Off Season Tides

The ocean was gray the way it always is in November off the Oregon coast. Not the pretty gray of a photograph. The flat, patient gray of a thing that has been working the same shoreline for ten thousand years and does not care that I brought a spreadsheet.

I had a spreadsheet. Of course I had a spreadsheet.

Trina, 54, data analyst, standing on the porch of a rental house called, according to the faded sign, Driftwood Rest, with a mug of coffee going cold in her hands. My hands. Sorry. I do that sometimes, slip into the report voice. Mark teases me about it.

Twenty-two years ago I met Mark at a data conference in Portland. He was a teacher dragged there by his district, bored out of his mind in a session about pivot tables, and I caught him drawing little sailboats in the margins of his handout. I sat down next to him and said, "Those are the worst pivot tables I've ever seen," and he laughed so hard a man three rows up turned around.

That's how it started. Curiosity. I poked at him, he poked back, and twenty years of marriage later we were still poking.

The trip had taken months to even say out loud. Not book. Say.

"You want to what?" Mark asked me one night in August, dishes still in the sink.

"I want to invite people. Adrianna, Dante, maybe Leanne. Rent the big house. See what happens."

"See what happens." He dried his hands on the towel, slow. "Trina. Say the actual thing."

"Fine." I set down my fork. "I want to know what it would feel like to... be with other people. With you there. Not instead of you. With you."

He was quiet long enough that I started making a list in my head of all the ways I'd just broken us.

Then he said, "Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay. I've been wondering how to bring it up for a year." And he smiled, and I laughed, and then we talked until two in the morning like a couple of kids planning a heist.

So here we were. He was inside arguing with the hot plate. The wind rattled the windows, and the ocean did its gray thing, and I thought, curiosity has always been my compass. It got me Mark. It got me here. Let's see where it points now.

A car crunched up the drive.

"Is that her?" Mark called from the kitchen.

"Adrianna! Oh my god, look at you!" I took the steps two at a time, which at 54 is a decision you pay for later, and she caught me at the bottom with both arms.

She was 54 now, silver coming in at her temples, and she wore it like she'd ordered it. Yoga instructor arms. That same laugh.

"Trina Wainwright, you did not get old."

"Neither did you, you show-off."

She hugged me, and it went a beat too long. Not awkward. Charged. I felt her breathe against my hair and I felt my own pulse pick up, and somewhere behind us Mark had come out to the porch and stopped.

"Adrianna Gates," he said. "Welcome."

"Mark Wainwright." She hugged him too, quicker. "Twenty years and you still shake hands like you're applying for a job."

"I contain multitudes," he said, deadpan, and she laughed, and I watched his face while she wasn't looking. There was something in it. Nerves, maybe. Something softer under that.

"Come in, it's freezing," I said. "The hot plate is being difficult."

"The hot plate is a liar," Mark said.

Mark, 56, retired teacher, steady as a fence post. That's my husband. He'd been quiet in the car on the way up from Portland, and I knew why. He'd read the same history I had. Adrianna and I, senior year of college, both of us 22, one intense tangled spring thirty-two years ago. We'd talked about it now, finally, in August, in the dark. He said, "So you two were...?" and I said, "Yes," and he said, "Good," which was not the word I expected.

Adrianna dropped her bag in the living room and looked around at the big room, the low beams, the windows rattling.

"This is perfect. Cold and moody and slightly haunted."

"Slightly haunted is the listing's selling point," Mark said. "Wine?"

"Please."

* * *

Dante and Tom arrived at six, crunchy with road dust, and Leanne came in from town at seven with a cooler full of crab cakes she'd made herself for the weekend.

"Potter's perk," she said, shoving the cooler at Mark. "I cook when I'm nervous. I made enough for twelve."

"There are six of us," Mark said.

"I know what I said."

Leanne is 39, a local potter with clay in the cracks of her knuckles, and she worked with Mark on a mural project four summers ago when he still taught summer sessions. She and Mark had this quiet spark thing, all teasing and almost-touches, and I had watched it for a whole summer from the sidelines with an emotion I couldn't name at the time. I can name it now. Appetite.

So we ate crab cakes and drank wine and told summer stories, because that is what people do.

