After mentioning my upcoming flight from winter at a New Year’s party in Templeton, I was drawn aside by a young woman who, in a few breathlessly-confided sentences, told me a bizarre tale. Writers often hear confessions, and I puzzled over the encounter for several days before letting it drop. I had never seen the teller before–nor have I spotted her since, to my regret–and I was not entirely sure of her sanity, given the story. But some weeks later, I heard a portion of the same from a salt-eaten Yankee transplant and yachtsman at an open-air bar in the town of Coral Bay. When I asked how on earth he came to know such a thing, the old man claimed that there were those who could commune with the ‘cnidarians’ of Drunk Bay.

Such coincidence seemed to cry out for telling…

***

Tamarind…

The girl who had been christened Tamarind — named after a tree that shaded the room where she had been conceived–gave a stretch of pleasure, and a man with rope and machete shifted to watch her from the tip-top of a ladder leaning against a palm. She passed his truck and peered into the bed, heaped with bunches of green coconuts. Glancing up, she saw him turn back to the harvest, his long dreadlocks swinging to one side as he severed a stem of coconuts. She snapped a picture of him with her new camera and walked on.

The day, sparkling with sun, was merely a usual sort of day on the island where the girl called Tamarind had once been only an infinitesimal egg. Her parents had stood under the bougainvillea that climbed above the French doors, gazing out at tamarind and hibiscus and an abalone bay with mother-of-pearl chips that meant sails, and her mother had said, “If it’s a girl, let’s name her Tamarind.” Her father had been amused by his wife’s certainty of conception.

But I was sure, she told the little girl, when she was old enough to tell. “I felt a wave of joy, and that was because of you.”

And now, at last, they had brought her to St. John’s, along with her younger brother, Steve, who had been made at home, in ordinary time and not in paradise.

She had the afternoon to wander; her father would be attending classes in the resort’s conference rooms until 5:00, and her mother had driven Steve to a snorkeling lesson at Cinnamon. It was her first whole day on the island. The evening before, they had taken the Ouestin ferry from St. Thomas, the long undulating line of the islands deep blue in first dark, with lights coming on. Never had she seen lamps look so much like stars, and as the ferry rocked forward, the real stars came out and were reflected in fragments by the waves. This is where I began, she thought, in this magical place. Her parents hadn’t worried about leaving her for the afternoon; this was, after all, where she belonged. And the Ouestin was as safe as safe could be; the resort was a private world, with shops and restaurants and places to rent a little boat and explore the bay. All she had to do was give the number of her room and her last name; she could buy or rent whatever she liked. Already she had eaten conch fritters with a coconut soda and, finding last summer’s suit too tight, had charged a bathing suit printed with leaves and pale red hibiscus blossoms, with a brief skirt for a cover-up.

“Perfect with your dark blue eyes,” the owner of the shop had judged. Her fingers had fluttered against Tamarind’s shining hair and glanced on her shoulder as the girl stared in the mirror. She was “beautiful, beautiful,” the fashionably bleached and sun-dried woman had said. And it was true; Tamarind was as perfectly formed and morning fresh of skin as if she had just been made to please the eye, out in the Ouestin garden. Her mother’s voice came back to her–”and every day, I felt another wave climbing up, and I loved you more and more until you were born. That was like waves, too, but of pain. It felt like giving birth to the world. Your small round head felt enormous, banging to get out. I saw your soaked crown in a mirror that the nurse held. My body was open like the O of a scream. Then all at once you were sluiced into the light–”

Tamarind smiled and shook her head to refuse a ride from one of the Iguana taxis that puttered ceaselessly through the Ouestin lanes. The drivers of the open carts were men from the island, and their musical voices sounded sweet to her ear. She walked by the spot where she had earlier seen iguanas–four-legged ones, not taxis–munching on flowers; she passed the tennis courts and the gazebo and the pool with its islands of trees and waterfalls. On the sand, rows of white lounge chairs waved to her with their little red flags–no, it wasn’t that but sunbathers signaling the nearby cafe for drinks. She slowed to watch the parrots, prying at nuts with their beaks and hard gray tongues, before drifting on. What would she do? So many possibilities…

A plump local woman in a Ouestin uniform was clipping round leaves from a sea grape hedge. Tamarind knew what they were–late the night before, the family had eaten at Miss Lucy’s, on the far end of the island, under the sea grape trees. Twisted through the branches, white Christmas lights had glimmered on waves that washed onto sand only a few feet from their table. She had stuffed herself on flying fish and candied plantains that tasted of lime and cloves, on okra fungi, pigeon peas and rice, and a bit of fiery mango that made her ask for a glass of milk. She had felt a little let down to find that the fungi was not fungi but only something like polenta with okra added, but she had loved eating under the big sea grape trees with their long bunches of unripe fruit… The woman’s hand moved lazily, pressing the stems against her thumb with a knife until they came away and were added to a pile pinched between her other thumb and forefinger. The harvest had an oddly ceremonial look, especially since the islander’s elaborate headdress of braids lent her a hint of royalty.

“What are you cutting them for?” the girl asked.

“For plates,” the woman said; “To make the food pretty.”

Tamarind wandered on, then wished that she had asked about the sea grapes–why had they sawed them into a hedge? There seemed to be a constant hacking of plants, as if their growth were so quick and luxuriant that one had to defend the planet from being drowned in a tidal wave of green. She had seen one of the workers shearing a mass of bright red bougainvillea with an electric trimmer. Afterward the papery blossoms sprinkled the pathway. It gave her a pang to see them scattered and wasted; at home the world was cold and dull and without flowers, and would be so for months to come.

When a toddler in a sun suit appliquéd with a jumping frog grasped at her leg, Tamarind squatted and handed over a horned shell that she had picked up on the beach.

“I’m sorry,” the mother said; “Is she bothering you?”

“No bother.” Tamarind plucked a sprig of plumbago and tucked it behind the child’s ear. “I like kids.”

“Well, I guess they must like you, too.” Very pregnant, the woman stood with her arms akimbo, feet splayed.

Tamarind could see the curve of a distended bellybutton through the fabric of the maternity swimsuit. The cloth was a shade of green that the makers of catalogues were calling seafoam this year.

“Is it a papaya or a mango?” Words popped out while she was thinking about the stem end of a fruit and the belly under the cloth.

“What–” The mother let out a single high note of laughter: Ah! “It must be a mango. Unless maybe it’s a watermelon. That’s what it feels like. But my husband wants a papaya.”

The little girl stroked the florets with her fingertips.

“Mango!” The lily pads and pink flowers that topped her sandals shook when she stamped her feet.

“Don’t you look pretty? Maybe I’ll see you again some time. Okay?” Tamarind was smiling again, waving, her eyes moving from the plumbago in the fine blond hair to a man she had seen waiting tables. She wanted to know what he was saying, and as she came closer she could hear him coaxing the red and yellow parrot, reproaching it for not being more loving: “Why you acting like you don’t know your good friend Matthew, why you acting so ugly like this? Give me a kiss now, give me a kiss, come on–”

Carrying armfuls of bird-of-paradise and the blooms called flamboyant–clusters of orange and yellow and parrot red–a woman approached her on the path.

“Where are you going with those?”

“To decorate the ladies’ rooms. Everything must be so beautiful, even the toilet.” She raised her eyebrows, and the girl laughed.

Tamarind wanted to tell this islander with the dozens of braids and high cheekbones that she, too, was beautiful. But a shyness rose up, stopping her mouth, and she walked on. Anyway, it was all lovely here–ridiculously so.

She paused to retrieve a blossom lying in the grass. She stared at the whorl of lavender-pink, rose at the heart. How lovely it was–the perfection of the pinwheel, with its slight curl at one side of each petal.

“What is it?” Her voice was only a whisper.

“That’s frangipani. Plumeria. The Buddhist temple flower.”

She looked up, startled but ready to be pleased. The young man standing before her was handsome, remarkably so–as excessively good-looking as the whole island seemed to be. Blue-eyed, with fair hair and bronze skin, he had the kind of strong jaw and sharp-cut features that seemed to belong in the realm of movies. He was wearing a pair of the stylish black swim trunks with scarlet piping that she had seen displayed in a shop window earlier in the morning.

“And that flower on your–on your very attractive little swimsuit–is hibiscus schizopetalus.”

She blushed; was he laughing at her?

“How do you know?”

He came closer, examining the cloth until she blushed again.

“The petals, see? They’re so deeply curved–why are you blushing?–and schizopetalus has those toothy leaves.”

“What’s this, then?” The girl pointed at a yellow blossom beside a splayed fan of palm.

“Oh, that’s hibiscus rosa-sinensis. You can easily tell because the other one doesn’t come in yellow, just a faded red. But sinensis can be red or pink or yellow or white. The branches on schizopetalus are more delicate, and the leaves are farther apart.”

“How do you know all that? Are you a botany major?” She thought he must be a college boy.

“No, not at all.” He was smiling at her again in a way that made her shiver right down to her toes, now curling secretly inside the green and red water shoes that matched her swimsuit. “I’m just a magpie–clever at picking up things. Here and there. You know, I’ve got a jeep from Honor’s.” One eyelid drooped, and he held up a hand to screen a glare of light bouncing off the bay. “Well, it’s my Dad’s rental, really. Everything’s my Dad’s, I guess.” He grinned at her. “Want to ride over to Saltpond Bay and go snorkeling?”

Somehow she agreed. After catching a lift to her room in an Iguana taxi to collect her gear, she met him beside the parrot cages. She felt perfectly dressed for the island in the leafy skirt, with the hibiscus flowers on her bathing suit peeping through a gauzy blouse.

“Oh, good. I was afraid you’d scamper off and not come back,” he said, but his look belied the words. He had known that she wouldn’t be able to keep away.

Perhaps he was conceited, Tamarind thought, or simply confident. She was excited; she even felt that she had half a crush on him, just because he was so striking and seemed to know things–the Latin words for flowers, at least.

“What’s your name? I forgot to ask.”

He paused an instant, as if to make her anticipate the more. “Nicholas–Nicholas Mallin. Very ordinary, isn’t it, compared to Tamarind?”

The wind lapped against her, and she gave a start; her skin had gone all gooseflesh. When she looked away from him, she could see a skein of drops falling toward the hills beside the bay.

“How did you do that?”

“What? Know your name?” He tapped her net sack, with the mask and snorkel and a Ouestin towel inside. “It’s on the tag.”

“Oh.” So it was. She had forgotten: nothing strange, then.

As Nicholas rattled on about their destination, they cut across flower beds and lawns toward the tennis courts. A girl of six or seven wearing a pink tennis skirt and pink-and-white vest and blouse was neatly returning the serves of a pro, who kept up a running commentary.

“Check the angle of your racket… Good, good. Now you’re getting it. That’s right, give me another just like that one, uh huh, come on, give it to me–whoa! that’s a tad too hard–”

A henna-haired woman sat watching the girl with an even younger boy on her lap. She smacked his hand lightly when he grasped at her gold necklace.

The diminutive player kept on sending the balls over the net, looking like an advertisement for the best sort of children’s clothing.

“Is that your daughter? She’s a pretty little girl.” Tamarind paused to watch the ball sail toward the pro.

The woman didn’t answer, her eyes sweeping over the unfamiliar features without a change in expression and then returning to the two figures in a sea of balls.

At this, Nicholas laughed. “Volley and return,” he said, nodding toward the bench.

This time the mother looked up at him, interest quickening. What was it that people were lured by, Tamarind wondered. Though dressed in an expensive new outfit from one of the Ouestin shops, she hadn’t mattered. She was somehow not right. But Nicholas had registered with the woman; her gaze had fastened to his face–and hers betrayed a flush of interest.

“My friend thinks your daughter a pretty little girl.” A trace of something–a jeer, perhaps–was in his voice.

“Yes, she’s–”

What the mother had been about to say was left unfinished, because Nicholas turned his back on her and walked off. At the narrow lot behind the courts, he began weaving through the rental cars.

“What are you doing?” Tamarind followed, watching with some alarm as he leaned into the front window of jeep after jeep.

“Oh, I just don’t remember which one my dad rented–but I know he left the keys inside.”

She trailed after him, clutching her bag and straw hat.

“But what if it’s somebody else’s? What if two people leave their keys behind?”

“My old man’s the only one who wouldn’t bother to pocket his keys–the only one trusting enough.” Nicholas groped at the ignition of a fire-engine red jeep peppered with dents. “There it is!” He held up a key with a small gold sunburst and an Honor’s tag dangling from it.

“You’re sure?” She felt uncertain. “Maybe we should ask at the office.”

“Nah. They always go out for lunch. Anyway, I remember the star.” One corner of his mouth quirked into a smile. “See, each jeep has a different key chain. This is mine. Get in, will you?” He tossed their bags–she noticed that there was nothing in his but a snorkel and mask–through the rear window.

Tamarind slid into the passenger seat; the jeep was new but already marred by dings and stains. The plastic windows didn’t unzip properly, and Nicholas had to reach over her to help. When his arm brushed against hers, she noticed that he was absolutely odorless, while she reeked of coconut sun block. And though she would never have gone out without a cover-up, he was still bare-chested.

“Aren’t you afraid of burning?–you didn’t bring any lotion.”

“Hah. The sun worships me. I never burn.” Grappling with the gear shift, he reversed the car with a roar, barely grazing an Iguana taxi. He waved to the driver and shot toward the entrance. “These jeeps are nothing but motorized cans,” he shouted over the rumble of acceleration.

“My mother told me it could be dangerous not to wear sun lotion in the Virgin Islands–that the light’s stronger here than at home.” She grabbed onto the window frame, jouncing as they turned left toward the town of Cruz Bay.

“Oh, well, I’m sure you’d burn. Everybody does but me. And the natives, of course. You can’t scorch a man who’s already black, can you? All you can do is darken him up a bit.” He whistled a snatch of a tune, shifting gears as they climbed a hill.

“Look at that funny little church! Cinder blocks all trimmed in turquoise and pink.” She craned out the window to see what had been spray-painted onto the bus stop close by. Something about JESUS saving somebody from RASTA, with a big flowered cross and the date.

“They’re a superstitious lot.” Nicholas swept around a tourist jeep that hadn’t quite made it to the crest and was beginning to slide back on wet pavement.

So it had been raining on the hills. Tamarind peered out the rear window to see if the other car made it to safety, but their own dropped precipitously into a valley before she could tell.

“My father told me the islanders here are Moravians, that they’re really quite modest people. He says visitors have brought bad habits and change.”

“Oh yes, those vicious stateside tourists,” Nicholas said, flashing her a smile as the car dove into a gulf once more. “Is your old man a Moravian?”

Tamarind shook her head. “He’s a professor. That’s why he’s here–for a conference.”

Nicholas whooped. “So that’s what they call it! Can you imagine? A bunch of college teachers grinding away in a place like this! I suppose they scrape up a grant and come boondoggling for free. Is that it? They could’ve had a meeting in some cold, benighted spot.” He laughed heartily. “Tell your old man that next year’s conference is in Newark. See what he says.”

“I suppose you’re right. The school pays for his meals and hotel and the plane ticket.”

