Sandy Point

photo by Todd Arena

There’s an island called Sandy Point where Long Island Sound pours into the Atlantic. My Nona and Pa lived on the mainland in Mystic. Once, my Nona remarked to the dinner table that we were an especially strange family. This was Thanksgiving or Easter. Maybe someone’s birthday. My Nona was kidding, of course. I couldn’t have been seven. I blurted out, Especially Ruthie. My Nona took me to the little back room and told me to apologize for what I said. So I did.

Auntie Ruth’s been through a lot, my Nona always said. She had operations on her knees. Kids picked on her about her scars. Bullies is what they are. She had a hard time with the drink, my Nona said. That’s why Ruthie kept dogs—they wouldn’t judge. My Nona and Pa bought her a new Subaru, and while Ruthie was inside at a twelve-step meeting, the dogs tore the car’s upholstery down to foam.

Once, my mother uneasily agreed to let newly sober Ruthie watch after me. I was still a baby. That night, Ruthie called my mother and father’s restaurant and said she’d gotten into the Rolling Rock ponies in the fridge. That she was sorry but someone needed to come home.

Eventually Ruthie got sober for good. She married a man named Lanny who sold Fords in New London. Lanny kept a boat outside and stayed up late tinkering with the engine, smoking cigarettes on the cement steps beneath the carport.

My Nona picked me up from school most Fridays, and I’d spend the night with her and my Pa. One day, Ruthie called for me on the phone. She wondered would I come stay with her and Lanny. Only if I wanted. She’d understand if not. I didn’t want to go to my aunt’s house with her smelly dogs, with her uncomfortable sofas. But I went.

Sometime later Lanny’s boat was seaworthy, and I spent Friday night with him and Ruthie willingly. Saturday morning we trailered to Noank and launched into the Mystic River. It was hot and calm, but on the Sound there were swells. We spotted a flopping sunfish the size of a dinner table.

Lanny let me take the helm. Ruthie sat with the dogs. It seemed strange to steer from the right side of the boat. I wouldn’t have known to say starboard. There were no pedals I couldn’t reach, and the speed was controlled by hand. We skipped over waves and all seemed fine till we were deep in a trough and Lanny strong-armed the wheel away from me. He deemed I’d put us in danger and told me as much. Maybe I had.

Before long we anchored and swam off Sandy Point. It’s where Rhode Island meets Connecticut meets New York. In the shallows stands the remains of an eighteenth-century warehouse where a man called Rhodes hid his liquor. Rhodes’ Folly, locals call it. Lore has it that to avoid paying tax, he moved his supply around, from state to state but under the same roof, so inspectors couldn’t confirm in whose jurisdiction his stash was stored.

That day on the water, no one mentioned Rhodes or his liquor scheme. The dogs were fetching off the bow of the boat in long bounds and splashes. I asked Lanny and Ruthie about the stone pyramid rising from the clear blue shallows, and someone thought it would be fun to go climb it. It might have been me. Likely it was me.

What happened next happened fast. I leapt from the stern and swam to shore. Lanny and Ruthie and the dogs did too. Then I was climbing the great remains of Rhodes' warehouse. Hands and feet on the granite. Then the dogs were climbing too. A paw nicked me. Then I fell. I remember the sound more than the pain. The hollow splash of water, stone, and bone. I tried to stand and gimped off into the sand.

Immediately I understood I was to hide this from everyone. Nothing seemed broken, I said. Ruthie agreed I wouldn’t mention it to my Nona and Pa, that I wouldn’t share what happened with my parents. No damage done.

My father, Ruthie’s little brother, met us back at the boat trailer. I launched into a lie about how earlier in the week I’d kicked the mission oak chair in the basement playing soccer, and hadn’t he and my mother noticed my limp? I used my secret with Ruthie to make my father feel neglectful. That’s a thing I did. Something about the day away on the water had aggravated it, I said. He never asked about it again.

I told my mother the lie, told my Nona and Pa the lie. I even told everyone at school the lie. No fun story about how I fell from several feet up while out at sea.

Thirty years beyond it, and no one knows the colossal disaster Ruthie avoided. It’s true I think of it that way. It’s not that I avoided disaster—though surely I did—it’s that Ruthie did. All that could have shaken the family’s unflinching love for Ruthie was if something happened to me, the only grandkid, while she was looking after me. The boy who fell into the sandy shallows and not onto the rocks, and then kept his mouth shut about it. It was an accident. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t something that happened and Ruthie happened to be on watch. It was her and her husband and their dogs and their boat and their blessing that willed my fall into the world.

I have a son now. It’s astounding to think I was allowed to go on Lanny’s boat. But my parents were worked ragged, glad for time alone, for free childcare on a Friday night. Of course I was safe with family. And it’s possible Ruthie and Lanny, and even my Nona and Pa, just mentioned in passing a low-speed cruise up the river, that they spoke in half-truths and fudged the plan to motor east-by-southeast toward the north Atlantic.  

That my Nona and Pa thought it was good for me to spend time with Ruthie is less surprising. They wanted their daughter, their first born, the one who’d been bullied for her scars, to care for and love and be loved by their grandson. At least she could be an auntie, they said. That was something. They imagined Ruthie and me on beaches, cruising in Lanny’s boat on calm, balmy days.

I feel it now on cool mornings. I wish I could call it Ruthie’s ankle, but there’s been other missteps since. A skipped stair, a mossy root.