GOLDEN SUN
NATHAN
Galoshes, a golden sun, beach towels. My three kids strung out in a line, pale smudges against the deep green of the water. The sweet salt air at dusk, Bea crying over how many freckles the week of unfiltered sun had brought out on her face. That line she kept looping until all we heard was a blur. I don’t see anything in these images except my beautiful kids and their little quirks. Our last night there, we went to a seafood buffet, and Bea went to bed earlier than the rest of us because her tummy hurt from overeating. Marcy looked in on her before she and I turned in. Bea was there. Bea was fine. We left the motel at nine sharp Sunday morning, sleep-fogged but satisfied, and it was all normal. Nothing ominous happened. Nothing.
Nothing. I don’t know how to retrace my steps. Marcy says it’s my fault. She doesn’t say this with her words, not yet, but with her eyes, the way they won’t quite look at me. I’m numb with shock from the ice in those eyes, which are greener than usual, with threads of blood from all the crying. The grim tight line of her mouth.
It’s just that I was the captain of the ship. The one whose only job was to get us all from point A to point—Christ, never mind. Anyway, I was driving the van and I could have sworn Bea was asleep in the “way back,” as the kids call it. How does a father drive seven hours and twenty minutes, five hundred and three miles, all mapped out on the GPS, two stops for gas and another for greasy fast food, and not know one of his children has vanished?
We usually go to Destin on vacation, every July like clockwork. There’s a place called Destiny Cove we prefer, mostly because Marcy and I loved the chintzy name and the pastel seventies stucco back in our childless heyday. And it’s right in our budget. But not this year—I think it was Bea who became fixated on Cocoa Beach this past winter, and by spring she had the other two demanding we “change things up.” I suspect the word “cocoa” had everything to do with it. After a few days of research, I booked six nights at the Beachcomber Inn, and that was that.
The last day. My steps. The beach lay beyond a wide, grubby courtyard outside our room, and after a quick forced breakfast of toaster waffles, the kids were off, Andrew yelling for his sisters to wait up. Marcy and I were right behind them, towels and lotion in hand. It was a nice stretch of beach. I enjoyed the untamed state of the vegetation—thick blades of sea oats, palmettos, distant towering palm trees in front of the nicer hotels. The world looked like it had just woken up.
A dune reached out toward the water several hundred yards down on our right, silt caught along its hump like the black shadows of ribs. I remember Andrew throwing shells at the braver seagulls until Marcy and I told him to stop. Cat bounced back and forth from the surf to her towel, checking her phone and bringing the start of her dating life one text message closer. She’s twelve, and I dread all those boys on her horizon with a depth I had no idea could be easily and utterly eclipsed in a moment. And Bea—she wandered in her Bea way. Over to the dune, to the water, to the concrete steps back to the motel, and everywhere in between, chanting her new earworm, “Golden sun gonna come for me, golden sun gonna come for you.”
The morning passed in a lazy dream, as that kind of morning should.
I remember Cat was upset about something on her phone, even throwing it down at one point. Andrew played in the sand but was soon inconsolable because he’d got sand in his eyes. Bea was fine, I think now, but majority ruled and we forced everyone back inside for lunch and a nap. I was out for at least two hours, and I wish I’d dreamed a warning, a figure emerging from the mist to show me I needed to latch onto my little girl and not let her out of my sight. But it’s not a mist. It’s a fog, like all my dreams before now.
Marcy was down at the beach again when I came outside blinking in the awful spill of sunlight. The heat and humidity clung to my air-conditioned skin. This was the moment my headache likely sprouted its roots. I went down to my wife and asked her where the kids were, and she paused in her reading to point in the direction of the dune. They were three little pieces of shadow crouched over something in the distance. If I close my eyes I can see myself standing there, peering down from above as if I know what I would look like from a seagull’s perspective, hands on my hips, gazing off to the right while I decided whether to go join my three little goons or catch a moment of stillness with Marcy. If I close my eyes I can wonder if this was the point in time my alarm bell should have been ringing. But I shouldn’t wonder this—we all saw Bea later. And then after that. And after that. Until we didn’t.
I lay down next to Marcy. Grains of sand seemed to crawl onto me from nowhere, as sand does, and I remember thinking that I’d be vacuuming the van’s carpet for weeks after we got home. Now I can’t because some of that sand is Bea’s.
I’ve already forgotten what book Marcy was reading. She read, we talked about our next date night, I told her about the seafood buffet at Clam Sam’s, she read some more, and I lay back with the sun coming red through my closed eyelids. Vacations are for napping in the sun, and I drifted off as though I hadn’t just come from a nap. Marcy woke me sometime later, screaming Bea’s name. I jolted up to find my wife on her knees, shaking our daughter, their foreheads nearly touching. “Honey! Honey, what is it?” she said.
I moved closer, asked the other two what was going on. Nothing, they both answered, Andrew staring at the ground and Cat shaking her head, confused, scared more of her mother’s reaction than by anything else, I thought at the time.
Bea had started crying, not her usual quiet sobs but a thin, babyish wail we hadn’t heard in years. Marcy held her tight against her shoulder, soothing her, glaring at the other two. “What happened over there?”
The three of them have always been more inclined to crack under Marcy’s pressure. They know I’m the pushover, the tired parent, the one who works all the time and misses dinners. Cat said they’d climbed the dune then half-jumped, half-rolled down to the other side and then back again. Everything was shadow there, cool and secret. Andrew had dug something out of the dead grass and sand: a soda bottle, thick green glass like the ones at Mom’s favorite antique shop back home. But the label had read Golden Sun, not Coke or Pepsi.