“What’s he studying?”

“I don’t know, really. But the conference is called Powers, Principalities, and the Post-Postmodern Age. It sounds–well, I don’t know what it sounds like.”

Tamarind clung to the door, catching picture-postcard glimpses as Nicholas whirled her through Cruz Bay: a narrow, shop-jammed street swooping into the heart of the village where, head tilted back, Adam’s apple working, a man with a machete gulped from a green coconut; the tiny harbor with a ship packed with tourists, flags snapping; a fisherman, also with a machete, chopping a large black fish into chunks on a slab table in the sun; a cemetery above the town with white tombs stacked one on top of another; a heart-stopping catch of brilliant blue sea next to aloes scratched with names; pre-parade clusters of children, decked in shirts of peach or rose or lemon and gripping band instruments that caught the glare of sunshine and broke it into stars.

“Not a single place to park. Typical Cruz Bay. So he’s a theologian, is he? Your old man?”

“He teaches in the Philosophy and Religion department at the college. He’s just a professor.”

For some reason this made Nicholas laugh once more.

“Should’ve known,” he said. “Professors are hardly ever devout. Too bound by taboo. Let’s stop, shall we, and walk around?” He zoomed into a slot between open-air tourist buses.

“Not there! Not there!” A group of local men on benches began shouting.

“What do you mean, taboo? Look,” Tamarind said, touching his arm with a finger; “They say we can’t park here.”

“Oh, you know. All this politically correct stuff–can’t allow a thought that might offend. The new liberalism. It amuses me. Mind you, I’m an equal opportunity mocker. I’ve got it in for the conservatives too.” Nicholas hung half out of the window. “Where then?” he yelled to the bus drivers and the old men. “Where?”

“Anywhere but there! Anywhere but there!” they chorused.

He lowered himself into the seat, his eyes narrowing, then shrugged. “Skip it. We’ll go straight to the beach. But we need some–” He reached into the back and jerked a cooler from the floor.

“Would you look at that! My old man thinks of everything.” Ignoring the shouts, feebler now, from the benches, he popped open the lid. “Plenty of lunch here,” he said cheerfully. “There’s pâtés–wonder what kind? That’s spicy meat and vegetables fried in dough. Like a pierogi only with spices. Heart of palm salad. Pigeon peas. And here–that’s seaweed salad.” He held up a container with a ravel of vivid light green strands tucked inside. “Sodas. Tamarind soda on ice! Just what you need. Ginger beer. And some Jamaican Red Stripe.”

“Won’t he be angry?” She was uneasy, imagining what her own parents would say if she drove off with the family picnic.

“Nah, it’ll be a good joke. He’s used to me playing tricks on him. He’ll figure it out. Anyway, he’ll just order more lunch and rent another jeep if he wants one. There’s plenty where this came from.”

“Are you sure?”

Nicholas didn’t answer; he reversed the jeep and blew a kiss to the old men, who jeered and flapped their hands at him in disgust.

“Shoo. I’m getting, I’m getting–but I’ll be back. Just you wait and see.” He swerved into the left lane, startling Tamarind. She would have to get used to riding on the ‘wrong’ side of the street. “And wouldn’t you like it, you poor old geezers, to have a banged-up jeep full of gas and a pretty girl inside–”

The jeep clanked and backfired as they climbed the island highway, and Tamarind felt faintly worried: her mother had wanted to show her the sights, and here she was already seeing them. A quirk in the road hugged a cottage-sized boulder, looking like an immense pod crashed to earth from some unseen world-tree. Not long afterward she caught a glimpse of the turquoise and royal blue of the island waters, rimmed with white sand, shining far below the north shore drive, and then she forgot everything old and remembered only the man beside her and the sights of the afternoon.

“Ginger Thomas, oleander, ixora, allamanda,” Nicholas cried over the noise of the engine, pointing to flowers in yards. “Look there,” he said, slowing to let her pick out the strange green tower that was row after concentric row of bananas. “See that pod-like thing? See there? You can’t miss it.” It hung down, a big purple phallus. “That’s the male flower. When it drops, the bananas are ready to be cut down.”

“Not very attractive, is it?”

“Not everything has to be. Even in paradise. Some things are fascinating; there are lots of dangerous plants. The ones with milky sap, especially.”

Coasting along, he showed her papaya, kenip, and mango trees. She had imagined the fruits loading down the branches to the tips, as on an apple tree, and was half repulsed to see papayas bunched close to the bole. It reminded her of some pagan fertility goddess. Who was that? Nicholas might know but she wouldn’t ask–a goddess with a cluster of many breasts.

“I ought to show you a sandbox. Then you’d have seen something alien. They’re yellowish gray, with spiny bark. Some people call them monkey-no-climb.” He gestured toward the woods. “Did you see that dark mass in the trees? Termite mound.”

“Termites?” She gave a twitch of the shoulder. “Up in the air? I saw something–I thought it was a gall.”

“Nope. Termite mound. Anyway, the fruits on the sandbox tree have ridges, and a shape like a slightly flattened pumpkin. When dry, they explode.” He jerked the wheel away from a precipitous drop. “The seeds are sickle-shaped, and they act like shrapnel.”

“Why sandboxes?”

“From the days of quills, when sand was sprinkled onto a fresh page to blot the ink. Shake this kind of sandbox, though, and you might end up with a little scimitar buried in your eye.”

“I don’t think I want to,” Tamarind said slowly, rubbing her arms. “Funny kind of scabbard… That’s not one of your favorite trees, is it?”

He darted her an amused glance. “No, I think manchineel would be my very favorite. Lovely yellow apples nestled in green leaves: Columbus’s men were impressed with the powers of manchineel.”

“Powers,” she repeated. “We’re back to that word again.”

“Not the same kind… So, is your father really interested in the powers and principalities?”

She considered and shook her head. “He was interested in the island. Not that he won’t go to classes! The first was on the power of the media.”

“Power of the media? You’d think they’d have more respect for the powers than to haul out those hackneyed old warhorses. What tripe!” Nicholas swung the jeep onto a scald, big enough for three or four cars. “There’s a view from the top. I’ll lug the picnic.”

The footpath was grooved from rains. A ruinous tower, all that remained of a Danish sugar plantation, squatted at the head of the trail.

“How wonderful!” Tamarind was not so grown-up that she didn’t think of fairy tales and long-abandoned castles.

Nicholas set down the cooler with a thump.

“This was the cane mill–come on, I’ll show you a sight.” He held out his hand and she took it, and though she had felt uncertain and apart from him when he had talked about the monkey-no-climb tree, she felt a small spiraling thrill of attraction.

“Look up.” He led her through the arched door. “Right there.”

She glanced into a jagged aperture high above her head. Mortar and stones were dank and darkened by mold, but hanging in the gap were pristine panels of something pale–three, four of them.

“Oh!” she cried, “combs.” Now she could see a knot of bees collecting and burgeoning on the wall, while others jigged in place near the opening. “And that’s a swarm! I’ve never seen such a thing.”

“Best be quiet and slow,” Nicholas said. “They might be Africanized bees, this far south.” He tugged her closer, as if he wanted to protect her, and Tamarind felt the urge to press her cheek against the burnished skin below his collarbone.

She didn’t; she hardly knew him.

“They can kill a child, can’t they?” Tamarind stepped back toward the light.

“More, if they’re angry. That would be a weird spectacle, wouldn’t it?” He followed her into the sun.

Only a few yards from the mill, she stumbled on the promised view. She stopped, staring down at white shore and island and dark patches under turquoise and blue that meant coral reef.

“That’s Trunk. Nice little package.” He kneeled, rooting in the cooler for a Red Stripe.

“I’ll say,” she murmured.

She drank in the colors, wanting to save them for the drab months after her return. Fishing her camera from the net bag, she captured the bay. Nicholas grabbed her wrist hard when she thought to take his picture.

“Hey,” he said, “don’t do that.”

She looked at him, startled. He was smiling, drawing her by the hand until he seemed about to kiss her. Just then some children spilled into the clearing, and a boy with a stick began jumping beside the tower. He ducked through the archway and began yelling bees! bees! bees!

“So maybe we’ll find out whether they’re Africanized or not.” Nicholas glanced up, winking at the bright sun.

“You wouldn’t let me–why not?”

“Sure, why not? Here, I’ll save his life while I’m at it.” He leaned forward. “Hey kid! You with the stick–come take our photo.”

Holding up a branch like a giant claw, the boy raced over. Siblings followed, one in diapers toddling forward with thumb corking his mouth.

“That your girlfriend?” Grinning, the kid seemed to sprout more teeth than could possibly fit inside his mouth. He was freely flecked; splotches streamed down his arms, collected on his knees, veiled his face.

“Sure. The lovely Princess Tamarind, that’s who she is. And I’m Prince of the Manchineels. I just met her, but she’s mine.”

“Huh. And I’m a king.” The boy revolved the camera in his hands, searching for buttons.

“King of Freckles, maybe,” Nicholas said.

This bit of witticism made the child howl with pleasure, and Tamarind had to wait for him to calm down before she could show him what to do.

The royal couple stood with backs to Trunk Bay and to the white sailboats like crescent moons sown broadcast on the turquoise furrows. Nicholas slipped behind Tamarind, bending to wrap his arms around her waist. She could feel his body against hers, pressed close, and her own heart running to catch up with the surprise of it, while his, already knowing, beat steadily on.

“Lemme get another.” The kid took one, two, three, more–until Nicholas jerked the baseball cap over his eyes. “Hey, where am I?” he screeched, dancing in a circle, arms out in mock dismay.

“It’s awfully hot.” Tamarind fanned herself with the straw hat. Her cheeks were red. “I feel faint.”

“It’s the sun.” Nicholas took the hat and flapped it vigorously so that her hair flew back. A small, knowing smile had hooked a corner of his lips. “Just the sun,” he said, more softly.

“Wi-ill, Sa-am, and I‑ris–” The names were drawled out, each ending on a rising note. After a silence, the voice floated up once more: “Answer me!”

“Better scat,” Nicholas advised the little ones, who stared without blinking for a few instants before scampering. “Here, kiddo.” He grabbed the cap from the boy and skimmed it toward the path. “Mama’s looking for you.”

Cheerful, he bowed from the waist before bounding off, dipping once to retrieve his cap.

“Thanks for the pictures,” Tamarind called. She took her hat and fastened it under her chin. The brim made her feel private, aloof from Nicholas.

“Hey,” he shouted. “Those were killer bees, you know.”

Will–or was it Sam?–shrieked with glee as he jumped onto the trail, out of sight.

“Oh!” Tamarind looked at the images stored on the camera. Nicholas was almost entirely obliterated, save for fragments of leg and arm. In several memorable failures, Tamarind’s face floated in a sea of fire.

“Strange.” Nicholas peered over her shoulder.

“I hope the camera’s all right.”

“It must be the glare. Or the kid’s a jinx. If you’re worried, we’ll stop by a shop later; how about that?”

She smiled, relieved. Everything would be fine.

He unpacked another Red Stripe for himself and a soda for her. Both ate with eagerness, as if they had gone on a taxing hike. Always adventurous when it came to food, Tamarind found the curried pâtés and the salads to her liking, the heart of palm crisp and cool. They didn’t chat; perhaps they had worn down the trigger for talk, or were simply tired by the effort of becoming acquainted.

The girl would have liked a nap, but felt it to be impossible. Strangers would be scaling the path. Africanized bees–if they were Africanized–boiled in a mass on the tower. The sun was fierce. And Nicholas: she scrutinized him from the shadow of her brim. She knew nothing about him. It hadn’t bothered her at the Ouestin, but now it did, a little.

He was gazing into Trunk Bay as he polished off the Red Stripe. Dots of sweat stood on his chest. It seemed that he was smiling faintly; or maybe his lips always had a slight upward curl. He appeared older than before, not in face or body but in an air, perhaps of weariness.

A child’s voice piped from the woods.

“Let’s go. Too many brats, too many bees.” Nicholas checked the cooler. “Suppose I may as well take it along. There’s a Red Stripe and a mango soda.” He yawned. “That beer made me sleepy.”

Tamarind couldn’t read him. Was he really deciding whether or not to abandon what belonged to his father? That seemed odd. He was distant, though he had been so attentive earlier.

“Come on.” He tossed the leftovers inside and shouldered the cooler.

As she picked a route along a fissure in the steep path, she kept glancing after Nicholas. He was jogging, letting out war cries as he jolted downward. That would wake him up. At the scald, he was waiting for her, the remains of lunch already stowed. When he beamed a grin, she felt relieved and was content to climb into her seat and let the shiny red jeep go zinging through the sunlight.

He whistled a ballad, “The Gypsy Rover.” Perhaps the merry round of verses was making him careless–he kept weaving over the center line, and now and then he had to wrench the wheel around a curve. After finishing with a flourish of trills, he spoke again. “You know where you are? We left the town of Cruz Bay, right? Then we passed Lind Point and Salomon Bay and Caneel Bay–after that we edged around Hawksnest and had a picnic between that bay and the next ones–Denis and Jumbie and Trunk. Trunk’s the one with the island. The next big one is Cinnamon, but that’s too crowded. Campgrounds. People. Nosy parker rangers.”

“We might bump into my mom and Steve there.” She wondered whether that might not be a good idea, though her mood was already shifting, and she felt a renewed glimmering of pleasure at being with Nicholas. Meanwhile the island was becoming two things at once; as they twisted along the coast, she could see on her left the dazzle of beach and sea, while on her right lay the forest, with its rich foliage and occasional termite nests that added notes of deeper darkness.

“Perish that thought! Your mother might disapprove of me, and the day would be over. We’ll just keep on going. Except for a stop at the mer-toilet. Mural mermen and maids and a real live bathroom. At Maho we’ll cut over to the town of Coral Bay–then hug the eastern bays until we curl to the west and reach Saltpond.”

He laced his fingers with hers, dropping her hand abruptly as the jeep narrowly missed striking a wild goat.

“Look! Slow down!” She stared after the ruins of another sugar mill, ferns sprouting from the walls. One of the wild island donkeys drifted in the murk like a ghost. Queer what a gaiety of stone was left–a nougat of colors and shapes in plasterwork. “So that’s where the ancestors of the people who work at the Ouestin and drive the tourist taxis and work in Cruz Bay were slaves.”

“Here or some other spot. The tower where we picnicked. Catherineberg. Annaberg.” He was smiling again, a small secret smile.

“They sound like names of concentration camps.”

“There you go. More of those Africanized bees. Camps, hives–you see? The world is full of them.” He began whistling again, a quick sprightly reel, but broke off to ask why she bothered thinking about things she didn’t like. “You can’t change the past. And it’s your duty to be happy in paradise.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Tamarind said, though she thought he was only partly so.

Nicholas certainly seemed happy, once singing a snatch of a ballad: I’ll show you where the white lilies grow / At the bottom of the sea

Tamarind noticed that the landscape of the island was changing as they aimed away from the coast, heading toward Saltpond Bay. They stopped once for a pair of ambling donkeys, once for the mer-toilets, and once for a view–finishing off the last of the drinks and watching goats graze along the brink of a cliff that bristled with tall cacti. On the opposite side of the road the slope dived toward the inlet of Coral Bay, where a school of sailboats was at mooring.

