8. Sun and Sand
SUN AND SAND
LEO
Ihad played in the World Cup twice. I had scored a winning goal in the final minute of a Champions League semi-final in front of eighty thousand people. I had held my composure under circumstances that had made grown men cry on international television.
I was nervous about a beach trip with two children.
I showed up fifteen minutes early, which I recognized as a mistake approximately three seconds after knocking, when the door opened to reveal not Estrella but a man I did not know in a very expensive suit, holding a bouquet of flowers and radiating the specific energy of someone who charged twenty percent.
The agent. Miguel Vega. The one who had helpfully provided my agent with Estrella’s address in exchange for, presumably, the ability to say he knew Leo Ramirez.
We shook hands. He looked at me the way a man looks at something he’s not sure whether to acquire or insure. Behind him I could see Pedro in a swimsuit, brandishing a plastic shovel, and Luz wearing Estrella’s expression on a smaller face, evaluating me with calm professional interest.
“I’ve heard you’re writing a book,” Miguel said.
“When I find the time.”
He gave me a look that communicated, with great efficiency, that he knew I had not found the time, knew why I had not found the time, and had complicated feelings about being part of the reason why.
Then he kissed Estrella’s cheek, issued what I gathered was a meaningful glance in my direction, and left.
Estrella watched him go with the expression of a woman who has been managed by agents for twenty years and has developed a robust immune response.
“He gave you my address,” she said.
“He did.”
“I should fire him.”
“You probably shouldn’t,” I said. “He seems to genuinely care about you. He just expresses it commercially.”
She looked at me for a moment, something shifting in her expression. Then: “He brought news. They’re expanding my role. More scenes, more dialogue.”
I felt a genuine rush of pleasure at this — not the polite congratulations I’d have offered a colleague, but something more personal, more invested. “Estrella, that’s wonderful.”
“Yes,” she said, and the smile that crossed her face was unguarded and brilliant and briefly knocked every prepared sentence out of my head.
Pedro solved this problem by launching himself at my legs.
“LEO. We are GOING. TO. THE BEACH.”
“We are,” I agreed, recovering. “And I have been reliably informed that we are building the biggest sandcastle in California.”
“I informed you,” Pedro said, with great dignity.
“You did. Very reliable source.”
Luz appeared at my elbow with her backpack and a small stuffed lion wearing, I now noticed, a pair of miniature swimming goggles fashioned from pipe cleaners and circles of cardboard. “León is coming too,” she informed me. “He’s the official sandcastle inspector. He has very high standards.”
I examined León gravely. He examined me back through his cardboard goggles. “I’ll try not to disappoint him.”
“He’s very encouraging,” Luz said, which seemed designed to make me feel better about my chances.
The drive to the beach was an education.
Pedro, who had previously seemed like a fairly quiet child, turned out to operate at a different volume when seatbelted into the back of a car with an audience.
He had questions about football — very specific questions, the kind that suggested someone had been doing research — and about Spain, and about whether a sandcastle could theoretically have a working drawbridge, and what I thought about octopuses.
“They’re very intelligent,” I said, on the subject of octopuses.
“More intelligent than footballers?” Luz asked, from the opposite side of the backseat, in a tone that suggested the answer might not go in my favour.
“Probably,” I admitted.
Estrella made a sound in the passenger seat that was almost certainly a suppressed laugh. I caught her eye in the mirror. She looked away, but not quickly enough.
I found the spot I’d scoped the day before — close enough to the water, far enough from the main cluster of families, with good sightlines and, importantly, one natural route of exit should we need to move fast. Fifteen years of navigating public spaces had made me automatic about these things.
I didn’t mention the exit assessment to Estrella.
“Perfect,” Pedro announced, surveying the beach with the authority of a man whose sandcastle ambitions required significant real estate.
What I knew about applying sunscreen to children: nothing. What I knew about pre-match preparation: everything. I approached the problem the same way I would approach the latter.
“Arms first,” I said, settling Pedro in front of me. “Then legs. Then face —”
“You missed his ear,” Luz said.
I applied sunscreen to Pedro’s ear.
“The other one.”
Pedro submitted to this process with the patience of someone accustomed to it, gazing at the ocean while I worked. León sat beside him in the sand, goggles on, technically supervising.
“You’re very thorough,” Estrella said, from where she was setting up the blankets.
“My left knee required three surgeries,” I told her. “I have a deep respect for preventive care.”
She looked at me. “That’s not the same thing.”
“The principle holds.”
She laughed — a real one, not the careful kind she sometimes deployed in public — and went back to the blankets, and I returned to Pedro’s sunscreen application with perhaps slightly less focus than before.
“His nose,” Luz said.
The sandcastle began as a modest collaborative project. Pedro had vision. I had structural knowledge. These things were not always compatible.
“It needs to be taller,” Pedro said.
“It needs a foundation first,” I said. “You can’t build tall without building deep. That’s —“ I paused. “That’s actually exactly what my first coach told me.”
Pedro considered this. “Was your coach good?”
“He was right about foundations.”
We dug. León supervised from a position of elevation that Luz had determined was appropriate for an inspector of his seniority. She herself was sourcing shells along the waterline with the systematic efficiency of someone who had identified a clear job and intended to execute it properly.
I was explaining the structural principles of the inner wall when Estrella said, “I’m going in,” and walked past us toward the water.
I watched her go.
I was aware that I was watching her go. I was aware that Pedro was also watching me watch her go, with the bright, interested gaze of a small child learning things about adults. I returned to the sandcastle with some urgency.
“You weren’t listening,” Pedro said.
