1993: Old Silver Beach, Massachusetts

As the only child of an only child, Lizzie Linwood had never given much thought to cousins. Before her first summer in Massachusetts, cousins had been an abstraction, like Turkish Delight, which, after having read about it earlier that year, she’d decided must be the sort of candy that the children of royals ate. From the backseat, she grabbed a few grapes out of the container her mother had wedged between the two front seats. According to her mother’s new husband, she now had dozens of first cousins and too many second cousins to count. She looked at Jim, who’d driven the overnight leg of the trip and was sleeping with his head on the window glass and his knees wedged against the dashboard. At rest he looked different, less pinched around the eyes and mouth. 

“Not too many,” her mother said. “Jim’s family is planning on a clam bake right after we get there.” Lizzie ignored her mother and ate several more grapes. “How much longer?”

“Stop asking.” Her mother readjusted her grip on the steering wheel. The car was fairly new, chosen because of its gas mileage, but it rattled on the inside so that much of what they’d said since leaving Memphis the day before had been yelled over the hum of the road.

“Is it more than an hour?” Lizzie worked her fingernail under the skin of the last of the grapes and peeled it.

“Read your book.”

“What do you think they’ll be like?” Of all the new relatives Jim had listed off, Lizzie had been most interested in the two cousins born improbably the same month and year as herself.

“Who?” Her mother leaned closer to the steering wheel, squinting at a road sign.

“The two,” Lizzie didn’t want to finish. It felt unlucky to ask about them.

“Elyse and Isobel? Everyone will be nice, like Jim.”

Lizzie sighed. After almost twenty hours in the car, the backseat had begun to feel small to Lizzie. She picked up the third book of the Narnia chronicles and stretched out, putting her socked feet on the window and using her soccer ball as a pillow to get just the right reading angle. The introduction of Eustace bothered her. She’d wanted all of the books to be mostly about Lucy, but instead there were pages and pages about their priggish cousin. Letting the book fall against her chest, she looked at Jim. Those first hours in the car, he’d tried to explain his family by naming his brothers, their wives, the aunts and uncles, and the cousins, who were all connected by blood back to a woman who was too old to be alive who lived thousands of miles away in the middle of an olive grove. She didn’t trust her mother’s opinion about the cousins and wanted to wake Jim and ask him again about the cousins, but she couldn’t quite form the right question. 

It was, after all, too much, too fast. Jim had shown up after Christmas, and by the time Lizzie had finished second grade, he’d gotten married to her mother and moved them out of her grandmother’s house, where they’d always lived, into a sprawling ranch house that was so new it still smelled like paint and saw- dust when they moved in. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him. She did, but she worried that Jim would act different with family. So far, being around him made her feel like that time her class went on a field trip to see how guitars were made and her teacher kept yelling at them to keep their hands in their pockets and not touch anything. Her stepfather kept his hands in his pockets around her.

The car slowed as they left the highway. Jim cleared his throat and sat up. Lizzie closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. She felt him looking at her and then watched under her lashes as he took her mother’s hand. “It’ll be wonderful,” he said.

“It’s been just us for so long,” her mother said. “And before that it was just me and my mother.”

“Family isn’t about numbers.”

Her stepfather kept talking, but in an adult voice kept low and indistinct. She let her eyes close on their own, the lids like weights against her eyes. In the darkness, Lizzie’s mind conjured the instashark Jim had given her for her birthday a few months earlier. It had started out the size of her hand, but after three days in a plastic pool in their new backyard, the creature had grown nearly as large as Lizzie. Instafamily. Her eyes flew open as the car slowed for a turn and moved from the smooth asphalt of the road to a gravel driveway. Falling asleep was like time travel. An instant earlier she’d had an hour to prepare to meet them, and now she had just seconds.

“They’re all out front,” her mother said, tapping on the brakes to slow the car even more. “There are so many of them.”

“That’s not even everyone,” Jim said, rolling down his window and leaning out to wave at the group of people gathered in front of the large house.

“It’s enough.” Her mother pulled into the driveway in front of the house and turned off the engine. Lizzie watched them get out of the car. Jim slid his arm around her mother’s shoulders, and before he could introduce her, she was swallowed up by hugs and kisses from the half dozen adults who’d been waiting out front for their arrival.

