Oceanside
By E. J. Nash
July 15, 2023
July 15, 2023
Of the three of us, I was the only one who disliked the idea. I wanted to keep my mother’s memory where it deserved to be—locked in a cherry wood box, carefully stored at the back of my head, where I kept all the soft things of my life: a hot cup of peppermint tea, the scent of jasmine perfume, the way the light hit the curtains in late August. Things that should not be touched.
The problem was Charlie, of course. Decades ago, when we were kids, Charlie’s teachers used a variety of euphemisms to describe her: Headstrong. Determined. Rambunctious. The truth was that she was a total pain, and if you couldn’t find her, it was because she was causing chaos somewhere in the neighborhood. Time had barely mellowed her out. Her career as a divorce lawyer let her channel some of that energy, and she was raising her twin girls to be just as boisterous.
“Let’s go, ladies,” Charlie said. She hoisted a large picnic basket onto her shoulder. It was empty; we were only bringing it in case someone from the mainland spotted us with binoculars and wondered what we were doing. “We don’t want to lose the tide.”
“We won’t,” Sarah said. “I checked the tide tables a million times.”
For most people, a million times might be exaggerating. Not Sarah. She was the meticulous one, the academic one, the one everyone thought would leave to study at some faraway university. She confessed to me after high school that she loved our hometown too much to leave, so she’d gone to the local college instead. Considering Sarah’s scientific nature, I originally expected her to be the most skeptical participant of the trip, but over the years I had been promoted to Head Worrier.
I looked out the window of our rental cabin. “Are those storm clouds on the horizon? I don’t want to get caught out there.”
The horizon was sapphire blue, the type of blue you’d find in a jewelry box.
“You’re so funny,” Charlie said, lightly punching my shoulder. “Let’s hustle.”
Charlie shepherded us outside and into the adventure, the quest, that space that should be left for heroes and not for three sisters who haven’t seen each other in years. Work, kids, family—the usual things kept us in our respective cities. Only now, on the ten-year anniversary of our mother’s death, did we come back here. Charlie wanted to find out the truth, or at least the shadow of the truth, and she’d roped me and Sarah into booking this cabin.
I stepped into a wall of heat and humidity and a salt-tinged breeze. Seagulls argued from nearby cliffs. It felt like I had taken a wrong step on the timeline and had been shuttled back to when my sisters and I were children. Yes, if I closed my eyes, I could pretend it was one of those summers when we vacationed here, those redheaded girls on the bluff. Mom would be down on the beach, preparing a fire for the marshmallows, and us kids would sit outside the tent, gazing at the rocky island offshore, staring at the lighthouse.
“We don’t know what we’re doing,” I said, tightening the laces on my shoes. “We could capsize. We could drown.” We wound our way down the dirt path that cut into the bluffs and led slowly, painstakingly, to the beach.
“Or we could figure out the mystery,” Charlie said.
“It’s not real,” I argued.
“It’s not real only if we have proof that it’s not real,” Sarah said.
I lived on the tightrope of belief and nonbelief. The breath of suspense, the yearning for something to be real. Conclusive proof either way would ruin it. Magic was long gone, replaced with GPS and artificial intelligence and Roombas. A different magic, sure. But one different than before.
Mom invented the story to explain why the gulls and terns and murres swooped and dove around the lighthouse in the day and disappeared at night. Of course they weren’t sleeping, Mom claimed. They were doing something much, much more special. This was when she would pause in the story. In the morning, when she handed over the books, she would wink.
Now, as I tripped down the path, I didn’t have time to stay lost in memory. We’d arrived at the beach, and the canoe was adrift on the rocky sand, just like Paul said it would be. He made a killing off renting boats, kayaks, and canoes to the tourists. He gave us the local discount, even though we hadn’t vacationed here in a decade. He liked to hit on Mom—everyone knew she was a single parent—and she always shot him down.
There was no dock on the beach, so we had to wade into the water. Sarah held the canoe steady as I awkwardly climbed inside, almost flooding it as I inched towards the front—or the prow, as Sarah called it. I hissed when a sliver jabbed into my finger. I hated this trip and hated the possibility of overwriting Mom’s memory with something so traitorous as the truth. I treated memories like I treated my children: something precious and temporary, something that I wanted to keep the same, but that would grow and change in unexpected ways.
“We need to know,” Charlie said. “We need to put this to rest once and for all.”
The truth: we loved each other and we loved visiting this oceanside town. We used to sit in the sand dunes and stare out at the lighthouse on those jagged rocks where the birds wheeled, cackling and cawing.
