Island of Misfits
We drive over the Atlantic Beach Causeway twice—on the way in and on the way out. The leglike piles holding the mile-long bridge plunge deep into the coastal waterway that separates Morehead City from Bogue Banks, one of the barrier islands of the Crystal Coast in North Carolina. As we get on the bridge, my father nudges me awake in the passenger seat, my pillow pet wet from slobber. My sister and I stick our arms out the windows and make wavelike motions on the wind. The air is hot and thick, smoky pine needles and melting tar that drips like syrup down my throat and into my belly.
Bogue Banks island looks like a giant foot stepping out into deep blue with the causeway biting at its heel. When we make it off the bridge, like always, time seems to slow down. The landmarks outside my window stop matching those on the Atlas map open across my legs. Trees grow taller, denser, roads wind and spout into unknown territory and inlets.
When we reach Atlantic Beach, my father stops at the ABC liquor store. He calls it the American Business College and I giggle because the sun glaring down on the topless jeep is already blushing his balding, oily head and because he is palming the back of my neck with his free hand, grabbing the skin between my head and shoulders. I wince in pain and a kind of joy at him not realizing his strength.
I am twelve and my sister is ten. We haven’t seen him since Christmas, and it feels easier to laugh than to go over the names of friends, grades, the things I’ve learned, my new sophistications. Easier to create something here with him than to fill him in on what he’s missed. On the eight-hour car ride here from Cleveland, Ohio, I pretended to know the words to Grateful Dead songs and eagerly listened to his impressions of Larry the Cable Guy. These are my favorite moments with him, when he’s a kid again with us.
Our heart rates pick up as we roll into Seaspray Condominiums, where a giant wooden sign with a navy, animated wave curling around the first S greets us. The adults who drag their families here every summer call it the Island of Misfits. We call it our playground in front of the ocean. The condominiums, compact 80s-style beach condos stacked on top of each other, seem to attract families trying to escape something. The adults toss out words like divorce, addiction, domestic troubles, fraud.
My father’s big Scandal is that he recently lost custody of my sister and me to our mother in a years-long court case following their divorce. Words that couldn’t be taken back were thrown around in a courtroom that I wasn’t allowed to enter. The summer handoffs of my sister and me to our father had started after the divorce and continued through the custody battle, and so did our vacations to Seaspray. On this trip and the trips after, my father’s eyes are red, puffy, angry. At rest stops along the way, his grip on our hands and arms will grow tighter. He will sing louder and snap his fingers to keep us awake in the lull of the car ride.
This is our third summer here with the condos looming over us like giants, two prisms that form an equal sign at the edge of the ocean. Everything between the beach and the condos—the courtyard, pool, hundreds of identical porches, the gazebo—belongs to the kids, new and familiar hideouts waiting to be found and explored.
Moments after parking the car, my father cracks a beer from the trunk and loudly clears his throat. This is our signal. We get out and follow him along the boardwalk, some once-a-year friends join behind us, and we march out to the sand, then the water. The first toe-dip is always the coldest. I dig my heels into the dense clumps of clay and peat that have washed up from the beach in potato-shaped lumps. I gather some in my hands. The dough-like masses are scattered all over the beach. I learned one summer at the local aquarium that the barrier islands on the Crystal Coast are primarily made of sand that constantly moves and shifts over time. When an island like Bogue Banks has moved enough, the old clay layer that hides beneath the landmass is eroded by offshore waves and washes up on the beaches in large clumps of clay that are actually tens of thousands of years old, from when the beach was just a salt marsh. The outermost layers of the mass are what I hold in my hands, but anything found trapped inside is much, much older. “Whale poop,” we call it, and chuck it at each other, collecting the stuff as weaponry for later.
“Grab my hands,” my father says to me and my sister and whoever has tagged along, his eyes far away.
We intertwine our bodies, stare ahead at the ocean, and conjure up a prayer. We are far from a religious family, but he is adamant that we pray to the ocean once a year after arriving. The ocean is the only authority he acknowledges, and so it is for us, too. The prayers are mostly requests.
“A boogie board,” someone blurts out.
“A twenty-pound bass,” another says.
“Bojangles and a tan!” we add.