“The camera’s working again. I wonder why–”

“Hummingbird,” Nicholas said; “See it? Needling the hibiscus.”

“So headlong.” She followed the bird’s flight toward the cliff but lost it among the cacti.

He jumped onto a ledge that overlooked the bay. “Can you make out the boat that’s tilted to one side? Three days from now, it’ll be underwater. In the bars they’re taking bets on the hour.”

“Just a second.” Tamarind was counting the wild goats. “Seventeen.” She watched the kids frolic from rock to rock. “Seven babies.”

“Annoying little beasts. They string out across the road and jam the way. But I like them–I wouldn’t mind being a billy goat.” He tossed his bottle into the jumble of foliage in the valley.

“That was very bad,” she told him. She was teasing, but she felt it was so: wicked to despoil the world. Boys, she thought.

“Bad, very bad,” he said, sliding a hand along her shoulder blade; “It’s bad not to do what Tamarind wants.”

Not for the first time, she wondered if he would try to kiss her.

But he didn’t try; they banged the doors shut on the red jeep and rocketed away from the overlook–down, down, down to the sprinkle of roofs that meant Coral Bay, where there were places to park and brand new shops selling abalone and imported beach wear and jewelry made of a milky blue stone native to the Virgin Islands. They paused to look, then flew on toward Saltpond Bay, swooping and rushing, swerving to avoid a baby goat.

She felt a pang of longing for her mother and Steve: what were they doing? Tomorrow her father had the afternoon free. The four of them would drive to Leinster Bay, and where sand yielded to a rocky thrust just opposite to Waterlemon Cay, they would don gear and lasso the island in one long swim. If her little brother tired, she would let him hang on her arm.

Tamarind had looped Waterlemon in dreams: it was already hers, as if her parents’ desire had forced not just a child but a fairyland into being. Falling swiftly from the shore of Leinster Bay, the world under waves would be a pale blue, with light sifting through the ceiling like a fine, luminous flour. Fish would flicker by, dimly seen at first:   a cloud of yellowjacks, perhaps, with a fairy basslet bolting for a branch. She would drift over a ring of coral that French angelfish explored, their lower jaws jutting and sulky, their movements dreamy. The gardens were purple and yellow and rust, with globes of brain, staghorn trees, and wafting fans where fish took shelter. The fish would be rainbows broken in the water: stoplight parrotfish and redbands and midnights, queen angels, rock beauties, triggerfish, butterflies. Another world, bright as a shattered prism, lay waiting for her.

“Heaven,” she said aloud.

“What?” Nicholas ran his nails along her arm.

“I was daydreaming about Waterlemon Cay,” she said; “That’s where we’re going tomorrow.” For a few minutes she had forgotten him, but now she turned to look, surprised once more that one so handsome and sure of himself had noticed her.

“Heaven, huh? Well, mobs of fish gather there. The coral’s in good shape.”

She smiled, thinking about why they were going. Her parents had made the circuit of Waterlemon only hours before she was conceived. Of course, she wouldn’t tell Nicholas. She was too timid, like a small coral-dwelling fish: the shy hamlet, perhaps.

“Here we are–Saltpond Bay.” With a twitch of the wheel, he veered onto the dirt, spraying pebbles.

The shore wasn’t far. That its border of sand was littered with cast-off fingers of reef surprised Tamarind. Convoluted pieces of brain lay in bleached mounds like a graveyard of coral. Only a modest display with map and guide to wildlife, faded to a drowned blue, suggested the national park. After a glance at the board, she waded the shallows, watching the minnows sling themselves away from her feet. The water felt cooler than she had expected. Nicholas had already thrown himself into the sea, striking out for a yacht moored in the bay. In a few minutes, he hoisted himself onto the deck. Tamarind shaded her eyes; she could see him gesticulate, a drink in one hand. He’s not a bit shy. Soon he crashed back into the water and swam toward shore, where he flung himself onto wet sand. No, he hadn’t known the couple on board. It was just a lark.

“Oh, that’s good.” Lying half in, half out of the waves, he pillowed his head on one arm and closed his eyes. “The sun’s just right.”

Slowly his smile eased away and he was asleep, breathing deeply; it seemed to the girl that he did everything to excess, and she felt abandoned and lonely. She glanced at her near neighbors, who were gathering up scattered snorkels, masks, and towels.

A small boy sat shivering on a rock, occasionally calling out to his father.

“There’s all these mean black pointy things that hurt my feet,” he yelled.

“We’re not going to come get you. You’ve got legs–get yourself back.”

Tamarind wondered if he would’ve rescued the child if there hadn’t been another man along. The son would have to prove himself now. He hunkered there for a long time before jumping in.

Afterward, she stripped to her bathing suit–feeling self-conscious because Nicholas had been awakened by the slap of a wave and now watched her without expression.   When she waded into the water, he rolled over and pushed himself onto hands and knees before standing. He flicked the hair from his eyes with a jerk of the head. “I’m going for another swim.”

Tamarind didn’t reply, guessing that he never asked permission of anyone. There was no use in feeling a twinge of hurt, not when she hardly knew him.

As she slipped into the waves, she was pleased to spot a young tang, yellow as a slice of sunshine. The child was right; urchins with long spines had invaded the bay and clustered among the coral and rocks. Her mother had said that the sea plunged quickly at Leinster, but here she felt too close to the coral and was fearful of being scraped and gashed. Now and then she rose and scanned the bay; Nicholas was proving to be a strong swimmer, arrowing far from shore. Slowly she drifted above the beds, a little disappointed that she didn’t see more fish, and that the coral appeared so drab.

While treading water, she looked about and saw that he had returned again and was floating close by. The boy on the rock and his family had departed, and several other groups had taken their spot. When Nicholas lifted his face, she pulled her mouthpiece aside.

“Time seems dreamy when you’re in the ocean,” she said.

“Maybe an hour. A bit more.”

She dove, caught sight of a trunkfish, and surfaced in a panic. The spikes of urchins had seemed about to pierce her hands. Tomorrow she would remember to bring gloves, she told herself, though surely the waves would be milder at Leinster.

“Everything appears about a quarter bigger and nearer,” Nicholas told her; “Salt water magnifies the floor.”

She spat out the snorkel and raised the mask. “I don’t like the urchins so much.”

“No? I love the way they look, so dramatic and inky. Gothic.”

He tugged at her fingers and she floated toward him and perched on his knee, her toes curled tight. She was more tired than she’d thought she would be, and the tears came into her eyes. When he drew her forward, she rested against him for a moment.

“Tamarind is a lovely little mer-creature,” he said; “I’ll keep her in a glass jar and feed her slips of sushi.”

“I’ve got legs.”

“Very fine ones, too.” His hand brushed against her calf. “You’re so lovely today that I think you must be at the very peak of your beauty. Like a flower that needs picking.”

“That would be sad. What about you?”

“Me? Not a flower–a fire thorn, maybe. But you’re one. Unless you’re a mermaid. Though I guess you’re trembling too much to be a sea girl, because they don’t get cold. Let’s go in–we can walk to Salt Pond and the bay beyond.” He pushed the mask up. “Want to? It’s on the other side of Ram Head. Not far, according to the map.”

“What’s that beach called?”

“Drunk Bay. There’s Trunk Bay and Drunk Bay. Everybody goes to Trunk, though.”

***

Salt Pond was three things: low rippling water to their right, a narrow seam of path, and, to the left, dense vegetation with cactus–the taller sort called pipe organ or, more grossly, dildo cactus. Intermixed were clusters of turk’s cap, green barrels topped by red and bristly hats garnished with the occasional pink flower. It was dimmer than in the bay, though why there should be less sun was not obvious. Tamarind missed the rhythmic slap of the waves. Salt Pond felt claustrophobic in contrast. But it was interesting, she acknowledged.

“A hermit crab!” She was as pleased as a little child, spying the trundling shell. For the hike, she had insisted on putting her leafy skirt and white blouse over her swimsuit. The water shoes squelched as she walked, but the going was easier here, where there was no coral to hurt her feet.

“Soldier crabs,” Nicholas corrected,” crawling around in their shell tanks.” He seized hold of a large one with a cone-shaped turret as big as his fist.

“Look at that! It’s huge! I wonder if that’s what–I dived and picked up a conch, but when I lifted it from the water, a claw poked out and I let go.” She drew back as the crab waved a pincer.

“Probably just a sea-going soldier. Want me to drag him out of his lair? So you can get a look at him naked?”

“No, don’t! That’s mean,” she said, but he only laughed and tossed the crab into the underbrush.

Afterward they switched places; now he was tailing her, whistling and occasionally pausing to skip stones across Salt Pond.

“You’re really good at that.”

“All in the wrist.” He made a flicking motion with his hand.

Tamarind had begun to feel uneasy. It took her some minutes to realize why, because the sound had begun so gradually.

“What’s that?” She half turned, looking across Salt Pond and listening.

“What’s what?”

She couldn’t think what it reminded her of at first. Then she remembered a family trip to Niagara Falls. The faraway thunder of the river as it catapulted over the cliffs had crept into her mind in just the same way. The fright of coming on the falls was of an order of magnitude akin to what she imagined it would be to slam through the atmosphere of Earth and into the infinite black closet of space. She hadn’t cared for the Grand Canyon either, the way the rift in the world disordered the ground.

“That pulse,” she whispered.

Nicholas drew her close until her ear was against his chest, and she could hear the steady tidal thump of his heart.

“Drunk Bay, I suppose,” he said.

And he kissed her, just when she was no longer wondering whether he ever would or when. Which was just like a boy. But it was exciting, this kiss, because it was all mixed up with a fear that was in turn whipped by the rhythmical threat of Drunk Bay. The flare of desire, the edge of his palm brushing the curve of her breast, and the drumming of his heart conspired to make her forget the bluster of the waves, but she did not; instead, the sound seemed to widen and thrum and flower around her. When her eyes opened, she saw the eyelashes black and spiky against his skin. His mouth tasted of cinnamon and cloves.

“Tamarind, Tamarind.” He sighed, weaving her fingers with his and luring her along the path.

She would have liked to kiss him another time, wished the edge of his hand to barely meet the rise of her breast, wished to taste his mouth. She wanted to lean against him and hear the muscle of his heart, yielding up the message tucked in emptied shells: the sea, the sea, the sea. Her nerves, linked with his, trembled and shone like a pale-barked sapling in the sun and breeze. The passage wasn’t wide enough for two, but his grasp kept her close.

The thudding that was not his heart but the rhythm of Drunk Bay made her stop, fingers loosening.

“I want to go back.”

“Come on,” he said, “why don’t you come on? It’s just a bay. They’re all different. That’s the fun of poking around the island. Is it the noise? Come on.”

She thought of whirling to race toward Saltpond Bay. But what silliness! This was no obscure track through wilderness; the route had been marked with a stippled line on the park maps, and the ground showed wear from many feet.

“All right,” she said.

And then they were at Drunk Bay, the rut lifting slightly and vanishing into a landscape of cobbles and spars, with a boulder hard to the left and a tide that forced itself, jostling with coral and white with foam, onto the land. It was bewildering, really, how one minute they were hemmed in, following the seam of the shadowy Saltpond walk, and the next, the world had shaken itself free of the interior. Tamarind stood on the brink where trail transformed to monstrous beach, her hands held out slightly to steady herself in the wind, the leaves of her skirt whipping. The other side of the Ram Head point was savage, subject to riptide and blast, and there was no sand visible, only chunks of dead reef hurled by the thrust of sea. Sky glowed; foam on the waves was lurid. Incessant breakage of ocean against beach had been the source of the ominous, omnipresent, slowly swelling sound that had threatened her on the path. For one held breath, Tamarind felt only astonishment at the fierceness of the surf and the rough bones of coral.

Then she began to see more. It was as though an unreeled scroll lay before her, one she had assumed to be in an ancient tongue until a word here and another there revealed her own language, curiously inscribed. A child-sized cairn speared through by a crooked cross stood directly in her way; beyond it, she saw a massive boulder studded with shelving projections.

“Skeletons,” she whispered, but that wasn’t it. The figures, dead white, reclined on bunks of rock–oval heads of brain with arms and legs made of branch and other coral.   There was something of the barrow and Stone Age about the scene: a trick of time that made this world into another.

The jagged surface hurt her feet through the thin water shoes. She read the inscription on the cross–not the name of some lost child but a hiker’s admonition to pack out trash. She laughed in relief, turning to follow Nicholas, who had wandered farther down the bay.

“How weird,” she murmured, her eye lighting on another figure, collapsed onto the rubble. Had it been a local or a tourist who scraped his knees on coral as he fitted together the head and neck, the torso, the arms and legs and feet, added disks for buttons and bewigged the head with string, bleached and frizzed by long immersion? She looked about and realized that form after form lay tumbled on the ground or propped against boulders: a pair of twins, their heads bald and oval; crude sexless beings with seaweed or ravels of wind-teased strings in their hands; a delicate creature with a toothed mouth that was the underside of a cowrie shell; a boy pinned to the earth by the enormous scepter of a phallus. A sculpture of coral, twine, and narrow boards resembled a gallows. The blades of another suggested a windmill, and on an outstretched line that had been pegged to the ground, a tied stick of driftwood twiddled. Beyond these contraptions Tamarind could make out further ranks in the mortuary of coral, the bodies diminishing as the beach swept into the distance–as if Drunk Bay might be infinite.

Where wild waves had flung booty of destruction, some obsessive visitor had sorted shells, sea glass, and salt-raveled rope into separate mounds. It was like some fantastic concentration camp at the end of the world, with its corpses and harvest–stacks devoted to teeth, shoes, or hair. Mist rose up like smoke from the dissolution.

A druidic ring suggested a miniature Stonehenge. Pairs of columns were capped by a flat lintel, and although a first glance suggested a diorama, the scene retained something of the pagan and the terrible. It might have served as a ceremonial stage for fairies–not the pastel flower-bearers sold in shops but sharp-nosed imps who savored a night’s work of blighting cattle and stealing children.

Nicholas navigated the coral, wind jerking at his hair and clothes as if it would scalp and rip and hurl them toward Saltpond.

“Drunk Bay,” he yelled, exultant, jumping onto a stone; “I’m drunk on Drunk Bay.” With a whoop, he leaped forward, his feet finding purchase on a joggling spar of coral. He teetered for an instant before careening forward and stumbling to a halt beside a sprawled figure.

That one had seemed pitiful to Tamarind. Peculiar, she had thought, how much an expression could be changed by setting two simple pebbles of eyes close together or apart, giving variety to these crude beings.

His left hand fluttered, reaching for balance; with the right, Nicholas snatched the spike of a phallus from the boy. A rock underfoot shot away, and he took several skittering steps before landing securely, the stick of coral raised slantwise to the sky as if he would use it to stab the white disk of the sun.

“Oh!” Tamarind cried out; the altering of the coral child seemed a violation–of what, she was not sure.

He laughed, whirling around.

