the sound

I am a forest person, but my richest memories have been formed on the shore. I grew up there, feet numbed to the rocky northern coastline, face salty, lungs stiff from seawater, hair bleached white from the sun. As a child, my mother shared stories of her youth – summers spent on a similar slice of shore, away from the city heat, in the 1950s when eastern Long Island was just on the verge of development. I would trace my fingers across square black and white photographs as I listened, faded pictures of twin girls standing in the sand, the same tousled hair as I would have three decades later after long days watching the tide ebb and flow, after building sand tunnels and trapping jellyfish, after warm, gritty peanut butter sandwiches and sunburnt shoulders.

My aunt died of cancer at forty-nine. Before her battle ended, back when she was still in her apartment on West 84^th, when I was still walking across town to help with groceries and late-night trips to the hospital, we took a walk. We hobbled past Zabar’s and Fairway, and then, tired, she asked to rest by the river. We sat together quietly at first, and then she talked about family. She spoke of dying. She told me that her greatest fear was being forgotten.

My father called the morning before her death to tell me it was time. By then, she had moved in with them, her hospital bed in our den, and later, in hospice. I remember the train ride east from Penn Station, the rush of the city disappearing, swallowed by suburbs, the blur of fall foliage.

After her last breath, after our goodbyes and the grieving and relief, once the night wrapped around us, I climbed into my mother’s car and drove down to the shore in the darkest of darkness. At the turnoff from North Country, I shut off the headlights, moving fast and blindly, steering only by the feel of the curves. I knew them by heart. It was like driving with my eyes closed, except they were open and encased with heartache.

At the beach, I climbed a lifeguard chair. It was a clear night, cold. The waves crashed, barely visible in the darkness. I could see Connecticut shimmering just beyond the horizon, a razor-thin line of light defining water from the sky. I sat on the giant wooden chair and cried harder than I thought possible. I cried until I gagged and gasped for air, until my lungs and ribs felt bruised, until my head ached. Once empty, I took a running jump off the chair, spread my arms wide, and felt that brief moment when time was suspended, the millisecond before my body tumbled downward, slow then fast, to the damp sand below.

Years later, my mother told me she’d driven her sister to the beach days before she died. My aunt had longed to see the beach but was too weak to leave the car. They sat in the parking lot, watching the gentle surf. Twins returning to the shoreline.

Eventually, my parents sold the house and moved north. I didn’t return to my childhood beach until almost a decade later when I was heavily pregnant with my first child. We had set out east to go apple picking, to buy a pie at a stand that I’d remembered as a little kid, but en route, I longed to get off the ugliness of the main roads, and we detoured to the sound. The beach was the same as when I was six and sixteen and twenty-one, empty in the late September sun, the shore still beautifully rocky, the smell of salt and seaweed, the clam and mussel shells, the weathered sea glass.

The week before my first child was born, as my husband and I stood together on the shore of northern Long Island, I thought about the journey we were about to embark on, the unknowns, the possibilities, the fears. I imagined the joys and the heartbreaks and the ordinary moments in between. I thought about the strength of the moment on the cusp of motherhood. I thought about the fragility of life.

I dipped my toes into the cool sand and felt the humid breeze against my cheek. I placed my hand on my swollen belly and looked toward a lifeguard chair. I thought about that painful night and remembered the numbness of driving in complete darkness, hurtling through unbearable emotions, half wishing that the car would cut a curve too close, that it would careen out of control so that I just wouldn’t have to feel. I looked across the sound to the tiny speck of Connecticut glittering in the afternoon sun.

I envisioned my aunt. I imagined what she might have looked like as a child running down the shore of Wading River. I remembered her smile, steadying her bike with one hand as we talked, having run into one another on La Guardia Place. I conjured that moment on Riverside, her body weak, on the brink of her last journey.

I wish she could have known then that her memory is always with me, that for years I would walk by her apartment building and trace my finger across her last name on the buzzer, which remained there for years until the building was sold. I wish she could have known that when I ran my first NYC Marathon, I ran it for her, repeatedly saying her name in my mind as I crossed through each borough, that I smiled and burst into tears at the finish line, that I’d carried a small photocopy of her portrait folded in the pocket of my shorts.

I wish she could have known that my oldest child’s name is hers, that I knew that day, feet digging into the sand, heart filled with remembrances, that I could capture a tiny piece of her, of us, in a new and vibrant life to come. I can’t know for sure, but perhaps she knew, somewhere in there, that the rocky shore and sea salt air was a bond we carried together in our blood, in moments that, while not congruent, were unspoken, soft reminders, memories in the lapping waves.