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

* * *

—

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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.