The door swung shut so fast it almost hit Joe in the ankle, almost nipping at his heel like a sheepdog would its misbehaving charge. Joe had slammed the door shut behind him for effect and it almost came back to bite him. In spite of his rage, he chuckled at that fact as he made his way down the weathered stairs of the rented beach house. He followed the trail that led through the dunes, covered in sea oats, to the Gulf of Mexico.

When one door closes, another one always opens. Joe had heard that theory although it was merely wishful thinking to him. The idea certainly couldn’t be counted on like Newtonian laws of gravity and motion. But in this case, the same shut door opened up again briefly, just long enough for Joe’s little sister to slip through and pull it shut behind her, closing it much more gently than Joe had done.

Joe didn’t hear the door creak open and shut and he never looked back in his sprint to the sea so he didn’t see his sister, Ellen, running after him. She was two years younger than Joe, which made her sixteen, but she would always be his baby sister. He had taken it upon himself years ago to look after her, to be her good shepherd through the dark valleys of life. So no matter how close to adulthood she came, Ellen would always be the baby sister.

Joe paused for a second at the end of the short trail to the sea. He couldn’t decide which way to go, east or west down the coast or south into the ocean. This brief indecision allowed Ellen to catch up to him.

“Where ya goin’, Joe?” Ellen asked, breathlessly, bending down to put her hands on her knees as if it would speed the oxygen to her lungs.

“I don’t know,” Joe muttered. He was still so mad that he couldn’t even look his baby sister in the eye. Instead, he stared at the sea. “Anywhere that takes me away from that man and his wife.”

That man was their father. The wife Joe referred to was his new one, not the woman that had given birth to Joe and Ellen. Joe’s father had remarried in the past year, right before Joe started his senior year of high school. No one liked the new wife. Joe and Ellen were convinced that their father didn’t even like his new wife and it was entirely possible, despite the vows of marriage. Even the woman’s own three kids, all below the age of ten, didn’t like her.

But she was a fact of life, much like rats or cancer, and she had insisted that the family, such as it had to be, take a summer vacation to Gulf Shores, Alabama. No one had wanted the trip except for her. Joe’s father was too tied to his work to care, spending all his vacation time on the cell phone or the laptop he had brought with him. He probably wouldn’t even notice that Joe and Ellen had left the rental house.

“You need to go home,” Joe told Ellen, secretly hoping she would be stubborn enough to follow him wherever he went. He wiped the sweat off his forehead. Lower Alabama in August is already too hot. The heat was stifling even at nine in the morning.

“I’m going wherever you go,” Ellen replied, her hands habitually on her waist in an unintentional show of defiance. She was the willful child of the two. Not that Joe wasn’t willful in his own way, his was just a quieter resolve.

“I think I might walk to Florida,” Joe declared. Something about the prospect of being in another state appealed to him.

“Then I think I might walk to Florida with you,” Ellen answered, sounding something like a little shadow.

“Let’s go then,” Joe said, turning east.

Joe had looked at a map of lower Alabama on the resentful trip down, taken only a few weeks before he would start college. Florida didn’t seem too far away from Gulf Shores, Alabama. The walk couldn’t possibly take more than three hours, Joe estimated, even considering they were starting from the far side of town. Of course, objects on land are never as close as they appear on a map.

Joe mentioned to his sister that he thought the walk would take two or three hours each way, bringing them back right around three in the afternoon, plenty of time for his emotions to come back down to earth from Mars and, almost as important, still in time for a late lunch and a nap before dinner.

“What do you think we’ll find there?” Ellen inquired.

“Probably nothing much,” Joe replied. “I betcha there’s nothing more that a sign letting us know where the line in the sand is.”

“In this case it’s really in the sand.” Ellen tried to be funny.

Joe wasn’t in a laughing mood. In fact, he hardly said anything at all for the better part of an hour as they walked east on the beach, still relatively deserted. All the hungover vacationers were still sleeping off their benders, not wanting to venture out into the stifling sun. And the families with children serving as alarm clocks had already come and gone to the beach, their morning excursions in the sand cut short by the intense heat of August.

Ellen tried to make small talk for most of that hour but Joe wasn’t biting. He’d give her a one or two word response to each inquiry and her musings thinned out like vegetation above the tree line. For the most part, Ellen just tagged along with Joe, always remaining one or two steps behind his furious pace.

“Sometimes I don’t know who to be more mad at.” Joe eventually broke his relative silence, letting down his guard for the first time that morning.

“What do you mean?” Ellen sounded puzzled.

“I mean,” Joe paused in thought. “Sometimes I don’t know whether to be mad at her for the way she treats you or to be mad at him for the way he lets her treat you.”

