Returning to Shore (15 page)

Richard rested his elbows on his knees and sunk his face against the heels of his hands. His voice was muffled. “Dear God,” he said, “why am I telling you all this?”

Clare looked out at the wide, flat beach. The water was gone, returned to the bay, but you could tell
how far it had risen towards the dunes, and you could read the pattern of its movements in the ripples it had left behind.

Clare looked back at Richard. Their arms were almost touching and she leaned sideways and tilted her head so she was leaning against his shoulder.

“You do have someone,” she whispered. “You have me.”

Richard put his arm around her and pulled her close to him, so her cheek was against his collarbone. He didn't cry so you could hear him, but she could feel him crying. She slipped her arms around him and pressed her face against his chest.

The clouds covered the sun and once again it turned cool. When the rain started, Richard told Clare to go back the way they'd come, the shorter way home. He'd continue to circle the longer way around the island, checking for terrapin tracks, and meet her back at the house.

Clare pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head and pulled the sleeves down over her hands. She jogged a distance and then, when she was tired, she walked.

She wasn't looking for terrapin tracks, but her eyes, once trained to search for them, spotted them
instinctively. They were fresh tracks, she could tell, and they were headed up from the water, towards the dunes. While she and Richard had been sitting together down the beach, a terrapin had come up on the shore and walked right across the footprints that Clare and Richard had left in the sand. Clare looked down the beach to where she had parted with Richard, but he had already gone around the corner of the island, and she couldn't see him. She followed the tracks up across the beach, lost them in the softer sand of the low dunes, and picked them up again. The beach grass pricked her ankles.

She saw the terrapin before she heard her, and Clare instantly dropped into a crouch. The terrapin must have just buried her newly laid eggs, and now she was tamping the sand down on the spot with her plastron, her bottom shell. She smoothed the sand and disguised the spot so that it would look like any other place in the dunes. She moved professionally and quickly, so intent on her business that Clare wasn't sure if she hadn't been seen, or if she had been, but was just ignored. When the terrapin turned to start walking back to the water Clare spotted the mark on her shell. It was Eleanor. It
had to be. Clare had an urge to call out to her, to make a connection, but she knew the best thing for her to do was to keep still. She stayed low and watched Eleanor, who, at last satisfied, scrambled over the beach grass, down through the dunes. Clare stood up now to watch her. She moved faster than Clare ever thought a turtle could move, across the stretch of open beach and back down into the water. She never once looked back at the nesting spot she had made, to the future generation of terrapins she had left, as a promise, behind.

It was raining heavier now, and Clare knew the tracks might soon be lost. She studied the spot to memorize it, found a piece of driftwood to mark the place, and piled a cairn of stones at the edge of the dune where the nest was made. Then she started running to get Richard. He was a fast walker, and she calculated that she'd catch him sooner if she met him as he came around the island on the other side.

She started running, but she didn't run very far before she tired out. She cut across the dunes and took the dirt road through the center of the island, near their house, and then cut down to the marsh. She hiked along the mat of reeds at the high-tide line. In
the distance she finally saw Richard, walking in her direction. She broke into a run.

“Daddy!” she cried. “Daddy! Daddy!” The word had come to her from someplace deep inside her; it came unbidden, like a snatch of music you didn't remember you'd ever heard. He wasn't Richard, or Dad. He was Daddy. It was his name in the language of her childhood, the name she had called him once, so long ago that she hadn't remembered. It was the name from when she had been that little girl in the photograph. It had been here, waiting for her on Blackfish Island, just as he had been here waiting for her, too.

With gratitude to my editor, Andrew Karre, well met on “Blackfish Island”; my agent, Edward Necarsulmer IV; my writing group: Barbara Diamond Goldin, Patricia MacLachlan, Lesléa Newman, Ann Turner, Ellen Wittlinger, and Jane Yolen; Elaine Lasker von Bruns; Artemis Demas Roehrig; and, as always, Matthew Roehrig.

Special thanks to diamondback terrapin experts: Barbara Brennessel, Don Lewis, and Bob Prescott, and to Mass Audubon's Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary.

Corinne Demas is the award-winning author of numerous books for children and adults, including
Everything I Was
for Carolrhoda Lab and
The Writing Circle
. She is Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College and a fiction editor of
The Massachusetts Review
. She lives with her family, her dog, and two miniature donkeys in Western Massachusetts and spends the summer on Cape Cod. Visit her online at
www.corinnedemas.com
.