“Tamarind, Tamarind–”

With heedless leaps, he plunged toward her. She noticed that his eyes matched the elusive color of the sea just before it hurdled the margin of heaped coral and smashed itself into foam. The buffeting winds and the unleashed waves had awakened a wild gusto in him.

When he kissed her this time, the coral branch in his hand tore a fine layer of skin from her inner arm.

“Ow!” She retreated from him, her arm cocked as she looked at the blood.

“Here,” he said with relish; “Let me lick it.” He seemed not to have the least care for what he had done.

“No.” She took another step. Was he joking? “We ought to be getting back to the jeep.”

“Why? It’s perfect right here.” He shrugged. “Besides, it’s not my jeep. If I want, I can just walk off through the cacti. Go bounding with a herd of goats. I’m the Prince of the Manchineels, remember? I can do whatever I like.”

“I thought your father rented the jeep for the day.” Tamarind’s voice trembled; the breeze dashed her syllables against the coral.

“No. I just borrowed it.”

“What do you mean?” She edged away once more, the pulse at her temple sounding in her ears like the sea.

“I wanted; I took it.”

“So the lunch wasn’t yours–wasn’t your father’s either?”

He smiled, flipping the branch of coral into the air and catching it neatly.

“Could have been. Anything’s conceivable. But I always take what I want. Did I say that already? The world’s my oyster; I eat what I like and toss the rest. That’s how it is.”

She scrambled over a nest of coral twigs and eggs.

“And you know what I want,” he went on. “You could lie down on this nice smooth sand and let me kiss you again, Tamarind. I would like that.”

“No,” she said to the gust of wind. The air was too strong for her, and hard to breathe when it thrust so violently against her face. The sky over the sea had darkened slightly, a cloud shielding the sun. It would be raining offshore in a few moments, letting down one of the brief tropical rains that were here and gone quickly but made the roads slick and hazardous.

When she looked over her shoulder, he was still smiling, the length of coral inscribing circles in the air.

“It’s too bad,” he said; “I ought to send you home to your father. It would be a good lesson to him. Dissing the powers that way, not believing in what’s there to be believed.” He stroked a hand over the place where his heart would be. “Still, pleasure before duty.”

“No,” she said, but faintly. Rain had begun to yield to ocean: a navy-colored cloud wept onto a spot of sea that, deeply shaded, began to glow with luminescence.

“I always get what I want, Tamarind. You ought to see that by now.” He began walking after her, moving lazily, his hips swinging, the coral held lightly in his hand.

***

The first rock flung against flesh raised an instantaneous weal and bled freely. Tamarind dropped to her knees, the breath rasping in and out of her mouth. Her arm and throat hurt. Panic was in her like a ravel of fishermen’s line knotted with hooks and beads, bedeviled by a corkscrewing wind off the sea. Fear weighted her arms and legs with sinkers.

Nicholas reeled, lifting a hand to his face–the stone egg had made its mark at the left eyebrow.

The rain cloud cast a tide of shadows across the coral.

Figures on the beach were struggling to sit up and teetering onto club feet in rickety unison. Even the circle of two-legged dolmen bestirred itself, each stumbling blindly over a chaos of unmade, unchosen coral. A cry spiraled from Tamarind’s throat. The uprising could have been a comic, skeltonic joke if only it had been tucked behind a luminous screen while she watched, close by Steve and Roy and Lisette. But family was impossibly far, on the other side of the island–it might as well have been on the other side of a mirror or of the moon: on the bright, reflective face, while she was jailed in the darkness of the back side.

Nicholas was laughing as he wiped the blood from his eye.

String-haired and squat, bald and eyeless, knock-kneed and giant, a coral army wavered toward him. They gathered missiles, hammered with their horny fingers against stone, shoved lumps of coral into the remnants of nets to make slings. But all this activity took place inside a silence that was in turn eaten by the gush of the ocean, devoured and forgotten, as if it never had been. Not even the striking of rock and coral against brawn and bone was audible: nothing but sea.

Tamarind glimpsed Nicholas with his mouth open in a roar. His face looked weirdly joyful, as if he had not yet realized any danger. He was whirling about, the scepter in his fist. For a while, it looked like a game of ninepins, heads toppling over and crashing into spines and legs. Domino-sized pieces of coral sprayed the air; then, all chance for play stopped. He was, quite simply, outnumbered. The white sea surged forward and boiled over him.

What was it she had said to Nicholas? Something about the dreaminess of time at the ocean? She flinched; no, it was better to think of a long-legged nightmare folded on one’s breast, refusing to go, making it a fight to breathe the air–the whole battle being packed into a flick of an instant that was also seven years of bondage to hell.

She strained to pierce through shade to where the mob was jostling, pressing, dragging something along the margin of the sea, shoving it slowly up the shore. Reflux scalded her throat with gall. She retched onto the ground, blotted sudden moisture from her eyes. She could make out the stubby and the tottery-tall ones shimmering over their trophy in a mirage-like mass, while a few, almost excluded, dived between legs or jigged with antic glee. The dolmen half-men jittered at the heels of the others. Cute. They’re almost cartoon cute. If only they weren’t–

The subject of their ministrations had completely disappeared in the moil of bodies. Under drifting clouds, the coral took on a fungal glow. A rhythmic clok! clok! clok! could be heard, faint under the crescendo of surf. Tamarind listened harder than she had ever listened to anything. Clok! clok! clok! Arms made from the skeletons of once-living coral rose and fell as regularly as if they were wielding mallets. She made a queer, shivering moan, her teeth set. The high-pitched note of it frightened her, but she couldn’t stop. Motes swirled before her eyes. They, too, were a fearsome swarm. When her sight was altogether black, wholly absence, she might topple into the dark.

A memory of the bees and their combs, with the slow accumulation of sunny days and flowers in cells of wax, wavered like a mirage before her. She clung to the image of purity in shadow: panels of snow faintly gleaming with the gold of stored light. Even now a brave young queen might be skyrocketing above Trunk Bay, a projectile headed into a new world, for the tower with its aged queen would never again be home. And whether queen or slave, the old one in her tattered wedding gown would never escape the infinite cells of her palace. Africans all, laboring after sweetness in the dark tower…

Breathe slowly, slowly. I’m drinking the wind, and it’s too much, too much for anyone. Her blood was freighted with oxygen. Cupping her hands over nose and mouth, she slowed her breaths, counting herself down by one-thousands. Breathe in. One one-thousand. And out. Two one-thousands. And in. Two one-thousands…

Tamarind could see once more. The coral swarm fell away from what they had done. Though some had legs so thin it looked as though bulky torsos were held up by mere scribbles of white, they moved off with surprising quickness. Here and there, a creature began to fold itself up, the dice of toes and slats of legs collapsing onto the bed where it had been joined.

She felt what her stone-time ancestors had felt on a barren, windswept hill overlooking the thrash of surf: whelmed. Surely it had been thousands of years since a menhir had been made in a spirit of awe and in fright at the wideness and lunging power of creation.

But at Drunk Bay someone had been seized by the ancient horror of the world’s overweening, inhuman beauty: had bent, scrabbling after the forms that lay in shapeless chaos. They called to that man or woman: brain! arm! hand! eye! And the newborn artist of the place took hold of a coral spine and laid it on the ground below the oval of a brain. They tamed the ruinous world. If he, he marked his presence. If she, she gave birth to a child with a face as pitted as the moon. They longed to make, as they had surely been made, dreamed into slow being in a time without time, when the universe was void. Perhaps they instilled in the images something of their own loneliness in the world, their desire to protect and to be protected.   Perhaps it was also a desire to succor the land by setting something human against the tantrums of the elements. After the first builder, others came and were inspired to create. Yet the place called Drunk Bay was only the stranger for such mortal work of creation.           

Tamarind felt all these things as if she had been seared with wisdom in one dazzling strike of lightning. No fire bolted from cloud to coral, scarring her from crown to sole with secret knowledge, but it might as well have done, because a wound was made, though invisible.

Along the beach, more of the beings were collapsing or propping themselves against stone. The sketchy lot she had seen outstretched on shelves of rock wobbled past her now, heading toward sleep.

More rain sifted from the cloud, close beside the lurid sunshine. A few of those sinking onto the shore were moistened by drops as the pall moved steadily off. As light increased, Tamarind could clearly see their handiwork.

A hundred yards down the shore, a barrow made from stones and coral hulked against the backdrop of ocean. Wearing the mystery of a monument that had endured from a prehistoric age, it echoed the cairn at the head of the trail but was larger, and had nothing of a cross about it anywhere. If the winds had been gentler, she might have imagined that some day it would be fertilized and seeded by birds and wreathed with grasses. Bleak as a skull, the tumulus gathered the landscape about itself.

The trembling that began after Nicholas had shrugged off her need to return to Saltpond Bay and the jeep now slackened. She was still weak from that first terror and felt unsure whether she could stand. The scrape on her inner arm made a rhythmic throbbing, but the sea-like pulse of blood in her hand had subsided. Tamarind jerked, startled by a movement: one of figures had not gone to its hard rest but was veering toward her, rocking from side to side. It was the boy Nicholas had mutilated.

The mute, craterous face of the eunuch turned toward hers. The pebble eyes were set far apart, as in a child’s drawing, and the tiny, upturned smile of blue sea glass had a simple sweetness that belied the upheaval of Drunk Bay and the fresh presence of the barrow.

When it became evident that he had come for her, Tamarind managed to rise, hands shaking. He made no sign but limped toward the cairn at the trailhead, occasionally turning his head in its socket to see if she still followed, pausing to wait. In the dim atmosphere of Salt Pond, the stumpy figure seemed to emit a spindly light. The scar of trail was smooth and easy under Tamarind’s feet, yet it felt like a long time had passed before they reached the trees that divided the pond walk from Saltpond Bay. Here, where the path vanished into scrub, she overtook him. For a moment she stood still, peering at the bay through the leaves. As she reached to push aside a branch and pass between trunks, she thought to look back, but he was already gone.

Here the air was sunny, as before. It seemed as though no time had passed, though the groupings of people on the beach suggested that several families might have departed and others arrived since. She remembered the boy on the rock; perhaps his mother was now poking at his feet with a needle, prying out the black tips of spines while she complained against the ways of men in a fierce whisper. Nearing a couple lying on a blanket, she turned her face toward the bay, as though she had just caught sight of something fascinating. She kept to the sand at the water’s edge, only once crossing the broken coral in order to retrieve her hat and the net bag of gear. She averted her eyes from the other bundle close beside it.

She didn’t want to consider how she would get back to the Ouestin. If she had to, she would drive the jeep, she supposed, but she didn’t want to touch it–didn’t want to see its fire-engine shine ever again.

“Hey! Hey! Mango–”

A child waylaid her, signaling with a shovel.

Tamarind stopped, staring at the little girl. It took her much longer than usual to see what lay before her: to recognize the snub nose and silky hair, the frog on the front of her play suit.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said, moisture springing to her eyes. When she kneeled, letting down the shoulder bag, the toddler hugged her ecstatically.

The pregnant mother was wading in the shallows, close to another child who bobbled face down in the waves. He leaped from the water, jerking away his snorkel.

“I saw a fish like a box,” he said, and his words sounded jubilant with discovery; “It had corners.”

His mother swung him out of the water, but he splashed back in.

“Oh, now I remember,” she said to Tamarind. The faille tank top to her suit rode up, showing a crescent of belly. “You’re the girl with the blue flower.” She lifted her sunglasses and gazed at her. “Is something the matter?”

“My ride.” Tamarind coughed, blinked against the tears. “My ride left me behind.” Her voice trembled when she asked, “Could you give me a lift to the Ouestin when you go?”

***

Tamarind went to bed early, but in the morning she rode in another rented jeep with Roy and Lisette and Steve. They drove to Leinster Bay and traipsed the path through the trees to the stones and strip of sand opposite Waterlemon Cay. Tamarind’s mother had tucked a frangipani flower in her daughter’s hair. They had all noticed some alteration in her mood but thought little of it.

With them she swam twice around the island, but all that day she never spoke about anything that had taken place on the afternoon before. She was afraid of what had happened; equally, she was afraid of being questioned.

Despite everything, the circuit of the island was just as beautiful as she had dreamed it would be, when she was a little girl. In the bay the water was a sky blue, light-drenched and cool, and the world dropped away quickly. When she gained the reef, she swam above corals that were not bleached but gay with color. Sea feathers yielded, fluttering with the current. The fish were radiant, whisking to the shelter of staghorn or hiding under the curl of a live fan.

She forgot nothing. The taste of cinnamon, the hand close to her breast, the clustering bees: all of the previous day was with her, so that she did not want to stray too far from Steve and her parents. She feared some manifestation of darkness in the water, but none came. Instead, the shadow of the last day seemed to throw this one into dramatic relief.

And then the queen angels and the parrotfish and the fairy basslet and a host of others–the bright, broken pieces of her long-desired rainbow–made her forget, so that she lay entranced for a long time on the skin of the water, gazing at the flashing of fish through beds of coral. The pain of salt on her arm’s tender scrape seemed to fall into abeyance. The secret world under the sea was a fount of life, and, lost in witness, she stopped dreading the shadows of barracuda and shark. Light dispersed from the summery sky; she drifted on the waves above angel and fairy, and it came to her that this underwater garden was, as her mother had promised, a glimpse of heaven. For some obscure length of time she was pierced by the loveliness and the joyful profusion of fantasy trees and flowers. All that was Tamarind seemed to melt into the cradling waves and the shared-out rainbows and the living coral, so that she felt herself to be as rich and strange as the very seas of paradise.

The post Drunk Bay appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Photo © Rebecca Beatrice Miller

Marly Youmans is the author of eleven books, primarily novels and poetry, along with several Southern fantasy novels for young adults. Her most recent books are: a novel, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (Mercer University Press, 2012), which won The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction and took home the silver in the ForeWord BOTYA fiction competition; a wild post-apocalyptic adventure in blank verse, Thaliad (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2012); and several collections of formal poems, The Foliate Head (UK: Stanza Press, an imprint of P. S. Publishing, 2012) and The Throne of Psyche (Mercer, 2012). Marly is a native of the Carolinas who currently lives with her husband and three children in Cooperstown, New York, a village that boasts two castles, and whose reality was hopelessly scrambled long ago by the romances of James Fenimore Cooper. She hopes to continue that trend with the upcoming novel, Glimmerglass, to be followed by another novel, Maze of Blood, inspired by the curious life and times of Robert E. Howard. You can find more from the author at her personal blog. The following story, “An Incident at Agate Beach,” originally appeared in Argosy Quarterly 3 (2005) and was reprinted in the anthology Northwest Passage: A Cascadian Odyssey (Windstorm, 2005) and in The Year’s Best in Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006) We’re delighted to reprint this story by permission of the author. – The Editors

***

“Where did you come from?”

Marsha had jumped when the child materialized at her side, peering over her arm to see what it was she was doing, and she glanced about to look for his parents.  But no one leaned from the cliff or climbed slowly down the path; no one was in sight along the beach in either direction, neither strolling along the rock pools nor bent to see what agates and jasper the tide had uncovered.

