Chapter Four

I am covered in salt and sand; my pants are soaked halfway up my thighs. The water feels so good, with the rhythm and pull of the waves moving me slightly farther in with each ebb of the surf. I don’t notice my feet carrying me out, but I move with the water as it goes, feeling alive in a way I have never felt before. My eyes rest on the horizon as the water laps at my knees. I hear voices on the beach, see the surfers still bobbing beyond some break line. The roar of the water is loud, and shells and small fish rush against the bare flesh of my calves. The water has reached my thighs, and another wave will soon take the water to my waist.

“She walked into the sea, and drowned.” The voice is Lola’s coming from my memory of the story she told me; the story of her niece. I understand, the walking into the sea. It feels like peace, and I am tempted to let the water take me. I let the waters pull me, deeper and deeper, until the water is at my waist and my feet begin to lift off the sandy bottom with each swell. It would feel like peace until it no longer did, and then it would be hard to turn back. I pull free of the fingers tugging me toward the deep, like the hands of mermaids trying to draw me to their cold, wet hearth. A whole world exists under the surface, life and death and creatures I can’t even imagine. I come out of the water and watch a boat trim along the horizon for a long time, just walking down the beach, feeling my wet jeans like a second skin.

I did the right thing, coming here, and I did the right thing for the baby, Emily Ann It was the only right thing I could do for her. It makes my heart ache knowing that not being a part of her life was the best gift I could give her. Her face forms, line by line, in my mind as I walk, cherishing the memory of the curve of her cheeks, the dark pools of her eyes. A smile curves my lips as I walk past the boys throwing the frisbee and begin to look for my shoes. The frisbee soars and lands a few feet beyond me, and one of the boys comes hustling over, smiling, suntanned, and beautiful. I smile back, feeling all the peace of the afternoon spent with the ocean

“The wind caught that one,” he says, slowing to a lope beside me.

“Looks like it.”

“I thought you were going in, there for a second,” he says.

“What do you mean?” I ask, feeling a small prickle in realizing that my time spent was not actually shadow time. I’d been visible all the while.

“I just thought you were going to keep walking.” His teeth glint in the sun beneath the wide spread of his lips. “Thought you were a mermaid, for a second.”

“Naw,” There is an easy movement to him, an easy smile; he is comfortable in his skin. He seems familiar, like I know him from somewhere, but of course I don’t. “It’s just my first time at the beach.”

He nods, and his friend is calling out, but he doesn’t look around. “Really? So you’re visiting?”

“No. I just moved here. Yesterday, believe it or not.”

“Wow. I believe it. Let me guess.” He puts two fingers to his temple and closes his eyes, drawing his brows together in concentration. “Kansas?”

I puff out a breath. “No.” I almost tell him I’m from Illinois, but then he will say something else and I will say something else, and I know where it leads from there. I feel burned by Warren, and still too raw about the baby to remember how to flirt with, or even talk to, a good-looking boy.

“I’m Trey,” he says, with a small, almost self-conscious tilt of his head. His hair falls forward, and I see Dylan in the motion and understand why he is familiar. He puts out his hand and shakes mine, and when he holds my hand a second too long, I pull free.

“Nice to meet you, Trey.”

“I hope to see you again, Kansas.” He winks and trots back to his friends, scooping up the frisbee and setting it free in the air in one liquid motion. I haven’t told him my name and want to pull him back to tell him.

“It’s Alison,” I say, but only to myself. He is already gone.

I watch the boys, as I walk backward away from them, watching the easy, athletic motion, that muscle-without-bones way of moving.

All the way back to the condo, I replay the encounter with Trey, the encounter with the starfish, the encounter with the sea, and a sense of calm rides with me back to Annabelle Drive.

Cici is sitting out on the patio, and I see her through the sliding glass door when I come through the front, her head bent forward, the fringe of her hair falling to cover the top half of her face. She doesn’t look up. I stand, hidden by the dark shadows of the interior and study her, etching the memory of her in this moment in my mind. I haven’t drawn, or even touched my notebooks, since the morning I sketched Emily Ann, the day I left Life House to drive to California. Before that I had not sketched in months, nothing more than doodles that entire time. I still notice the beauty around me—the beauty of this strange, desert land I have come to. I study the beauty of Cici’s features, the beauty of her fair skin cut sharp by the angle of her hair. I stand until she must feel me watching her and looks up to find me blurred in the shadows. Her lips are painted red, the deep, dark red of black cherries, but she has forsaken all the dark eyeliner that was her trademark. She smiles, and I slide the door open, feeling a low blush rising because I’ve been caught spying on her.

My jeans are drying and feel crisp with the salt and sand. Cici reaches a hand out to me, and I let my fingers slide along hers before sitting beside her on the bench. She taps a finger on my knee. “You take a swim?” She crinkles her nose, and I wonder if she can smell the salt on my skin.

“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” I say and hear the awe in my voice, sounding like a little girl. I clear my throat. “It was really cool.” I sound more like myself, more like a grown up, or a teen, whatever I am supposed to be.

“Where did you go?”

“Del Mar,” I say, testing out the taste of it on my tongue. All the names are foreign, exotic. Poway, Escondido, Pomerado, Palomar, Del Mar, and a host of Ranchos—Rancho Bernardo, Rancho Penasquitas, Rancho Cucamonga.

“I love Del Mar. It’s my favorite.” She smiles, but a small line creases her forehead. She glances away then back at me. “I’m glad you’re here.” Her teeth close on her bottom lip, and I try not to see Warren in the movement, but I can’t help it. “You okay?” she asks.

I nod and look away, from her lips, from her worried eyes. “Yeah, I’m okay.” She isn’t referencing the move or my adventure at the beach. She is talking about Emily. “I wish you could have seen her,” I say quietly, wishing she could know how beautiful my baby was. Is, I remind myself; she’s not dead.

“Me too.” Her hand brushes across my shoulder. I shift, and she lets her hand fall away. I can’t be touched. I can’t because I am too raw when I think of her.

“I’m sorry,” I say sometime later, shrugging, wishing I hadn’t shifted free from her hand. I didn’t mean to hurt her, and now her eyes look closed and dark. Not angry, just protected.

“It’s okay,” she says, and the closed look in her eyes fades out. “I remember.”

We sit for a few minutes more, and then I tell her about Meredith and Tom. I tell her about how she kind of made me think of who I wanted to be, if I’d had a different life.

She listens, I talk, and when the words fail and we sit in a pocket of quiet for a while, she says, “I think we should never talk about that again.”

I am not sure that I never want to talk about her again. But maybe not talking about her for a while will be okay, to give the hole in my heart time to scab over. Janice had said something like that, when she discouraged me from coming back to look at pictures. Cici needs to be done thinking about the baby she left behind, I can tell, by the way she has talked about it. She felt obligated, I think, to ask me about mine.

I nod, accepting that I have to go on somehow. She slaps her hand down on my knee, and the tension breaks. “Ready for a party?”

“No.” I let a low chuckle rumble around my ribs and a smile to take away the negative.

“Come on. It will be fun.”

I let her persuade me because I don’t want to be here without her. I like Sybil, Connie, and Darla just fine, but I’m not sure I’m ready for an evening of “getting to know each other.” I don’t even know what Cici has told them about me, but I have a feeling that I should maybe find out. I don’t know if they know about Life House, or the babies, or the story of my broken life. I’ll have to ask Cici, but she is already getting up and pulling my hand toward the sliding door, already talking about the perfect outfit for me.