The Different Girl

I didn’t.
    The tide was halfway up the beach, but there was still dry sand where I could walk. I went the same way I had the night before, now under an open blue sky, looking for details. I had come back to finish what I’d started by finding her—though what there was left to finish, I couldn’t imagine. Perhaps it was because I couldn’t imagine that I was determined to look.
    Half-buried shells and coral lay scattered by the waves, like the remains of writing mostly wiped away. The sand above the waterline still held a jumble of footprints, mine and Irene’s—her prints pushing deeper when she’d been carrying the girl. I looked for the print of another foot altogether, the girl’s bare, injured foot, but she must have been crawling. That’s why her tracks were odd, which was why I even noticed them.
    I climbed into the grass. In the sunlight where she’d lain was a tiny place, just a flattened circle. In a day or two, the grass would spring back and nothing would be left to tell what had happened. Then I saw, half hidden in the grass, a green nylon bag. It was dusted in sand, which fell off like powder when I picked it up. It was the size of a big book, with a zipper and a strap. I unzipped one side and peeked in. Then I sat down in the grass and unzipped it all the way.
    The bag was stuffed full: a wadded cotton shirt, short nylon pants, a pair of plastic flip-flop shoes, a tube of sunscreen, a deck of playing cards, a string of green beads, and a small hard plastic square with buttons and a little dark screen. Last was a zipped-up rubber pouch with seven photographs. The water hadn’t gotten in, and they weren’t stuck together. I laid the pictures on the grass, as if seeing all seven would tell me more than looking one by one.
    The first picture was taken from a boat, looking at a dock much bigger than ours and covered with boxes and crates. Leaning against the crates were two men, taller than Robbert, with bare feet and dark skin, smiling at the camera. It felt like meeting new people, because the men were smiling right at me, even though I knew they were actually smiling at someone else, at whoever was holding the camera, and however long ago that was.
    I wondered if feeling these two things at once was like Caroline’s dreams.
    The second picture was also from the boat, but aimed over a metal rail across the water and beyond, at a jagged green line on the horizon, an island. The sky was gray, and the top of the island crowned with fog. I noticed the wedge of foam on the water and realized the boat had been moving .
    The third picture showed a big blue and yellow parrot in a cage.
    The fourth picture was from an island because it showed a beach, with palm leaves hanging into view. But most of the picture was of the ocean, facing west, because of the sun setting bright orange.
    The fifth picture was a man holding a fish. He was knee deep in the ocean, and smiling. His skin was dark, and he had a round stomach that poked from under his T-shirt. The fish had a silver belly and green fins.
    The sixth picture must have been inside the boat: a little room, with bunk beds and a foldout table, lots of shelves, and a hanging lamp. The man holding the fish in the fifth picture sat at the table, still smiling, with a plate of food.
    The last picture was the girl herself, sitting on the wooden deck of a boat. She wore a green shirt without sleeves and was showing her finger, which had a bright pink bandage wrapped around the tip. Her hair was tied back. Her eyes were brown. Her teeth were small and white. Her skin was dark, with darker freckles in a stripe below each eye and across her nose. It was a face unlike any I had seen.
    The bandage made me think of her insides. We’d seen Robbert cut himself from shaving, and Irene cut herself on a can, so we knew about blood, but what had happened to the girl in the ocean was a door opening wider—not that we hadn’t been told, but just that we hadn’t been told everything.
    I looked at the pictures again and again, laying them in different arrangements, and began a list of questions so I had something to say to the others, to Robbert and Irene, or to the girl when she woke up and needed to know who’d found her things. That made me think about what she might say about her boat, or about being in the water, or what she’d say if she went on one of our walks. What would her voice even sound like? Like Irene, or like one of us?
    I had too many thoughts and