I hug her sideways, not wanting to squish the baby, who is so small and sound asleep. In grade school Mallory towered over me and was the kind of girl people called “big-boned.” But now she feels small in my arms, with bones no bigger than mine. Her hair is shorter, but her face is just the same.
“Mine was,” I call to Gracie. “Hers was boring.”
“That’s exactly what you said! I was so mad I didn’t speak to you for days. Her white dog was always filthy, Gracie.”
“Gray. The dog was a gray dog.”
“He needed a bath.”
“You’ve reproduced.”
She laughs again. She has a great laugh, like it comes all the way up from her feet. “I’m a factory. I’ve got a two-year-old boy back with my mother.” She scrunches up her face. “The challenging middle child.”
We laugh because that’s what Mallory is.
“I cannot believe it.” I’m about to add that I didn’t know she’d gotten married but then I have a flash of a memory of an invitation that most likely arrived after being forwarded a few times and right in the middle of some crisis: an overdue paper, 200 exams to be graded. Had I even responded? I can’t remember. Is it possible that I didn’t even RSVP to Mallory’s wedding? A small parade of wedding invitations flashes by: Ginny, Stacy, Pauline. I’m not sure I responded to any of them, certainly never sent a gift. It made no sense to me, why people wanted to get married.
She glances over at where I’ve been sitting in the sand with the notebook. “Can we join you?” she asks, and then she sees the dogs panting in the shade behind us. “What’s this? More dirty dogs?”
“You be nice. You’re a role model now.”
“God help us.” She spreads out two enormous beach towels and erects a little tent for the baby when it wakes up. She attaches a toy to its ceiling. “He blisses out on this hanging chicken thing.” From her cooler, she offers me a selection of juices in small bright boxes and a box of animal crackers.
“Those are mine!” Gracie calls as she drops what looks like a small lobster in the pail. “But you can have them.”
“She’s pretty fearless, isn’t she?”
“She’s obsessed with crustaceans. Whenever we come to Ashing we spend all our time at the water’s edge.”
“How far away are you?” On the phone she said she lives in New Hampshire now.
“About an hour and a quarter. We’re near Nashua.”
Nashua. It was the kind of name we would have made fun of when we were kids, the kind of place whose racetrack was advertised on channel 56. Nashua, we would have said in our pretend Boston nasal accents. Naaashua, New Hampsha. I expected Mallory to be living somewhere glamorous.
“The rumors are flying around town about you.” She laughs hard. “I even heard you were dating Neal Caffrey.”
“No dates, but he is my only friend here.”
“So you really are living in Ashing?”
“My father had a bit of a breakdown when Catherine left.”
“I heard she left. In June, right? Just like your mom.”
“Spring with him must be hell, I guess.”
Gracie howls and Mallory leaps up. Something pinched her finger. Mallory holds the baby’s head as she bends over Gracie in the water, but the baby wakes up anyway. By the time she returns to the towel he’s red and bleating and kicking. She unfastens a series of snaps and pulls out from the cup of her bathing suit an enormous veined udder with a wide brown center and an inch-long nipple which the child seizes in his mouth, sucking the skin up into pleats around his pumping lips. Jesus.
“I was always a little scared of your dad,” she says, then asks if I remember the time we missed the train and he and Catherine came to get us in Allencaster. I didn’t. She says she has a long diary entry about it, how I calmly told them there was a mistake in the schedule but they didn’t believe us. “I cried when they kept yelling at us, but you were so cool and controlled and never cracked.”
“I don’t remember that at all.”
“Really? I swear, once you have kids — Gracie!” She jumps up again, baby still attached and sucking, and sprints to the water. She splashes in and plunges her left arm to the bottom while the right keeps the baby in position, and hauls up Gracie, whose face has momentarily lost its confidence.
“Breathe,” Mallory shouts, and whacks her on the back. And I watch as the color comes back into the child’s face. Then she looks down at the sandy bottom and up at her mother and bursts into tears. “It’s all right. You’re fine.” Mallory tries to wipe her wet hair out of her eyes but Gracie swats her away.
“I almost had an eel and you scared it away!”
Mallory smiles. “There are no eels here, honey. There’s never been an eel.” Which makes Gracie even more furious.
When Mallory comes back I want to compliment her on her patience but I feel like that might be insulting Gracie. The baby’s meal has gone on uninterrupted. His legs and most of the blue pouch are soaking wet but his eyes press tighter shut each time he sucks.
“You’re thinking, and that’s not even the complicated child.”
I laugh.
“She has no interest in learning how to swim. And she wants to be in the water all day long.”
I’m curious to know what she’d been about to say about having kids. “So, you’ve been reading your old diaries recently?”
