It’s just past dawn on a Tuesday morning in early spring. Dim light filters through heavy clouds above hills to the east. The tide is high in the bay, a light breeze rippling its surface. A pair of harbor seals slip into the water near the inlet, beyond which languid waves lash the sand. Closer to the highway bridge on the tallest of a trio of volcanic rock stacks, the figure of a woman comes clear as the darkness fades. She sits with knees to chest, hair covering her face, one arm looped around the trunk of a stunted Sitka spruce. If not for the fleece jacket with a waterproof shell, she might be taken for some mythical creature risen out of the sea; one who’d sprout a tail were she to dive back under the surface.
But she is human, cold and tired. She has been on the rock for nearly seven hours. She pulls the jacket tighter but can’t stop shivering. Her face feels numb. She no longer knows whether to laugh or cry. She does both and then stops herself to conserve her strength. The seals pass below without glancing up at her.
The woman’s name is Andrea Schaffner. Friends and family call her Andi. She is thirty-five years old, straight, unmarried, and childless. For the past year and a half she has carried on an affair with a married co-worker—her direct supervisor—at a Portland nonprofit whose mission is to aid struggling rural communities with economic development, especially those suffering from the loss of logging and fishing industries. Her lover, James, is Program Director, and she is Program Manager. Though his salary is ten thousand dollars a year higher than hers, they work as a team—as equals, she believes—meeting with mayors and city councils and chambers of commerce to design recovery plans and training programs and otherwise help locals attract business, build up tourism, establish sustainable forestry and fishery practices. They travel to beach and mountain towns all over the Pacific Northwest, always booking two motel rooms but using only one.
From the rock she can see the motel they checked into last night just a few hundred yards across the bay, a squat, three-story building with rusty balconies that leave stains whenever rain drips from them onto the stucco below. Their room is on the second floor near a stairwell, but from this angle she can’t be sure which one it is. The lights are off in all of them. She can picture it as she left it; James in bed, naked and snoring, her overnight bag unzipped but not unpacked, her cell charging on the desk. Of all the stupid mistakes she’s made over the past day—or over the past two years, the past thirty-five—not carrying her phone is the one for which she’ll never forgive herself. That, and leaving her sandals behind a driftwood log on the beach so she could feel the sand between her toes.
The breeze eases, shifts direction. She catches the smell of wood smoke and thinks that maybe people are beginning to wake, early risers heading to work, though she knows there is little work in Lincoln City or anywhere else on the coast. Ninety percent of the houses here are vacation rentals, and the people who clean them can’t afford to live nearby; instead they drive over the Coast Range from Salem, Albany, the shabby outlying suburbs of Portland. Over the regular beat of waves beyond Salishan Spit, she hears wings flapping against water. Geese or gulls, perhaps pelicans.
And then comes the sound of an engine, a loud one, not at all like the hybrid in James’s Prius. For the first time in more than an hour, she sees headlights in the distance heading north around the bay. She stands with difficulty, leaning against the little spruce’s trunk, keeping most of her weight on one foot, and gives a big wave. Please see me, she thinks, and immediately recognizes the irony, given how often over the past year and a half she has feared exposure, prayed to stay hidden. She can see the truck now, an eighteen-wheeler hauling an unmarked container. Blankets, she thinks. An entire truck full of thick down comforters. She flings her arms wildly, hops up and down on one foot, nearly loses her balance. The headlights’ beams pass a few yards to the west of her stack, and then the truck rounds the curve onto the bridge. It passes the end of the bay without braking, changes gear, and heads uphill into town. Andi sits and shivers.
***
She can’t believe what she’s gotten herself into, but then again, the facts of her life continually astonish her. How can she be a person who regularly sleeps with someone else’s spouse, the father of two pre-teen girls? Even while in bed with James, his hands gripping her backside, or her legs straddling his hips, she can’t quite square her actions with the image she carries of herself as someone who does good in the world, who puts others’ needs ahead of her own. Last night she said as much to James, not for the first time, and again he agreed: it was crazy, they were completely out of their minds, they couldn’t keep on this way indefinitely. But, of course, the craziness was exactly what turned them both on, and in minutes they went from holding their heads in their hands to holding each other around the waist, pelvis to pelvis.