“What is it?” he asked, not bothering to answer.  His eyes moved from the linen in her lap to the sewing basket, the lid thrown open to reveal a tumble of crewel embroidery thread mixed with silk and cotton floss.  The circus gaiety of the contents must have drawn him, for he put his hand out and fingered a hank of purple thread, then ran his fingertips over the cloth tomato, studded with hundreds of pins, many of them a plain stainless steel but others topped with bright, transparent heads.

“It’s–”

“Sea urchin?”

“A pincushion,” she told him, pulling a redheaded pin from the sawdust to show him.

He took the pin from her and studied it, whispering “ushion, ushion.”  Curious, he tapped the point against his arm.

“Ow!”

“Yes, it’s sharp.  The pins are to hold the fabric when I hem or appliqué.”  She saw that the words meant nothing to him.  “Look.  You see?”  She took another sampler from the basket, turning it over to show where she had hemmed half of a side, leaving a picket of pins in place.

He seemed fascinated, touching the heads as if he were counting.

“How old are you?  You look about seven, I’d say.”

“Yes.”  Though he spoke, all his attention was on the sampler with its motto and vases of flowers and birds.  His home-cut hair hung low on his forehead and covered his ears, though he somehow managed to look refined despite its carelessness–it must have been the delicate features and the sharp straight nose.  The hair was a pale gold, shifting all together, like a cap.  The boy seemed compounded of quickness and light, his fingers darting eagerly across the stitched scene.

“Do you like it?”

“Yes.  But there are no fish.  There should be fish.”

Marsha laughed, folding the cloth and tucking it under the thread.

“It’s sad, but very few samplers have fish,” she told him.  “Now and then you might see a bit of waves and a fish or two.  Not often.”  She wasn’t surprised that he wanted fish.  Why, seaweed was tied at his waist like a kilt.  The pale bladders shone among the dark leaves.

Reaching under the basket, she took out her laptop and showed him some other samplers she had recently completed, along with a project that was still in the planning stage.  She had not quite finished copying the stitches onto a grid and making a key as to their colors and types.  Her husband had formatted a program for her, so that she could type in the number of threads in warp and woof and the dimensions of the piece and immediately begin work.

“I don’t know what it is.”  The boy patted the unfinished sampler in her lap and added, “I like this one better.  It’s soft and pretty.”

“These are just pictures, you see?  You’ve never seen one of these at school?  This is a computer.  I store the images of my samplers on it.  That’s what I do you see–I make museum reproduction kits, and people buy them and make copies of samplers that some little girl stitched a hundred years ago.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  Because they like them, I suppose.  For the fun of making.”

“Why would you want to store?”  He appeared to be struggling to follow her words.  “That’s not how we save things.”

“What do you mean, not how we save things? What do you do with them?”

“Oh, the stones, you know.”

“The stones.”

“You know, the stones.  The ones with the letters on them.  We call them ogil stones.”

“What an imagination you have!”

“You should throw this away.”  The boy tapped at the metal rim of the computer.  “It doesn’t belong.  But don’t toss it in the waves!”

She was amused.  “Why not?”

“Because it’s not for the sea.”

“Well,” she said; “I’m not so much on computers.  That’s my husband’s domain.  He’s a real wizard with programming.”  And she thought of Jim, somewhere by the shore, searching for agates, as he had done years ago as a child growing up along the coast.  She liked seeing him this way, barefoot and away from his desk.  Only three months had passed since the day they’d met, and now they were married.  His job remained mostly a mystery to her.  She had barely seen him at work–two or three times she had watched him rotate figures or objects of white mesh on a blue background.  They had appeared rather like the result of a cross between a wire dressmaker’s dummy and a 3‑dimensional drawing of the Earth, showing latitude and longitude like a stiff net holding in an endless sea.  Then the next time they had substance and color, and she was disappointed.  She had liked them better as enigmatic and blue, glimpses from another world.

“I’m sorry,” she said; “I wasn’t listening.”

“My brother is in love with you.”  The boy smiled, showing bright nubs of teeth and tiny canines.

“But I’m married,” she protested.  “He can’t be in love with me.”

“Well, he is.  He told me so.  He has been watching you every afternoon, and he loves you.”

“I’m on my honeymoon.  He can’t be in love,” Marsha said severely.  “And what’s your name?”

“Bramble?”  He looked hopeful.  “You could call me Bramble.  Or Ramble.  Or Scramble.”

She laughed.  “All right, Bramble it is, at least for now.”

“Good.”  He gave her a smile of intense sweetness.  “And my father is in love with you, no matter what you say.”

“Now you’re confusing me!  You said your brother was in love with me.  Are they both in love?”

“Oh.  Well, it’s not that.  We just don’t count us that way–we’re just all close and we don’t think about those sorts of things.  Brother, father, all that.  Though he’s really my half brother.”  He seemed a little confused about how to explain his meaning.  “We’re born out of nowhere, right?  And so we’re all the same.”

She lifted her eyebrows.  “Okay,” she said.  “We’re the same.”

“No, not exactly.  Some people are just born knowing.  Other people are like you.”

“Were you born knowing?”

“Of course.”

*

Every afternoon for three weeks Marsha sewed while Jim poked about the tidal pools or went searching for agates and jasper.  Afterward they would wander hand in hand along the shore or swim, and sometimes they would go up to the big bedroom with the plate glass window that framed the sea and the cavernous rock formation (wild when the tide was high) and the beach with its rocks and its animal flowers.  They had a keen sense of how rare and precious their time together was, and that it wouldn’t come around again–the two of them free to spend the day any way they liked.  Both meant to sleep late but neither ever did, as the window had no curtain.  Marsha could never get over her feeling of surprise that the sun didn’t come up over the edge of the ocean, though the increasing light still managed to wake them at dawn, when they would stir and make love and go back to sleep.

They always intended to do nothing one day, just to stay in bed, but the big swashbuckling sky flung down its swords of light onto the sand and the sea, and they could not stay inside.  Jim still had a child’s excitement about what he would find and came home from his beachcombing with sacks of treasure–a curve of fossilized dolphin bone, a fossil clam, a bloodstone, opaque jasper in shades of butterscotch, red, brown, and green.  He brought black agates, pink ones, occasionally pale blue.  The owners of the house had a notebook in which they had recorded the best places to look or dig on or near the beach, and he pored over this homegrown guide, scouring it for clues.

Occasionally Marsha went with him, but she had deadlines to reach on new kits, so usually she sat under an umbrella, detailing the pattern of a sampler on her laptop, or else sewing a reproduction.  The few hours apart made them eager to be together again, though it wasn’t as if Jim were entirely absent; often she caught sight of him wading in the surf or clambering on the rocks.

Because their access to the beach was a private stairs–the house belonged to Jim’s boss and was seldom used by any but his wife and daughters–she didn’t see many other people.  It wasn’t much different from plenty of other nooks along the coast, and the owners called it simply the agate beach, though that was the name of a dozen or more near-nameless spots.

Now and then a group of runners would skim by and vanish into mist, and once Marsha had seen a line of karate students punching and blocking their way across the sand, not looking toward her as they moved in unison, each step–right leg, the left, the right–inscribing a crescent on the air.  She wondered idly what the name of the move was.  A man in a black gi moved swiftly alongside, correcting a stance or the position of an arm.  Only he glanced her way and smiled.

The boy came to see her almost every afternoon.  Some hours after the karate class had passed, he came and stood before her like a wading bird, one leg up.  She kept sewing and didn’t look, and he began pivoting, kicking at the air with his raised foot.

“Did you see the teenagers run by?  Did you see the yellow belts and the green belts and the brown belts?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, stopping with his leg still up, the knee bent.

“I thought you must know karate.”

“What is karate?  You mean those people who do this?”  He dashed about the sands, kneeing imaginary opponents, striking them with elbow and fist, and ending in the horse stance with a great shout of Hoah!

“So you do know karate.”  She took the fabric she had been working on out of the hoop and tucked the needle with its gold thread into the pincushion.  “Bramble, isn’t it?  I couldn’t remember what you wanted to be called.”

“Today I would rather be Eetsch!” he declared.  “But I don’t know karate.  I just followed them because they were interesting, and I watched when they fought the mist.”  He came close and leaned against the rock where she was sitting.  The faded old tomato caught his attention.  Picked up, it sagged against his fingers.  “This is so hard and bumpy on top.  Soft underneath.  But something could grab underneath and tear its guts–”

“What do you mean, fought the mist?”  Marsha took the cushion from him.  It had been her grandmother Josephia’s, and she felt a mild attachment to the idea that their hands had touched the same thing, performed the same work.

“They went down by the water, and they did this–” here he flashed about the sand again–” inside a cloud.  It was torn to pieces but came back together and won, so they had to go home.”

“You have quite an imagination,” Marsha observed.

“No,” he said, looking puzzled; “I just have eyes that see things.”

“So some people have eyes that don’t see?”

He didn’t appear to think this question worth the answering.  Perhaps it was too obvious; perhaps he thought it merely rhetorical.

“The black man asked me to come with them.  He chased me, but he couldn’t catch me.”

“The black man?  Do you mean the devil?  Oh, I know–the black belt.  I thought he looked friendly.  What did he say to you?”  Marsha tugged at the sampler, straightening the cloth.  It had puckered around a large urn from which fantastic flowers sprouted.

“He wanted me for himself.  To do his magic.  He said I took to it like nobody’s business.  What did he mean by that?”

She looked at the lithe frame and the feet that seemed never to be still but danced and pattered on the sand.

“He meant that you could be good at karate, that you looked like a natural–somebody who can do it easily by imitation.  At least, that’s what I suppose he meant.  What did you tell him?”

The boy jumped in the air and sank into the horse stance, rocking and grinning at her.  “I said Hoah! in the deepest voice in the world, deeper than his, so deep that it scared some of the hairs out of his head.  Then I shouted Yah! Yah! Yah! and Catch me!  He raced after me, but I lost him in the stones.  They were all running after me,” he said with satisfaction, “but nobody could catch me.  I looked out at them and laughed.”

“How?  Did you hide?”

“I swam into a rock pool and stirred up the sand so they couldn’t see, and I hid in a crack.”  The silk of his hair swung, as if nodding in agreement with the words.

Marsha wondered if any of his tale was true.  Just then he gave a snap punch and another, and began scuttling about comically, still crouched in horse stance.

“Well, you are limber and quick.  I don’t doubt that he would have wanted to teach you.  But you shouldn’t hide in the water like that.  What if you drowned?”

“You’re not calling me Eetsch, you know.  You should call me Eetsch.  I’d never drown.  I can swim better than you.  Better than any of those punch-punch boys.  If they had come close, I could’ve jumped into the sea and swum away from them all, till they gave up and drowned.”  He put out his chest like a body builder, grinning at her.

“What a little Puck you are,” she said, rather charmed by his boastfulness.

“What’s that?”  He frowned, wrinkling the smooth area between the two gold bows of his eyebrows.  Martha felt like touching them, they were so fine and glistening.

“A sort of sprite.  A fairy.”

“You mean with wings?  Oh, I like them.”

“Do you know any?”  She laughed in sheer pleasure.

“Well, I’ve seen them.  You’d have to talk to my brother about those.  He knows them–he’s met them far out in the ocean, riding on a whale’s back.”

“Birds, I suppose,” she said softly.  “So today you are Eetsch, and he’s your brother again.”

“Yes.  But I’m really always the same, and he’s really all the same.”  He reached for the pincushion, catching his fingernails on the steel heads.

“Careful with that–”

“And he still loves you.  He’ll always love you.”

“Why?”

“Why love you?  I think maybe it’s your hair.”  He crept close and combed his fingers through its ripples.  “Looks like gold.”

“That’s a silly reason.”

“Why?  Maybe it’s not that.  You have sea eyes.”  The boy peered into her face, coming so close that she drew back.  “And you sit on the rocks and sew.  He likes the songs that you sing …”

“Well, he shouldn’t.  I’m married, and I love my husband, and we’ll live a long and happy life together.  If all goes well,” she added, crossing herself.  It seemed bad luck to have said it outloud.

Eetsch’s nimble fingers were working with the pins, making a pattern of jags and triangles out of the colored ones, with the steel heads outlining them.

“What’s that?”

“A rune, a rune,” he caroled.

“What for?  How do you know about runes?”

“I don’t think there’s a word for it.”  He paused, staring at his handiwork, before squatting to start another shape.

Idly leaning with chin on hand, elbow to knee, she watched him turn the pincushion, stabbing the cloth surely and swiftly.

“You’re a strange little boy,” she said.

This made him laugh.  Already the cushion looked like some beaded monstrosity from the Victorians, though perhaps it was too geometrical for that–more like a native product from the Cherokee in the mountains where she had lived until she met Jim.

“It’s not like a voodoo doll or something like that, is it?  You’re not trying to do me some harm?  Or what about Jim?  Maybe your brother would like Jim to go away?”  She slipped down beside him on the sand, in the shadow of the boulder.

Although she had been teasing, he took the question quite seriously.

“No, it’s joyful.  I just don’t know how to say it.  You keep the pins the way they are, and everything will turn out all right in the end.  The way it should.”  He didn’t look at her; his fingers were too busy.  “You see?”

Marsha touched the top of his head; the sunny hair felt hot against her palm.  For an instant, he froze.  Then he relaxed and went on with his patterns.

“So he wouldn’t hurt Jim,” she murmured.

“No; why do that if you love him?  Besides, he likes Jim.”  He inspected the pincushion as it caught the blaze of afternoon and seemed to ignite in his hands.

“Likes Jim?  Have they ever met?”

“No, of course not.  But my brother watches out for me, and he sees Jim, too.  He helps him with his–his works.”

“His works?”

“Yes, my brother puts the pebbles and the big ones, the cobbles, in his path so he can’t help but find them.  It’s a game.  He hunts for lovely ones under the water.”

“You mean agates and jasper?”

“Yesterday he put out pink agates, and the day before it was blue ones, the kind that you don’t see so often.  He said that Jim was very pleased.”

Marsha gave a little twitch of unrest.  It was true; she remembered that he had found blue agates two days back, and he had left pink ones on her pillow only the afternoon before.  The coincidence of the thing was queer.

“Did you talk to Jim?  How did you know?”

“I told you.  My brother told me.  I don’t talk to Jim.  Like I don’t talk to the black man.”

“Jim wouldn’t chase you.  He’s seen you in the distance.”

“I know.  I let him see me.  Here.”  He held out the tomato, wrapped in runes.  If they were runes, Marsha thought, and not just his play.

“And what shall I use when I need pins?”

“Oh, there’s some left over.  I put them on the bottom.”  So he had, but he couldn’t resist the flourish of putting the silver pins into the shape of a star.

Eetsch leaned close to her and made a clicking sound with his tongue.

“What’s that for?”

“It’s my kiss.  I invented it.”

Once again she was struck by his smile, which seemed a thing of great purity and sweetness, and on impulse she put her arm around him and pressed him close.  Perhaps children were a good idea, she reflected, if they were as bright and nice as this one.

He wriggled out of her grasp and jumped to his feet, laughing at her and showing the sharp little chips of canines–baby teeth, still unshed.

