The sand is cool between my toes, and the briny air opens up my lungs a little. The rolling hush-hush of the ocean and the yawning expanse of the sky open up something else in me too. I kick at the ground, sending puffs of off-white into the air. The wind seems just as angry as I am, flinging the sand around, and I kick at the earth again. And again and again until I’m walking through a sandstorm.
My eyes start to feel gritty and my knees wobbly, so I finally slow and sit down, folding my legs underneath me. I dig through my bag and pull out the wrinkled, torn-in-one-corner picture of my parents I always carry with me. My father is tall and handsome and refined in his uniform. My mother is smiling and bright-eyed, her perfectly purple-painted nails resting gently on her pregnant stomach. Luca’s caught me staring at this photo a few times. Usually he doesn’t say anything, just offers a shoulder squeeze or one of his annoying-as-hell noogies.
But I don’t really stare at this picture because of my dead father. He was killed in Afghanistan when I was two, so I never really knew him. No. I pore over this picture because of the woman. Maggie Glasser. Same name as my mother. Same face. Same long fingers. But everything else is different. Her hair isn’t dull and stringy-looking but shines like spun gold. Her eyes aren’t ringed with lack of sleep and sadness and booze; her shirt doesn’t droop on her shoulders as if from a clothes hanger.
Both people in this picture are total strangers.
And it pisses me off to no end.
I stuff the picture back in my bag and tamp down the maddening crawl of tears up my throat. I’m wrenching the zipper closed when I hear something that sounds like a sob. It takes me a few seconds to realize it’s not coming from me.
About twenty feet away, there’s a girl sitting in the sand. Her back is to me, but I can tell she’s curled into a ball, her knees tucked to her chest as she huddles against the wind. The current laps over the shore, and her slouchy white T-shirt is dotted with salt water. Her hair is a halo of black spirals around her head, her skin a warm brown. From where I am, I can see her shoulders moving up and down—?she’s definitely crying—?and her left arm jerks here and there like she’s fiddling with something in the sand.
I stand and take a step closer to get a better view of what she’s doing. There’s a jar of peanut butter next to her, silver spoon jutting out from the top. Every now and then, she reaches over and scoops up a bite, sucking on the spoon through her sobs.
I watch her, totally transfixed by how the wind keeps picking up locks of her hair and tossing them around before setting them back down. She wipes her face before digging into the peanut butter again, her left hand still sweeping over whatever she’s focused on in the sand.
After a couple minutes, I pick up my bag and start walking toward the lighthouse. Time to check on Mom. Time to deal with Jay. Maybe work in a little daydream about the New York trip in between all the real-life suckage.
But then I hear that sob again—?deep and almost free sounding, like it’s a relief to let it loose—?and it makes me stop. It makes me turn back around and find the girl in the sand, who’s now standing and facing the ocean with her bare feet in the freezing water, her peanut butter jar and what looks like a large square-shaped book clutched to her chest. I can see her profile now, and tears stream down her face.
That’s when it hits me.
This is Eva.
Luca’s Eva. Emmy’s Eva. Just-lost-her-mom Eva. There’s a picture of Dani Brighton and her daughter on the bookshelf in Emmy’s living room that I’ve seen at least a hundred times. In the photo, Eva’s around thirteen or so, middle school lanky with a mouthful of metal, but it’s definitely the same girl standing on the beach now. Same lean frame and sleek cheekbones and wild, curling hair.
I should leave. God knows, when I’m upset enough to actually let some tears leak out, I want to be left the hell alone. But something makes me hesitate and take a few steps closer to her. That something might be the fact that my best friend would stare me down with his big disappointed puppy-dog eyes if he knew I left Eva out here, alone and crying, without so much as a howdy-do.
Or that something might be that I’m curious. That I don’t want to go check on Mom. That I feel miserable right now and misery loves company or whatever the hell. That something might be a lot of different somethings, but either way, my feet carve through the gravelly sand, weaving in between the sharp rocks until I’m just a couple of steps behind her.
“Hey,” I say, reaching out at the same time to tap her elbow. My voice and my touch are as soft as I can make them, but she still startles, actually coming off the ground a bit as she whirls around. Everything in her arms tumbles onto the wet sand.
“Crap, sorry,” I say, bending down to pick up her stuff. There’s the open peanut butter jar, a spoon, a pack of colored pencils, and one of those grown-up coloring books titled Lost Ocean, all of which is now partially covered in the reallive ocean.
“It’s okay,” she says as she kneels to help me. Her voice sounds clogged, and the tears keep coming. She doesn’t even fight them back, just lets them have their way.
“Were you actually trying to color out here?” I ask, handing her the book. “It’s windy as hell and you were sort of sitting . . .” I gesture to the waves lapping closer as the tide rolls in.
“Yeah, it’s a policy of mine to only color in really precarious places.”
“Really?”
She laughs, a watery chuckle. “No, not really.”
We both stand, and I see now she’s a little taller than me and slender. Her T-shirt hangs off her shoulders, neon-green bra blazing through the thin cotton, and her skinny jeans are wet to the knees.
“Well, this is unfortunate,” she says, peering into her jar of peanut butter. Specks of sand dot the gooey surface almost entirely.
“The hazards of a New England beach,” I say. “The sand and the wind have wills of their own.”
“I see that.” She scoops up a spoonful and lets it hover near her mouth. “Can’t be much different than the crunchy version, right?”
“Oh sure, just a little more protein.”
Her light-brown, amber-flecked eyes rest on mine, grinning through a sheen of leftover tears. She opens her mouth, resting the spoon on her bottom lip. I watch her, sure she’s going to pull away at any moment. There are even a few short strings of seaweed stuck in the peanut butter, for god’s sake.
When she starts to close her top lip, I can’t take it anymore. I yank the spoon from her mouth, and it plunks into the sand.
“Hey, now,” she says firmly, but she’s half laughing.
“I could not in good conscience let you eat that. There is such a thing as marine bacteria, you know.”
“You could’ve just said Stop. You pretty much hit me.” She rubs at her wrist, but she’s still sort of smiling. There’s a hint of relief underneath, like she’s happy to be joking around and distracted from those tears. Or maybe that’s just me.
“Desperate times,” I say. “Suck it up.”
“You’re a little bit prickly, you know that?”
“Better prickly than infected with a tapeworm.”