Moonglass Read Free

I just didn’t want you to come home to an empty room.” He cleared his throat. “Most of your stuff is still in those boxes, but I got a few things out. You still have plenty of time to get settled in before school starts.” I stood in the middle of my new room, amidst my things, and tried to feel it. The word “home.” But it wasn’t there yet. For me, anyway. When my dad said it, though, it had a ring of old familiarity to it, and that was somehow comforting. I sat down on the edge of my bed, which felt the same as it had back home, ran my hand over the same worn-soft quilt.
    He rubbed his neck. “I gotta open the park in the morning, so I won’t be here when you get up, but I’ll leave some money on the counter if you wanna walk up to the Shake Shack for lunch. We can go for a dive or a surf or something when I get off.” He walked over and kissed the top of my head. “Good night, kiddo. I love you.”
    “Mm-hm. You too.”
    When the door closed, I stood up and looked around again. On top of my dresser sat my jar of sea glass, full with the greens and blues of countless hours spent combing the beach. I walked over and examined it, wondering what the ocean might uncover here, on this beach. Maybe a rare piece—purple, or yellow, or red. I set the jar on my nightstand, where it belonged, then changed out of my wet swimsuit.
    Any other day I would have opened my door to the outside and sat on the step, breathing in the night and listening to the ocean. But this day had been long and heavy, and the only thing I wanted was to start over in the light of the morning. I climbed into the cool of my sheets and switched off the light. For a long time I lay there listening to the sounds of my new home. The most noticeable was the rhythmic smack of waves on the shore, and then the static-like sound of their foam rolling up in disorganized ripples. The rest of the night outside was silent.
    I wondered what Laura and Shelby were doing at this moment. Thought of my grandma, probably sitting up with her glass of wine and a “late movie,” like she loved to watch. I replayed the conversation I’d had with my dad, spoken and unspoken, until I had myself convinced we’d be all right here … somehow.
    But then I rolled onto my side and thought of my mother, here on this beach.
    And like a reflex I closed my eyes against it all.

CHAPTER 2
    I needed to run. Because for as long as I could remember, it was the one time when I could just move and not think of anything . Being in the water could calm me, but it wasn’t the same. When I was younger, after my mom was gone, the ocean was the place I went to be near her, where I would dive under the waves, thinking I’d maybe catch a glimpse of her there, hair splayed out like a mermaid’s—swimming, beautiful and strong and free. She felt close and peaceful that way, and since then, the water had become the place where I felt most at home. But being here, where she’d been before I even existed, where she and my dad had a history he had laid to rest until the night before, it somehow all felt too close. So I needed to run.
    I walked the narrow path to the sand and glanced at the run-down beach cottage as I passed it. In the weak morning light it seemed especially still and quiet. All the windows on the first story were hidden under sprawling bougainvillea, but upstairs I could make out a small window shrouded in dirt, and a tiny sagging balcony facing the water. Someone had woken up to a deserted beach a long, long time ago and had probably seen the same simple beauty of pelicans gliding in a line, wing tips hovering impossibly close to the surface of the swells.
    The beach and its cottages stood out in stark contrast to the other side of Pacific Coast Highway. Across four lanes, lining the hill s was a series of homes that were really more like the celebrity compounds I’d seen in magazines. The higher up the hill they were, the tall er the columns and the wider the arches