“We’ve been vacationing at this beach since Grace was a tiny one, staying at this hotel,” Dad says, to my boyfriend John.  He’s lying.  He’s the type who talks things up to strangers, likes to act all grandiose with his one tooth wagging out in front, belying him.  We’ve come to this beach every summer since I can remember, but we’ve only stayed in this hotel a few summers, the summers before I left for college.

Dad sits in a beach chair under an umbrella, chain smoking, and John and I on a blanket a few feet away.  “Hopefully this time he won’t have an angry streak or be black,” Dad says, gesturing at the man who’s carrying my sister on his shoulders, throwing her into the waves.  He laughs, sputtering a bit on his beer.  I pick up handfuls of sand, let it sift back out between my fingers, forming little molehills.  I don’t, have never had, the energy to contest him.  I’m a marvel of apathy, a superhero for the modern age.

We’re all at the beach because my sister Angie is getting married again in two days. Her last marriage ended with her on our parents’ couch saying, “I’m starting a new fashion trend. Whaddya think?” her eyes droopy behind two Xanax and five beers.  In a fit of domestic fervor, bleach had been thrown on everything she owned.  She’s got the resilience that only slightly stupid people have, but me, I’ve got none of it.  Instead of throwing punches, I stare sort of dumbly into the sun, asking when, when?  When Angie speaks about this wedding, she says half-candidly, “Third time’s a charm.”  Resilience.  Me, I look away when she says these things.  I stare at the corner of the room where the wall meets the floor.

My brother Jay sits on the sand next to us, and he puts more sunscreen on his daughter Sofie.  “If she gets sunburned, her mom will never let me hear the end of it,” he says.

“When will the arrangements be finalized?” Grandma asks, as she turns a page.  She’s half-reclined reading People magazine, and doesn’t bother to look up.  Jay says he doesn’t know.  He’s got his face in his hands, he’s crying again.  It’s pathetic and we’re all mourning it and feeling sour about it except Grandma, who is an idiot and doesn’t know what she’s done.

“Hey Sof,” I say, “I’m kind of hungry,” and I pretend to gnaw on her little chicken wing of an arm.  She’s squealing at me, but she’s also in love with me.  She’s beautiful and perfect, and the only one of us who appreciates absurdity on a religious level.

“Will you watch Sofie?” Jay asks me, and I say, “Of course I will, of course.”   He goes to take a ride on Dad’s motorcycle so we don’t have to look at him and feel our insides seizing.  I imagine he rides with the wind in his face and thinks about how things were before he had to move back home, to live with Dad, all loud, stomping through the house on his bad leg, forgetting his naked pictures of Mom on the bathroom counter for everyone to stumble upon.  More likely he thinks about sweet nothing.

Sofie yells at me, “Auntie Grace, Auntie Grace, I’m a doggy! yip yip yip!”  I keep my eye on her as she runs out towards my other brother Tim, who’s fishing knee deep in the surf.  She’s obsessed with his black lab.  I can see Tim mouthing the familiar, “Pet him nice, Sof, you’ve got to be nice.”  She barely touches the dog, like she’s patting a ball of cotton candy.  Tim’s a year older than me, looks like me, but with a sharper jaw.  He teases Sofie, lifts her up and pretends to make her ride the dog like a horse.

All four of us haven’t been at the beach together in years.  I always come, because I’m the youngest and have no excuses.  Tim moved out of our house in the ninth grade to drink and live in a fishing town on a cape jutting out into the gulf.  He raises clams for a living and rarely comes inland.  Jay and Angie had been married, were busy.  When we get together like this, a festive wonderment hangs in the air between us.  We stand around, smiling at each other dazedly, amazed, as if we just crawled out of a mangled car on the side of the freeway.  We’re happy that we’ve survived.

