Sebastian
When he was too young, his mother had said, The sand is white because it’s made of everybody’s bones. They’re dried up by the sun and saltwater, yes? And they’re tossed around and around and around until they crumble into dust. She held his frame in her cross-legged lap, her breath warm on his ear. Your grandmother and grandpapa, their grandmothers and grandpapas, all tossed around. Just dust. She kissed his cheek. He cried with each step of bare foot against cold sand on their way from shore to boardwalk.
She asked him pointedly, a couple of years later, Why don’t you like the beach, Sebi? Why don’t you play in the sand with your brothers?
He preferred the streetcar to the beach, and on the days Sebastian handed over his pocket change to his brothers, they’d count the silver guilder and let him stay on as they raced out to the sea. At home in the evenings, the three older boys were scraped-up, sunburnt, sandy, and Seb, small, pale, clean, would nod along as they described to their mother the seagulls and relays, white caps and ballgames, Waves the size of tsunamis, really! But we swam in them anyway, Sebi nearly froze himself solid.
Oh? Yes, he does look very cold, doesn’t he?
He does, he does! they chorused, so Seb wrapped his arms around himself and feigned a shiver, tried his hardest not to grin. What deception!
When his mother tucked him into bed those nights, she said, Be sure not to get sand in your sheets, did you wash it from your fingernails and hair? to which Sebi would reply, Mama, I stayed on the tram today, and she would kiss his cheek.
The tram swayed gently as it moved. Its interior was a brighter green than grass. It ambled through the city along stone walls that drooped with ivy. It ambled under treetops that glowed with sunlight. The branches reached, wove, sprawled, and sometimes seemed to make emerald tunnels; these were Sebastian’s favorite sights on the route.
Some days he brought a comic and studied its pages but also studied the way the light came and went, lit up the colors in watery, flickering patterns. Sebastian preferred superhero comics to the funnies.
The girl with whom he would have his first kiss introduced herself by passing a note in grade eight. She said to him that afternoon, I think you’re sweet and funny and so quiet. I like your hair, that it’s almost white. Especially on the days you sit by the window at that desk in the sun.
Her lips were chapped when they kissed briefly on the pier, and when boarding the streetcar afterward, the conductor said, Have a nice day, Sebastian and lady friend, and Sebastian said something like, Thank you, sir, and the girl laughed in her seat, said, How does he know your name?
Sebastian met Anna in university and found her lively and loud at a time when the girls he knew preferred to be perceived as dainty, graceful, demure. It was at a social event that she asked him what he studied, and he told her Politics, and she replied, Pol-i-tics, so Sebastian said, What do you study? to which she responded with a turn of phrase that made heat rise to his cheeks.
Anna became a professor of biology. Sebastian studied the law, enjoying most its precision and straightforwardness. Anna held her husband’s hand when they sat on the streetcar in the mornings and evenings; Sebastian listened intently to his wife as she read and reread her abstracts aloud in their bedroom.
Are my arguments clear?
Brilliant.
The wording?
Perfect.
After repeating herself once, twice, three times, she’d toss the papers to her typing desk and place both hands on Sebastian’s cheeks. Her kisses were harder than Sebastian sometimes wished they might be.
Sebastian did not grow to like the beach. Of course, there came a point when he realized the sand was not the bones of those long dead. In his early teens, he had attended the funeral of a distant cousin, and it came suddenly to him that bodies were buried in coffins in cemeteries, deep in the ground. Or, they might be burned. The important thing was that the dead were not rolled down the beach and into the ocean and tossed around and around until they crumpled into dust.
Although he did not grow to like the beach, he came to love its wind, heavy and thick, like something you could run your fingers through or taste on your tongue. Anna loved the beach, would swim every morning if she could. Sebastian did not swim with her but watched her dive into the water and climb out of it. He watched her throw herself against the waves time and time again.
They were at the beach when Anna told him she was pregnant. A warmth bloomed in his stomach before he saw tears on her cheeks. He had never seen his wife cry. Not on the day they were married nor the day her parents passed. He did not ask, Are you sad or happy? because he was too afraid to know the answer.
Did you know, he began, that sand is made of bones?
No, it isn’t.
Yes, everybody that lived before us, the saltwater dries them up. They’re tossed in the waves until they become dust.
No, Sebastian, that’s not what sand is. Anna rested her chin on her bent knees.
When she was three months pregnant, Anna was let go from her position; her dismissal coincided perfectly with the end of a term. When Thomas was born, he had Sebastian’s pale, golden hair and his mother’s tight ringlets.
Anna smiled at the baby often; she smiled at her husband less. I do not want another child, she told him one night. He had not been in the delivery room when she gave birth but had heard from one of the nurses, hushed, She was lucky.