“More time,” my father says last, but it sounds like a regret and not a plea.
On our walk back from the beach, I see the condos and the world between them in a warm film. Nothing ever changes here besides the color of paint on the exterior, this year a mint green. This is when we split off from our father, from the adults; when the sun starts to slip below the earth on the first night of the trip. From this point on, the days melt together. At the end of the boardwalk, he disappears into the condos, where the adults roam from porch to porch—what they call “drinking around the world.”
We dart through the halls of Seaspray—ten or twelve of us—the kids rotating in and out as vacations begin and end, always finding each other while the parents party. We are at the mercy of the adults—the Misfits. Whoever is the toughest, boldest, and most confident becomes the impromptu leader of the pack—decider of games. It’s usually a boy, and I spend most of my time trying to thwart their power, trying to win something. My body is strong and fast enough to beat them in barefoot soccer, a sand sprint, a wrestle, and we spend all day testing our bodies’ limits. From a distance, we all look like brothers in our loose Bermuda shorts, with salted hair, chests sunburnt and bare under cutoff t-shirts, knees nicked red from the dune grass, always moving.
The hallways of Seaspray smell of salt and rotting wood. After sprinting hundreds of times across the courtyard in games of “capture the flag,” the cold, damp carpeting welcomes my bare feet like wet grass. Next year, we will run with plastic Dasani water bottles full of our parents’ Absolut hidden under t-shirts. We will sneak drunkenly into the nooks between stairwells and the laundry room to make out with the kids of new families at night and pass the water bottle in a circle. But this summer, we are still repulsed by the prospect of each other’s bodies in that way.
Instead, we chase each other like baby gulls through the prickly, unkempt courtyard—a roulette of spurs and creepy older men—and pelt each other with five stars and nerf balls. We tell ghost stories of Blackbeard, the pirate infamous for plundering ships in the eighteenth century, still believed to haunt the beaches of the Atlantic coast.
When it is dark and we are hungry, we slip back into someone’s condo and grab handfuls of honey baked ham and dill pickles from countertops while dodging stumbling adult legs and swaying hips. We duck under dinner trays, away from French-tipped nails and the white khakis of a toppling ReRe (the birdlike matriarch of Seaspray) and her husband, PapaT. We know the Misfits only by their nicknames. To say their real names would be to cave, to cry uncle. The Misfits without nicknames are just adults on the periphery, nameless shadows on the edges of the drinking circle.
We duck the arms and swinging ta-tas of Boobzilla trying to sell us one of her custom-made necklaces (“get your dad, sweetheart”), run past Blonde Santa making a joke about the woman he screwed (“come sit on my lap”), hedge ourselves around the talon fingers of Mr. Bigg, nicknamed for his belly and the times he brags about his father’s money, threatening to pinch our cheeks and measure our height. We just miss Ursula’s wide mouth as she bends down real low, teeth yellowed from cigarettes, to whisper a secret about womanhood we don’t want to hear yet, or ever.
I hear my dad somewhere, telling the joke he practiced in the car in the gravelly voice we both get from talking too much, the one I try to mimick every now and then. Sometimes I pause, watch him tilt his head back in a laugh, the way my lips curl into that same, tight smile when I am determined or angry, the one dimple we share on the left side of our mouths.
“You look just like your father,” people say to me, often, and I try to hold on to that.
We are back out as fast as we came in, back to the corners where they can’t reach us, where we pluck tufts of seagrass and fashion them into swords, slicing into our shoulders and exposed calves, fighting over who gets to be king of the sand dunes until we fall asleep in the gazebo.
Over the weeks, the parents become shells of themselves, eyes dark and mouths slack with alcohol and oblivion. Their numbers grow as more families roll in, and so do ours; two moving units avoiding the other. The Misfits all bask in the sun, their skin swelling like bratwursts as they suck up tequila tonics and Budweiser disguised in coffee mugs and American flag koozies. They drink before the sun hits the middle of the sky and after it is long gone.
One day, I take a sip of my dad’s vodka, assuming it is water, and he belly laughs, gives me a beer. We kids split it between us. We learned summers ago to recognize the difference between tipsy and annihilated, not to call attention to ourselves when a hand was occupied with a drink after dark, even if it was an emergency. We know where the First Aid kits are, for cuts, black eyes, sprained ankles.