For James, sex was enough to quell any doubts, at least until their next trip together two weeks away. But after he grunted, kissed her, and fell promptly asleep, Andi lay listening to his breath and the waves and the rattling heater, once more telling herself this couldn’t really be her life, even if she had no other to replace it. An hour passed, and when she knew she wouldn’t drift off, she dressed and slipped outside, where a rare break in the clouds revealed a bright moon, the tide far out, the inner bay floor uncovered all the way to the opposite bank. She’d never seen the stacks exposed to their base. On her way toward them, she spotted bubbles in the sand, and with a reflex that surprised her, she dropped to her knees and dug with both hands until she came up with a clam. A small one with brownish stripes and a purple tip, not like the big razor clams she and James had recently eaten in Vancouver during a weekend conference they hardly attended. Still, pocketing it gave her a feeling of accomplishment, and she dug up more as she crossed the silty flats thick with weeds, the sand sucking at her feet with every step.
Her jacket pockets were heavy with shells by the time she reached the stacks. In the morning, she’d build a fire on the beach and steam them for breakfast, surprise James with them just as he was waking up. It would be their farewell meal, she decided, enjoying the drama of such a thought and the way it immediately choked her up. They’d eat and make love one last time, and then it would be over. She’d never steamed clams before, not even on a stove, and didn’t know how to do it on open flames. But it was time to learn new things; time to become the person she thought she should be rather than the one who stumbled into careers and love affairs as if she had no control over where her feet carried her. She could always look up directions on her phone when she got back to the room.
Before returning, however, she’d climb the stack and sit for a few minutes looking at the stars, which were far more distinct here than in Portland, even with the moon still high above the horizon. It was the right place to feel lonely and sorry for herself and hopeful about the future, except on the way up she sliced the ball of her foot on a barnacle. It bled, not profusely but steadily, and she lay on her back with her foot in the air waiting for it to clot. When it finally did, the tide had come back in. The water was already up to her knees by the time she limped down the rock, and it was freezing. The bank was several hundred yards away, and by the time she reached it, she’d be mostly submerged. How long did it take for hypothermia to set in? Her foot throbbed. She’d probably need stitches. A weak swimmer at the best of times, she didn’t know if she could kick hard enough to keep invisible currents from yanking her out to sea.
Back atop the rock, she waited for James to wake and realize she was gone and to come looking for her, though only part of her believed he would. He always slept hard after emptying himself into her and rolling to his back, rarely shifting his position all night. Often, he didn’t hear the alarm in the morning and stirred only when she tickled his feet. And he usually woke cranky, yawning and rubbing eyes, already distracted by thoughts of work or the drive home, uninterested in her affection. What was she doing with this forty-seven-year-old boy, selfish and inconsiderate, with graying chest hair and the beginning of a paunch? What did it matter that his smell made her salivate?
If he didn’t come looking for her, she assured herself, it was definitely over between them. But if he did, that was another matter. She imagined him swimming through the frigid water to save her, then cooking the clams while she warmed in a bath he’d drawn. He might tell her how precious she was to him, that she meant more to him than anyone else in the world—including his daughters—and if she wanted, he would leave his wife for her. And then she would say, as she had before, that of course he should stay with his family, at least until the girls were in high school and didn’t care what he did; she was a big enough person to recognize what priorities mattered most, and who said she wanted a full-time relationship anyway?
Yes, if he saved her, it would be okay to put off any decisions about parting until some other time.
***
Now as mist thickens into drizzle, she no longer cares who rescues her. She no longer cares how embarrassing it will be to have someone discover her here. But a dog? Yes, somehow, despite the cold and discomfort, she’s still capable of being insulted. She who has only ever had cats, including a calico who currently punishes her for her frequent trips by pissing in a corner of her office closet. Yet it’s a lanky black mutt that spots her, flapping a long pink tongue. It yaps at her from the beach, runs into the shallows and back out, shaking freezing water from its fur.
