Terrible Tilly

From the room at the Seafarer’s Inn where she and her husband stayed for three nights to celebrate their sixth anniversary, Erin saw slices of an ocean and a stream.  An obstructed view of two bodies of water. The ocean fed a split in the sand, carving a permanent inland stream. People gathered at the edges, lining its small beaches with umbrellas and ice chests and unfolded beach chairs. In the early mornings or evenings, herons and seagulls bobbed in this calmer water, away from a wave’s reach, where they could perform drawn-out water landings like float planes on a busy waterway. If you took a photo from a specific angle, especially in the evening when the sun glittered from the eye’s edge of the horizon and flooded one’s view with light, it looked as if this inland stream was part of the ocean, erasing its arms. It became reabsorbed into the larger picture, into the ocean, by one’s perception, hiding its identity. 

During the day, in absence of a king tide, the river was a barrier to the real beach and real ocean. Erin and Chris stepped over the feeding lines of this stream, walking through the shallowest fingers of its reach to get to the other end of the beach which terminated in a protrusion of rocks leading to a park and lookout point. 

It was a rare day, not too windy, sunny but not unforgivingly warm. Despite this, the beach was nearly empty by the time they walked down to the rocks and the walkable end of the sand. Some beachgoers went no further than the inland stream, setting up along its edge as if they were not yards from the ocean’s reach. Most walked down the beach toward Haystack Rock, an often-photographed endpoint on the horizon crowned with sea birds. A person or two dotted the crests of the sand dunes in the opposite direction, up from where Erin and Chris walked, looking down to the sand and water below.

The tide was in, so they wouldn’t be able to clamber among the basalt rocks left exposed and accessible during low tide. The rocks were black and butted by white carbuncles and bursts of iridescent green moss. Ahead, a couple with their young, long-legged hound walked a tightrope path along the bottom edge of one of these black rocks. Erin paused on the wet sand to watch, her heels sinking slowly downward, to make sure the dog made it down.

“Seems cruel to force the dog to walk the edge like that,” she said. 

“Yeah. At least they’re not too high up.”

They waited until the dog and one of the pair safely descended the curving path along the base of the rock. When Erin and Chris approached the rocks, the few others on the beach had retreated to the edges of the valley to sit on a log or blanket. Erin felt as if they were alone even with these potential watchers.

They stood at the base of the rocks to search for any tucked away tidepools. Erin put a hand against the dark surface of the columns which rose from the mottled base. She expected these pillars to feel rough like the exposed rocks one had to scramble over like the couple and their dog had, to leave a mark when she withdrew her palm, but the flat surface was cool even in the sun and left no print on her skin. She imagined her entire body pressed against the rock there, how the smooth force would feel against her forehead or the soles of her feet or her sweating breasts, a solid place to rest. She felt tired, incredibly so, and envied those staying in the monumental houses behind the sand dunes who could walk out of their back doors and straight to the dunes, though she supposed they had the rougher time of getting down to the beach. 

“You can’t see it when you’re behind the rocks,” Chris said.

“See what?” She glanced back down the beach toward the monolith of Haystack Rock. It was a dot now, reduced in its grandeur to a pebble atop a stretch of sand.

“Tilly.”

Erin turned back to the water. She stepped back from the rocks, put distance between her body and the basalt. She had forgotten to orient herself in relation to the offshore point. Her vision and her existence had been reduced to the beach, the rocks, the dunes, the lapping edge of the water. The lighthouse winked back into existence a few more yards in the other direction.

Before turning back, they walked closer to the dunes. This portion of the beach reminded Erin of somewhere else, of how she pictured east coast beaches to be, with dunes and waving stalks of dry grass. This beach was different too from the beaches she had visited as a child, immense stretches of sand that led straight to the dark water, interrupted only by crowds. She hadn’t understood at first when she moved to the Pacific Northwest that most of the beaches were rocky and was disappointed until she found new beauty in them. 

There was a gathering of slim, wave-polished logs once regurgitated by the ocean. Set back from the water at a distance that wouldn’t be touched by most high tides, it had not been visible as they approached, or from the equal ground of the water’s edge. The bleached logs were arranged in rows as if to support seated bodies watching a performance, four logs on either side of a center aisle with a circle of shells and stones at the head as if a stage. It would have taken some time to assemble.