Last summer, a splinter of wood got stuck in my cornea. Distrusting of all medical processes and institutions in general, my father refused to take me to the doctor or the ER.
“Just wash it out in the salt water,” he said.
He was convinced the ocean could heal it just fine. I begged to go the doctor, my eye swollen shut and bloodshot. Instead, he told me the story of when he got bit in the arm by a brown recluse spider and braved the pain by soaking in a bath, conveniently leaving out the part in which my mother found him unable to move in the tub and had to dress his limp body for the ambulance she called. They learned later that he could have died if the venom had reached his heart. After our trip that summer, I had to have surgery on my eye; the doctor was shocked at how long I had waited to see her.
On the third or fourth day at Seaspray, some of the dads, including mine, join us on the beach. We giggle as the feathery legs of sand fiddlers scuttle over our bare toes when the waves recede. We call them sand fiddlers because of the way their many flossy feet restlessly fidget when caught, but their real names are mole crabs; they spend all day hiding their one-inch, roly-poly bodies underneath the protection of the shore. One of my favorite things is to catch them in scoops of dampened sand and let their fast feet free the rest of their bodies. I touch their squirmy backs and bellies and release them back onto the ground. The “v” markings in the sand give them away, a tiny burrow at the tip which simultaneously exposes and conceals their bodies.
“Come with us,” our dads say, their hands held out to us as we wade into the water, looking up at their broad backs.
I envy how easily they move, how they trust their bodies against the current. When we can no longer touch the bottom, we scramble onto their backs. The waves crash into us, but we are safe on the backs of goliaths.
“It’s getting too deep!” I squeal, as the water rises up my father’s torso and I cling to his hairy arms, keeping an inventory of his moles.
But he keeps going until the water is up to his neck. I climb wildly up his back until my feet are on his shoulders, then he catapults me into a wave. Thrilled, I don’t see the oncoming swell and am thrust into the mouth of it. It spins me like a dryer ball violently all the way to the shore until I am coughing up water and mucus and spit onto the sand.
“Respect the ocean. It can turn on you when it wants to,” my father tells me on his way out of the water, the soles of his feet flipping up as he walks back to his playground.
The day before the Fourth of July, we are halfway through our trip, although I am not sure what day of the week it is or when exactly we are leaving. Whenever I ask, I am answered with, “Who cares, we are having a Big Time!” It wouldn’t be the first or only time we stayed past our welcome, forgot the checkout date, or missed our flight back home.
The parents have really gone all out today, eyes rolling back into their heads, the faint smell of puke in the hallway that spills out into the courtyard. Refrigerator doors hang open and sloshes of margarita drip from the countertops.
We spend all day as far away as we can from them, digging giant holes in the sand, filling them with buckets of salt water and pretending they are our very own Jacuzzis at our very own private resort, where we are all in our thirties and have stable jobs. Someone is a fisherman, a teacher, an auctioneer. I am a painter and sometimes a veterinarian. At night, after we are forced to return to the condos for food and water, everyone falls asleep except for my dad and me, sitting on the couch.
He is really gone, which is normal at this point in the vacation. I don’t like to be around him when he is like this, when his cheeks are red and the two-bedroom condo feels small, and his six-foot, three-inch body contorts and flails in ways that don’t seem right. On other trips, I’ve spotted shards of glass on the carpet, a mug launched at someone’s head. He tends to edge toward something else on these nights, something more hostile.
I stare at him guardedly, wishing for something funny to come out of his mouth, for us to keep laughing. I know better than to say something. I pat my sister on the leg, a warning. She is drifting off but gets up and shuffles sleepily to our room. He looks back and forth between us, paranoid.
“Don’t disrespect me,” he snaps at me, wounded, an animal backed into a corner.
The bluish gray eyes we share are unrecognizable on him. I stay. I want to make him laugh, to look at me. I’ve been here with him before, stiff on the edge of a couch into the early hours of the morning listening to paranoid theories about people we are connected to and how they’ve plotted against him. He talks until I agree with him, tell him I believe him. I apologize. We are hovering at the edge; I am waiting for him to push off, to throw me in.
