Category:

TWO

"You're thinking about a boy with wild blond hair, aren't you?"

I turned to see Punk smiling at me, the island breeze stirring a few loose tendrils around her face. That lady could always read my mind.

"You have to admit, Punk, he was something special. Still makes me a little wistful to think about him."

"Yes," she agreed, "he was special. But that hair, Edie..."

"Oh, come on! He was a California surfer boy. That was the look."

We laughed together at the memory of my first and only summer boyfriend, whom I'd met right here on Horn Island. An older man, seventeen to my sixteen—well, almost sixteen—Cole Donovan came here from Santa Barbara when his dad got a temporary assignment at Keesler Air Force Base. After he went back to the West Coast, we wrote to each other for a while, but teenage boys being teenage boys, the letters eventually trickled out. I was heartbroken. But I still had a soft spot in my heart for him and fond memories of moonlit kisses on the beach.

"They say men get better with age, but I'll tell you what, Punk, I have yet to see a guy in his twenties or thirties who could hold a candle to Cole at seventeen."

She smiled and dusted some sand off the top of her foot. "Imagine what he would've looked like with a little snip-snip of that hair."

"Stubborn," I said, nudging her with my elbow. "How about a fire?"

"Plenty of time for that," Punk said. "Go and give Horn a proper greeting. We'll build a fire when you get back."

I grabbed my camera and set off down the beach. The island's north shore faces the Mississippi Sound, where gulf waters, corralled between the mainland and a string of barrier islands, are flat and river colored. But Punk and I had anchored on the southern shore, near Horn's eastern tip, washed by the open gulf, its salty waves curling against white sands.

Slash and swamp pines blanketed the island's interior, giving it a scruffy beauty. Their tall, bare trunks hoisted tufts of green into a sky now mellowing into the pastel watercolors of sunset, less than an hour away. This time of day, the surf grew calm and flat as a mirror. Terns and sandpipers scurried across the sand, right at the water's edge, with seagulls spiraling like a live mobile hanging high above a cradle of sand and sea. Listening to gulf waters lap against the shore as a stiff island breeze blew my hair away from my face, I took pictures of one soul-soothing scene after another, trying to capture the tranquility of this place.

Lately, that's been mighty hard to come by—tranquility, I mean. I go to church and cry because all those hymns about everlasting love cut too close to the bone. I go to the grocery store and cry because something stupid like the boxed macaroni and cheese we lived on in college triggers too many memories. I turn on the radio and cry because a local station plays the Go-Go's, and it takes me back to a sunny spring day when laughter poured out of an AMC Gremlin bound for Chewacla State Park, where we would lie on a quilt Punk gave me, crank up a boom box, and work on our tans as we dreamed about a place of endless promise called the future.

I closed my eyes, turned my face to the sky, and took a deep, long breath, turning down the noise in my brain so I could hear soothing island sounds—the splash of a jumping fish, the flap of pelicans' wings, the wind in the pines. Peace. That's what Horn sounded like to me.

Everlasting peace.

Walking barefoot in the hard-packed sand washed by the surf, I let myself reminisce about my long-ago summer with Cole, which I hadn't done in a long time, certainly not since Leni got sick. Truthfully, it was Pop's boat and not my ravishing teenage self that first got Cole's attention. I had forgotten my suntan lotion when I dropped anchor and waded onto Horn. As I went back for it, I saw the most gorgeous boy I had ever laid eyes on, checking out the boat. If

I'm honest with myself, I've never felt anything like that arrow-to-the-heart first glimpse of him, a tall, tan dream with golden-blond hair, blue eyes, and a right-dimpled smile to die for.

I heard a splash and looked out over the water to see where it came from—a couple of dolphins playing together in the gulf. That's what Cole and I were like back then—just a couple of carefree dolphins living it up under a summer sun.

I was about to turn around and retrace my own footprints when I spotted some writing in the sand. Even before I got close enough to read it, I could predict what it said. Likely some variation of "Brian Loves Ginger" or "Dave Wuz Here." As it turns out, I was wrong.

Kneeling beside the writing, I lightly ran my finger across it, not words at all but symbols, or maybe they were letters, but not from any alphabet I could read. Touching it made my skin tingle. I stood up, took a few steps back, and felt the tide lap at my feet. Raising my camera, I took several shots of the sand message, which had an ancient look about it. Odd for something destined to be erased by the wind and water any second now.