“Should I thank your brother, I wonder?”

The boy shrugged.  “It doesn’t matter.  He did it because of love.  Your Jim, what kind of stones does he like best?”

Marsha stared at him, feeling certain that this was a very odd sort of conversation.  He drew her gaze and kept it.  She would miss him, and the aesthete in her would miss looking at him.  Though not conventionally beautiful, the dark eyes and fair hair and the slender, almost sharp features gave her a good deal of satisfaction–the sort of pleasure she might have gotten out of examining a valuable and fascinating sampler, say.

“He likes all the jaspers and agates.  But he hasn’t found any sagenite, the type with the threads shot through the stone, and I know he would like a good enhydrite.  Do you know what that is?  The kind with water trapped inside?”

“Sure, I know.”

His eyes were no longer on her but on the waves.

“You should go up to your house,” he said.  “The sea’s turning.”

At once he sprang away, his shirt ruffling in the wind, and raced into the water.  Marsha stood, calling, and witnessed the boy throwing himself into the ocean, under the shadowy lee of a massive rock.  Then he was gone, though she raced after him and searched until the tide was waist deep and pouring toward land.

“Marsha!”  There was Jim on the cliff steps, with her basket in his hand.  “Over here–it’s coming in fast.”

She knew it was too dangerous to stay.  Spars and timbers near the rock pools were floating on the low water.  The owners of the house had warned against swimming anywhere but the public beach down the road because a log, riding on a glaze of water, had sometimes killed.  Even grown men had been struck and crushed.  It wasn’t like the beach at Kill Devil Hills where her parents had rented a cottage each summer, where the flags had told them what to watch for–the fluttering red cloth marking rip tides and strong currents.

“This way!”  He pointed to a narrow defile between stones where the water was rushing and foaming, and she splashed up from the sea, casting a glance over her shoulder now and then but seeing nothing.

*

To her relief, the next afternoon the boy was back with a shirtful of sagenites “from my brother,” lovely clear and golden stones shot through with needles of air.  Marsha and Startle–he had named himself Startle for the day–left one on each step of the twisting staircase up to the house, and Jim had been well surprised.

“He’ll be stunned,” she had told the boy.  “Happy.”

The newlyweds made love on the boss’s king-size bed with the stones all around them on the sheets and pillows.  Jim had set them on her naked body and, when she closed her eyes, balanced two ovals on her eyelids.

“I feel like a queen laid out in a Neolithic barrow.”

“I’ll be a greedy cave man, sacking and pillaging the dead and coming home with treasure.”

She arched against him, feeling the stones slide from her skin.  The sagenites struck one another with a noise like the clicking of dice.

“My lady of the agates,” Jim whispered, reaching for her.  He looked exposed and vulnerable without his glasses, like a sea creature out of its shell.  His skin was pale, his eyes dark.

The sagenites slipped, momentarily sticking to one and then the other as he pressed against her.  When the tide of their lovemaking had broken on the stones and begun to ebb, the smooth shapes lay against her torso, outlining the curve of her side, her waist, the flare of her hip.

“My beauty.”  Jim took others and outlined her nakedness, then curled beside her with his arm across her breasts and his face nestled in the curve of her neck.  She smiled at the strangeness of his fancy and at his delight in the polished forms, which was different but no less than his eagerness for her breasts and thighs.  Wasn’t it like a boy to pick up stones or sticks?

“Like a man’s genitals,” she whispered, drawing her hand along the ridgeline of his spine.  Was he asleep now, a cobble clasped in one hand like a toy in the hand of a child?  “Nothing but a stick and two stones.”

As she drifted after him toward sleep, she thought for the first time of how the brother–if there was a brother–had collected the air-needled stones and held them in his hands, so that, if he existed, he had in some sense touched her intimately; or, at least he had reached from one moment in time to another as surely as grandmother Josephia with her much-handled pincushion.

*

Jim was swimming; she could just detect him, far out, where they had seen the black and white orcas turning leisurely in the sun.  Then she glimpsed something in the circle of rocks that the owners had said was named the devil’s porridge bowl because its contents churned to white at high tide, and she was frightened and called for him to come back, though of course he couldn’t hear.

“It was someone–I saw an arm reaching out of the water.  But nobody ever surfaced.”

She had stayed at the edge of the waves until Jim swam to shore and rose, dripping, from the shallows.

“You saw something.  Probably just a trick of the light.”

“No, I’m sure.  It was a man’s arm, and there was something odd … bluish, maybe, I’m not sure.”

Jim was scrubbing himself with the towel she had brought, his skin becoming rosier by the instant.  She hadn’t been able to make him understand how afraid she had felt, seeing the arm and hand, knowing that he was out of reach.  Perhaps she wasn’t even clear on its importance–that instant of seeing the hand.

“Well, if it were a man, he’d probably be blue with cold.  It’s chilly out there.”

“If it was,” she corrected.  Because it was, it really was, she thought.  “You’re not taking me seriously.”  She dug her bare toes through the sand grains, dredging crystal from below the surface.

“What am I supposed to do?  You tell me that you saw an arm in the ocean, and I’m supposed to do something?  We could call the Coast Guard, but they’d think we were crazy.”

His hair stood up in spikes, and Marsha reached to flatten it with her hand.

“No, not that.  You look like a pincushion.”  She remembered the boy, holding the tomato in his hand.  “A sea urchin.”

“An urchin that needs a long hot shower,” he said.  “Brr, I’m going in.  You could come along, you know.”

“All right.  I’ll be there in a minute.”  She had caught sight of a white shirt, fluttering from behind a boulder.

When Jim had climbed halfway up the stairs, the boy came running out to see her.  He had a slender spear in one hand, tipped with an arrowhead; he wore a look that she had seen before on his face:  excitement, tamped down.  Marsha realized that she would miss him when she went away, and that she no longer worried about his parents or where his house might be.  He seemed to be well able to take care of himself, and to think that everything that called to his attention was interesting.  She liked that about him.

“I saw an arm.  In the devil’s porridge bowl.”  She nodded toward the low, jagged walls of the cauldron.

The boy pursed his lips.  Perhaps he was busy thinking, perhaps listening.  His profile seemed to rest against the light, as if leaning on it for support.

“Where?  I mean, exactly.”

“You see where there’s a jag?  Where the rock goes up and there’s a curve, with a sort of hole?”

He unbuttoned the shirt, tucking it into a crevice in an upright stone.  Then he was naked, all but a necklace she had noticed before–pierced with a hole and ringed by runic shapes–and the long fringe of seaweed hanging from his waist.  Skipping into the waves, he quickly waded out, and in an instant he was standing inside the walls of the devil’s bowl and reaching up to feel inside the opening she had seen.  He waved at her; he was clutching something as he leaped from the cauldron.  At other times the hemmed-in surf foamed and was wild, but now the water sloshed gently against the sides.

“From my brother.”  He put the cobble into her hands.  It was a large sagenite, pierced by many shafts.

“It’s lovely.”  She wasn’t looking the stone which was, indeed, remarkable, with traces of blue like clouds, so that its whole aspect bore the air of a picture in a bottle–a cloudy scene with sunlit rain coming down.  Instead, she was staring at the spot where she had seen the arm.

“Here.”  He held up the pendant around his neck, and she grasped the stone’s edge, unsure what he wanted of her.

But before he could say another word, she caught a glimpse of something, right through the opening in the center.  She made out a man’s face rising from the sea.  She blinked once, found the head again; then a third time she saw him, looking straight toward them, but when she drew away and stared, she detected nothing, nothing at all.  The boy’s features were impassive, and he let the necklace fall back to its place.  Hardly enough time had elapsed to register the features in memory, but she thought that there was a resemblance and felt–how?  The waves could play tricks on a person, she told herself:  no reason to be anxious or afraid.  And hadn’t Jim been swimming out that far, half an hour ago?  Perhaps it was a snorkeler who had been floating on the waves and was only occasionally seen.

“What do you call yourself today?”

“I call me King-of-Fishes.”  He smiled as he stared at the Pacific, peaceful now and dark blue, sparkling in the sun.  “That means I’m in charge of all the fishes.  But my brother is king over the sea and even the deep gulfs and the creatures of old fire, so he is better than me.  Though I am quite good enough,” he said proudly.

“And what did you show me just now?”  She wasn’t sure that he had done so; she wasn’t positive of anything except that Jim would be waiting for her at the top of the cliff, and that he would forgive her for not coming to him in the shower when he saw the big sagenite that the boy had put in her hands.

“Did you see something.”  He spoke softly, walking away from her.

“What is that device around your neck?”  She followed, touching him briefly on the hair, where a dazzle of sun rested like a crown.

“Oh that.  That’s my toy.  It’s a thing that binds me and heals me and brings me back when I go away.  It’s my blessing.”

He fingered and gave the cord a tug, checking to see if it held secure; his hand reached for the knot at his nape.  Afterward he gave the stone a swipe, as if to polish it.

“Sometimes you don’t sound a bit like a boy, you little King-of-Fishes.”

“But what does that matter?  Even when you’re an old, old woman, you won’t feel any older inside.  You won’t feel any older than you do today, except for the weight on your breast.”  He tapped the pendant.  “Not this.  The dead, I mean, and the things that didn’t happen.  And mistakes you made.”

“Now I know you’re not a boy.  You’re a wise weird thing that’s thousands of years old.”  She drew away from him, teasing him and turning to look back at the ocean and scan the waves for something–a little interruption that was neither whale nor bird nor buoy.

“No, I’m just me.  King-of-Fishes.”  He took her by the hand, and his fingers were cold and a little tacky, as if he had been playing in brine and mud.  “Remember what I said at the start.  Some are just born knowing.  It’s easier that way.”

At the start of what, she wondered.

“I’ll be going home soon.”  It was surprising how sad saying the words made her feel.

King-of-Fishes leaned against her, his arms chilly against hers, and he made his clicking noise that meant a kiss, and she clicked back at him, pressing her cheek against his.  She marveled at how she had become so fond of this boy, when she’d never met his parents and knew almost none of the usual things about him–where he lived or went to school, his favorite movies and games and books.  They looked at the water together, and far out a whale breached and showed a flash of black and white, tidy as a domino.  An orca.

“You’ll come back,” the boy told her, his voice dreamy.  “I promise.”

Then he jerked his head up, as if in response to a shrill note–someone close by had whistled.

“Wait, I’ve got a present for you–”

He darted away between stones, the seaweed flying, and Marsha kept still, her gaze traveling slowly across the surface of the sea but finding nothing to arrest its motion.  In only a few minutes he was back again, flushed and smiling.

“This is for him–”

He handed her an enhydrite, cobble-sized.  She exclaimed in surprise, holding it up to see the water trapped inside.  It had been erratically worn and was smoother on one side than the other.

“My brother told me to give it to your man.  Said that he shouldn’t go home without one.  But I’ve forgotten his name–”

“Jim.  His name is Jim.”

“It’s hard to remember when the names never change.  It’s so dull.  Don’t you ever want to be something besides a Marsha?”

“You liked my name because it sounded like marsh, and you like the wet places.”

“Yes, but sometimes you could be Bog or Pool.”  He was serious, pressing against her, tilting his head.  Its silk clung to her arm.

“A Puddle.”

“Rivulet is nice.  I like the sound of it.  Or you could be Queen of the Ocean.  You ought to be Queen of something.”

He was absently rubbing the stone that hung from his neck, and when he looked up at her, she thought that his nervous, delicate features were beautiful.  Yet she didn’t remember finding him so at first.  The idea occurred to her that she could take the boy home and adopt him.  But it was too soon; she had known Jim for such a short time.

“Maybe Queen of the Sea Slugs.”

“Yes.”

She was amused to see that his face was serious.  He was turning a small bundle in his hands and hardly seemed to notice her words.

“Would you like to live where I do, in a city?”

He pulled away from her, shaking his head.

“I would be crazy,” he said; “I would be like that man who fought the sea.  Hoah!”  He scampered toward the waves and jumped in, kicking and whirling and slashing with an imaginary sword.  She saw the package fall, striking his leg and tumbling into the shallows.  He spun around, feeling the loss, and knelt, groping with his hands.  She could hear him crying out, “No, no no, no …” and then with a great upward leap he shot from the water, punching the air with his fist.

“I almost lost it,” he panted; “My brother would have been very angry.  I would have been angry too.”

The package was bunched in his hand, its gold cloth poking out in puckers between his fingers.

She knew to wait, that he would show her if he chose.  And if she asked and he didn’t want to share, King-of-Fishes would be off, the drops flying from his heels.

“It’s for you.  Open your hands, and I’ll give it to you.”

She did as he said, seating herself cross-legged on a heap of pebbly crystals and offering her cupped hands.  The enhydrite lay before her.

“Now,” he told her.  “You must keep these for yourself and not give them to the–to Jim.  It’s very important, because they’re meant only for you.”

He stared at her.  “Well?”

“All right,” she agreed.  “I won’t give them to him or anybody else.  I’ll keep them for myself, because they’re from you, and I’m fond of you and will miss you.”

The boy frowned, kicking at the sand.

“It’s not exactly from me–that is, my brother gave them to me.  For you.  And there’s one for each of us.”

“Your family?”

“That’s what you would say, I guess.  The ones who are together.”

“I suppose that’s a family,” she told him.

He stood on one foot, thinking.  “It’s like a school of fish.  How they all turn to and fro.  We just know the same way–where we are and what’s happening and who’s going to do something next.”

“But you’re here with me.  You’re not with anybody else.”  She combed her fingers through the fine threads of his hair.

“That’s because I’m a boy.  The children always have adventures on the beach.  That’s how it’s done.  Because they’re in between, not a baby and not grown like the sea and the land are when they’re together at the shore.  Not sea and not earth.”

Marsha had entirely forgotten about Jim and the shower.  “What stories you tell!  I really am going to miss you.”

He stamped hard against the sand with his foot, then lifted it up to see the imprint.  “You’re not holding out your hands anymore.”

“Sorry.  I forgot.”

She cupped them again; obediently she shut her eyes when told to do so.  He laid one after another–something smooth and cool–on the shadowlines that separated her fingers.  The last he placed on her right palm.  Opening her eyes, she looked at the seven enhydrites.  In coloring they didn’t appear like any she had seen in shops or in Jim’s collection, and they were all of similar size and shape, about as long as two of her finger joints.  When she held them to the light, they glistened, blue or turquoise with occasional glints of rose and green.  No, she had never encountered anything like them.

“Sweet,” she said.

He ignored her; perhaps that wasn’t enough praise, or perhaps it was just wrong.  “This one is me.”  He pointed with his pinkie finger, indicating the smallest stone.  “And this one is my brother.”  Here he tapped the one that lay on her palm.

“And there are others.”

“Of course there are,” he said, sounding puzzled that she needed to say so.

“Is one of them your mother?”

“My mother died when I was a baby.  I don’t remember.”

Ah, now we’re finding something out, she thought.  So his mother is dead, and maybe the brother acts like a parent.  Because his father may be gone or dead as well?

