The Beachcomber's Guide

The Beachcomber’s Guide is the first thing I see, the anchor to the past.

We walk into the cottage, and I'm hit with memories of childhood. Running barefoot on the toast-colored boards, a feathered path worn down the middle of the front room, long imprinted from sprinting off the beach to the kitchen, ignoring Anna’s call to wash the sand off our feet, because we were only grabbing another soda or an extra bucket, and how much sand could possibly be deposited onto the floor in such a mad rush? (The answer: a lot.)

“We’re here,” I tell Anna now, and the familiar shine in her sea-green eyes comes to life. I glance at Brad, hopeful despite the fragility of Anna, who is wandering the front room on the worn path like she should be, as if her body is remembering even if her mind is not.

The room is virtually unchanged, and this brings a lump to my throat. When I asked Caden to take up residence for this summer, I hadn’t expected much. I just needed to keep the utilities on and the house running until school ended and I could bring Anna home. A college student and three buddies seemed like a recipe for tenant disaster in this house, which felt like a time-stopped relic, every single detail a precious memory. I was expecting hints of Caden’s friends—a pungent stench of beer and the scent of almost-men, a smell I knew well, having grown up with two brothers. But there was no sticky coffee table, no overflowing dumpster in the backyard, which was a square of meager grass mixed with sand and oyster shells. No one ever went there, why would we? On the other side of the cottage was the ocean--nature's most glorious playground.

Caden had done good! He had removed all the signs of his summer stay; surfboards and giant flip-flops and the tower of empty cans that I recall seeing in the background of our video chats. The kitchen was wiped clean, I saw, as I ran my fingers over the counter like a butler searching for dust. I opened the ancient Westinghouse, hearing its familiar groan and bracing myself for spoilage, but it, too, was wiped clean. I felt a rush of love for my crazy younger brother and imagined this was how parents feel when their children finally began to grow up.

I turn back and I see Anna ease down in her familiar lime-green armchair, the cracked rattan ottoman just waiting for her feet, and Bradley and I hold our breath as she settles back. This is going to work; I just know it. Anna swivels the chair around, her eyes becoming locked towards the sea. There is a dune and waving beach grass blocking the view, but beyond that the ribbon of gray where the sky meets the water is visible. Anna’s breath catches.

“Oh, wow,” she says. “Can we go to the beach?”

“Of course,” I say. She hasn’t noticed The Beachcomber’s Guide, and in my excitement, I pick it up and show it to her.

“We can look for shells?” I say, making it seem like a question, an option out of the blue. I fan the book, inhaling the musty, salty smell the pages have absorbed, years and molecules of beach energy over time. But Anna doesn’t seem particularly interested in the book.

“Okay,” she says, in that absent way that has become familiar, her pale eyes becoming vacant. I can tell, when I look at her, that she is aware that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, or who she’s with, or who she even is in some moments, and that it bothers her. We try to avoid this scenario, because the only thing worse than seeing Anna with no memory of herself is to see her mourning it. To watch sorrow take over her face, punctuated by glimmers of fear, followed by a stubborn stance that seems to say, I’m not going to let these people know how frightened I am.

That is why I’m so adamant that we can bring her back. Because of that stubborn streak. Because she sometimes looks at me like she wants to tell me she’s inside there somewhere, lost and scared, but she won’t say it. If the Anna I grew up with was afraid of anything, she never let us know.

The peeling pea-green screen door bangs behind us in that conversant way, one loud and three softer claps, until it's springs decide to rest. Anna follows Bradley, her feet instantly remembering how to walk over the dunes as she kicks her shoes off without me telling her to. I grab a stray bucket off the porch and toss The Beachcomber’s Guide into it.

As we summit the dune, I am overwhelmed, as I will forever be, by the majesty of the ocean. It’s early fall, warm and languid, and the waves are quiet today, the water devoid of surfers. The beach, too, is nearly empty save for the occasional couple walking a dog in the distance, so far away we’ll never catch them, even if we wanted to.

When I was a kid, my friends were always envious of my summers at the shore. While they were stuck in water-less mid-state North Carolina, I was transported with my brothers to the Outer Banks to live with my childless aunt for the summer. My parents, high school teachers, spent their summers chaperoning groups of students on international trips—Europe, Costa Rica, Greece. They craved these adventures, dreamt of the time when we’d be old enough to tag along, but when that time came, we were already beach kids for life. There was zero interest for any of us to travel across the ocean when we could live at the ocean.

