The Space Between Waves

Further down the beach stood an older girl. The older girl watched the midnight waves as they lapped at her feet. She didn't know danger was imminent and that her younger sister would soon be under her protection.

Her name was Saoirse, which people always mispronounced, and she had stopped correcting them except when it mattered.

She was seventeen and had come to the beach to be alone, which was something she needed more often than she could explain to people who didn't need it. The family was back at the rental house, her parents in the kitchen with their wine, her sister Nell asleep, or supposedly asleep, or doing whatever eight-year-olds did when they were supposed to be asleep, which Saoirse remembered involved mostly lying in the dark having enormous thoughts that felt urgent until morning.

The beach at midnight was a different place from the beach at noon. The sand was cooler and held the impressions of the day's footprints like a record of everyone who had been and gone. The water was dark, the kind of dark that made it impossible to tell how deep it was from the surface, and the waves came in the same rhythm they always did, indifferent to the hour, indifferent to whether anyone was watching.

Saoirse was watching.

She had a habit, developed she couldn't say when, of watching things that moved continuously. Fires. Traffic from a high window. Water. She found it easier than watching still things, which demanded interpretation. Moving things asked only that you follow them, which required nothing, which was sometimes exactly the right amount.

She didn't hear Nell coming until Nell was almost beside her.

This was characteristic. Nell moved through the world at a volume that varied between two settings: extremely loud and completely silent, with nothing in between. Right now, she was silent, barefoot, wearing her pyjamas with the yellow stars on them, her hair in the particular state that happened when she slept hard and turned over several times. She stopped a foot away from Saoirse and looked at the water.

"You're supposed to be asleep," Saoirse said.

"I know," Nell said, in the tone of someone who considered this information rather than instruction.

"Does Mum know you're out here?"

"No."

Saoirse looked at her. Nell continued to look at the water. There was sand on her feet, and the hem of her pyjama bottoms was damp, which meant she had been walking for at least a little while before she reached Saoirse.

"How did you even know where I was?"

Nell shrugged. "You always go to the water."

This was true, and Saoirse hadn't known that Nell knew it. She turned back to the ocean and said nothing, and Nell stood beside her saying nothing, and for a moment it was almost the thing Saoirse had come out here for — the quiet, the movement, the absence of demand.

Then she noticed that Nell was shaking.

Not shaking the way people shake when they're cold, which was rhythmic and manageable. Shaking the way they shake when something has happened or is happening or is about to happen inside them, and the body is the first thing to know.

Saoirse turned to face her fully. "Nell."

Nell's jaw was set in the way it was when she was refusing to cry, which in Saoirse's experience was a reliable indicator that crying was imminent.

"What happened?"

Nothing.

"Nell. Look at me."

Nell looked at her. Her eyes were bright in the way eyes were bright at midnight when they were filling with something.

"I had a dream," she said.

Saoirse waited.

"It was bad," Nell said. "It was really bad, and when I woke up, the house was dark, and I couldn't remember what was real."

She said this last part with a precision that Saoirse recognised the particular articulation of someone who had been lying in the dark for a while, working out exactly what was wrong before they could name it. Saoirse had done that. She still did that.

"What do you mean you couldn't remember what was real?"

"Like," Nell stopped. Started again. "In the dream, something happened to you. And then I woke up, and it was dark, and I kept thinking, did it already happen, and I just didn't know yet, or" She stopped again. "I just needed to see you."

The waves came in. Went out. The rhythm they kept regardless.

Saoirse felt something happen in her chest that she didn't have language for yet — a rearranging of something, the way a room feels different when you move one piece of furniture. She had always thought of Nell as the one who needed looking after. This was a role she'd accepted without examining it, the way you accept most things that are given to you before you're old enough to question them. Saoirse: older, responsible, the one who held things together. Nell: younger, chaotic, the one things happened to.

She had never thought about it from Nell's side.

She had never thought about what it meant to be eight years old and have a sister who went to the water at midnight and what it might feel like to wake from a dream in a dark house and not know yet if the bad thing had happened.

