A Wintery Beach Tells a Story
At Windbreak, I walk the beach.
I start at Loon Point, and I walk east first, as though I’m the jogger. Then I walk down to the Velasquez
property and turn back in the direction of Windbreak, as the Coopers did, envisioning the night from that
vantage point. I study the exact area where my father was discovered, on the high sand, fifteen feet from the
entrance to the rickety stairs, leading up to his property. I look up at the bluffs, take in those stairs from below,
take in the next-door neighbor’s high wall, my father’s gentle palisades.
I try to re-create it. The pattern of it. The order. What exactly happened that night? If someone pushed him,
then where did they go, if not down those stairs, landing on this beach too? Did they jump the fence s eparating
Windbreak from the neighbors? That would have been captured. If they went out Windbreak’s front gate, that
would have been captured too. Unless someone knew how to erase what was seen.
“Nora?” I turn around and see an older man in a Yale baseball cap, a white mustache matching the hair
peeking out from beneath the