And every morning, there would be books.
Charlie was the oldest of us. She was the one who first suggested that Mom went to the library at night to get us the books. Then she figured out that libraries were closed at night. Only when we were all old enough—Charlie was ten, I was eight, and Sarah was seven—did Mom invite us down to the firepit at the beach to explain. This memory, like all the others, has been altered with time. The colors have bled, the details are lost. What I remembered: The beach. The night. The crackling fire. As I started to row towards the lighthouse, I was eight years old again.
“This is how books are made,” Mom said that night.
We leaned forward.
Mom placed more twigs in the fire. “The birds start past the horizon. They scan the world, looking in the places humans can’t go. They fly over the stories: the adventures, the romances, the horrors. They stay for a while. They listen. They remember. When they’re ready, they fly over here.” She gestured toward the dark, beautiful expanse of the ocean.
“They’re attracted by the lighthouse,” she continued. “They know humans are here. They have a listener. So they fly, fly, fly and they go up, up, up, and they shriek with joy knowing that they’re home. Of course, they can’t transform in the day. That wouldn’t work at all. Night, of course, is the time of magic. They sneak inside, very quickly, and their wings turn into pages. Their beaks turn into spines. And by the morning, there’s a nice stack of books.”
By this point in the story, my eyes had widened. “How do we get the books out?” Sarah asked.
“That’s what the librarians do,” Mom said. “They’ve got boats. Every night they row out, carefully put the books in bags, and bring them to shore. The librarians know exactly what books we need, and by the time we wake up, we’ve got a stack near our tent.”
“Where do the books go when we’re done with them?” I asked.
Mom snapped her fingers. “They fly away, and they find a new lighthouse.”
Lies. Beautiful lies, and I could see that now. As we approached the lighthouse, I knew we wouldn’t find anything. It was only twenty minutes of rowing, but it felt like a waste of time.
Finally, we awkwardly climbed ashore onto the small island. The lighthouse was different now, something real and tangible, as if it floated out of my dreams. I catalogued it quickly: red and white stripes, a metal gallery deck, a glassed-in dome that protected the lamp. There were no living quarters. As far as we knew, it had always been unstaffed. We’d never thought about how it operated, or who was responsible for the light that whirled across the sky. Even now, we hadn’t asked permission for this visit. I was worried the city would arrest us for trespassing.
“We could get in trouble,” I said, just as Charlie knocked on the wooden door that led into the lighthouse proper.
“Or we could find something wondrous,” she argued. No one answered the knock—no ghost, no phantoms—so Charlie tried the handle. The door opened smoothly without creaking. As if the door opened quite often.
The base of the lighthouse was empty but clean. A winding spiral staircase led upwards. The pounding of waves was still audible. “There’s nothing,” I said. “Let’s go back.”
Disappointment chewed my stomach. I wasn’t sure what I had expected to find. A hidden library in a lighthouse? Birds with pages for wings? No, Mom’s stories were just that. A lovely dream, half-lost to time. Something small and beautiful and bright for her children.
“Let’s go up,” Sarah said. Her tone was just as frustrated. “We’re already here.”
I wanted to go back to the cabin. My shoes were soaked through and I was shivering. My feet squelched with each step I took up the metal staircase. I tried not to be angry at Mom. The way she told the story, the way she was so serious; sometimes it was better to be honest than to let someone believe. A cruel fantasy.
We eventually made our way to the trap door at the end of the staircase. It was unlocked and swung open easily. Using a drop-down ladder we easily climbed up to the dome. The multifaceted lens dominated the center of the small space, but it was the ocean I couldn’t look away from with those magnetic colors, the shades of cobalt and indigo and azure. Sailboats sprung up on the horizon. A painter’s vision of what an ocean should look like; something tender and immense at the same time. Still, there was nothing there to suggest any type of magic, and we quickly decided to leave and to swallow our sorrow as soon as we could.
The walk down the stairs took longer than the trip up. The sun glared down at us once we were outside. It was a dazzling light, one that burned, one that seared my skin. I wasn’t looking forward to rowing back to shore. Then I looked at the birds again, that whirring mass of wings and flesh, and watched how they stayed longer in the shadowed side of the lighthouse. “Do you think we’re here at the wrong time?” I suddenly asked.
Sarah and Charlie looked at me with a hungry expression, and they understood.