Of course, he agreed, let’s not have another child.
As a toddler, Thomas ate only fruit and fruit-flavored ice cream. Anna grew frustrated when her husband indulged their son, buying peaches and apples but forgetting the broccoli.
Slowly and then all of a sudden, Anna became quiet, became sullen, did not care whether Thomas ate broccoli, until one day she walked through their flat’s front door like a firework. She would begin teaching again in October, she declared. Beaming, Sebastian congratulated her, and Thomas clapped sticky toddler hands. Anna tousled her son’s hair, ran her fingers through her husband’s, and kissed them each on the forehead in turn.
My sunshine boys.
After just months back in her position, Anna met another man, a professor of art history who taught a course as a visiting lecturer. When he returned to his university two cities over, Anna left with him. The transition was quiet and sudden; Sebastian recalled Anna’s blushing cheeks on the occasions she had spoken warmly of her colleague. He had never before seen his wife blush, not on the day he proposed nor when her sister told stories of their rowdy childhood mischief at dinner parties.
I didn’t plan for it to happen like this, you know.
I know.
Soon, Anna’s letters stopped coming. It had been difficult enough to read them aloud to Thomas, who, at five, was only just learning the alphabet. It was more difficult still to explain why there were no more letters at all. The idea crossed Sebastian’s mind, once, twice, to write his own letters in neat cursive, pretend they arrived by postman, and unseal them before his son’s wide eyes.
My most darling Thomas, I am traveling to America this week! Next week, I am off to China. Then I plan to board another boat that will take me all the way around Africa. My next letter will be postmarked from Cairo! Check the postbox every day, my love!
Thomas, in his teens, grew into his frame in a way that Sebastian never had; Thomas knew how to hold his broad shoulders with confidence, and Sebastian wondered where he had learned. There seemed always to be classmates at his side, in the flat after class, kicking sneakers off by the door, grabbing orange juice from the fridge. Sebastian tried but could not remember the names of the ever-changing cohort of young men — each lean, loud, quick to laugh.
He couldn’t keep up either with the girls that Thomas introduced him to nonchalantly, continuously. Yes, Leila again, we’re doing schoolwork. Sarah’s coming over for a project tomorrow. Sebastian nodded, chimed, They seem very nice, when he could fit the words in.
The cases took up most of Sebastian’s time. He held a seat, for a period, in the chamber of the international court, busying himself with border disputes. Burkina Faso and the Republic of Mali. My most darling Sebi, he might hear in Anna’s bright voice, especially when worn-down, when over-worked. I have just arrived in West Africa! You could not imagine all of this sand, and no water in sight, no North Sea to dive into, no salty breeze, can you believe such a place exists, my love!
When his mother finally passed, after having grown confused and small with age, Sebastian stood with Thomas in the same cemetery where he buried a cousin. The oldest of Sebastian’s brothers, brawny and red-cheeked, stood beside him. The second-oldest brother, living now in Germany with his wife and young children, could not make it to the Netherlands in time. The third brother, closest to Sebastian in age, had died unexpectedly of a heart attack three years earlier. Levi and Sebastian and Thomas rode the city streetcar back to the flat. If you’ve got some guilder, Sebi, Thomas and I might let you stay on and ride the rest of the day, we won’t tell mother. A teasing wink. The interior of the tram was as green as ever.
Levi stayed with them two more days, and when he left, Thomas asked, Where does he live? Is he married or what? Sebastian realized he didn’t know a thing about his eldest brother’s life.
Sebastian saw his ex-wife only once after their divorce, years later, on a crowded sidewalk. She held hands with a small girl whose ringlets shone yellow in the sun. Briefly, he imagined her daughter was his own. He could hear Anna’s voice clearly in his mind, and she said to their daughter, My sunshine girl, and then he watched their backs as they walked away, watched their legs step in time.
After his mother’s funeral, Sebastian did not like to go to sleep and instead stayed up into the night with hot tea and paperwork in English and French. Eventually, his eyes would shut, and he’d dream of his mother’s pale face in the waves, tumbling around and around and around —
When he awoke, he appreciated the soft, thumping bass of Thomas’ music, which traveled from his son’s bedroom door, down the old hallway, and into the dark of his room, even at the early hours when the boy should have been long asleep.
Thomas met a girl while on exchange in the United States in his third year of university. He studied music, and so did she. It was a subject Sebastian knew nothing about, and he felt embarrassed, sometimes, as a result.
She’s really great, Thomas told his father over the phone. Really great, Dad.
She seems very nice. Be good.
Sebastian watched as his son peppered the years with transatlantic flights, and when Thomas and Emily visited the flat together, having dated three years, Sebastian knew what they would announce.