By this time Marcy had pulled away from Bea, interested in the story. “Golden Sun?”
“It’s from my song,” Bea said, swiping at her nose with the back of her hand.
“You better tell me you three didn’t drink out of it,” I cut in.
Andrew made a sour face. “No way, it was full of yucky water. We threw it away.”
“Then what happened to upset Bea?” Marcy asked.
“She wanted the bottle and yelled at us to give it to her,” Cat said. “Then she tried to drink some of it, and she got mad when Andy broke it on a rock.”
“I did not!” And Bea cried that thin, regressive wail again.
Marcy looked up at me then, and we both rolled our eyes without rolling our eyes. She pulled Bea back to her. “Honey, it’s okay, it’s just an old bottle that had who knows what in it.”
We all calmed down and it became a strange but not exactly incongruous segment of a day in our lives. Bea’s the middle child, and the little ways she finds to stand out only make us fall harder for her. It wasn’t until earlier today I thought to ask Marcy why she acted the way she did, shaking Bea like that. Bea was only crying, right?
Marcy had trouble answering, as if the reason hadn’t been clear even then. “Her eyes were glass,” she told me. “Glazed over. It was like all that crying wasn’t touching her eyes at all. I guess I forgot about that.”
Bea felt better the morning we left. I knew it when I saw she had her galoshes on. The bright blue ones. They scraped against the concrete outside the motel room, in little aimless circles—she was dragging her feet like she always does. If not for the noise of it I probably wouldn’t have noticed—because of course Bea would be wearing galoshes at the beach in July. What other kid would even sneak them into her suitcase? That’s the last clear picture of her in my mind. I told Cat to get her sister and brother into the van while their mother finished up. It was ten of nine, time to get on the road. My back already ached in anticipation of the drive.
The kids—or maybe just Cat and Andrew—were quiet with the iPad they share, except for an inevitable argument or two. Only a few miles of Florida remained when I stopped for gas. I looked through the back window at the pump, saw the blanket with the shape of sleeping Bea under it. I didn’t check, probably paid just as much attention to what was reflected in the window, the haze of sky and power lines hanging over a rash of strip malls.
I paid with the debit card, right there at the pump. The kids might have gotten out and stretched their legs—Marcy says Cat and Andrew did, but we both agree in this new perplexed way we have that Bea was sleeping in the back. For a good while after that, I was the only one of us awake, the interstate a ribbon of the kind of tacky blandness only Americans could design, billboards for things no one wanted to think about or stop for. Marcy’s book had slipped off her lap onto the floorboard, and she slept with her head leaning against her window.
At a few points I found myself humming something while the family napped. I think that was the beginning of uneasiness—even when Marcy shook Bea and stared into her eyes like she did, there was no tightness in my chest. When I realized what I was humming, a hidden meaning came out of the half-melody but remained just as obscured to me. The idea of there being something wrong with Bea’s words, with the soda bottle the kids had found the day before. But it was an easy thing to shrug off. Bea’s our little parrot. She’ll get a line of a song or a piece of nonsense she heard from her little brother stuck in her head and loop it until we all go mad. It was just Bea. Marcy used to say that she was skipping without a jump rope.
That last afternoon in Cocoa Beach I got one of my headaches—not quite a migraine but it kept wanting to be, edging into my peripheral vision, digging in for a long stay—and little patience for her singsong chant. Behind the wheel the next day, in the nothingness of southern Georgia, the headache had neither receded nor bloomed. That’s why the line bothered me so much, of course, but then . . . here I am again, bringing it up now. It’s lodged in my brain, too.
The headache began with her chant, in fact, the day before. I snapped at Bea, yes, I did, and she ran half-crying around the corner of the motel, toward the pool. The late smear of sun seemed to push out into the dimness between buildings and swallow her up, but it was a trick of pain and light. That can’t be important, though, because I remember Marcy corralling the kids and getting them dressed, and we went out to dinner not long after that. The kids had never seen so much shrimp. My headache had dimmed to a soft fluorescence of pain, and I even had a few beers. We were a tired and happy family of five with sunburns.
There is something else: Cat said something about “the old man” at dinner the last night. Andrew giggled and Bea told her big sister to shut up. I asked who this old man was, the fear every parent has sparking briefly in me, and Cat said it was just some guy on the beach who gave the three of them slices of bread for the seagulls one day on the beach. Before the incident behind the dune.
Marcy says Bea stretched out in the rear seat of the van when all three kids got in, her bear Chester in her arms. She doesn’t know if she pulled the blanket over herself. She doesn’t know much of anything more than I do. Everything, whether viewed separately or together, seems so normal, except it isn’t at all. None of it is. Hours on the computer have told me there’s no such thing as a drink called Golden Sun.
Since we got back home, I’ve grilled Cat and Andrew on when Bea was sleeping, every detail of the stops we made, that old man, the dune, every piece of this nonsense jigsaw puzzle Marcy and I can dump out of the box. And I don’t know if it’s the paranoia in me—the hot, despairing bafflement of this—or just that I am so tired, but sometimes I think there’s something the kids are not telling us.
And on my desk is something I found in the “way back,” under the fleece blanket and under the duffel bag I somehow mistook for my middle child. A bottle cap, black and serrated around the edges, orange letters spelling GOLDEN SUN inside of a yellow starburst. It looks like it has never been pressed onto the neck of a bottle, like it passed from a factory that doesn’t exist straight into my daughter’s hand. I pick it up and clench it in a fist until it hurts. I put it down until I pick it back up. The palm of my hand is pocked with faint circles, each shaped like a sun.
