After This Read Online Free PDF Page B

own spit of island, and even the neighborhood backyard pools had
been drained and dismantled.
    Beneath this watery light the room itself was in steady shadow.
His wife was beside him, buried in pillows. He was fifty-one and
would be a new father again by the end of the year. This morning,
woken by the wind, he had put his thumb to each fingertip, counting
decades.
    The children ran ahead. A white trail of sand cut through the
scrub pine and the yellowing beach grass, rising across the dunes and
then dropping down again to the wide white beach that then itself
dropped down again, sharply, a kind of cliff, a kind of collapse—the
way the children felt their breaths collapse, coming to its edge, to the
terrific thunderclap of the ocean.
    The sand here, at their feet as they looked down from the dry
cliff, was dark gray, the color of a thundercloud. The children bowed,
putting down their toys (plastic machine guns, a football, a shoe box
filled with green army men and small, camouflaged jeeps), unlaced
their sneakers, and jumped down, arms raised, heels digging into the
falling sand of the seawall.
    Not a soul.
     
At the foot of the dunes, John Keane dropped the wool blanket
and the tufted pillow and the teddy bear, unhooked the quilted
hamper from his shoulder and his wife’s hand from the crook of his
arm. He felt the wind raise the sand and fling it, stinging, into his
cheek, saw his wife pull the folded edge of her scarf over the side of
her face, turning away from him and the blowing sand.
     
He picked up the wool blanket and moved it farther inside the
dunes, to a shallow valley where even the sound of the moving air
seemed suddenly to retreat. He spread the blanket, walked out again
to lift the tufted pillow and the bear and the plaid quilted hamper,
then returned a third time to give her his arm.
     
She stood, holding the edge of her colorful scarf over her cheek,
shading her eyes with the other. Her face made harsh and unlovely by
the sand and the wind and the deep line between her eyes.
     
“Sit back here,” he said. “You’ll be out of the wind.”
     
Under her chin, the bright red-and-blue tails of her scarf rose,
writhed, paddled the air. “I can’t see them,” she said.
     
He looked toward the ocean, the forlorn image of the abandoned
sneakers and toys—the shoe box had already lost its lid—at the edge
of the known world where the sand disappeared and there was only
water and sky.
     
“I’ll tell them to come up,” he said and knew she would not
move—some vestigial habit of her race or of her sex, this frowning
vigil at the edge of the sea—until he had returned them to her sight.
     
He crossed the wide breadth of beach, hearing their voices coming
to him on the wind before he saw them at the shoreline. The two boys
were stamping at the creamy edges of the waves—making small
explosions of water and wet sand—his daughter down on her
haunches, examining something, a mussel or a crab or just the
mysterious, bubbling holes that opened and closed like mouths under
the retreating waves.
     
Beyond them, the ocean was high, whitecapped, agitated. There
were disks of black and gray as well as gold among the rushing swells.
In the panhandle, in the Carolinas, metal blinds had been drawn, iron
awnings brought down on the white houses that were bunkers now,
among the palm trees and the flamingos. But here the sky was mostly
blue and clear, except for a few white, rushing clouds just above the
horizon.
     
Some vestige of his race or of his sex made him think, whenever
he looked out across the ocean: As it was before me and as it will be
long after I’m gone. For the second time today, he touched his thumb
to his fingertips. He could make it to the 1980s or 1990s, perhaps even
to the next century, when the new baby would be grown, maybe with
children of his or her own. But even with the best of luck, it would not
be equal to the time he’d already