ST1.5 | "The Sand Bar"

PROMPT: Family—We can’t choose them, and we can’t choose what they bring to our lives. Whether they have our backs, need our help, or make our lives worse, they’re still our blood. From the overbearing parent to the blindly devoted spouse to the judgmental sibling, we want stories befitting RHP that feature family. Be it blood or chosen family, tell us a story of lives complicated by or with family.

THE SAND BAR

by M.E. Proctor

Try driving from Miami International Airport to Key West in bumper-to-bumper traffic, temps in the mid-nineties, with a three-year-old in the back singing Baby Shark do do, do do . . . on repeat. It would push a Zen Master to murder, or send him to holy forbearance.

You either strangle the toddler, or reach beatitude.

Carolyn, my daughter, piece of my heart.

When we park in front of my in-laws’ seaside villa, Laura and I are ragged, tempers strung on gossamer threads. Grampa Ollie and Gramma Sharon swoop down on the SUV and release Carolyn, who’s still yelling Baby Shark at the top of her capacious lungs.

They cluck. “She’s so cute. Come, baby, come see your room. It has dolphins.”

Dolphins. Is there another song with dolphins that will saw through my nerves?

Laura elbows me in the ribs. “Flipper,” she says. “Click click click. Click click.” She whistles. “Three hours of that and I’ll be ripe for the straitjacket.”

“That’s CIA hardcore, Manchurian Candidate. Knock me out if you see my eyes glaze over and I start saying things like: Got. To. Find. A. Telephone.”

She laughs.

“I love you, Lau.” I kiss the top of her head.

We offload our bags and Caro’s gear. As always, it looks like we’ve packed for an intergalactic trip instead of a week at the beach.

The kid doesn’t care about cooling off and settling in. As soon as she’s in her bathing suit, she runs along the deck, screaming to get on the boat. She wears the pink life vest with the characters from Frozen that Gramma Sharon bought at the local beach store. Laura follows behind, slathering her with sunscreen. Caro wriggles free, slick as an eel, as soon as the last dab is applied.

“How is she in the water?” Grampa Ollie says.

“She floats.”

My father-in-law shoots me a disgusted look. Seven years married and he hasn’t warmed to my sense of humor.

“We’re taking the boat out, feel free to join.” He tramples down toward the dock.

Laura, hands sticky with SPF 50,000, catches the exchange. “You managed to pinch Dad’s gills already? We just arrived. That must be a record.”

“Your father branded me an asshole the first time he saw me. How long before he asks you, again, why you married me?”

“I wish you would try to humor him, Jack. You like running your nails over the blackboard, don’t you?”

It is entertaining. Oliver Jenkins is easy to rile. He used to run an engineering firm and bossed around a few dozen employees for over thirty years. The habit is tough to break. Anybody who doesn’t meet his standard of riding crop subservience is a punk, a hippie, or a hooligan. Words I’m sure he mumbles under his breath each time he looks at me. I’m a criminal attorney. I could tell him a thing or two about punks and their grim lives. And what they’re willing to do to get ahead. They’re a world away from Ollie, his boat, and his beach.

“You mind if I skip the boat ride, Lau? A book, a cold drink in the shade. I need to chill.”

She kisses me. “Promise you won’t check email the moment I turn my back.”

She knows me well.

Fifteen minutes later, the boat roars away from the dock, Captain Ollie at the helm, ballcap glued to his head. He’s showing off for my benefit, with his killer wake rocking the lichen-encrusted pilings. The moment the boat rounds the point, I’m in the sitting room, studying the bar. It looks like a tequila day, and I fix a big ice cube-loaded Paloma. I grab my tablet and scan emails. There isn’t much, a couple of questions that I answer quick-fire. It appeases my conscience and I make a beeline to the pool.

Can’t say I suffer from being alone in paradise.

Then it’s time for another cocktail and my book. And dozing off.

“Daddy, Daddy!”

Caro’s voice drills through a comfy dream pillow. She sounds less shrill in this environment than at home, maybe because she harmonizes with the screech of the seagulls.

She jumps in my lap, seawater-soaked, and I help her out of the life vest.

“Dolphins,” she yells in my ear. “Sooo many!” Her arms flap like a desynchronized synchronized swimmer. “Everywhere!”

“Looks like you had a good time.” I stand up with her wrapped around my neck. “Want to rinse in the pool, punkin?”

“Yessss.”

I wish she knew how to control her volume level. She’s stuck on 11, like the guys from Spinal Tap. Laura walks up carrying a bunch of wet towels. “Okay if I dunk her, Lau?”

She nods. There’s something in her face I don’t like. Her parents are still on the dock. I can’t hear them, but it looks like a nasty argument.

“We swim, Daddyyyy . . .”

Laura drops the towels and rushes inside. My daughter is punching my shoulders.

“You want to float on your back?” I say. “You remember how?”

I stand in the pool next to her, ready to give her a supporting hand, but she’s fine, eyes closed, quiet and relaxed, finally.

“Do a dog paddle.”

She dips low a couple of times, but the gulps of water don’t faze her. She’ll be swimming soon. I float on my back next to her and she climbs on top of me. We’ve done this often, since she saw the video of the otters carrying their babies this way. We go around the pool a few times and she’s half asleep by the time the grandparents come back to the house and I’m ready to get out.

“She’s a real water baby,” Gramma Sharon says.

Ollie groans. He’s munching on a thick cigar and looks even more irritated with me than usual. I hand Caro over to Sharon and go check on Laura.

She’s in our room, on the bed. Her eyes are red, she’s been crying. I take her in my arms.