I want my baby back. I want to hear her galoshes squeaking in the hallway as she drags her feet through the house where she lives and sings her songs and sleeps safely in her blue-quilted bed. You could say these recollections, theories, details—whatever we’re calling them—are distant straws to grasp at, but my headache has returned. In retracing my steps I’ve gone in circles, five hundred and three miles of maybes, and Bea isn’t in a single one of them.
Some mornings I go out to the driveway and meet the first strong light, stand and stare at the back window of the van. I squint and rub the sleep out of my eyes. I don’t let my eyes go through the glass and the scrim of dust into the way back. I feel closest to her—closest to the Bea of this moment—in the window’s reflection. I almost see her in the tree line across our little street, in the wedge of coloring sky. It is a small peace, and the sun rises, coming for me.
MARCY
When I dream now, I dream of how Bea felt on that last day. The heaviness of her body as I carried her to bed and tucked the stiff motel sheets around her, and dropped a kiss on her forehead. I wake up with my arms clutching at nothing. Somehow, this is worse than putting her in the ground.
Again and again I circle back to the that day with the dune—the sun reflecting off of the sand in long, gleaming stretches so that my eyes ached from squinting at whatever paperback I’d thrown into my bag. These are the details you’re supposed to remember when you’re retracing your steps. These are the things you do when you try to remember where it was you lost your child. But there are only bits and pieces. Flashes of memory still bleached by sun and sand and salt, and the sound of my children’s voices as they streaked over the sand like wild beasts.
Golden sun gonna come for me, golden sun gonna come for you. Bea’s little song had gotten into all of our heads. I caught Cat humming it as she stared at her cell phone, a smile playing at the edges of her lips. Even Nathan mouthed it along with Bea. Although, now I’m not sure he even knew what it was he was doing.
At first, I thought it was a commercial. Some tiny section of a jingle she’d latched on to. It was fitting. Golden sun. It was why we’d come here in spite of the guarantee of sunburns and sand hiding in every crevice. Probably some local ad that ran during the cartoons she watched in the morning while I packed the cooler with sandwiches and bottled water and granola bars and orange slices. All things we would eat without really wanting.
But I listened to my daughter, how she whispered those words as if they were something too delicate, too lovely to sing loudly, as if they were something she could lose, and there was the raw, bright edge of a memory suddenly burning and then gone again. I had the thought that I wanted to leave this place, to get back into the van without gathering our things and go home, but Nathan would have thought I was crazy. He’d spent so long planning this trip. Hunkered over his ancient laptop, he’d spent hours researching.
I told myself it was the heat. I drank one of the bottled waters and waded into the ocean to cool off and watched the shimmering forms of my children as they flitted back and forth from the tiny camp we’d set up. Our towels, the cooler, the umbrella that provided almost no shade. How far away it all looked. How unlike anything familiar.
It’s easy to see the moments you should have paid attention to after they’ve already passed.
I don’t remember the last morning at the beach. I should. Those would be the lovely things to cling to when I wake gasping in the dark, the sound of Bea’s voice still lingering in the cups of my ears. There were tears. Andrew upset over something. Sometimes, I think it was Bea’s song. He didn’t like it and asked her to stop, and she’d said something back to him. Something sharp and cutting, which was not like her at all, and then he’d started to cry, but when I try to remember, I can’t be sure if that happened at all, and there is a deeper part of me that starts to ache.
I remember that we went back to the motel to sleep. Nathan drifted off straight away, but I could hear Bea through the door that joined our two rooms. “Golden sun gonna come for me, golden sun gonna come for you.” It did not sound like a song anymore. It sounded like something else.
For a long time, I stared at the ceiling and pretended I couldn’t hear my daughter whispering in the next room.
Even when Bea fell silent, I could still hear her voice unraveling those words. Over and over and over until I thought I would remember how I knew them, but my memory was dull and hazy, and I lay on the bed next to my husband but did not sleep.
When the children woke, they pulled me back outside. Andrew mumbled something about finding crabs, and even Cat seemed antsy. I do not remember Bea in that moment. If she was silent or if she, too, clamored to return to the beach.
There is only a blank stain when I try to picture her face, how she looked in that moment like a television turned to static.
Memory is something like betrayal. There, sitting on the beach, the children faded blurs in the distance, Bea’s song running through my head like something foul, I remembered why it sounded familiar.
Golden sun gonna come for me, golden sun gonna come for you.
There had been a girl in my seventh grade class. A girl’s whose name had been buried under the crush of years, but she’d had long ropes of auburn hair she kept pinned back, and these are the things your memory will reveal to you if you know how to stand still and watch.
The girl had sung Bea’s song. Sitting in class, she sang it over and over. I was sure of it.
And then, one day, the girl wasn’t there any more. There and gone, and no one talked about it. Teachers’ eyes would pass over her seat, pausing as if to consider there had once been a body there, but then they would move on, and eventually, I forgot her, too.
Behind my eyes, a dark star of a headache began to form. Without thinking, I mouthed the words to the song and pressed my fingertips to my forehead as if the pressure could hold back whatever had taken root there.
There had been something else, too. Some other, more terrible thing that had happened to the girl but had not been discussed.
Gonna come for you.
I told myself it was an old jingle, told myself Bea had seen it on YouTube or on some throwback television show and gotten it stuck in her head. These are the lies parents tell themselves.
Suddenly dizzy, I drank a bottle of water in slow, small sips and watched my children playing on the dune.
