(My list, if you're wondering, in no particular order: Parlee/Rissers/Brackley/Chapin/Queensland and more recently Chesterman/Cannon/South Edison. Google each one with beach tacked on and you'll see where I grew my soul, and to this day I still love them more in the rain.)
Before the boys, before the midway, before the circus, before Jake, before even Lochlan and Caleb and Christian and Cole there was just me.
I was always small for my age. Always running to catch up, always teetering on my tiptoes to see everything that everyone else could squarely gaze at, always jumping up to catch the ball/get in the bed of the truck/hit the pinata/reach the box of cookies on the third shelf from the top in the pantry.
Always playing alone. I didn't like Bailey's friends. I had already moved away from Andrew and everyone else teased me because I was so small, because I couldn't read things in English, because I called things by funny names, I foundered for words constantly and because when I don't smile I look perpetually like I'm going to cry, people tended to approach me with concern and then melt away when they realized everything was fine.
Was it fine? I don't know. I was too young to decide.
When it rained I would put on my red rubber boots and my red raincoat with the plastic snaps and the giant hood and I would go out into the brook where the backyards met and I would watch the water so intently. It was never a beach day when it rained. My family only went when they could bake themselves golden and me, always red and then and only then would we come home. I craved the beach when it rained, empty and barren, the drops leaving strange patterns in the sand, seagulls muted, canteen boarded up, parking lot empty. Something I saw only on the weeks where we would move to the beach to live on vacations.
The big beaches are the best ones, with miles of sand to walk on, room for everyone, and full facilities. Outdoor showers. Fast food. Ice cream. Boardwalks and cutting sea grass, dunes to lose yourself in and sandbars for days. As a child I have walked out into the part of the world where it curves and then turned only to see tiny people on the beach and not know which ones were my sister or my dad. I didn't understand why no one came calling for me, if I was out too far, if anyone even noticed I was gone.
Where are you going? Bailey smirked when I had pointed to the empty horizon.
That's France so I'm going there. Tell them I won't be home for dinner.
I scratch my shoulder, now tender and beginning to blister and turn and keep walking. I walk until the water is up to my neck and swirling strongly around my ankles far underneath, until I begin to see darker parts where seaweed grows in plants anchored into the ocean floor, not floating randomly in where the surf meets the shore and only then do I turn back and walk a straight line back to where I started. Sometimes the water is up to my knees. Sometimes it's almost dry. Seven sandbars. Eight. Nine. Eleven. Finally I'm back to the crowds and I scan the blankets and sandcastles and sunshades and then I see my grandmother's oldest quilt, my mom stretched out reading a book, my dad maybe gone off to find food, Bailey at eleven broiling herself in dark tanning oil, the older sister doing it right. I stand there and look at them and then I ask,
What happens to the ocean when it rains?
It gets more dangerous. That's why we only come here when it's sunny.
I take off my red rubber boots and step into the brook. I've cleared the rocks and leaves and branches to make the bottom bare but it's still muddy. It squishes up between my toes and I close my ears. The wind rustles through the trees but I can barely hear it for the burbling noise of the water as it flows down through the neighborhood to come out of the big pipe by the highway, or so I imagine because I'm not old enough to follow it to the end.
No, it's not the same.
That night at dinner my dad tells us we're moving, that he's bough a house for us in a really nice neighborhood in a different town, closer to a big city, that the street we'll be living on has lots of kids, and has a path at the end that goes through the woods to a baseball field and a park, that it's really nice.
I never stepped into the brook again.
Is it closer to the beach?
Yes. But a different beach.
I never thought to ask if the kids in the neighborhood would be nicer. Or if my family would pay attention to me if I went to far just because we lived in a new house in a new neighborhood. I never asked if we could find all the plastic fish from the little fishing rod set I had for the brook that swallowed all the pieces the first day I tried it out before we leave, just in case.
I just thought to myself, when we live in the new town, I'm going to the beach when it rains.
Instead I met the boys and everything was vastly different after that.
