But as the water washed away from me I failed to remember how. I thought about the Greek mythology we’d studied in high school. Staring at the ocean, I thought: Yes, the never leaving, that hypnotic pull out to sea. Of course it could be embodied by a woman.

24

A LITTLE GIRL APPROACHED WILLIAM AND ME ONE MORNING when he was digging in the sand on the beach. It was early and no one else was up yet. The girl was wearing a bikini, which looked funny, with her back arched and child-belly ballooning out between the top and the bottom. Her skin was deeply bronzed, though a white line of flesh emerged on her shoulder when the strap of her top slipped down. The sight of her made me realize how long it had been since I’d seen a tan child. All those hours at the playground, but kids were always coated in zinc sunscreen now, streaks of white all over their bodies protecting them from the sun.

I looked around for her parents, but there was no one else on the beach that I could see. Where had she come from?

“Where are you from?” she said, parroting my own thoughts back to me. I didn’t know how to answer the question. “The city,” I said eventually.

“Where are you staying?” she said, sighing a big exasperated sigh.

I pointed up to the roof of our house, peeking through the trees. “That one,” I said, then, imitating her tone, “Where are you staying?”

She pointed farther down the beach in an indiscriminate direction.

She had big ears, this little girl, or maybe not so big, but the kind that stuck out. She seemed to know it; she had a habit of tucking her hair behind them, then untucking it and then tucking it back in, her arms always moving up and down as she spoke. I wondered if her mother had told her not to tuck her hair behind her ears. She couldn’t have been more than seven; she seemed too young to recognize a feature she didn’t want to accentuate.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Six and three-quarters,” she responded. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Wow.”

“Is that old?”

“Are you a teenager?”

“I’m older than a teenager.”

“Wow.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Sienna,” she said.

“My name is Ella and this is William.”

“Are you his mommy?”

“Yes,” I said, the lie feeling natural for some reason. “Do you have any babies?”

She giggled. “I’m too young for babies!”

“Oh!”

“Can I tell you a secret?” she asked, leaning in toward me.

“Of course!”

“I don’t want any babies. Ever. I think they’re disgusting.”

I laughed. “I think that’s great.”