We waited. The picnic basket we’d brought as a decoy wasn’t empty after all—Sarah had packed sandwiches, “just in case” the tide tables were wrong—and we licked the peanut butter off our fingers.
With waves lapping at the small island, we were cut off from time itself, adrift in a place where we were old and young at the same time, a palimpsest of ourselves. I yearned for the future and craved the past. I wanted to become a bird. I wanted to wheel around the lighthouse, to watch myself sitting on a sand dune, to fly into the sun. We talked about how much we missed Mom. How much we missed each other. How much we didn’t care about the truth. That it was enough to sit here watch as the sky burned with neon pinks and oranges. By the time midnight arrived I was torn, one foot on the beach as a child, one foot in the lighthouse, my soul hovering somewhere near that light that stretched somewhere beyond the horizon.
Then: a deafening silence. We’d become so accustomed to the shrieking of the birds that those cries and shouts had melted into background noise. The stillness was jarring.
“Let’s go!” Charlie shouted, scrambling to her feet.
Our flashlight skipped over the rocks and scrubby undergrowth. We sprinted past the boulders, past the tidal pools, past the canoe and up the small incline. You could almost say we flew, flew, flew. You could almost say we went up, up, up.
Charlie reached out to open the door at the base of the lighthouse—and collided with the doorknob when it didn’t open. It was locked.
“It was open before,” Sarah said.
“Shh.” I held up a hand. “Listen.”
First we heard the waves. Then we heard our own breathing. Finally it exploded—the sound of pages rustling, murmuring, brushing against themselves. Not a handful of pages, but a flock, a gathering of something unknowable. It sounded like swords. Like bees in a meadow. Like a city humming at night. Horse hooves on sand. Sneakers slapping against the road. A dragon snapping her jaws. Sailors lost at sea. A Ferris wheel on the moon. A car on fire. Talking animals, voiceless teenagers. Salt-stained houses on the shore. Trees aching in the forest. It sounded like me, in a hammock or on the couch or on my favorite tea-stained chair in the living room, the chair where I could look out the window and see my favorite maple tree, the one I planted so many years ago, the one where I could relax underneath its canopy and enjoy the shade with my book.
The three of us sat next to the door, leaning against the wood, holding hands, and continuing to listen. We weren’t surprised when small lights on the mainland slowly started to sail towards us. We knew who they were. We knew why they were coming. And tomorrow, when we were home, we knew the story that we would tell our children.
The problem was Charlie, of course. Decades ago, when we were kids, Charlie’s teachers used a variety of euphemisms to describe her: Headstrong. Determined. Rambunctious. The truth was that she was a total pain, and if you couldn’t find her, it was because she was causing chaos somewhere in the neighborhood. Time had barely mellowed her out. Her career as a divorce lawyer let her channel some of that energy, and she was raising her twin girls to be just as boisterous.
“Let’s go, ladies,” Charlie said. She hoisted a large picnic basket onto her shoulder. It was empty; we were only bringing it in case someone from the mainland spotted us with binoculars and wondered what we were doing. “We don’t want to lose the tide.”
“We won’t,” Sarah said. “I checked the tide tables a million times.”
For most people, a million times might be exaggerating. Not Sarah. She was the meticulous one, the academic one, the one everyone thought would leave to study at some faraway university. She confessed to me after high school that she loved our hometown too much to leave, so she’d gone to the local college instead. Considering Sarah’s scientific nature, I originally expected her to be the most skeptical participant of the trip, but over the years I had been promoted to Head Worrier.
I looked out the window of our rental cabin. “Are those storm clouds on the horizon? I don’t want to get caught out there.”
The horizon was sapphire blue, the type of blue you’d find in a jewelry box.
“You’re so funny,” Charlie said, lightly punching my shoulder. “Let’s hustle.”
Charlie shepherded us outside and into the adventure, the quest, that space that should be left for heroes and not for three sisters who haven’t seen each other in years. Work, kids, family—the usual things kept us in our respective cities. Only now, on the ten-year anniversary of our mother’s death, did we come back here. Charlie wanted to find out the truth, or at least the shadow of the truth, and she’d roped me and Sarah into booking this cabin.
I stepped into a wall of heat and humidity and a salt-tinged breeze. Seagulls argued from nearby cliffs. It felt like I had taken a wrong step on the timeline and had been shuttled back to when my sisters and I were children. Yes, if I closed my eyes, I could pretend it was one of those summers when we vacationed here, those redheaded girls on the bluff. Mom would be down on the beach, preparing a fire for the marshmallows, and us kids would sit outside the tent, gazing at the rocky island offshore, staring at the lighthouse.