“If you ever want me and my brother and the rest of us,” he said, staring intently and drawing his face so close to hers that his features went out of focus, “you just sow the stones in the ground near the sea.”

“You could come and live with us,” she suggested, hardly listening, but he gave a jerk of the head in dismissal.

“I would be crazy.  I just told you, remember?  I’d be like that man who tried to kill the sea, remember?  And look what happened when I pretended–I lost the stones!  I can’t live without the sea.”

The boy drew back.  “You sow them in the earth if you want us.  But it has to be by the ocean, or else we’ll die.  Are you listening to me?”  He grasped the thin cloth of her cover-up, gathering it in his hand.

“Yes, but–”

He ran away from her, not even stopping for his shirt, and was lost among the crowd of rocks near the devil’s bowl.

“King-of-Fishes,” she shouted.  “Come back!  I’m sorry.”  But she had to go up the stairs without saying goodbye that afternoon, carrying the cobble and the seven enhydrites, which she wrapped in the strip of gold.

On the last three days she hardly saw him, only spying his figure in the distance.  She had finished her projects and now accompanied Jim on his forays in the rocks.  Once she saw the boy bounding from steppingstone to steppingstone, and once she saw him perched on the lip of the devil’s bowl, staring into the water.  Another time she thought that she could make out the shapes of two pale-haired swimmers, far from shore.

Feeling a little disloyal, she had hidden the seven stones in a jewelry case.  Jim had been pleased with the enhydrite and wanted to find another.  Once when he was asleep she carried the box to the window and scrutinized them closely, noticing lines like the shapes on Josephia’s pincushion incised on the surface.  A flake of something bright inside the largest one caught her eye.  When she held that one up, she detected a thin shard suspended inside the stone’s pocket of liquid.  It glinted, fluttering in the water like a leaf falling through air.

When Jim was loading the car, she hurried to the beach, hoping to see the boy once more.  She looked for him near the stairs and in the hollowed-out boulder where she had once found him sleeping.  He must have been watching, but he let her search and call his names and didn’t answer until she wandered into the grove of upright stones.  He laughed, jumping up to rush at her and throw his arms around her waist.

“Who are you this time?”  She leaned and pressed her cheek against his hair.

“I am Sad,” he told her.  “I am sad.”

*

Back in the apartment in the city, the whole episode seemed far away.  She put the case on the wardrobe with some other jewelry boxes, and immediately she forgot.  The image of the boy in his seaweed skirt and a spear in his hand, the face she had glimpsed as through a keyhole, the hand in the devil’s bowl:  they appeared like nothing but dreams.

Even her life with her husband became illusory, beginning with the third day of their return.  On that date, a truck failed to stop at an intersection and ploughed into the driver’s side door of her car.  His car in the shop for an overdue inspection, Jim had borrowed hers.  He was killed only a few blocks from the apartment.  Just like that.  Simple.  Dead on arrival.  Her car totaled.  The death’s very abruptness seemed to evade tragedy and to suggest an unreality.  Only at the funeral did the loss begin to sink in, though she had an intense desire to get up from the pew and leave the church, to abandon this–this undertaking, which was nothing she had ever wanted.  His body was cremated, and the ashes placed in a metal tube with a stopper.  The cylinder possessed the heft of a costly kaleidoscope, and its sound was a mix of rattles and shifting sands.  But there had been nothing to see, neither light nor color:  only dark.  She hid the blind thing inside a lidded vase.

Strange how Jim’s exit from time seemed to distort time.  The evenings were long and cavernous and held a multitude of thoughts.  Grief seeped in little by little.  She bought a television–a device she had always disliked–and let it eat the hours.  Marsha sat on the floor in front of the screen, rocking back and forth as she cried, the volume turned up so that no one in the nearby apartments would know.

“I met you three months before we married, and we were at the coast for three weeks, and then we returned and you died on the third day.”  She gave the vase a shake, as if she could get his attention.  “So there were just three months, three weeks, and three days.”

At the beginning of her period, she slumped in front of the television with the urn in her arms, crying without making any attempt to stint her tears.  She was weeping for their children, who were not and would never come to be, and she was mourning for the body that wanted a baby when it was too late.  The image of an enhydrite with a flake of mineral trapped inside came to her mind.

The loss might have been easier if she had not been an only child, born to a mother almost fifty and a father of sixty.  Both her parents were now dead.  And it might have been better if she had moved to the Carolinas again, but she couldn’t make herself do so.  She couldn’t bear the idea of explaining to everyone she knew what had happened, and hearing how, yes, it was tragic and terrible but that time would heal.  For that matter, she didn’t want to pack up or get rid of Jim’s clothes and the objects in his study.  She wore his shirts and bathrobe; a faint fragrance of him lingered in their closet.

Jim’s boss always brought her flowers on the seventh day of the month.  The two had been best friends since boyhood, and they had gone to Cal Tech together.  When small, the pair of them had been called JimJase, they were so close.  Jason suggested that she go back to the house by the beach of agates and jasper to sprinkle her husband’s ashes on the waves.  She thanked him but said that she was not ready.

At night she lay in bed, aching for Jim to reach for her or to curl at her back, his breath warm on her neck.  Sterile limb, the hand that gripped the tissue was useless, merely her own.  No other touch would arrive in the dark, secret and surprising.  She often dreamed of seeing him at the shore.  He would be wading at the edge of the ocean, picking up jasper and agates, his head down as he examined his finds.  She saw that they were nothing like the stones of day; they glowed, and burning needles pierced the sagenites.  He would turn but not see her, and the weight of the cobbles looked heavy in his hands.  When she pursued him through a labyrinth of upright stones, he only receded into the background until she could not tell him apart from the gray, bent rocks.

She would awake, tears on her face and a terrible pain in her chest, and she would turn on the lamp and stare at the dark windows and at the pale arc lamps in the street.

In time, she had to set his pictures around the house because she began losing his face.  She matched the exact shade of his shaggy hair to a hank of Theolian’s bloodroot floss.  His eyes were less easy, and she settled on wood umber.  Studying his images, she found him slippery and hard to keep.  The fashionably ugly glasses got in the way.  She wanted to see the exact shape of the line moving from brow to orbit to cheekbone, but it remained elusive.  After all, they had had only the three months, three weeks, and three days.  In time.  After all.  She hated the words; sometimes she thought that she hated language.  When she no longer needed it at night, she donated the television to the nearest Goodwill store.  A dullness set in, and she found herself still uninterested in needlework projects, though she forced herself to continue.

The worst was when spring came and brought fresh forgetting.  Shouldn’t April have brought a renewal of desire?  But it was impossible to remember a man every minute, every hour.  She sat under the fruit trees, sewing a new sampler.  The original had been purchased by a private collector, who let her study and measure and take notes in return for a document–an accurate description and an assessment of value.  The naked man and naked woman were crude but charming.  The faded apples on the tree had turned to salmon, as had many of the birds.  Petals drifted onto the cloth, and she brushed them away.  When she tucked the linen into the basket, her hand grazed the pinheads on Josephia’s cushion.  Drawing it from the bottom of the basket, she felt surprised all over again by the designs made by the colored and silver pins.  She had forgotten–it had been so long since she had needed more than a hoop and a paper of needles.

That night she called Jason and his wife, thanking them for the latest delivery of flowers, left on the mat outside her apartment door.  They urged her to use the house again if it wouldn’t make her unhappy to be there.  Perhaps it would be a help, a resolution, an ending:   a something.  She would think about it, said that she was not “getting over” Jim but that she seemed to be putting his memory at a little distance, as if their days together had been collected and given a museum space down the hall.  That evening she went into his study for the first time in months.  Cobbles and pebbles were spread across the library table, dusted with silt.  A magnifying glass lay on the blotter of his desk.  She took it in her hand, feeling for his grip around the handle.  A memory of rolling across sheets littered with sagenites drifted into her mind, and she tried to fix the moment so that it would grow.  But the images slid into the shadows and would not stay.

Copies of Jason’s sketches for a new game lay scattered in loose sheaves on bookshelves.  She inspected one, noticing for the first time that the hero bore a vague resemblance to her husband.

Then, remembering the seven stones, she went to her bedroom and scoured the dresser and chest and wardrobe but found nothing.  Only when she looked under and behind the furniture did she find the jewelry case, wedged between the wall and the paneled back of the wardrobe.  Unknotting the bundle of gold cloth, she strewed the contents across a pool of lamplight.  The fingerlings of stone were lovely.  She had forgotten how unusual the color was, almost turquoise in places, with blues and flecks of other colors.  Again Marsha felt sure that she had seen nothing like them in Jim’s books.  The runes were scratched onto the surface and might have been made yesterday, they looked so fresh.  Rocks were among the eldest things, but they remained mysteriously youthful.  A thousand years from now someone might hold an enhydrous agate in her hand and wonder who had incised it, who had held it, what had become of them–and was the treasure lost only last year or a hundred or more?

They might as well have been elf bolts, flung at her, because they woke a sleeping curiosity and desire.  How had she forgotten the boy for so long?  She remembered his sharp-cut nose and the darkness of his eyes.  How comical he was, wearing a seaweed kilt and a too-big oxford shirt, probably left behind by a tourist.  She had seen him bathing naked, diving off the outermost rocks of the devil’s bowl.  Never had she spied him in mundane dress or looking like an ordinary child in company with his playmates or parents.  Once recalled to mind, he became the focus of her thoughts, and she felt eager to see him.

She and Jim’s mother, along with Jason and his wife, met at the beach house in June, and they waded out to an island of rock and each tossed a handful of the grit and ash from the cylinder onto the water.  Afterward the others lingered for an hour to collect stones, because that seemed right.  Roaming along the spits of rock and over black bands of sand and heaps of clear crystal, Marsha had a pleasant sensation that the boy was close by, but after the others departed the feeling drained away.  It must have been seeing them at a distance, bending to examine a pebble or toss one into a bag, that made her feel that the day had become familiar–like those lost days when she could spy her husband hunting for treasure, beyond the next pile of shillets or the next curve of the beach.

Although she called for him and looked, she saw no evidence of the child except for his homemade spear, wedged in a crack in the rocks.  The shaft was broken, but the stone was still good, bound to its stake with a strip of dried grass.

She felt disappointed and a little worried.  He had always been so quick to appear!

When it was time to turn out the lights, she felt afraid and left a lamp burning.  She didn’t know why or what she feared.  The bare-faced moon shone through the glass wall overlooking the sea and lit her empty bed.  The evening made so many homely or pleasant figures wear a different aspect.  If she were to spy her husband by starlight:  what horror.  Even seeing the boy tapping on the glass–impossible, as the house jutted from the cliff–would scare her, she felt sure.  And if she walked down to the beach at night and saw a pale arm in the surf, or two faces, she would be too trembly and weak to climb the stairs.

*

“You said that I’d come back,” she told the handful of enhydrites, “but you didn’t say that you wouldn’t be here.”

Seated close to the edge of the cliff, she surveyed the coast and sea, the pale sands and the black sands, the forest of upright stones, and the devil’s bowl.  For three days she had searched for the boy, even going so far as to ask at a another house whether they had seen such a figure, dressed in seaweed.  Nothing.  A heavy silver spoon lay in her lap next to the smooth finger joints of stone.  After a while she got up and dug into the soil, prying up low windblown plants she didn’t recognize; their roots held crystal, clear or amber, with here and there a jot of red or green jasper.  The narrow trench, a few inches long, looked like a model of the grave of some ancient king, heaped with precious jewels.  She laid the largest enhydrite in the pit and pressed the plant roots and sand into place.  Immediately she felt the impulse to dig it up again but did not.  Levering up another clod of sand and roots, she slipped the smallest stone under it.  She remembered the year that she had planted tulips upside down and wondered whether there was a right way and wrong way to do this.  How close together?  She settled on two feet apart–about the width she had used when planting perennials.

“I must be mad to do it,” she murmured, patting the last piece of turf.

Looking around, she saw that the soil looked undisturbed, as if she had done nothing, and wished that she had marked the sites.  It would be hard to dig up the stones again.  Perhaps she would never find them all.  But what did it matter?  She didn’t believe anything would happen–and if not, why were they important?  No, it was fine, whether she found them again or not.

The next day she stayed indoors, only once venturing to the beach to watch a rainstorm pelt the standing stones until they were black and glossy.  Then she returned to the house and took a shower, the hot water sluicing her back until she was relaxed and sleepy.

She thought of reading a book, but words had lost the meaning for her that they once had held.  What was the use of a story?  She had been in a story of happily-ever-after; then she had fallen out of it, as if the writer had excised her with a flood of ink.

The next day she saw a morning rainbow, and she took the fading vision as a lucky sign.  Wind blew away the clouds and rubbed the ocean against its nap, tossing foam.  Going to the cliff’s edge, she saw that the ground was still saturated, so wet that water had collected in a shallow depression.  Although on waking she had decided to dig up the stones, not wanting to lose them, she now planned to wait a day until the ground had dried.  That afternoon she walked for miles up the coast, stopping to visit pools of stars and anemones.  She came across the black belt, watching his class perform calisthenics, and she paused to examine the faces of the younger boys.

“Excuse me, do you remember–”

He swung around, a wiry, slightly bowlegged man with his hair in a ponytail.

“Do you remember a boy with seaweed–around his waist, I mean–he was very quick and light.  He followed you one day and imitated your class.”

The man gave a lopsided grin, shaking his head.

“I tried two or three times to catch that one!  He used to tease us, but I thought he would have been champion material, with a little training.”

“Have you seen him?  Recently, I mean.”

The class was doing push-ups now, while the surf frolicked to and fro, undermining their grip on land.

“No.  I don’t think I’ve seen him since last fall.  You know him?”

“He used to come and play and talk to me, when my husband was out of sight.  I just hoped nothing had happened to him.”

The instructor turned back to his class, perhaps disappointed to hear about her husband.  “If you find him, tell him to join my group and be a winner.  There’s a real spark to that one.”

“Perhaps he was afraid of you.  He called you the black man.”

Amused, his eyes flicked to her face.

“Like the devil, you mean?  I’ve got a reputation as a taskmaster, but that’s quite a distinction.”  His hand went to his throat, and she noticed a small Celtic cross and chain between his fingers.   “The black man.  What was the kid’s name, anyway?”

“He never had the same one twice.  I don’t think he ever told me a real name, or certainly not an ordinary one.”

“I wouldn’t worry about him.  He had the look of a kid who can take care of himself.  Say, about that husband of yours …  Are you happy with him?”

This seemed a difficult question, and Marsha puzzled it over in her mind for a second longer than confidence warranted.  The ramifications of it seemed more and larger than she would have guessed.  Was she content now, with what was left of him–that is, memories of three months, three weeks, three days?  Was she capable of living with the Jim that was absence and being at ease, perhaps not now but later?  Was he in any way still hers, or still a husband, though separated from her by time?  She wondered whether she seemed bereft and abandoned, to make this stranger ask such a question.

“Whenever I have been with Jim,” she said at last, “I have been happy.”  That much she was sure of.  The answer was no doubt clouded, but she felt it was the best she could do.

“I guess that’s–somehow I thought he might have run off–well, you know where to find me,” he said cheerily, jogging away from her and calling for the class to follow.

