When the saint came to the baptism, the entire church went silent. Even the baby, who was only a second before screaming her indignity at the wet, cold process, hiccuped and hushed.
I don’t even remember hearing the church door open. Only that sudden silence, and then looking up to see a miracle walking through the church.
The saints don’t speak. It’s said they can’t, that their voices are one of the things the tide takes from them. Maybe they just don’t need to speak. It is enough, I suppose, to be a miracle. And that, they certainly are. They used to be people, the saints. People we grew up with, who lived here with us. But once they become saints, they look like impossible, not like human. Bones the bleach white of driftwood visible beneath skin that is glass. Lightning-struck sand turned into a person, the translucent softness of sea glass in some places and perfectly clear in others. Salt water rather than blood in their veins. The light shines right through them, blinding. Pearls, which were once eyes. The Saints’ Tide takes and the Saints’ Tide transforms.
The saint continued their progression toward the baptismal font, toward the child. They walked slowly, taking the tide’s own time, then stopped. There was a noise then—a gasp—from my sister, Rinna, the child’s mother, as the saint took the baby from her arms and lowered her into the salt water of the baptismal font. Fully. Rinna’s face was terrible—torn between her obvious desire to rescue her child, and the knowledge that what was happening was an unasked-for wonder. The baby didn’t cry at all, not even when the water closed over her head, and not when she returned into the world of the air. She simply opened her eyes, the holy water beaded on her lashes like glass.
The saint handed her back, nodded once to Rinna, and left.
The Sister of the Tide who was performing the baptism reached for the baby, then dropped her hands back to her sides. “Truly, the ceremony was performed, and I can add nothing to what has been done. Do you have a name for the child?”
“Her name will be Maris,” Rinna said, her voice almost steady, “for the sea.”
• • •
In the beginning was the sea. The saints came after.
• • •
Word of the saint’s visit, of their participation in my niece’s baptism, traveled fast, and it seemed like everyone in town tried to squeeze themselves into Rinna’s small house that day. It was a miracle, certainly, and one everyone wanted proximity to. A sign—though no real agreement as to what. Perhaps that Maris would someday be a saint, though that was said in whispers.
I wished they wouldn’t say it. A sacred destiny is a hard thing to wish upon a child.
But whatever it meant, the saint’s participation in Maris’ baptism was a wonder, one large enough that contingents of both the Sisters of the Tide and the Sisters of Glass stood in knots on Rinna’s front porch. Separate knots, of course—the Sisters did enjoy their disagreements over the finer points of doctrine.
No matter what you believe, the saints are inescapable. They live among us, they walk our streets, they gather at the edges of the beaches, but there is something in them that changes when they become saints and not people. Their past washes off of them—they return smooth-faced and unrecognizable. After the sea, they don’t interact—they are observers, silent and lovely and strange, but they are like statues, untouchable signs and symbols, not participants. The fact that this one had broken that distance was something remarkable and something everyone was talking about.
I nodded and smiled and said hello to more people in the time I spent crossing my sister’s living room than I had in the entire month. It was a relief to finally make it into the kitchen.
“How are you doing?” I asked Rinna as I took the sleeping Maris from her arms. She was a small bundle of warmth, her dark hair a silk fuzz. I pressed my cheek to the top of her head.
“I don’t even know,” she said. “I haven’t had time in all this to breathe. A saint baptized my daughter, and all I can think is that Sean Locke ate at least three pieces of honey cake! Three! I’m running out of food because the entire town has come by, there are no clean dishes left in the house, and I still need to make the offering to the tide sometime today.”
I laughed. “Sean knows you’d never bake him your honey cake, so he’s trying to take advantage while he can. And I can make the offering for you.”
“Are you sure you don’t mind?” She brushed her hair back from her face and ran water into the dish-filled sink.
“Honestly, I’d rather be out there than in here with all these people.”
“No, but I mean—I know that isn’t really your sort of thing. It was enough that you came to the baptism.”
“It’s not the sea I have the problem with,” I said. “I promise, I’d be happy to do it.”