"Remember the year the college lost the entire float downriver?" Adrianna said. "Trina, you were in that canoe."

"I was in that canoe because YOU dared me."

"You said yes immediately. No hesitation."

"Because I thought you'd row."

Dante laughed. He's 46, a photographer who also does urban planning work, which is a sentence I still don't fully understand. He and Adrianna have been together eight years, met at an art opening, and they are open in the easy way some couples are, like a door with a loose hinge that swings wherever.

"The whole float?" Tom said. Tom is Dante's cousin, 28, a carpenter up from Eugene for the weekend, broad hands and an eager way of leaning in when people talk. "How far downriver?"

"Two miles," I said. "In a canoe full of papier mache."

"That's the best thing I've ever heard."

"He's easily impressed," Dante said. "Don't encourage him."

Leanne refilled glasses and said, offhand, like she was mentioning the weather, "You know, if you all are looking for something to do this weekend, there's the beach past the north jetty."

"The clothing optional one," Dante said, smirking into his wine.

"It's not official," Leanne said. "It's just... understood."

"Understood by whom?" Tom asked, sitting up.

"By everyone who goes there and takes their clothes off, Tom."

I snorted into my glass. Mark was very interested in his crab cake. Adrianna looked at me over the rim of her glass, one eyebrow up, and Dante's smirk got wider, and Tom looked genuinely intrigued, the way a young man looks at a map of somewhere he hasn't been.

"I'm just saying," Leanne said, "it's off season. Nobody's there. Gray as anything, but the hot springs pool up on the rocks is nice."

"There's a hot springs?" Tom asked.

"There is," Leanne said.

"Is it also... understood?"

Everyone laughed. Tom went a little pink and laughed too.

"I'm going to remember that one," Dante said. "The understood hot springs."

"Understood by absolutely no one," Leanne said. "It's on private land and we trespass and I will deny everything."

"Noted," Mark said, and there was a gleam in his eye I knew. Twenty years of knowing.

Later, when Dante and Tom went out to the porch to smoke and argue about a fence Dante was designing, and Leanne went to help them carry wood or something, Adrianna stayed at the table across from me, turning her glass by the stem.

"You look good, Trina."

"You said that already."

"I meant it already too." She turned the glass. "It's weird being here with you. Good weird."

"Good weird," I agreed.

"I keep thinking about that spring. Senior year. We were insane."

"We were 22 and invincible."

"You used to laugh into my shoulder," she said, "so your roommate wouldn't hear." And she was looking at me, steady, waiting, the way she used to wait.

Mark was in the kitchen doorway. I don't know how long he'd been standing there. He didn't say stop. He didn't say go. He just watched, and I felt watched, and it did something warm and frightening to me.

"Adrianna," I said, "can I kiss you? Mark's right there. I want him to see."

Her breath caught, just barely. "Yeah," she said. "God, yeah."

I leaned across the table and kissed her, and her mouth was exactly as remembered and completely new, and Mark made a small sound from the doorway like a man discovering a room in his own house he'd never opened.

"Okay," he said, when we came apart. His voice was not entirely steady. "Okay. So we're doing this."

"We're doing this," I said, and my hands were shaking, and I have never once, in twenty years of making charts, been able to graph how happy that shook me.

Morning came in gray and loud, wind slapping the windows of Driftwood Rest like it wanted in. I made coffee on the hot plate and stood on the porch watching the ocean do its slow gray thing.

"Walk?" I asked Mark, coming in. "Down to the beach. All of us, maybe."

"Sure." He was doing the crossword. "Weather's terrible."

"That's the point of weather."

We gathered everyone by ten. Leanne found her boots. Tom appeared with a jacket that was clearly borrowed from Dante, sleeves too long, grinning about it. Adrianna came down in leggings like she'd been ready since dawn. Dante buttoned up slow, a man who walks slow on principle.

The beach past the north jetty was empty, of course. Off season, nobody. Just us and the wind and the gulls doing their harsh business. Pretty quickly the group sorted itself. Adrianna and Leanne and Tom ranged up ahead, and I fell in with them, and Mark drifted back to walk with Dante, and that was fine. That was natural. That's what people do on beaches.

Except I kept half an ear behind me, because