The Summer He Left by Alison Ozawa Sanders

The Summer He Left | Alison Ozawa Sanders

Mom lets you choose the perfect spot – close but not too close to the water, equidistant from the people to either side, far from annoying kids who might steal your sand toys. You walk right out of your flip flops, leaving them behind you like footprints, plop down in the cool sand, and plunge your fingers in. The drive from the valley felt like it took forever. Mom was crying again. Then she suddenly wiped her face and said in a wobbly voice, We girls just need a day at the beach. You felt her watching you in the rearview mirror, silently begging you to smile, to say something cheerful back to her. Your eyes refused to meet hers. And then she started sighing a lot, which, these days, means she’s going to start crying again. You just stared out the window and watched the green freeway signs fly past.

But now, the sand is soft beneath your thighs and you can feel the crashing of the waves like thunder in your chest, and the wind is wild, whipping in your hair. You fill your lungs with the briny air and look to the horizon. All of this feels like it could almost wash the rest away. 

You want to get right to it – run straight into the waves, do cartwheels at the water’s foamy edge, bury yourself in the sand – but Mom says Sunblock first. Standing side by side, both looking out over the water, you pass the bottle back and forth, smearing the lotion over chests and limbs and cheeks. It smells like coconut, and the scent is deeply familiar but also faintly repulsive, cloying. 

Honey, can you get my back? 

You ignore her. She lowers herself to sit on a towel so that you can reach, and she lowers the straps of her swimsuit over her shoulders. You instinctively look for someone, anyone else, who can do this. But, of course, there is no one. You scan the beach and imagine that every other mom has a husband who does this part, and then they trade places, and the moms do it for the husbands. They both like it because it’s sort of sexy and that’s what grown-ups do. But not your mom. What she told you was: Dad left us. But you know that has to be a lie. He left YOU, you want to scream at her, but she already cries so much all the time, you don’t say anything. You hate how splotchy her face gets when she cries. 

You kneel behind her, hold the bottle aloft, and squeeze a big blob directly onto her wide back, sprinkled with moles and freckles. You spread the lotion with the pads of your fingers only, wishing it would sink in faster. That blob was a bit much. Peering down at her hunched form, you think of a Thanksgiving turkey – soft and pink and vulnerable before it goes into the oven. You smear the lotion as quickly as you can, wanting to be done. 

When she does your back, she rubs the lotion in her palms first, so it’s warm when she spreads it up your neck, over your shoulders, down the neat stack of vertebrae. Okay, okay, you say, though you know she’s not done yet, and you scamper to the water on colt legs. One day I’ll run away too, you don’t dare say.

Later that evening, back at home in the valley, she undresses in the little bathroom with the light that hums like a beehive. You glance up to see your mother’s back striped with pale streaks – your four fingers. One shoulder glows an angry red, scarlet blotches bloom at her armpits and along the edges of her swimsuit, and you feel guilty, for a moment. That must hurt, you think. But neither of you says it aloud.

That night, you wake in the middle of the night, chest slick with sweat, heart jackrabbiting in your throat. In your dream you were falling, falling. You go to her then, silently, and her room is cool, and into her bed you climb, nestling behind her. Through the thin T-shirt you feel the heat of her skin on your cheek. She smells like the ocean, and your eyes drift shut.

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