“Thank you,” she said. “The stuff’s by the door. I really appreciate it.”
“No problem.” I tucked Maris into her little baby seat, wrapped the ends of the blanket around her feet so they wouldn’t get cold, and kissed her head. Then I grabbed the basket of things Rinna had assembled, and went out to the beach.
The quiet was a relief after the press of people and voices in Rinna’s house. It was growing late, the approaching winter bringing on the darkness sooner and sooner each day. The sky was a cauldron of clouds, slate splotches pushed about by the wind. There were streaks on the sand, patterns left by the wind. The air felt thick and heavy, like a storm coming in. My favorite sort of weather.
After I’d walked far enough that the waves broke over the tops of my feet, I stopped. I set the basket on the sand and waited, breathing in and out with the tide until I felt quiet and peace in the rhythm of the waves. Then I made the offering.
“I offer these gifts in thanks for the gift of Maris, and in hope that she may one day be safely returned to the sea,” I said. I poured out the jar of seawater Rinna had collected on the day she learned she was pregnant, the source of life held as a promise for the life to come. I scattered salt on the waves, to take bitterness from Maris’s days. Finally, I dropped a tiny, clear piece of glass, that the saints might bless her. The waves grabbed it, tumbled it across the sand, and then pulled it under.
A good sign. Rinna would be happy. She’d been religious enough when we were younger that I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had chosen to cast herself on the tide, to aspire to sainthood. I was glad she hadn’t—I liked my sister here, and speaking. I’d never really understood the holiness in silence. To me, holiness should be a living thing—not a glass example, but something that breathes and feels with you. The sea, not the saints.
Even though the offering was finished, I stood, lingering in the quiet, in the setting sun. The waves swept back and forth over my feet, the tides pulling at the sand beneath them, sending me just enough off-balance to remind me that the sea was not my place. Something smooth bumped against my left ankle. I looked down.
A glass heart.
A saint’s heart.
• • •
I’m not the sort of person who’s used to dealing with miracles.
• • •
I didn’t take the heart into my sister’s house. I knew how she would react—it would terrify her. She’d see all the day’s previously good signs as twisted, as bad omens, as things of terror gathered around Maris. The saints go back to the sea one last time when they are ready to end. After that second, final death, they break apart, and their relics occasionally wash up. This heart was a piece of one the sea hadn’t kept—nothing soothing in it. I left it on the edge of the sand, then went inside, slipping in the back door so I could avoid any remaining crowd.
“It’s all taken care of,” I said.
“And the glass?” she asked.
“The waves took it.”
Relief softened the lines of her face. “Thank you for doing that. I just want everything to be right for her.”
“Of course you do,” I said. “So do I.”
“The house has cleared out some—most everyone’s gone home. Do you want to sit down and have a drink? I think there might even still be some food somewhere.”
“No—it felt like a storm was coming in. I want to get home. But before I go—how are you?” She looked drawn. And it had been a day, and probably more of an exhausting one than she had planned for, but she looked thin around the edges.
“I’m fine,” she said, and pressed the heel of her hand to her heart. “It’s just—everyone kept talking about what this means for Maris. Her future. Her destiny. When she would become a saint herself. She’s only little, you know? I want her to have a life first.”
Rain hissed and spattered, the first part of the storm. “Anyway, you better go if you don’t want to get drenched. Good night.”
“Good night.” We hugged, and I left. I took the saint’s heart with me. I wanted Maris to have a life first too.
• • •
The storm roared through the night, the rain falling in sheets, the wind a constant howl. I wondered if Maris slept through it, or if she was keeping Rinna as tired and wakeful as I was.
I kept thinking of the heart. Occasionally fragments of the saints wash back up after their return to the sea. Partial hands and feet are the most common. But never a heart. Or at least I’d never heard of such a thing washing up before. The tide brought many blessings, but this—I wasn’t sure what this was.
