Every summer, they arrive here. They race here in their Range Rovers and Mercedes, hugging the bluffs, lustrous cars gleaming in the sunlight. Summertime pop electrifies the air. They round the bend and every heartbeat falls into rhythm, thumping with the drumming waves. Gravel spews and dogs bark. The kids tumble out in a tangle of lanky arms and lopsided grins. Then comes the wild dash to the beach. Down the bluffs, up and over the dunes. The meadows ripple with laughter, the reeds swish and sway. There is always some hollering, some shoving, someone who nearly twists their ankle. The birds startle and the cliffs shrug their shoulders. The sun yawns. Summer at Westshire has begun.
Except this time, she comes alone. Alison Dearborn, clad in a navy blue coat bought along Fifth Avenue, with glinting brass buttons running down the center. Beige sandals, and oversized sunglasses. She steps out of her SUV and surveys the beach around her, like a lost sailor in a tempest-tossed land. Her features, once delicately chiseled, have dulled and fractured, like limestone cliffs pummeled for millennia by the ocean’s wrath. Tears have eroded crevices in the skin, brine carving into the rock face, forming deltas and dire straits. Alison bites her lip and a cloudfront passes over her brow. There is no screaming. Her kids are nowhere in sight.
From the trunk emerges a single striped tote bag, bulging with junk. Stooping slightly, Alison graces the cobblestone pavers. The house stands alone on the hill, a storybook-like structure, lines of shingles spelling out a sailor’s tale. Gables and eaves are stacked at odd angles, slate gray faces outstretched towards all four corners of the earth. Geraniums line the windowsill. Alison’s eyes linger on the upstairs bedrooms, where a line of stuffed animals stare back. She’d given one to her son each year. The sea otter, the beluga whale, the pink octopus, with its ridiculous tentacles. A moose, a giraffe, a tiger. She ascends onto the porch. Reaches into her purse and pulls out the key. Fiddles with the lock. The door clicks, and from its nine-month slumber the house has awakened.
The inside is exactly how the Dearborns left it. A haze of luxury is sprinkled over everything, like a layer of golden dust accumulating throughout the years. White shiplap interrupts navy blue walls. A marble backsplash frames the kitchen. Floor-to-ceiling windows peer out at the waves.
For a week, Alison does not emerge from the house. Seagulls peck at their feathers and wail over the bay. They haggle over a few treasures, a shard of glass here, a piece of foil there. They call to each other, beseeching when the kids will arrive with oyster crackers and breadcrumbs. Rabbits scurry, noses pressed to the ground, tails flecked with sand. Every once in a while they pause, ears perked up, straining for the sound of pattering footsteps, the cacophony of giggles. Blue herons in the shallows grow old, preening their silver coats, uneasily shifting from leg to leg. With no kids to tell them off, the geese resume full command over the beach. Even the waves are restless, lashing against their seaweed tethers and gnawing at the rocks.
The house is a silent stronghold, guarding its lone inmate from the sands of time. While spindrift flies into the air, Alison trudges about, white knotted blankets entrapping her shoulders like fishing nets. There is no cell connection, no TV. She boils coffee that never touches her lips, she flips through novels without absorbing a word. More often than not she throws open the windows, the white curtains unfurling like ghosts in the wind. She subsists on sardines and memories, gingerly examining each knick-knack in the house. Every conch shell perched on the mantle, every photo bolted to the wall. Size three flip flops shoved under the bed, a film of salt and pepper crystals still cloaked to the bottom. She files these objects away in the back drawers of her mind, aggregating the proof, corroborating her sanity. It is like she is the last person on earth, like the world drops off past the horizon. At night, light seeps from the upstairs bedrooms, honey patches coating the ground. A silhouette paces back and forth. The menagerie of stuffed animals stares on.
Then one evening, Alison dons a red sundress and swings the patio door shut behind her. With a floppy straw hat perched on her head, she hobbles down the path to the beach. Her pallid face elongates under the shadow of the brim. Her eyes are fixed in the distance, staring into the past while searching the horizon, fruitlessly, for an incoming ship. The ocean exhales and she clutches her hat, tenses her knees as if a single gale could whisk her away. She wavers on the side of the bluff, unmoored.
