The Time to Nana’s
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Although she knows it isn’t true, the way the sand is moving under Mila on this Florida beach makes her feel as though it loves her back. The other people here are day drinking their spring breaks to absolution. To them, she is nothing more than driftwood, prone and still. They do not love her back. But the sand itself, which cradles her quietly, yielding to her as she settles, seems like it might.
Mila has been brought on a vacation by some guys from her high school, most of whom she hardly knows. They left her here a little while ago, off in search of alcohol. Mila shifts, and the sand allows for her motion easily. She opens one eye and squints along the plane of the beach, as though she’ll find the straight line of time connecting the present to the future somewhere in its endless crests and falls. How long has she been here? An hour?
The hour is a funny thing. Once, to Mila, the abstraction of an hour was simply another way to explain the time it took to be driven to Nana’s. There was the settling into the carseat to be buckled in, the small mercy of being unbuckled at the end of the drive, and in between was the time of an hour. So they became synonymous with one another. Her parents would tell her that they would be back from grocery shopping in one hour; this was one drive to Nana’s. Or that they were leaving for Nana’s at two o’clock; so they would arrive at three o’clock.
When Mila got her driver’s license, she began to drive herself to Nana’s twice a week, totaling four individual hours of time, two going hours and two returning hours. On these drives, Mila could choose which radio station to play and whether the windows would be rolled down. Some of the songs on the radio were always good, and in between good songs, her mind would make itself scarce, just for the little while. Pretty soon the hour would have passed and she would find herself at Nana’s.
Lately, Mila has been feeling that maybe the hour can’t be trusted like she thought it could. Take this beach, for instance, which she can’t help but feel loves her back. Has it been more or less than an hour since the guys left here? Mila can’t say; they’re strangely mutable, these hours. Perhaps this is a function of her upcoming graduation from high school, that she is closing in on a linear and finite set of remaining hours. Or maybe it’s that, right now, she is on someone else’s vacation.
* * *
The guys have found beer. This is a miracle of the biblical variety. In the evening, to celebrate, they order pizza and drink themselves half to death around a shoddily constructed bonfire on the patio of their rented home. Mila is holding her second drink and watching Peter retch into the low bushes that separate the deck from the sea, having consumed too many beers in too short a time. It’s the way it’s all about to end, Mila thinks, that makes them act like this.
Peter is, presumably, the reason why she’s here. They’d slept together at a party that they’d both crashed, two castaways having hoisted themselves aboard someone else’s ship. He’d liked her for eight years, and she’d never returned the feelings. It was that simple, and that cruel. She knows precisely why she was brought along on this vacation: if not to sleep with him, to sleep with someone. It’s a coveted position, by high school standards. Before she left, she and her friends had all laughed together over the guys’ obvious, omnidirectional desperation. Later, in the privacy of their own bedrooms, Mila imagines they’d wondered why her, and not them. Mila isn’t special, after all.
The guys are performing, for her and for one another. Nate shotguns a beer and then crushes the can in his fist in triumph. He looks over at Mila to make sure she’s seen. Two weeks ago, he fumbled his skinny limbs onto the varsity baseball team; this has gone to his head. Two of the guys are wrestling, and another is mocking one of the freshmen on the JV baseball team, where the rest of the guys have been placed, to uproarious laughter. Peter has rejoined the group with a beer in hand. He hasn’t lost that little-kid roundness in his face yet. He doesn’t look much different than he did in the third grade, when Mila and Peter first shared a class. His fingers grip the can too tightly, breaking the firelit condensation on its silver exterior, like he’s nervous it’s going to leap from his hands if he isn’t careful.
* * *
At some later point, Mila finds herself in the kitchen, thirsty from the beer. She doesn’t turn the lights on as she gropes around the counter for a decently clean cup for water. The kitchen’s linoleum floor is littered with crumbs and wrappers. Half of a cold Hawaiian pizza sits in an open cardboard box. The stove spells out the time in green numbers. They won’t stay in line long enough for her to make sense of them. Mila squints. She’s drunker than she realized.
Peter comes into the kitchen. He tears off a slice of pizza and then notices Mila propped up against the stove. “Want some?” he asks through a mouthful of dough.
Mila shakes her head. On this particular vacation, eating freely would be a social sin. “Peter, what time is it?”
He heaves himself up onto the counter. “Dunno.”
“How long have I been gone?”
“No clue.”
“Oh.”
“You planning on rejoining us anytime soon? We miss you out there.”
No, they don’t. “Yeah. Sorry.”
“Nah, it’s all good.” His hands twitch on the faintly-lit countertop. “So, uh. It’s our last night. Nice that we got booze, right?”
“Yeah. It’s nice.”
