Adelaide On the Beach

When Sedgwick saw the body on the beach in the morning he resisted believing it was Adelaide, the woman he had been seeing until they had wordlessly drifted apart without, he thought, having made any sort of commitment, save for the unspoken assumption that they’d spend an evening or two together when she was in town, mostly on the weekends, at one of the beach bars along the A1A strip up by Fort Pierce for drinks, slow dances, and sharing their stories over a bowl of peel n’ eat shrimp or maybe the conch fritters which she liked better even though they were greasy and she’d have to take a Zantac later but truly because the lingering smell of shrimp on her fingers kept her from teasing herself with the smell of Sedge on them after he would leave with the sky beginning to lighten over the water in the east through the windows of the condo she rented in the winter months, but before the beachgoers had set up their chairs and umbrellas, save for the brown-skinned men in Panama hats, long sleeve shirts, and their tall fishing rods to catch the blues or whatever was running from the tuna that early in the day and, when Sedge, that day, saw the body, a shudder ran down his spine to behind his knees from the adrenaline or whatever chemical it is that shocks into your veins and your heart and lungs and stomach even before your eyes have adjusted to what you are seeing, like how your brain knows what is coming before the tires screech and the metal crushes you into the exploding airbags and breaks your nose, and he realized then that it was her, with the leathery men and women around her with their tucked-in towels and their heads bent, and she, lying on her stomach with her arms spread out limp and wide and her head turned away from him as if she could not bear to think of him looking at her lying flat on the beach in the black bathing suit she loved and thought she looked stunning in and how he might think then that she’d worn the same bathing suit two days in a row instead of how she washed it each evening and hung it to dry on the railing of the deck of the condo, soaking up the morning sun and the freshness of the sea and, with her hair red and clogged with clumps of brown seaweed, and the drying sand adhering to her back and her thighs in a way that she would feel made her look dissolute and un-ladylike, and as if she wanted him turn and walk back up the beach while the other men and women standing over like mournful Neolithic sarsen Stonehenge pillars created long slow shadows across her body, with one of them pointing toward her as if questioning whether or not to cover her before the police came, and talking in soft funereal tones to spare her from hearing what perhaps only she, if she were alive, would hear, as she always had, as criticism and fault with her, as had her father in the years before he left her mother and herself in the one bedroom apartment in Kissimmee where she had slept on the pullout couch and, even then, at the age of seven, was expected to have washed and dressed herself and made her own breakfast and folded the bed back up into the rank and moldy innards of the couch that had been in the apartment they rented by the month, and hearing, on the first day of every month, the rapping on the door as she picked up the trash and bottles from the kitchen floor and put them in the bin as she had been told to do whenever the landlord came for the rent, peeking in over her shoulder, breathing his rancid breath with his hand on the small of her back in a way that chilled her and made gooseflesh on her arms and she would tell him that he should come back in the evening to see her father who had the money for him, while her father, at that very moment, was laying in his shorts and tee shirt with his arm across her mother, before she dressed and left for work at the nail salon in Orlando six days a week, knowing that the life she had was not the life she wanted nor wanted for her daughter and prayed that when Adelaide was old enough she would leave this tawdry place and its guns and ammo shops and have a life that would bring her a little happiness, a little rest, and a man who would treat her right, like a woman wants to be treated, and which, she told Adelaide, that that life would come to her because she was smart and strong and wily, to which Adelaide would laugh and say that she never wanted to be like Wile E Coyote because he’s the one who always runs off the edge of the cliff or has an anvil falling down on him and maybe he dies or maybe he doesn’t but she didn’t really know because she’d always put her hands over her eyes when she saw that starting to happen and she hoped that it never ever would happen to her, and her mother would grab her up in her soft white arms and hold her as tight as could be and squeeze Adelaide’s breath out of her and say to her, “Adelaide, my baby, that will never happen to you,” and, when Sedge saw her lying there in her black bathing suit in the center of the growing crowd on the early beach with the receding tide, his heart sank and his knees sank, falling to the rough sand, he shielded his eyes in his arms, wanting in desperate hopeful hopelessness for what he had seen to be unseen, undone, and erased from the eternal memory of the universe and feeling, too, that somehow, someway, he had what?…. failed her?…. forsaken?…. her by not caring enough to avert whatever had happened to her, while knowing in the deepest depths of his being that, yes, that was, in truth, what he had done.