Zuma

At Mom’s you have two choices for meals: take it or leave it. At Dad’s you have too many. You eat whatever you want, whenever you want. It’s late enough in the morning that a frozen dinner feels acceptable, and you eat out of its black plastic tray as you stare up at the Disney Channel, nightgown still on—a blue-and-white-striped one your grandmother bargained for at the flea market. At eleven you’ve begun to outgrow it, and the buttons keep popping open. You will change soon.

And that’s when you hear it.

You mute the TV. You hear it again: your brother screaming.

When you get to your father’s bedroom, you see Dad shaking like a freshly fumigated bug. Your brother is by his side on the phone, his face red and sweaty, like when he’s been skateboarding all day.

By the time the EMTs roll your father out, you still haven’t changed. Your buttons keep popping open.

A gloved hand pats you. He’ll be OK, they say. Don’t worry.

You change.

You are standing on your favorite beach in a pink bathing suit. Your hair is sun drunk and wind washed. You feel the squishy sand under your toes, the waves lapping your tanned feet. You laugh, hearing the crashing and echoing surf, seeing the tiny sand crabs scrambling to burrow back into their safe, mushy home. You are four, and people adore you. You think this is how it will always be: splashing briny water, searching for dolphins that pop to the surface, happy and free.

Dad places your eight-year-old fingers gingerly over the brand-new keyboard. You’ve already washed your hands real good, heard the lecture about no liquids or food ever around his computer. You need to learn to use one; it’s the way of the future, he says. So you practice using all your fingers. You don’t peck. Home row, QWERTY, Ctrl+Alt+Delete.

When the kids spill out for recess one day, not long after Dad’s seizure, you hang back and say to your sixth-grade teacher, Can I talk to you? She’s offered before: Anytime you need to talk, you just let me know. So you do, you let her know.

She ushers you into the adjoining room—boxes of supplies and paper and textbooks, a quiet fortress—and you tell her about the dream you had, about how you were back there on the shore of Zuma Beach, the mushy sand beneath your feet. Then I was waving, and there was my dad, and he was waving back, but then he kind of disappeared like sand. He was suddenly sand, and then he was gone.

Thank you for telling me, she says, but she’s already dialing the front office from the phone on the wall. I think you should talk to someone, she tells you. You thought she wanted to talk to you. It’s then you realize she is concerned about you and your developing brain and how this experience might have affected you—issues only a trained professional can handle. This is what she is worried about, why she told your classmates to be nice to you: your father is dying, so they need to stop making fun of you and your strange dreams and your fat body. You want to tell her it wasn’t a dream, not really. You were on that beach, you felt that sand, you know that place. It wasn’t a dream because you could feel your father there, you could see him waving goodbye.

Your father’s scent—Dial soap and Clorets gum and coffee breath—is replaced by the smell of soggy diapers, of unwashed flesh, of hair heavy with its own oil.

Late at night you eat ice cream straight from the pint, spoon sticky with sugar. You eat by the fridge light. You eat and eat and eat. You are alone.

You eat fast, worry about scarcity. You always hunger for more but have learned not to ask for seconds at meals.

You’re not still hungry, are you?

Are you?

If we are infinite, you wonder, then where did my father go? If his body returns to the earth, regenerates, what will it become next? You are thirteen, and your father sits on your lap. No, your father’s body sits on your lap. No, no, your father’s ashes sit on your lap.

You arrive at the beach where you once built sandcastles, where you ate turkey sandwiches with Italian dressing and stuck Bugles over every fingernail. It’s dusk, and you feel your mother’s worried energy—it’s not really legal to do this, she’s told you, but here you all are, ankle deep, wading in. His body merges with the sand, dissolves into the sea. His remains will coat another kid’s skin, support a teen’s toes, grip the hair of lovers on the shore.

You grab his body by the fistful. It’s gritty. It’s coarse. It’s your father’s teeth and bones. It’s all you have left. And you can’t wait to let it go.

You are still touching the same keyboard you did the day he taught you. If you type long enough, maybe you can find your way back to him.