“My brother’s friend from college hooked us up,” Peter explains. “Pretty cool of him.” Mila thinks of the clammy hands that gripped her waist, clinging too tightly, at that peculiar party six weeks prior, as though they were about to dance in some bygone era. Relax, she had wanted to tell him. I’m not going anywhere. Not yet, at least.
“Very cool.”
Mila can pin down one number on the display above the stove, but then the others float up murkily, as though rising through water.
Now Peter approaches her hesitantly, maneuvering himself down the counter, stopping right beside where she wavers. “Honestly, I get why you’re in here. I know the guys can be kind of immature.”
“Mmm.”
“Don’t get me wrong, they’re my boys. But we’re about to graduate. It’s time to grow up a little, you know?” He sighs and runs a hand through his hair. Mila feels sorry for how hard he’s trying, and for how long into this trip it’s taken him to come and say a few words to her alone.
“I guess so,” says Mila. He was sweet at the party, overly nervous, fumbling with the condom in whatever strange bed they wound up in together, but he was only trying his best. A JV senior on the baseball team. He runs hand through his hair again and looks away, a little sadly, because he can’t quite bring himself to look right at her. They can both hear Nate’s voice booming outside through the screen door, jocular and triumphant.
On her way out she takes his hand for a moment and says, “Thanks again for inviting me. It’s been fun.” She goes outside, sparing him a response. She doesn’t care to face what might wash up, whatever strange and melancholic beast he both harbors and battles, a creature whose conception she can’t help but feel responsible for.
* * *
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Later, Mila and the guys wander down to the beach and drop themselves onto an empty stretch. One guy starts playing tinny music on his phone, and another tells him: don’t put your phone in the sand, dumbass, your phone’s gonna get sand in it. Overhead, the world is a blue-black fist of nighttime, luscious as a bruise. A few stars puncture the darkness.
The guys are talking about Mila’s friends. Each guy lists each girl they’ve slept with. As far as Mila knows, they’re mostly bluffing. One girl is mocked for the sparkly shirts she still wears. Mila knows that the girls who aren’t named suffer a worse fate than the sparkly-shirt girl, who is at least awarded the privilege of attention.
Someone finally shouts over to Mila, “Sorry, we’re talking about your friends.”
“It’s cool. I won’t tell.” Of course she will. They’ll ask, and she’ll try to be kind and try to be honest, as if the two can be reconciled.
Now the boys are reminiscing on past baseball seasons. You remember that one year, how good we were? one guy asks. It’s the nostalgia of the whole thing, Mila thinks dimly. All that unaddressed fondness they’re harboring, sloshing around and half-alive, and none of them are allowed to confess it to anyone, not to themselves, and never, ever to one another. But it’s why Nate and Peter have decided to run into the ocean, their shirts discarded on the sand, and are now thrashing in a tempest of roughhousing that must be a game because they can’t admit that, on some level, it’s real. It’s why the boys are so careful to keep to the facts of the past, the statistics and numbers and quirks of their teammates and their games, steering around anything subjective.
Nate comes up from the ocean, shaking water from ropy lupine limbs and sporting a smirk as he approaches. He sits down next to her and says, “Hell, that was cold.”
“You’re pretty brave to go in,” Mila tells him.
“You wanna give it a try?” he asks, looking straight at her and then over to the guys, smirking.
“I think I like it up here,” Mila says.
“Fair enough.”
“Hey, I don’t know if I ever told you, but congrats on making varsity.”
“Aw, that’s nothing. I was basically on varsity last year too. I played in a bunch of the games. They just couldn’t say, cuz they didn’t want to make the other guys feel bad or whatever.”
“No, seriously. It’s so cool. I’ll bet you’re, like, really, good.”
She lets him rough her up a little, feeling the sand morph smoothly underneath her. It’s the last night, after all, and the mixture of alcohol, stars, and the ocean’s warm breath soften out all the edges so that Mila can almost forgive herself for allowing it to happen.
When it’s clear that he doesn’t know what to do next, she rolls herself out from under him and sits up.
He exhales heavily and puts his head in his hands for a moment. Then, too loudly for the distance they’re at from the group, which has gone notably quiet, he yells, “I’m going back up. It’s fucking late.”
How the fuck would he know what time it is? one guy asks. Another says something about Peter, who is still in the water, and everyone snickers. It’s alright, Mila thinks. Nate can say they would’ve, but that she wanted to stop. He won’t lose face.
Mila lies back again and attempts to divvy the enormity of the nighttime sky into something that makes sense. When they all fly home tomorrow, Mila will drive from the airport right to Nana’s. Mila will bring her cottage cheese and sardines from the grocery store, and Nana will tell her the same old stories in the fusty nursing home room. In these stories, characters and locations undergo changes at random, as if Nana is pulling proper nouns from a bingo wheel full of all of the proper nouns she has ever known. Since last spring, Nana hasn’t been allowed to play bingo with the other residents. She had taken to babbling incoherently over the announcer, shouting forth places and years that have long passed and now mean nothing. Although seventeen years ago she chose Mila’s name, she now calls Mila by any number of nouns: Martha, Jesus, salmon.
