They tell each other the hideout disappears whenever they’re gone, and reappears only when they step across that threshold of brush.
Every summer, on the day of lowest tide, when the undulating sine wave on the chart dips below that tantalizing line of –1 feet, brushing close to –2, Robyn and Peter go with their parents to the tide pools. They visit on other days through the year, on crisper weekends in spring and fall, even when the sea is rough and white-capped in winter; but it is this singular lowest tide when magic is made and broken.
This year Robyn is five, and Peter is three, and they are still at home, crouching in the grass, picking at their plastic sandals—waiting for their parents, who move so slow, Robyn thinks: they don’t understand the urgency of this day, the mysteries so briefly revealed, so quickly hidden by the incoming tide. Secret crevices, tangled fishing nets, the orange flash of a Garibaldi. There are dangers too: stingrays, jellyfish, the whims of the sea. Last week she was out on the edge of the reef where fishermen cast long lines into deeper waters when a wave charged the rocks and knocked her down. She tumbled hard against the barnacles, choking with saltwater. The aftermath was a blur: Father rushing her home to wash her wounds, the sizzle and sting of hydrogen peroxide, Peter watching with awe and fear. Robyn had been spinning with terror, still dizzy from her fall, and yet—she burned with the pleasure of her pain, of being touched, chosen, by the sea, the sea.
Next to her in the grass, Peter unearths a roly poly curled tight in a blue-gray ball. He picks up the bug and hands it to Robyn. He is anxious, hoping his sister is pleased with his offering. He senses her restlessness to depart and is himself also restless, still too young to unyoke his sister’s desires from his own. When the bug unfurls in Robyn’s steady palm, Peter watches his sister pinch it at the middle and turn it upside down.
“It’s pregnant,” she says authoritatively, pointing to an orange splotch on its belly. “These are the best ones.”
Peter’s little body swells with pride. Then comes the groan of the front door, a slab of oak as heavy as the house itself. Robyn bolts up, alert; she drops the roly poly into the grass, where the creature balls up again. Peter sags, the tether of his sister’s attention snapped.
Robyn thinks nothing of her betrayal.
“Are you kids finally ready?” Father calls, a laugh in his voice, his and Mother’s ambling figures walking down from the porch and onto the lawn, leisurely, unhurried, toward the gate.
Of course we’re ready, Robyn thinks, we’ve been ready for years—and indeed, years pass, and we leap ahead, two summers later: Robyn, who was five years old, is now seven; Peter, who was three, is now five. And still: the children wait, Robyn fumes, Father makes the same lame jokes. Robyn wants to bite back—but always, there is Mother, whom Robyn adores, and Mother loves Father, and if A then B; and Robyn does not want to be scolded for whining, and so she says nothing.
She looks instead to Peter, who is watching a line of ants crawl up the fence. Her frustration flares at the sight of his orange-red hair, which inspires constant cooing from teens and grandmothers, its rich color, its wild ways. But the boy is so tame. Though she used to play with him in the dirt, corralling earwigs, lately she’s been holding back, thinking of the injustice of her limp blonde locks. But then she thinks of the bullies at school, how they take advantage of his guilelessness by getting him to show his underwear to girls. Peter doesn’t know any better, he feels the intended shame but doesn’t understand why; and Robyn is both hurt to see his pain and embarrassed by his innocence. She wants to push and protect him at the same time.
Finally Mother and Father have traversed the lawn, and Mother opens the gate, and they all head toward the beach. It’s a short walk, just a few minutes around the block and down the path to the cove, the children in front and the parents behind with towels, beach chairs, a cooler, their rainbow umbrella. A year rolls away beneath their feet, a week here, a smattering of Saturdays there. In summer the sun makes glue of the hot black tarmac, and Peter’s rubber sandals have become sticky with it. Six years old, he feels the excitement as if his heart is a balloon whizzing up into the forever-blue sky. The anemones! The cliff lizards! The bathing rock! And his sister, there, showing him the way.
