. The Russians, though, will steal anything that ain’t tied down.”
“Are you both from here?” Darryl asked.
“He’s from Florida,” she said. “I grew up near Salvo. My granddad had a fishing pier. It’s not there anymore. The Ash Wednesday storm took it off in ’62.”
“How did you meet?”
“He was in the Coast Guard during the war and it was his job to ride up and down the beach on a horse. The U-Boats were bad, especially in ’42, everything was blacked out—if you lit a lantern to go to the outhouse somebody would arrest you—and at night we used to sit in the dark on the end of Granddad’s pier and watch the ships blow up. You’d see the flashes off in the distance, and then three or four seconds later you’d hear, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Next day we’d go up and down the beach to see what had washed up and this guy, him and his buddies would ride up and down on their horses and look it over and tell us whether or not we could keep it.”
“What was the best thing you ever found?”
“Spam. Oh my God, we thought that was a treasure.”
“Did any bodies ever wash up?”
“Oh, yes. That’s how we met,” the old woman said. “Isn’t that right?”
The old man grunted.
“Listen to him. He’s still pissed off at the Germans. He’s a Jew, so I guess he’s got a point. I’m not a Jew, but his people weren’t observant, so when we got married it didn’t matter. I say if a German’s check don’t bounce, who gives a shit? What were we talking about?”
“How you met.”
“Oh, yeah. Dead bodies. So, anyway, one day I was on the beach with my little sister, probably hoping we’d find some more Spam, and we saw a body bobbing around out in the surf. Naked and that dead white, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that color. The fish and crabs had been at it, but we’d grown up around a pier and seen stuff like that. So we just squatted down and watched it because we didn’t have anything else to do. You couldn’t tell if it was German or American.”
She tilted her head at the old man.
“Just then he rode up on his horse, all handsome in his Smokey the Bear hat and told us to stay with the body until he got back. Well, pretty soon the tide started coming in and the body started to float away. I didn’t want him to be mad at me when he got back, because I thought he was good-looking, so I waded in and grabbed it by the ankle, and every time a wave lifted it up I pulled it toward the beach. Eventually I got it far enough up on the sand that it wouldn’t wash away. My sister just sat on her ass the whole time and didn’t help me one bit. You couldn’t make her touch a dead body, but she would gut a shark and not think anything of it. Now she lives in Phoenix.”
“How old were you?”
“Fourteen,” she said. “He came back with his buddies and a truck and talked to me and found out where I lived, and we started sneaking around together. I’d climb out the window. My folks didn’t like it, but you put a teenage girl on an island with a bunch of Coast Guards and what do think is going to happen? He said he would come back after the war and marry me, though, and he did. I’ll give him that. His people had a motel in St. Petersburg, a big pink monstrosity called the Del Moroccan, and when we got married they set us up. He wanted to get out of Florida, be his own man, and I never really wanted to live on the mainland, so we came back to Nag’s Head. There wasn’t much here then. We were the only brick motel on the island. The tall sign was his idea. I thought up Wade-n-Sea.”
The old man snorted through his nose.
“He wanted to call the place the Del Conquistador,” she said, “but I thought it sounded like somebody’s name. Hey, look, everybody. It’s Dale Conquistador. We were busy as we could be for a long time. Filled up all season. The same people came back every year. They would have kids and then their kids would grow up and have kids and the roof would blow off and we would put it back on and everybody would come back the next year.”
“It sounds like you’ve had a nice life,” Darryl said.
“You hear that?” the old woman said. “He says it sounds like we’ve had a nice life.”
The old man waved as if swatting away a slow-moving mosquito.
“This one here,” she said, “he always had to have a new Cadillac, and he always had to have a fast boat, and he always had to have some little waitress tramp of a girlfriend, and in the winter when we went to Florida he had to be a big shot at the track, throwing money around, leaving big tips.”
The old man raised his chin and gazed levelly at the old woman. Darryl couldn’t read his expression.
“Big, shiny Cadillacs,” the old woman said, shaking her head. “He hates a Japanese car as bad as he hates a German. He thinks the Japanese are in cahoots with the Mexicans. Oh, and the Chinese. They’re in on it now. Is your car Japanese?”
“Swedish,” Darryl said.
“You hear that? He says that car is Swedish.”
The old man lowered his head.
Darryl leaned toward the old woman. “If you don’t mind my asking,” he said, “how did you two stay together?”
The old woman blinked at him and twisted slightly in her chair. He had asked the question he shouldn’t have asked until the end of the interview. He was losing his touch.
“That’s kind of a personal question,” she said. “What’s the matter? You and your wife not getting along?”
“No, ma’am. Not really.”
“Well, since you’re so damn curious, let me tell you the secret to a long marriage. If you want to stay together, then don’t leave.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
The old man nodded.
She put her hands on her knees and stood up. “You hear that?” she said to him. “Tide’s almost in.”
Darryl hadn’t noticed the boom and shush of the surf until the old woman mentioned it. He wondered how that was possible. He turned and looked toward the wing of rooms barely visible between the parking lot and the ocean. “Wow,” he said. “That sounds close.”
“It is close,” she said. “We’ve lost four hundred feet of beach since we built the place. In the early years, when the tide was out it took forever to walk to the water. And now,” she said. “Well, now it’s time for me and him to go inside and turn off all these damn lights.”
When Darryl walked by the wheelchair, the old man grabbed him by the wrist.
“Your car,” the old man rasped, “is shit.”