With the wind nipping at her cheeks, Alison throws off her hat and screams.
And then she takes off running, beads of sand spraying behind her heels. She kicks off her sandals and plods barefoot to the shore. Hordes of geese spread their wings and lift off the ground like paper airplanes. Alison laughs and dances among the dunes. Tendrils of seaweed brush her calves, the waves lap at her knees. The sea bluffs cradle her. Her tears drip into the tidepools. Strands of pearls, swirling round and round in the emerald vortex.
Alison tilts her face up to the sky. Meringue peaks swirl through the heavens, the sun crisping the edges a golden brown. The waves jump for joy and the seagulls cartwheel through the mist. All is well at last.
The days go on. Alison sings at sunset, coaxes the colors over the horizon. Paces the driftwood each night, whispering to the waves, searching for a soft spot to land. Splinters of truth wedge under her toenails and embed in her tender flesh. She grits her teeth and keeps teetering along, heels trembling, wincing with each step. The moon rises. Threads of twilight weave into the tapestry above, droplets of starlight dangle from the silky web. The tide fluxes in. Soapsuds sweep away the day’s grime, burying everything under a blank slate of sand. The undertow breathes out. Darkness subsides and the horizon blushes.
In the morning Alison haunts the coast, hair disheveled, bathrobe tied around her. She stumbles around, arms outstretched, combing through fistfuls of mist. Futilely digging up the past, racing against the fresh deposit of sand. Afraid her memory will falter, that the ridges scarred into her temporal lobe will be smoothed away, washed out with the ebbing sea. Searching. Always searching. She claws through seaweed, turns over rocks, embarking on a treasure hunt for fool's gold. All along, the pain she seeks is buried away, locked deep inside her chest. She lugs the rowboat out to the bay and bobs around on the waves, a lone sailor, a coxswain with no crew. Water seeps through the boards and she bails it out, but a thousand scoops of the tin bucket is not enough to stop the endless tide.
She skips pebbles on the ocean, and the waves draw near to listen. Her wish is the same each time. Her husband’s name. Another pebble plunges out to see. Her daughters’ names. A splash. Her son’s name.
She grows desperate sometimes. A sandal, chucked to sea. A pearl earring.
Until one day in the height of August she packs up her tote bag. Her hair cascading down her shoulders, she scampers to the shore. Uncorks a bottle of wine and upends it, letting the contents pour onto the sand like splattered blood. With trembling fingers, she rolls up a piece of paper and places it inside. Re-corks the bottle, and sets it onto the sand. The ocean obliges. The bottle nods up and down, dipping through crests, vanishing under valleys. Then, for good measure, Alison hurls her wedding ring in after it.
She stands by the rocks for a long time, arms encircled around her slender frame. The beach has given everything it has to offer to her. A moment of sunshine, a final farewell. She swears she’s heard their giggles in the waves, seen their shadows bending through the reeds. The beach belonged to them. It is not, was never, hers for the taking. The house belonged to a past family, and she is nothing more than a guest, bathed in borrowed time, cloaked under self-deceitful lies. Someday it’ll be enough. But now it’s time to go home.
The rabbits pause their nibbling and stand petrified as the engine revs. Alison drives off in a cloud of dust. The house atop the hill stands unlocked, abandoned. The lights are off, the windows are agape. Wind rushes through the deserted house, spiraling up the staircase, sweeping across the barren dressers. Wallpaper flutters and spires of dust rise into the air. The curtains dance and billow, rustling faster now. They whisper, speaking, no screaming, to each other, streaming out the windows. Sails straining with all their might, tugging towards the tide, yearning to be free. For hours, neither gull nor heron, neither wind nor sea, dares to make a sound.
Steffi Kim is a junior from Seattle, Washington. In her free time she enjoys playing soccer, reading novels, and spending time with friends and family. Her writing has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and you can find her pieces in Scribere, Balloons Lit. Journal, and Teen Ink. She is currently 16 years old.
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