The Cottage at Glass Beach by Heather Barbieri

rocks last night, did you feel the pull of the past?”
    More than she’d like to admit. More than she understood.
    â€œI’m not about to break with tradition now.” Maire tamped the soil down firmly. “Besides, if we don’t like him”—she smiled as she flicked a weed into a bucket—“we can always pitch him back into the sea.”
    T he girls stole over to the rocks near the fishing shack. The clapboards of the one-room structure had bleached gray, the shingles gap-toothed along the fringes, the door slightly off its hinges. It didn’t look as if it could withstand the violent storms that battered the island many months of the year, and yet it had.
    â€œI’m glad we’re not staying here,” Ella said. “It makes the cottage look like the Plaza.” They’d gone to New York and stayed there for her tenth birthday. She’d loved the Eloise books then. She wasn’t that girl anymore, too old for such stories. She gravitated to serious books now, with darker themes, reading far beyond grade level.
    â€œIt’s not so bad . . .” Annie’s voice trailed off. Even she had trouble finding something kind to say about the place. “Are those bones?” She indicated a pile of spined ribs, whitened by the sun, near the southeast corner, with a shaky finger.
    â€œFish bones, silly. It’s a fishing shack, remember?”
    â€œAre they from ancient times?”
    â€œI doubt it. They’d have turned to dust by now if they were.”
    â€œI don’t want to turn to dust.”
    â€œEveryone does, eventually.”
    â€œWhat about our grandmother? Do you think she turned to dust? It’s weird no one knows what happened to her.”
    â€œMaybe she left. People do sometimes.”
    Like their father. They didn’t say his name, but it hung in the air between them. How Annie kept setting a place for him at the table at home, thinking he’d show up. How Ella would find herself listening for the slam of his car door, the sinking disappointment every time she realized it was only Mr. Livingston, next door, arriving home from work, home, to his family. How she’d watched for her father from the stage of her final school play—she’d had the lead in Alice in Wonderland —another chair left unfilled, row D, number 3. Her mother sitting in seat number 2 at every performance, her face tight from smiling encouragingly, smiling enough for both of them, when really it only made it all the more apparent he wasn’t there.
    â€œLet’s look inside,” Annie said.
    â€œWe don’t know where he is. This needs to be a covert operation.”
    There were no windows on the sides of the structure, only on the front, its back set into the surrounding rock, as if it sprang from the earth itself. The girls crept closer, their knees stained green, and ducked down behind a tangle of nets and floats, the plastic worn and cracked. The stoop was swept clean of sand. He must have intended to stay for a while.
    The seals barked from the beach below. Ella put a finger to her lips. “Look. There he is.”
    He was swimming in the cove, the seals with him. He was an excellent swimmer, clearly at ease in the water, unafraid of the animals.
    â€œDoes he have any clothes on?” Annie asked.
    â€œI can’t tell,” Ella said. “I’m not sure if I want to.”
    Annie stood taller, to get a better look.
    â€œGet down!” Ella warned.
    He turned, the water swirling at his waist, eyes seeming to meet theirs across the expanse, though he was too far away to say for certain.
    Annie took another peek. “He’s heading for shore. Do you think he’s mad at us for spying on him?”
    â€œRun!” Ella said, not wanting to find out.
    They scrambled back to Glass Beach, crouching and darting through the grass. Their beach. Theirs. They would say they’d been there the whole