The storm tapered off just before dawn, but its remnants clung to the morning like sea wrack. I walked through gusts and drizzle, stepped over puddles and downed branches. I passed a clutch of people, stopped to let a saint make their slow way across a street, rain streaking iridescence on its glass skin. I looked as closely as I could but saw no heart beating beneath the shining glass.
Then I walked inside the Convent of the Sisters of Glass.
I hadn’t been in the convent in years, but muscle memory is a powerful thing: without even thinking, I dipped my left hand into the basin of seawater just inside the door and traced the sign of the wave over my forehead and my heart. The convent was quiet—the silence held, purposeful.
There relics were displayed in the long hallway that was the public part of the convent. Hands, it seemed, tended to last—there were three, two of which were complete. One foot, the big toe missing. Part of a head. Nothing even remotely like the glass heart I had, wrapped in fabric and tucked into my bag.
Aside from being unlike any of the other pieces here, the heart was in immaculate condition—not a chip, not a scratch. It was as if the heart had been made separately, or perhaps never used, to still be so perfect.
I pressed my hand against my chest.
“Can I help you?” Unlike the Sisters of the Tide, who dress in sea colors—blues and greys and greens—the Sisters of Glass dress in white and silver. They each wear beads of sea glass strung into a circle and wrapped around her wrist. This one wore glass that was all clear, clear as the saint’s heart. She was my age, which seemed young for a nun. Usually, women don’t choose to care for the saints until after they’ve had lives of their own. But vocations come when they will, or so I’ve always been told. She smiled. “My name is Olivia. I’m sorry to disturb you if you wished to keep silence, but you looked a little lost.”
“I found something,” I said. “I think it might be from a saint.”
“What is it you’ve found?” Her voice low and calm, her expression polite interest.
I looked around. The hallway, people passing through, an older woman praying in a corner, seemed like too public a place for what I had to show. “Here?”
“We stand amongst holy relics.”
She had a point.
I pulled the glass heart from my bag and opened the wrappings. Olivia turned fish-belly white, stepped close, and silently re-covered the heart. Her hands still on the fabric, she said, “Perhaps someplace less public would be more appropriate. If you’ll come with me?”
She walked in that way that eats the ground while still being graceful enough not to look like hurrying. I followed her down the long hall and into a small room. There were windows open—I could hear the waves crash.
She closed the door behind us. “Let me see the heart again.”
I passed it to her.
Her hands shook as she unwrapped it. “Where did you find this?”
“In the sea, last night. It washed up right before the storm came in. I had just finished making the offering to the tide for my niece, and there it was.”
“Your niece. There was a saint at her baptism, yes?” The question sounded like an afterthought. All her attention was on the heart in her hands.
“Yes. Do you think that could be related?”
“I wouldn’t think so—the saint’s appearance at the baptism is a blessing on the child. Did the offering to the tide go smoothly?”
I let pass the fact that the heart’s appearance had not been described as a blessing on anyone. “It did—the waves took the glass. Then I stood in the water for . . . a while. I’m not sure how long. Then the heart washed up.”
“I won’t say they aren’t connected—the tide does as it wills. But I believe the heart is a sign for you, not for your niece.”
“I’m guessing since we’re tucked away in here, it’s not a good sign.” The weight of it in my hands was as heavy as a secret.
“You are holding someone’s preserved and unbroken heart in your hands. What kind of a sign do you think it is?”
It felt like the sort of question that was almost rhetorical, that had an expected call-and-response answer that I was supposed to give regardless of how I actually felt. “I’m holding a saint’s glass heart, and whatever it means, I think it’s a sign that should have gone to someone else.”
“It’s natural to feel unworthy of a gift of this nature,” she said.
“It’s not that I think I’m unworthy,” I said. “It’s that I don’t want it.”
• • •
I remember the first time I saw a Saints’ Tide. They’re not common, which is a mercy; it’s not the sort of thing that you’re likely to forget.
