Ted sleeps on his back at the corded edge of the dunes, away from the shouting and the kites, the holiday families, the war veterans from the convalescent hospitals scouring the horizon pointlessly. Sylvia, though, despite herself, has gotten as close as she could to the heart-pounding edge of damage and ruin: swinging her basket, strolling intentionally along the village arcade in the direction of the hospitals overlooking the beach, sliding her gaze toward the bony men with their empty sleeves, their orthopedic boots, their ghastly burns and wheelchairs parked on the gray slab of concrete at the edge of the barnacled breakwater. A man with a crutch and a pinned-up trouser leg struggles before her as she circles back on the beach, his head down, looking for shells that he can’t pick up or just watching his footing, she doesn’t know which. He hobbles in Ted’s direction, toward the new lighthouse built to replace the one blown up by the Nazis, toward the fishermen in their faded blue shirts stacking baskets of herring in the distance, their flat-bottomed berckoise boats run aground onto the sand between tides.

Swiftian in his repose, Ted sleeps through the halting journey of the one-legged man who passes by, the tip of his crutch strangled with seaweed. Immovable, Ted sleeps through the distant calling of the fishermen, the parade of barely clad jeunes filles in their vivid bikinis, oblivious to the coital stirrings in the reeds and the sallow thorn around him. Even on his back he appears a man-mountain, an immutable backdrop to the industry of sandy-bottomed children dragging tails of ruffled kelp fronds.

Tomorrow they will be home to Frieda. Sylvia hopes her mother will remember to put the baby down for a nap early so she’ll be awake when they arrive. She can’t wait to be home. She veers up the beach toward Ted, over the dry expanse of whiffling sand; in just the two weeks since they passed this way on their drive south to the Merwins’, her pelvis and ankles and knees have loosened, awash in the solutions of maternity. Unsteady, she switches the hand in which she carries her basket of shells, noticing the fullness of her belly.

“Ted,” she calls as she approaches, her voice ribboning off in the dampered air, cast out impersuasively with the calling of gulls.

“Ted,” she calls as she gets closer, the blowing sand duning against his legs, in the folds of his unbuttoned shirt; the depth of his retreat into sleep nearly knitting him into the marram grass and ranunculus on which he rests his head. “Ted … Ted,” she calls to no effect.

She stands at the sink, her hands in the water, wedding copper glimmering beneath the surface.