And then she feels more shame than relief when a man follows, materializing out of the gloom. His legs are thin but his top half is surprisingly broad and oddly shaped with a huge hump on his back. It takes her a moment to realize it must be a backpack beneath a poncho, but before she does, she thinks of an old crone from storybooks, the kind who might help her but only for a price. Her first instinct is to hide. She huddles against the bent trunk of the wind-battered spruce, and hopes she looks like a bundle of roots silhouetted against the brightening clouds. But the dog keeps barking, splashing now into the bay, swimming a few yards in her direction, and then turning and swimming back. Before the man reaches the water’s edge, he raises his head and pulls back the hood. She can’t see features, only the outline of a gaunt face topped with wispy hair blown back by the breeze. But the voice comes to her clearly, throaty and loud.
“The accommodations are cheap,” it says, “but not much in the way of comfort.”
“The heater’s broken,” she calls back. The shivering makes her voice tremble, but otherwise she tries to sound stoic. “And no one answers at the front desk.”
“Next time you might want to book somewhere with amenities. Like a roof.”
“Good idea,” she says, and wonders how long he plans to go on this way. The dog has calmed now, sitting beside his leg, glancing up at him and then back toward her. “Maybe walls, too.”
“Do you see any driftwood up there?” he asks, and now she begins to question whether he was joking after all. Does he believe she chose to stay here all night?
“Driftwood?”
“Small pieces. Size of your foot’s ideal.”
“I can look.”
“Best time to find them. Right when the water drops.”
“Do you happen to know when it’s due to go all the way out again?”
“Low point’s around eleven,” he says, “but it’ll still be about four feet then. Won’t be dry again until tonight.”
“Maybe you could call somebody then? Police, I guess?”
“They’ll take longer than the tide. I can get hold of a boat. Just take a few minutes.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she says.
“Meantime, look around for small bits,” he calls. “Size of your foot down to size of your hand. Nothing too fresh. Old and beat-to-hell is good.”
Without another word, he turns and starts back the way he came toward the old wooden pier sticking partway into the water before petering out in a staggered grid of rotten pillars, and beyond it the dunes covered in grass and salal. She almost calls him back. Even more important than being taken off this rock is not being left alone on it again; she’d rather have him there talking to her for the rest of the day than spend another moment with nothing but her thoughts and the sound of her chattering teeth. But without seeming to hasten, he’s moving quickly away. The dog barks at her once more and then races after him. Past them, she can see the waves clearly now, white crests forming out of the fog and then spewing up spray to become part of it again. On the spit, the harbor seals, dozens of them, huddle together lump against lump against lump. The droplets coming through the spruce are larger now, loud against her hood. The sound scares her, makes her feel even more isolated, and before the man and dog reach the pier, she calls out to them, “Please hurry!”
If they hear, they give no sign.
***
Then she’s on her own again. A few lights have come on in the motel on the first floor and on the third, but not on the second. One of the dark rooms is the one she booked, that the agency is paying for, but in which she hasn’t set foot. How different the job would be if she were to sleep on her own every night, get up and meet with local officials, and not feel a secret tingling between her legs. Would she care at all about the mild successes they had, bringing small investments to towns that would never thrive again but only limp forward as the world continued to leave them behind?
The truth is, she’s never cared much about the plight of out-of-work loggers or fishermen—like the old man with the dog, maybe—except in a distant, abstract way like caring about people with prostate cancer. Unlike James, who came from a dying rural community in the Midwest, studied political philosophy as an undergraduate and earned a master’s in policy and planning, Andi didn’t arrive here as a result of passion. She grew up in an affluent Boston suburb, majored in European history, and then worked for a series of nonprofits, some arts-related, others social service, sometimes doing publicity, sometimes program management. As long as the organization’s mission was generally to make a positive impact on the world, she felt reasonably satisfied at the end of the day, though the work was largely tedious, and she never felt particularly tied to any position. She followed a boyfriend to Chicago, and then another to Seattle. She’d come to Portland to pursue an online flirtation that never bloomed into a relationship. She took the job because it was the first one that offered her health benefits.