“Maybe a wedding?” Chris said.

Erin could imagine someone constructing this for a series of social media-ready photographs taken at golden hour, posing at the head of the invisible-walled room with bare feet next to the arc of shells in the sand. 

“Or a religious ceremony.” Now she saw that the rows were arranged like pews or benches in a church, a preacher at the front in the center of the shells. “Or ritual.” It was more silent here than the rest of the beach, the area isolated on one side by the dunes. The scene was empty, devoid of the human element which had once used it, rendering it ruins. 

“A funeral?” Erin’s mind went to Rose.  

Erin was in the early months following loss, or tangential loss, when moments too bright with life or too bleak with decay brought her late friend Rose next in thought. She saw a hummingbird in the backyard in the days following news of Rose’s passing and told Chris this seemed like a sign from Rose, or maybe the hummingbird was Rose, come to say goodbye or to provide reassurance. But even as she said it, she realized it sounded like something she’d read in a book or seen in a movie, and she wasn’t sure if the idea came from some storage drawer in her mind filled with images absorbed during a semireligious childhood, or if she was the creator of this idea. She said, Hi, Rose, to the first few hummingbirds she saw during this period, out of superstition. 

When Erin pulled her gaze away from the logs, the shells, to Chris, she realized he was facing away from the arrangement, staring out at the ocean. Looking for Tilly.

#

Erin grew up with a narrow vision of what going to the beach meant. Going to the beach meant a six-hour road trip from the Arizona desert, eight if her family stopped to use the bathroom and refuel just over the border in Blythe, which her father hated because they’d once seen a man wearing only a robe stumble through the gas station. Once they reached Los Angeles, there was still the creeping drive through the streets where asphalt sizzled just as it did back home. Erin peered over the horizon after each turn until they reached the first glimpse of water. Later, after her parents established themselves somewhere in the miles of foot-blistering sand, Erin and her brother jumped waves, rarely leaving the water until called to leave. Since no boats came in so close to the shore, there was no interruption to their view. It didn’t occur to Erin at that age to stare far off into the unending horizon, or to notice the absence of anything. She looked at her brother as she tried to jump higher than he did or stared into the murky water to spot a fish or a human body part, but she never found either, though one time she grabbed what she thought was a palm-sized rock from shallow water, only to realize it was a dog turd. Then it was back to the motel pool where their father instructed them to pre-wash so they wouldn’t shed sand all over the motel room. 

Now, as Chris and Erin walked toward Haystack Rock, she thought about how she preferred to keep moving once on the sand. The beaches in the Pacific Northwest weren’t as friendly to loafing: the wind whipped, the sky clouded. She knew she had aged, too, and no longer found the idea of submerging herself in the ocean’s freezing water appealing, nor did sitting in a wet suit sound like something she should do unless she wanted a rash, and her skin was paler now too. She didn’t care to touch the water, only look at it, and didn’t join Chris when he waded in up to his ankles. She stood back on the beach, covered with a shawl to avoid burning, and watched as he searched the shoreline for intact shells. 

A younger couple nearby shared a blanket in the sand. They took turns eating blueberries from a translucent plastic container, their fingers gathering handfuls, then dropping the fruit into their mouths two or three at a time, exchanging smiles and private details. Erin couldn’t hear with the breeze and the pound of the ocean. She wondered if they had washed the blueberries, still in their store-bought clamshell, before they devoured them. The young woman wore a yellow bikini and sat with her legs crossed. Comfortable, at home. Her light hair fluttered loose in the breeze, blond streamers. Erin hadn’t worn a bikini since she was a child in the backyard swimming pool. She felt a longing for a life in which she wore a yellow bikini in public, in which she laughed effortlessly, limbs unarranged on a blanket. 

Later, as Chris and Erin walked, they came upon a bird crouched in the wet sand near the edge of the water. The bird was black, a pigeon guillemot like those who circled and nested on the rock. He hunkered in a way that indicated he was injured. Erin stood a short distance away to take a photo of the bird before she realized he hadn’t moved from his dip in the sand for several minutes.

“Is he okay?” she said to Chris.

They both stood, watching, as others went around them to continue their walks down the beach. 

“Maybe he’s not well,” Chris said.

“Maybe we can call a wild animal rescue?”

Silence indicated this was a ridiculous idea. Then, “What would we say? Come save this injured bird?”