I’m watching Sofie make pratfalls into the tiny waves lapping way up the shore when Dad turns to me and says, “You’ve got quite a little belly on you now, don’t you?”  He’s laughing again.  It erupts into a hacking cigarette cough, and for a brief moment I imagine him a desiccated old man, alone.  He’s drying up, shriveling, dryer and dryer.  Finally, without anyone to life-suck he’s turned into a handful of sand there on the seat of his wheelchair.  Because people expect you to respond when they talk to you, I say “Ha!” loudly and dryly.

John’s got his mouth near my ear, he whispers “You’re a beautiful person,” which brings an interesting mix of solace and humiliation.  I steel myself and focus my eyes over Grandma’s shoulder at her magazine of beautiful people doing mundane things.  I’m good at drumming up absurdity for consolation.  Stars, they’re just like us! They take shits!  I squint my eyes and light a cigarette.

Mom comes up from the ocean.  “Hey honey,” Dad says, giving her a kiss on the lips.  Mom’s stomach is flat from doing aerobics videos in our living room, and her hair is yellow, a stripe of grey roots crowning her.  Dad helps her color it, sitting at the dining room table, his fingers fumbling in plastic gloves.  “How’re the waves?” he asks.

“Oh they’re wonderful,” she says.  “Amazing.”  Dad makes a point of coming here every year, but hardly ever goes in the ocean.  He’s got this bad leg, but he seems to enjoy himself when he hears Mom using this voice.  She gets quiet and emphatic.  “Ahh-mazing,” she says.  Living with Dad and scrubbing shitters for a living must be a magical potion for self-actualizing, because Mom is more well adjusted than anyone I know.

She turns to John and me and tells us about the book she’s reading.  It’s about reincarnation and hypnotic regression.  “I must have been a water creature in a past life,” she says, “because of how much I love the ocean.”  It’s too heart-scraping, hearing her talk about this with her eyes wide and earnest.  I know I should be happy that she is happy.  But I don’t want her to have to use these stories to console herself, I don’t want her to have to clean up other people’s messes.  I want a big fat wad of money between her and the constant abrasion of life.

“I need to go cool off,” I say.  I jump into the waves like someone who’s been to the beach many times and knows the secret.  If you dive straight through you’ll come out on the other side, smooth and placid.

*

When we pack up our things and come up from the beach, the hotel manager is waiting outside Dad’s room.  He’s fat and bald, with a surly countenance.  I sense the disaster welling up behind us when I see him, like the chokingly sweet smell of ozone that rolls in before a hurricane.  I’ve always been a bad psychic, sensing everything but telling my family nothing, and escaping when I got the chance.

“I was getting complaints about one of your rooms,” the fat man says.  Mentally I try to will him to admit he’s a messenger from disaster, to come clean, but he keeps talking.  “Sir, your son has done extensive damage to the room.  There is dog shit and broken glass everywhere, and you will be held responsible as the room is in your name,” and then there is some more repetition of some more bad things.  I can’t blame the fat man, because this is his job, being a messenger from disaster and all.  But I am growing weary.

Dad’s arm shakes on his cane, and I think about his heart disease that requires blood pressure medication and a Zoloft, daily.

“Tim,” he says quietly to the carpet, though Tim is not here.  “Tim,” he says again, louder.  The prodigal son, he was always the favorite.  He looks just like Dad did in all those pictures from Vietnam, when dad’s face was small and square and clean shaven.  Dad’s arm won’t stop quaking on his cane.  It’s slipping off.  “Tim! Tim!” he screams.

*

“Nice outfit Grace,” Dad says. “Must be the Polish in you.” He’s snickering, rasping at me from the hospital bed, and I’m not listening to him.  I’m much too saturated to absorb anything more.  I stare at the painting above his bed, a painting that yells NICE at me in big block letters.  No, this is not nice, I repeat over and over in my head.  I realize there’s a beach scene on the painting.  It’s talking about Nice, France, and the painting above the other bed says MALIBU and presents a similar ugly pastel wave hitting an ugly pastel shore.