“We don’t know what we’re doing,” I said, tightening the laces on my shoes. “We could capsize. We could drown.” We wound our way down the dirt path that cut into the bluffs and led slowly, painstakingly, to the beach.
“Or we could figure out the mystery,” Charlie said.
“It’s not real,” I argued.
“It’s not real only if we have proof that it’s not real,” Sarah said.
I lived on the tightrope of belief and nonbelief. The breath of suspense, the yearning for something to be real. Conclusive proof either way would ruin it. Magic was long gone, replaced with GPS and artificial intelligence and Roombas. A different magic, sure. But one different than before.
Mom invented the story to explain why the gulls and terns and murres swooped and dove around the lighthouse in the day and disappeared at night. Of course they weren’t sleeping, Mom claimed. They were doing something much, much more special. This was when she would pause in the story. In the morning, when she handed over the books, she would wink.
Now, as I tripped down the path, I didn’t have time to stay lost in memory. We’d arrived at the beach, and the canoe was adrift on the rocky sand, just like Paul said it would be. He made a killing off renting boats, kayaks, and canoes to the tourists. He gave us the local discount, even though we hadn’t vacationed here in a decade. He liked to hit on Mom—everyone knew she was a single parent—and she always shot him down.
There was no dock on the beach, so we had to wade into the water. Sarah held the canoe steady as I awkwardly climbed inside, almost flooding it as I inched towards the front—or the prow, as Sarah called it. I hissed when a sliver jabbed into my finger. I hated this trip and hated the possibility of overwriting Mom’s memory with something so traitorous as the truth. I treated memories like I treated my children: something precious and temporary, something that I wanted to keep the same, but that would grow and change in unexpected ways.
“We need to know,” Charlie said. “We need to put this to rest once and for all.”
The truth: we loved each other and we loved visiting this oceanside town. We used to sit in the sand dunes and stare out at the lighthouse on those jagged rocks where the birds wheeled, cackling and cawing.
And every morning, there would be books.
Charlie was the oldest of us. She was the one who first suggested that Mom went to the library at night to get us the books. Then she figured out that libraries were closed at night. Only when we were all old enough—Charlie was ten, I was eight, and Sarah was seven—did Mom invite us down to the firepit at the beach to explain. This memory, like all the others, has been altered with time. The colors have bled, the details are lost. What I remembered: The beach. The night. The crackling fire. As I started to row towards the lighthouse, I was eight years old again.
“This is how books are made,” Mom said that night.
We leaned forward.
Mom placed more twigs in the fire. “The birds start past the horizon. They scan the world, looking in the places humans can’t go. They fly over the stories: the adventures, the romances, the horrors. They stay for a while. They listen. They remember. When they’re ready, they fly over here.” She gestured toward the dark, beautiful expanse of the ocean.
“They’re attracted by the lighthouse,” she continued. “They know humans are here. They have a listener. So they fly, fly, fly and they go up, up, up, and they shriek with joy knowing that they’re home. Of course, they can’t transform in the day. That wouldn’t work at all. Night, of course, is the time of magic. They sneak inside, very quickly, and their wings turn into pages. Their beaks turn into spines. And by the morning, there’s a nice stack of books.”
By this point in the story, my eyes had widened. “How do we get the books out?” Sarah asked.
“That’s what the librarians do,” Mom said. “They’ve got boats. Every night they row out, carefully put the books in bags, and bring them to shore. The librarians know exactly what books we need, and by the time we wake up, we’ve got a stack near our tent.”
“Where do the books go when we’re done with them?” I asked.
Mom snapped her fingers. “They fly away, and they find a new lighthouse.”
Lies. Beautiful lies, and I could see that now. As we approached the lighthouse, I knew we wouldn’t find anything. It was only twenty minutes of rowing, but it felt like a waste of time.
Finally, we awkwardly climbed ashore onto the small island. The lighthouse was different now, something real and tangible, as if it floated out of my dreams. I catalogued it quickly: red and white stripes, a metal gallery deck, a glassed-in dome that protected the lamp. There were no living quarters. As far as we knew, it had always been unstaffed. We’d never thought about how it operated, or who was responsible for the light that whirled across the sky. Even now, we hadn’t asked permission for this visit. I was worried the city would arrest us for trespassing.
“We could get in trouble,” I said, just as Charlie knocked on the wooden door that led into the lighthouse proper.