“Yes,” said Erin. “I bet they do it all the time. We can wait with the bird while they get down here.”

The tide was coming in, pulling at the bird’s feet in its small hollow. The bird remained unmoved, planted in the sand so that it now had a gully forming around its perimeter.

“The water,” Erin said. She came closer as if to stop the creeping water’s reach. “What if it drowns?”

“Drowns on the beach?”

She could watch over the bird until it had rested enough to fly off back toward the rock. It was just exhausted from flight. It didn’t hop on one foot or hold a wing aloft. It simply didn’t move from its spot. 

Another bird glided in next to the bird. The bird hopped into position next to his wayward companion for a moment and Erin thought, how sweet, his partner has come to rescue him, to sit with him in despair. The visiting bird nuzzled him now, pressing its beak into the other bird’s side.

“It’s so sad,” Erin said. “What if it’s his mom?”

In a snap, the visiting bird nipped at the resting bird. 

“Oh god,” said Erin. “What’s he doing?” 

The bird pecked with more force, nudging the injured bird from its sand circle.

“Oh my god,” Erin said.  

“Come on. Let’s go.”

Peck. Erin started to follow Chris but stopped and glanced over her shoulder back at the birds. “We have to stop them,” she said. “We have to do something.”

“No,” Chris said. He took her hand. “There’s nothing we can do.”

“Yes, there is,” she said, but even as she said this her body was in motion after Chris. 

Erin looked back once, then again, until she could no longer make out two separate shadows and instead saw a single dark entity. She felt sick to her stomach. Later, she remembered the photograph: the bird in his last moments on earth. Why did she save this reminder, this final glimpse? For what purpose? It was memory which would fade over time until she no longer remembered which bird, which beach, which year. She would name the bird in her head in anticipation of this dislocation. 

#

Erin emerged from the bathroom where she’d inspected her face in the cloudy mirror over the sink. She hadn’t been careful with the sunscreen, and random pops of pink emerged atop her ears and along her neckline. Everything felt too bright, even indoors. The windows and sliding patio door were ajar to encourage the breeze inside, so Erin felt somehow chilled and warm, overdressed and underdressed. 

Chris was curled on the bed over a magazine, its pages folded at sharp angles. He took a moment to look up, to acknowledge her in the room. “What are you reading?” she said.

“Oh,” he said, like he hadn’t realized she was there, though she’d only been out of the room. “It’s about the lighthouse. The Tillamook Lighthouse? Apparently, it has quite the history.”

The lighthouse was once active but had since been decommissioned. It stood atop a sharp, steep outcropping of basalt a mile out from the coast. The ocean and its moods were so treacherous that a mason had died during the construction, and later crews lost their lives while others lost supplies and connection to the mainland in storms. A storm in the 1930s smashed out the lantern room. After the lighthouse was decommissioned in the 1950s, the rock and its lighthouse were sold to investors. 

“I wasn’t sure if it was still active,” Erin said. “I thought we’ve seen a light on there before but maybe it was a passing ship.” 

The most recent owner had started a subsequently failed columbarium before listing the property again for sale. The urns would remain with the property if it was sold.

Erin glanced out the windows which overlooked the beach, but Tilly was out of sight in the sun of midday and too far down the beach for a view. “All that death on one rock.”

“That’s why they call her Terrible Tilly.”

“The urns are still there?” Erin said. 

This bothered her the most, that the dead had no say in this and remained in metal containers stuck on this island, with reports of vandals breaking out windows and spray painting some rocks but otherwise few visitors. She thought of Rose, alone in hospice. There was no funeral or ceremony that she’d heard. A former coworker had emailed Erin to let her know Rose had passed before Erin had realized she was gone, or so near to leaving, though she should have checked in before it came to this point. Erin had known she was sick for years.

“Don’t ever have me buried on some island,” Erin said. “At least sprinkle my ashes in the water so I can be free.”

“Kind of romantic,” Chris said. “Burial on an island. At least they’re on the water.”

“But nobody can even visit them. They’re alone out there.”

“They’re dead.” 

“I just don’t like the thought of being trapped there forever,” Erin said. She felt irritated with Chris, felt a betrayal in his amusement of the lighthouse and its history. 

“We should go for a walk on the beach tonight,” Chris said. “We’ll bring a flashlight.”

