I'll Be You(43)

“Thank you, but no…my baby is—” I clambered back into the car, gunning the engine as the woman stared at me, dismay on her face.

“But wait!” I heard her call as I drove away, Charlotte blinking with disorientation in the back seat. “I didn’t get your autograph!”



* * *



—

Charlotte and I drove north along the coast until we found a beach that wasn’t jammed with teenagers and tourists. I showed her how to dig for mole crabs, scooping them from the wet sand as they tried to burrow away. We made a collection in an abandoned pail, counting to ten and back since Charlotte couldn’t count any higher. When the pail was half-full, she put a fat fist in the water and stirred it around and looked at me with amazement as the mole crabs burst into a frenzy. I could tell that my niece was the kind of girl who wouldn’t be afraid of bugs, and that filled me with a strange sort of pride.

The sun was in its midsummer glory, high and unrelenting, only a whisper of a breeze blowing off the ocean. The curls at Charlotte’s temples had pasted themselves to her head with sweat. I took her gritty hand in mine and we went down to the water to splash in the surf, stomping in the yellow foam that the waves left behind. She found a stick of driftwood almost as tall as she was and we dragged it in the wet sand, spelling out our names. MIMI + LALA.

Eventually I sat down on the sand while Charlotte poked around the waterline with her giant stick. My sister was missing and the day’s expedition had been a waste of time and, really, my entire life was barely sputtering along—and yet, sitting there watching her, a strange emotion settled over me. I looked out at the cloudless horizon, past the oil platforms and the cargo ships hauling Chinese electronics toward San Pedro, and instead of feeling a sense of dread at the emptiness out there—the doom of a world in slow decay, dying oceans and islands of plastic trash—I felt something else entirely. The openness of possibility: a little girl poking at kelp with a stick. A bucket full of mole crabs. Our names in the sand and a promise of ice cream and a future filled with the unexpected. A curious, abstract feeling: hope.

A question floated into my head: What if my sister never came back? What if I took care of Charlotte forever? What if this was my shot at parenthood?

The dog came out of nowhere just then: black and shaggy, hair matted with sand, mouth foaming with seawater. His eyes wild with beastly excitement at the sight of the giant stick in Charlotte’s hands. He leapt and grabbed the stick in his bared canines, giving it a firm shake.

Charlotte’s jaw went hard. She dug her toes into the sand and yanked back.

But the dog outweighed her by a good thirty pounds. He whipped his head back and forth as Charlotte hung on to the driftwood, flung about like a rag.

“Mine,” she wailed.

I was on my feet and running, and down the beach I saw the dog’s owner sprinting toward us, too. We both arrived at the exact instant that momentum got the better of Charlotte and she went flying across the sand. She screamed like she’d broken something essential.

I had her in my arms before I could stop to think, brushing away the sand, feeling for lumps. She wasn’t badly hurt—sandpaper scrapes on her knees, a lump on a thigh—but a scratch across her cheek was oozing a thin line of blood. The dog’s owner dragged him away, apologetic, as I rocked Charlotte in my lap. I didn’t have a Band-Aid or Neosporin, just a bottle of tepid water and the hem of my T-shirt. Her tears felt like an accusation, that I hadn’t been diligent enough, that I hadn’t been watching her when it really counted, that I wasn’t prepared for this at all.

She pushed her face into my chest, leaving a smear of snot and blood and sand across my front. A biplane cruised by overhead, towing a banner that advertised a marijuana delivery service called High Supply. I wanted to hide Charlotte’s eyes from it even though she couldn’t read yet. Someday she would, though, and by then it would be far too late to protect her from dogs and drugs and things she didn’t yet understand. All the diligence in the world can’t keep a child from harm. My mother could have warned me about that.

“Lala go home,” she said tearfully.

“Time to go home,” I agreed, even as I wondered where, exactly, home was supposed to be for each of us.



* * *



—

We arrived back in Santa Barbara to find my mother working in the front garden, pruning back the lavender along the path with a pair of garden shears. I extracted a tearstained and sticky Charlotte from the back seat, and she wobbled onto her feet and charged across the yard to her grandmother. She flung her arms around my mother’s veined legs and my mother wobbled a little with the impact, a painful smile on her face.

“Ouch,” she said softly, and stuck her fingers in Charlotte’s soft curls, holding her tightly against her body. She lifted Charlotte’s head with a cupped palm and traced a finger down the bloody scratch.

“Oh my God. What happened?”

“It’s just a scratch. She had a little fall.”

Charlotte looked up at my mother, sober as a judge. “Bad dog.”

My mother looked over Charlotte’s head at me. Her voice was hot with accusation: “She was attacked by a dog? How did this happen?”

“We were at the beach. And she wasn’t attacked. The dog wanted her stick and Charlotte wouldn’t let go and she got knocked down. That’s it.”