At first, there was only one carnation, a single pink flower, shimmering petals on a naked stem. It seemed he was observing it through the eyes of a paper mask, peepholes that constricted, circumscribed, his vision. He was afraid to see more or to want to see more. To want to see more deserved some form of punishment, although he was unsure who would perform the punishment or what form the punishment would take.
The carnation had some sort of history, a story behind it. He was sure it belonged to someone, but he didn't know who this person could be, what kind of person would possess it, wear it. An old woman? A young man? A store clerk? A relative? Faces came to him, images of past acquaintance. None of the faces claimed association with the pink carnation. The carnation itself looked fragile, as though human touch would bend it, break it in two.
He started to itch, an allergy, a desire. He was allergic to flowers, to carnations in particular. Since when? And why? The itching broke into goose pimples on bare arms and legs, and a sudden gust of wind lifted the mask from his eyes, opened his vision. He closed his eyes, squinting them shut, but he could see through his lashes more carnations, a growing field of them, the original carnation lost in the haze of their swaying.
His breathing became labor, hard work. He couldn't breathe for the fragrance. Too many. It wasn't so bad when there had been only one, but now so many. The air polluted his lungs with perfume. And then he knew his location, knew why so many flowers surrounded him. He was at a funeral, in attendance, and the flowers enclosed him within a tent of stultifying aroma, as if death's vanguard, life's chief sense, were smell. He guessed, although he didn't know this for a fact, that he was simply one of the observers. He hoped, although he didn't know this for a fact, that he was not the observed. He watched through pinched eyelids, glimpsing, but not permitting himself to see.
If it was a dream, it was one he carried with him. He couldn't remember when he had first dreamed it. In school? At a desk? As a boy? When? In the beginning, there had not been so many carnations. In the first dream, the original, there had been only one, the first flower he saw in each repetition, each reincarnation, as it were. He didn't have to be asleep to dream this dream. His eyes did not have to be closed. The dream seemed to violate all the rules of dreaming. There was no law to the dream, only order, a sense of routine.
He felt it was only a matter of time before the flowers suffocated him during his dreaming. He believed they would cover his body like pimples or boils. He would inhale the stems through his nostrils, the petals would clog his sinuses, and that would be an end of him. More like drowning than suffocating. A swimming and then a sinking in flowers.
Albert, Mrs. Burroughs' son, was a long way off down the beach. His toes left imprints in the sand like a fanning of seashells, and the gulls circled overhead in a frenzied halo as he tossed bread from a cellophane wrapper into the air. A dog trotted at the boy's heels, and when the boy ran out of bread for the gulls, he turned the chase on the dog, which outran him clinching a bicycle inner tube in its jaws, something it had found washed upon the shore and adopted as a plaything, a possession to keep from the boy.
The dog easily outran the boy, just as the boy easily outran the man. They had youth, and youth meant energy. The dog would age seven years in another year, and seven more years the year after that, just as the man felt that he, too, was aging more rapidly than the calendar allowed.
And the boy? Perhaps he was aging, too. It was hard to tell.
Besides being Mrs. Burroughs' son, Albert was general handyman and sometime porter for the Waybread Inn, taking his orders from Mrs. Burroughs directly, yet punching eyeholes through paper napkins at the dinner table, peering at his mother as though through the eyes of a mask, distracting her to the point that Finch was able to feed bits of meat to the dog begging under the table. He had spent four summers watching the boy grow from an imp who played at mopping floors and nailing old fence posts together into something just short of adolescence, someone who could now climb the ladder and change the big block letters that spelled out seasonally appropriate specials and messages on a fluorescent backlit sign for the eyes of northbound motorists on their way to Westcot. One of these messages read: JUDGE NOT UNTIL YOU SEE YOUR ROOM. Another said: LOVE THY NEIGHBOR UNLESS THEY'RE MAKING NOISE. Albert arranged the letters in crooked lines, like knots of stiffened laundry dangling from clothespins. They spelled messages of the soul, which were regularly ignored by motorists racing toward the resorts of Westcot, where the beaches comprised actual sand instead of the Waybread Inn's nameless grit and the messages were less taxing of the spirit and conscience: FREE MASSAGE WITH VISIT or TWO SLEEP FOR THE PRICE OF ONE.
The neon tubing above Mrs. Burroughs' messages still advertised the predecessor of the Waybread Inn before it became the Waybread Inn and was still known to locals as Charlies, without an apostrophe.
And Charlie, without an 's' or apostrophe, had been Mrs. Burroughs' husband before he was lost at sea--or rather to sea, as Mrs. Burroughs liked to remind herself. Neighbors--mainly residents of the inn next door--had last seen Charlie sunning himself on a lawn chair on the beach before the tide set in. They had strolled by with baby strollers, jogged by in jogging shoes, walked by with walking canes or beach umbrellas, waved or hollered 'hello,' and then had never seen him again, once the tide had come and carried him away, like a piece of floating raft for sea-weary gulls to take their perch.