“It must be like nothing for you,” said my friend Denise, one summer when her parents allowed her to stay with us for a few weeks. “Like, its normal to just look out your bedroom window and there’s the beach.”

“Yup,” I said, pride swirling around my aunt and her very beachy cottage where anything went, where we stayed up late and slept in as long as we wanted and spent the day doing whatever our hearts desired. If you existed on Pringles and Coke for a week, no problem. If we forgot sunscreen and ended up burnt...oh well. Sure, there were rules about safety—particularly by the water—but for the most part summer at the beach with Anna was a paradise of freedom.

But I had lied to Denise just a bit. That sense of wonder each time I tromped up the dune path and skittered down the side again, the ocean and—seemingly, the whole world--opening up to me, never became any less glorious.

In the mornings, Anna would go for her collection walks, The Beachcomber’s Guide tucked into her fanny pack, a mesh bag for her treasures slung around her body. Anna was beautiful in the way that lifers at the beach are: caramel skin, bleached hair unkempt and wavy, her body strong and lithe from a lifetime of surfing. Even as teens, we would try to get up early at least a few times each summer to go on these walks with our aunt. There was just something holy about the beach in the morning, the sun intensifying from behind the horizon, the sky unfolding to reveal a day that held infinite possibilities.

Anna was a local artist, and her creations of sea glass décor were widely renowned. She had an uncanny ability to spot the glass in a shell bed of tiny rocks and broken clams, and it was always a competition between my brothers and I to see if we could one-up her on these walks. We never came close.

When it came to anything besides sea glass, The Beachcomber’s Guide would come out of Anna’s fanny pack, the pages frayed and water stained, and we would look up whatever we'd picked up: sand dollars or shells or driftwood or starfish or mussels. It was such a simple ritual—we’d stop, look it up, read about it, and then throw it back in the sea. We rarely kept anything, and we looked everything up so many times that I—and my brothers and certainly Anna—could recite The Beachcomber’s Guide from start to finish. We did not need to look up seaweed or gastropods—we knew what they were. But there was something sanctified about the find, about the pause in the morning. About the flipping to the page where we knew the grainy black and white photo and short description of an olive shell would be. Like people in church, singing the same hymns. We knew what the words would be, but hearing Anna’s voice read them repeatedly was a balm for the soul.

I could use that balm now, I think, watching Bradley arm in arm with Anna. He looks giant next to her, a full-grown man, and I suddenly miss Caden tremendously. Caden, with his wild, youngest-child mischief, my brother who brought out the fervent energy of childhood, so desperately needed in this very adult time of my life.

Bradley had always been Anna’s favorite. She would claim otherwise, but he was her surfing prodigy, and later, partner. While Caden and I built sandcastles and bodysurfed all day, Bradley was learning the language of the ocean from Anna. He was a natural in a way Caden and I were not, and at the end of the summer, when my parents would come down for the final week to collect us, their shock each year reflected how talented Bradley was.

“It’s almost like he’s your child, Anna,” my mother said every year, the easy banter with her sister a smokescreen that covered the chasm between them. I think, sometimes, that my mother wanted her freedom to travel the world on the school’s dime, but she still harbored jealousy at how close we were with Anna. Anna certainly wanted us every summer, but there was a hint of judgment for my parents, who were so quick to cast us off.

I’m not sure I noticed this as a child, but I did as an adult. After the initial aftermath of Anna’s accident, when her fate was uncertain, my mother drifted back out of the picture. Once it was clear Anna was going to live, she backed away.

“I trust you,” is what she said to me. At the time, I was 25 years old. Now, as I trail Bradley and Anna, I am a whopping 26. I am way too young to be making decisions about the health and care of my aunt, who should be gearing up for another winter at the beach, working on her art and putting to use a year’s worth of collected sea glass. She’s supposed to spend next spring visiting the local galleries with a truckful of inventory and then preparing for summer. Even though we’re grown now, we come back in the summers as we can. Bradley works remotely. I, following in my parents’ footsteps as a teacher, had solely picked that profession for the perk of summers off. Caden, a junior at NC State, had planned to spend whole summers of college life here.

He just hadn’t planned to spend it without Anna.

It was classified as a ‘freak’ accident. Like when someone misses a step and trips and lands in a way that paralyzes them for life instead of just a regular old ankle sprain. Or when a tree randomly falls on a walking trail and crushes someone. It hadn’t even been a particularly wild day on the water, not like one might imagine. The waves were just so-so when Bradley and Anna decided to head out, just after dawn.