“What’s going on?”

The tears start again and she buries her head in my shoulder.

“Is it your damn father? Did he say something? I swear I’ll knock him on his fat ass.” The more she cries, the angrier I get. “Goddammit, Laura . . .”

She puts a cold hand on my mouth to shut me up.

“It isn’t Dad . . . I got so scared, Jack . . .”

She lets out an anguished moan. I pull her close. “Are you hurt?”

“No. No. Oh, God.” She wipes off the tears. “It wasn’t dolphins swimming around the boat, Jack. It was sharks. I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

I’ve only seen a large group of sharks once. In the Caribbean, on a snorkel tour, the guides dropped chum to attract nurse sharks. Inoffensive, they said. It made me want to leap out of the water.

“We were around the point. By the sand bar. Where we always go to swim.”

Ollie and Sharon’s favorite spot. Clear water, white sand. Colorful little fish that tickle your legs, and the occasional turtle. I never saw anything bigger than a turtle.

“One moment, I was playing with Caro on the tube, and the next the sea was full of them. I had just the time to hand Caro to Mom and grab the ladder.” She runs her fingers through her wet hair. “I wanted to scream and I couldn’t. I was terrified, and I didn’t want to scare Caro . . . God, Jack, it was horrible.”

I hold her tight.

“The water turned red. They were . . . frantic. They were biting each other.”

“Shhh . . . You’re okay. You’re all okay.” I like the seaside but I’m a landlubber. I’ll never pretend I know the sea or understand it. “What did Ollie say?”

“Nothing. He said nothing. He started the boat and we raced back home. Jack?”

“Yeah, baby. It’s all right now.” I feel so dumb, inept. I was sipping tequila and snoozing, while my wife and daughter were attacked by sharks.

“They shredded the tube.”

Her eyes are too big for her face. Pupils reduced to pinpoints of terror.

“I’ll get us on a plane tomorrow,” I say.

She hesitates. “I don’t know . . . Caro won’t understand.” She shakes her head. “We can’t do that to Mom and Dad. It isn’t their fault. We don’t have to go near the water.”

“And when you look at the ocean, you’ll see what?”

“I won’t look at the water.” She has that mulish expression I know well. Like Caro when she refuses to eat what’s put in front of her.

***

Caro is with Sharon in the kitchen. I find Ollie on the patio with a scotch and another stinky cigar. He’s leaning on the balustrade, eyes on the blue horizon. It gets my hackles up.

“What have you got to say?”

He shrugs. “It’s nature.”

“Was there a carcass on that sand bar? Something attracted the sharks, Ollie.” He argued with Sharon on the dock. What the hell did he do? “Did you drop fish guts? Is that it? You thought it would be fun to show a bunch of frenzied sharks to my daughter?”

He rises to his full height—I have a couple of inches on him—and roars. “You think I’d do a stupid thing like that?”

Frankly, yes, I think he would. But his outrage is real. “Then what is it? You know these waters. What the fuck happened?”

He drops in a cane chair. He doesn’t look at me. “I don’t know.”

I know evasion when I see it. “You must have an idea.”

He sighs. “There was an incident, a week ago. A boat sank, with migrants, at night. The Coasties found the wreck; there wasn’t much left, couldn’t tell how many people went in the drink.” He runs a liver-spotted hand through his thin hair—the same gesture as Laura’s, and my heart jumps. “There were a lot of sharks still in the area.” He looks up at me, pleading. “That was off Marathon, miles from here.”

“Did you call the Coast Guards?” I say.

“Why would I?” He looks puzzled.

“Because something brought the sharks there.” I hand him my phone. “Call them. Give them the position of the sand bar.”

He fights me, it’s his nature. “I didn’t see any debris worth a damn. Pieces of driftwood, whatever. I can’t call the Coasties for nothing. And this is Key West. The Chamber of Commerce . . .”

“Don’t give me that Amity Beach bullshit. It didn’t work in the movie, and it won’t work here either. If you don’t call them, I will. Laura will talk to them.”

He grumbles. He slaps my phone away and gets his: a flip phone, for chrissake.

“Uh, yes? Oliver Jenkins here. I’d like to report an incident? Uh . . . a shark incident.”

I leave him to spin his tale. He can pretend to be civic-minded Ollie. He’ll have to dodge his Chamber of Commerce buddies. Tourists, sharks, and migrants in flimsy boats do not mix well.

Laura and Sharon are in the kitchen. Caro is sprawled on the rug in front of the fireplace. She digs into a box of toys. Her tablet is on the coffee table, discarded. There’s a stack of wooden building bricks that might have belonged to Laura. I plonk down on the rug, with my back to the coffee table. I’m a firm believer in out of sight, out of mind.

“Let’s build a house,” I say.

Tonight, I’ll figure out how to block that damn Baby Shark video.

***

Migrants in small boats are very much in the news two days later. Thirty-one Cubans beached their raft on a Key Largo beach in front of surprised tourists. The Cubans told the Coast Guards that they lost track of two other boats that left at the same time they did. Searches are ongoing.

Sharks teem in the hundred-mile-wide corridor between the Keys and Cuba. They have ravenous appetites.

M.E. Proctor (@MEProctor3; web: www.shawmystery.com) is currently writing a series of contemporary detective novels. The first book Street Song comes out from TouchPoint Press in 2023. Her short stories have been published in Vautrin, Bristol Noir, Pulp Modern, Mystery Tribune, Reckon Review, Shotgun Honey and others. She lives in Livingston, Texas.