She reached out and took Nell's hand. Nell's hand was cold and small and held on with the grip of someone who had been uncertain for a while and had found something certain.

"I'm here," Saoirse said.

"I know," Nell said. "I can see you."

"The dream wasn't real."

"I know that now."

They stood like that for a while, Saoirse's feet in the water, Nell beside her with damp pyjama hems, the night around them doing what nights did, which was continue.

Then Saoirse felt it.

A change in the sound of the ocean, or in the rhythm of it, not wrong exactly, but different, the way a piece of music sounds different when a single instrument drops out. She looked up the beach and then down it and then out at the water and saw what she hadn't seen before because she hadn't been looking for it.

Further out, past where the waves broke, past the dark shelf of the shallows, a shape, low in the water, was moving in a way that shapes didn't move when they were parts of the ocean.

A boat. Small. Without lights.

Moving too fast toward the shallows where the rocks were, the rocks she'd seen at low tide that afternoon, covered now by the turning water, invisible from where she stood, invisible from wherever that boat was.

Her mind did something she'd read about but never experienced: a kind of cold clarity, everything irrelevant falling away, the world reduced to the things that mattered right now in this order: the boat, the rocks, the distance, the time.

She squeezed Nell's hand.

"I need you to do something," she said. Her voice came out steady, which surprised her.

Nell looked up at her. Something in Saoirse's voice had already communicated itself. Nell's expression had changed from the soft vulnerability of a moment ago to something more alert.

"What?"

"Run back to the house. Wake up, Dad. Tell him there's a boat coming in without lights, and I think it's going to hit the rocks. Tell him to call the coastguard. Can you do that?"

Nell looked at the water. Then back at Saoirse.

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to stay here and keep watching."

"Promise?"

The word landed differently than it would have landed an hour ago. Saoirse understood now what it cost Nell to ask it, what it meant to be the younger one watching the older one walk toward the water at midnight and walk toward it again and need the assurance that this time she would come back.

"I promise," she said. "I'm not going in. I'm just going to watch and shout if I need to. Go, Nell. Fast."

Nell went.

She went the way she did everything at that setting, completely and at full volume, her feet loud on the sand, her yellow star pyjamas disappearing up the beach toward the light of the house, her voice already carrying her father's name into the dark.

Saoirse turned back to the water.

The boat was closer now. She could see it more clearly, a small dinghy of some kind, two figures in it, one of them moving, one of them not. She shouted, she didn't think about it, just did it, her voice going out across the water the way voices do at night, strange and too loud and carrying further than she expected.

One of the figures moved. Looked up.

She shouted again. Waved both arms. The figures in the boat moved, and then the sound of a motor changed, and the boat slowed and turned, not fast enough, not quite fast enough, and then the hull scraped stone she heard it from where she stood, that particular sound, but slowly, softly, the turn having taken enough speed off that what should have been a collision was instead a grinding halt.

The lights came on in the house. Her father's voice was behind her.

The figures in the boat were moving. Both of them, she could see now, both of them moving.

She let out a breath she had been holding for what felt like several minutes.

Behind her, Nell had come back out of the house, had apparently deposited her father and immediately returned, her task completed, her word delivered, back now where she'd decided she needed to be.

She found Saoirse's hand again in the dark.

"Are they okay?" she asked.

"I think so," Saoirse said. "I think so."

They stood together on the beach while the adults took over her father on the phone, her mother arriving with a torch, the distant sound of a coastguard engine somewhere in the dark becoming less distant. The ocean continued its rhythm around all of it, indifferent as ever to the hour.

Nell leaned against Saoirse's arm.

"You kept your promise," she said.

"I told you I would."

"I know," Nell said. "But it's different when you actually do."

Saoirse looked down at her. At the yellow stars. At the hair that had reached a new stage of disorder. At the face that had been terrified an hour ago in a dark room and had come looking for the one thing it needed, which was just to see that the person was still there.

She put her arm around her sister.

The water came in. The water went out.

Everything, for now, was exactly where it was supposed to be.