“I was. Foundation. Layers. Compact each level before adding the next.”
“You stopped talking.”
“I was thinking.”
Pedro accepted this with the generosity of someone who knew exactly what I had been thinking about and had decided to be magnanimous.
I looked toward the water. Estrella had waded in to her waist and then, with a fluid economy of movement that completely rearranged my thoughts, dove through an incoming wave and disappeared.
She surfaced further out, already into her stroke, moving parallel to shore with the easy confidence of someone entirely at home.
“She won competitions,” Luz said, appearing beside me with her shell collection. “When she was younger. She has trophies.”
“I heard.”
“They’re in a box,” Luz continued, with the philosophical air of someone who has considered this. “But the important things are in her. Trophies are just proof for other people.”
I looked down at her. She was examining a shell. León was tucked under her arm.
“That’s very wise,” I said.
She shrugged. “Abuela says it. About acting. That you don’t need an award to know you’re good.” She set the shell carefully into her collection pile. “Leo.”
“Yes.”
“Do you think Mami is good? At acting?”
I thought about Estrella’s face when she’d told me about the expanded role. The unguarded light of it. “I think she’s extraordinary,” I said. “I think she came here and started over and is doing something very hard and doing it with grace, and yes, I think she’s good.”
Luz nodded slowly, weighing this. “She thinks she’s not good enough,” she said. “She doesn’t say so, but I can tell.” A pause. “I think you help her feel good enough.”
She returned to her shells before I had time to respond to this, which was perhaps intentional.
Estrella emerged from the water eventually, salt-bright and relaxed in a way the beach had given her that I hadn’t seen before. I handed her a towel without being asked — I had located it twenty minutes ago in preparation — and she took it with a slightly surprised look.
“You’re very organized,” she said.
“Sixteen years of professional sport,” I said. “I have contingency towels for everything.”
She laughed, wrapping it around her shoulders, and sat on the blanket beside me while the children continued the castle’s fortification.
The afternoon was warm and unhurried. She told me about a telenovela she’d filmed years ago, near a coast like this, a storyline so dramatic that the cast had started calling each other by their character names off-set.
She was funny about it — self-aware and quick, with an impressionist’s instinct for the telling detail.
“Why acting?” I asked, when she paused. “Originally.”
She considered this. “Because I could be anyone,” she said. “Where I grew up, you were who your family was, what your neighborhood decided you were. On a stage, in a scene — you could be entirely someone else. Or entirely yourself. Sometimes it’s the same thing.”
I understood this more than I would have expected. “Football was similar,” I said. “On the pitch, nothing else mattered. Not where you came from, not what you had or didn’t have. Just what you could do.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m trying to figure out who I am when I’m not doing it.” I looked at her. “Hence the book that refuses to be written.”
She looked back at me with an expression I was beginning to recognize — the one that meant she was deciding whether to say the true thing or the careful thing. “Maybe the book isn’t cooperating,” she said, “because the story isn’t finished yet.”
Before I could answer, Pedro arrived at a run to inform us that the castle required a flag, urgently, and that this was not a negotiable item. I found a flat piece of driftwood, which was deemed acceptable, and the crisis was resolved.
The sun was low by the time we packed up — two sleepy children, a bucket of shells, one structural driftwood flag that Pedro refused to leave behind, and León, who had been promoted to Chief Castle Guardian for the day.
Pedro fell asleep in the backseat before we’d left the parking lot. Luz followed ten minutes later, her head against the window, León tucked under her chin.
Estrella looked at them in the mirror. The expression on her face was the quietest thing I had ever seen.
“Thank you,” she said, softly enough not to wake them. “Today was —”
“I know,” I said.
She looked at me. “You know?”
“I’ve been to very beautiful beaches,” I said. “This was the best one.”
She was quiet for a moment. Outside, the city began to gather itself around us, lights coming on as the sky darkened.
“Leo,” she said.
I glanced over.
“There are photographers outside my building. There usually are on weekends.” A pause. “I hate making the children navigate that when they’re tired.”
I assessed the information, made a plan, and told her what I was going to do. She listened without arguing, which I had already learned was not a given with Estrella.
It worked. She took the children in through the side entrance while I gave the photographers three minutes of my attention — a comment about the upcoming season, a posture that said this is everything I’m giving you, a deliberate visibility that left them satisfied and looking the wrong direction.
When I got upstairs, Estrella was running the bath, the children were depositing sand onto the bathroom floor with great enthusiasm, and she looked at me over Pedro’s head with an expression that included, I thought, a measure of relief that she hadn’t expected to feel.
Luz requested a story. I was made to understand that this was non-negotiable.
I sat on the edge of her bed with Where the Wild Things Are, which I had read enough times now to know the voice for Max and the voice for the Wild Things, and Pedro burrowed against his sister, and Luz held León against her chest, and they were both asleep before the wild rumpus was over.
Estrella stood in the doorway when I came out. The apartment was quiet. The city beyond the windows was doing its nighttime thing.
“I should go,” I said.
She looked at me for a long moment — the same weighing expression I was learning, the one that meant she was being honest with herself about something.
Then she stood on her toes and pressed her mouth to mine, briefly and softly, a question more than a statement. Her hand rested against my chest.
I kept very still. I was afraid that if I moved, she would remember all the reasons she’d been careful.
She pulled back, her eyes meeting mine. Something in them had settled.
“Goodnight, Leo,” she said.
I could still feel the warmth of it. “Goodnight, Estrella.”
I made it to the hallway before I stopped, leaned my back against the wall, and took one long breath.
Then I smiled like an idiot all the way to the car.