I had been sleeping, along with Caden. It was a rare week when all three of us were free at the same time, and thus far it had been spectacular. High-seventies—which was mild for August—solid blue skies, lazy winds. The patchy clouds that rolled in each afternoon lent themselves to sunsets of shocking orange and pink, visible over the sound from the widow’s walk at the top of the cottage. We had spent the week idling about, walking the shell beds, drinking copious amounts of wine, and just enjoying the magic of our little slice of heaven.

Later, Bradley would be stunned. He didn’t know what happened. No one did. There were others in the water, and they all said the same thing: the waves were tame. There wasn’t much action. The people walking on the beach said they weren’t even aware of the missing surfer until they realized, through the great distance and the sound of the surf, that Bradley’s calls were ones of distress. Was she pulled under by some sort of riptide? That seemed unlikely, Anna knew the ocean like she knew The Beachcomber’s Guide. Tests were done to see if she had suffered a stroke or a heart attack, but no culprit was found. It was eventually concluded that she must have struck her head against something—whether it was her board or a floating piece of debris, no one could say. When she woke, she could count to a hundred and walk and talk and she knew all the planets and the seven continents.

But she could not name us. She had no long-term memory, it seemed. The doctors predicted it would be temporary, and a stint in rehab would do the trick. This was when my mother backed away, and I took the lead, my brothers right behind me.

But rehab hadn’t done the trick. I was certain that the hospital and the rehab facility in Virginia were not where she needed to be, but getting her to the beach was tricky, logistically, with all of us in school or at work. As the one-year mark neared, talk of insurance caps and nursing homes—nursing homes!—started taking place. It didn’t seem that ‘a stint in rehab’ was the antidote for Anna.

“Bradley, we have to take her home. Just for a few days. If she sees her place, and the ocean, and feels the sand in her toes…it will bring her back.”

Bradley, more inclined to believe in doctors than I, had still agreed.

“But if it doesn’t,” he warned me gently, “We have to come up with a long-term plan. You understand that?” His big-brother voice was both scary and reassuring.

And so here we were. Caden had moved back to school, but he’d drive in over the weekend. We’d all be here, and the weather forecast was phenomenal.

I jog a bit to catch up to Bradley and Anna, who are both motoring along in their athletic bodies just like they always have. They are quiet, and then Anna stops. She bends down and picks up a plain old scallop shell, white and orange, fully intact save for one broken edge.

“Pretty,” she muses, and catches my eye. “Do you know what it is?”

I grab the book out of my bucket. “Should we look it up?” I say excitedly, catching Bradley’s eye.

“It’s a scallop shell,” she tells me, abandoning the forgotten ritual before I can even let my fingers open the book. “Very common.” She can’t remember our names or lifelong habits, but she knows what kind of shell it is. She turns and tosses it back to the sea, just like we always have.

“Can we go back to that house now?” she asks me. “I’m tired.”

“It’s your house,” I remind her gently, as I have about twenty times since we left the rehab facility. “Of course we can.”

“Oh yeah,” she says, offering a little laugh to hide her embarrassment, which gives me hope. The old Anna would have done that. I link my arm with hers and Bradley looks away. He gazes over the water and I can see the movement of his throat, the lines on his brow as he blinks back tears. He doesn’t think this will work, but she threw the shell back, didn’t she? She knows she should know this house, her home. It will work. It has to.

Back at the cottage, storm clouds are brewing. I ask her if she wants to head up to the widow’s walk, the lightning in the distance promising a great electrical show.

“Sure,” she tells me, sitting back down in her green swivel chair, spinning back and forth.

But the storm never materializes, and Anna seems content looking over the dunes. Bradley says he needs to lay down, so I walk up and climb out onto the widow’s walk alone. In the distance, the black sky turns blue again, although the wind stays steady where I am. On the beach, I see surfers appearing. With the threat of lightning over, they come out in droves.

Behind me, I hear footsteps, and I realize Anna has followed me.

“No lightning,” I say. “Look.” I gesture to the surfers, black dots on the beach, a rainbow of boards at their sides, watching the waves for the perfect entry point.

“Oh!” Anna says, leaning down on the railing and cupping her hand over her eyes. “That looks like fun!”

I stare at her for a minute, sorrow welling so deeply I fear I might drown. She is so delicate, and I imagine we are up here together years ago, excitedly waiting for whatever we might see.

Anna turns, smiles tentatively, beautifully.

 “Whose house is this again?”