The Seashell

by Angela Saulsbery

The beach is empty. All the tourists are gone; their towels and totes and pails and shovels are gone too. Only a small girl is left. She sits on the rocks, stacking large pebbles into a fort, raying smaller ones around it, white for her army, brown for the enemy. Lily and her army will defend the fort with unfailing courage. Saltwater blood spills over the stones. As Lily works, the wind tugs at her curly brown hair, and cold sea spray pricks her bare legs.

Lily puts one last stone in place and gets to her feet. She is careful to brush every grain of sand from her shorts. Daddy will be angry if he sees sand; he’ll know she was here. She remembers how angry he was yesterday. She mustn’t do anything to make him yell again today. She will have to go home now, before he realizes she’s missing, and be quiet and good and nice, and do what she’s told. She trudges toward a blue house across the street.

Lily glimpses a sliver of white, and she crouches over it and pulls the white object free of the sand. The object is a large, perfect seashell. In the side of the seashell, there is a slit for a snail to come and go. Lily thinks that it must be nice to be a snail. Snails can hide whenever they like.

Lily remembers a shell like this one, and a woman with brown curly hair like Lily’s own. Lily remembers running her hands over the shell’s chalky surface as the woman, Lily’s mother, said, “If you put your ear up to the side, you can hear the waves whenever you want.” At the time, Lily wondered whether the snail liked hearing the ocean even when he was asleep in his house. She didn’t think about hiding.

But her mother left — Daddy was very angry, and she walked out the front door toward the beach early one morning. Lily never saw her again, and her relatives’ whispered conversations told her only that her mother had gone into the sea. Lily told herself that Mommy had gone to stay with the mermaids for a while in their underwater castle, but that she’d someday come back for Lily. Lily decided that it was selfish to cry and feel sad when her mother had a golden carriage pulled by dolphins and a beautiful mirror studded with gems the color of the sky. Surely her mother was happy.

Lily sits down again at the edge of the water, drawing her thin legs up underneath her and rubbing at the large bruise spread over her left thigh. The memory of shadows seeps into her mind. Shadows and shouting, and the clang of metal hitting the floor. Then a slap and the rustle of a body sliding down the wall. Then loud violent footsteps climbing the stairs. Then silence.

Lily’s mother comes into Lily’s bedroom. There is a red mark over one side of her face. She opens Lily’s bedside drawer, takes something out, and puts it into her pocket. She’s wearing her coat.

She kisses Lily’s forehead.
“Where are you going, Mommy?”
“Nowhere far.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“No. Go back to sleep. Everything is fine.” Lily wants her mother to stay, but her mother is smiling. She’s not afraid anymore. Nothing is the matter.

Lily wakes up early in the morning. Red and blue lights flood through her window and flow over the walls. It must be the ocean, Lily thinks. It must be the lighthouse. Maybe they changed the colors. She hears wailing, and thinks, it must be the sirens, like in her mother’s bedtime stories. Women with fish tails, who gather on rocky shores to sing. Yes, the sirens are singing.

Lily goes back to sleep.

When she wakes up again, her father is on the phone. “They’ll say I did this,” he says. “This is my fault.” His voice cracks; his eyes are red. Lily can’t find her mother, or her seashell.

Maybe she can use this shell to talk to her mother — after all, it is connected to the ocean. If Lily calls her mother’s name into it, she might hear and decide that it’s time for Lily to live with her and the sirens. “Mommy!” Lily calls into the gap in the shell. When she presses the warm white shell to her ear, she hears a gentle echo of the waves that crash close by, a whisper telling her that it isn’t time to come live with the mermaids just yet. She closes her eyes and listens. She thinks that she feels her mother’s hair sweep over her shoulder. She thinks that she hears someone’s feet settle into the sand beside her, and she feels safe.

“Lily!” Lily’s father strides toward her, fists swinging at his sides. Lily jumps up, heart fluttering, short of breath. The shell tumbles from her hands and lands at her feet. Now there is a hairline fracture running up its side, a fault line, an imperfection, but Lily grabs for the shell anyway and stuffs it into her pocket.

“What have I told you about coming down to the beach by yourself?” Lily’s father shouts. He shakes Lily by the shoulders. She can smell orange juice on his breath, and something else, something harsher. He comes even closer to Lily, and his features blur. Now he’s unrecognizable; he could be anyone. “Do you want to end up like your mother?” Lily shakes her head — she knows that’s what her father wants.

His eyes dart over the beach and linger over the misty cliffs and caves on the far side of the bay. He drags Lily across the curve of the sand too quickly for her to keep up. She steals one last, hopeful glance at the rippling, foam-frothed blue of the water. No one is there, and the waves still snarl and beat at the defenseless shore.

Originally published in Yellow Chair Review, September 2016.