“I’m sorry,” he says after some time.
Finally, the worn crow’s feet around his eyes dip down, the expression of pain, the heaviness of my father’s head in my lap. I hold onto the weight, like all firstborns. I am convinced it is what adults deal with, that I am mature enough, finally, to take this on. He has lost his footing. These are the moments when we touch the bottom together, when he goes out too deep. I am prepared to save him.
In the morning, when he is still in his red-hot sleep, my sister and I quickly and stealthily brush our teeth, grab a Pop-Tart and a bucket, and run to the beach. The others are on their way, too. It is the Fourth of July. We roll our eyes at the last ones to arrive at the shore. We have planned an expedition: we are going to build an aquarium.
We race each other to the top of the dunes, piled extra high today from the wind, kick our feet at the crest and ride the sand avalanche to the bottom, toppling over each other. Conch shells are collected in the buckets first, as ashtrays for the Misfits, currency for a favor.
We find a Portuguese man-of-war on the beach, or is it a regular jellyfish? It is dead. No, it jiggles. We poke it with sticks, grow impatient.
“Touch it,” one of us yells. Touchittouchittouchittouchit.
Boobzilla’s son extends a pruney finger and sticks it all the way in. We lean in close. Nothing. Then, pain. He screams, writhes, wriggles, shrieking and sobbing. No adults are on the beach or awake. His face turns red and tears rush down his cheeks. The screaming grows louder, intolerable.
“Well, what the fuck do we do now?” Mr. Bigg’s daughter asks.
No one is near us, but we are afraid of getting found out, yelled at. Shutupshutupshutupshutup.
Blonde Santa’s son jumps up, remembering a thing about jellyfish, drops his pants and pees on Boobzilla’s son’s finger until the screams quell to moans and then whimpers and then silence.
“Jesus Christ,” someone sighs.
The rest of us take turns smashing our big buckets into the water, catching minnows against the receding tide. We whip whale poop at each other’s bellies and backs, pack sand at the bottom of the chosen aquarium buckets, a protective layer for the ashtray shells, and add chipped sand dollars to the slush. I scoop up alarmed fiddlers scuttling on the beach, sieving for food, and try not to laugh at the tickling on my palms, to act tough before dropping them in.
When we have gathered the final elements of our aquariums, we swirl our hands in the buckets to touch the fish and fiddlers, holding their slimy bodies in our palms. When we get bored, we leave the buckets in the sand and chase each other into the water, sprinting across the sandbar and falling off at the edge of the dropoff, bellies smacking the darker shades of blue.
When we return to the shore, maybe an hour later, the minnows have floated to the tops of the buckets, lifeless. The fiddlers no longer move when we manipulate the sand, and the water is hot and soupy. One of us grabs the buckets of waste and chucks the insides back into the ocean.
Later, I learn that sand fiddlers and other marine life survive on movement. Vibrations from approaching footsteps signal the need to bury deeper, to hide from predators. Fiddlers are constantly moving backward in the sand and swash, swimming and burrowing in whatever direction the water takes them, their sensitive antennae perched above the sand on lookout, ready to retract and rebury as they follow the waves.
Hours later, we trudge back uphill, a supply of Pop-Tarts the only meal we’ve had. My father spots us on the boardwalk, his eyes under the familiar spell. I can tell from the way the adult bodies bloat and sway that they have partied extra hard today, keeping the end of the trip out of sight and out of mind. My father grabs my hand, and I follow his large feet to the front-facing side of the condominiums in the patch of grass that looks toward the bridge. A mound of fireworks stands before us, and the rest of the adults stagger out from the east staircase, Dave Matthews Band playing on someone’s speaker.
We take turns sprinting back and forth with the matchbox, watching rockets, roman candles, fountains, Catherine wheels, and cakes spin and explode off of the pavement. I am still holding my father’s hand during the finale. I think it is almost a perfect night. The kids each take a sparkler. While we spell out our names in burning cursive, a cracking sound fires from the east stairwell and splits into the air around us.
