DAY AT THE BEACH by Nick Faber Albert wakes up and stares at the unfamiliar objects in the room around him, andin these first morning moments, when the dust dances in the sunlight in front of him, thisroom, these hands, this bed, none of it feels like his. He tosses around, twisted up in his blanket, lying in the direct path that the curtains have created for the warm sunlight, yethe feels a deep coldness.A picture sits beside him in a simple frame, a middle-aged man and a younger woman standing in front of a valley. It's black and white but so lush and so green. Now heremembers: he's Albert, and that's Helen. He checks the watch beside the photograph. It'sSaturday. He can sleep in, so he rolls over, and here is Helen, his wife, the dead one, lying beside him.“Helen? ” She opens her eyes and she is so young. Albert sits up and makes eyecontact with himself in the mirror. If it had all been a dream, then he is impossibly old.But Albert isn't thinking as rationally as that. No, this is a happy day indeed, maybe eventhe happiest day of his life.“Is this the day we go to Ocean City, Helen?”She smiles and nods.“When we get a bucket of mussels and eat too many, and fall asleep on the beach before the sun goes down?”Helen smiles and nods again and Albert claps his hands.When he gets to the car, Helen is waiting for him in the front seat. Albert makes itto Ocean City in five and a half hours flat, like he always has, but when he turns ontoOcean Parkway, it's all wrong. High-rise condos blind him with shiny mirrored windows,

there's so much traffic he can hardly move, and worse, when he gets to the restaurant, theone with the buckets of mussels, it's gone.“Can you believe this?” He bangs on the steering wheel, and Helen looks at himlike she can’t believe it either.But then it hits him. “Today isn't today, is it?” Helen shakes her head.Albert parks by the beach and buys a tub of fries for lunch. He walks up and downthe boardwalk, but it's just not the same. He tries to put his arm around Helen but he can'ttouch her, and when he asks her what she thinks about Ocean City, about him, aboutanything, she has no voice to answer.He plants himself on the sand for sunset, and as the daylight fades away, so doesHelen. So Albert drives back home alone.The next morning, Helen is in his bed again, smiling, nodding. So Albert drives back to Ocean City, and just like the night before, the condos, the restaurants, the traffic,it’s all wrong.All of Ocean City must think he's a buffoon, the way the weekender families andthe sandy brown locals watch him pump gas with a ghost in his front seat.When Albert gets back to Virginia and pulls into his driveway, it's night timeagain, and Helen is gone. Before he goes to bed, he finds the letter that Helen left himamong her things, and he lays it on the pillow next to him as a reminder.It's Monday morning, and Albert remembers everything. He almost laughs athimself, relieved that he won't be driving to Ocean City just to jog his memory. Instead,he looks forward to toast and eggs and maybe a walk to work if it’s nice out.

But he gets up and here’s Helen, standing in the doorway in her pink track suit,the same one she wore one the day she left for her aerobics class and never came home.“Leave me alone, will you?” Albert can't even look at her. “Just leave me aloneand go back to sleep with the rest of the dead.” He turns to face her and she's gone.“Wait, Helen. I didn't mean it. Don't go. Please. Not like this.”She’s halfway down the street before Albert can get out the door. He can't find hisshoes so he goes out in his slippers and calls down Campbell Street. “I’m sorry I said youwere dead,” he says, and his next door neighbor, who is bent over her bed of perennials,sighs.He catches up with Helen on Market Street, but his slipper blows out in the FoodLion parking lot. He sees a taxi cab and runs up to the driver, who is pushing a cart full of groceries.“Buddy, I’m off duty,” the driver says.“And I'm desperate,” Albert says.Albert sees Helen ahead and the driver slows down, but not slow enough.“We have to wait for her,” Albert says, but the driver says he has ice creammelting in the trunk, so he takes Albert straight to the top of Reddish Knob.Unlike the day Helen jumped, there is no one at the peak of the mountain. Albertsits down against a large rock and falls asleep waiting. When he wakes up and crawls outof hiding, a few college kids are hanging around a pickup truck. At first they scream interror, then they laugh, and finally they ask Albert if he’s OK. The boys offer him beer,and the girl gives him a bottle of water and an apple.