Chapter Text
Post-storm sea always brings more seagulls and fewer tourists to the beach.
The birds are the first thing Robin notices every time, before the cold gets into her sleeves, before the foam starts aggressively pushing across the sand and then retreating like it changed its mind. After rain, the North Beach in Dune City smells like salt, and iron, and clouds, and she has never been able to explain that to anyone who didn’t come here often.
She tried once, with her best friend Steve, who stood next to her in the same spot and said it smelled like dead fish.
The Pacific, though, doesn’t stop being enormous just because a small town has built itself a few hundred yards from its edge, and in this county that enormousness is a daily fact.
Robin loves it the way she loves very few things. Specifically, the way she loves being the only person somewhere, and the way she loves something that doesn’t ask her about anything.
It was Sunday in October, and it rained all morning in the heavy, indifferent way that coastal Oregon rains in the fall. Persistent, like the sky was trying to impress its boss. It stopped around noon. By 3:15, Robin has walked the quarter-mile from the end of Spruce Lane to the stretch of beach below the bluffs where the sand is dark from rain, and the tide is out, and nobody comes.
This is important: nobody comes. There’s a more popular stretch half a mile north, where the town proper meets the shore, where there’s a small parking lot, a plaque about something historical, and a spot where families set up on summer weekends. But after Labor Day, that stretch empties with the tourists, and this stretch—rockier, shadowed by the bluffs, requiring a muddy path and a short climb down—never had anyone to empty.
She’s sixteen at the moment. She’s been coming here since she was eleven. Five years of this particular piece of sand. She sits with her back against a rock that she has sat against enough times that she’s stopped noticing how cold it is. Her knees are pulled up. Her sneakers are already wet at the toes, she doesn’t have a hood, and her short hair is perpetually escaping, no matter what she does to it. She doesn’t fix it; it’s not like there’s anyone to fix it for.
The sea after rain has a different texture than the sea in sunshine and is different again from the sea in the grey flat light of an overcast day. After rain, it’s restless. The surface has that broken quality, all chop and movement. The waves come in quick and irregularly, overlapping, and the sound they make is louder than usual—not quite crashing, but a constant overlapping percussion that fills up the air and, more importantly, fills up the part of Robin’s brain that would otherwise be doing things she’d rather it didn’t.
This is why she comes. Not for the view, though the view is, objectively, extraordinary. Not for the solitude alone, though she likes that too. She comes because the ocean is loud enough to drown out the inside of her own head, and it’s the only thing she’s found that does that reliably, and she found it at eleven years old when things at home were getting bad in ways she didn’t have names for yet, and she has never stopped being grateful for it.
The kelp is thick on the sand today, pushed up by the swell. Dark ropes of it, tangled, dragged from somewhere deep. She reaches over and picks up a strand of it, the bulbous kind, the kind with the little air sacs, and presses one between her fingers until it pops. She’s been doing this since she was a kid, and some things stay the same.
She stays for an hour and a half. She doesn’t take out her phone. She doesn’t write in a journal or sketch in a sketchbook or do anything that would make for a good description of a solitary, introspective girl. She mostly just sits and watches and presses kelp between her fingers, and when the sun starts setting, and the cold becomes a real thing to deal with, she gets up and goes.
---
The path back up the bluff is slippery from the rain, and she takes it slowly, holding onto the exposed root she’s been using as a handhold and hoping it doesn’t decide today is the day it finally comes loose. It holds.
The walk back through town takes twelve minutes if she goes the direct way and fourteen if she takes Clear Lake Road to avoid the block where the Hargrove family lives, and she takes Clear Lake Road.
Dune City has the specific vibe of a small coastal town that hasn’t quite figured out what century it wants to be. There are wind chimes on every other porch. There are pickup trucks with gun racks and also hand-painted signs for an artisanal soap shop that opened two summers ago and inexplicably survived.
There’s a Smokery that has been there for twenty years because the family that runs it has been there for twenty years, and nobody messes with Henry Creel, who is seventy-one and terrifying in a way that transcends cultural context. There’s a church on the hill with a reader board that currently says ETERNITY IS A LONG TIME TO BE WRONG, which Robin passes every single day.
She knows everyone here. This is not a comfort. Knowing everyone means everyone knows her, and in a town this size, what everyone knows about you becomes something you can’t get out of.
What everyone knows about Robin: her mother is Linda Buckley, who works at the county assessor’s office, goes to the First Baptist Church on Sundays, and makes the same green bean casserole for every potluck. Her father left when she was six, and nobody talks about that, including Robin. She goes to Dune City High, where she gets good grades in English, French, and history and mediocre grades in math. She doesn’t play any sports, and she doesn’t go to the games, and she sits at lunch with Steve Harrington and sometimes Eddie, but nobody else.