“Joe, I’ll be fine.”

“No,” Joe stopped and turned to face his sister. “You’re not fine. You call me all the time in the middle of the night with tears in your voice.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“I just wish you could live with me and mom.” Joe started walking again. “I know the two of you have your rough moments. But I know you’d be happier if you didn’t have to deal with your father’s wife.”

“He’s your father too,” Ellen reasoned.

“Unfortunately,” Joe muttered.

“And she has a name.”

“I’ll never say it.”

“Come on, Joe,” Ellen answered, “that’s being petty.”

“Maybe so.” Joe agreed. “But she’ll never be more than just his wife to me. And I still think you’d be better off with mom. You’d have the house pretty much to yourself once I leave for college next month.”

“You know how it is,” Ellen answered.

“Yeah, it stinks,” Joe said. “They gave us a raw deal.”

“That’s for sure,” Ellen agreed.

The raw deal that Joe mentioned happened when their parents finally agreed to officially divorce, after four years of separation. Their father sat the two teenagers down, told them that one child would go with each parent so that they could have leverage against each other, and gave them five minutes to decide their fates. At the time, Ellen didn’t get along with their mother. Joe and his father never got along. So they made the logical choice. But it still stunk.

“Do you think he actually loves her?” Ellen asked after a few moments of silence, apparently observed for their rotten fates.

“I doubt it,” Joe answered.

“Not even in some twisted way?”

“I doubt it,” Joe said again. Ellen was about to speak up in reply but Joe cut her off. “You know our father. Loving really isn’t his thing. He needs, but he doesn’t love.”

“Unfortunately,” Ellen mimicked her brother, who gave her a playful glare.

“He just wanted a wife.” Joe sighed. “It didn’t matter who it was. He just needed someone to take care of him. And it didn’t matter who it was. You know that. You remember what he said to mom before they finally got divorced.”

Their parents had been separated for nearly four years with little hope in sight. Only the slightest glimmer of light was visible at the end of the tunnel and it seemed marathons away. Their father sat their mother down one day and asked her if she had any intention of reconciling their marriage, adding the fact that he had met someone new at church in the singles class he had been attending as a married man. If his current wife didn’t want him, he’d find another with haste. He thought this new information would be a bargaining tool, a lever to lift his estranged wife into action. He was an emotionally challenged man and later wondered why his words didn’t have the expected positive affect on his wife.

“Well, since you put it that way,” their mother replied. At least she knew where she stood. The whole reason she had separated from her husband in the first place was that he had never shown her the love she felt she deserved, oblivious to any emotions besides his own. She had hoped he would change. She was the one who gave up hope that day, signing the papers a few minutes later.

Their father remarried in three months. Evidently he wasn’t kidding about finding someone else. But he chose poorly.

“He should have seen her coming,” Joe continued. The woman had three kids to feed and was fresh off a divorce of her own and even fresher off a suicide attempt. She was desperate for anything positive in her life when their father came around. Once, in a fit of anger, she had told Ellen that their father was a stable paycheck for her, one that Ellen would be most unwelcome to interrupt with her complaints.

“But he didn’t see her coming at all.” Ellen shrugged. “Anyway, it’ll all be over with soon enough. I’m almost out of the house.”

“You’ve got two years of high school left,” Joe answered. “Two years can be a long time, especially when you’re a teenager and miserable.”

“I’ll have you to call every night.” Ellen smiled weakly.

“And you know I’ll always answer the phone.” Joe reached back and squeezed his sister’s hand. “I just wish it didn’t have to come to that. A father should look after his daughter.”

“A father should look after his son,” Ellen replied.

“I gave up on that a long time ago,” Joe said, with a bitterness that he wouldn’t admit in words. “Besides, he’ll never change.”

“Do you think he’s just oblivious?” Ellen asked. “I mean, sometimes I feel like I’m less than a shadow in the corner when I’m around the two of them.”

“I think he knows,” Joe answered. “I think he knows but he’s too afraid of her. He lost one wife and he’s afraid of losing another. You know how he can’t stand to be alone. And his new wife knows that too. She’s got him wrapped around her finger and every time he starts to step out of line, she threatens to take her love away. That’s no way for a relationship to be. Love should never be conditional. But hers is and she’s got him so afraid of being alone that he lets her get away with anything. And that’s a shame because you’re the one who suffers the most. I see it and you see it, and I think he sees it too.”

“So basically he chose her over me?” Ellen asked rhetorically.

“No,” Joe corrected her. “He chose himself and his weaknesses over you.”