On the phone with her parents, who don’t understand why she has to live so far away, she talks about the importance of helping workers whose livelihoods have dried up. They built the country, she says, made it what it is, and shouldn’t be abandoned just because those who control the wealth have moved it elsewhere. But with James she never talks about the people they serve, except in practical terms: whether they’ll sign on to agreements to manage their forests and fisheries in a manner that won’t deplete them for good; whether they’ll provide useful data she and James can report on upcoming grant applications; whether their stories are compelling enough to appear on press releases and promotional pamphlets.
The people themselves are irritants, distractions from the pleasure they derive only when they are alone. She has come to think of their daytime meetings as punishment they must suffer in order to reward themselves when they are finally free in the evening. Whether these communities recover or collapse is all the same to her, so long as she has a reason to keep driving to mountains and beaches and tearing off her clothes in darkened motel rooms. If she ends things with James, the job will lose all meaning for her. She might as well take a corporate position that will further exploit and undermine these communities and double—or triple—her salary.
More lights are coming on in the motel, some on the second floor. She’s now quite sure that the fourth one from the beach side is James’s, that he has woken and found her gone, and that he has checked the bathroom and perhaps called her cell phone only to discover it on the laminate desk. And then what? Does he call her room, the one she’s never entered? Or the front desk to ask if the clerk has seen her or if she’s left a message? Does he check to make sure the car is still in the parking lot? Maybe he guesses she’s gone out for coffee and that she’ll surprise him with pastries, believing he deserves it. At what point will he begin to worry? She wants to imagine the moment when he thinks she has really decided to leave him; when he’ll suffer an exquisite pain and longing for what they’ve shared, and even more, the moment when she returns and he’s so relieved he knows he’ll never take their time together for granted.
Any second, she thinks, he might step onto the balcony and see her, and then the brief hold loss has on him will loosen. So she ducks behind the spruce and hopes to prolong his worry for as long as possible and, thus, to seal herself in his heart for good. Because of course the real reason she has considered ending the affair isn’t because she has come to believe what they are doing is crazy—she knows it is, has known all along—but because she anticipates that James will eventually come to his senses and decide he can live without her.
***
And that’s when she hears the boat engine, a soft stuttering above the rain. The fog has grown denser, and she can’t see anything yet, can’t tell what direction it’s coming from. But she remembers she is supposed to look for driftwood and does so while she waits. There’s nothing on top of the stack, though of course the tide hasn’t been this high, so she lowers herself carefully over the side and begins to climb down. She watches out for barnacles now, but her foot slips on a weedy spot and she has to grab hard with her numb fingertips to keep from sliding. The clams in her pockets bounce against her hips. The engine grows louder, but still no sign of a boat. A couple of feet above the waterline she does find a silvered stick as thick around as her wrist and a little longer than her forearm. She hugs it to herself, crouches, and thinks the boat isn’t coming for her after all. Just then the dog yelps directly below her, followed by the gravelly voice: “Check-out time.”
“Kind of early, isn’t it?”
“You get what you pay for.”
The dog barks continuously as she descends the rest of the way, and only when she’s right above it can she make out the aluminum boat with a small outboard motor, the lanky figure with a hump beneath his poncho, his hood up again so she can’t see his face. He makes no move to help her down, just stays seated with a hand on the tiller. The look of him calls up another image from a childhood storybook of Charon and the river Styx, which in turn makes her think of the band Styx, her older sister’s favorite when they were growing up. Every night through her bedroom wall she’d listen to ballads that went on far too long, growing increasingly frenetic but also oddly seductive: Come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with me!
