July 8, 1987; 5:30 P.M.
July 6, 2007; 5:30 P.M.
Nathaniel!” My mother’s voice carries over the Pacific waves, whose white foam mixed with the beach’s sand crust our feet. “Don’t take him too far! We’re leaving soon! We need to be at your aunt’s by seven o’clock!”
Nathaniel grips my hand harder and turns back to Katie, who is standing a little more than a hundred yards down the beach. I look up at him as he squints and blocks the sun’s rays with a hand and calls out to her.
“I’ve got him, Mom! We’re just going to see the tide pools!” An immense wave crashes at our ankles, and Nathaniel swings me up off the sand so the rushing water doesn’t sweep my feet out from under me. “Close call!” he says once he’s set me down. “You almost became a fish.”
“Just be careful!” I hear my mother fading behind us. “Those rocks are slippery, and I don’t want him cracking his head!”
“Can that happen?”
“Can what happen?” He takes my hand again and we pad along the wet sand toward the tiny set of tide pools that spot the cove’s walls.
“Could I really become a fish?”
“Sure,” Nathaniel says, nodding his head authoritatively. “Happens all the time, actually. Why don’t you think Sarah Friedman’s at school anymore?” Nathaniel’s mind works in peculiar ways.
It’s July and the days are idle and long, but the sun—although balanced tall in the sky—the sun’s light is getting tired and soft. The waves, blue and recurrent and churning, keep pounding at our feet, and Nathaniel, forever diligent to the task laid bare before him, continues to lift me off the ground each time the whitewash causes me to stumble. Close call, he keeps saying. You almost became a goldfish. Or, that could have been bad, he tells me, because a school of guppies has been calling my name.
“Are you sure I’d be a goldfish?” I ask him as we near the tide pools.
“Positive,” he responds with another authoritative nod.
I think about it for a moment and then look back at his tan, freckled face. “What would you be?”
“A shark,” he says without thinking, but rather swooshing me into the air again as a wave crashes. “Whoosh!” He rocks my tiny body in the air for a moment before setting my feet back down upon the sand. “But I wouldn’t eat you, so you don’t have to worry.”
“Why not?”
“Well, first of all,” he takes a first step onto the smooth rock leading up to the small pools, which are turning gold and silver as the sun inches closer to the horizon. “First of all, I’d make sure you were a tough goldfish.” He clambers a few more steps up the rock.
“Goldfish can be tough?” I say, my head cocked and my feet sinking into the sand. Nathaniel sighs and puts his hands on his bony hips.
“Of course they can. Look at Alvin.” Alvin was a small, miserable creature Nathaniel had won for me at a school fair nearly two years ago. He’d insisted that Alvin was a fantastic specimen of marine life, all robust and sturdy and vigorous. When Nathaniel first presented him to me, I had spent two full days with my nose pressed hard against Alvin’s small glass bowl, waiting patiently for some indication of the fantastic or the extraordinary. In the end, though, the small brute didn’t do much, aside from float and shit and eat and—occasionally—swim. Two weeks after his arrival, my mother flushed him down the toilet when I was at school. Fish, she told me as she cooked halibut for dinner, were meant for the sea. Just you wait, Nate told me, we’ll be reading about Alvin in the papers soon enough. “Now will you come up here? There are some things I want to show you.” He reaches a hand down the slippery rock and pulls me up alongside him with a single heave.
“Why else wouldn’t you eat me?” I secure my footing on the edge of one of the small pools, a minuscule puddle inhabited by a single sea anemone and a lazy hermit crab.
“Because we’re brothers,” he said matter-of-factly. “The police will arrest you if you eat your brother. It’s not allowed.”
I nod understandingly. Makes sense to me, I think.
“Now look at this pool, Taylor.” He grasps my right hand again and uses his free one to point into the puddle. “This is the most famous tide pool in North America. You can ask anyone.”
My eyes widen as I stare at the crab sitting motionless in its shell. Below us, down the sand, far away from the most famous tide pool in North America, other families are packing up baskets and bags with towels and shovels. In the water, beyond the breaking of the waves, two surfers float on their boards without the slightest traces of ambition. Katie, farther and farther and farther away, sways her hands in the air and shouts words and orders that vanish somewhere in the air between us. I crouch down next to the pool, my knees at my chest, and dip a small, pink finger into the water.
“Don’t do that.” Nathaniel kneels next to me and gently removes my hand.
“Why not?” I ask, startled.
“Because that’s theirs,” he replies patiently. “That’s their place.” He sighs and sits back on his heels. “And you wouldn’t like it anyway.”
“How do you know?”
“I went into a tide pool once,” he says, looking off to the horizon. “Before you were born, of course.”
“What was it like?” I ask readily. Nathaniel shrugs and doesn’t answer. “Nate, what was it like?”
“Where?” he asks.
“In the tide pool.” I stomp my foot impatiently.
“Just really crowded, I guess.”
And we sit there a little longer as the sun skulks cowardly to the water and as Katie continues her plea for us to return.
“Do you think we should go back?” I look up to ask him.
“No,” Nathaniel says, resting his chin on his knees. “No, not yet.”
Outside, over the narrow green breadth of the National Mall, the light is waning. Aside from the dust balls and the books and the aging computers, I’m the only one in the office; Congress is still on recess for Independence Day, and half of the staff has used the free time to escape to oases outside the Beltway. I’ve moved a pile of papers to one side of Peter’s desk, and I’m sitting Indian-style on the other corner, just watching as cars and trucks and bikes and people make their way up Constitution and Independence, up the two sides of the Mall. And for this instant the clock’s second hand is paralyzed somewhere between eleven and twelve, and my mind’s just sort of paused, and I’ve forgotten about the invitation sitting on the desk next to me, the one that tells me I’m cordially invited to a celebration of the engagement between Annalee Mark and Chase Latham—which, when you stop to think about it, will probably just be really crowded, anyway.