Dad motions to Mom, “Get me some water, Kris.”  Mom sits beside me reading a book with a poorly Photoshopped cover titled Lives Between Lives, by Rick Chorman, PhD.

“Here, drink this,” she says, handing him a can of Ensure, mother’s milk for the ancient and afflicted.

“I don’t want that shit,” he says.  Mom’s eyes are open, but they’re glassy and unaffected, and her brain is somewhere else.

“Can I smoke in here?” he continues.  “Where’s the ashtray?”

I look out the window.  We’re up high, and I see the line of the ocean a few blocks away, where it all ends.  The sky is dark now, plum-colored with afternoon rain.

“You’re going to kill yourself,” I say limply to the parking lot below.  Because I’ve inherited Dad’s weariness, I can’t hold it against him.  Smoking is a habit for people who have a realistic idea of the slim cushion between them and disaster.  Dad and I are linked arm in arm, we see it there, waiting in the wings for us, and together we say, so what, come and get me, I know you.

I wonder where Tim is.  No one could reach him.  Maybe he’s sitting on the beach with his dog, a beer in his hand.  Maybe he’s getting another tattoo. Dad and Tim love and infuriate each other so much because they’re the same.  They both believe their actions have no consequences for anyone else.

“Our family,” I want to say to Dad and Tim, “is fragile like an old woman’s bones.  There are no reinforcements of luck or money.  Any stupid thing you do breaks all of us.”

But I don’t say that.  I pick up the can of Ensure and slowly pour it out into the trash can, while looking at Dad.

“Now you don’t have to drink it,” I say.  He doesn’t speak.  When he’s quiet and still, Dad’s tooth and bald head make him look like an infant, tired and helpless, momentarily genuine.

He reaches for the remote, smashes the quiet.  “Video Vigilante!” the TV screams.  “Citizen uses personal camera to catch prostitutes in action!”

I put my forehead against the window, all thoughts shrinking away in the noise.  John stands beside me, rubbing my arm.  He’s the only one around making sure blood is still flowing to my extremities.  His eyes are an opaque brown, the light reflecting off them in big white squares.  I wanted to somehow tell Dad that John holds me up by the arms when I start folding into myself, but all Dad could say about him is “He’s vegan? He doesn’t drink milk?”

I’m listless and John looks down at me and asks, “How can I help?”  I look up at his glass spheres, his opaque reflectors.

“I’m fine,” I say.  “Did you know that you have marble eyes?”

Outside, the plum-colored clouds keep rolling in, and it’s just an afternoon thunderstorm.  I wish it were the tails of a hurricane whipping us. In Florida there’s weather, lots of it, and it makes you think about the body.  It reminds you that you are corporeal and small.

We were all here as kids once, at the beginning of a hurricane. The sky was bruised, and the waves swelled, three times their usual size.  Dad let us stay on the beach until the last possible moments, when the lightning started zipping down. Angie and Jay took their surfboards out, yelled excitedly over the rough water.  Tim and I swam further than we should’ve, let the waves pull us under, throw us against the sand.  It felt apocalyptic, but in an electrifying, almost funny way.  Tomorrow was going to be different, but we were going to survive it.  When we left the beach, the water kissed the grass at the top of the dunes, threatened to spill over its designated bounds.

The hurricane crashed down while we slept.

The next morning we hurried out to see the aftermath, the new world.  We found wildness flung all over the sand; trash, pieces of people’s yards, driftwood, palm seeds from Africa.  Tim and I decided to build a sandcastle, an indestructible one.  We filled the middle with storm loot, glass bottles and two-by-four’s, plastic bits.  We packed sand on the outside and picked sea oats to put on top, wheaty little flags blowing in the wind.  When we finished, I made triumphant declarations to everyone.

“If anyone kicks our sandcastle, they’ll kill themselves.  They’ll break their foot!”

“This will always be here,” said Tim.