I walked across the lawn toward the backyard, the ocean spreading out before me. The grass was short, and I wondered when Jack had stopped over to cut it. I knew he came here often. He didn’t ask me to come with him anymore. The answer had been no so many times this past year, he’d stopped asking.
To the right was the hammock, the worn rope stretched between two tall elms. I saw the girls swinging lazily in the morning, Maddie nestled between them.
Inside the house, I heard voices in the kitchen. My mother’s laugh, and then Jess’s. There were boxes stacked against every wall. My mother had opened the windows to air out the chalky smell of dried plaster. I climbed the stairs, turned left down the hall, passing bedrooms. Some walls were flat gray: the ones we hadn’t plastered. Trim board lay stacked on the floor.
A project abandoned for more than a year.
The nursery was the only room that was finished. We’d insulated it before she was born, and the girls had helped me decorate it. I walked to the wall, remembering the day the girls picked out the wallpaper.
We’d spent an hour tucked inside a nook in the design store surrounded by stacks of sample books. You choose, I’d said, she’s your baby sister. They agonized, picked one, found another they liked, then another. They finally settled on a thick yellow paper with a border of butter cream, sage, and lavender hearts. It took us two days to wallpaper the room. Jack popping in every so often, telling the girls to call him when they gave up, with a wink to me, my belly large—eight months pregnant—wallpaper glue stuck to my hair. The girls shouted for him to get lost. He’d bet them twenty dollars they’d be begging for his help after an hour. They shoved him out the door, and he caught my eye before he shut it. The look on his face said he was lucky. He knew we were lucky.
I moved to where the crib once was. Next to it there was a window, and I opened it, glanced down to the sunflower garden below.
There was a noise from the hallway, and then my mother was in the doorway, out of breath.
“Is Kat up here?” she asked quickly.
“No. Why? I thought she was with you.”
“She was with me. Right next to me and Jess in the basement, and then she said she forgot something in the car, and now I can’t find her. I told Jess to check by the water and I’d look in the house.”
I looked out the window at the ocean. The sun shining off the blue water. The tide was out, and a dark stretch of sand was uncovered. Something yellow caught my eye, and I squinted, not able to make it out.
Then there was Jess, running across the lawn to the flash of yellow, to the water. Not jogging. Sprinting. As if every second mattered.
I flew past my mother, out the bedroom door, my mother following me, calling absurdly from behind me to be careful on the stairs, the yellow finding its place in my mind—Kat’s backpack that she’d insisted on holding on her lap on the ride over.
She knew better than to be at the ocean by herself. It was a rule. One she’d never broken. Until now.
The lawn ended at a stone wall with a four-foot drop to the beach below. But the flash of yellow I’d seen wasn’t at the wall. Or on the beach. It was farther out, at the water, where the ocean began and stretched for miles and miles.
In front of me, Jess reached the wall and disappeared over it, out of my view. I ran after her, my legs pumping as fast I could get them to move, my lungs burning. There was panic. Then anger. What the hell did she think she was doing? Low tide would have the water thirty or forty yards out, but when it came in, it came fast.
Kat knew this. Her father was a fisherman. She didn’t need to be told the sea had its own set of rules. She’d heard the stories we all knew by heart. Boats sunk or damaged. Men hurt or missing. Sometimes found. Many times not. She knew better than to be out there alone.
It was only five minutes before I reached the wall, but time moved in slow motion. The girls were two dots in the distance, the sun flashing off the water, blinding me. I ran to them, the only sound my breathing and the slap of my soles against the packed sand. Somewhere in the sky above, a seagull let out a shriek, a shrill cry filling the air.
When I was closer, I saw that the girls were standing in the water, the yellow backpack floating between them, the ocean lapping at their feet, the tide already making the turn in.
Jess was holding something. Holding it the air, away from her body.
It was another minute before I reached them. Kat was crying, her face red and tearstained, a scowl on her face. The backpack was at her feet, open and on its side, water filling it with every wave. Next to it was a wooden brown box, half-submerged.
Jess’s face was blank, her arm straight out in front of her. In her hand was a bag full of ashes. It took me a moment to register. Maddie.
“Take it,” Jess said to me urgently. “She was trying to dump it in the ocean.”
I reached out, dumbfounded, looking from the ashes, now in my hand, to Kat, to the box tumbling in the water at our feet.
“I wasn’t dumping it,” Kat screamed through her sobbing. She bent down and took the box out of the water. “You made me drop it, and now look.” She grabbed the bottom of her T-shirt and frantically rubbed the cotton against the wood, trying to dry it even though water streamed from the corners.
Jess hadn’t moved, her expression a mixture of emotions that I knew mirrored my own: confusion, shock, disbelief.
My fingers were curled around the plastic bag, my other hand supporting it from the bottom. I hadn’t blinked since Jess thrust it at me, hadn’t breathed, it seemed.
There was a noise behind us, a shout, my mother in the distance, standing on the lawn, the word okay making its way out to us. I held up my hand, signaling that we were, and she put her hand to her heart to show her relief.
I turned back to the girls. Time stopped. No one moved. No one spoke. There was just the sound of the ocean. And Kat’s sniffling.
I wondered how long Kat had hidden the ashes. When had she taken them from my closet? How had she even known they were there?
I thought back to this morning, picturing them in the closet. But I hadn’t seen them, I realized.
I’d looked at what I always looked at: her baby blanket, the one I wrapped around the wooden box the first day I’d brought it into the house and placed it on the shelf in my closet. I hadn’t taken it down from the shelf once the entire year.
I couldn’t bring myself to touch it, knowing the smell of the blanket would gut me. The softness of it against my cheek would bring me to my knees. The thought of her wrapped in it, fresh and clean out of her bath, would put me on the floor.
Now Kat looked over at me, her face flushed. Her voice was hoarse, choked. “She’s supposed to be in her favorite place. So I brought her,” she said.
I swallowed, choosing my words carefully. “This is something important, Kat. Something we should do together. As a family.”
“You told Dad you didn’t want to. You fought about it. I heard you.”
“I meant that I wasn’t ready. Not that I didn’t want to.”
“Well, that’s not fair. Dad’s ready. I’m ready. And Jess is ready. Aren’t you?” Kat asked Jess, whose eyes were still on the ashes.