Putting on her tennis shoes, Lizzie looked around at the children. Some of them were too young to walk on their own and were being held by their parents. She cracked open the far door, the one away from the chaos, and stepped out. She searched the swarm of bodies, looking for anyone who could be close to her age, worrying that being the same age wouldn’t be enough to be liked by her new cousins. Jim had promised that they were ex- cited to meet her, but Lizzie knew how adults were with children: they never understood that kids, like adults, didn’t always get along. She tried to catch her mother’s eye without calling out for her, and just as she closed the door, she felt a hand slide into hers.

“Come on. If we leave now, we’ll get out of helping to carry stuff down to the beach.”

The hand was clammy, and as she grasped it, Lizzie felt the short, jagged fingernails and the torn skin around the cuticles. A second girl wrapped her arm around Lizzie’s waist.

“Stay low until we’re in the clear.”

As the three of them crept behind the car and then dashed for a clutch of bushes that lined the property, Lizzie tried to figure out who was who. The first girl, the one with the clammy hands, held herself with a confidence that was beyond her years. She wore red-framed glasses that kept sliding down her nose because of the heavy lenses. The other girl was rounder and softer with wide eyes and skin as perfect as a doll’s.

“Run,” said the girl with the glasses.

The three of them took off, and Lizzie, who’d always been fast, kept herself right at their heels. After a few moments, they slowed, looking back over their shoulders. The shorter girl, with bangs so long they fell into her eyes, offered Lizzie a sticky gumball from the pocket of her sundress and then introduced herself as Elyse. “You like gum?”

“Everyone likes gum,” said the other girl, who Lizzie decided must be Isobel.

“I should have told my mom we were going,” Lizzie said.

“Your mom won’t care,” Elyse adjusted her dress and smoothed her hair. “You’re eight, right? That’s how old you have to be to go to the beach without an adult.”

Lizzie reached for the gumball—it tasted like marshmallows. Back home, she wasn’t allowed to chew gum. She blew a large bubble and when it popped, she nodded in agreement, marveling that neither of her new cousins wore shoes. During the four- or five-block walk to the beach, Elyse and Isobel talked back and forth, finishing each other’s sentences and occasionally breaking out into a rhythmic snap, clap, stomp motion and then calling out “whoomp there it is.” They tried to teach Lizzie the pattern as they walked. Being with them felt familiar and gave her shivers of anticipation, like when her mother started a story with “a long time ago.”

“That’s the Robinsons’ place. They don’t like kids,” Elyse said as they passed the stone façade of a house.

“Last year they called the police on my brother,” Isobel said. “For shortcutting their yard.”

“Grandma said Ms. Robinson’s just mad cuz her husband asked for a divorce.”

Where the asphalt turned to gravel, they stopped and did three rounds of the there-it-is dance, which Lizzie had figured out by then, and finished by hopping around on one foot three times in a circle before calling out “whoomp.” For no reason, Lizzie giggled.

“You have to tell the guard you’re local,” Isobel said, waving at the man sitting on a slowly turning stool in the small gatehouse at the edge of the parking lot.

“Your mom is wicked pretty,” Elyse said, drawing her long, wild hair over her face, reminding Lizzie of the crepe myrtles in Memphis and the way their bark peeled off in long dark curled strands.

“Wicked,” she said under her breath, trying out the slang.

“My mom’s mad that she’s so pretty,” Isobel said. “Said she didn’t look ten years older than Uncle Jim.”

“Don’t be a chucklehead.” Elyse flicked Isobel on the arm. “Mom also said you like soccer.”

Lizzie shrugged. She loved soccer but wasn’t sure how to explain that to her new cousins.

“We’ll all be good at different things then,” Isobel said. “I like to sing and Elyse likes to draw. You can be good at sports. We all like the color blue. That’s what we have in common—oh and our birthdays and the pact we made to never cut our hair.”

Elyse reached out and ran her fingers through Lizzie’s tangled blond strands. “Uncle Jim says now we’re like Charlie’s angels. He used to call us double trouble. But he’ll probably give us a new nickname now that there are three of us.”

“You’ll like Uncle Jim,” Isobel said, picking at a scab on her elbow until it started to bleed. She put the scab itself in the pocket of her overalls. “He makes pancakes and digs moats. Everyone thinks he should move back here, but Dad says you go where the jobs are.”

Lizzie listened to them but couldn’t find voice enough to add to the conversation. They seemed older than her friends in Memphis. More like fourth graders. The beach, with its beauty and vastness, made her want to cry out. She felt her heart constrict and then explode in an expression of joy at the sight of the white sand in a curving crescent shape and the marine blue of the bay. A creek bordered by a rock wall divided the beach in half. Visible about ten yards from the beach was a sandbar where dozens of people in brightly colored swimsuits played.

