Moonglass

cottages, and I watched as the ocean, wild and angry, lined up waves, one after another. I gave up waiting for her a long time ago, and that was fine until we got here. Until she came back, like everything in the ocean does.
    Another wave thundered down, and this time I felt it in my chest. Up ahead I could make out the blurry outline of the shack, which stood, cold and empty, in the dim afternoon. I forced my eyes away from it and up to our front window, where light warmed the room. Maybe dad would be back from his rescue, stretched out on the couch in his sweats, reading a book. He’d look up, smile, and give me a hard time for being soaked. He’d tell me to hop into the shower to warm up. Then he’d ask me if I wanted hot chocolate, mainly because he’d want some too but would never make it just for himself.
    He had made it for me that night. After I’d heard him yelling over the wind while I sat huddled against it. The wetness of the sand had soaked up through my pajama bottoms and chilled me so that my entire body shook and twitched. But I squeezed my hand tight around my moonglass, and I lifted my head when I heard him close by. He pulled his work jacket off and scooped me up, protecting me from the cold and the wind and the flashlights swinging around with voices behind them, now calling only my mother’s name. He warmed me under blankets, then made hot chocolate that stood untouched while he held on to me tight and asked, over and over, “Did you see where Mommy went, Anna? Did she go into the water?” When I finally nodded, he went silent and stayed that way until my grandma arrived to take over.
    I stopped at the end of the road and stood in the rain between the shack and our lighted window. And I hated her. I hated her for leaving us, and I hated her for coming back.
    I dropped the umbrella into the mud, then checked our window again before kicking off my shoes. The rocks were barely discernible beneath the high tide and chaotic surf, but I kept my eyes on them as I bent my head to undo the clasp of the necklace. Then I walked over pitted sand, pummeled by raindrops, straight out to the rocks. Calm, like she had been.
    A gust of wind smacked me on the back, and rain pierced my clinging jersey, but I only felt the weight of the moonglass, squeezed tight in my hand. And now the weight of it wasn’t enough to keep me searching for another little glimmer. finally I was finished with her, like she had been with me. She could have it back.
    On the outer edge of the rocks, a wall of water stood up tall before it pitched forward and blasted them, sending spray high into the air, like rain falling upward. Frothy water churned and swirled around my ankles when I stepped onto the first rock, and I breathed in sharply, because of the cold. My feet found their way over craters in the rocks and the jagged edges of mussel shells, to a place that felt far enough out to leave her behind.
    I uncurled my fingers. Looked at it one last time. Then resolve clenched my hand around the glass, and I chucked it, as hard as I could, into the oncoming wall of water. The force I threw it with shocked me. I saw the tiny glint of red disappear into the face of the wave at the same moment I realized what was about to happen.
    I didn’t have time to be shocked when the wave hit me.
    The thunder of waves, the pounding of the rain, all of it went quiet. It was replaced by a muffled rushing, angry and chaotic, that whipped me around. I wasn’t unfamiliar with the sensation, having been tossed by waves more times than I could remember. I held my breath, even when I felt my body land with a dul thud on the rocks, then bounce over them in the violent water, all limbs and odd angles, completely out of control. My toes scraped rock, and I kicked off hard and broke the surface, barely in time to get a breath before I felt the pull backward, back over the jagged edges of the tide pools. Then, the next onslaught. This one hit with the force of a wall tumbling down onto me, but it was instantly stilled by the muffled crack of my head, which sent sparks of light bursting in front of my eyes. I didn’t feel the edges of the rocks. I almost didn’t feel the sensation of moving at all.
    Eighty-seven seconds.
    Every spring, when I was little, I sat in the back of the lifeguard headquarters and listened to my dad read to a new batch of rookie guards a passage from The Perfect Storm about the stages of drowning. It said eighty-seven seconds is