The Deep Places by Ross Douthat

The Deep Places by Ross Douthat

Author:Ross Douthat [Douthat, Ross]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2021-10-26T00:00:00+00:00


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No clarifying vision was delivered, and at the end of that August I took a break from the Grinder’s IV, loaded myself up with oral antibiotics, and drove in a stupor with Abby and the kids to Maine, to the mid-coast region where my mother had grown up and my relatives still lived. It was beautiful and awful: Those small towns and coves and islands were the landscape of so much remembered childhood happiness, and to be there again in this state was somehow more intolerable than anything. I walked the beaches of my youth in a daze, as thin again as I had been at seventeen. I watched the sunrise through eye sockets that burned; I heard the seagulls through ears that were always under pressure, as though I were fathoms deep beneath the sea. My children played on the sandbar, my infant son splashed in the saltwater puddles, and my beloved wife watched me watching them. A veil of pain was drawn between me and everything I loved.

On the last morning, I was up early as always and I carried my son, now six months old and heavy, down the long, low-tide strip of sand. The pain was mostly in one shoulder, though I knew it would be somewhere else soon enough. There was a spot where the sand gave way to barnacled rocks bewigged with seaweed, where the tide met the stones; sometimes in her youth, my mother had found sand dollars there. I had never found one in decades of looking, and over time it had become a game I played—If I find one today, it means that God exists. If I find one today, it means that the girl I have a crush on has a crush on me. If I find one today, it means I’ll get into the college I want. If I find one today, it means…

Inevitably, I had been playing the game all that vacation week, casually glancing in the shallows as I waded with my kids.

If I find one it means I will get better.

If I find one it means I will get better.

If I find one it means I will get better.

On that last day, though, I was in too much pain to play. I held my son in my right arm, watching the seagulls sweep above, feeling the fire spread down my left arm and side. At a certain point, the combination of beauty and agony broke me, and I began to sob there, on the empty sandbar beside the flat, blue bay, while my son cooed curiously, and from somewhere in the depths I came out with a desperate, rasping croak.

“Help me, God. Why won’t You help me?”

My eyes dropped to the water. There between my feet, as tiny as a nickel and as pale as a wedding dress, was the only sand dollar I have ever found.



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