Before I came to live with her I had never seen the ocean. Mom and I had lived first in the North Carolina piedmont, which was a long way from the coast. After she had to leave her job at the furniture factory, we moved west to the mountains, which was even farther from the coast. Although I was a competent swimmer in a pool, I was still nervous of the ocean. After being knocked down about twenty times, getting water up my nose and sand in my eyes, I postponed trying to master the waves and took to walking on the beach. There were new ocean things for me to discover every day, comparisons to be made, conclusions to be drawn. Everything I encountered seemed to be sending me some kind of message. Some of the messages made me feel good, others not so good. The patterns made in the sand by the outgoing wash redrew themselves again and again, different each time, and would continue to do so after I was dead. The stately pelicans flapped in a single line toward their destination, while the skittish gulls zipped and zapped, shrieking at one another and getting diverted. When the tide went out, as it was starting to do now, it left behind these tiny-shelled creatures frantically trying to dig themselves back into the wet sand before the birds ate them. Some made it, some did not. And on top of that, all the birds I saw, plus all the crabs that came out at night, were already programmed to gulp down the tasty defenseless little loggerhead babies when they hatched in mid-July and raced for the sea.
I knew why the tides rose and fell; it had been part of seventh-grade science. I also knew that we were composed of seventy-eight percent water when we were born, though it went down to sixty percent as we got older. Our brains remained eighty percent water, however, and the ancient part of our brain remembered that when we were formed many millennia ago, we swam before we could crawl or walk. Even now we began our lives immersed in the waters of our mothers’ wombs.
Children playing in the shallow waves screamed with exaggerated terror while mothers hovered close by. There was this one mother sitting in a low chair near the surf. She wore a straw hat and oversized sunglasses. Her toddler, about three, was carefully transporting a shovel full of water from the receding ocean to pour on her feet. By the time he reached her, the ocean had all spilled out and he emptied a waterless shovel on her painted toenails. But then I saw her raise her eyebrows at him behind the oversized sunglasses. Her glossed lips gave him a special ironic smile, meant for just the two of them. Better luck next time, the look said. Meanwhile, I’m staying right here. There were little eddies of security going back and forth between them and it wrenched my heart.
Yellow trash barrels were placed at regular intervals along the beach border where the grasses and dunes began. To date, I had walked north as far as the fourth yellow barrel beyond Aunt Charlotte’s cottage. The barrels stretched ahead of me, getting smaller and smaller in perspective toward the island’s north end until I could no longer count them.
But today, even before I reached the third barrel, something horrible happened. It was like I had been turned upside down. Everything was so terrifying it stopped me in my tracks. My heart was pounding a mile a minute and, worse than that, I found I no longer knew how to walk. Somehow I found myself sitting down in the sand—it must have been abrupt because my bottom was stinging. A couple in bathing suits passed by and the man looked over and acknowledged me with a man-to-man wave. After lifting my hand in return, I quickly unlaced a sneaker, pretending there was a pebble inside it and that was why I needed to sit. I turned the sneaker upside down and made a big deal of shaking out the pebble. I put the shoe back on but when it came to tying the laces in a knot I couldn’t remember how. The boy whose stepfather had smashed his face in had lost his memory for weeks. “A whole bunch of my life was just wiped out forever,” he went around bragging to anybody at the foster home who would listen. Maybe I was going insane. When Mom was still working at the furniture factory, a woman who worked in the sanding department “lost it” one day and never came back. Two men had to carry her from the floor. She had to go to a mental hospital. This sometimes happened to people, Mom said, either because they couldn’t endure their life anymore or because, through no fault of their own, something suddenly went haywire in their brains.
I didn’t think it was the first reason, because I could endure life at Aunt Charlotte’s much better than the foster home, where nothing was private and you never had a moment alone. At Aunt Charlotte’s I had plenty of time to myself and didn’t have to listen to platitudes about how everything horrible that happens to us is part of “God’s plan.” I no longer had to share a room with a boy who made noises under the covers. At Aunt Charlotte’s I had my own room and could listen to the ocean at night, just as my mother had done as a girl that time she had visited here.
If it was the other thing, and something in my brain had suddenly gone haywire, what would happen to me? At the very worst, I would be discovered insane on the beach, unable to remember anything or tie my shoe, and sent off in an ambulance to a mental hospital. If the brain somehow righted itself and I made it back to the house, what then? If I told Aunt Charlotte about the panic, she would get on the phone and call in another grief counselor, if I was entitled to any more of them—or did you get to start all over in a new state?—or I’d have to go to a therapist and Aunt Charlotte would resent having to drive me there and we would be diminishing the money in the trust.
It took some rude plops of water on my head to remind me that if I was using my brain well enough to figure out possible outcomes of my madness I probably wasn’t mad. The skies had opened and people were fleeing the beach or sheltering under umbrellas. The woman in the big sunglasses and her little boy had vanished. I looked at my feet and saw that both sneakers were tied. Walking home in the pouring rain, I decided not to mention anything to Aunt Charlotte.
“That’s the trouble with afternoon walks,” said Aunt Charlotte. “In this season you can depend on it to rain. Sorry it spoiled your adventure, but I’m glad you changed clothes. I had a productive afternoon. I’ve laid in the sky over my McMansion, and tomorrow I’ll tackle the shrubbery. It’s not there yet in real life, but I’ll duplicate what’s in the architect’s drawing.”
“Maybe I’ll go the whole way to the cottage tomorrow morning.”
“It’s a fair walk, but you’re young. I haven’t done it for a while. The last time I went up there to take some new photos of Grief Cottage I drove north as far as Seashore Road goes, parked in the turnaround, and then fought my way on foot up through the dune grasses and Spanish bayonets.”
“What are they?”
“Very prickly plants. They look like succulent bayonets sticking up from the ground. You don’t want to sit or fall on one.”
Supper was the only meal Aunt Charlotte and I ate together. I did not mind this. I liked making my own breakfast and having a sandwich around midday on the porch. Mom and I had never eaten all our meals together because of her jobs and her different shifts. Aunt Charlotte wasn’t a cook and didn’t aspire to being one. The foster mom made a big deal about her cooking and baking, but everyone had to sit down together for every meal and we had to take turns praying and then we each had to tell what we had learned that day. As soon as I was old enough, Mom and I had shared the cooking. Spaghetti sauce was her masterpiece (her secret was clove powder), and she made a fabulous thick soup from her own combination of cans. I could fry hamburgers and scramble eggs and do pulled pork in our slow-cooker. For the rest, we got our stuff from delis.
Or went out to pick up a pizza.