“We’re on this side,” Isobel called, when Lizzie started walking the wrong way.

“They divided it so that residents get one side and out-of-towners the other.” Elyse pointed: “No point in making friends with the kids on that side of the jetty. You have to be here, on the beach where everyone belongs.”

As her cousin spoke, Lizzie became aware of how different the word “beach” sounded when Elyse said it. Lizzie liked the way she talked. It reminded her of the time a girl from the middle of nowhere Mississippi had moved into her school. How that new girl had swallowed and meted out her words had been music to Lizzie.

It made her even more self-conscious about speaking, knowing that to her cousins’ ears, her Southern accent would sound as foreign. Elyse waved to a group of women hovering over a beach fire and several pots that Lizzie figured would soon be the clam bake she’d been told about. “My mom is over there,” she said, gesturing toward an apple-shaped woman who laughed so hard she jiggled.

Isobel unhooked the latches of her overalls and let them fall to the sand. “Watch what I can do,” she called, throwing her clothes and glasses toward Elyse’s mother.

Elyse sighed and picked up the scattered items, shrugging out of her sundress and dropping the pile of clothing on the edge of her mother’s towel. Her hands lingered for a moment, covering her body as if she were embarrassed at her chubbiness. Lizzie shaded her eyes against the sun and watched Isobel turning perfect cartwheels in the sand. “Go on,” Elyse’s mother said. “They won’t bite.”

Isobel, looking over her shoulder, issued a challenge to Lizzie and Elyse. “Last one to the sandbar wears the seaweed.”

Without thinking, Lizzie took off at full speed.

Behind her, she heard Elyse’s mom talking. “There she goes now. It’ll be fine.”

Lizzie liked to run. Her feet plunged into the shallow water without stopping and she laughed as she kicked up water into her face, delighted to taste the salt of it. She mostly swam in chlorinated pools in Memphis. The Mississippi, muddy and full of mysterious whorls, remained off-limits. She beat her cousins by ten yards and after they’d recovered their breath, Isobel plaited a crown from lengths of seaweed and eelgrass that she pulled from the floor of the ocean and set it atop Elyse’s head.

“I always wear the seaweed,” Elyse said.

Lizzie put her hand over her mouth to keep the words from coming out. She was afraid they’d be the wrong words.

“Do you talk?” Isobel asked. “You haven’t said one word to us. Nobody told us you didn’t talk. They said you were tall for your age.”

“She talks,” Elyse said, turning to Lizzie.

“I don’t have a bathing suit,” Lizzie said, looking down to see that the cuffs of her jean shorts were damp.

“Nobody cares about that, silly,” Elyse said, pulling the hem of Lizzie’s oversized T-shirt and tying it into a knot at the waist. “There. Just roll your shorts up some more and you’ll be fine.”

From the shore, Elyse’s mother waved at them and yelled at them not to go out any farther. Lizzie saw her own mother and Jim walking toward the clump of Wallaces on the beach. All of the other women were short. Lizzie watched as her mother stood apart from everyone; that was one of her tricks to appear shorter than she actually was. The Wallace men were all as hand- some as Jim, with wide shoulders and full, thick hair. She blew a bubble so big that when it popped, she had to peel the gum from her nose. In the time that Jim had been with her mother, Lizzie had liked him okay. In the way that she liked her teach- ers. Every day he tried a different nickname with her—Sport, Chickadee, Chicken, Bunny, Elevator. She figured that was his way of trying to get comfortable. He did an Irish jig when he arrived at the jumble of beach towels and umbrellas, and Elyse’s mother hugged him as if he were her own brother. She pointed out the girls and Jim called to them, “Be careful, Lollypop!” That was the name he’d settled on in the car.

“Geez,” Isobel said, “You’d think we were actually in danger. This is the bay. The ocean is on the other side of the Cape. Nobody drowns here unless they can’t swim.”

“I can swim,” Lizzie said, trying to make up for the fact that she hadn’t worn her bathing suit under her clothing. “How far out can you walk?”

“Depends on the tide,” Isobel said, stepping off the sandbar and walking until the water swirled around her chin. She floated on her back, her toes pointed and her arms crossed as if she were dead. Her orange hair turned a deep copper when it was wet.

“She likes people to look at her,” Elyse said, sitting down on the sandbar so that the water came to her neck. She held her hair away from the waves to keep it dry and dipped her nose and mouth in the water to blow bubbles.

Lizzie dug her toes into the sand, feeling the larger rocks, and ventured a question of her own when Isobel had floated back toward them. “Y’all come here every summer?”