Erin shivered. He knew she was afraid of the dark, still slept at home with a nightlight, and yet every time they came to the beach, he suggested a night beach walk. “We won’t be able to see. It sounds scary.”

Chris didn’t respond. He moved the tourist magazine to his nightstand without unfolding the bent pages. Tilly, made sinister by photographs captured on a stormy day, stared back into the room.

#

The next morning brought a veil of sea haze, so they walked to a coffee shop in town instead of to the beach. Erin waited in line for their lattes while Chris stood outside, his back to the window. The coffee shop was humid and it gave Erin the sense of being inside a terrarium. The insides of the windows sweated with desalinated sea air. Napkins in a short stack to the side of the cash register melted into each other. It would be a welcome environment for tropical plants that didn’t survive this far north on the coast, or the ferns that died back in the winter only to reappear in tender form in April. Erin’s heart did a little skip in the humidity, a perceived extra beat she pictured as a trapped moth flapping inside the bone walled cave of her chest. She held her breath for one second, two seconds to settle the flutter. The woman in front of her had idle conversation with the cashier while the barista called her coffee order over a shoulder. 

“My family has a house down the hill,” the woman told the cashier. She gestured and the cashier nodded. 

Erin wondered why the woman had to declare that she lived there, or at least stayed in a house there, as if her permanence in the seaside town bestowed on her some sort of authority or social currency inside this coffee shop terrarium with its dripping windows. She wondered if the woman could see Tilly from the floor to ceiling impact resistant windows of her home. She was surprised when she moved to this coast, away from the desert, to see that people left their curtains open even at night, living life in full view of the street below or neighbors across the way.

She met Chris outside the shop and handed him an iced latte. They started down the street, one of only four main streets in the downtown lined with ice cream shops and seafood restaurants and gift shops with driftwood sculptures in display windows, all white paint contrasted with light woods. Chris paused to look at flyers taped to the window of a realty office. 

“We could never afford to live here,” Erin said. As a teenager, when on vacation she had collected those free catalogs of local properties for sale and brought them back to her bedroom in the desert. She didn’t like the mansions but instead looked for details that seemed unattainable at that age and which she associated with an exotic locale, an elsewhere: a front yard gate painted lavender, a screen door, a staircase to a second floor. 

“We might be able to swing a small place in another ten years or so,” Chris said. “Not here and maybe not on the coast. On a lake.”

Erin imagined a shack nudged into the shore of a body of water she could glance across, one with shores too close. She tried to picture herself on the muddy beach, aluminum legs of a beach chair sinking slowly into wet earth. There would be no waves to come again and again for her feet but with that no pull, no growing then retreating force to keep her on the beach. No opposing force to keep her in place.

She remembered the bird on the beach and wondered if he survived despite the attacking bird and the incoming tide. It was possible. He was made to fly and to float. 

“We should go back to the beach to find that bird,” Erin said.

Chris shook his nearly empty cup, the ice rattling against its plastic sides. “The dead bird? Why?”

“We don’t know that he’s dead,” Erin said. “He could have floated away.”

“Oh, Erin. I think he was sick. Or hurt. And I doubt the body would still be there.”

She needed to know for sure. She did this sometimes, clicking through to social media posts blurred for the viewer’s protection and marked sensitive content by animal rescue organizations even though she knew she would be upset with what she saw there. It was like an itch bordering on an ache, this need to witness. Without seeing the body, she didn’t know whether to feel the loss. 

#

Erin only agreed to go down to the beach in the dark because she was caught off guard. They had dinner at the pasta place, having already dined at the fancy seafood restaurant and the fish and chips place on prior nights. Service was slow, and Erin realized as the patterns of sunlight changed against the wall above Chris’s head that they had missed the last sunset of their trip. By the time they paid the check and walked to the beach entrance, the sun was already down and the beach had a blue quality, one that Erin felt in her bones as they climbed down the stairs to the sand. Hand-dug fire pits dotted the beach and smoke filled the air. They didn’t have the flashlight.

“It’s too dark,” Erin said. She stopped in the sand. “I can’t do it.”

“It’s civil twilight,” Chris said. 

“We could be murdered out here and nobody would even notice.” Erin pulled her sweater closed and walked ahead out of irritation at Chris’s maritime knowledge.

“Tilly can lead the way,” Chris said. 

They stood together on the beach of the inland stream. 