* * *
After a while, the guys make their way back to the house. Now that it’s just Mila on the shore, Peter whoops freely in glee. The waves swallow him up and spit him out carelessly. The tide has been coming in all night, approaching Mila slowly and steadily. Without thinking, she stands and walks down into the ocean, still in all of her clothes.
She sinks up to her mouth, putting her knees into the shifting sand. As the taste of the burning water washes over her tongue, she forgets about the hours and trips that await her, the prom that will lacquer romance over all of the wasted eighteen-year-olds, the senior prank which will make a martyr over whoever is suspended, the classes from which nobody has anything left to learn. In the enormous blue cold, her heart surges forth alongside the tide, demanding something which she will not provide.
Then Peter is standing in front of her, tugging her upward.
“Come on!” he shouts, pulling her upwards. “Don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel it?”
She keeps her knees in the sand, refusing his insistence that she acknowledge this night as anything more than stars and water. After a little while, Peter lets her go and keeps on plunging and diving, now silent, as though the ocean is holding his voice captive.
* * *
Peter and Mila sit side by side at the water’s edge and watch the sun come up. The sand still loves Mila, cradling her weight with soft arms. After six days here, she’s starting to think that maybe it will love her no matter what, that its love is unconditional. Peter’s shoulders are beaded with water. His head hangs between his spread knees.
“Nate came on to me,” Mila says, “while you were swimming.”
“Oh.” Peter doesn’t look at her. The sky lightens in the smallest of increments.
“I don’t like him or anything. I just don’t want you to be in the dark about it.”
It is after Peter has been quiet for a long time that the ocean delivers a carcass. At first, Mila is startled. Then, she thinks it must happen often, that she and Peter aren’t witnessing anything special. After all, death must be as ubiquitous in the ocean as it is everywhere else. The fish’s pale pink flesh and the last vestiges of iridescent scales tear away from a skeleton of wire-thin bones. Two gelatinous eyes bulge from its dull head, reflecting the rusty tinge of dawn. Once, maybe, this was a beautiful animal.
“You shouldn’t touch it,” Mila begins, but Peter has already stood up, picked up a stripped length of driftwood from a little ways away, and is prodding at the pale flesh as if he can’t help himself. The stench is growing, the primordial scent of something that shouldn’t see the light of day.
“I can’t stop thinking,” Peter says, in a gaunt voice, “about all the stuff that can never happen now. It’s like I’ve killed everything good that I’ve ever had a chance at.” He sounds weighed down; that strange creature, which Mila knows that she fed for far too long, is a heavy burden to carry.
“Peter, please, just leave it,” Mila says, and suddenly feels a great thrall of nausea. She keels over and purges a brackish mess of ocean and beer from herself onto the sand. When there’s no more left in her stomach and she lifts her head, he’s put the driftwood down and is staring at the fish silently.
He lays the wood down between the creature and the tide, delicately. He looks at her. The strange orange dawn alights on his wet face. “Is there anything— anything at all—”
“Do you want to know? Really?” she asks. Her mouth tastes filthy. She spits. “Peter, there wasn’t anything you could have done, and there isn’t anything you can do now. In six weeks we’ll take an awful picture together at graduation, and in six months we’ll be in different states, and in six years I won’t remember your name. I’ll call you Paul or something. Does that make you feel better? Is that some great revelation to you?”
Then she shuts up and lets him sob. She’ll never tell anyone about the way it sounds, how the noise contains the weight of thousands of hours that have all been knotted up into one huge, meaningless sadness. She lets the sound land in the widening distance between them.
“I know that you were trying,” Mila says finally. The sky has birthed yet another white-hot day.
“It’d be cool if you didn’t say anything to the guys,” he mutters, swiping angrily at his face, kicking up sand as he passes her by on the way back up the beach.
Mila buries the fish alone, gagging at the scent. She christens the grave with Peter’s abandoned driftwood, fingers an “M + P” into the sand.
* * *
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The nursing room smells of fish and antiseptic. Oil drips from Nana’s mouth from the sardines, which she eats directly from the can. Mila knows better than to wipe her lips, and watches Nana’s faded dress accumulate new stains over the ones that already exist.
“Mary, dear, have some sardines, won’t you?” Nana requests, and thrusts the can toward her. “You loved them so much as a girl. We never had these in the war, you know,” she says, her voice suddenly turning melancholy. Nana’s eyes are like twin mirrors, glassy and unfocused. The only part of her that still has control are her hands, which bring each whole fish to her lips. Nana has never lived through a war, but Mila is used to these embellishments.
