Moonglass

them?”
    He blinked, maybe taken aback at my questions, maybe at what the answers were. Then he cleared his throat and looked out over the water, and resignation settled on his face.
    “No. They didn’t like me. And they hated that she did. And, yes, that’s why you don’t know them. When she chose me, they chose not to be a part of her life.” His voice was a mix I knew, sad and angry. “Or yours.”
    I took a deep breath, trying to understand. It didn’t make sense. “Because they didn’t approve of you? Because of money or something? That’s insane .
    She was their only daughter. How does a parent even do that?” I was surprised at how indignant I felt, but it sounded like the most ridiculous, old-fashioned thing I’d ever heard, to disown your child because she fell for someone you didn’t approve of. My dad watched me without saying anything, and then I knew.
    There had to be more.
    More than one wave passed under us this time, but we didn’t move or say anything. After what seemed like forever, he got to the more.
    “We were seventeen, Anna. We had a year of school left, and then she was supposed to go off to some big college, far away, and live up to their expectations. She’d already made up her mind that she wasn’t going….” He paused, like he was deciding what to say. Then he cleared his throat. “When she told me about you, I was on my knees in the sand before she could finish, with a piece of sea grass for a ring, and it was the most right thing I’d ever done in my life.”
    He looked at me now with eyes I’d seen before. Eyes that had lost her. And I couldn’t stand to look back, so I put my head down and ran my finger down the center of my surfboard. They were a year older than me. And parents.
    “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. You were a little girl when she died, and right after it happened, you wanted to know everything about her, like you were collecting details to remember her by. You slept with her clothes, wore her perfume, asked me to tell you the stories she used to tell .” He shook his head.
    “You’d sit out there on the beach with me, talking about how she’d come back as a mermaid and you’d swim together in the waves. It broke my heart, but it was good to talk about her with you.” He paused and looked down again before bringing his eyes back to me. “Then somewhere along the line you stopped asking, like she was just gone. And we stopped talking…. So I didn’t tell you when we came here. I didn’t know how to even start.”
    I felt weary. Like I was sinking. For a long time I’d put it on him that we didn’t talk about her. But it had been me, too. Because the older I got, and the more I remembered, the heavier it weighed on me. It was easier to think of both her and her death as a dream, or to push it back to a place where the details were hazy and unclear, and I was never there.
    I stared hard now at the beach, zipping my moonglass back and forth along its chain, wishing I had just left it alone, because now there was more, and it started with a choice she’d made before I was even born. She’d chosen my dad, and she’d chosen me. She’d left her family, and her life, and the place she’d loved behind, because of the choice she’d been forced to make. By me.
    I blinked back tears and bit the inside of my cheek. My dad treaded water over to me and put his hand on my leg. “I wasn’t sure about coming here at first, because of all this. But the happiest memories I have of your mother are here, and lots of people around knew her, and so I thought, now that you’re older, if you started to wonder, it might be a place you could find out who she was and see her in a different light. She was really happy here.” He looked hopeful, like he wanted me to ask him more about her. He had no idea he’d just confirmed what I’d always thought, that I was a part of her unhappiness. We’d never said the word for what her death really was, but people who are happy with their lives don’t just walk out into the water. He had to know that. I’d known it, somewhere deep, that things were bad, but I didn’t know when it had happened. And now I realized it had begun with me.
    I nodded and wiped at my tears, smoothing the surface back over, because, really, that was what we both wanted. “I’m glad you told me. And I’m so, so sorry. For … for how I’ve been, and … everything.”
    “Don’t be, Anna. It’s all right.” Another little