“Or we could find something wondrous,” she argued. No one answered the knock—no ghost, no phantoms—so Charlie tried the handle. The door opened smoothly without creaking. As if the door opened quite often.
The base of the lighthouse was empty but clean. A winding spiral staircase led upwards. The pounding of waves was still audible. “There’s nothing,” I said. “Let’s go back.”
Disappointment chewed my stomach. I wasn’t sure what I had expected to find. A hidden library in a lighthouse? Birds with pages for wings? No, Mom’s stories were just that. A lovely dream, half-lost to time. Something small and beautiful and bright for her children.
“Let’s go up,” Sarah said. Her tone was just as frustrated. “We’re already here.”
I wanted to go back to the cabin. My shoes were soaked through and I was shivering. My feet squelched with each step I took up the metal staircase. I tried not to be angry at Mom. The way she told the story, the way she was so serious; sometimes it was better to be honest than to let someone believe. A cruel fantasy.
We eventually made our way to the trap door at the end of the staircase. It was unlocked and swung open easily. Using a drop-down ladder we easily climbed up to the dome. The multifaceted lens dominated the center of the small space, but it was the ocean I couldn’t look away from with those magnetic colors, the shades of cobalt and indigo and azure. Sailboats sprung up on the horizon. A painter’s vision of what an ocean should look like; something tender and immense at the same time. Still, there was nothing there to suggest any type of magic, and we quickly decided to leave and to swallow our sorrow as soon as we could.
The walk down the stairs took longer than the trip up. The sun glared down at us once we were outside. It was a dazzling light, one that burned, one that seared my skin. I wasn’t looking forward to rowing back to shore. Then I looked at the birds again, that whirring mass of wings and flesh, and watched how they stayed longer in the shadowed side of the lighthouse. “Do you think we’re here at the wrong time?” I suddenly asked.
Sarah and Charlie looked at me with a hungry expression, and they understood.
We waited. The picnic basket we’d brought as a decoy wasn’t empty after all—Sarah had packed sandwiches, “just in case” the tide tables were wrong—and we licked the peanut butter off our fingers.
With waves lapping at the small island, we were cut off from time itself, adrift in a place where we were old and young at the same time, a palimpsest of ourselves. I yearned for the future and craved the past. I wanted to become a bird. I wanted to wheel around the lighthouse, to watch myself sitting on a sand dune, to fly into the sun. We talked about how much we missed Mom. How much we missed each other. How much we didn’t care about the truth. That it was enough to sit here watch as the sky burned with neon pinks and oranges. By the time midnight arrived I was torn, one foot on the beach as a child, one foot in the lighthouse, my soul hovering somewhere near that light that stretched somewhere beyond the horizon.
Then: a deafening silence. We’d become so accustomed to the shrieking of the birds that those cries and shouts had melted into background noise. The stillness was jarring.
“Let’s go!” Charlie shouted, scrambling to her feet.
Our flashlight skipped over the rocks and scrubby undergrowth. We sprinted past the boulders, past the tidal pools, past the canoe and up the small incline. You could almost say we flew, flew, flew. You could almost say we went up, up, up.
Charlie reached out to open the door at the base of the lighthouse—and collided with the doorknob when it didn’t open. It was locked.
“It was open before,” Sarah said.
“Shh.” I held up a hand. “Listen.”
First we heard the waves. Then we heard our own breathing. Finally it exploded—the sound of pages rustling, murmuring, brushing against themselves. Not a handful of pages, but a flock, a gathering of something unknowable. It sounded like swords. Like bees in a meadow. Like a city humming at night. Horse hooves on sand. Sneakers slapping against the road. A dragon snapping her jaws. Sailors lost at sea. A Ferris wheel on the moon. A car on fire. Talking animals, voiceless teenagers. Salt-stained houses on the shore. Trees aching in the forest. It sounded like me, in a hammock or on the couch or on my favorite tea-stained chair in the living room, the chair where I could look out the window and see my favorite maple tree, the one I planted so many years ago, the one where I could relax underneath its canopy and enjoy the shade with my book.
The three of us sat next to the door, leaning against the wood, holding hands, and continuing to listen. We weren’t surprised when small lights on the mainland slowly started to sail towards us. We knew who they were. We knew why they were coming. And tomorrow, when we were home, we knew the story that we would tell our children.
E. J. Nash is an Ottawa-based writer. Previous work can be found in The Globe and Mail, Nature, Woman's World, and elsewhere. She can be reached on Twitter @Nash_EJ.