“No, thank you, Nana. I’m not hungry,” replies Mila, smoothing Nana’s dress, bringing her hand to rest gently on her knee. She is dehydrated from the flight home and from the days spent loafing in the sun, and still nauseous from the morning. “Nana, will you tell me about when you were young?”
Nana smiles absently, gazing into some unknown point in the past. Her lips are coated in a thin sheen. “I’ve told you before.”
“I know, Nana. But I want to hear again. Tell me about your town.”
“Well, my town was called Port Measure, even though we weren’t anywhere near the coast. No, it was as far as anyone can get in Florida from the ocean. There wasn’t much to do in the summers, but my word! How hot it could get! And the wheat fields stretched out so flat in every direction, and in the sunlight it shined and rippled all silver, like water in the early morning.”
“That’s lovely, Nana,” Mila tells her sincerely. “Tell me about Mom and Pop’s farm. Was it nice to live there?” Through the many iterations of these stories, Mila has come to piece together moments of reality from Nana’s childhood. Mila has even come to love them, when they glimmer through the litany of falsehoods.
Nana suddenly drops the can. Its contents smear across her dress. She grips Mila’s hand tightly in both of her own. Her face turns stiff. “Did I ever tell you about the buried treasure?” she says hoarsely, and her eyes lock into Mila’s.
“No, Nana. You never did,” replies Mila, startled by the insistence of Nana’s grip
“I must confess to you now something which I have never told anybody.”
Mila glances over at the red button on the wall which will summon a nurse. But Nana’s eyes latch onto hers, and Mila is unable to wrench herself from the chair.
“It was the summer of 1793, the summer of the bank robbery. The robbers held the bankers hostage for hours. The teller finally gave up all the money in the vault and they ran. But they never made it out of town. The sheriff shot two of them dead, and they caught the third one in Oregon. He didn’t have the money, but rumor held that he had black dirt underneath his nails. So everyone whispered in town that in some farmer’s field was the sack with the stolen money, just waiting for that robber when he got out of jail.
“My twin sister, Loaf, it was our eighteenth birthday. We were just little girls—oh, Mila, we were so young. It was the hottest day of any summer anyone could remember, and we went out to the wheat fields to harvest. We brought our long blades. Loaf was always sickly as a child. Too thin. She was looking as pale as anything out there. When she tripped I saw the mound she had fallen over.”
“Nana, you didn’t have—” begins Mila, but Nana keeps speaking.
“I didn’t help her up. I got on my knees and began to scratch up the field, and when Loaf tried to stand, I hit her over the head with the butt of my blade. She laid out on the sand like some little skeleton, all bone. The poor little thing. So thin. I found the money. I ran through all the fields, faster than the devil so he couldn’t catch me, until I hit the highway, and caught the bus to the city. I met your grandfather. My life started.
“You have to understand, Mila,” Nana rasps, and Mila can see “I hated her for what she was. Six months later, I heard what happened. They found her dead in the field after three days. She was just skin and bone. They didn’t know what had done it. They couldn’t prove a thing.
“I didn’t care. I was married. Your mother was on the way. It was the spring of 1973, and your grandfather had a nice job at the bank, and I was in love.”
Although Mila is left speechless from this particular fiction, she notes dimly that at least part of Nana’s recollection is true: Mila’s mother had, in fact, been born that summer, and her grandfather had been a banker his whole life.
“Mila, it wasn’t that I killed her. It was that I could—not—care.”
The room reeks with the scent of spilled sardines. An ocean splits the distance between the red button and Mila. The instant in which Mila is paralyzed lasts longer than every drive it has ever taken her to come here. But Nana has folded her hands calmly in her lap and closed her eyes, as though she’s made her peace, as though she’s simply waiting for Mila to grasp what Nana has understood all along.
* * *
Later, Mila is told over and over that it isn’t her fault. The blood clot that reached Nana’s brain is common in Alzheimer’s patients. Nothing could have been done; she was dead before the ambulance reached the nursing home and found both Mila and Nana as still as specimens preserved in jars. It took them longer to remove Mila from the room than Nana; as it turns out, in some instances, the living are often worse off than the dead. Nana’s delusions had lasted for months. The nurses reassured Mila that they had heard endless iterations of violent stories, all of which were utterly invented.
Mila doesn’t believe it. All through the summer she has nightmares. She isn’t fun anymore; when Peter and his friends hang out, they never invite her. Instead they select among her friends. Each time, they are thrilled to be chosen. In the early morning twilight, just as their long, desperate nights are packing themselves up, always with the vague disappointment of unfulfilled longings, Mila awakes, always gagging up bile, always feeling that she is paying some estranged debt.