Although a body had never been found, Mrs. Burroughs kept up her hopes. And that was the one thing Finch liked about Mrs. Burroughs: her ability to sustain a series of hopes. He liked the way she responded to him, handling his complaints and queries with bluff lines: "The walls are too thin, you say? Too much noise through the walls? It's that traveling salesman again. His electric razor, I'm sure. I'll ask Albert to have a little word with him." "The curtains again? Won't close properly, you say? Always leave a crack between? Well, the day I breed a clientele of peeping Toms will be the day I resign my mantle in favor of poor Albert over there. Nevertheless, I'll have Albert take a look at them."
Finch found himself fond of her, discovered a store of impressions he had collected over the summers he visited her beach below Westcot--ever since the death of his own wife--spending as little as two weeks and as many as two months with Mrs. Burroughs and her son. He felt that in the common denominator of their respective losses they shared the grounds for a friendship, or if not a friendship, at least a matured acquaintance, and that in some ways a relationship had already been started.
"Give her time. Give her more time," he thought to himself. "She must give her husband seven years' notice, seven years' chance of return, and it has only been four summers since I have been visiting her and her son." But there were dreams he dreamed in which he and Albert and Mrs. Burroughs made a family, united in carol around the odd-and-end business of managing the Waybread Inn, yet always in this daydreaming, Mrs. Burroughs' husband would find his way out of the sea, a return of the mummy, dragging along the lawn chair on which he had floated, chained to its aluminum frame by long strands of seaweed, which also bandaged his arms and wrapped around his legs and eyes.
"What is rosemary?" Albert asked, carrying the inner tube loosely at his shoulder, the dog leaping at his heels for it. "Mother used to sing me asleep with rosemary rhymes, but now she says they're different, like beads I must play with."
The waves lolled onto the beach like a metronome, and the grit felt cold between his toes, as he treaded with the boy the jagged line of the waves' farthest reach.
Feelings, not words, he thought. Feelings, not words. Too many words in his head, and not enough feeling. No feeling but there had to be words to outline the feeling, to give it a shape. Such a thing to be cursed with, one's mind.
The dog snatched the inner tube from the boy, and Albert was off again, a flashing of silver hands and feet in the cool light of dawn.
They chased each other in circles around a woman at the far end of the beach, but the woman didn't seem bothered. She lay like a sliver of driftwood in a cot, a hammock suspended between portable arms of a wooden frame, the wind teasing strands of hair into a mimicry of stage fright, hair all on end. They traveled in circles, boy and dog, in mad gambol for the inner tube, like characters out of a derelict bedtime story, churning themselves into oleo-margarine.
It seemed the woman had been sunbathing early. Too early, he thought. Yet swimsuit clad. Bare legs. Bare arms. Bare shoulders. And the chill something only youth could bear. He himself, though barefoot, was dressed in chamois vest and dungarees rolled below the knee.
He whistled for the dog through his teeth, but produced a mere spittle of saliva. Albert approached instead, wearing the inner tube above his ears like a laurel, a victory wreath.
"Mutt," Finch said. "Settle down."
The dog was all springs and leaps for the inner tube, but he unwound a rope that he wore as a loose belt from his waist and managed to fasten it around the dog's neck like a noose.
"Quiet," he commanded the dog. "Heel."
The dog wrestled with the leash as though out of a straitjacket. He dragged the dog along the sand, leaving a wake like that from a whisk broom, bruising the dog's fur, all against the grain.
"Mother says we must whisper," Albert said, "when we know someone to be asleep. So as not to enter their dreams."
The woman lay quite still, as though a sculpture abandoned by an artist-lover. Her swimsuit was made of thin straps, barely covering ornaments of flesh, and he could see that this made an impression on the boy, as well. Albert knelt in the sand, drawing squares and circles with his forefinger.
He recognized her as the mysterious guest in Room #7, now laid out in full view of boy and man. She had kept to herself for three full days now, eluding conversation, quietly sidestepping to allow passage in the narrow upstairs hall. She hadn't attended the meals laid out by Mrs. Burroughs in the communal dining room: breakfast, lunch, or supper. Still, in the three days of her stay, he thought he had detected the hallmarks of a routine. Generally, she would emerge late from her room, mid-afternoon. He had watched her from a window, combing the beach, picking up and discarding any number of shells, then standing still, staring out to sea. He had paused outside her door the night before on his way to his own room, pressing his ear near the jamb. He had overheard the thin flame of a radio: Country-Western heartbreak, mournful lyrics of loss and departure. And then something more, barely detectable: a stifled sobbing underlay the twanging leak of noise.
He had asked Mrs. Burroughs about her during yesterday's dinner, but she politely rebuffed his inquiries: "She will let us know in her own good time, I'm sure. The thing for you and I to do, Mr. Finch, is to give her a modicum of privacy. One thing I do not approve of in any form is snooping."