She has been confirmed as being gay by approximately four of her classmates who noticed things and by her own internal monologue, which she conducted alone in her room at fourteen and arrived at with a sort of exhausted, unsurprised relief, like finally locating something she’d been looking for in the wrong drawer.
In most places in 2022, that last fact would be the kind of thing that exists alongside everything else, one fact among many, a thing that is simply part of a person without being the defining architecture of their existence. Dune City is not like most places.
It’s not that being gay is a secret, exactly, or that there are no gay people here. There are. She knows three of them. Two of them are the artisanal soap couple, who moved here from Portland and maintain a sort of pleasant part of town that Robin finds admirable. The third is Eddie, whose uncle runs the hardware store and whom everyone treats with the specific tolerance of someone they’ve known since childhood and can’t quite reconfigure their feelings about.
The point is: it's complicated in the way small towns are complicated. It’s not violence. It’s not slurs in her locker. It’s the look that Jason Carver gives her when she walks past, that particular narrowing, that slight compression of the lips, the way some people’s faces do a calculation and then show you the result without meaning to. It’s the conversation she heard once through her mother’s bedroom door, on the phone with someone:
I don’t know, Carol, I just think it’s a phase; kids get ideas from the internet, and you can’t just—well, I told her I don’t want to hear about it, is what I told her.
As if what Robin had been hoping for was a conversation about it. As if what she’d wanted was to be heard about it. She’d been standing in the hallway with a glass of water, going back to her room, and she’d stood there for a moment holding the water and thinking about how it felt to know something about yourself and have the knowledge belong only to you because the other option was worse.
Nina Hargrove is on his porch when Robin passes the end of Clear Lake Road. She still has a line of sight.
Nina is seventy-three and has strong opinions about several things, including but not limited to: property taxes, the quality of current music, and Robin’s mother’s daughter. The look she gives is brief. Robin keeps walking.
Outside the Gas-N-Go, two boys from the grade above hers are leaning against a truck. She knows their names. They don’t go out of their way to bother her; they’re the kind of indifferent that reads as neutral from a distance but feels, up close, like a specific kind of erasure. One of them glances at her. She keeps her eyes forward. She has perfected the art of walking through a space like she is already somewhere else.
This is the thing about Dune City that she has never been able to fully articulate, even to Steve: it’s not that people are cruel, exactly. It’s that they have already decided. About her mother’s daughter, about the quiet girl who goes to the beach alone, about the thing that got around—not loudly, not officially, but in the way things get around in small towns, through the membrane of glances and half-conversations and the particular silence that falls sometimes when she walks into a room.
There was a girl two years above her, Angie, who was openly and loudly and definitely gay and who wore it like armor and whom Robin had watched with something between admiration and exhaustion, because she knew she did not have that in her. The armor Robin wore was invisibility. It worked, mostly. The cost of it was that she had to keep paying it.
She turns onto Spruce Lane. Four more blocks.
The houses here are the kind she’s looked at her whole life: shingled, salt-weathered, a little tired, with the gardens going dormant for fall. Someone has a pumpkin on their porch that is already beginning to collapse inward. Someone else has a wind chime made of driftwood and shells that she has heard every single day since third grade. She knows which houses have dogs and which dogs will bark.
She knows which porch light has been burned out for two years because nobody climbed up to replace it. She knows this town the way you know a place you have never chosen, completely, involuntarily, the way you know a specific creak of a stair in a house you grew up in, knowledge worn into you by sheer repetition until it lives in the body rather than the mind.
Her mother’s car is in the driveway.
---
The house is clean. This is the first thing anyone would say about it, and it is accurate, and it is also the most precise description of everything wrong with it. The house is clean, the way a waiting room is clean—not warm, not lived in, just maintained. The surfaces are clear. The dish rack is always empty because her mother washes, dries, and puts away before the water is barely off her hands.
There are no pictures on the refrigerator. There is a cross above the kitchen doorway, small and wooden, the kind sold in the gift shop of a church. There is a framed piece of calligraphy in the hallway that says As For Me And My House, We Will Serve The Lord, which is from Joshua, which Robin knows because she was raised to know it, and which she has walked past approximately six thousand times.
Linda Buckley is at the kitchen counter when Robin comes in. She’s still in her work clothes even though it’s a Sunday, or she changed back to them, which is something she does. She is cutting vegetables with the focused attention she gives to tasks that don’t require it, the knife going steadily, her eyes down.
“You’re sandy,” she says.
“I was at the beach.”
“I can see that.” A pause. The knife keeps moving. “Dinner’s at six.”
Robin sets her bag down inside the door. “Okay.”