Robyn stops at the gate to the path that will take them down to the beach, the air drowsy with the scent of honeysuckle; she plucks a blossom and pulls out the stamen for a taste of perfumed nectar. She’s ten now, about to start fifth grade. Normally she would bound ahead, but earlier that week she stumbled off the path into a secret hideout, with sleeping bags and benches and a fire pit; and since then, though their parents forbade it, she and Peter would sneak in together each time they passed. They tell each other the hideout disappears whenever they’re gone, and reappears only when they step across that threshold of brush. Robyn won’t admit it to him, but she feels safer with Peter there. The sense of risk is both heightened and tempered by his presence. And she needs this menace, finds herself drawn to the dark places at the edges of her world.
The two children walk together through the gate and onto the dirt path that leads to the cove. In ages past, this land sloped smoothly to the continental shelf; but countless cycles of tide, the brutal waves, the slow claws of sea, have carved a cliff down which the children now descend in switchbacks, ever unable to see more than a few steps ahead. The smooth sidewalks and trimmed lawns of their neighborhood disappear up and behind them; here, ivy grows in tangled bushes, tendrils creeping to wrap around their feet. The path grows progressively more wild, unkempt. Their parents fall farther and farther behind.
It’s not that Robyn wants to be them—but if she could be among them, she thinks, maybe she would feel less lonely.
As they approach the site where Robyn found the hideout—years ago, now—Peter, still caught in elementary pleasures, lingers at the spot, hesitates. Robyn knows he wants to see if the camp is still there, that old game, but she, on the cusp of becoming a true teen, feels they’ve grown past that. It’s her job to help Peter wriggle out of his youth, shed those silly curiosities. Now, she strides past the marked tangle of brush, and without looking back, she knows Peter will follow. She feels a twang of remorse, because in fact she has only grown more curious—her imagination has started to tingle with shadier possibilities for that fire pit, those empty bottles—what if she, alone, were to return—
But she continues swiftly down the path, passing the “rest-a-while” bench, carved with lovers’ initials, where Peter always stops to sit. Such a baby. At the bottom stands another gate, then the beach. They have to wait here for their parents to catch up, though they’re old enough now to go on their own. Both children understand this, though Robyn is the one whose hunger for independence is the more raw, the more profound. She is constantly chafing—against Father, who’s so dorky; against Mother, who tells her to be patient; against her own oily hair, her funny-looking knees.
Beside her, Peter listens closely for the distinct sound of Father’s gait, the swish of Mother’s long skirt. He notices that Robyn has chosen to wear a bikini today instead of her old one-piece, though her chest is still flat. She has grown sullen, is somehow beyond the rest of them, straining for freedoms that Peter feels no yen for. And perhaps it’s the first time—yes, on this most potent of days, the day of lowest tide—that he feels a jolt of recognition of his separateness from his sister. A late realization perhaps, but Peter is a late bloomer.
He turns to Robyn. “Think we’ll see the eel again?” Their pet eel, he is calling it already in his mind.
“Maybe.” Shrug. She’d never admit it under interrogation, but the eel has been one of their most thrilling finds. A few days before, not the lowest tide but close to, they were squatting still as trees over a pool, letting their fingers dangle into the water like roots, pinching the pink flesh of mussels—which they’d pried from the reef’s bouquets and smashed open with a rock—to feed the spiny fish that darted in the shallows. From an unexpected corner: the thick blade of a moray, with filmy eyes and tiny needle teeth, snaking steadily toward Robyn’s fingers. She snapped her hand out of the water and the eel pulled back into its hole. But soon Peter was drawing it out with fresh mussel, dipping his other hand in to touch the eel delicately, curiously, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Mother’s voice comes from up the path: “Go ahead, Robyn, Peter, pick a spot. We’re right behind you.”
Robyn slips off her sandals and moves quickly across the sand, yellow flecked with gold and glitter, small dunes that shift under the pounding of feet. She stakes a place in an open area, far enough from the cliff to be safe from falling rocks. Robyn would kill to see a rockslide in action. Nothing exciting ever happens to her. It’s getting on toward noon, and she has finally reached the Emerald City of teendom. She celebrated her 13th birthday with her girlfriends doing each other’s makeup and taking glamor photos. They’d even offered to do Peter’s makeup, to which he shyly submitted, until Robyn got irritated at the lack of attention upon herself and banished him from the upstairs room until all birthday shenanigans were concluded.