When Nathan came out, I did not tell him about the girl who had vanished. The girl who knew Bea’s song. It was stupid. A mother getting all worked up over nothing. It was an old habit of mine. Wanting to keep the children too close. “You’ll smother them,” Nathan would say, and so I bit my tongue just until the edge of pain as he settled next to me and prattled on about things that didn’t really matter. A date night that probably wouldn’t happen. Some seafood buffet that would more than likely make us all sick as dogs.
I said the things I was supposed to say, my eyes still trained on the kids, watching as they shimmered from three to two and then back to three. I told myself that one of them had just stepped out of view. That was all. Once, I could have sworn I saw four distinct blurs in the distance, but again, there was the sun and the ever-creeping sand, and the thick, sour taste of fear on my tongue, and Nathan had already started to drift off again.
Gonna come for me.
I glanced down at my book, sighed, and closed it. When I looked back up, the children were gone. There were no shadows beside the dune, and I leaned forward, my eyes flicking over the horizon as panic grew hot in my belly.
And then, they were there. All three of them in front of me, their faces flushed and freckled, their hair wind-swept and wavy from the salt.
It was Bea that I saw though. Only Bea. She stared back at me, her eyes too dark, the pupils too large, and she looked at some point just beyond my shoulder as if she’d found a small tear in the veil that separated the worlds and was gazing at what lay beyond.
“Bea?” I said, but she did not respond. Her mouth opened, but there was no sound, and despite the heat, my skin went cold. What looked back at me was not my daughter. It was not a face I knew. The girl standing before me wore my daughter’s skin, but she was not my daughter.
“Bea?” I’m not sure how many times I called my daughter’s name, but I remember screaming, remember shaking her until it was her again, her voice crying the same way she had when she was much, much younger, and there was Nathan beside me, his voice filled with authority as he asked what was happening.
I forced my hands to be still. There was nothing wrong. Nothing. But then Andrew told me about the bottle. Golden Sun. I should have paid attention.
Coincidence, I thought, but that is not the way of the world. There are no coincidences.
“It’s from my song,” Bea said, and I forced myself to believe her. It was just a song. Just a song.
“You better tell me you three didn’t drink out of it,” Nathan said, but I already knew Cat and Andrew would have done no such thing. It was only Bea I was worried about. Only Bea who would have tried to drink her Golden Sun.
“No way. It was full of yucky water. We threw it away,” Andrew said, and I wanted to grasp his shoulders and squeeze and ask if he was sure, but I kept my hands balled into fists at my sides.
It was Cat who told me. Cat who told me that Bea had tried to drink from the bottle. I glanced at Nathan, but he looked unconcerned, as if this was just another scene, just another ridiculous moment in a long string of moments that added up to being a parent.
Gonna come for me.
Nathan asked me why I’d been screaming, but I cannot remember what I told him. Some bullshit answer that would make sense. It was just a jingle. Just a memory. None of it was connected.
There was dinner where the kids stuffed themselves to the point of gluttony. I poked at my salad and listened as they circled about the things they had come to define themselves by.
“The old man was . . . .” Cat said, and Nathan looked up.
“What old man?” he said, and Bea shot a glance at her big sister.
“Shut up,” Bea said, and Andrew giggled.
“What old man?” Nathan said again. Cat shrugged and popped another shrimp in her mouth.
“Just some old dude. He gave us some bread. To feed the seagulls. No big deal,” Cat said, and Nathan let it drop.
When I went in one last time to kiss the kids goodnight, Bea was already asleep, her arm thrown over her face, and her mouth slightly open. I should have sat with her a moment longer, but even now, I wonder if this is a false memory. Something my brain invented to keep me from pain.
Perhaps she was gone even then, and I just don’t remember.
Sometimes, I think if I’d held her to me, if I had absorbed her as a part of myself, I would still have her, and this hole tearing through the very center of me would stitch itself up.
I like to imagine this is how I can forgive myself, but then I think of that lump of blankets riding in the back of the van, and I know there is no forgiveness at the end of everything that has happened.
Nathan says he remembers Bea on that last morning. Galoshes. She was wearing her galoshes, but what I don’t tell Nathan is that Bea didn’t bring her galoshes.
At least, I don’t think she did.
That morning, all I could think of was Bea’s song. I tripped through the words over and over until all that was left in my mind was a kind of madness, and so we loaded our bags into the car, the kids subdued and quiet, and there was that lump of blankets in the back I told myself was Bea, but I do not remember her on that morning.
Nathan hummed the tune for Bea’s song for a bit, and I wanted to scream at him, to tell him to stop, but I was on edge and overreacting. I counted my breaths and watched the sky ahead of us and told myself it would all be fine once we got home. We just had to get home. When I drifted off, the sleep was fitful, and I woke feeling disoriented.
We stopped for gas. I got out and stretched, my back compressed and my legs jumpy. Cat and Andrew may have gotten out as well. I don’t remember. Everything was colored with the air of normalcy. The five of us lethargic, the apathy of our normal lives descending like a cloud. We did not think to look beyond the things in front of us.
And then she was gone.
Cat and Andrew turn pale faces on the world, and their cheeks are salt-stained, but at night, I can hear them humming, can catch the edges of Bea’s song, and I know my children are keeping something from me.
Nathan says there is no such thing as Golden Sun. He’s scoured the edges of the internet, hunting for the jingle or a photo of the bottle I saw on that last day, but there’s nothing to find.
Some nights, I think I can hear Bea moving through the dark, think I can hear her just outside our door, her hand on the knob, and she is singing softly. So quietly it’s almost not a voice at all but a breath, and I cannot bring myself to get up, to open the door to whatever waits on the other side.
