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cover him with sand until he became this mountain of sand, only his head and neck visible. Walking into the water, she rinsed the sand from her hands, did a few deep knee bends, boosting herself up with her fists against her knees, and ambled to her mountain of sand.
    â€œHelp me with the umbrella.” Aunt Stormy poked the sharp end of the pole into the sand.
    â€œLet me,” Mason said.
    â€œWe’ll need some shadow,” Aunt Stormy said.
    I smiled but didn’t correct her. My mother too had confused shade and shadow. In German, both words were the same: Schatten.
    Opal half-walked, half-crawled to the edge of the sea, and I followed her, knelt down, and pulled her into the curve of my arms so that we faced the waves and felt their power…as I had at her age, naked and scuttling toward those white and curling waves that were so much taller than I was, and my father, strong and summer-brown and running, sliding himself on the sand between me and the water, a people-wave stopping the water-wave from getting me. Then, stepping behind me, my father pulled me up by my hands, and the instant the wave was about to knock me over, he let me fly across it— bird…fish…bird-fish —and I flew above the wave till he landed me on the sand, my father, shy on land but a hero in the water. He raised me up again so I could fly across the next wave too, each bigger and faster. Not one knocked me over. Because I could fly. And when he landed me for the last time, he turned me toward my mother and Aunt Stormy. I squatted and grasped fists of sand for them.
    How do I remember, Dad? From stories you told to me? From what I still feel in my body: the flying…the lightness…the certainty that there is a way across. “A way we haven’t thought of before,” you liked to say.
    â€œFly…” I lifted Opal above the waves, and she gurgled with pleasure. “Fly…”
    â€œFly…” Mason brought his lips against my ear. “You and I…we’d make fantastic babies.”
    â€œYou’re not serious.”
    â€œToo soon?”
    â€œI barely know how to take care of one. While you’re playing house.”
    Aunt Stormy came up next to us.
    Mason tilted his head. “Don’t be pissed at me, Annie. It’s just that—”
    â€œWhat are they doing?” I pointed to the woman who had buried the man. She was laying her folded towel next to his and stretching out so that her head was next to his, but her body facing in the opposite direction from him, away from the water. Then she started digging herself in, using the smaller of the two shovels to scoop the sand from around her body and heaping it on top of herself. At first she was sitting up, reaching for the sand with her shovel, but then she had to lie down, let the sand sift across her till it was up to her chest.
    â€œIt’s what they do when they go to the beach,” Aunt Stormy said.
    â€œBut why?” Mason asked.
    She shrugged. “It’s what they always do.”
    The woman closed her eyes. Rested. There was something ancient about those two, the burrowing in, something foreign and intimate.
    â€œAre they married?” Mason asked.
    â€œI have no idea.”
    â€œI bet they’re mother and son.” I squatted, balanced Opal on my knee, and drew their outlines into the sand. A man and woman burying each other. Someone else might see it as a burial. I knew it wasn’t. Imagined the delicious weight of cool sand. What they do when they go to the beach…
    â€œI bet they’re married,” he said.
    â€œShe’s much older than he,” Aunt Stormy said.
    â€œSo?” Mason asked.
    Aunt Stormy laughed. “Good for you, Mason.”
    â€œI bet you ten dollars they’re mother and son.”
    â€œTen that they’re married,” I said.
    â€œAnd how will you find out?” Aunt Stormy asked.
    Mason grinned at her.