Originally published in “The Battered Suitcase” (Vagabondage Press)

This one isn’t like the others we’ve seen. No palms, no birds, but the waves are enormous.
No people, no hotels, just the curving expanse of this brown sand, the same brown as the
sky and the dry, leafless trees. The air has a sweet, spicy smell: grass baked for months in
the sun, grass that has almost forgotten it was ever green, grass that even the jaunty cows in
the inland fields won’t eat. Grass the color of the iguanas that dart over the sand, flickers of
movement on this crashing desert beach.

And then there are the shells, those little empty homes. The whorls, the cracks, the
crevices, the spirals, the shells that resemble bodies, the shells that resemble flowers. These
are the ones we find in Guanacaste, Costa Rica: broken conch, white as bone. Smooth
speckled cowries, ridged mollusks, whelks. Delicate cones. Slender olives, the exact color of
my skin. A single, near-perfect sand dollar, thick at the center and thin as paper at the
edges, and printed with lines, that dead body’s map. We pass clusters of snail shells, and
then none for many steps. The smallest, whitest shells are round like moons. If you kneel
down and look close, you’ll see that these shells, shattered by the sea, have made the sand;
in your hand you can hold a million pieces—pink, blue, black, silver, white.

And so the beach isn’t brown; it’s a rainbow, a millennia of shards.

My mother and I pluck the shells we like best from the sand so that soon both of our
pockets are bulging. We try not to let my dad notice; he hates when we go on trips and then
cart things home: shells, stones, pine cones, nuts, leaves. Why do you need all that stuff? He
always asks. You women. And so my mother tells me he doesn’t have to know about the
shells, four Styrofoam cups full so far, that she hides under the hotel bed and will seal in zip
lock bags and stash in the luggage just before we check out. He’ll never have to know, she
tells me now as we stroll the beach, and she wipes the swirling skeleton of a smashed conch
on her shorts and slips it into her pocket.

We walk and walk, and finally the still, brown heat is unbearable, and I just have to
get in the water, I tell my parents, or else I am going to die. Until now, the ocean has seemed
unappealing, better to look at than go in, with the water that’s brown with swirling sand,
and the rock formations that are revealed at low tide. But I don’t care; I’m sweating, these
shells are weighing me down, and the water is right there, so salty and cool. I’ll be careful.

I wade in; it takes a long time to get waist-deep. When I turn back, I see that my
father has followed me in; he steps gingerly towards me, towards the rising waves. The
bottom is all sand here, and as I pick my way deeper I start to trust the water more and
more. The waves feel so good, the way they lift me off the ocean floor, splashing in my hair
and onto my skin, cooling me down. My father and I stumble in until the water almost
reaches our shoulders, and then we ride the waves as they crest, in and out, swimming
against the current, getting water in our mouths. We can see my mother, standing on the
shore and shading her eyes with her hand. The waves come; we jump to keep our heads
above them.

I return to the shore, but my father stays in the water. I squeeze out my hair, put on
my cap, and then I watch him swimming there, letting the waves lift his body up and then
set it down again. He is twenty-seven, he is sixteen, he is five. He jumps when the waves
come, he paddles out and rides them in, he lets the water push him around. He is all alone
in that ocean; no birds, just the shells, the hot wind, the cool and blessed spray. He is only
thinking about those waves, the one that will come next, the one that will come after that,
the big one that he can see in the distance.

*

At night, we eat dinner and then walk out onto the beach to look at the water. The
tide is at its lowest point now. Again, my mother waits while my dad and I walk to where
the waves lap and cross over each other. It takes a long time to reach them; the water has
sunk so low since morning. The beach is empty, and even though the resort, with its lighted
pool and its lighted rooms, is right behind us, we are able to see so many stars. The Big
Dipper is to the north and upside down. There is Sirius, my father says. It’s the brightest
star in the sky. We silently admire the Milky Way, set low and bright and cresting the sky.
We clasp our hands behind our backs and inhale. Here are the waves, lit at their
edges by phosphorescence. Here is the Pacific Ocean before us. I am twenty-seven, I am
sixteen, I am five: I am standing in the dark water with my father, looking out.