“Steve called the house phone.” Her mother says this with specific neutrality that is not neutral at all. Steve is the one friend she has never found a reason to object to, because Steve is a boy, which satisfies some accounting in her mother’s head that Robin is trying to audit. “I told him you were out.”
“Thanks.”
Another pause. The knife stops. Her mother looks up then, and Robin gets the look. Not angry, not warm, just the look that takes inventory of her, checks her against some internal standard, and finds her present but unresolved. It lasts two seconds. Then her mother goes back to the vegetables.
“Six o’clock,” she says again.
Robin goes upstairs.
---
Her room is on the third floor, which in this house means a converted attic with a slanted ceiling on one side and a window that faces the backyard and the strip of alders behind it. She chose it when she was nine because it was the farthest from everything else. She has not regretted this.
She drops her bag. Kicks off her sneakers, which leave a faint print on the floorboard. She doesn’t change. She lies down on top of the covers with her jacket still on and looks up.
The ceiling is white and has sixty-three cracks in it. She knows this because she has counted them. She counts them again now, not because she’s forgotten but because the counting is the point; it’s something for her eyes to do while the rest of her decompresses, the mental equivalent of popping kelp. She starts at the left corner above the window, the short horizontal one, and works across in a rough grid of her own devising.
She loses count around the cluster near the light fixture. There’s a spot where three cracks converge and then a fourth branches off at an angle, and she can never decide if the fourth one is its own crack or a continuation of one of the others. She starts again.
The second time, she gets to forty-seven before her phone buzzes. Steve: A video of a dog trying to fit through a cat door. She watches it twice. She sends back a single emoji, the one that’s crying but also laughing, and puts the phone face-down on the mattress beside her.
She starts the count again.
Outside, the wind has picked up. She can hear it in the alders, that soft brushing sound, and beneath it, beneath everything, always, is the sea. From here, it’s just a presence more than a sound, felt as much as heard, a low, constant rush that she has slept to every night of her life. On bad nights, it’s the thing that keeps her from going fully under. On good nights, she barely notices it. Tonight it sounds like breathing.
Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three. The cluster. She loses it again.
She gives up on counting and turns her head.
---
It’s on the wall beside the door, slightly crooked on its nail in a way she has straightened probably thirty times and stopped bothering with. Small canvas, maybe the size of a piece of paper. A yard sale find, three years ago, the church did a sale every October, and she’d gone alone on a Saturday morning with eight dollars and nothing particular in mind, and she’d seen it propped against a folding table between a box of paperback romances and a bread maker that still had crumbs in it.
Three dollars. She hadn’t been able to say why she wanted it.
She still can’t, exactly.
The girl in the portrait is maybe her age, maybe a little older. Curly, dark hair, the kind that has its own life. She’s small; you can tell from the proportions, the way the background dwarfs her slightly. She’s wearing the kind of clothes that place her precisely in time without looking like a costume: a blouse with a softly ruffled collar, a cardigan the color of faded pink, and a suggestion of high-waisted jeans at the painting’s lower edge. Early eighties. A particular flavor of girlish that isn’t trying to be anything other than what it is.
She isn’t looking at the viewer. This is the thing Robin noticed first, the thing that made her pick it up from against the folding table. She’s looking to the side, at something just beyond the painting’s edge, and her expression is caught. Between two things. Alert and private, maybe. Or like she knows something and hasn’t decided yet whether to say it.
The painting looks wet.
This is not something Robin has ever said out loud, because she is aware of how it sounds. But it’s the only way she can describe it. Not water-damaged; she’s checked carefully, up close, and the canvas is dry, and the paint is fine. It’s something in the colors, the way they’re saturated in a specific way, the way the shadows have a slightly blue quality, the way the background—dark and indeterminate; it could be a room or could be weather—seems to have depth beyond what the paint should allow. She has looked at it in morning light and evening light and the flat grey light of afternoons, and in every light it has that quality. Damp. As though it came in from outside and never quite dried.
She has wondered about the girl. Not obsessively. Just the way you wonder about a face you see every day. Who she was, who painted her, and where the painting had been before a church sale at the edge of the Pacific. Whether anyone had missed it when it left.
The portrait looks back at the room from its crooked angle.
Six o’clock is in forty-five minutes, and then there will be dinner, and then her mother will watch something on television, and Robin will come back upstairs, and then it will be Monday. This is what her life is right now: the space between the beach and Monday, filled with ceiling cracks and the smell of dinner she doesn’t want and the low, persistent sound of the water. She has been sixteen for exactly three months, and she already knows that the best thing about being sixteen is that it ends.
The girl in the portrait looks at something outside the frame.
Robin looks at her.
The sea does what the sea always does.