The adults arrive and make a show of setting up their chairs and propping the umbrella. “Sunscreen,” says Father, and Robyn and Peter dutifully turn their backs to a parent apiece to get their shoulders slathered. It’s a grand tradition, the application of sunscreen, one that, for the children, collapses the years into a single living sum: the smell of chemical coconut; the bottle farts; the sudden coolness of lotion on sun-tender skin; the suffocation of pores; the feeling (and this is Robyn’s, hers alone; because it’s tiring to be 13, to be too cowardly for real rebellion and resorting instead to tiny, perpetual acts of unpleasantness) of being a passenger, of relinquishing the wheel of one’s life for a few blessed moments.
Finally it is done, and the years divide themselves again into discrete scenes, and the unrepeatable present announces itself as the two siblings, the boy—whose fiery hair has subdued to a strawberry-blonde—now almost as tall as the slender girl, trot toward the reef.
Out on the rocks—sleek with the thin, flat strands of eel grass—Robyn, 15, picks her way between and around the shallow pools. Peter has forked off elsewhere, blazing his own trail, Robyn supposes, not without a twinge of loss. She busies herself making an inventory of the pools’ contents: bumpy green kelp; ivory-colored cowry shells that she pockets for her collection; small fish that dart among the shadows; a population of hermit crabs or a slow-moving starfish, reminding Robyn of her parents ambling across the lawn as she waited at the gate, roly poly in hand, so many summers ago.
Glancing back at the shore, she sees them now under the umbrella, the same as always, though the rainbow has faded into a dirty pastel palette. In years past she’s thought it embarrassing—such a display, like tourists; Father might as well be wearing socks—but today she feels a certain fondness toward these fumbling, ungainly adults. Mother hasn’t relented on curfew rules, and Father is goofy as ever, but Robyn has started to feel something else, too, and the cliff rising stiff and huge behind them—erosion eating at its façade—makes the feeling more pronounced. Last week Mother came back from an appointment with a bandage on her cheek where she had stitches from something called a Basal cell. “Basil like the plant?” Peter asked, and Father smiled and said no, Basal with an a. Mother said the scar would be tiny, and in her laugh line anyway. But Robyn saw that under the table she was squeezing Father’s hand.
Later Robyn looked up the word in the library: skin cancer. The memory of those words sends a cold trill through her body as she stands on the reef. Her own fascination with mortality led her to experiment, briefly, with the goth crowd, though her bronzed skin set her apart from their paleness, and she couldn’t bring herself to dye her hair black. Now she’s changed tactics and is edging her way toward the popular kids, who live in gargantuan houses and write down what they wear every day so they don’t repeat outfits more than once a month. It’s not that Robyn wants to be them—but if she could be among them, she thinks, maybe she would feel less lonely.
Across the reef, Peter leaps nimbly from rock to rock, passing young children (as they were once!) fascinated by sea anemones. He, too, is still compelled to touch them from time to time, to feel the pucker of their purple-green tentacles just before they draw shut. But today, on the day of lowest tide, he searches for more precious things. This is why they still come, isn’t it? He steps into a pool and crouches to investigate an overhang. Nothing. He straightens and pauses. Strange to think he once saw the tide pools as a source of infinite wonder, that he and Robyn planed their weeks around this day of the magical –2 feet. Now he knows that nothing is infinite, everything can be cataloged: bivalve, cephalopod, gastropod. Littoral, bathyal, abyssal. Tourist, inlander, local. He sees Robyn wandering reluctantly a few rocks away: for all her posturing, definitely a native species. Her hair is tangled down her back, and her freckled skin glows with years of accidental summer tans. She moves with grace on the jagged, slippery reef, unlike Peter’s middle-school friends, who have been devolving as they approach high school. Their jokes are getting louder and their jeans sag a few centimeters lower each week. Peter feels strangely immune; wherever this need comes from to fit in, Peter is missing it—or perhaps it is that other needs, other desires, are stronger.