The years it happens, it happens in the late spring—Resurrection Season. That first year, I was ten. I remember the moon was full, and glass had washed ashore, pieces and pieces of it, coating the beach into shining, for three tides. The necessary signs were there: the next low tide would be the Saints’ Tide. There was a crackle of excitement in the air, the same sort of electric feeling that comes in before a hurricane.
I went to the beach with Rinna. Playing saints had been her favorite game that year, even in the cold of the winter. She’d walk out into the water, then immerse herself, then come back—silent, solemn. Sometimes she’d drape herself in tiny pieces of seaweed, crown herself with driftwood and beach glass.
I’d thought it would be like that to watch. That it would be like a party almost—people walking out into the waves, then coming back all glass and shine and holiness.
It wasn’t.
Most of them turn back, the people who think they are going to walk into the water and walk out saints. It’s a glory to think of—the transformation, the sacredness. But it’s also a death. You walk into the water and then you keep walking. You walk until your lungs fill with salt water. Until your heart stops. Until you die. There is no guarantee that you will return. Most people—even the ones who make it as far as letting the waters close over their head—thrash their way back to the surface, to dry land and a life no holier than any other.
Most of the people who do walk into the water and hold themselves there beneath its surface drown.
I didn’t realize it that day—too young, too excited. They disappeared, yes, and it was strange, but so was everything else that happened. So I didn’t count, didn’t think about how many went in and how few came back out. But there is always a second, darker tide that returns.
Only one saint walked out of the waves that day.
I admit, it was like seeing a miracle. The shine that began below the surface, the way the waves parted and fell away, the person now glass and pearl and bone. The hush that followed it out of the sea, the only noise the breaking of the waves. The beauty was almost unbearable—I had to turn away.
We waited after that. Hoping for another saint. After a while, the afternoon shifted. The voices of the remaining watchers were less anticipation, more dread. The first body washed in as the sun set.
Rinna didn’t play saints anymore after that.
• • •
All that day, the heart was a weight on me. Heavy, rewrapped and tucked in my bag as I walked home. Heavy in my thoughts as I tried to go about my day. It pulled at me like the tide. That night, I took the glass heart back to the beach. Not because I was considering tossing it back into the waves. Not seriously, anyway. That wouldn’t solve the problem. But I needed to think about it, and that seemed the best place.
I had asked Olivia if I could leave it at the convent, to be placed with the other relics. I’d hoped she would say yes—that would make its appearance just a thing that had happened, not a puzzle to be solved. She’d said it was best that I keep it—it was an unanswered question, and even if I didn’t want to hear the answer, she didn’t think it would speak to anyone else.
I’d refrained from mentioning that the saints never spoke.
I sat just above the waves, took my shoes off, and let the water wash back and forth over my feet as I held the heart in my lap. The glass was cool to the touch, only just warmer than the seawater. It was an oddly pleasant shape in my hands. Comforting, almost. Almost.
I wondered if I had known the saint, before they were transformed. I wondered if I would have said they had a good heart.
No one really knows why the tide chooses some and not others to be saints. The Sisters of the Tide say it’s holiness, that the sea knows the truth of the heart, but everyone has stories of someone whose sainthood was a surprise to everyone who knew them in their life before. The Sisters of Glass say it’s a desire to be better than you were, the willingness to let the water wash everything from you, until you are clear like glass.
That version makes a little more sense to me, but I don’t know. I’ve lived with them around me my entire life, and almost everything about the saints still seems strange.
The tide rose up higher, soaking the hems of my jeans. The damp fabric clung uncomfortably to my legs. I stood up and took my tossing thoughts and the glass heart home.
• • •
Olivia was standing in front of my door when I got home, her white robes stark against the night sky. She twisted her beads around and around her wrist. “I’m sorry for showing up unannounced, but I can’t get the heart out of my thoughts.”
“Look, I’m freezing. My clothes are soaking wet and uncomfortable. All I want to do right now is go inside and have the world’s hottest shower, and then a whiskey. So unless this is some sort of an emergency, I’d appreciate it if we could have this discussion some other time.” It was, perhaps, not my most pious moment.