She lowers herself as far as she can and drops the last few inches into the hull. The boat wobbles. Her cut foot hits cold metal, a shriek of pain rises up her leg, and she clamps her teeth to keep from crying out. She falls onto the seat, and the dog barks in her face, licks her hands. The boat eases backward away from the stack before turning and heading slowly toward shore. Over the dog’s head she finally catches a glimpse of the man’s face—not quite as skeletal as Charon, but gaunt and weathered, eyes set deeply beneath wild eyebrows. It’s the kind of face she’s used to seeing at open community meetings off in the corner, skeptical and unmoved by her work on his behalf. She passes him the stick of driftwood. He holds it up with his free hand, still steering through the fog with the other. The light is diffuse all around them, but he shifts position as if he can get a better view by angling closer to the sun. He squints and turns the stick end over end. Then he tosses it over the side of the boat. “Needs a couple more decades,” he says, sounding not disappointed so much as confirmed in his low expectations.
She wants to show her appreciation, feels he should be compensated for his effort, but her wallet is on the desk along with her phone. All she has in her pockets are the key to James’s room and the clams, so she pulls out the latter and holds them out in both hands. There are nine of them in total, hardly enough for an appetizer. The dog sniffs them and looks to its owner. “Not sure what the exchange rate is,” she says, “but I think this is more than I paid for the ride out.”
This time he doesn’t take up the banter. Instead, he peers intently at her hands, the creases on his forehead unfolding as his brows lower. “You didn’t eat any, did you?”
“I usually wait until after dawn for breakfast.”
“Don’t you know about the ban?”
“Ban?”
“All of Oregon. Southwest Washington, too. No clams. Blue-green algae.”
She doesn’t understand what he’s saying but answers anyway, “I hadn’t heard.”
“It’s dangerous,” he says. “Causes brain damage. Permanent.”
The thought that she might have poisoned James rather than indulged him horrifies her but also makes her laugh. An idiot’s version of a suicide pact: Juliet too stupid to know she shouldn’t eat clams or serve them to her forbidden lover. Now it’s her turn to toss them over the side. Nine little splashes she can’t hear over the sputtering engine, each shell visible for the first few inches beneath the water and then gone.
Sooner than she expects, the boat skids into the soft sand on the north shore of the bay right in front of her motel, but now she’s reluctant to get out. She wants to say something to explain herself but doesn’t know what. The light in the room she believes is James’s is still on, but the curtain is also still drawn. “I’m actually staying there,” she says, gesturing at the rust-stained stucco. “But those accommodations aren’t much better.”
“Crappy bed?”
“More the company. Complicated.” And then, as if to justify being here at all—or else to justify her very existence—she tells him about her job, what she’s trying to do to make the place vibrant again for people like him, not just wealthy Californians with second homes.
“People like me?”
“You know, whose livelihoods—” She pauses, shrugs, juts her chin toward the inlet, then in the direction of the single hillside visible through the fog, barely recovering from a decade-old clearcut. “Fishermen, loggers, whose industries—”
“I’m a sculptor,” he says, and shifts the backpack from beneath the poncho so he can open the zipper. He pulls out a piece of driftwood the size of his hand, pronged and gnarled, worm-eaten. “This is what I’m after. Got to get out just when the tide starts back to beat the competition.”
“Sculptures? Out of these?”
He hands her a card. It has the name of a gallery on it, and beneath, an image she has to look at carefully before she understands what she’s seeing. A chunk of driftwood on a metal stand, a face carved into one end—a woman’s face, sultry and blissful, surrounded by waves of silvered hair. It’s so hideous and absurd she instantly wants to own it.
“When I moved here in ’73,” he says, “it was all hippies this end of town. Great place to raise the kids. Music every night. You could live on nothing.”
She pockets the card and thanks him, says she’s sorry to have taken him away from his hunt. The dog yaps when she gets out of the boat, jumps after her, and tears up the beach before she can grab its collar.
“Don’t worry about her. She knows where to go. I better get this back before the owner notices it’s missing.” He doesn’t look at her as he backs the boat away. “You find any good pieces, bring them by the gallery.”
She listens to the boat’s motor even after she can no longer see it. The dog’s also out of view, and the beach is once again empty and still. She searches for her sandals behind all the nearby logs but can’t find them. After a few minutes she gives up and limps to the motel.
