They walked together on the path that led to the cape. Through evergreen forest, sunlight dappling the path here and there. Over the damp, often tilted, rough-cut wood that formed their boardwalk. It wasn’t milled lumber. It was more natural than all that. Bea could feel the humidity in the air, and hear the distant sounds of ocean waves on rock.
“I need to stop and rest a moment,” she said.
There was no place to sit, so Bea leaned on her own thighs and puffed. A moment later the girl moved closer to Bea’s side and encouraged Bea, without words, to lean on her.
Bea did.
“I’ve been thinking,” Allie said. “Now that we have this big adventure behind us . . . I think I need to figure out a way to get in touch with my parents in jail and let them know I’m okay.”
“Oh,” Bea said. “I hadn’t thought about that.”
“I’ve thought about it enough for both of us. The first few days I was just so mad at them. It’s like I figured it served them right. But it’s been so long now. They must be getting pretty panicky. I’m not sure I want to punish them that much.”
“So you figure they know you ran away?”
“Well . . . yeah. They must. I mean, their kid gets turned over to the county. I should think the county has to let them know if they . . . you know. Lose her.”
They began to walk again. Slowly. The morning was getting warmer, which didn’t help Bea’s energy level one bit.
“Do you have any idea how to contact them?”
“None,” Allie said. “If I knew how to call them, I would have done it days ago.”
“You think we’ve oversold this to ourselves?”
Bea knew it was a sharp conversational turn. But she had no idea how to help with the problem of the girl’s parents.
“The cape, you mean?”
“Yes. That.”
“I think we’ll find out in about a quarter of a mile,” Allie said.
By the time they arrived at a viewing platform at the very northwest tip of the country, Bea was finding it hard to keep her head lifted. It felt easier somehow to bend over herself, as if sheltering her straining lungs.
“There’s a bench,” she heard Allie say.
Bea stopped, pulled in a few ragged breaths, and looked up.
In front of her, under the shade of several trees, lay a rustic wooden deck with small tree trunk poles forming a railing. More poles rose to meet it vertically, so no little children could fall through. And yes, there was a plank bench. Beyond that, Bea could see the jagged edges of more cape on the other side of a small cove. Inside the cove Bea could make out sea stacks—huge boulders extending up from the water, big enough to be their own tiny, very tall islands. Trees even grew on top of them.
“There are steps up involved,” Bea said, still breathy. “Only a couple, but still.”
“But I think it will be worth it,” Allie said. “Come on. I’ll pull.”
A moment later Bea stood with her feet on the plank decking and her hands on the round rail. She looked down to see caves worn into the sheer stone cliffs topped with dense evergreen, the water frothing white at the edges of jagged maps of rock. She could hear echoing roars as waves rolled into the caves and met the end of their travels. Bea could relate to reaching the end of one’s travels.
“I’ve never seen a piece of coast that was so . . . complex,” Bea said.
“You mean like the way it’s all ragged?”
“Yes. Like that. It’s so intricate. Lacy, almost. I guess the ocean has carved all this over the years.”
They watched and listened in silence. The sun at the railing of the platform was making Bea too hot, but she didn’t want to go sit down. She wanted to keep looking off the corner of the world. Her world, anyway.
“So . . . ,” Allie began. “Did we oversell it?”
“No,” Bea said firmly. “No, it would be impossible to oversell it. I think it’s the loveliest place I’ve ever seen. And I have you to thank for it, for keeping after an old fool until she finally broke down and tried something new.”
PART SIX
ALLIE
Chapter Thirty
Travel Advice from Ducks
“I want to stop at Ruby Beach,” Allie said.
There was a new sense of conviction in her tone. A sureness. Finally she was stepping up to take better charge of this adventure.
They were driving south on the 101, inland by default, and Ruby Beach would mark the spot where they arrived on the Washington coast again at long last.
“And you really can’t say no,” Allie added, “because all the way up I asked you to stop a million places, and you always said, ‘On the way back. On the way back. On the way back.’ And now we’re on the way back.”
“Fine,” Bea said, her eyes still glued to the road. “Ruby Beach it is.”
It seemed almost too easy. Allie thought maybe it was a sign that the trip would be easier from here on out.
When Allie arrived back in the parking lot from her exploratory trip on foot to the beach, Bea was hanging her upper body out the open driver’s side window.
“There’s a walk involved,” Bea said, “isn’t there?”
“It’s short. And you have to see it, Bea. It’s the most beautiful beach ever. And there’s no one here. We have the place all to ourselves.”
“Tell me what’s so different about this beach from every other beach we’ve seen all along the way. Tell me now, before I get down on my tired old legs and my sore old feet and haul all the way out there after that long hike I took at the cape.”
“I can’t describe it, Bea. You have to see it with your own eyes. Tell you what. If you get out there, and I’m wrong, and it wasn’t worth it, you don’t have to stop at a single lighthouse on the way back.”
The older woman seemed to digest that offer for a moment. Then she powered up her window and stepped down from the van.
“That makes me a winner either way, I suppose,” Bea said.
They stood together at the end of the path, breathing. Surveying their surroundings.
The air was misty with moisture. Fog-like low clouds blew, parting occasionally to show a steely blue-gray sky marked with higher, more distinct white clouds. The mouth of a creek emptying into the ocean ran through rocks and sand near where they stood. Its water was wide, flat, and shallow. It seemed to hold perfectly still, reflecting the cloudy sky.
There were sea stacks here too, just off the driftwood-littered beach. One was huge and wide, like a high, sheer-sided island. Others rose ragged and pointy, severe haystacks of rock.
“What are those stones for?” Bea asked.
Allie turned her eyes to a log, a massive fallen tree trunk of driftwood. On it, someone—or many someones—had stacked dozens upon dozens of small rock towers, little pyramids of stones. Round, smooth, flat stones, like river rocks—the largest on the bottom of each pile, decreasing in size as they rose. Some only three stones high, some six or seven.
“They’re like ducks,” Allie said.