She could see her own grief reflected exquisitely in his face. They were different in every way but this; in this they were the same.
Robyn—16—has stopped over a small pool to look for crabs, and she is about to walk away when she notices there is something familiar about the shape of this particular rock, the rounded edges, the shelf just there. It’s the bathing rock, she realizes. When they were young, she and Peter used to sit inside and pretend it was a bath. Now the pool seems tiny, for babies. How little they were! She has a flash of memory, holding her father’s hand as she waddled along the beach, too young to walk on her own. Then another flash, getting knocked over by a wave, scraped knees, the sting of tears. To her surprise her eyes fill and she has to blink to keep from crying. She hears Father’s voice, untainted by the years: “The ocean wanted you too much,” he’d whispered to ease her fright. “It tried to take you with it. You were too special.” Why isn’t she special now? What has she lost?
The day grows into afternoon; the crowds are at their peak. Peter watches a lifeguard sitting idly on a raised platform, sunglasses revealing nothing; he hears the faint thump, fwipt, smack of a middle-aged couple passing a volleyball back and forth, bump, set, spike. In the wet sand where the water comes in and out, young kids make drip castles and bury their hands and dredge up wriggling, tickling sand crabs. Peter remembers when he and Robyn did the same. They’d prepare a bucket with sand and seawater and plunk their captives inside, then bring the bucket home at the end of the day. But after a day or two away from the ocean, the creatures always went still.
He feels a suction on his ankle and looks down. Two pale tentacles, emerging from under a large rock, probe his skin. His heart jumps. An octopus, a big one, judging by the tentacles. An uncommon find. He pries himself from their curious stickiness and steps out of the water to scan the reef for Robyn. Before others see it, he wants to share the find with her; moments of connection between them are so rare these days. In the past year at the same high school, Peter has learned to bury his disappointment in Robyn’s brushing him aside, his scientific interests and auburn hair a clear impediment to her own quest for coolness. Now, for example, she’s gone off somewhere with her boyfriend, a skinny theater guy who picks her up from the house and drops her off late at night. From his window Peter saw them kissing in the boyfriend’s car when he’d parked under a streetlight, their hands busy down low. Later he thought about the boyfriend’s arm, the way it moved quickly back and forth; he removed his sister entirely from the image; he imagined the boyfriend’s hair, thick in front of his eyes; he felt his forehead grow hot; and when it was over, he went into his and Robyn’s shared bathroom and flushed the tissue without turning on the light.
Robyn’s boyfriend gets bored with starfish, so he and Robyn leave the reef and wander toward the parking lot by the road, where a border of boulders protects the coastal highway from the crash of high-tide waves. He balances on a tilted rock and tells Robyn about a prank he played on his friends. He’s a sophomore at the local college, studying drama or physics, he hasn’t decided yet. Robyn has told him she loves him, because when they lie in the bed of his friend’s pickup and drive along the highway late at night, with the cool sea air rushing over her closed eyes, his arm over her chest is the only thing keeping her from floating off into the darkness. But—love? No, she doesn’t think that. Once, she took him to the hideout along the cliffside path, where she and Peter used to go. The magic was gone; it was clearly a makeshift campsite, probably where homeless people slept. Her boyfriend brought a six-pack of beer and said, “This place is trippy,” and the weekend after that he returned with a group of people from his dorm. The presence of all those people, instead of being a reassurance, as it was with Peter, felt like a trespass. After they left, she went back alone, removed their empty bottles and bent cigarette butts, and swept their footprints from the path. Anyway, she tells herself, she’s going away to college in a few months, out of the state, too far to keep anything alive—as she knows from all those years of bringing home sand crabs from the beach in a bucket and watching them die.
