Sixteen
Grace exits the coffee shop in a hurry, a new sense of urgency pushing her along while an acrid taste—part spoiled creamer, part disbelief—lingers in her mouth.
Outside on the sidewalk, she tugs down her hat, slides on her sunglasses, then wrestles her bike from a metal rack while the surfer boys’ voices still rattle around like pinballs inside her brain.
Cece. The smoothie. The one her younger self apparently stole.
(Had Grace ever actually been brazen enough to do such a thing?) It was impossible.
And yet, it was also proof. Maybe whatever Grace had been experiencing since arriving back on Sea Drift wasn’t only happening in her mind. Which possibly made it worse.
In one ungraceful swoop, she throws a leg over the bike’s hot plastic seat, drops her belongings into the woven basket, and starts to ride.
The landscape blurs past—pastel houses, slices of water.
It’s been ages since she’s pedaled this hard—beach cruisers are more typically used for, well, cruising.
But she can’t stop. Even though she’s surrounded by a setting where people come to get away, Grace feels an innate need to escape.
Eventually, she reaches the northern tip of the island—a place where the boulevard comes to a dead end and all that’s left other than water and a parking lot is a pine-tree-lined path. The muscles in her legs burn as she parks her bike, grabs her things, and sets off down the trail.
On certain days, the path is packed. Families posing for pictures.
Kids off-roading while their mothers shout about poison ivy.
Today, it’s 152quiet. For many people, coming here is a rainy-day activity, something you do when the beach isn’t an option.
Which is maybe why Grace came. Because even though she’ll technically be out in public, she’s confident she’ll be alone here so she can think.
Another few paces and Grace sees it, its black-and-white body taking shape through the dense green brush.
The lighthouse. As stoic and certain as ever.
A structure historically meant to safely guide people back into port.
Grace and Birdie used to come here together to collect pieces of driftwood, look through the old-fashioned viewers at the ocean, then climb the lighthouse, walking the 216 narrow steps all the way to its top.
Sometimes, when Grace was older, she’d come here for an hour or two by herself, often when Birdie was out getting more groceries or meeting up with Carol Murphy to enjoy baskets of clam strips for lunch.
Back then, Grace liked to be alone sometimes—not lonely, there was a difference—because doing so often meant carving out extra time to write.
She’d bring an old composition notebook or journal, a few pens, and her thoughts, then plop down someplace and try to puzzle through whatever thoughts were taking up space in her head.
And now here she is, thirty-seven, traversing the same worn path and preparing to do the same thing.
The trail splits. Most visitors veer left toward the main attraction and designated photo spots.
Grace veers right instead and follows a narrower, more overgrown path, the one she knows opens up to the jetty.
She steps off it, over to the long line of dark rocks that stretch out into the sea like an arm, and picks her way across them, careful not to slip on their slick surfaces.
There’s a danger to it—visitors aren’t technically supposed to walk out this far—but it’s a risk that’s always felt worth taking.
Once she reaches the last rock, Grace sits, kicks off her sandals, and inspects her heel, newly sore from her long bike ride in flimsy flip-flops.
She twists her leg and picks at it, but it’s no use.
The skin around it blooms red, not in an urgent or dramatic way, but enough for her to notice.
Probably the early signs of an infection, love, she hears Birdie say.
If you ignore it, Cece, it’ll only get worse.
153
She shifts her weight, trying to settle in and figure out what, precisely, to do next.
She unscrews her water and pulls her journal and a pen onto her lap.
Maybe it’s the silence out here. Or the fact that sitting this far out in the sea has always made Grace feel both full of wonder and also infinitely small.
Whatever the reason, she decides to just stare.
In two days, Grace will be thirty-eight.
It’s a nothing birthday. Not a new decade or milestone worthy of a special party.
It was just supposed to be a day. A nice one, but simple.
That’s how she imagined her whole life would feel at this stage, too.
Easy. All the questions that once haunted her—Who am I?
Where am I going? What do I want? When will I figure things out?
—tucked neatly away in her past. And wasn’t that the kicker?