Joe and Ellen walked in silence for a while. Joe thought he saw his sister well up and begin to cry. So he put his arm around her as they walked down the beach. Evidently that action soothed her stirring emotions like aloe on a burn. She held her tears inside, at least for the moment.

Joe knew he had to change the subject and he did. He started talking about how much he was looking forward to college. Of course, Ellen would be welcome to visit every chance she got. And she’d take him up on the offer a time or two.

But mostly Joe and Ellen talked about happier times, times from their youth, times before they became jaded by a world full of fallen saints and rising devils. At least they had their resilience, somehow still retaining hope in a world of sad goodbyes and worse hellos. Of course, their resilience was forged in each other. Neither Joe nor Ellen had the strength to hold themselves up. But somehow, in the midst of their vulnerabilities, they found the courage to hold each other up against life’s storms, of which they had witnessed more than their fair share.

Ellen had thought to bring a watch along. She informed Joe that noon had come and gone. Where was Florida? Joe guessed that it must be just around the corner. He was ignorantly certain of the fact.

Florida didn’t come until three in the afternoon, the hour that Joe had appointed for their homecoming of sorts. At least he was half right about their walk, Joe reasoned. He forced himself to chuckle, presumably for Ellen’s sake.

“I thought there would be a sign.” Ellen wondered aloud.

“There is.” Joe replied. “Kind of.”

He pointed to a bar on the beach, set right where the sea oats would have covered the dunes. A sign welcomed patrons to the Floribama bar and declared that the establishment was built on equal parts of two sandy states.

“So we walked all this way to Florida and the only thing here is a bar neither of us is old enough to go into,” Ellen said in frustration. “We could have just walked fifty yards down the beach for that.”

“I didn’t know,” Joe defended himself.

“I’m not mad at you.” Ellen picked up on Joe’s defensiveness. “Don’t worry. This is just typical of our luck.”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Joe continued to offer his unnecessary explanation.

“I know,” Ellen stated, her hands on her hips in a posture that made even her five foot frame intimidating. “And I agreed to it. So what do we do now?”

“I guess we go back.” Joe shrugged his shoulders. “You were always the good one at math, but I think we won’t be there until about nine tonight. That’s twelve hours of walking. I’m sorry. I really am.”

Ellen just laughed in frustration and fell back onto the beach, starting to make what would have been snow angels, had the powder been icy instead of sandy. At least she’s kept her sense of humor, Joe concluded, sitting down beside her, wrapping his arms around his legs and throwing his head forward into his knees. He sat in the sand for more than a minute in silence. He sighed and stood up, reaching for his sister’s hand to help her onto her feet.

“I need some water and I don’t think they’ll let us into the Floribama bar. And neither of us brought any money anyway,” Joe said, pulling Ellen to her feet. “There’s a hotel about a quarter of a mile back. I’m sure they have a fountain by the pool.”

Joe and Ellen needed much more than a drink, especially Joe. Both of them were ravenous, the rumblings of their stomach occasionally audible over the gentle crash of waves. Six hours of walking had done them in. And they had six more to go.

At least Ellen was dressed for the occasion. Besides her shorts, she had on a long sleeve T-shirt, one she had stolen from Joe, one that ironically came from Vail, Colorado, a place that would have seemed a million degrees cooler on that August day. Ellen had also worn an Angels ballcap, again stolen from Joe. So her arms and face were shaded from the Alabama sun. And she had worn tennis shoes so her bare feet hadn’t been pounding on the ground for six hours.

Ellen had dressed as well as possible for a twelve hour walk on the beach. Joe had worn nothing but swim trunks. No shoes, no shirt, no nothing. His skin was already bright red. Sometime around two, his skin’s shade of red had passed from lobster to fire engine and was only getting brighter. And his bare feet felt bruised, as if they had been held up and pounded with rocks as a form of cruel torture.

By six in the evening, Joe was a flaming ball of misery. Ellen genuinely felt sorry for him but she couldn’t stop laughing. It was just in her nature to do so and Joe wasn’t offended. Joe, an imaginative problem solver, waded into the ocean and began to swim along the shore. The saltwater felt better than the sun and sand against his burnt skin and aching feet.

Ellen offered Joe the shirt off her back and the shoes off her feet but Joe wouldn’t accept. The shoes wouldn’t fit anyway, he told her. The shirt used to be his, he conceded, but he refused to take it back. The damage was already done, he concluded.

“Besides, someone’s got to look out for you.” Joe called out as he struggled like a dog in the shallow Gulf of Mexico. “And your own father won’t so I guess it’s probably going to have to be me.”

“He’s your father too.” Ellen answered.

– George Uriah