Talia Adry

The Tide Pool

Runner-up for the 2023 American Literary Review Essay Contest, Judged by Kendra Vanderlip

I wanted to stay still that spring—in the moment before the golden-eyed grass produced yellow flowers in the lot behind our house, and the sticky monkey crept orange blooms over the neighboring fence. I wanted to stay as I was, in the early months of the pandemic, in a college town in mid-coast California, where most nights I fell asleep to the rhythm of cicadas and a low breeze that shifted the fronds of palms like marionettes. I was like a child hovering in a doorway, listening for the okay before I emerged. I never wanted to write about my brother.

To tell the story of how we spread his ashes in the tide pool, I should explain how I arrived in California in the first place. I spent twenty-seven-years of my life in Boston, or just outside it, circling it like a hawk, hungry, restless. I moved out of my mother’s apartment when I graduated high school and lived with boyfriends or friends periodically over the course of ten years. I wandered from one moment to the next, doing my best to accept that adulthood looked like a constant need to push myself. My mother always said she was tired of doing it alone, and I didn’t want to feel tired.

When I left home, my brother was eleven-years-old. He used to visit me when I lived with my boyfriend, and we would cook him dinner or take him to the movies. He wore a lot of my hand-me-downs, which is funny to think about now, but at the time, my clothes didn’t feel gendered. I remember seeing a photograph once of my mother and brother standing on a trail in Maine, my brother wearing the Old Navy tee shirt with the drawing of a blue pickup truck that I had worn in middle school, his knees dirty and protruding from bony legs.

My mother never had any money, which she couldn’t help but remind us, particularly during long, cold winters when we were grateful our subsidy included heat and hot water. We lived on the edge of a long, commercial route crowded with strip malls, eye doctors, and donut shops, and spent summers crossing the bridge over to the north side where the houses were nicer and the land cleaner. It was a relief not to see the boxy brick complexes where we spent most our time outdoors playing kick-the-can by the laundry room.

By the time I reached adulthood, I’d had enough experiences with men to know that I attracted them, that even before my breasts developed, I attracted them, and as a result, spent most of my time in high school wearing men’s clothing. I knew the narrative if I stayed home after I graduated: teenage girl seduces older man and finds herself pregnant. I knew the neighborhood would tell this story, maybe not in words, but in passing glances, in gossip for my mother and lover to hear, for his family and mine to receive in dirty looks and raised eyebrows.

When I left home, I’d stopped being a child many years before, but my brother never did. He remained a boy, always, who died at twenty-five, scarcely educated, scarcely experienced in the world outside of the town where he lived with my mother. He never went to college, never received a driver’s license. He never flew on an airplane. I was spreading a boy’s ashes in California, a boy who never left home for the light, but found only darkness, sinking into silence. Not long after this, I dreamt he was ten and came to stay with me in California, when one morning I caught him under the kitchen sink drinking the cleaning supplies.

Throw it up, I said in the dream. Don’t you know it’s poison?

I remember telling my brother when he almost dropped out of high school that I understood, that if anyone, I could relate, and that it wasn’t easy for me, either. He was seventeen at the time, and I was twenty-four, nearly finished with my college degree and living on my own. What’s horribly sad is the memory of my brother saying that I could never understand what it was like for him because my father was alive.  My father had bought me a car. My father flew me to Florida to spend summers with him. My brother had no one to buy him a car, no one to worry whether he should have a car at all, and perhaps this was why he never bothered to get his license. Of course, I was lucky. I had somewhere to go.

But after my brother’s father died, he had nowhere to go, and—after I moved away from home—fewer people to hold him accountable. Between seventeen and twenty-five, he graduated high school by the skin of his teeth and worked a number of varying low-wage jobs: Sbarro line cook, liquor store clerk, gas station cashier—always leaving these jobs or being asked to leave. My brother preferred to drink nips of Fireball whiskey and smoke cigarettes inside the house. I can’t even recall his brand of cigarettes, but then, maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention.

The summer I drove west, my brother was twenty and still living with my mother in a smaller apartment than the one we grew up in on the south side of town. She lived, always, month-to-month, and called, always, when something was wrong. I sent her money when I could, and worked out how to live in California while my mother and brother stayed behind, rooted as they were, locked together in that dark apartment. The town changed but the apartment never did, always curtained, always dim—while I drove to California and towards the light. I drove and drove until the country flattened out, the land caved in, and the horizon opened into limitless skies. I drove with little intention of ever going back, even after I’d promised my mother.

Recently, my husband, who also lived in California, told me that he’d heard stories of the tombstones having three dates in California: date of birth, date of death, and the date a person moved to California. We didn’t know if it was folklore or not, but after hearing this story I knew I was reborn that year. I went to California to follow the light, and for years afterward I would speak of how bright the state was, how blinding.

