Mallory glides over polished oak floors, calling her brother’s name. But what is missing from this sonata? Some whoosh, some clatter. A yellow butterfly dances in the front yard, tracing in backward hops and loops its doomed crusade against the wind. Her father is away, surfing some coquina reef, her mother on a quest for groceries.Ĭabbage palms flail east. Listen: the stormswell attacks the beach: thunder made operatic by distance. She has the same heart-shaped face, same Cherokee cheekbones as her mother. The mother turns round to look, but sees only lilac clouds glued on the low sky, the water like hammered gold.įresh from her bath, ponytail darkening the back of her shirt, Mallory arranges the plumeria in the bowl with zen precision, plipping them in stem-first so the pink and yellow petals overlap spiralwise. “What’s that face?” the mother says when the little girl ejects over the top of a wave. They wade out through warm lace, toss their boards down, swim into bands of white, lattices of rainbow. “Swell’s not going to hit until the afternoon.”Ĭhase is already kneeling at his board, scraping wax over his deck with rapid strokes. “Isn’t it too big out there?” Mallory says. He lays them by the pool: gleaming crafstman’s pieces, hand-shaped tints of coke-bottle blue, malachite green, ripe persimmon. The father is thumping down the beach––bald, shoulders tufted, monkish, three surfboards balanced on his head. When your feet feel really light, you test the air in little hopping jumps, and then, when you’re ready…”Ĭhase’s head snaps to attention. You get running with the wind, like you’re paddling for a wave. “You have to start on the ground,” she says. “I thought if I jumped out a window, maybe.
“Flying? I never fly in my dreams.” Chase plunges his fists into silt and bubbles. “I was flying over the Montessori playground.” She is watching her mother levitating over water. The swell’s fury is still a few hours from this coast, but the little girl can sense it with an animal prescience, like the seagull that bends suddenly landward but cannot divine why.Ĭhase––tanned, towheaded, awkwardly muscled, jointed in the way of a young macaque––stuffs his shovel into the sand. Mallory’s eyes––Cherokee eyes, lambent as black tea––strain to the belt of darkest water, to the place where dream monsters glide white-eyed in the abyss.Ī storm brews in the Sargasso: witch cauldron, twists of Saharan sand, hooded troops launched shoreward. She scans the wind-rippled sea for her mother… afloat somewhere on the breathing hills, out past white ropes, a blonde speck on a sky-blue board. This is the musical simplicity that appeals to her: the chunch of her brother’s spade, the whisper of the ocean shallows, the sizzle and lash of the shorepound. Mallory, elfin-eared, eleven, sits squinching her brown toes in the delicious warmth of the bottom sand. Chase works the edge of the pool with the shovel, sweat plinking from the tips of his hair, chittering out the perpetual monologue of the eight-year-old boy.
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