The line moves, but my feet step forward without my say-so. The seal is small. Is it sick? Is it going to die? The officer eyes me, and I step back with the others.

A boy nearby speaks Spanish. I don’t remember much Spanish from school, but he uses the word madre. That, I remember, is “mother.”

The officer sticks wooden stakes into the sand and ties neon tape around each to create a giant square of bright tape around the seal. “This is very common,” she says. “A mother will sometimes leave her pup on the beach while she hunts. The baby is left here on the sand. Safe. Away from the great whites who hunt them each summer.”

Relief washes over me. The seal pup is okay.

I look toward the rolling waves and wonder where Madre Seal is. How does she remember where she’s left her baby on this beach that stretches all along the southern coast of Cape Cod?

“Please do not cross the tape,” the officer calls to the crowd. “If Mom sees people too close to her baby, she may leave her behind.”

My mind gets stuck on the two words her baby. Not the baby or a baby but her baby.

The officer turns and seems to speak only to me. “But don’t worry. The mom always comes back.”

I look toward the ocean. If only that were true.

• • •

I walk down the beach away from all the people because they make me feel squirrely. And all the way down Seagull Beach, I drag those thoughts of the abandoned pup.

And I wonder if it wonders.

The wet sand squishes up between my toes as I walk. But soon the quietness is interrupted by excited voices carried on the wind. I turn to see that the officer has moved everyone much farther away from the neon tape. All of the noise and pointing toward the ocean tells me there is something to see, so I sprint back, running where the water meets the sand. When I get close enough, I see what looks like a black ball floating in the water. The head of Madre Seal.

The baby seal scurries toward the sea like a fat black inchworm. Under the neon tape. Toward the waves. In the water, Madre Seal swims back and forth, back and forth, and I can feel her worry about all of these people near her baby. But still . . . she is there.

There.

I am surprised at how relieved I am to see her. As the baby hits the water, Madre Seal leaps and dives. Leaps and dives.

And then the most surprising thing happens. I start to cry. Not the kind of cry that you can squelch and swallow but the kind where your whole body knows how you feel. And it’s right then that I realize that when people say you can’t miss something you’ve never known . . . Well, that simply isn’t true.