Nathan thinks I blame him, but I can’t bring myself to tell him of the girl I knew when I was young. I can’t bring myself to tell him how she disappeared.
Because I fear that no amount of trying to piece together how and where our little girl went is going to bring her back.
I whisper the song to myself now. Sing it when there’s no one else around. Perhaps, if I sing it enough, Bea will come back. Perhaps she will hear my voice in whatever spot she’s come to inhabit.
I pretend to sleep, and when I do, there are the dreams. Bea’s body in my arms as I walk into the ocean, the cool water closing over our skin until it covers our mouths, our noses, and then we are choking as salt water fills our lungs.
But there is no sand, no water where we live.
No way to find the road back.
CAT
I told my parents the man on the beach with the bread was old, but he wasn’t. Not all the time anyway. Maybe it was the way the sun slanted through the air, cutting gold into his cheeks and pillowing clouds inside his eyes, but sometimes he looked younger than Mom and Dad. Sometimes he even looked like a boy, but that can’t be right. I’m not even sure how I know because when I try to remember his face it’s fuzzy. Either there’s a part of me that can’t remember or part of me that won’t.
And everyone wants me to. Tell us what you remember, they say. Tell us. When’s the last time you saw your sister? When’s the last time you saw Bea? They think they’re asking the same question, but they aren’t.
The man said to tell our parents he gave us bread for the seagulls, and even now my fingers remember the way the stale crusts curved against my palm and shed hard little dandruff bits. I remember the gulls swooping wide-winged over the water, greedy mouths open and demanding. But these memories are lies. There was no bread, there were no gulls, there was only the warmth of the sand on my soles and between my toes and his voice his voice his voice. The song he sang got in my head and wrapped around my thoughts, taffy thick and sticky, but I saw his eyes when they looked at Bea. How the clouds gathered there, growing darker as they gained strength. I think he would’ve taken any of us—where and why I can’t answer because I don’t know and that’s the truth, I swear it—but she’s the one he wanted all along.
I tried, though. I tried to make him look at me instead. I arched my back and cocked my hip to the side and looked through my eyelashes, the way Bells, my best friend, does. When she does it, heat blooms in men’s faces and they shift from foot to foot and look away fast. And the thing is, I’m not flat-chested or skinny or still “growing into my face” the way Sasha is. Mom’s words, not mine. We’re mostly the same, Bells and me, but when she does the look, there’s something else, something I’m missing. I call it her Isabella pouty lip gloss face, even though she’s not always wearing gloss when she makes it. I keep practicing in the mirror at home, though, and I think I’m close. I want to be close. You can’t lose something before you ever have it, can you?
My dad always seems upset that I’m growing up. When he looks at me, it feels like he’s searching for the daughter he knew, not the one who’s becoming someone else. Maybe the new me isn’t good enough. Isabella pouty lip gloss face or not, I definitely wasn’t good enough for the not-old man. When he looked at me, all he saw was who I wasn’t. He looked at Andy the same way, but it’s different. It’s always different for little kids and boys.
I don’t understand why my parents don’t remember the man. When he first walked over to us, he waved to them and they waved right back. Both of them. He even told Bea, Andy, and me to turn back and wave so Mom and Dad would know we were fine. “We don’t want them to get worried,” he said, and it was before the song—I’m sure of it—but his voice was still music. We all put on parade-march smiles and waved, and I swear that memory isn’t a bread and gull fake because it feels too bright. So why don’t my parents remember him? It must be for the same reason I can’t picture his face. He doesn’t want us to.
Part of this is Bells’ fault. If she hadn’t texted me that she was hanging out with Sasha—and we agreed we weren’t going to until she apologized to both of us for being such a bitch—I wouldn’t have been mad. I wouldn’t have followed Bea and Andy down the beach. And I really wasn’t following them, just heading in the same direction. The last thing I wanted to do was spend time with Annoying Sibling 1 and Annoying Sibling 2, but of course the minute I got close they both came running, even though I know my face said back off.
Then the man was there. I knew something was wrong when he started singing because that stupid song was too big and even when his mouth wasn’t singing it, the words were hanging over us, as heavy as the salt air. But even though my head knew, my feet wouldn’t move. I stayed where I was, a mannequin caught in his spotlight.
He put that song inside us. He told us to find the sun. He said, “If you find it, you’ll shine bright forever.”
“How do you find it?” Bea said.
He said something else, but instead of hearing it, I was underwater and waves were crashing over me. Everything went blurry; my body was too warm and then too cold. And I heard his song again, but I didn’t want a sun to come for me or anyone else. Then I didn’t want anything or hear anything or feel anything. The world snapped back into focus and I crossed my arms over my chest, cheeks burning, and not from the sun.
“Bread and gulls,” the now-old man said, and the song was gone, replaced with a whip. “That’s what you’ll tell your parents. Bread and gulls and nothing more.”
When he walked away, I looked at Andy and Bea but they were watching him go, their faces circus bright. “We should tell Mom and Dad,” I said.
“Tell them what?” Bea said, her eyes hard and shiny.
My spine went cold, and I couldn’t think of anything to say so I brushed imaginary crumbs from my hands.
I tried to forget about the man, the song, about everything. I got into another fight with Bells about Sasha, and then I just didn’t care so I apologized and she seemed okay with that. I had to be careful about texting, though, because if I did it too much, Mom would glare at me sideways, like I was doing something completely horrible. But it was my vacation too; if I wanted to text 24/7, shouldn’t I be allowed to?