“It’s not an emergency. It’s just—my husband left me for the tide,” she said. “To become a saint. That’s why I became a nun. Because I didn’t know what else to do to make that okay.”
“Come in,” I said. “You can have some whiskey, but I’m still taking a shower.”
“Thank you.”
She was holding the heart when I came back down. “I wondered if I could tell if it was his. But it just feels like glass to me.”
“Does that make it better or worse?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Neither, I suppose. He’s still unrecognizable, silent and glass, and I’m still the woman whose husband would rather be that than warm and in bed beside her.” The sea’s own bitterness in her voice.
“What do you”—I gestured at her robes—“say about people who choose to become saints?”
“Officially, of course, it’s a sacrifice. A calling. A miracle. On my good days, I truly believe that.” She finished the whiskey in her glass.
“And on your not-good days?”
“It feels like cowardice.”
I nodded. I’d never really known anyone who became a saint, not beyond the casual sort of way you know everyone when you live in a small enough place. To me, going to the waves seemed a way to walk away from a life, and not a way to live it.
“How can you bear it, then?” I asked. “Living among the relics?”
“Because I hope that it will help me understand. That if I can sit in the quiet, with the glass, somewhere in that quiet, I will know why he felt called to go to the sea, and that somewhere in that understanding, I’ll find peace.”
• • •
It’s easier, I think, to be a saint than to be a human.
• • •
The next morning, Rinna came over to tell me that Maris was sick.
“The doctor says it’s her heart,” Rinna said, red-eyed and splotchy from weeping. “It’s not fair. She’s so small, just such a tiny thing.”
Maris was sleeping in her carrier at Rinna’s feet. She looked delicate, even more than would be expected of someone so small. Her skin more translucent than before, the colors of the veins showing through, instead of healthy pink.
“We’re going to go to the Sisters of the Tide. I want them to pray for her.”
“Of course,” I said.
“Plus, you know how the saints like to walk the grounds there. I’m hoping we’ll find one that I can beg for a blessing for her, the poor little love. . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“I’ll go make an offering to the waves,” I said.
“Thank you.” Rinna’s hand clutched mine, hard, hard. “I trust the doctors, of course I do. I know they’ll help her. But the saints can too.”
“Of course,” I said.
• • •
The saints, of course, are miracles. It is impossible to see them and think of them as anything else. They are the numinous given form. We give thanks to the sea for their presence among us. We ask them for blessings, for benedictions.
They walk through our streets, all hours of the day and night, sacred and silent. Every so often, they will stop, will lay hands on someone. It happens rarely enough to be seen as a blessing.
It’s a dark thought, I know, but sometimes I think that we look at the wrong thing. The saints are walking miracles, yes, but I wonder if the miracle is that moment of transformation, of walking into the tide as one thing and out of it as another. I wonder if that moment of transformation is the only miracle that belongs to the saints. If everything else we’ve built around them is just our own hope.
If that occasional laying on of hands isn’t an act of blessing, but one of regret—of reaching out for a humanity they no longer have. Of them wanting connection with warmth, and with life once more.
We pray to the saints, and I don’t know if they hear us. They have certainly never spoken an answer.
• • •
It became clear, soon enough, that no offerings to the tide or prayers to the saints were helping.
“Glass?” I asked, the word falling dully from my mouth.
“Look,” Rinna said. Her hand shook as she pushed Maris’ shirt aside. A small spot of glass shone on her chest.
“A saint,” I whispered.
“Maybe?” Rinna’s voice cracked. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do, how to help her.”
I kissed the soft swirl of Maris’ dark hair. Maybe I did.
It’s always been the sea I’ve believed in—had faith in—more than the saints. I can feel the holiness in the turn of the tide; the crash of the waves is sacred music. It’s the sea, after all, that transforms people into saints. The miracle isn’t in us.
• • •
That afternoon, I took the glass heart to Rinna.
She stared at it, then at me. “You’ve had this how long? And it only now occurred to you that it might help?”