The fact that they’d all moved back into her mind, like time had merely been an illusion and the years—the ones that’d felt so long sometimes—had never actually passed.
“Wh-what is that?” Grace suddenly stutters to herself, her sight trained on the water.
Something strange catches her eye. From beneath her dark sunglasses and the shadow of her baseball cap, she squints and tries to interpret the sight.
Five—no, six—not-quite-right objects float past. At first, from her elevated spot up on the rocks, she thinks they’re some unusual school of fish, a lesser-known species of bird, or a collection of small, discarded bags.
“Wait.” She strains her neck forward, her whole face scrunched up in a question. “Are those . . . papers?”
“Yes,” a voice—one full of drama that Grace instantly recognizes but really wishes she didn’t—announces from behind her. “And that’s exactly where they belong. In the water, where they’ll disintegrate and no one will ever be subjected to reading the awful half attempts at prose written on them.”
Grace turns slowly, not quite wanting to look but aware that—other than catapulting herself into a dangerously deep part of the ocean—there’s no clear path for her to run away.
“Also, you don’t need to remind me,” the late-twentysomething girl who stands a little way back on the jetty states.
She holds an oversize 154bright-pink journal—the words Be Calm and Carry On .
. . with Your Story stamped in bold typography across its front.
Without a word, she whips it back open, tears out another sheet, crumples it into a tight ball, and tosses it.
“I’m well aware that what I’m doing is bad for the environment.
” She flings it. The paper catches in the wind before it touches the water’s surface.
“Selfish, I know. But honestly, not to sound terrible, that’s the least of my problems at the moment. ”
Instantly, Grace’s heart starts to do backflips, while her palms become coated with sweat.
She blinks, as if one of the sheets of torn paper has somehow flown straight into her cornea, inhibiting her ability to clearly see.
But of course, just like all her other recent unexplainable encounters on this island, her vision is not the problem.
It’s her.
The wild hair, still golden but pulled up in a messy-yet-trying-too-hard high bun.
The designer-distressed jean shorts (which cost her half a month’s rent).
The black T-shirt, which for reasons she couldn’t articulate, made her feel a touch edgy.
The oversize beaded bib necklace she wore everywhere that year, hoping to look .
. . what? More stylish? More grown-up? More New York?
Just above, her more garish jewelry choice, the glint of gold metal—the nameplate necklace—shines on her chest.
Cece. Ten years earlier. Freshly twenty-seven. Not yet knowing this would be one of her last weeklong visits here, or that the life she’d been pining for—the one that would ultimately crash a few short years later—waits just ahead.
“What are you doing?” Grace asks, pulling her hat down farther to better conceal her face. “Why are you throwing papers in the ocean?”
While she waits for a response, Grace flips through her mental Rolodex of memories in an effort to remember this day.
But she can’t. The older you get, the more specific instances from your past begin to dim.
It’s like your mind starts to run out of storage and begins to purge files to free up space.
Some moments—the big ones—stay. But others, the in-between scenes that unfold in the quieter pockets of our days—words we said, small things we did—fade.
155
“Dear God, would you stop!” Grace shouts as Cece rips out another page and sacrifices it to the sea.
“I don’t remember why—I mean, I don’t understand why you’re throwing them into the water like that.
” A pair of seagulls swoop down, thinking they’ve found an early lunch.
After a brief investigation, they fly away, disappointed. “Is this symbolic or—”
“You wouldn’t.” Cece smacks her journal—the one Grace distinctly recalls buying on a visit to the Strand—shut.
She slides it into her canvas New Yorker tote bag, then crouches and takes a seat on the rocks.
“That’s part of the problem. No one does.
” She sniffles and tries to hide the fact that she’s crying.
“Also, lighting them on fire felt too on the nose, you know? Fire. Creative burnout.” She quickly wipes her eyes.
“It’s bad enough that my writing feels entirely clichéd.
I don’t need the ways I reject it to feel trite, too.
” She lifts a hand to her chest. “God, I hate this thing,” she announces, and unhooks her clunky necklace.
“It’s so heavy.” Cece holds it out, looking at it from all angles, like she might chuck it into the tides, too.