The Long Draw

We used to go to Carrow's Cove every Fourth of July, back when my dad still had the boat and my aunt still had her cabin on the ridge above the water. It was 2009, I remember, because that was the summer the fireworks got cancelled halfway through on account of a storm rolling in off the water, and everybody had to pack up quick and scatter for their cars.

The cove itself sits at the bottom of a long gravel road, and if you know it, you know the tide does something strange there. It pulls out further than it should. Locals call it the "long draw," and there's an old rule passed down that nobody really questions anymore: you don't walk the flats when the tide's all the way out, not past the second sandbar, not even to grab a good spot for the fireworks. My aunt used to say it like she was just being safe, like it was about the mud sucking your shoes off. But she never explained further than that, and when I was a kid I never thought to ask.

That year my cousins wanted to go crabbing before the show started, and my mom told me to go with them and keep an eye on the little ones. I wasn't in the mood. I said I'd catch up. So I sat on the dock a while, and then, because I was twelve and bored and the tide was already pulling way out past where it should've been, I started walking the flats by myself.

It's a strange feeling, walking ground that's supposed to be underwater. The mud was packed hard in some places and soft in others, and little pools kept catching the last of the daylight. I got maybe a quarter mile out, further than the second sandbar, further than I'd ever gone, before I noticed a kid standing out there too, just past a cluster of rocks, looking down at something in the sand.

He didn't look up right away. When he did, he had this calm, unbothered face, like he'd been standing there a long time and didn't mind it.

"You're not supposed to be out this far," he said, not unkindly.

"Neither are you," I said back.

He almost smiled at that. "I've got more time than you do." He crouched down and picked something out of the mud, a shell, I think, though I never got a good look, and turned it over in his hand like he was checking it against something only he remembered. "The tide's not really going out, you know. Everybody thinks it is. It's coming back. It always comes back faster than people think."

I told him that didn't make sense. The tide had been out for a while already. He just shrugged like it wasn't something he expected me to understand yet.

"You should go find your family," he said. "Before it turns."

I don't know what made me listen. I turned around to head back, and when I looked over my shoulder to say something else, he wasn't there. Just the rocks, and the mud, and the little pools going dark with the last of the light.

I didn't say anything to anybody. Not that night, not the next morning. It wasn't until we were packing up to leave, three days later, that I saw it. A laminated notice taped inside the bait shop window, curling at the corners like it had been there since before I was born. A boy's face, dark-haired, maybe eleven or twelve. Missing since 1987. Last seen near Carrow's Cove at low tide.

I asked the man behind the counter about it, tried to sound casual. He didn't even look up from what he was doing.

"Every few years somebody says they saw him," he said. "Tide brings him back around, I guess. Some folks leave shells out on the rocks for him. Can't say if it does any good."

We left that afternoon and I never went back to that cove again, not once, not even the summers my cousins kept going without me. But every Fourth of July since, right around the time the light starts going flat and gold like it does before a tide turns, I think about that kid crouched in the mud, turning a shell over in his hand like he had all the time in the world to figure it out.

And every year, I still don't know if he was warning me, or asking me to stay.