“Y’all,” they said in unison and then started shouting it out as if it were a curse word. By the end of the summer all of them would be using “y’all” and “wicked” in the same sentence.

When Isobel started clapping like a seal and barking “y’all,” Lizzie collapsed into a fit of giggles with them, forgetting entirely that she wasn’t dressed to be swimming. Elyse gave up trying to keep her hair dry and Isobel spent the next hour teaching them how to make arm farts. Once or twice a younger cousin ventured their way, but they persistently ignored Elyse’s mother’s pleas to let the little ones play with them and drove the interlopers back with splash attacks. During one of these bombardments, Lizzie swal- lowed what felt like a bucketful of the salty water and coughed so hard that Elyse and Isobel had to pound on her back.

They floated for a bit after that. Lizzie was already tallying up stories to tell her friends back in Memphis about her new cousins and the beach. Mrs. Dameron, who taught the third grade always had show-and-tell the first day back, and Lizzie had started to consider the perfect item to show. It would have to be something that was unique to this beach. Lots of kids went to Destin over the break.

“Where’s your other dad?” Elyse asked, and Lizzie couldn’t tell whether she’d been waiting to ask the entire time they’d been together or whether the thought had just occurred to her. As she got to know her cousin better, she realized that she never planned ahead. Every action in her life was a reaction.

Isobel, as if sensing there was no answer to the question, dunked Elyse, which started a spirited round of play fighting until Elyse got sand in her eyes, which made them all stop.

“I’m not crying,” she said before either one of them could accuse her.

“I don’t,” Lizzie said, surprised to be speaking even as the words left her mouth.

“You don’t what?” Isobel asked. 

“Have a dad.” 

“That’s okay,” Elyse said, pulling at the corner of her eye and trying to blink the sand out. “Lots of kids don’t have dads.” “Everyone has a dad,” Isobel said. “I know,” Elyse said. “I mean like my friend Susie, she doesn’t have a dad. He died or something.” 

“I don’t think mine died,” Lizzie said, realizing how little her mother had told her. For most of her life, Lizzie hadn’t given much thought to the identity of her father. Occasionally, faced with a daddy-daughter dance or when her friends’ fathers would ferry them to one place or another, she’d remember that it was strange that she didn’t have one. But it wasn’t until her stepfather came along that she was forced to confront the idea that some- where out there she had a father. Her mother tended to answer questions about her father with other questions. “What do you need a father for?” she’d ask in the same voice she used when Lizzie had been caught sneaking an extra cookie.

“Knock, knock,” Isobel said.

Elyse groaned and splashed water in her cousin’s direction. “She loves this sort of game. Knock-knock jokes, riddles, word puzzles.”

“Fine. Try this one. It’s a memory test. There’s a one-story house with yellow walls, a yellow roof, yellow fridge, yellow plates—”

“I get it,” Elyse said. “Everything’s yellow.”

Isobel continued listing the contents of the house. Lizzie knew the joke. The answer had been given away in the first sentence. She took a deep breath and swam under the water, keeping her eyes tightly shut, and closed her fist around a few errant strands of eel grass to keep her submerged. Once last year she’d asked about her father. No, that wasn’t right. She hadn’t asked. All the other times, that’s what she’d done, started with a question: Who is? Where is? Why is? But this time, she hadn’t given her mother a choice. “Tell me about my father,” she’d said. What Lizzie had wanted was a description, an occupation, a location. Instead, her mother had placed her hand on Lizzie’s head and smoothed her hair into a ponytail, twisting it in the back so it would hold. “You’ll meet him someday,” she’d said, “and he’ll love you enough to make up for not being here now.” And then, as if knowing what she’d said wasn’t even close to enough, she added, “You have his eyes.”

Her lungs burned. She let go of the eel grass, bursting the surface of the water, and gasped for air. When she looked around, she saw squiggles of confetti as her body adjusted to the sudden intake of oxygen and the bright sunlight above the water.

“Girls,” Elyse’s mother called, walking toward them. “We’re ready to eat.”

“Triplins,” Jim shouted after her. “Like cousins and triplets.”

“I don’t understand,” Elyse was saying, while waving impa-tiently at her mother. “You never told me what color the stairs were. Isn’t everything yellow?”

“There are no stairs,” Lizzie said, grinning at her cousin. “It’s a one-story house.”

They dunked Isobel together, their laughter echoing across the surface of the bay. Lizzie knew that for third-grade show-and-tell in the fall, what she’d bring would be a bottle of bay water, a nickname for the three of them, and their own secret whoomp dance.