“Yeah, I have. It’s funny—” she winces, then yanks her nipple out of the baby’s mouth. It doesn’t look easy. The skin stretches an inch before he releases it. He wails as she lifts him up and out of the wet pouch, and he keeps wailing until she slides him in the tent with the hanging chicken and he stops short. “He starts to bite when he’s done. Drives me crazy.” She pushes her boob back in her suit. I see the long nipple fold in half to fit. Mallory got breasts before me, like everyone else, but they had been normal, not these pale raw tubers. She doesn’t seem to remember, again, what she was about to say.
We watch Gracie dredge the bottom of the pool with both hands, occasionally taking in water and croaking it out. She has elements of Mallory at that age, the straight dark-blonde hair, the strong thighs, but her square slightly squished face is someone else’s. Her focus, her fixation on a thing, is from her mother, too. And yet that seems to be gone from Mallory now. She can’t follow through on a thought. Her snacks are neatly packed, though. She brings out thinly sliced apples laid carefully in a plastic container with a lime green top. Gracie grabs a few and then hurries back to the water.
“Plumber’s butt,” Mallory says, and Gracie pulls up the droopy back of her suit. “Remember the hours we spent in your mother’s closet? All her fancy clothes. And that wall of shoes! Oh, she was like a real live princess to me.”
The words are familiar. She was at the funeral, I’m remembering now. I sobbed in her arms. And she sobbed too. And then I didn’t see her again until this moment.
Gracie totters slowly toward us with her bucket. Water sloshes at the sides. “I’m thirsty and hungry and thirsty,” she says. She puts the bucket down and takes a little box of juice from her mother. She puts the straw in her mouth and it turns purple. She sucks it all down without stopping, her breathing growing louder and her belly pushing out, then hands the shrunken box back to her mother. “More,” she gasps. But the baby has started fussing in the tent and Mallory is on her knees changing his diaper.
I reach in the bag for another juice box.
“Say thank you, Gracie,” Mallory says without looking. She’s lifting the baby up by his feet with one hand like a plucked chicken.
“Thanks,” Gracie says and hands me back the box half full.
I offer her some crackers but she shakes her head.
“Wanna see my collection?”
I get up and peer into her bucket. Snails, crayfish, starfish, and crabs are piled on top of each other. The crabs are fighting, two against one. I ask her what she’ll do with them, and she says she’ll put them all back. She asks if I’ll help her.
“I’ll carry the bucket,” she says, and lugs it back to the edge of the water. The little white bows on her red bikini have come untied. “Don’t drop them all out together. You need to find the right spot for each one.” She wades in. “Here. Here’s a good spot for a crab.”
She wants me to reach in the pail and get one. “You’re going to have to pull them apart first.”
“Easier said than done,” I say.
“I know!” Her laugh is just like Mallory’s. I feel like I’m playing with Mallory again, only I’ve grown up and she hasn’t yet.
I stick my hand in the cold water and grab one by the sides of its body and shake but they all stay stuck together.
“Here,” she says, and her little fingers go in and all the crabs shoot apart. I don’t even know how she did it.
We place each crab in different parts of the pool.
“Off you go,” she says quietly each time. We watch them float to the bottom, then scramble furiously beneath the sand to hide.
Before she puts the snails back, she puts one hole-side-up in her palm. “Did you know they come out of their shells when you hum to them?”
“What?’
“It’s true. Watch carefully.”
She hums one note over and over but the hole stays dark. Then she hums the first few bars of “Edelweiss” and a little bit of water seeps out and then a brown tube inches out of the shell like a periscope.
Up on the beach, Mallory is putting the baby back in his carrier. They have to go. “I’ll call you when we come down again. Will you still be here?”
“Maybe.”
Gracie is swinging her empty bucket around in a wide circle. “Will you come here tomorrow, Daley?”
“I will, but I don’t think I’ll see you.”
“I know. I’ll be in my home. But will you come say hi to everyone for me? You don’t have to take them out of the water. You can just wave.”
“I can do that.”
“Thanks.”
I stroke the little patch of fine hairs on the baby’s head. They are light and soft as milkweed. And the skull beneath feels spongy, like it hasn’t hardened all the way yet. I stand on the rocks and watch them move slowly around the cove, Mallory’s shoulders weighed down by the beach bags, the tent, and the cooler, and Gracie skipping through the water, and Mallory telling her she is going too deep. I should have offered to help them back home. I never learned the baby’s name, or how old he is. My chest is burning for all three of them.
In my notebook I write: Mallory. Gracie. Baby with fat legs kicking in his pouch. I want that. I do want that, J.