She turned around and faced it—she could see the fiction classroom near the beach, the dining hall up the hill, the garden and swimming pool near the dormitories. Marianne turned back to the water, the late-afternoon sun glimmering off a light sea chop, a few pristine sailboats in the distance. As a child she’d realized that, for adults, the real charm of a beach vacation was not the smell of suntan lotion or the sound of the surf or the feeling of warm sand between their toes. It was not the possible glimpse of porpoises or seabirds or the brief dips they took in the water. What mattered most was sitting with your back to everything else.

The last time Marianne spent any real time at the beach was the summer Ruth turned thirteen, when they’d gone as a family. Her father had a girlfriend then, a woman named Noreen who answered phones at the elementary school and had known their mother vaguely. Marianne could never understand what the two of them had in common, but figured that Virginia’s Middle Peninsula offered slim pickings when it came to dating. Noreen was the one who extended the invitation, calling Marianne at home on a Friday evening in May. “Oh,” she’d said, surprised-sounding, when Marianne answered the phone. “I just meant to leave a message.”

“What is that noise?” Noreen asked, after telling her about the house—four bedrooms, oceanfront.

“What noise?” Marianne said, walking away from the window, as far as the phone would stretch. She thought about the space, the wall-to-wall carpeting of silence that would be her family’s beach vacation. The phone cord stretched all the way to her bed—three big steps. “I would love to see Ruth, too. Girl time.”

“Yes,” Noreen—a woman who kept a menagerie of Beanie Babies arranged around her school system name plate—said warmly. “Girl time!”

Marianne flew down from New York, a choppy flight on a commuter plane to Richmond. Heaving her lumpy duffel bag into the used book–lined trunk of her father’s Chrysler, still shaken by the turbulence she should have left thousands of feet above her, she felt old. But somehow over the six-hour drive, riding in the backseat next to Ruth, she turned into a teenager again. She asked how long until they got there, she slept with her head against the window and her mouth falling open, she bought Cheetos and Dr Pepper at rest area vending machines. She listened to her iPod, a time capsule of the year she bought it. Occasionally Ruth passed her an earbud, and she obligingly bobbed her head before passing it back.