Mostly I was waiting for it to all be over. I wanted to be home where the creepiest thing around was old Mrs. Edwards from down the street with her clicking false teeth and her drawn-on eyebrows. But I knew if I said anything to my parents about wanting to go home, they’d be pissed.
When Bea started singing, I even tried to ignore it. She was always singing something—songs from the radio, TV themes, made up stuff, whatever. It didn’t mean anything weird. It didn’t mean anything at all. But it wasn’t just the words, it was the way she sang it, low and serious.
Golden sun gonna come for me, golden sun gonna come for you.
She sounded like one of those religious people you see on TV, crying mascara tears and pretending to be good so people will send more money.
We were on the beach, Mom reading, Dad sleeping—I think—Andy and Bea building a castle. I rolled over and glared at Bea. “Shut up.”
“Come to the dune with us,” she said.
“No.”
“I’ll stop singing,” she said, too low for anyone but me to hear. “Pinkie swear?”
She twined her pinkie with mine, and I wanted to believe her so I did. Andy and Bea got to the dune first, ran up and flopped over, rolling down into the grass below. No one was watching, so I did it, too. After a while, Andy started digging in the grass, flinging sand and rocks and pebbles all over the place.
Halfway back down the dune, Bea got super still.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“The sun,” she said, her voice watery and goosebumps danced on my skin. “It’s not his to find.”
She moved fast, making it to the bottom as soon as Andy said, “Hey, look what I found!”
I snatched it from his hand, ignoring his whining pleas to give it back. It was a green glass bottle with Golden Sun written on the label. The bottle was uncapped and half full of murky liquid. It smelled wet and musty, the way our grandparents’ basement smelled after a big storm. It was awful, but I took another sniff and it wasn’t. It was something honey sweet and the green glass was glowing lightning bug—bright and the bottle grew warm in my hand and—
Golden sun gonna come for me, golden sun gonna come for you.
—I lifted it to my lips without thinking.
But I didn’t drink it. I swear I didn’t. The smell turned wrong again and I shoved it away from my face, stomach all knotty the way it is before you throw up. Bea grabbed the bottle from me with both hands, and I couldn’t stop her. I couldn’t I couldn’t I couldn’t.
I told Mom she tried to drink from the bottle, but it was another lie. She didn’t just try. She drank it because she wanted to find the sun.
Andy smacked it out of her hand, and the glass shattered into a hundred glittering pieces, but it was too late.
It was already too late even before that.
Bea started crying, but it wasn’t her normal crying, not even her I’m really hurt cry. It was a cry a baby would make, her eyes all wet and glassy, and Andy and I just stared at her. She started running to our parents so we followed her. A few minutes later, Mom was shouting. She dropped to her knees in front of Bea and started shaking her by the shoulders, asking her what was wrong, what happened. My dad’s eyes were still puffy and half-asleep, and he looked from Mom to me and back again, yelling at her, yelling at me and Andy, asking what was going on.
“Nothing,” I said, scrunched my toes through the warm sand down to the cool beneath. Other than Bea and Mom freaking out, I didn’t say.
He didn’t believe it. I could see it in his face.
“Why is your sister crying?” Mom directed the question to me and with it, she gave me The Look—the one that says no phone, no Internet, no hanging out with Bells—so I told her how we were by the dune and Andy found the bottle buried in the sand. How Bea got mad when Andy broke it.
“Did you drink it?” she asked, and her eyes were too big as she looked back and forth at me and Andy. “Did any of you drink it?”
Andy pulled a face. “No, there was gross water inside, not soda.”
I shook my head, and Bea kept wailing so Mom took that for an answer, too. Dad was wide awake now, but he looked confused. And I was thinking of the way those pieces of broken glass caught and held the light, and how I wanted to fall inside and keep falling, even though I knew they weren’t shining for me.
You can fall into the sun. You can fall a long, long time. I know that doesn’t make sense, but it’s how I felt then, how I feel now. We’ve all been falling since that day. Just in different ways.
The night before we left, we went to dinner at this seafood place. We got steamed shrimp and I kept eating and eating, even after my stomach hurt. It was like if I was eating, then everything was okay, and it wasn’t. It wasn’t at all. I couldn’t look at Bea because when I did I imagined the Golden Sun on her lips and tongue, all that sweetness, all that warmth. It was wrong, I knew. It was a lie same as the man’s old face, and I didn’t really want it, but I didn’t want her to have it either.
Andy took a roll from the plastic basket in the center of the table and started picking pieces from the crust. He blinked at me, his eyes suddenly teary. “The bread wasn’t real.”
“But the old man was,” I said, the words meant for him alone.
I guess I wasn’t quiet enough because Dad said, “What old man?” His voice was sharp, his eyes sharper still. I waited until he asked a second time before I told him it was just an old guy who gave us bread to feed the seagulls. Not a big deal. I held my breath, waiting for Andy to say something about the bread again, but he didn’t.
The next morning, Dad woke us up early, telling us to get a move on, he wanted to be on the road by nine so we’d miss the traffic. I usually hated that part, but I helped Mom pack without complaining once.
Bea got in the back of the van, the way back. I remember that. She stretched out across the whole seat, holding Chester, her old stuffed bear, and pulled the blanket up to her chin.
Except she wasn’t Bea.
I’m not sure when it happened or how it happened. She was Bea when we met the man on the beach, she was Bea when we found the bottle, she was Bea when she drank the Golden Sun, but she wasn’t the girl in the van. If they write a book about us or make a movie, that’s what they can call it—The Girl in the Van. Everyone will buy it if it has girl in the title.
I don’t even remember if she was Bea at the restaurant. I just remember eating too much shrimp, Andy’s comment, and Dad’s suspicion.
