Hair wet
Arms at her sides
Black waves crash around her
But she doesn’t waver
She needs the sea to come and take her
Zadie must have seen it in her face. “What’s wrong?”
“I think it was Mom… She was in the water.” She looked out at the whitecapped tide barreling down the black sand. “The waves looked like they were made of smoke.”
Zadie followed her gaze. “Are you feeling up for a walk?”
Finn nodded. How she was “feeling” was irrelevant, and both of them knew it.
As Zadie and Finn made their way slowly down the volcanic beach, the air cooled and more fog rolled in. The sea stacks now seemed to float on the mist like a cloud city. Waves would burst from the fog, then retreat back to it, hissing like injured sea creatures. It was the kind of dreamlike place that should have been full of memories, but either they had all been carried away by the fog or Finn just couldn’t sense them.
“Getting anything?” Zadie asked.
“No. It’s like this place has no memory, like we’re the first peopleever to come here.” She knew this couldn’t be true, of course, but the quiet and stillness were unnerving and a bad explanation was better than none at all. A place without memory was a place without life. Had they unwittingly stumbled into some kind of underworld? Finn pulled the reins on her imagination. They weren’t dead. They were on a beach—a dark, lonely, unsettlingly quiet beach.
A small colony of sandpipers appeared on the sand in front of them, then scuttled out of the way. As Finn watched them run, her attention was brought suddenly back to the stinging in her feet. “So you were the one that found me? In the woods?”
The question was so out of the blue, it seemed to catch Zadie off guard. She looked at Finn questioningly.
“I heard you and Joel fighting,” Finn clarified.
“Oh. How much did you hear?”
“Not a lot. Is that why he left?”
“He was scared you were going to get hurt.” Zadie tucked her hands into her jacket pockets, then continued. “He thought we should quit.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him you had it under control.”
Finn swallowed. Not even she believed that anymore.
“I had a premonition,” Zadie added. “That’s how I found you.”
“Seriously?”
She nodded. “I can’t believe it worked.”
“I can.”
The girls shared a knowing smile like it was a telephone made from two cans and a piece of string.
Then through a break in the mist, Finn spotted a figure. “Look…” It was a long-limbed woman with wavy hair that reached the middle of her back. She was wading into the waves as if she were going for a dip, but she didn’t move like she had any intention of swimming. She barely disturbed the water, arms limp at her sides as the ocean slowly pulled her into itself.
“Mom!” Finn took off in a hobbling sprint down the sand.
She had heard of time slowing down in moments of crisis, but as she raced toward her mother, time did not slow so much as it reversed. Finn was eighteen, then a few steps later, she was seventeen. By the time her toes touched the freezing water, she was thirteen and crying into the pillow of a strange bed. And when she had waded through the last of the sea and fog, when she was in arm’s reach of the person she’d spent five years hoping to find, she was twelve years old again, picking up her mom’s discarded anklet, squeezing it in her fist until it made painful impressions of their initials in her palm; calling out for her mom in every room of the house until the windows steamed with her breath and the despair she’d expelled from her lungs was inhaled again, starting the cycle all over. And so it was in an unexpected flash of anger—not joy or longing—that she forcefully grabbed her mother’s shoulder.
But the startled woman who wheeled around to face her was not Nora, and by the bewildered look on her face, she clearly didn’t recognize Finn, either.