“Hunh,” she said, impressed in spite of herself. “So who owned this cottage?”
They were crossing Kent Island, with its commercial strip of outlet stores and fast-food franchises. It was all very familiar. “My parents,” he replied.
“The Durans?”
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said, “but—yes. The Durans. That was their name.”
“The Durans weren’t your parents.”
“These ‘Durans’ were.”
She looked away in frustration.
Somehow, even though it was long before dawn and there was no way to see beyond the stores, Duran could feel the nearness of the ocean. Maybe it was the sense that there was nothing behind the stores, no backdrop, no forms or shapes, no distant points of light.
“I remember so much,” he said, talking as much to himself as Adrienne. “I remember where we kept a key, under the third white rock in a series of rocks arranged along the walkway. I remember the battered Monopoly game that we kept at the beach. One year the shoe piece went missing, and my mother went crazy looking for it. It was her favorite piece.” He smiled. “She used to say: ‘I guess I’ll have to settle for the iron.’ Like it was a big disappointment.”
They were rolling through the flat farmland of the Delmarva peninsula, the horizon an invisible line between the black earth and even darker sky. An occasional silo rose from the ground, where metal skeletons of irrigation equipment stood idle in fields of stubble corn. Every few miles, they passed produce stands that were boarded up for winter, hand painted signs leaning against the ramshackle buildings:
Arriving at an intersection, where signs pointed north to Rehoboth and south to Ocean City, Duran hesitated, unsure of which way to go.
“Take 113,” Adrienne told him.
“But—”
“Trust me,” she said. “I used to live around here, remember?”
Duran frowned. “No.”
“Oh, that’s right,” she remarked in a sarcastic voice. “You had us down south. Where was it? Alabama?”
“South Carolina,” Duran told her.
“Turn left.”
About forty-five minutes later, they drove through Denton, Delaware, detouring past the house that Adrienne said she and Nikki had lived in. It was a tidy brick rancher, with a vinyl carport, and a mailbox painted with morning glory vines. In the front yard were a pair of trees whose rounded crowns had been gutted to accommodate a power line.
Half an hour later, they were on the outskirts of Bethany Beach, the horizon pink with dawn. Duran could feel the excitement mounting within him. Once he saw the beach house—once he actually stood before it—the past would be his again. And undeniably so. He could show it to Adrienne—the white rocks and outdoor shower, the little garden. Even if the place had changed, it would still be the same. He was sure of it.
Soon, he was announcing their arrival. “Coming up—the Bethany Beach totem pole!” A minute later, they rounded a curve and there it was, the towering kitsch emblem that marked the intersection of Main St. and Highway 1-A. As they drove closer, he could make out the elongated face of the Indian carved into the wood. It was like seeing an old friend. He remembered, with sharp nostalgia, arriving at this intersection as a boy, how he and his father shared a ritual, filling the car with war whoops.
“When’s the last time you were here?” Adrienne asked.
He thought about this, but… “I don’t know. I was just a kid.”
When the street dead-ended at the steps to the boardwalk, he turned left onto a road that ran parallel to the beach.
“Were you thinking we could stay here?” Adrienne asked. “I mean, if you can’t remember the last time you went to the cottage, it’s not like it’s still in your family, is it?”
She was right, of course, but he didn’t know what to say—and that was strange, even to him. He’d never given a thought to the cottage. Was it still his? Was it ever his? It ought to be, but he couldn’t say for sure. The question had never come up. But now that he thought about it: no, he hadn’t been here since his parents died. His only memories of the place were childhood memories. Yahtzee and Boggle, Monopoly, and playing in the waves.
But all that would resolve itself, Duran thought, as soon as he saw the place.
Some of the houses they passed were modern and built on stilts to protect them from hurricanes. These tended to be much bigger than the old cottages, with elaborate multilevel decks. Fabric flags—lighthouses, crabs, sunflowers, ghosts—snapped in the breeze. The new houses were unfamiliar to him but everything else was just as he remembered it, right down to the realtors’ signs beside every other driveway. For Rent: Anna Liotta, Hickman Realtors. For Rent: Connor Realty Co. Same old firms. They would rent out the beach houses on a weekly basis all summer long—when the families who owned them were not in residence. He tried to remember if his own family had stayed at the beach all through the summer, but he couldn’t.
“Well?” Adrienne asked.
“What?”
“I asked you—”
“I don’t know,” he told her in a distracted voice. “I don’t know what happened to Beach Haven after my parents died.”
“But you should—”
“I just want to see it,” he insisted. “And anyway—it’s right around the corner.” Turning left onto Third Avenue, he recited the numbers: “One-thirteen. One-eleven. It’s the fifth house, on the left. Right… there.”
It was an old cottage, a little shabby. The sign that hung from the post beside the walkway trembled in the wind.
He stepped from the car, and stared. Adrienne got out, and came around to his side. The air was fresh with the smell of the sea, and they could hear the ocean’s susurrating boom, just a block away. “They changed the name,” Adrienne observed. “So that answers one question. Someone named Gill bought the place.”
Duran shook his head. “This isn’t it.”
“What?”
He put his hand on his forehead, and closed his eyes, recalling the things that just weren’t there: the wraparound porch and wide wooden steps to the front door, the dormered windows on the second floor. He tried to understand how the house in his head could have been changed—remodeled—to resemble the one in front of him: a narrow frame structure with two steps up to the door, no porch, no dormers. No hydrangeas, either, and no white rocks to hide a key.
“This isn’t it,” he repeated.
At Adrienne’s suggestion, they drove up and down the streets of Old Bethany for nearly an hour. Maybe he’d gotten the address wrong. Maybe it had been torn down. Maybe. But try as he did to superimpose the house in his memory on the landscape before him, it didn’t work. Beach Haven was a figment.
“God,” Adrienne said when they stopped for coffee and she took a good look at the crumpled mess that was the rear of the Stratus. “I’m in for it with Budget.” A little laugh escaped her. “Of course, at fifteen bucks a day, I waived the collision coverage.”
“I’ll pay you back.”
She shook her head. “Forget it. My credit card will cover it. It’s just—there’s going to be a ton of paperwork.”
Going inside the Dream Cafe, they found themselves the target of half a dozen stares. “My God, what happened to you?” the waitress asked, seeing the matted blood behind Adrienne’s ear.
“I hit my head,” she replied, and got up to go to the ladies’ room.
While she was away, Duran sat, brooding over his latte. He knew, now, that something was terribly out of whack—that he wasn’t who he seemed to be, that his memories weren’t his own. Not the long-term memories, at least.
But last night was real—of that he was sure. He was sure because he hurt in so many places. His ribs ached, and his tongue was cut in a way that made it painful to speak. And not only that: his imagination wasn’t up to inventing the sound he kept hearing, the crack of his assailant’s neck as Duran drove his foot into the man’s chin.