I only know that my sister’s gone, and she was gone before we got in the van. Whoever—whatever—was in the van with us was only there so no one would be suspicious until we were too far away to change things.
If anything could’ve been changed anyway.
Now, Mom is hardly sleeping and sometimes I hear her walking around the house at night. She’s looking for Bea, but she’ll never find her here. Wouldn’t matter if she walked a dozen steps or a thousand miles, she won’t find her at all.
I asked Andy last night if he was okay, and he said yeah, but his eyes went far away. “He won’t come for us,” I said, clamping a hand over my mouth as soon as the last syllable left.
He nodded, but only with his head, not his eyes.
Dad spends most of his time in his office with the door shut. Every time he comes out, he asks me more questions, which are mostly the same questions: What did the old man look like? Did Bea get out the last time we stopped the van? Did she get in the van at the hotel?
But last night he asked me if Bea was wearing her galoshes. Even though it’s something she’d do, I can’t remember.
I think he’s waiting for me—for someone—to tell him something that will fix this or at least explain it. He looks at me funny, all pinched nose and squinted eyes, lips shaped into a different question, one he wants to—but can’t—ask. I want to tell the truth, I can feel it pushing on my lips, but it’s locked behind a brick wall and there’s no door.
He won’t let us say anything.
I tried to write it down last night, but instead of words I drew a shape: a circle with a starburst inside it. It means something, it means something important, but I don’t know what. I drew it over and over again, tearing holes in the paper.
The worst part, though, the thing that’s worming its way through me like living barbed wire, never mind what I said to Andy? I’m afraid it isn’t over yet. I’m afraid it won’t ever be over.
ANDREW
What Bea never told our parents, what we kept to ourselves, were the extra verses of the song, the lines that really mattered. There were other secrets—things we saw on the dunes, out by the water, and in the shadows too, but I think it started with the song.
Golden sun gonna come for me, golden sun gonna come for you.
The sun gonna burn as it sets you free, sun for you, and sun for me.
There’s more, but I’m not ready to sing it, to share it yet, because I miss Bea, my sister, and yet, I feel like she’s still here. But what do I know, I’m just a baby, crying at night, afraid of the dark, my parents living ghosts now, my only sister, Cat, as thin as a sheet of glass. When I try to sleep at night now, I keep going back to the beach. There are two of me now—before and after, then and now. They are linked somehow, but I can’t figure it out.
All of those little moments—running on the beach, loading up the car, Bea sleeping in the back, covered with a blanket—they are blurry, and come to me in bits and pieces. I remember thinking about the name of the hotel, Beachcomber Inn, and in my head I saw a giant comb, huge black teeth raking across the sand, and I didn’t like it. Not one bit.
When Dad isn’t looking, I go to his office, push open the heavy oak door, and sneak inside. It scares me to death, when I go there, not because I’m afraid of my father, although I am at times, but because of the bottle cap. It shouldn’t be here, not at all. Mom has found me more than once, sitting on the rug, the light fading, crying as I hold the cap, pushing the edges into my hand.
Is it my fault?
Mom never says anything, when she finds me, but when she picks me up, and stares out the windows—I swear I can hear the waves crashing on the beach again, those stupid seagulls and the bread crumbs we threw at them. I never trusted those rats with wings—beady black eyes, and gray, dirty feathers.
Sometimes I sit at the breakfast table, eating my Cheerios, Dad hiding behind the newspaper, Mom looking out the window, Cat texting a friend with an angry look on her face, and I ask them questions that never get answered.
“Where did Bea go?” I ask.
“Will we ever see Bea again?”
And then in a softer voice, “Did I even have a sister named Bea?”
They never say anything, and I wonder if I’m actually talking, so much in my head these days—conversations with a pile of stuffed animals; none of them answering, but all of them listening. I fall asleep crying, slipping under the animals, their arms around me, the fluffy weight of them pushing me under, to a nightmare where I search for my sister, her voice on the dunes, always one more hill, up and down, never finding her. Chester bear watches over us all, a little bit of Bea sitting on top of the pile, his right ear torn, one black eye slowly coming undone.
I wonder, if I try hard enough, if I keep thinking about her—can I bring her back? Is there a verse I don’t know? And if I somehow stop thinking about her, if I forget her face—those bright blue galoshes that sit in the front hall behind the umbrellas there one minute, and gone the next—will she really, truly be gone?
I don’t know what to believe.
When I fall asleep, it’s always the old man, and the bottle I see.
And then I’m back there, on the beach, and the man has eyes for me this time. Maybe he always did. But I wouldn’t drink it. I was the one that found the bottle—bored, hot, wishing that something exciting would happen, something fun, something different. I was humming to myself, as I was digging—first out of boredom, then with fast, angry fingers, burrowing down, through grass, and shells, and pebbles.
And then I held it in my hands.
Golden sun gonna come for me, golden sun gonna come for you.
The sun gonna burn as it sets you free, sun for you, and sun for me.
When you fly too high, to the sun in the sky,
Tell me what you see, what you want to be.
And then there were shadows standing over me, two of them, Cat and Bea, and they wanted the bottle, but it was mine. My turn. Not the baby . . . my turn. But they took it away from me anyway, stronger, both of them—first Cat, and then Bea, with her quick little hands. And as she tipped it back, Bea’s eyes became bright, behind her something shimmering in the sunlight, the muddy liquid disappearing down her throat—and inside the bottle something swam. Little fishes, bits of seaweed, something with a spark inside—it all happened so fast.
