The Last Tide

The fire had gone out an hour ago. Maybe two. Ezra hadn’t moved.

He sat in the low canvas chair with his knees apart and his elbows on his thighs, a bottle of Maker’s Mark hanging from two fingers like a dead thing. The beach stretched out in front of him in the dark — Ruby Beach, which Diane had always called the most honest place on earth because it didn’t try to be pretty. It just was. The sea stacks rose out of the black water like broken teeth. The Pacific was doing what the Pacific always does on the Washington coast: threatening everything. Low, grinding roar. Foam catching what little moonlight got through.

He hadn’t put up the tent. Hadn’t seen the point.

She would’ve put up the tent, some part of him said. She would’ve had the tent up and the Dutch oven going and she would’ve made you carry all the heavy stuff and then acted like she did all the work.

He took a long pull from the bottle.

Stop.

She would’ve brought those little candles in the mason jars. She would’ve called it ambiance and you would’ve pretended to roll your eyes but you loved it. You loved every single stupid candle.

“Stop it,” he said out loud.

The ocean didn’t care.

Ezra Voss was thirty-eight years old and he had the face of a man who had once been beautiful and hadn’t yet finished losing it. Dark eyes. Heavy brow. The kind of jaw that looked like it had been made for taking hits. He’d dropped twenty pounds in four months and his flannel shirt hung off him like a flag at half-staff. There was a cut above his left eyebrow, mostly healed, that he didn’t remember getting.

He didn’t remember a lot of things lately.

The gun was in the bag beside the chair. He hadn’t taken it out yet. He’d driven four hours from Portland with it wrapped in a kitchen towel at the bottom of the duffel, and the whole drive he’d told himself he was just going camping. Just going to say goodbye to a place Diane loved. That was all. That was a reasonable and even tender thing for a man to do.

He was very drunk and he knew that he was lying.

The whiskey was doing what whiskey does — it was making the grief enormous and the fear small, which was the whole idea. Grief he could work with. Grief was at least hers. It had her shape in it. When it crashed through him he could close his eyes and find her in the dark: her laugh that started quiet and then went loud and helpless, her hands that were always cold, the particular way she said his name when she was tired — Ez — just that, just the one syllable, like even his name was something to be cherished and not wasted.

Four months, he thought. Four months and I still reach for her side of the bed.

A wave came up the beach — further than the others, ambitious and cold — and soaked his boots. He didn’t move.

Some animal logic in him said: you moved your feet. You pulled them back from the cold water. That’s something. That’s a vote.

He hated that part of himself tonight. That stubborn, stupid, animal part that kept insisting on next breath, next breath, next breath as though there were something worth breathing toward.

He thought about the way the detective had looked at him. That careful, neutral face they must practice in a mirror.

Mr. Voss, I’m so sorry for your loss.

He’d thrown up in the hospital parking lot. He’d sat in his car for six hours. He’d driven home to an apartment that still smelled like her shampoo and he’d sat on the bathroom floor and he’d —

Don’t.

He’d survived. Which was its own kind of indignity.

The bottle was nearly empty. The gun was still in the bag.

He reached for the bag.

His hand stopped.

Diane, he thought — not as a word but as a frequency, something in the chest. The specific weight of her. The particular architecture of loving someone for eleven years, how it becomes structural, how you don’t know it’s load-bearing until it’s gone and everything above it falls.

He had a memory surface without warning: the two of them at this beach, three years ago. She’d waded into the surf in her jeans — impulsive, laughing, daring him to follow. He had. They’d stood there in freezing water up to their knees and she’d grabbed his face with both cold hands and kissed him and he’d thought, I will never not love this woman. This is a physical law.

The sob came out of him like something tearing.

He bent forward in the chair, the bottle dropping from his fingers, and he made sounds that weren’t words. The ocean matched him. The ocean was indifferent and enormous and in its indifference was something almost like mercy — it didn’t flinch, it didn’t look away, it just kept moving.

You could still drive home, something in him said. The animal. The stupid, embarrassing animal. You could sleep on the beach. You could watch the sun come up. She always said the sunrise here was worth the cold.

His hand was on the bag.

He stayed that way for a long time — bent forward, hand on the bag, halfway between two outcomes, the tide coming in.

He thought: I want to want to live.

Maybe that was enough. Maybe that was the thread. Not the will itself but the ghost of the will, the wanting-to-want, so thin you could lose it in the dark.

Diane, he thought. What do I do.

The wave came.

It didn’t answer. But he was still listening for it, and maybe that was everything.

He sat back. Slowly. Left the bag where it was. Lay his head back against the canvas chair and looked up at the sky through the coastal fog and breathed.

In.

Out.

The tide kept coming. He kept breathing. The animal in him, that wretched, faithful animal, counted every breath like it was keeping something precious alive.

Later. Much later. When the grey light came.

He reached into the bag.

Not for the gun.

For his phone.

He had a call to make. He didn’t know who yet. Just — someone. Just a voice. Just proof that the world still had people in it who might say his name.

He scrolled.

He stopped.

There was a text. Four months old. He’d never deleted it. He’d never been able to.

From Diane’s number, sent the afternoon she died.

We need to talk tonight. Please come home. There’s something I have to tell you.

He had read it on the drive over. Pulled off at a rest stop outside Olympia, hands shaking, because even now it broke something open in him. Even now he could feel what it had felt like to read those words for the first time, standing in the kitchen, still in his coat, the apartment quiet in a way that had made the hair on his arms rise before he understood why.

The bedroom door had been closed.

He put the phone face-down on his thigh and looked at the water.

The grey light was coming up slow over the sea stacks, turning the foam pale. It was, he had to admit, exactly as beautiful as Diane had always said.

He sat with that for a moment.

Then he picked the phone back up and deleted the text.

His thumb didn’t shake at all.

He stood up. His knees were stiff from the cold and the hours and he stood there for a moment getting his balance. Then he reached into the bag, wrapped his hand around the grip, and walked down to the water.

He didn’t pause. He threw it as far as he could.

The Pacific took it without comment.

He stood there while the foam ran over his boots, cold and indifferent, and watched the place where it had disappeared. Then he walked back up the beach, picked up the bag, and started toward the car.

Behind him, the tide came in and filled his footprints one by one until there was nothing left to find.