But then she had folded her napkin on her lap and leaned his way, lowering her chin and producing the hint of a smile. "If you should learn anything, you'll let me be the first to know?" she whispered. And Finch had tilted his head, pretending offense at the suggestion.
"What's wrong with her?" the boy asked.
Wrong? he thought. Wrong?
It hadn't occurred to him anything might be wrong. But even the dog sensed something. It shuffled underfoot, pawing the sand: incipient holes for invisible bones. It sat on its haunches, apparently self-conscious, scratching a flea from its ear. Then it stood on all fours, pacing the leash around Finch's ankles, forcing him to goosestep, a flamingo on tiptoe, to avoid entanglement.
So: there were things he didn't perceive, things he couldn't anticipate. Things that others saw: a boy and a dog. Just as there were things he saw which he imagined no one else could see. Images which were his alone, his burden through life.
The woman held one arm across her stomach, while her other arm slunk toward the ground, fingers touching the rim of a half-filled glass of transparent liquor: gin Finch guessed by the smell, or the absence of smell. He discovered the bottle, half-buried in sand. Its label confirmed his suspicion. He stooped to touch the woman's wrist lightly, so as not to wake her. It wasn't so much a taking as a touching of her hand, a searching for pulse.
A smudge of white substance adhered to the woman's nose, a dab of cold crème or suntan lotion. The white splotch, like a birthmark, endeared him to the woman. He was reminded of his wife, her carelessness revealed in an abstract strand of hair, a forgotten earring.
He remembered the time they had made love in Roosevelt Park, in the autumn leaves beneath a maple tree in broad moonlight without a blanket. Dead twigs had left imprints on her back and thighs that had looked like the meandering footsteps of a small nocturnal mammal, a weasel or mouse.
The second hand of his watch closed the distance back to the twelve-mark, and he dropped his fingers from her wrist. He felt himself involved in myth on this morning, kneeling beside this woman, and he resisted the impulse to lean over and kiss her on the cheek. The waves, in their plunge onto shore, entered his mind like a tympani of daydream, and his study of the woman seemed to rest on the monotony of the sound, a lulling of consciousness.
"Albert," he said, and the boy looked up from his drawing in the sand. "Albert, I want you to do something for me. I need you to make a phone call."
"A phone call?" Albert repeated to make sure.
"Yes, a phone call. I need you to call an ambulance. Can you do that? Do you know how to do that?"
"Yes," Albert replied. "I think so."
He took the makeshift leash from Finch's hand. The dog strained against the leash, forepaws digging in the sand. The boy contemplated the woman, lying on her cot, and then looked into Finch's eyes.
"Will she be all right?" he asked.
"Yes," he answered. "I think so. Yes."
As the boy left, his sight was startled by the presence of a pink carnation. Its stem taunted him like a beckoning finger, bending with the sound of the waves, bending back again with the interlude of silence between. The carnation was a warning, a momentary blur of the woman's features, her face. He heard the dog begin to whine far off, like a schoolboy's lament, the whining blending with the sound of the waves, providing a counterbalance to the vision of flowers and calling him back to reality.
The woman's purse lay under the cot, like a prayer book in the shadow of a pew. Unzipped, it had vomited half its contents onto the sand: toothbrush, hand mirror, hairbrush, toenail clippers. A future archeologist, uncovering the contents of her purse, assembling the items on a table, would be able to say something about this woman and, by extension, the age, the time, in which she had lived.
As for himself, he was no Sherlock Holmes. He retrieved the woman's change purse. He discovered a driver's license within. "Mary," he read. "Mary Phillips." In the picture in the license, she seemed so innocent. Her eyes had squinted against the camera flash. Two days ago, she had turned just twenty-one years old.
He felt for her pulse once again--no change. The heartbeat was slow but regular. Her breathing was hesitant, but he could still detect the shallow rising and falling of her chest.
He was glad she was still wearing her sunglasses. The green lenses reflected his face back to him, preventing any penetration of her eyes.
"Hey!" he heard behind him, a distant shout along the shore.
He turned stiffly on his haunches. A photographer had set up a camera on a tripod. The camera sprouted an extraordinarily long telephoto lens. The photographer waved his hand repeatedly to the side, palm outward, a movement he might use to shoo away a fly.
The presence of the photographer angered him. Finch looked at the inn, a white, clapboard building on the hilltop above the dunes. A thread of white smoke snarled out of the chimney, frail handwriting against the steel of the sky. Hopefully, Albert had made his phone call.
He stood to confront the photographer. He took three steps along the beach. The carnations returned, a blanch in his eye, a fragrance in nostril. He tried blinking them out of consciousness, but they returned more heavily, more oppressive than ever. He maintained a vague idea of punching the photographer squarely in the nose, but the photographer kept waving him out of the way, out of his line of sight.
He had an elusive feeling of collapsing onto the beach. His fingers instinctively went to his throat, searching his neck for its jugular. And then he heard a distant rush of footsteps in the sand.
