“It’s about a forty-five minute walk,” she said over her shoulder to him. “When we get to the highway, we go down that about half a mile, then we get to the bridge. Then we have to cross the bridge, and that takes about ten minutes. Then we’ll be on the island, and it’s about a twenty-minute walk from the bridge to where I like to go. If you need to stop, just let me know.”
“I’m all right,” Victor said, though he was already dizzy with the heat.
They did not talk much as they made the long, hot trek to the oceanfront. Victor found himself absorbed with the sights and sounds and smells along the way; the landscape was another world to him, for all that he had evidently been to the beach as a small child. There was a strip of sidewalk across the length of the bridge over the sound, and he stopped, for a moment, in the middle, and leaned over the railing to look down into the sound as the strong warm wind whipped his hair to one side. Shelby sensed that he wasn’t right behind her and doubled back.
“Don’t even think about diving,” she said, “you’d break your neck. It looks deep, but it isn’t really. And it’s full of disgusting eels and jellyfish.”
They walked on. When they came to the island, Shelby veered to the left, and they walked along the main drag, which was flanked on both sides with cheap motels, cheap but overpriced seafood and fast food restaurants, convenience stores, and dock houses. Shelby turned into one sandy parking lot and onto a wooden walkway that led over a set of dunes. They passed a shed that held changing rooms, and then Victor saw the ocean for the first time that he could remember. Inexplicably, the sight made his heart race. He shaded his eyes with one hand and looked out as far as he could to where the ocean and the sky merged into one hazy line. The crash and hiss of the surf was as rhythmic as a pulse. The sense Victor had that what confronted him had a life of its own was so powerful that he was compelled to speak. “Wow,” he said, and as this expression seemed inadequate, he said it again. “Wow.”
Shelby, in the meantime, trudged several yards ahead, and laid down a green bed sheet that she carried along in her black bag. Victor stood stock still at the foot of the dunes until the intensity of his encounter with the ocean passed through him. Once he situated himself next to Shelby on the bed sheet, his astonishment faded, but he could not dismiss his sense that the two of them, along with the dozens of other visitors to this particular stretch of beach, were there at the mysterious, innocent pleasure of the place itself.
“I like it here,” Shelby said. “People don’t come here because it’s so close to the piers. They think the pier draws sharks. It does, but the sharks it draws are too small to hurt anybody. Besides, I don’t go in the water anyway. Do you?”
“I’ve never been to a beach before,” he said.
“Oh that’s right,” said Shelby. “Well, can you swim?”
He nodded.
“I can’t,” said Shelby.
This seemed incredible. “For real?”
Shelby reached into her big bag and pulled out a bottle of lotion, the contents of which she proceeded to languorously apply to her arms and face. “Me and daddy haven’t always lived with Gum, you know,” she said, “I lived with my mother until I was about four,” Shelby gazed grimly at the horizon. “We never stayed in any one place for very long, so I never had a chance to learn a lot of things. I don’t even really remember going to school very much until my mother left me with Gum. And by that time Granddaddy was dead and Gum had to start running the restaurant full-time, and she never had time to teach me to swim. So, even though I’ve always been around the water, I’ve never learned. Ironic, isn’t it?”
Victor wasn’t sure, exactly, what the word ironic meant. Shelby finished slathering her skin, drew up her knees, clasped her forearms around them and continued. “My mother didn’t really leave me with Gum. She lost custody of me, then she kidnapped me, and then she brought me back here to live when it got too hot for her. Daddy divorced her, or she divorced Daddy, when I was about three. I can’t even remember them ever being together. After that she started doing a lot of drugs, and I guess Daddy started to do a lot more drinking than he had before. He was still in the Coast Guard then, stationed in Charleston. My mother and me lived just about everywhere in the state, even Raleigh for a little while. She took me wherever whatever loser she was with took her. Eventually someone reported her for leaving me alone too much while she was out doing god knows what, so she left me with Gum. My mother’s very beautiful,” Shelby paused and looked out to sea. “She’s Lumbee.”
“Huh?”
“Lum-bee,” Shelby rolled her eyes and enunciates. “Lumbee Indian. Haven’t you ever heard of the Lumbee tribe?”
Victor shrugged. If he had, he couldn’t remember. But that explained, then, his cousin’s rose-copper coloring. Her mother was an Indian. Victor wondered what his grandmother thought of that.
Shelby sighed and spoke with the weary tone of one obliged to explain the obvious to an idiot. “We’re the largest Indian tribe of east of the Mississippi. But no one knows anything about us, because we don’t have federal recognition. Some people say we’re the descendants of the Lost Colony, mixed with the Native Americans. That may be true, but there’s also African blood in us. No one is really just one race, I don’t care what anyone says. You can be racist against yourself, you know. You can deny who you are. But the fact is, we’re a coat of many colors,” Shelby looked at Victor as if she expected him to contradict her. Then her look changed, as if he had suddenly come into focus for her.
“Hey, you know, I’ve never even met your mother,” she said. “I know that Gum likes her. I know they talk every now and then. What’s your mother’s name?”
Victor picked a handful of sand up from beside their bed sheet and let it sift through his fingers. “Veronica,” he answered. “But she hates it. She won’t let anybody call her that. She calls herself Ronnie.”
“Veronica,” Shelby said it musingly. “What a beautiful name. So European. I wonder why she doesn’t like it….”
Victor shrugged. “She really hates it,” he said. “What’s your mother’s name?”
“Tanya,” Shelby said this as if the sound left a bad taste in her mouth. “Your mother’s Italian?”
“I guess so. Her family name was Bassano. I think there’s some French, too.”
“Mediterranean,” Shelby nodded approvingly. “Southern Europe is a mixture of all kinds of people, too. Like I said, no one’s really any one thing. Certain people just want to think they are. Gum’s like that,” Shelby unclasped her knees and stretched her legs out in front of her. “Have you noticed that? That she’s kind of racist?”
Victor nodded.
Shelby’s lips, usually so full, compressed into a line that looked very much like their grandmother’s habitual expression of grim forbearance. “It bugs her that I’m not white. It always has. She was brought up that way that people shouldn’t mix, and she’s never really gotten over it. I guess there was never any reason for her to try, until I came along. And she’s tried, in her way. But I know it still bothers her. Some things you just can’t change about yourself, even if you know you should,” Shelby reached behind herself, untwisted the knot of hair at the nape of her neck, and let the sea breeze whip her thick, dark, rusty curls about her face. “It only bothers her, though, when she thinks