***
She was wrong about James’s room. It’s the fifth from the end, and its lights are still off when she finally makes her way back inside. James is still asleep on the sagging mattress, rolled onto his side now with his back to the spot where she should have been. The alarms on the clock and his phone are sounding—the former set to a jazz radio station, the latter electronic birdsong—but he snores through both. Seven and a half hours and he hasn’t known she was gone, hasn’t suspected anything might be wrong. She strips out of her jacket and wet jeans, out of sweater, tee-shirt, and underwear, and slides under the blanket, shivering. If only she can get warm, she’ll fall asleep, too, despite the music and chattering birds, but the cold is so deep in her she thinks it will take hours to dissipate. In the meantime, she studies the moles on James’s back, most light brown, a few pink, one alarmingly dark and misshapen.
Is there something about this stretch of pale skin that makes it matter so much to her? Are its qualities particularly suited to excite or comfort her? Or is it just what happened to fall into her path? She’s sure she would tire of this back if she had to see it every day, or if its owner’s beard trimmings clogged her sink, his dirty clothes filled her laundry basket. It’s strange to think that she is actually content with her tentative existence – her small rented apartment, her disgruntled cat, her borrowed lover – and that she’d do anything to hang onto these things. Her foot aches, but she will hide the cut from James, pretend she has been with him all night, that nothing has shaken her faith in him or their ridiculous affair. The best thing to do is to hold perfectly still and listen to the waves crashing in her mind since she can’t hear them over the sound of alarms and snoring. And she is beginning to warm after all, her eyes are beginning to close. She will stay right where she is all morning, or all week, or for as long as the tides move in and out of the bay.
But then James’s snore chokes off into a loud snort, and he stirs. That cranky groan, the beleaguered yawn and shake of his head. He pushes onto an elbow and looks at the clock before turning to her. “You let us sleep in,” he says, and shuts off both alarms. “We’ve got to be downtown in twenty minutes.” He slides out of bed, and she watches his lovely hairless buttocks move across the room and disappear behind the bathroom door. There won’t be time for both of them to shower. She wants to join him under the hot stream but knows he doesn’t like to see her naked if they won’t have time for sex; it distracts him too much, gets in the way of practical thoughts. So she stays where she is until the shower turns off. She should wash her cut foot to keep it from getting infected, but there’s no time for that either. She gets out of bed, dresses in her work outfit—slacks, blouse, flats—fixes her hair in the mirror over the desk, packs her bag, and is ready to go by the time he comes out wrapped in a towel, still scowling.
“If neither of us can wake up, we’ll have to jack the volume.”
“Next time,” she says, and opens the curtain so she can look out at the rock where she spent the night, twice pulling down her pants to pee off the side. To her surprise, though, their balcony doesn’t face the bay; only the parking lot with the blue bubble of James’s Prius a short drop below.
“I’ll change it back to the buzzer instead of birds.”
He says it without hesitation or doubt, without any question that there will be a next time. In two weeks, they’ll drive to the high desert and will lie together on another motel bed beneath a greasy headboard. And then she’ll watch him pull on his boxer shorts as she does now, watch him button his shirt over the broad chest and soft belly, watch him stuff the ends into his chinos and cinch the belt. Until then, she needs nothing else. Or almost nothing. “You should go to the dermatologist,” she says. “There’s a dark mole on your back. It looks angry.”
“I know,” he says. “Beth told me.”
“Oh. Good. I’m glad she’s paying attention.”
“I’ve got an appointment next week.”
“On our way home,” she says, surprised at the catch in her voice, “there’s a gallery I want to check out.”
“I’ve got to take the girls to jujitsu at four.”
“It won’t take long.”
His expression is tight, pinched, full of aggravation, but also certain of her devotion. “Can we just do our job and worry about other things later?”
“I’ll lead the meeting today,” she says, trying to match his confidence, and then waits until he has passed through the door to shuffle behind him, favoring her wounded foot. Beyond the parking lot, fog obscures everything.