Someone lets out a sharp “oh” as we turn our heads back toward the building. A woman lies at the bottom of the stairs. We quickly recognize her as one of the Misfits with no nickname. We remain frozen for a second, until several adults snap to it and run to the woman. PapaT is the first to get to her, to gently lift up her head. But she doesn’t move.
What we are seeing isn’t real; it can’t happen here on our island. Others soon gather, checking for a pulse and calling out orders, yelling into phones, trying to summon some other authority that might save her, though I think everyone knows it’s too late. The Misfits begin to find their kids, as if they are waking from a strange dream. I hear things like, “heat exhaustion,” “stroke,” “accident,” and “it’ll be okay, she’ll be okay.” None of us believe them, of course, but we need to hear it anyway. When I look up at my father next to me, he is still.
Dying sparklers hit the grass. The song of an ambulance wailing over the bridge gets louder. I thought ambulances didn’t come for places and people so close to me. My dad doesn’t pull me or my sister away. Instead, he puts his arms around us.
“Is she dead?” I ask.
“I think so,” he says.
We watch as she is carried off and then stand there, quiet. Less than an hour later, my father is gone again, and the party continues in someone else’s condo. No one talks about the incident. No one uses the east stairwell out of respect and fear, a kind of permanent superstition permeating all of Seaspray.
When we all find each other again, we retreat to the courtyard and lie in a circle on our backs, grass squeegeeing between our toes. Someone suggests we play Bloody Mary, the game in which we spin individually in a dark bathroom over and over until we see the face of some female biblical character in the mirror, covered in gore and guts and blood, and scream silly until someone opens the door. One of us always sees her.
“Not tonight,” someone says.
“I bet she’s gonna haunt the fuck out of this place,” another said.
We all agree. The next day, we dare each other, one by one, to go check the east staircase, convinced her ghost will appear. Don’t touch the walls, or you’ll be cursed for ten years, we decide.
When we leave Seaspray, we forget about the incident, or we don’t talk about it ever again. My father drives my sister and me all the way back to the mountains in West Virginia, where our mother packs us back into her car, and we return to the gray coast of Ohio. Nothing is quite the same after this summer. Not because of the death, exactly, but there is a shift in the joy of these trips. In the joy I am able to find in my father.
When the drinking gets worse and worse, when doctors try to explain that his body is shutting down, after the fraud and breaking-and-entering charges, after we estrange him for own safety, he will disappear altogether.
When I am almost thirty, I move for a graduate program to North Carolina, where I have not been since I was a kid, since I spent summers there with my father. The university is two and a half hours from Seaspray, on a different coast. The school’s website shows yellow beaches and time-lapsed videos of students trudging through seagrass and dunes, accelerated tides and clouds slipping through the sky. I count the ways the world changes on the drive from Ohio, easing into the South again, and imagine the ways I could lose myself.
One summer between semesters, I travel to Seaspray alone. It is unnerving to see this place continue to exist outside of my memory. Children who look like we did play in the courtyard, barefoot. A different layer of paint is on the exterior of the buildings.
“Key West Blue,” a new guest calls it, sarcastically. I search for signs of the incident on the east stairwell but don’t find anything.
I walk out onto the boardwalk and sit in the wet sand, several feet from the water. I close my eyes and pray to the ocean like my father did, and the smell reminds me of him. I still don’t know how to grieve his absence, how to remember him, to recognize myself in him. The way he relished a good story, how he never stood still, always planting and retracting to other coastal cities, alone. I wonder about the parts of me that are older, that remain hidden.
A year later, I receive a text from my aunt, my father’s sister-in-law who texts my sister and me occasionally when she learns something about our father from the internet, usually his whereabouts, a text from someone who ran into him, or something worse. But this text is underwhelming; they have been coming more and more sparingly. FYI, no one knows where he is anymore. I can’t send anymore updates. The last friend we were in contact with had to cut him off. I’m sorry. He will move from coast to coast, now somewhere in Florida. Never still, never reliable, always floating.
In this new home, I will sometimes walk to the north end of the beach and wade out to calm water—where the sound eddies into the ocean—and I will float, the water a steady percussion of movement holding my body between two currents. Here, I will rely on the ocean to help me conjure a childhood uninterrupted, an uncontained self.
Published in the Spring 2024 issue