There was nothing I could say in the face of that—even my fear that it was a bad omen, well, she had a sick daughter, of course it was. But maybe if I had brought it earlier, it would have been a good omen, would have prevented Maris from getting sick. Everything that I hadn’t done was the one thing that would have helped.
“Take it away,” she said. “I don’t want it here. I don’t want it anywhere near Maris. And I don’t want you near her either.”
“Rinna?”
“I mean it. If saints themselves are giving warnings, maybe you’re what’s being warned against. Stay away.” She turned her body, holding Maris as far away from me as she could, and clutched her tightly.
“I’ll be praying for her,” I said.
“Like that will help. You barely even believe.”
“Rinna, I—”
“I don’t want to hear it. Go. Take that thing and go.”
I love my sister. I went.
• • •
The saints began to follow Maris.
“They’ve never done anything like this before,” Olivia said.
I hadn’t seen it yet. Rinna was still furious with me, and so I had been staying away from her, so as not to add to her stress. “Following?”
Olivia nodded. “Just one at a time at first. Trailing after her in the street, on the convent grounds. There are more now. I saw five this morning, standing outside your sister’s house.”
“Like a vigil,” I said.
“Yes.”
“What do you think they’re waiting for?” I asked.
“I wish I knew.”
So did I. A vigil ended with change or with death. And Maris was such a small thing.
• • •
Glass covered the beach with the next tide. A rough line of it, broken and shining, clear as tears, mixed among the more usual driftwood and detritus cast up by the waves.
“It’ll be a Saints’ Tide,” Olivia said. She bent, lifted a handful of the glass, then let it rain back through her fingers. Other Sisters of the Glass walked the shore, their robes flapping like wings in the wind. Some bent and gathered the glass—they’d string it together for their holy beads.
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“There are signs. The heaviness in the air. The amount of glass that’s washed up, and the way it reaches out from the waves. The saints are restless on the convent grounds, walking in circles. They can feel the pull in the tide.”
“Will you watch?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I’m a Sister of Glass. My work will come after.”
“After?” I thought of the bodies, that second, gruesome tide. There must be someone, I thought, who helped the families when they realized that the sea had taken from them and would not give back. But that wasn’t what she meant.
“There are always saints who return to the sea then. We see them out, and we collect what returns.”
What returns. Broken glass hands, reverently displayed in the convent. A glass heart, sitting on my kitchen table. “Can you tell which ones will go?”
“No,” she said. “But some of them always do. It’s as if there has to be a balance—a tide that goes out for every tide that comes in.”
I picked up a handful of glass and let it fall back to the sand, and I thought of a heart of glass that had come in on the tide, a heart of glass that beat in my niece’s chest.
Olivia stood next to me, her hand on my shoulder, as I wept.
The next morning, a second glass tide came in, thicker than the first, turning the beach into a hard, merciless glare. I stood, shivering in the late-spring wind, on Rinna’s porch. There was a ring of saints, silent behind me, watching the house, the sea beyond it.
The door opened. “What?”
“How is Maris?” I asked.
“No worse,” she said, beginning to close the door again.
“It’ll be a Saints’ Tide,” I said.
“And why do you care?” she said.
“I just thought you’d want to know.” The excuse wasn’t quite true—I was sure she did know. I wanted to see her. To see Maris.
“Well, now that you’ve done what you came for, you can leave again.”
“Rinna, please,” I said.
“No.” She closed the door.
The saints were still silent as I walked past them. I hadn’t expected anything else.
• • •
Rinna was there on the beach with the next tide, the third glass tide. Her hands were fisted at her sides, and her eyes hard on the horizon. “I’m going out tomorrow. I’ll offer myself to the tide.”
My entire body went cold. “You’re doing what?”
“For Maris. When I’m a saint, I can cure her.” She didn’t look at me, just kept her face turned to the waves.
“She doesn’t need a saint, she needs a mother.”
“What would you know about either? You don’t know what it’s like, to sit there and watch her, and watch the doctors not be able to help her, and just have to do nothing. At least this way”—a sob cracked through her voice—“at least this way, I would be doing something. Something that might actually help. Something other than just watching.”