When she returned to the stairs in the late afternoon, she noticed that the cliff face was marked with long tearstains.  Drops plummeted from the lip, and, as she cocked her head to look, one splashed onto her forehead.  Checking the top, she noticed that the pool had not shrunk but rather had grown larger.  The vegetation was soaked and a brilliant green.  Moisture seeped, collecting in rivulets that inched toward the brink.

She supposed that it had rained more than she knew.  Inside the house, she curled by the big window overlooking the ocean and stared out.  She was hungry but didn’t feel like eating.  It was restful by the cool glass, with the waves wrinkling the sea’s surface and the shadows of the rocks growing long.  She took a sampler from the basket but pulled the needle through the fabric only once before letting it drop.  The long walk in the sea air had tired her.  Like a gradual tide, the night edged in, blurring the line between wakefulness and sleep.  In the morning she woke on the floor with her head pillowed on her arm.

Stumbling to the pantry, she took out a sack of coffee.  From the kitchen window she could see the moon to the southeast, hanging over North America in a tissue of clouds.  As if by magic, the veil turned red, and the crescent glowed a pale, bright sage.  She stared, drinking her coffee, until dawn yielded to the daylight.  Only then did she rummage in the freezer and find some waffles, eating them fresh out of the toaster with neither butter nor syrup.  Without Jim, she no longer had an interest in cooking, so it didn’t matter.  Nothing inside the house really held her notice; all she wanted was to go outside and wade in the surf and climb the rocks until she became weary.

Barefoot, she stood on the stone doorstep–blue and shaped like a child’s drawing of a cloud–and listened to a pattering.  The sound, so pleasurable and erratic in its notes, startled her.  When she went to look, Marsha found that the water could no longer be thought of as a large puddle.  Streamers of liquid splattered against the rock face, blown by the breeze.  Peering over, she saw that a stain of considerable size had spread over the sand.  All day the pool grew, until it was some yards wide and constantly spilling over the edge of the cliff.

“I wonder,” she said aloud, but left the thought unfinished.  Although cautious, she ventured close and finally stepped into the shallow circle.  The water felt as cold as a mountain spring.  “Maybe a coincidence.  Could you be coincidence,” she muttered, bending low and combing her hand through the low coastal plants to see if anything had surfaced from the ground.  Nothing:  nor were there cracks or perforations of any kind.  “If you’re not a coincidence, what then?  Should I feel worried, alarmed?  I’ve done something–what?”

By nightfall, a miasma tinged faintly blue hung over the pool, which was deeper and faster-flowing than before.  When she picked her way through its current, Marsha felt streams of bubbles flying against her ankles.  Kneeling and then crawling on the drowned plants, she felt her way across the cliff-top.

“Seven.  There are seven.  Like sand creatures buried by a wave and sending up bubbles.”  Her voice was muted by the fog that swirled slowly around her.  When she moved away, it seemed to settle in columns above the water.

And still she was not afraid.  She had no desire to drive off in Jim’s little blue sports car with his prescription sunglasses still stuck in the pocket of the visor.  Only when the moon rose and the stars came out did she begin to feel uneasy, alone under the zodiac with no one to see or to care what happened to her.  Her old friends were three thousand miles away, and only Jason and his wife and perhaps some of Jim’s other colleagues knew that she was staying in the beach house–those plus her mother-in-law, who hadn’t cared for the daughter so abruptly foisted on her.  She didn’t go inside, all the same, even when the mist over the pool thickened with dew and streams rushed from the ground and became a torrent, wallowing and then eddying at the base of the cliff until a finger of liquid trickled across the sand and vanished between stones, heading toward the sea.  In less than an hour, the waterfall had made a rutted course and now flung itself pell-mell from height to sand to stones, losing itself in the tide.  At once, with a whoosh!  the cliff emptied itself of liquid, the creek twisting in the air like a silver otter with a tail of mist, vanishing between the standing rocks.

Marsha, who had been kneeling on the damp ground, exhilarated by the strangeness and increasing force of the falls, got to her feet.  Her gaze was on the silvery track, winding across the sand.  The water was gone, diving into the sea and hiding itself.  The end was as mysterious as the beginning.  Going to the site where the pool had formed, she bent and looked closely at the surface in the moonlight.  Though the expanse appeared quite undisturbed and felt no more than ordinarily damp to her palm, the seven enhydritic stones were lying close together on top, as if she had never buried them.

She retrieved one after another, tucking them into the pocket of her cover-up, a clingy garment that had been a favorite of Jim’s.  It recalled the colors of the ocean, an aquamarine with streaks of darker blue and green.  The wind tousled her hair and cooled her flushed cheeks.  What to do?  In the house, she looked at herself in the mirror and turned away, momentarily frightened by the intensity of her own stare–a glittering in the eyes.  Out again, she left the door unlocked and slipped slowly down the cliff stairs, her hand on the rail.  It wouldn’t hurt to go halfway down and see what remained of the waterfall, the stain of its passage glistening by starlight.

The wind toyed with her hair, tickled her skin.  The night seemed heartbreakingly lovely, with an edge to its beauty that didn’t come from her memory of Jim’s loss or from her grief afterward.  Just now she seemed to have gone beyond that private sorrow.  Motionless in the sky or rocking on the mirror of the sea, the stars drew her thoughts away from self–a mote in the oceans of time and space.  Also infinite was the flux of waters that went on forever, wrapping round the globe, and the sadness that was in her like blood and bone seemed for once to be parceled out and shared with the tide and pulse of the sea and the outward-going stars, sailing toward the ever-retreating end of the universe.

A bat-like flittering caught at the corner of her vision.  She looked toward the upright stones, stabbed onto their flimsy shadows.

“Marsha!”

The boy leaped into a patch of light.

“Come down,” he called to her, and she ran down the steps to meet him.

“Thank God! I was afraid you were drowned–”

“Not me!  I’m a fish!  You remember; I’m a king of the fish.  The dolphins love me.  They’d never let me drown.”  He laughed, the pearls of his teeth flashing.  Shyly, he put his arm around her waist and smiled up at her.

“You’re taller–and where’s your seaweed?”

He glanced at the cloth knotted around his waist.  The fabric didn’t cover much more of him than the seaweed kilt had done, but lacked the impromptu air of his former guise.  “I’m older.  My brother said that I was too big to dash about the world naked.”

“Where have you been?”  Marsha touched his cap of hair, silky as ever, and her hand brushed against his jaw.  In the moonlight she could see the veins twining blue under his skin.

“Oh, around.”  He jigged in place, full of the irrepressible joy she remembered.

“I’m glad you came back,” she told him.

“Of course.  Why wouldn’t I?  And I knew you wished for me.”  Here he turned a cartwheel out of sheer excess of spirits.  “Besides, my brother wanted to see you again.  It’s still the same for him as last time.  Once we love, we love for keeps.”

Marsha watched as he fled through the standing stones, weaving in and out of the light.  In a few minutes he returned, skittering across the sands, and took her hand in his own.  The fingers had the same slight tackiness that she remembered from before.

“Jim–you know that he died last year, after we went home.  Did you know?”

The boy looked at her warily, without smiling.  “You know my mother died, didn’t you?”

“Yes, you told me.  I didn’t forget.”  She wanted to put her arms around him but was shy about it.  They felt useless, hanging at her sides.

“Well, that’s how I know about your husband.  You just told me.  I’m sorry, though.  He liked the stones.  We would have given him better ones this year.  My brother said that we should give him some from our–from where we live.”

“That would have been nice.  He would have liked them.”  This time she reached for his hand, and he let her take it.

“I wish nobody ever had to die,” he said in a low voice.  “My mother is the only one that I know who died.  And I don’t remember her.  Why did he?”

“A traffic accident–a truck hit him on the road and killed him.”

“I’ve seen those …  I knew he hadn’t drowned, or the fishes would have told me.”

He looked so matter-of-fact in this declaration that she laughed, lacing her fingers with his and letting him tug her across the sand, nearer to the waves that were steadily pouncing closer and closer to shore.  She had forgotten how peculiar a little being he was, with his stories about the sea and stones and his ignorance–fancy a child never having held a pincushion!  Or perhaps that was twenty-first century life, with clothes readymade in China and Mexico and Thailand.  That must be where all the pincushions had gone.  She wondered if the boy knew that China existed, and if he would let her teach him the things that he should have learned.  She believed he must never have gone to school …  What she saw after burying the enhydrites was pushed aside now, as if it hadn’t occurred at all.  The reality of the boy’s quick, dancing self overshadowed the past days and made them appear as insubstantial as dreams.  Even Jim was merely a shadow, and speaking of him hardly grazed her with sadness.

“You don’t believe me!  You’ll find out–” The boy smiled but not at her, glancing toward the sea.

If she hadn’t felt the stones pressing against her hip, she might never have thought of them.  But she took out the fingerlings one by one and then spilled the fistful into his hands.  He gave another secret smile and tucked them into the waistband of his garment–a short sarong, she thought it might be, if such a thing was worn by boys.  The stubby figures were pressed against his skin.  No, not figures, she remembered:  just stones.

“And I have something for you.  Close your eyes.”  He grasped her hands, pushing them into the shape he wanted.  Something hard skimmed her palm, then flopped onto its side.

“Oh–”

It was a cord and pendant, the latter like the one around the boy’s neck:  that is, transparent, circular, perforated in the center, incised with what he had called runes.  Chambers of water were trapped inside, several of them holding minute flakes.

Marsha held the necklace at arm’s length, staring at the ocean through the hole.  It seemed that she could make out four or five figures in the water, unless they were merely rocks, jutting up from the sea floor.  As she moved the stone slowly across her field of vision, she saw something else:  the figure of a man, leaning from a jagged perch.  She could tell no more from that starlit distance except that he appeared muscular, with fair hair.

“Here, bend down and I’ll put it on you.”

She didn’t give up the pendant for several more moments, staring until she knew that she could learn nothing more.

“Did you see my brother?”  He tugged at the string to make sure it was tied well, afterward lifting the pendant to look at the runes.

“I suppose so.”  She felt a blankness, the sort of bewilderment one feels at the top of a stairs, realizing that the reason for ascending has been left entirely behind.  Marsha shivered; a breeze had sprung up.  She looked back at the steps and the cliff, with its stain that still marked where the waterfall had flung drops against earth.  In a few minutes she would go to the house and sleep, and in the morning she would find the boy and ask him to go away with her.  She could adopt him; she might even name him after Jim.

The crisp incisions on the hoop of stone pressed their messages against her skin.

“What do these signs mean?”

“It’s hard to say.  It’s like a song.  See, here’s the sign for air, just under the one for water.  See?  Air under water.”  He touched each with his fingertip, rubbing lightly.  “This one is a binding or a blessing, see, right next to heart.  Here’s fish; here’s woman.  There’s healing in it, and reviving, and protection in childbirth.  And long life, too.”

“That’s a lot.”  She twisted the cord nervously in her fingers.  In the morning.

She would go away with the boy in the morning.  “You seem older this year,” she said, a little sadly.

“My brother made me learn things.  Not just the runes.  But I skip off where he can’t find me whenever I want.  I’m a king too.  He can’t make me.”

“And what do you call yourself?  Today, I mean.”  She remembered the jumble of names, ending in Sad.  Perhaps he would be happy now.

“Tonight I’m Merlin.  Mer, that’s the sea.”

“And a merlin is a bird–”

“A falcon who stoops to catch a silver fish!”  The boy whirled, his arms lifted into wings and his hands gripping the air like claws.

“Yes, and a wizard who was a seer–”

“I’m a seer too.  I see and see and see,” he declared, ending with a somersault.

“What do you see?  Do you see my future?”  She asked but he wouldn’t or couldn’t tell, so she lifted the pendant to her eye like a monocle.  The swimmers bobbing in the waves were gone, but the man was still musing on his rock.  Wind lifted his long hair.  The skin at his throat and on his chest looked bluish.  Maybe that was a trick of the moonlight, though.

“Did I tell you that the black man asked about you?  He wanted you to learn karate …”

The boy let out a peal of merriment.  “He’ll never catch me!  Not so long as I have legs to run.  I would swipe off his head with my sword arm.  You hear him talking?  Draw arm, sword arm, all that, and there’s not a blade or scabbard in sight.  He’s a fool who fights the mist.”

Back in the city there would be things that he could learn.  Perhaps he could take lessons–he was quick and bright, he would be good in fencing or any of the martial arts.  At first he would need a tutor for school.

“I must go inside now,” she told him.  “But you’ll come see me tomorrow, won’t you?  We can sit and talk all day, and maybe you could come back to the city with me in Jim’s car?”

What a rubber face!  She suppressed her laugh.  He had contracted his brow, squinting at her, and now said only, “traffic accidents,” as if that settled the issue.

“Tomorrow, we’ll talk about it then,” she insisted; “I need to rest.”

“But I wanted you to meet my brother,” he said.  “Look, we’re already at the ocean, and he’s just right there.  Come on.”  His grasp had a surprising firmness, and she exclaimed as he tugged on her arm.

She stumbled at the edge of the water, going down on one knee.  He stopped and waited as she stood up but didn’t offer to help.

“A little ways–can’t he come here?”  She was breathing fast, nervous and–she now admitted it to herself–afraid.  A chill flashed over her as she remembered strewing Jim’s ashes.  His atoms were now the sea’s, his death swallowed and spread on the currents.

“What’s the matter?”  The boy looked at her, frowning.

“I want to go home.”  She was trembling, not just from the cold.  When she lifted the pendant and glanced through it, she saw that the figure had moved from the rock and was chest-high in ocean, moving gently up and down with the rhythm of the waves.

The boy was determined, pulling her in the water, teasing and laughing at her fear, vowing that she would soon see his brother face to face.  She had the sensation that they weren’t alone, that others were close around them, urging them on, taking her by the hand, pushing against the force of the waves.  Along this portion of the coast, the floor dropped away quickly, and soon she felt helpless, riding on the swells, her legs dangling.  When she lifted the necklace again, she saw with a shiver that the boy’s elder brother was swimming swiftly in their direction.  As he came closer, she glimpsed his face, strong-jawed and bold in its contours.  In a few more moments, he was close beside her, so that she could only catch glimpses of him through the lens of the stone.  These quick angular snapshots frightened her more than ever, because something about him was not right–not just the blue and turquoise flush to the skin but the whole muscularity of him, the too-handsome, chiseled face, and the irises of the eyes that were cool but radiant like two pieces of sagenite set in sockets of stone.

The boy was laughing at his own success.  Marsha gripped his shoulder, pinching him tight, as the brother drew her toward him.  They each had her by a hand, and for an instant she was drawn against the man and felt the muscular hardness of him along the length of her body.  She cried out, and water filled up her mouth with its murmuring.

A jogger in a black gi was leaping through the surf.  He heard the sharp note of distress and stopped, staring at the sea.

From the shore, all that could be seen was a slight disturbance in the water, over in an instant.  The swells became smooth.  Waves kept pushing their freight of sand and weed to the shore, reflecting the upraised sickle of the moon and a harvest of starlight.

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