It began with a cough. Her brother had a cough. And, after all, what was a cough? They had all had them. In winter, they passed them around like sweets. Enough coughing meant no school. Although sometimes we sent them off anyway—risking a call from the school nurse, who only half the time would be convinced by our pleading that it was nothing—so that a few more hours might elapse before the apartment filled with their books and the paper wrappers from their snacks.
But now it was August, and we were at the beach. All winter we dreamed of the house, with its blue floors, the tiny periscope hole in the roof, the red chairs, the rickety porch with its view of the bay. The children turned brown. It was hot. The sea was flat. At low tide, a little pool appeared, and a sandbar, and she, the youngest at three, stood on tiptoe in the water, screeching when an inch-high wave hit. "I think the water's actually cold," she ran to tell us. "No, I think it's actually warm." We sat by the edge in our low beach chairs, the same chairs that used to embarrass us when our parents brought them to the beach. Why do we have so much stuff? we would ask them, eager to be free of it all, of the towels and swimsuits and bottles of juice and fruit, imagining ourselves alone on an empty stretch of beach, naked, with a rucksack. Now we're the ones who unload the car and carry the heaviest bags.
She's so little we let her run naked, even though we have learned that turning brown is bad. We are careless, self-indulgent, to let her do it. By late afternoon, the sun has slipped behind the enormous high dunes, and blue shadows lap at the water. When she comes up from the edge, she is shivering. Her older sisters and brother and their friends are far out in the waves, on their boogie boards and surfboards, unidentifiable in their black wetsuits. We keep track by counting. One, two, three, four, five, six. Is that Anna? We ask each other. Do you see Nick? There's Rose. "Come in now! Come in!" we scream at them, our arms making huge pinwheels so they will pay attention. It is easy for them to pretend they don't see us.
During the night, she coughs on and off, and wakes once. The wind on the bluff pounds the house. In the morning, it is hot and blue again. We get to the beach after lunch, but the sun is still high. From the top of the dune, shielding our eyes, we look for the cluster of bright umbrellas that mark the colony of our friends. They hail us. The older children jump like seals into the waves and swim out to their pals. She stays by the edge. Today, there is another child her age, but she's cranky and won't play. It's too much sun, she didn't sleep, we explain to the other child's parents, chagrined. Secretly, we're annoyed: why won't she just play nicely? The younger children are fooling around with the surfboard, and she wants to try. A wave rears up suddenly, a dragon, foaming at the mouth, she's hurled underwater and onto the sand. Everyone races to help. How can we have allowed this to happen? This is appalling! She is young, much too young for these high jinks. She comes up sputtering. What kind of parents are we? Until someone else makes a mistake, our reputation is shaken.
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