Rumors from the Lost World by Alan Davis

stay.”
    â€œDarling, let me fix you something to eat.” The bottom of her face was slack.
    â€œThat would be nice,” he said. Still, he held her down. “Maybe some other time? I’m just here to pick something up.” He hurried into the bedroom. Unable to contain herself, she followed.
    Gilbert sat alone as a shower of late-aftemoon sun puddled on the floor.
    Sidney emerged with a sleeping-bag under one arm.
    â€œDelinquents, beach bums, stray dogs, and worse,” his mother said. He answered politely, his voice soothing, and Gilbert, standing restlessly now, opened the screen door for him.
    â€œYou know where Ruth is, don’t you?” Sidney asked. His glance dissected Gilbert. Until Gilbert emptied his mind and took a cleansing breath, as though jogging, a flurry of associations careened wildly through his mind, a canoe adrift in white-water. She’s lost, elsewhere, I don’t know, he thought, but yes, dead, accept loss or become its victim. “You do know where she is.” Sidney’s voice was blotchy, beginning to peel. He still wore the blue-striped trunks. “I tell you what. If she should by chance end up at your place, will you tell her I’m waiting?”
*
    Ruth appeared that night. A shower pelted the roof until morning. Unable to sleep, Gilbert jogged through rain, the cool splash of water, the churning of ocean against its shores, the sound of bare feet on wet sand. Everything felt right. He had routines, and they were harmonious with the cruel traction of the world.
    Back in bed, damp towel around his waist, insomnia lifted; he drifted between cool pelting rain on the roof and more rapid waters of nightmare where Ruth swam, liquid, whirling. The sun splashed a rainstorm of light, soaking her hair, drenching her with sun and shadow, body towed helplessly, lungs full of water, arms aflail.
    On the beach road next morning he met Stephanie, walking barefoot, avoiding bits of gravel and swords of beach grass, hair braided and curled into a knot, as though grief required a mouming-cap. “Going to check on Sid,” she said.
    â€œI’ll come along. I want to retrieve those Melvilles Ruth borrowed.”
    Bleary-eyed, Sidney refused to leave the beach until Stephanie agreed to take his place. Eyebrow screwed up, he stared at Gilbert. “You going to wait?”
    â€œNot for Ruth, no.” Sidney smiled sardonically and stumbled away. In the dry slanting glare of morning, he was clearly mad. Gilbert told Stephanie her indulgence fed into his delusion and became outright participation in his madness.
    â€œGet off it. I spend part of my day on the beach, why not now?” Handfuls of scooped sand trickled through long fingers. “Whatever made you chink up that charade on the beach? It was grotesque, that plaque, those people.”
    Gilbert pulled his brows close, hooding his eyes. “People die. What would you have us do? Pretend she stepped out for a pack of cigarettes?” With a wave of her hand, Stephanie contemptuously dismissed the routines of community life—a special ordinance that allows a section of isolated beach to serve as a memorial, the muted punctuation of a funeral, a solid line of type in the obituary columns. Independent, talented, a young painter who knew her craft and didn’t imitate the latest rage, thick highways of paint scraped across the canvas with a rake, she still refused to be serious, never worked for a living. That’s what Gilbert thought. People looked out for her. Gilbert was one of them.
    â€œI don’t believe in funerals because I’ve been there,” she said, refusing to face him. “Things fall into place.” For a moment he wondered whether she was taking her promise to Sidney seriously. A nervous leap of her eyes usually qualified or deepened her words; a twist of her full mouth hinted at her mood. But now he had only a severe angular profile of a dark woman sitting