The day my mother found him unresponsive on his mattress, the day after my brother choked on the mucous that accumulated overnight in his throat, I stood in the glaring sunlight of a perfect, cloudless sky. When faced with the impossible, the details we recall tend to be aural: the swish of passing cars, the call of a mourning dove, bees shifting on lavender. We see it only when we hear it; it comes back to us only then, in the passing of cars, and then, suddenly, standing in the bold, blazing sun, the moment comes searing back like the wildfires in late summer. It had to be me that afternoon receiving the call.

My brother sought a different type of place, a state-of-mind that took him somewhere else, maybe, from the dim, curtained apartments of our childhood, or the image of his father clutching his arm on a mildewed couch. Who knows what my brother sought. I’m only guessing. But sometimes I can see it clearly, his somewhere, his desire to set out on his own; my desire to drive west, away from everything and everyone we grew up with. What we wanted was the same, only the approach differed. I went to California; my brother started using dope.

“Your greatest fear,” my therapist said when he died. Even she was speechless.

It was late-spring when I felt safe even in the waning hours of sunlight, when the chickens all hushed in their coop, and we bred rabbits in makeshift pens by our shed. No part of my childhood had prepared me for the sounds hens make early in the morning—the haunting, bubbling laughter that starts with one and erupts into an onslaught of clucks before I’d had my first cup of coffee. Everyone talked of how time spent in lockdown might be healing, forcing us to face some personal defect or trauma, or some longing that couldn’t be addressed before this, and couldn’t be repressed after. I suppose the pandemic had split us all open and laid bare our vulnerabilities in the face of such a crisis. I stayed in California and began to tell people I was writing a book about my experiences with an older man, how deflated it left me, and how I chose to cope, years later, when he contacted my mother and told her he should have married me.

After my brother died, I couldn’t stand the memory of that time, how I fell easily into sleep the nights I was alone, how I would walk the Davenport cliffs and remain sure-footed as gales threatened to toss me into the sea. For once, the elements beyond my control didn’t scare me because I had somewhere to go and someone to be.  

The years I spent at home grappling with what I considered irreversible shame seemed to slowly recede into memories of someone else’s life. Another girl had struggled to open the windows in the apartment so she could breathe. Another girl had waited faithfully for her adult lover to pick her up from school. Another girl, not me, not the woman I was in California boundless, free.

The day she found him, my mother called me twice and I missed both calls. It was like something inside me knew not to answer. When I finally called her back, hours later, it was my uncle who answered her phone, the first sign that something was wrong. “Evan’s gone,” he said, “I’m sorry,” and then the cacophony of deafening sirens and the flaring, visceral light.

The next thing I did was call my best friend. I’d never heard her cry like that, just from the shock, a sudden apologetic weeping. I am standing in the sunlight in that moment, but I can’t remember if I cried. I hear my friend weeping. I called her to confirm that this was the most devastating event of our lives, and that in the face of it, I couldn’t weep. I cried silently instead, and maybe I called her for this reason, too. I was too angry to weep. Writing even now about his death makes me angry, but with whom tends to vary.

We never discussed where my brother should be buried, or if he should be buried at all. We had him cremated partly because his father was cremated, and partly because we didn’t have any money. We held a small service outdoors in a Vietnam Veteran’s memorial at a park where we asked that people bring their own folding chairs. My mother said she didn’t know what to do with the ashes. She still had his father’s ashes in a box on his dresser. The idea that his ashes would sit on the dresser alongside his father’s terrified her, but after his memorial, I returned to California for the last time and brought his ashes with me.

One thing about living with shame is that we forget how to trust our instincts. It was only after those years away that I began to trust myself again, even in the face of a global epidemic, even in the face of death. Before we were married, my husband flew back with me to the golden state where we decided to drive down the coast before heading east. This was the first time we had been in California together, the first trip we’d taken as a couple, a trip where I carried my brother’s ashes in a fanny pack we bought at the airport. The first place I visited when I moved to California was Monterey, and it seemed right to make this drive again, as if closing out a chapter, past the inner channel of Moss Landing and over the Elkhorn Slough, past the produce stands, and the Sand City dunes. When we saw the beauty of the Big Sur coast, I trusted that my brother would have found a place for himself there.

We drove to Carmel Point because I wanted to show my husband Tor House, once home to Robinson Jeffers and his family, a stone cottage built on a point of land that meets the sea like the prow of a ship. I brought the fanny pack with me as we stretched our legs after driving, climbing down onto the outcrops of rock to get a better view of the cove. It was here that we saw it, a tiny pool of shallow water glittering in the afternoon sun. My husband said that tide pools are full of life, and we hunched over the pool in search of starfish and sea urchins, but could make out only the green algae-encrusted rocks in the cloudy water, and I remembered a poem about tide pools I once read in a forgotten edition of Poetry Magazine:

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[1] “Tide Pools” by Dave Smith | Poetry Magazine. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/34479/tide-pools.

Talia Adry is an American essayist, memoirist, and poet. Adry holds an MFA from San José State University, where she served as Senior Copyeditor for the California literary journal, Reed Magazine, of which she was also a contributor. She currently teaches English Composition at Framingham State University and is hard at work on a forthcoming memoir. She lives with her husband, the poet Sam Witt, in Brookline, Massachusetts.