Peter watches Robyn gaze up at the cliff, which has retreated little by little each year, the weather at work; ugly concrete sea walls are being erected all along it to protect the costly houses whose yards and porches are slowly tipping over the edge into empty space, like gardens at the end of the world. The sun drops lower, the colors of the beach are muted, the water is calm. The wind is shifting. The tide is on its way in again, and the shore is starting to empty of people. But he and his sister remain. Robyn seems reluctant to leave, and Peter won’t push her; he senses her melancholy, though even she doesn’t seem to have a reason for her unhappiness. Peter thinks it’s the distance—how can she be so far away from all she’s ever known? He starts college in a month, staying local, unwilling to sever his coastal ties. But when he suggests she move back to California, she gives a gray little laugh. “And do what?” she says. “What would I do here?”
Robyn picks up a piece of driftwood and tosses it into the water: useless flotsam, like her degree in history, she thinks bitterly. Stepping over a clear pool, she eavesdrops as Peter shows his “friend from college”—or so he introduced his boyfriend to their parents—the simple delight of sea anemones. Other species have become less common in the years since they were children, but the anemones continue to flourish, and Peter and his boyfriend are childish with glee. Robyn remembers when Peter came out to her: they were walking up the path toward home, was it only last year? She’d made him stop, to see if they could still find the hideout—she’d kept the memory close and safe all those years, their secret place, untouched by the passing of time—but they never got that far, because Peter said, “I want to tell you something.” And though her mind spun, exploded outward when he explained the direction of his desire, she returned to the moment filled with joy.
Now she watches the swift clouds and the shifting light patterns on the water; she dips a foot into a pool and swishes at eel grass. She glances toward their towels on the beach and is startled to realize Father isn’t there. Just Mother, reading a book in the colored shade of the musty old umbrella.
But of course Father wouldn’t be there; how silly of her to think. She looks into the sun and blinks back tears. It’s so unfair, she thinks, as if she were her teen self again, with that skewed sense of justice, a morality that bent around her like gravity around a planet—unfair that there was no warning. Just a phone call in the middle of the afternoon, an impossibly ordinary time—sun slanting in through the window, her boyfriend picking up Thai for dinner. She’d booked a flight right then, called her boss from the taxi; Peter picked her up at the San Diego airport, red hair gathered low on his neck in a ponytail. He was tall, handsome even. Gentle. She could see her own grief reflected exquisitely in his face. They were different in every way but this; in this they were the same.
He’d taken Robyn to dinner at a restaurant where he knew the chef; in between classes, he explained, he’d been working on an organic farm that supplies vegetables to the high-end restaurants in the area. Robyn felt safe there, swaddled in the noise of other tables’ conversations, Peter’s silence her center. The waiters brought dish after dish on the house. Robyn was happy to see Peter had found a place of sorts. Now, on the reef, she feels that relief again for Peter’s belonging—yet with it comes a longing for her own niche, her own answer to the question of where she would go when the tide comes in again and she can no longer be here, in the place that is half sea, half land, never wholly one thing or another.
Hands in his pockets, Peter walks with her over the rocks. It’s been a long time for both of them, five years since Father died. And Peter, without her the past summers, somehow let the lowest-tide tradition slip, unwilling perhaps to betray the memories of a thousand cumulative summer days when they walked the shore together. They still have their reef-legs, though, instinct guiding their steps. Peter lets his eyes pass over the rippling surface of the pools, remembering the moray eel they fed one year all summer long, always in the same hole, always with its beady black eyes—their pet, they called it, their pet eel. Since then, tourist traffic has not been kind to the reef, stripping it bare, wearying the grooves. All those people who overturn rocks, peeling off starfish to take their carcasses home as souvenirs. He remembers how he and Robyn collected cowries and smashed mussels to use as eel bait. Their actions, too, are to blame. Today they will be lucky to find a sea star larger than the palm of his hand.
The beach no longer cares for them—it never did; it’s too big for them, too ruthless, too eternal—but the hideout has been theirs alone.
