I took the satellite phone from the guide with sand still stuck to my wet hands. Every person on that beach was staring at me, the eleven strangers from my river trip and the two guides and my daughter and her husband and the woman in the cruise line uniform, and the only sound was the Colorado sliding by. “This is Detective Alvarez, Fort Lauderdale,” said a calm voice in my ear. “I am sorry to bother you on the river, and you are not in any trouble. I just want to ask you about your brother in law.”
I had one brother in law, Roy, the younger brother of my Del, seventy years old, a retired pipefitter living in Pompano Beach. He had come to the funeral four years ago in a borrowed suit and left before the potato salad. I told the detective all that. There was a pause on the line, and then he said, “Roy walked into our station this morning carrying a shoebox. He says he has something to confess, and he refuses to say it to anyone but you.”
I put the phone on speaker so Kelsey could hear. The detective explained it with the patience of a man who has sat through a great many tearful confessions. Roy had not booked the cruise. Del had. In January of the year he died, Del had quietly paid nine thousand dollars for a ten day trip to the western Caribbean, a surprise for our fortieth anniversary. He told no one. He was already sick by then, and he must have known how it would end.
“The reason,” the detective went on, “is in the shoebox. I think it is better if Roy tells you himself, but I can tell you he has not stolen a dime from anyone. He sailed under the name of your husband, and his wife Janet sailed under yours, because your husband begged him to. He wanted that trip taken, and he was too sick to take it, and he would not tell you for fear it would break your heart.” I sat down hard on the cooler where my daughter had been sitting.
Love sometimes keeps its secrets not to deceive, but to carry a weight it cannot bear to hand to the person it adores.
Kelsey took the heavy pack off her shoulders and sat in the sand at my feet like she did at five years old. “Mama, I found the second map under the old one when I borrowed the toolbox of Daddy from your garage,” she said. “The island with the red circle. I wanted to ask you, but I was so ashamed about the cruise. I thought if I came down here and gave it back to you, we could start over.” She had hiked seven miles with forty pounds of rusted steel to say that. I decided on the spot that she was going to be the death of me and I would die happy.
We finished the river trip. I will not pretend I enjoyed the last two days. But Kelsey rode in my boat, soaking wet and shrieking through the rapids, and Tanner learned to bail water with a coffee can. The guides, who are in their twenties and have seen everything, pretended not to notice that I held the hand of my daughter for the whole last stretch. When we reached Lees Ferry, there was a rental car waiting, and a plane ticket to Fort Lauderdale in my pocket, paid for by my son in law.
Roy met us at the police station on Broward Boulevard with the shoebox on his knees. He looked like Del in his last winter, thin and stooped, with the same big knuckles. Janet sat beside him and held his arm. He did not make a speech. He pushed the box across the table and said, “Sister, I should have brought this to you four years ago. I was scared. I am sorry.” In the box were a seashell, a roll of film, and a letter in an envelope, the handwriting on it as familiar to me as my own.
Del wrote the letter in March, with a shaking hand. He said he had loved me for forty years and that the only thing he regretted was never taking me back to the island where we spent our honeymoon in 1980. He asked Roy to go in his place, stand on the beach where we had been, and photograph it for me. Then he asked Roy to give me the pictures after the funeral, with the shell and the letter. He said he wanted me to see the sea one more time through his eyes.
Roy had gone. He had stood on that beach on a hot April afternoon and wept and taken the photographs. But when he came home Del was in the hospital, and then Del was gone, and Roy lost his nerve. The false passport weighed on him like a stone. Every year he told himself he would drive out to Cheyenne, and every year he got as far as the airport. It was Kelsey calling the cruise line that finally made him pick up the phone. He said that was how he knew it was time.
I did not press charges, and neither did the cruise line, once Detective Alvarez explained the story. They even wrote a letter of apology for the mix up, which Kelsey framed. I developed the film in a little shop on Las Olas. There were thirty six pictures, all of the same stretch of white sand, taken at every hour of the day, with the sky going from gold to pink to purple. In the last frame, Roy had written something in the sand with his finger. It said, Del was here.
In February, Kelsey and I flew to that island, with the map from the toolbox folded in her purse. We stayed in a little pink hotel and walked the same beach in the early light. I set the shell down at the edge of the water where the wave reaches, and let it go. Kelsey paid for the whole trip herself, from the money she earned working double shifts at the hospital where I used to do the billing. I am sixty six years old, and I have now been down the Colorado and across the Caribbean. I would do both again, as long as she comes along.
