Beachglass Excerpt:
Delia's 18th Birthday Party (page 99)

After a while, Timothy insisted I open my presents, handing me his first: a small box wrapped in paper he had painted himself. Inside it was a necklace, a long silver chain with small colored-glass beads, strips of metal, and a single piece of beachglass that hung from a half-circle of greening copper that said “dream” in uneven black letters. I held it up in front of me, letting the glass twirl in the dappled light.

“It’s beachglass,” I said, thinking of all the times I spent in the sand by my house, collecting these little bits of tumbled glass, and the jar of it that I had on my windowsill.

“I know you collect it, so it reminded me of you. Then I got to thinking about how cool it was that something that could have just as easily been trash is jewelry instead, and it reminded me of us drunks: not only are we salvageable, we’re completely fabulous! We’re artwork, dammit. And how many people step right over us looking for the perfect seashell? Bor-ing! That glass is the real treasure, as far as I’m concerned. It’s like us. We took a lickin’, and kept on tickin’, hon!”

He laughed and tossed me another box to open, but I was still deep in thought about what he had just said. What a fine line we walked, how close destruction and creation are, and how much of each a recovering alcoholic has. Is. 

After the presents, Timothy announced that he would like everyone to stand up for a special ceremony. He handed us each an unlit candle as we rose and formed a circle around the table. He explained that each person would make a wish, then they would light their candle from the previous person’s candle, put it in the cake and return to the circle, joining hands with the person next to them. The result would be one very bright cake, an unbroken ring of friends, and eight wishes in addition to my own.

It started with Joan, who quietly closed her eyes in prayer and lit her candle from the one on the cake, which was tall and spindly like a broom-whisker. Hap paused, lit his from hers. And so on. The process reminded me of the Olympic torch, the eternal flame, even though I knew it had begun only moments earlier, with Zodiac’s Bic lighter. But still.

When the candles were all lit, we stood in silence, in a sort of cluster meditation, hands firmly pressed together, almost swaying. My parents were on either side of me and my friends—my tribe, I thought—were all around me. Energy passed from hand to hand to hand like a live beam of light. The circle was charged. Sacred. I could feel tears springing up behind my closed eyelids and chills on my arms. I was relieved when Timothy told me to go ahead and blow out the candles—it was such a thick, precious moment that, though I did not want it to be over, I couldn’t bear the weighty pleasure of it for another second.

I leaned toward the cake and turned to look around me. I felt a surge of pure love like a wave swelling past me, raising my body, then settling me back down.

I closed my eyes and held my hands over my heart, in a prayer, a thank-you. I inhaled, made my wish, and bent to blow out the candles. I’ll never know if it was the hair spray or what, but instead of feeling a serene release of breath and hearing the patter of applause, I had an entirely different experience.

I felt, rather than saw, the flame lick over the left side of my head.

It made a windy sound and was bright and warm, but not painful, and I reached up, calm and unalarmed, and patted it out the way some women fluff their curls. Strangely enough, my hair sustained only minor, nearly undetectable damage, just a light singe that was easily brushed away. Everyone gaped, frozen in various states of fear and wonder, obviously not having spent as much time around crack smokers as I had. It was as if they were playing charades and had been told to act out the phrase oh my God.

I turned toward them with my hand over my mouth. They looked to me for a reaction, a clue (burns? tears? embarrassment?), but I was already laughing a sudden, pure, infectious laugh, a laugh that was shiny and clean and fast like Mylar confetti thrown in front of a fan.

Joan was the first to join me, her nose crinkling and her shoulders bouncing. Timothy was the loudest; he couldn’t stop. Hap went silent and had to wipe tears from his eyes, and I had never seen Zodiac look so kidlike in the whole time I’d known her. My mom had started to rush to my side but started laughing, too, when she saw I was okay. My dad even cracked a smile.

Once we’d settled down, I turned to extinguish the candles for real this time, making a point of pulling my hair far back from my face, which garnered a few more laughs. After I’d made my wish and blown out each candle, I turned back toward everyone, a dazzling wink of a smile on my face. It was precisely that moment that Timothy captured with his camera, frozen with an old-fashioned flashcube pah: an eighteen-year-old me smiling at him, thirty-six and healthy, another lifetime ago. That picture contained everything in a neat rectangle—the magic we shared that year, the strangeness of it, the awe. It said it all. It said, even when your hair’s on fire, we’ll be laughing. Even when your hair’s on fire, you’ll still have me, hon.