Sand Beach
Sand Beach, Bar Harbor, Maine.
It’s late November, two days before Thanksgiving. Two days before the Alvarez family reuninion.
Emily is standing in the cold, shallow water of the ocean. Her feet are numb and wrapped in wet, cotton socks. She has never seen the ocean before. She has never smelled its clean, salt air. And although night is coming and a storm is on the horizon, she doesn’t ever want to leave.
Salt water sprays across her legs and the icy, November wind finds her body underneath her brother’s shirt. It makes her shake and shiver so that she has to hold herself and clench her teeth to make it stop. Why – she thinks – had she never learned to swim? She wants to go out farther and deeper – the mysterious is pulling at her – but fear holds her back. Fear of everything that is and could be beneath the surface of the waves.
Her brother, who up until now has been watching from the shore in a winter coat that she refused to wear, finally turns and starts heading back toward the parking lot.
So, for a few moments, before the ocean gets too violent and the air too cold, she is alone. She thinks back to earlier in the day, while flying above New York:
“Your grandmother, Lily, who you used to send letters to when you were younger, is getting very old. And I know you’ve never met her, but everyone says you look just like her when she was a girl. I’ll introduce you to her… She might even remember you.”
The plane ride from Albuquerque, New Mexico to Augusta, Maine had taken eight long hours. Her mother had had plenty of time to talk about all of the relatives that Emily had never met. All of the kids who had grown up so fast. The sisters who played volleyball in college and the boy who won second place in a high school state science fair. And then she spent an hour talking about her own mother. And maybe – maybe – she wiped away a tear.
“This will probably be the last time you get to see her.”