You’re so young to get married! He laughed, they laughed with him, and when Thomas told his father he planned to live in Washington with his fiancé, he placed a hand over his father’s, a rare touch between them, and said, You’ll visit, though both of them knew Sebastian could not or would not get on a plane.
Anna never responded to the wedding invitation. Sebastian had no idea his son had reached out, didn’t know how he had found an address. I don’t know what I expected from her, Thomas said over the phone.
I know you are frustrated, that you are disappointed.
Thomas hung up.
Sebastian sometimes caught himself wondering, in the slow hours of midmorning, especially, where Anna’s disinterest had arisen from. He had not known her to be emotional, but she had been intense and thorough. Did she think of them? Had she simply forgotten?
Thomas and Emily held a small ceremony in Scheveningen with Sebastian and Thomas’ childhood friends, too, those gangly, juice-drinking teenage boys who had grown into men. A handful of colleagues and family friends came by to congratulate Sebastian, to pat his back, to say what a beautiful match, look how he’s grown up taller than the rest of us.
Sebastian, Thomas, and Emily rode a streetcar to the pier. I always sat in the window seat, the one right behind the conductor, and I’d crane my neck to watch over their shoulders, pretend I was the one driving. Sebastian observed the way his son sweetly leaned in toward his fiancé when he whispered, his forehead pressed flush against her temple.
Sebastian looked out the window and tried not to eavesdrop. Strange how, when he spoke English, his son no longer sounded like his son, that giggling spoiled boy.
My dad, he’s always preferred the tram like this. I can’t tell you how many afternoons we sat and rode loops and loops around the city, eating ice cream all the way.
Sebastian ordered vanilla, Thomas strawberry, and Emily stracciatella. They all sat hip-to-hip-to-hip on a bench off the boardwalk and watched the seagulls and white caps, watched a cluster of kids running relays and playing ball.
I love this beach, Thomas said to them both, to no one in particular. How it looks like it goes on forever.
Sebastian did not grow to like the beach, but his lab could run for hours in the sand. So he stood patiently, picked up the soggy tennis ball, threw, waited, picked it up, and repeated. The dog had been Thomas’ good idea. Sebastian did not dream at all when the dog slept at his feet.
On Sundays, Sebastian ate at the cafe at the end of the boardwalk. It was small and wood-paneled, friendly and old. It reminded him of Tuesdays and of afternoons in September. In the back, two glass doors opened to a view of the sea. The waitress had copper-red hair worn long and loose, and on empty, dreary days, she lingered at Sebastian’s table.
He thought once, correctly, that she was making eyes at him, though he must have been at least the age of her father. His fine blonde hair, thinner now, more closely resembled silver. He had deep creases across his cheeks when he smiled and when he did not smile. Crow’s feet spread outward from the corners of his eyes. He had gained some weight over the years, though not much; he had become softer, though he had always been soft.
The copper-haired waitress hovered and chatted, said, You didn’t bring your dog today, to which he responded, She was slow to get up this morning, under the weather. He blamed the rain.
The first and only time he and the copper-haired waitress slept together, it was at her place, when her roommate was out, and when it was over, she complained, You’re just too polite, it was almost funny, and he laughed, and she laughed, and he slipped on his shoes and slipped out the door.
It was only mid-afternoon, and Sebastian chose to walk along the beach rather than the boardwalk or street. He carried his shoes pinched heel-to-heel, dangling from his right hand, the socks tucked neatly under leather tongues. He would get on the streetcar at the next stop, not this one, not yet.
Call them trams, busses even, the waitress said one Sunday. Say streetcars, and you sound ancient, way older than you are.
You don’t have any idea how old I am.
Touché.
One Sunday, she was simply gone. The woman behind the counter made an espresso, explained the waitress had quit and gone traveling with her boyfriend, had said she wanted to start a band, sing Eurovision.
Steam hissed from the espresso machine.
Did she leave a message for me? Sebastian wanted to ask, but he didn’t, because he was too afraid to know the answer.
Emily was pregnant with twins, due in December. Sebastian shook when the plane took off and shook when it landed. The dog stayed with a colleague whose six-year-old son was overjoyed. Sebastian met his granddaughters, held them each in turn, and he shook when the plane took off, shook again when it landed.
You’ll stay longer next time, Thomas said over the phone.
Next time the four of you will come to visit me. We’ll go to the beach.
Days grew longer when there was less to fill them with. Sebastian’s hours at the court were reduced gradually. Sebastian took to riding the tram on long afternoons, and the dog was content to nap with her chin on his feet.
Some days, he brought a book, and he studied its pages but studied also the shadows the rain made against the window against the text. Some days, he let the car lull him to sleep.
In the evenings, he drank his tea and listened to songs Thomas said he might like. He wrote notes that said, Call in the morning, because he didn’t want to forget.