Shell Fragments
*
The weeks after the water trap debacle were hard on Gill. He started wearing sunglasses and bought a used motorcycle that he rode without a helmet. He transferred some of his work responsibilities to me. I started to tend the palm trees, chlorinate the water, hose down the hot concrete paths that led from hole to hole. I put in longer shifts while Lacie sat at our apartment, making macaroni and cheese and watching videos about married couples buying expensive beachfront houses.
*
There’s a beach access across the intercoastal waterway, just before the southern tip and commotion of Clearwater Beach. The road is lined with high-rise mirrored condos built in the late 1980s and accented with neon blues and pinks and greens. Gated houses with terracotta roofs sit on the residential lots.
I was there after the news report—after Lacie left me on her couch—alone and trying to appreciate some of the natural appeal of the place. While I was putting a few bucks into a parking meter, I saw Lacie at the shower station holding a naked child in a bucket hat, his belly puffed out like an uncut poached egg. She was scrubbing the kid’s feet, laughing and getting her skirt soaked, when a muscled man with chapped lips visible from a parking lot away came up behind her and started tickling her armpits. She put the kid down and fell into this man’s arms, all dramatic like she had fainted from the aggressive tickling. Lacie looked into this man’s eyes and kissed him while the shower water ran over their bodies.
I walked closer, discreetly, staying behind a row of parked F-150s, and found that it wasn’t Lacie at all but a teenager with a similar build and wet-hair appearance. Uncanny. The couple kept laughing as I walked past. I looked at the little kid and saw nothing in its eyes. Just sitting there, naked and sunburnt. I walked over a rough stretch of beach that used to be a parking lot. Shell fragments jutted out of the asphalt—slowly loosed as the cement around them eroded, slowly reclaimed by the ocean. I found a place to sit by the lifeguard stand. The wind whipped some sand into my eyes, and about that time I got a call from Gill.
*
Gill told me that he had been reflecting the past few weeks. About his lot in life and what he wanted from his relationships. He concluded, after this reflection, that he needed to be smarter in how he won his son’s trust. Once his son’s love for him superseded his son’s love for Nance, he could regain some custody.
The way to outplay Nance, he figured, was to present their son with gifts that verged on magical. Gill reminded me that every Florida kid, deep down, believes in magic because of their proximity to Disney World. And Gill had just the gift in mind for his son. It concerned the unaffiliated bird sanctuary near Moccasin Lake, which, he said, was in a serious financial strait that was narrowing as we spoke. The owner of the enterprise—a good friend of his—had overestimated the local community’s willingness to donate to broken, flightless birds of prey. As such, to spare bankruptcy and personal ruin, the friend was required to liquidate the sanctuary’s assets, including the rescued birds. Really, Gill said, the owner just wanted someone to take the birds off his gloved hands. The burrowing owl with no eyes and half a beak. The red-tailed hawk with wings chewed up by an outboard boat motor.