The sky is deepening into sunset, and a breeze raises goosebumps on Robyn’s arm, as if she’s been touched by a ghost. The whole beach, she feels suddenly, is full of ghosts. She’s 29 now, still living in that faraway kingdom of amber seas and tideless summers. She has a job, a man she’s decided to marry. But when Peter called last week—the first time they’d spoken in a year—to remind her that the summer’s low tide was coming up, she bought a last-minute ticket. She was nervous the whole flight, each bout of turbulence a sign that she’d waited too long, that she was only dredging up old troubles. But the plane had landed smoothly, she’d rented a car and now she’s here, soaking the last warmth of the sand through her bare soles. The gulls cry. The sea sings its languid, crushing song.
And here is Peter. Here is her brother. The boy she once felt responsible for, now a man who—he’d told her when she arrived—missed his bus that morning because he’d stopped to lean his shoulder against a telephone pole where a woodpecker was pecking far above, just to feel the vibrations.
“It used to seem so essential,” she says to him. “The lowest tide of the year.”
Peter nods.
“You know,” he says, “it’s not really the lowest.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s the lowest tide of the summer, but not of the year. That happens in winter, usually January. Mom and Dad lied.”
Robyn stops. The cliffs lean inward, then back; her senses sharpen to the whirr of a Frisbee, the padded footfalls of a jogger passing by. How much has she forgotten? How much has she mutated to suit her transitory needs? Unmoored, without anchor, she has a deep ache to return to the house, but even that is lost to her now, sold years ago to strangers.
Her throat constricts and she turns to Peter wanting to say something, wanting, but fumbling. Then—
“The hideout,” she says. “Do you think it’s still there?” As soon as she says it, she knows they have to go back. It’s exactly the right thing to do. She is compelled by an urgency she didn’t expect and can’t define. The beach no longer cares for them—it never did; it’s too big for them, too ruthless, too eternal—but the hideout has been theirs alone. The intrusions, even those she brought herself, are forgivable, because, she now remembers, the hideout—the true hideout—only appears when she and Peter are there together.
Peter shakes his head. “Twenty years is a long time.”
But Robyn is already running the length of the beach, which is narrowing now with the incoming water as the sea seeks to kiss the cliff. Peter follows as she swings open the gate onto the obscured trail, and he is reminded of the way her ponytail used to bob when she skipped ahead of him. Anything to get her like this again, he thinks, to get her to this state of abandon, to keep her here. He doesn’t even stop at the rest-a-while bench—a first. That he can still experience a first in this place humbles him.
It never turns out as you imagine: decades of wind bend the trees, a sudden storm can fell them. The cliffs have been eroding for eons and two children’s steps today, their many steps over the years, might add up to something magnificent—some slight release of a pocket of earth, meeting another pocket, mixing with pebbles and ice plant and dead bees and blossoms, gaining mass, tumbling toward the ocean, riding the currents to spread their seeds, taking root in a faraway place with different fish, different birds.
They reach the spot breathless. At least—Robyn thinks this is the spot, but she can’t be sure. Everything looks unfamiliar, the brush tangled and thick, the trees oddly shaped. She tries to push back the foliage but nothing will give. A branch whips across her face, stinging her cheek. Finally she sinks, crushed. It’s ridiculous, she thinks: an adult woman, barefoot, brought to her knees by an overgrown bush.
Then Peter—tall Peter, quiet Peter—lays his hand on her shoulder. He raises her from the ground; he leads her a few steps farther; he reaches into the brush and puts his whole body into it, opening the way for her to follow. Robyn catches the scent of honeysuckle, and she knows this is how she will remember the moment: Peter’s hand outstretched, his ponytail coming loose as he urges her off the path, That’s it, put your foot there—and the hope, but not the fact, of the secret beyond, the sea below.
Raised among the tide pools of Southern California, Jenny Williams is the author of The Atlas of Forgotten Places (St. Martin’s Press), which Ghanaian author Kwei Quartey praised as “Nothing short of astonishing.” She works at the intersection of AI, writing, and product design, and recently completed a novel about AI and motherhood. She currently lives in New Zealand with her partner and young son. Get in touch with her via jennydwilliams.com.
Header photo by CK Foto, courtesy Shutterstock.