Darryl was sitting on the rear bumper of his car when the Wade-n-Sea sign blinked off, followed seconds later by the pool lights. The wing on the other side of the parking lot vanished into the fog, save for the indeterminate yellow glow of what Darryl knew to be the safety lights underneath the covered walkway. The darkened rooms fronting the sea disappeared entirely. Darryl walked around the car and placed his hand on the doorknob to their room, but couldn’t make himself go inside.
He followed the safety lights from his wing to the abandoned wing and then felt his way from door to door until he found the breezeway to the beach. He dragged his fingers along the rough brick wall of the tunnel as he moved unsteadily toward the pitch-black roar of the surf. When the wall ran out he stepped off the concrete walkway and pitched forward into the air. Before he had time to yell he landed face-first on wet sand and somersaulted onto his back. The warm froth of a dying wave immediately gurgled around him. He leapt to his feet and jerked his cell phone out of his pocket and held it over his head. It wasn’t until the next wave slid up over his ankles that he lowered his arm. His neck hurt and his face felt scraped up. He placed his hand on his chest and checked the thrash of his heart for premonitory irregularities. When he opened his phone the illuminated screen seared an after image of levitating rectangles onto his retinas. Satisfied that he wasn’t dying, Darryl clambered up the four feet of dune he had just tumbled down.
He found himself not at the entrance to the breezeway but at the open door to one of the abandoned units. Sand had spilled several feet through the doorway and Darryl followed it across the threshold and into the room. The air inside was still and sour, its odor a mixture of mold and the pungent smell of fish and mud left behind after a receding tide. The surf sounded as if it were going to break on top of him. He felt a little giddy with fear. He forced himself to take another step. The carpet beneath his bare feet was wet and clammy and gritty. It was the darkest place he had ever been. He leaned into the room and waved his arms around in front of his face. “William?” he whispered. “We mean you no harm.”
He opened his phone and held it at arm’s length with the screen facing out, as if it were a torch. The room was empty. No beds, no nightstand, no dresser, no round table and matching chairs, no television secured to the wall by a bracket, no folding luggage rack with its ratty webbing—everything had been taken away. He knew that Cheryl had never set foot in this particular room, and never would, but the fact that this room was so similar to the room in which she now slept, or didn’t sleep, and that it was ruined and empty suddenly flooded him with despair. He moved to the spot corresponding to the place where Cheryl’s bed would be in their room. He flipped the phone shut and sat down on the floor. Once, four hundred feet of white beach had lain between this room and the ocean, and now only a fragile berm of sand separated the room from that same ocean’s inexorable lifting up and dragging away. He knew that the nor’easters were coming, if not this winter, then the next. You couldn’t blame the ocean, of course; he understood that. The ocean itself possessed no intent, no peacefulness or fury, save that ascribed to it. The problem was that a boy from Florida and a girl from Salvo had chosen to build something in its way.
Darryl and Cheryl had once published a newspaper, and they had once had a little girl, but now the newspaper was gone (although, somehow, a cruel facsimile of it still appeared daily in their paper box, poorly written and riddled with typos) and the little girl had grown into a young woman whose face only two days ago had clouded over with scorn when she opened her door and saw them. Darryl lay back on the dank carpeting. He patted the empty spot on the floor beside him. He had begun to shiver in his wet clothes. “My car,” he mumbled, “is shit.”
Cheryl’s cell phone rang a long time before she answered it.
“Darryl?” she said. Her voice was warm with sleep, mercifully drained of danger. She might throw the other shoe at him once she had had a cup of coffee, but he was in the clear for now.
“Hey,” he said.
She yawned, and he heard her sit up in bed. “Where are you?”
“I’m not sure. I fell into the ocean.
“Are you all right?”
“I wish we had our newspaper back,” he said.
“I know you do.”
“I wish we had our newspaper back and I wish you were pasting up the front page and I wish we had a good picture above the fold and I wish Misti was under the light table.”
“We can’t do anything about any of that,” she said softly. “That’s all gone, baby.”
“Then what are we going to do, Cheryl? Please tell me, because I honestly don’t know.”
Cheryl drew in a deep breath, held it a beat, then let it out. He pictured her with her eyes closed, holding a fistful of her hair straight up in the air. When she opened her eyes and let go of her hair, she would be ready to face whatever needed to be faced. He had been married to her for more years than he had been alive before he met her. It was a fearsome mathematics to consider, a number unrolling day by day toward some finite but unfathomable edition. They had gone to print together 3,682 times. They had spent their youths compiling a record already sliding from the realm of the public into the realm of the historical inside a morgue of microfiche drawers in the Argyle library. Their daughter was going away from them in exactly the expected ways. Darryl held himself perfectly still.
“Okay, College Boy,” she said finally, “here’s what we’re going to do. In the morning, we’re going to eat a big breakfast. Then we’re going to go to Virginia Beach and find us an Interstate pointed toward home. After that we’ll just have to see. Does that sound good, Darryl? Because right now that’s all I’ve got.”
In all the years he had worked with her, Cheryl had never worried about the next paper until it was time to lay it out, and she had never met a deadline she was afraid of. For his part, whenever she yelled, “College Boy, get your worthless ass back here and bring me some copy,” he had always produced, even on the deadest days, copy enough to bring her. It was the only way he knew to make a life, the transfigurative ordering of event into story, something he could not do without Cheryl. What good, after all, is editorial without production? He stood up and turned in the darkness toward where he remembered the door to be.
“That sounds good enough,” he said. “Let’s run it.”
