It started with a vacation.
For eighteen years I had not taken one.
I had told myself it was because I couldn’t afford it, two jobs, two girls, every dollar spoken for, and that was true, but it was also a lie I told to avoid the thing a vacation requires, which is stopping long enough to feel what you’ve been outrunning.
The girls had their own money now, from part-time jobs, and they had been saving it, and the night we got back from Pearl’s, Chloe put an envelope on the kitchen table, on the same spot where the towels had been.
“We’re taking you somewhere,” she said. “You don’t get a vote. You’ve had eighteen years of votes. It’s our turn.”
They took me back to the beach.
The same beach, three states away, where a grieving man and his best friend had found two babies in the sand.
We stayed a week, which is the longest I have ever done nothing in my adult life.
I did not know how to do nothing.
The first two days I kept standing up to do a task that wasn’t there, and the girls would point at my chair until I sat back down, and by the third day something in me that had been clenched for eighteen years finally, slowly, let go.
I slept nine hours one night.
I had not slept nine hours since before Ellie d*ed.
I woke to the sound of my daughters laughing on the balcony and the smell of coffee one of them had made wrong, too strong, exactly the way Ellie used to make it, and I lay there and let myself cr* in a way I had never allowed myself in front of anyone, quiet and clean, the kind of crying that is not grief but the end of it.
We found the row of changing cubicles, still there, repainted twice but the same bones.
Chloe stood in the one where I’d found them.
She’s eighteen and nearly my height now, and she stood in the little cubicle where she had once been a newborn the size of a loaf of bread, and she said, very quietly, “This is where you got us,” and I said, “This is where you got me,” and neither of us could say anything else for a while.