“Ah, she doesn’t have a flashlight either,” Erin said. She looked in the direction in which she expected to find Tilly standing tall on her rock, but she couldn’t make out the shape in the bluing dark. She knew the ocean was filled with whales and boats and sunken boats and bodies and depths unfathomable, and it bothered her not that they existed but that she couldn’t see them from her vantage point in order to take stock of threats. She recalled looking into a sulfur pool at Yellowstone years before, its orange and red edges dissolving into a crystalline blue center. It was beautiful but when Erin peered into it, she could see that the pool was narrow and deep, an unending depth which made something in her heart ache, and she stepped back at the impulse to imagine being pulled into this center, too deep to picture. She didn’t trust what she couldn’t brush with an extended toe while she stretched for the bottom.

She stopped then. “Please can we go back? It’s so dark, and I’m cold.”

The wind had picked up since they’d exited the street. Chris readjusted the hood of his sweatshirt only for it to blow off again like a boat sail filling. “Let’s go back.”

#

Erin waited until Chris snored to get back out of bed in quick bursts of movement, not all at once. She slid to the edge of the bed, then pushed back the sheet. Swung her legs to the carpet. She walked to the chair where she’d left clothes for the drive home and pulled on pants and a sweatshirt, slipped on her sneakers. She slid the room keycard, decorated with a seashell, into a pocket and reached for the door but remembered the flashlight and grabbed it from the edge of the table before leaving the hotel room. The door clicked shut behind her and she didn’t hear Chris call out or feel his stomp on the thin floors, so she kept going.

The car-lined street outside their hotel was quiet but glowed yellow from the streetlamp, a light dampened by misting rain. It was the kind of unavoidable rain which saturated the air and brought wetness from all angles, not just from the sky—it seemed to swirl up from the ground and attach to her sweatshirt, her pant legs. She only had this chance to go back to the beach before they left so she allowed herself to feel the mist as it touched her face and hair.

The beach was as dark as she’d imagined it though the roar of the waves provided a consistent meter for her travel across the expanse. She walked in the direction of Haystack Rock so she wouldn’t fall into the stream, eyes down at the sand, then swept outward to the path in front of her so that she could maneuver the pocked surface and avoid rolling an ankle. She didn’t see any movement on the beach up ahead, no scurrying of animals or predators. She glanced at the frothing ocean, measuring from memory where they had seen the bird and using the white tips, visible even under a sparse moon, as a guiding line.

She could make out the dark forms of the houses lining the beach and tried to recall if it was this large rectangular shape or that which was closest to the bird. The two-story house with the distinctive roofline or the one with turrets, reduced now to photo negatives of their daytime selves. The flashlight’s beam in front of her like a searchlight, she hoped to discover the bird’s body in the sand where she’d last seen it. 

Her eyes had adjusted but now that she was on open sand, she felt borderless. The flashlight was dying, giving her less and less guidance. She flicked the button on and off to revive it, to awaken a reserve of power she knew didn’t exist. She whimpered. If she ran in the direction of the street, away from the water, she might make it far enough along to be guided in by the glow. The light drained away in her hand, and she kept hold of the flashlight as a weapon.

Now she would never find the bird, or the absence of the bird. She was afraid to break into a run because that would be an acknowledgement that there was something specific from which to run. She stood still and felt the wind move around her body. As if watched, she remembered to look for Tilly, but the moon was too weak to illuminate her out there off the shore. Chris would know the name for the moon’s current place in the cycle of things. Erin would have to trust she was out there even though she too was without light.

“I’m sorry,” Erin said.

She felt a growing sense of panic. What if she walked into the water or fell in the sand? There were so many ways to not make it through the night. Her body felt the disorientation of being on the beach while Chris was asleep in the room where she had been, where she should be. She started to walk back to the street, marching so that she wouldn’t trip, the row of homes offering no guidance, still in shadow. She kept going. She rounded a bend and saw the streetlight coming closer. She began to cry. Up ahead, the light blinked on in their room, a square eye calling her home. She ran.

Suzy Eynon is a writer from Arizona. Her work is published in JMWW, Roanoke Review, Passages North, and elsewhere. Her micro chapbook, Commuting, is forthcoming in the Summer Series 2024 from Ghost City Press. She lives in Seattle with her rescue cats.

Published October 15 2024