“You think you’ll be back?” Ray asks.
“Undecided for the moment,” Grace admits and subtly looks down at her belly. “I don’t have a clue what the next few months are going to bring.”
Behind them, a few people trickle into the cinema in advance of the next showing.
“Well, whatever life brings, Porter,” he says, the first time he’s called her by her old nickname in years, “I hope you do come back.” Finally, he lets her hand go. “Whenever you feel ready.” He smiles, and it feels like a sort of homecoming. “It’s a small island,” he tells her, as if she needs the reminder. “Whenever you decide to cross that bridge again, you’ll know where to find me.”
Thirty
Saturday
It’s time.
Although it’s early, the sun not yet even fully up, Grace is awake. Showered. Dressed. The trash tied up. The bed linens stripped. Caleb’s beach towel, which she forgot to give back, neatly folded on the kitchen table. Her bag’s already packed and in the Jeep. Once again, just like when she first stepped inside here one week ago, the house is still.
After seeing Ray at the cinema yesterday, Grace returned here, quietly began to close things up, then spent the rest of the day out back in one of the Adirondack chairs. She didn’t read. Didn’t write. Didn’t do anything productive.
Instead, she just let herself sit and think.
About her mother and their memories here together. About the strange tenderness of being known so intimately by a place. About how, now and again, a setting can come to remember you in ways you forgot to remember yourself. The versions you loved. The versions you lost. The versions you’re only now learning to forgive.
She thought about how some people—if you’re lucky—can see you that way, too. Not as chapters, but as a whole story with twists and turns and messy parts you’ve at times wished you could rewrite.
How sometimes you had to go backward in order to go forward again. And how, on other occasions, life hands you circumstances that force you to go forward alone.
How the ones we love—the people who shape us—don’t really vanish when they go. Not really. Instead, they turn into stars—distant and quiet and impossible to reach—but always there and still lighting the way.
Now Grace locks the house for quite possibly the last time in her life. She heads around back and leaves the key beneath the bottle of strawberry shampoo. Then, in the dim light of early morning, she walks slowly up the empty street and in the direction of the dune.
Before she leaves, she knows there’s one thing left for her to do.
The beach is quiet. Hazy. Empty. The breeze cool with lingering hints of night.
Like always, Grace kicks off her shoes, then walks down the dune’s incline. The cool grains shift beneath her bare feet. All around her, the grasses whisper a quiet lullaby. She makes her way past the vacant lifeguard stands and across the wide stretch of sand. She moves toward the water, as still as a canvas. Above it, the sky is a muted palette. Blots of gray. Hints of lavender. The first precocious webs of yellow and peach.
The magic hour.
That pocket of time when the world quiets and everything feels like a dream.
Which is what Grace tells herself is happening when the haze starts to clear down by the water and she sees her. Sitting just past the slope, not far from where the gentle ebb of waves hits. A woman in a classic one-piece, a breezy cover-up, and a straw bucket hat. A chubby toddler runs in circles at her side.
Grace takes a cautious step toward her, remembering what Cece said the last time they saw one another the other night. That it wastime for Grace to stop thinking about the past and to instead begin to consider the next version of herself, the one who comes after all this. She touches the lower part of her stomach, assuming that’s what this is. Not the girl she was at sixteen or nineteen or twenty-two, but the woman she’s on the cusp of becoming.
Until the person in front of Grace turns around.
It takes her a minute for the details to assemble themselves in her mind. The way her shoulder-length hair that hangs from beneath her hat seems blond from a distance, but gray when the hints of sunlight peering through the clouds hit it just right. The way she holds her posture, strong and confident so that she can comfortably balance the weight of her loss on it. The hint of red still staining her lips even though she washed her makeup off the night before at bedtime.
Birdie.
Not as she was when Grace lost her. But as she was a long time ago.
“Oh, don’t even look at me,” she calls out and wipes her bottom lashes. Her face is the same, but younger, smoother, the skin taut with youth. And yet, still remarkably, impossibly, hers. “I thought I was alone down here. You’re probably best to keep walking. The lifeguards ought to stab a bunch of warning flags around me when they arrive. I’m a mess.”
“I-it’s okay.” Grace moves a little closer, her breath caught inside her throat. “To be honest,” she continues, her fingers shaking, “I’m kind of a mess these days, too.”
Birdie scooches over by a few inches, not because there’s no space, but more as an invitation for this stranger who’s appeared behind her to come sit. Grace lowers herself into the sand and stretches out her legs, her sight no longer cast on the water, but rather on the two people—the woman and her child—to her right.
“Sorry about all the crying,” Birdie says, still dabbing the tears away like they’re nothing, and not every feeling inside her. “You’re supposed to be happy when you’re at the beach.” When she says this, she gestures at the setting as if to say,Just look at this place.“Unfortunately for me,our time down here this week hasn’t just been a vacation.” Her hair catches the breeze and billows across her shoulders. “For me, it’s also been a time to grieve.”
