Page 1 of The Seascape Between Us

Chapter One

Daniel

When I was five years old, my father broke my arm. My parents had been fighting in the kitchen, their voices growing steadily louder while I pretended to watch TV and ignored the sick fear swelling inside me. My father was drunk. Again. His rising voice turned my skin cold and clammy. Normally when my father was drunk, and he started yelling, I made a beeline for my room and hid in my closet, covering my ears until the yelling stopped.

I can’t remember what was different that day. Maybe it was the fierce aggression in my father’s voice or the way he kept pounding his fist on the counter, making me jump every time. A strange energy hummed through me, and something just felt off. I was as afraid to run and hide as I was to stay. So, I stood up from the floor where I’d been trying to watch cartoons. My skinny legs trembled when I shuffled my way to the kitchen.

After similar incidents with my father, my mother had given me strict instructions to stay away from him when he got likethat—and even at just five years old, I knew ‘that’was code for when he was drinking. But I didn’t this time.

In the kitchen, my father’s big frame was crowding my mother, pushing her back against the kitchen counter. She was crying, and he had his arm back like he was going to hit her.

Fear burst inside me like fireworks, but instead of running and hiding like my mother had always warned me, I darted forward, wriggling my way between my parents while trying to push my father back.

He let out a curse and grabbed me roughly by the arm, his thick fingers digging in painfully while he dragged me down the short hallway. Once we reached my bedroom, he flung me inside.

I’m not sure if it had been the force he used when tossing me into my room or if he’d twisted my arm wrong, but something cracked and white, hot pain streaked through me. I collapsed to the floor, cradling my injured arm to my chest, and howled like a wounded animal.

After that, things turned fuzzy. I remember being at the hospital with my mother. She looked sad. The doctor who cast my arm was nice. He’d given me an orange lollipop when he was done. Then we were back at the three-story walkup where we lived. Instead of taking me inside and putting me to bed—it was already dark and past my bedtime—my mother told me to wait in the car, saying she'd be right back and not to unlock the doors for anyone.

She wasn’t gone long, probably five or ten minutes, max, but even that short time, alone in the dark, waiting for her, I’d been terrified she wouldn’t come back, that my father would be waiting for her in the dark like some sort of storybook monster come to life.

I was tired and scared, and my arm hurt. I wanted to go to bed. I wanted my stuffed elephant, Bob, whom I kept tuckedunder my arm while I slept. But mostly, I wanted my mom to hug me and tell me everything would be okay—even if I didn’t quite believe it. I’d been witness to too many of my father’s rages to truly believe we’d be okay, but it was still nice to hear, nice to pretend.

The car door opened suddenly, and I jumped, but relief smothered my fear when I saw my mother tossing a couple of messily packed duffel bags with our clothes onto the passenger seat next to her. The box of tampons, where she squirrelled away money—probably because it was the one place she could be assured my father would never have looked—poked out of her purse, and she passed Bob to me in the backseat.

“We’re going to be okay,” she told me, pulling the car door closed behind her. The locks on all the doors clicked into place. “He willneverput his hands on you again.”

Then she pulled out of the parking lot behind the building where I’d lived my first five years, and drove off, leaving Minneapolis behind. We drove until the sun rose and well into the day, stopping only to use the bathroom and pick up food that we ate while she kept driving. We stayed at a roadside motel, pulling in early in the morning—probably unable to drive safely any longer—but as the sun set the next day, we were back on the road.

I thought we’d drive forever, and maybe we would have, except once we hit Saltwater Cove, the only thing past the small Oregon town was the ocean. So, we stopped at the Seascape Hotel just past dawn, and with me hoisted on her hip, she went inside to ask about a room.

Ramona had been running the hotel back then, and I remembered how her eyes had widened when she looked at us—we must have looked as exhausted and hunted as we felt. She hadn’t asked for my mother’s name or a credit card. Hell, I couldn’t remember my mother even giving her anything fromher carefully guarded stack of bills that she had moved from the tampon box into her wallet. Instead, Ramona grabbed a key from the pegboard behind the desk and led us up to the second floor. My mother carried me, following Ramona down the narrow, open walkway in front of the rooms to a suite at the far end.

The sun had been slowly creeping up over the motel, turning the sand on the beach a soft pinkish orange. I looked over my mother’s shoulder at the deep blue ocean stretching out like forever, gulls squawking and swooping over the waves where the sun shimmered like liquid gold. At the ripe old age of five, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and for the first time since I’d heard my father’s voice start to rise in the kitchen, I felt like we’d be okay. I felt good, safe.

Now, thirty years later, sitting at one of the tables on the patio, my feet propped on the chair next to me, a cup of coffee steaming on the table, I was still awed by the beauty of the sun rising up over the hotel, turning the strips of gauzy cloud—the last remnants of last night’s rain—into streaks of pale purple and pink across the indigo sky.

I loved mornings like this, quiet and peaceful—at least for now. In an hour, maybe two, if I was lucky, the day would start, and I would spend the next eighteen hours putting out one fire after another. But for now, I had my coffee, the whisper of the surf sweeping up the beach and the sun brightening the sky.

I’d barely drained my coffee when June, the hotel’s night manager, slipped out from the restaurant onto the patio.

“We have a problem,” she said, weaving between the tables until she reached me.

I tensed and set my coffee cup back down on the table. “That doesn’t sound great.”

“It’s not. The couple in 208 said their ceiling started leaking sometime through the night, and it dripped onto their luggage.”

“Shit.” I leaned back, pinching the bridge of my nose and closing my eyes. I could almost picture dollar bills sprouting wings and flying away over the ocean with the gulls. I opened my eyes and stood. “Did you check the damage?”

June nodded. “They weren’t exaggerating. There’s water damage on the ceiling, and they hadn’t bothered to unpack, so dirty water had dripped onto their clothes for most of the night.”

That god damned roof again!“Okay, move them into 210, comp them for their stay, and promise to have their things cleaned. I’ll collect it all and take it to the dry cleaners.”

She snorted loudly. “What? Is this my first day? I’ve already moved them, reversed the charges and taken everything they needed to be cleaned. I’ll drop it off at the cleaners on my way home.”

I loved June. She was older, probably in her late sixties, heavyset, with a cloud of white hair curling under her chin. To look at her, she gave off sweet, grandmotherly vibes, but she was, in fact, one of the most efficient people I’d ever known. I never would have been able to keep the hotel running all these years without her.

“Thanks for taking care of all that,” I told her.

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