And then he was there. The old man who wasn’t old, the boy trapped in a bottle—the bottle made of flesh. He was a clown, without the makeup, terrifying. His fingers were always moving, I don’t know if the others saw it—running a coin over his knuckles, holding a ball of burning light, rubbing his fingers together, tapping them tip to tip—always moving, and it made my skin crawl. Around his head there was a halo, and then a ring of buzzing flies, and then a crown made of thorns. The mixture of suntan lotion and the sickly sweet coconut with the smell of rotting fish—I thought I might puke. I covered my mouth, afraid of what might come out.
In the distance I could hear the water rushing in, and slipping out, a warm wind on the dunes, something foul in the air.
None of it was real.
All of it was real.
And what did we wish for? I know what Bea wished for. What she always wished for.
She wanted to be special.
I was the baby, that’s what they said, “But he’s just a baby,” and “Cat, take care of the baby, the little one,” and “When you’re older, Andrew, but not now—you’re too young.” So Cat was the big sister—Mom when Mom was away, or busy, or tired. Cat could make a mean grilled cheese sandwich, always in triangles, one of the few times I’d ever see her smile. Sometimes she was Dad, too, taking out the garbage with a huff, smashing a spider with a paper towel, a snarl on her lips, stretching up on her toes to bring down a game from the top shelf of my closet.
But Bea? She was lost in the middle, sometimes stuck between baby and big girl, too old for my picture books, and simple toys, never getting the extra attention that Mom and Dad gave to me. And not old enough to be in charge, either, poor Bea—that was Cat, with a sigh, and a frown, and sometimes, a rare hug to make it all better. Bea was stuck between worlds. And she didn’t like it.
Stuck between worlds.
I sit up in bed, the star nightlight glowing from the wall. And out the window, I see the moon is filling up again, with light, to shine down on us all.
If the sun is yellow, is bright, what is the moon?
A different light, a way to keep away the darkness, I think.
I go to the window, and stand there, pushing away the tears, the house so quiet. And when I look down to my little hand, and open it up, there is the bottle cap, gleaming in the moonlight.
Golden Sun.
New words, I think. We need new words.
I close my eyes and think, as hard as I can, trying hard to remember everything the old man, the boy, the spirit trapped in another body, told us. What he showed me.
When I was holding the bottle, before the girls, he was nothing but a glimmer. Not real yet. Only possible. But the things the bottle promised—in a flash it washed over me, no longer the baby, but an older boy now, tan skin, long hair, running through a forest, a spear in my hand, chasing something, but free at last to do what I wanted—to stay up late, to stuff my face with meat and cheese, to cover myself in mud, to splash in a creek, no, a lake, no . . . the ocean? There were others there, I was not alone—boys and girls, long hair and shaved heads, skin in colors from pale white, to light brown, to tan, and darker still. And it made me happy, this life, far away, somewhere else. It shouldn’t have. It should have scared me to death.
In the shadows, there was something else. And it moved so slow, branches cracking, tree roots ripping up from the earth, the ground trembling. How big? How large?
Huge.
So big.
I don’t have the words to describe it. At least, I didn’t then. But I do now, the beach disappearing, the dunes, the man who was not a man, the forest that was not a forest—hard words to say, something I saw on a television show. National Geographic, I think. PBS maybe.
Behemoth.
A show on mythical creatures, on monsters, and legends.
Leviathan.
That one, to do with water.
Something else, something old, maybe. Something more, or all, at once.
I open my eyes at the window, full of words for the moon, words I shouldn’t know, but they spill from my lips anyway—harvest, waxing, crescent, waning, yellow, pale, and gibbous.
The bottle cap vibrates in my hand, and I spit up something onto the floor—muddy water filled with squirming creatures, a flicker of light dotting the puddle, sparks of salt, or minerals, maybe—wound in seaweed, fishing line, and little bits of twine. My throat is raw, and slick with pain.
When I close my hand, the cap bites into my skin, an orbit of crescent moons running around my palm. I cry out softly, these nips at my flesh, a few drops of blood falling to the carpet—one coin, a second coin, a third coin paid.
I miss my sister, I miss the fighting, the late nights talking about school and friends, and summer—all the ways we would explore the world together. I close my eyes and try to remember her face.
Bea.
Bea. Again.
Bea. Always. With us.
And the words come again, this time, something to capture the magic of my wish.
Harvest, waxing, crescent, waning,
yellow, pale, and gibbous—staining.
And in my heart, I know the blue galoshes are no longer in the front hall, if they were ever there to begin with. My lips tremble, afraid to go on, my skin cold, goosebumps rising up, afraid to open my eyes, but also . . . afraid to stop. Not halfway, not between.
I can smell the ocean, hear it crashing on the beach, those damn seagulls cawing and circling, while the bushes around our house rustle, the trees swaying back and forth, branches rubbing up against the house, scraping and screeching, my eyes still closed, the words still coming.
What was lost, is still remaining.
Sun and moon forever reigning.
A scratch at the window, and I can’t open my eyes. I think of what we were before, my family—my father the strong one, picking me up, laughing as he spun me round; Mom always smiling, her eyes filled with light and love; Cat as lost as the rest of us, but trying to be so brave.
And Bea.
Always Bea in the shadows. Bea. Lost, for so long. Now found.
I place my right hand on the glass, and it is cold, so very cool, and on the other side, a gentle clacking, afraid to open my eyes, fingers drumming, bones tapping. In my head I can see Bea standing in the sunshine, and maybe she has the blue galoshes on, and maybe she doesn’t, but she’s smiling, singing a song, a catchy tune, and I sing along with her.