Read After This for Free Online

spent.
     
He called to them. “Come up,” he said against the wind. “Your
mother wants you up.”
     
The wall of sand the sea had made, the cliff, the collapse, seemed
smaller now with their father standing on top of it, his hair raised in
the wind. They scaled it quickly, in wide strides, their arms pumping.
     
He put his hand out to his daughter, pulled her up easily over the
edge. And then bent to gather the shoes and toys, swinging the canvas
straps of the two toy machine guns over his shoulder (surprised to
find that some mistaken memory had caused him—momentarily—to
be surprised to find they had no weight). Jacob,
     
the oldest, ran to retrieve the cardboard lid while Michael, his brother,
lifted the shoe box, shifting the contents—green army men, toy
bayonets, machine gun, camouflaged jeeps—taking roll.
     
With his thumbs hooked over the lid, the boy carried the box up
the beach, behind his father and brother and sister, feeling the drag of
sand but feeling, too, that with a small effort he could overtake them.
     
Their mother stood at the base of the dunes, her hands seeming
to cup her broad face as she waited for them.
     
“Back here,” their father said. “We’ll be out of the wind.” And
once more gave his wife his arm. The children ran before them, the
boys running up and down the sides of the dunes, sand slipping, as if
they had no choice in the matter, as if the world itself were tilting, the
little girl imagining shipwrecked and island-lost, and only her father’s
cleverness (there were guns slung over his shoulder) to keep them
safe and warm.
     
The plaid blanket was already spread in a gap between the dunes,
the tufted pillow on it, the lunch hamper, and the teddy bear who had
not been lost, not drowned in the wreck, after all. She threw her arms
around it, an extravagant reunion. “If it weren’t for me,” her mother
said dryly, smiling, “you would have left him behind in the car.”
     
Too soon to eat, they agreed, and her husband gallantly gave her
his hand again as she lowered herself to the blanket, first onto her
knees and then, carefully, onto the pillow. Straightening himself, he
palmed the football like a younger man and called the boys to follow
him out to the beach.
     
She leaned back on her palms, the wool prickly against her skin
and already dusted with sand.
     
There was the now oddly distant knock of the waves against
themselves and the softer yet similar sound of the football meeting
their hands. There was her husband’s voice, Go out, now, Keep
your eye on it, Good, and the voices of the boys, mostly complaining:
My turn, Hey, Interference. The ball a kind of shadow passing before
her, between them, across the sun itself or so it seemed.
     
Annie, her daughter, had claimed the corner of the blanket, sitting
perversely, her mother thought, with her back to the ocean and to her
father and the boys on the windy beach. The worn bear (cherished
now that she had recalled its existence) on her lap. She was not
speaking, but her lips moved and her eyes were clearly engaged in a
conversation of some sort—she frowned, she shook her head—and
despite the echo of the ocean falling down on itself, the slap of the
football in their hands, and their voices, carried on the wind, it was
this conversation as it played like light across her daughter’s features
(she raised her eyes, made them smile) that absorbed the mother’s
attention.
     
Mary Keane watched her daughter and felt as well the punch and
turn of the baby not yet born and saw the similarity of the mystery of
them both—the baby unseen, moving an elbow or a foot, the means to
an end all its own, unfathomable; her daughter with the unseen life
playing like reflected light over her face, her lips moving in a
conversation forever unheard.
     
She slipped her hand under her belly, shifted her weight on the
pillow, and looked up to see the boys returning, windblown, kicking