“And then what is Maris supposed to do? Because it’s not like you’ll be able to come back. Even if you become a saint, you’ll be glass. You’ll be like that.” I jerked my head back, to where a phalanx of saints stood. Silent.
“Are you saying you won’t take care of her?” Rinna looked at me.
And there was nothing I could say to that. I’ve never wanted a child, but of course I would.
“I’m doing this,” Rinna said. “This is how I can help.”
“And what if you die?” I asked. “You know that’s more likely—you go out into the water and you don’t come back a saint, you come back a corpse. How does that possibly help Maris?”
“At least I will have tried. I’m her mother. My job is to do everything I possibly can to save her.”
“No,” I said. “Your job is to raise her.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Tears poured like glass from her eyes. “Don’t you think I’d rather hold her and laugh with her and watch her take her first steps? Don’t you think I’d die to hear her say ‘Mama’? But my baby’s heart is turning to glass, and she won’t ever say anything if she doesn’t live.
“My job is to do whatever it takes to help her. If I have to die for her, I will.”
• • •
I don’t pray, not to the saints, anyway. I know the gestures and the rituals, and I’m happy to follow the forms when asked. I don’t begrudge anyone their beliefs, and I would never turn my back on a blessing when offered. But I can’t bring myself to ask for one, not directly.
Not even for Maris. For me, asking the saints to help would be mouthing empty words, and why would they listen to that, from me, instead of Rinna, or Olivia, or any of the Sisters, the people who meant what they said?
But I believe in the power of the sea. My whole life, that’s what I’ve looked to. So I took the glass heart, and I went to the beach, and I sat vigil for Maris, all night and into the dawn. I matched my breath to the waves, in and out, and I hoped that what I was doing was enough like prayer that the sea would hear me.
• • •
The Saints’ Tide. The wind whipped the water white. I pulled the blanket tighter around Maris. She was so small in my arms, and I could feel the fluttering thump of her glass heart against my chest. “Rinna, please.”
“You tell her that I loved her. More than anything. That she was why I did this.” She shook as she spoke.
“You should stay here and tell her yourself. Please, Rinna.” Salt stung my eyes.
“She’s not getting better. I have to go.”
I set Maris down in her carrier, the glass heart next to her, and embraced my sister. “I love you.”
She reached her hand out, shaking, and brushed it against Maris’ hair. “Goodbye.”
Rinna walked toward the waves. She didn’t falter, didn’t look back. Not even when Maris cried, sobbing that seemed far too loud for her small body.
Then a voice cracked out like the breaking of ice. “Stop!”
A saint. A saint had spoken.
That one word, in that unheard voice, was enough to command. No one moved. Not even Rinna. We barely breathed. And so the crack, when it came, echoed even over the sound of the tide.
The saint was shattering. And still they walked forward, down the beach, toward the tide.
Toward Maris.
The saint held out their hands, and I put Maris in them. The saint shuddered, cracked further, but held Maris safely, carefully, as they walked with her to the waves. The cracks widened; glass fell to the sand.
The saint paused at the edge of the tide and lowered Maris into it.
Another shattering. The saint crumbling now to pieces and Maris falling into the water and Rinna pulling her out.
“She’s fine!” Rinna gasped. “She’s healed!”
At my feet, the glass heart cracked open.
• • •
I took the two halves of the broken heart to Olivia at the Convent of the Sisters of Glass. “I thought these might belong here.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “You seem hesitant.”
“I think that they need to go back to the sea,” I said. “But I don’t really know how any of this works.”
“None of us do,” she said. “We just hope things become clear someday. If you think they should go back to the sea, then that’s what you should do with them. The heart came to you in the first place.”
And so that night, I took the heart back out to the waves. I stood, the salt water washing over my feet, one broken half in each hand. “Thank you,” I said. To the sea. To the saints. To whatever might be listening.
I placed the glass heart into the water and watched as the tide carried it away.