Notes: My first fic ever, so please don't judge too harshly.
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He remembered the undertow.
His parents� friends had rented a place on Salisbury that summer, and they had gone to visit for a long weekend, filling the car with sunscreen and towels, blankets and bathing suits, and his sister�s stuffed dog, which could not be left home on any occasion. It was rare in those days that his father would take time off from work, and so he remembered the trip. He remembered the stifling heat of the leather seats in the stuffy little car with no air conditioning. He remembered the long games of I Spy and punch buggy. And he remembered the ocean.
He had never seen anything so big, so endless. He had never imagined that something could exist that stretched out so wide that he couldn�t see the edges of it, so far that it could hug the sun in those early morning hours before the world was awake. She had woken him early one morning, his sister, and dragged him down to the beach, her flip flops slapping against the rotting wood of the aged walkway and echoing against the walls of the sleeping beach houses.
The beach was deserted at that hour, littered with the debris of the tourists whose loud celebrations had kept him awake far into the night. Seagulls pecked at a leftover bag of popcorn that lay deserted beside the smoldering remains of a late night bonfire. He yawned, thinking of his cozy sleeping bag on the cool cement floor, but Joanie�s look of reproach made him clamp his mouth shut again.
�You�ll thank me for this someday,� she told him with the wisdom of an older sister. �You can�t call yourself a New Englander without ever seeing a sunrise over the Atlantic.� She turned a cartwheel on the sand, and he watched her. Neither of them had changed out of their pajamas, and her flannel shorts and baggy t-shirt would have looked absurdly out of place here at any other time of day, but now, with the faintest band of pale pink beginning to creep across the horizon, and the slight warm breeze blowing drifts of sand around the deserted stretch of land, she seemed oddly at home.
That was how he would remember her in the years to come, when he woke alone in his strange new bed, and clenched his teeth to keep from crying out for her. He would remember her on that beach, in the pale light of the morning, and he would try to convince himself that she was still there, just a state away, turning cartwheels on the sand, and waiting for him.
She had stopped halfway to the water and turned back, giving him a look that asked �what are you waiting for?� as plainly as if she had said it aloud. Maybe she did say it. He couldn�t remember now. He wished he could remember every moment, but somewhere along the way, time and tears had washed away the details. He had blinked, his mind still hazy with sleep, and padded across the sand to meet her at the water�s edge. She kicked off her sandals and splashed into the surf up to her knees, squealing at the cold. She turned to look at him again, and this time he was sure that she had said nothing. She just held out her hand to him, and he shook his head at her because she was crazy. Then he waded in, shivering, because he was just as crazy as she was.
They stood there like that, her wet up to her knees, him up to his waist, with her hands on his shoulders, steadying him in the gentle flow of the waves, and they watched the sun rise. He could feel the sand between his toes being sucked back out to sea with each wave that passed, and he shifted nervously, his mind full of visions of himself being pulled out along with the sand and the water, drifting out until all he could see of Salisbury was the tiny shimmer of lights from the houses along the water, and he couldn�t see Joanie at all.
Something grazed his foot, and he leaned down to sift his fingers through the sand, closing them around it. He lifted his hand and let the sand and sea dribble out as he inspected his discovery. Joanie leaned over too, curious, and plucked the shell out of his fingers. She scraped off the sand that clung to the inside, and dried it carefully on the edge of her shirt. Then she held it up to show it to him. One side was rough and black, ugly in its simplicity. But the inside, when she showed it to him, was a brilliant swirl of greens and blues and pinks that shifted as she tipped it towards the sunrise. �It�s a mussel shell,� she told him, placing it back in his hand. �You saved it from the undertow.�
The undertow. There was a word for that nameless drifting, that pull that tugged inexorably at his feet as he stood there, clutching the shell, and watching the sky turn from brilliant red to fading purple, and finally to the blue of a clear summer morning. When the sun had finished emerging from the sea, they had walked back to the house in silence, already bound in mutual understanding that when they got back they would change into dry clothes, curl back up in their sleeping bags, and wait for their parent to come wake them. There was no need to share this morning with anyone else.
And even now, years later, he never had. His father had retreated into himself in the years that followed, and if Josh had ever wanted to talk about Joanie, he doubted that his father would want to listen. Their mother had tried to keep her daughter�s memory alive, and even these days, when he made the trip home from Washington, the tattered form of the beloved stuffed dog kept an eye on him from a shelf in the corner of the living room. But even she would not have understood the significance of that morning. And when Donna had absently picked up the shell from his desk at work and twirled it between her fingers, asking why he kept it there, he couldn�t tell her.
The sand crunched under his shoes as he made his way over the walkway, the same tattered boards that had echoed the passage of his sister�s feet so many years ago. It hadn�t been as hard as he had expected to slip out for the night, abandoning the benefit in Boston with a vague excuse. They were still worried, he knew, even though months had passed since December. That much was made clear by the fact that no one had argued. Only Donna had thought to ask where he was going, and he had found that he couldn�t lie to her. He just didn�t tell the whole truth.
It was March, and it was late, and the beach was deserted. The moonlight played over the sand, casting dubious shadows across the dips and curves created by generations of sandcastles and fire pits. He walked slowly to the water�s edge, stopping along the way to peel off his socks and shoes, and roll up the cuffs of his pants. The sound of the surf washed over him comfortably, punctuated briefly by the hum of a car engine on the road behind him, the cry of a child from a porch somewhere down the beach, the bark of a dog.
The cold of the water shouldn�t have shocked him. He knew perfectly well what time of day it was, and what time of year, but he still caught his breath sharply as he waded into the surf. His feet tingled numbly as he stood, staring off at the horizon, watching the moon dance across the waves. He didn�t know what he had expected to find, what he had expected to feel. He stuffed his hands into his pockets, and knew that he shouldn�t be surprised to find it there. He didn�t remember slipping the shell into his pocket as he left the office, but there it was. Pulling it out gently, he tipped it so that the moon reflected in the colors on the smooth concave surface.
You saved it from the undertow, she had told him, and he had believed her. He had believed that he was capable of defying something as powerful as the undertow, that he could reach in and lift out this thing of beauty from the muck, rescuing it from an eternity of tumbling out to sea. And then she had been caught in her own undertow, a force that pulled her steadily away, borne not by water but by flame.
He had not saved her.
He had been told that it wasn�t his fault. He had even started to believe it himself, in his mind. But in his heart, well, his heart was a different matter. He ran his finger along the edge of the shell, committing to memory the curve, the colors, the texture. Then he leaned over and reached into the water, feeling it rush around his hand and through his fingers. His hand untwined from the shell, and he felt it scrape up against his foot one last time as the sea reclaimed it. He stood for another moment, watching the moon shimmer across the surface of the water, and then he turned, retrieved his shoes, and left behind the ocean, the sand, and his memories.
He began to forget the undertow.