Risham runs into the sea, leaving the Sofers behind. In her cherry swimsuit, waving to the family, she looks like a buoy bobbing in the Cape. The remaining contingent is settled on a faded bedsheet dug out from the basement closet of their summer house. Max, Risham’s golden-haired fiancé, is too busy helping his teenage cousins plant a crooked beach umbrella in the sand to look in her direction. Jonathan, the eldest cousin by a margin of twelve years, salutes Risham with what she has come to recognize as the Sofer manner: a finely tuned condescension masked with false civility. Beside Jonathan sits Ilene, her wide-brimmed straw hat blocking most of her body from view. But Risham knows Ilene will be looking anywhere but at her. They had not spoken since the day that Risham stopped working for Ilene, because she had gotten engaged to her son.

It is a Friday morning at the end of May, the water still chilly despite the sun’s best efforts. Only a few other beachgoers are willing to enter the ocean. A young father, holding a baby in a frilly wetsuit. A group of boys playing chicken, balanced on each other’s shoulders, trying to wrestle each other into the water. A girl yoked into the game as their ineffectual referee. Some of the teenage cousins make attempts at boogie-boarding, the waves popping them back out each time. They all stick close to shore. But Risham swam varsity throughout undergrad; does laps at the Y every Saturday; has something to prove to Ilene and her soon-to-be in-laws. She follows the line of buoys, which are not the usual red spheres but instead elongated and smiley face yellow, each one marking another ten yards. As she comes up for air she counts each distance. At one-hundred yards, she thinks, she will cut back, then do another lap. Since arriving in Provincetown two days ago, she and Max have been trapped inside with his family by spring thunderstorms. Waking up to the sun that morning made her ravenous. She wants to eat the day up; lick the plate clean.

In college, Risham’s swim coach once took her hand and said, admiringly, that she moved like a dark knife in the water. Nobody had ever said anything like that to Risham before. But when she repeated the compliment to one of her dormmates, they just pursed their lips and said, “Why’d she have to call you dark?”

“I don’t think she meant it like that,” Risham said. She found the phrase poetic. But her roommate was unconvinced. And it was true that Risham was the only brown girl on the swim team, and her coach never learned to pronounce her name correctly, and often made comments implying that Risham should feel very grateful to be there at all, but could such a loose web of association and incident mean that her swim coach was being racist?

In the end, Risham didn’t care because she wanted so badly to be the dark knife in the water. She wanted to be held in contrast; she wanted to be seen. And now at each buoy, she turns her head just enough to see if anyone is watching her. But not too far. No, never too far. Just enough to feel the sideways glance of everyone but Ilene.

Despite working for Ilene for eight years, this is Risham’s first time in Cape Cod. Max insisted that his mother didn’t mind having her in attendance for the annual reunion, but the chill from Ilene and her family was obvious on arrival. Risham’s little hope for a reconciliation with Ilene dissipated quickly.  

She is already familiar with most of the Sofers. Ilene’s older brother, her younger sisters, their children—specialized surgeons and corporate lawyers—who rent out nearby houses, forming a satellite network around the Chatham house, which Ilene bought with her ex-husband in ’92, when she won the Guggenheim.

The teenage cousins occasionally come by Ilene’s apartment on 29th street. Not all the teenage cousins are really teenagers, or even direct cousins of Max. The youngest is eleven, the eldest twenty-two, freshly graduated from college. Some are the children of the elder generation of cousins, others the children of Ilene’s younger siblings. One is a second or third cousin, who happened to be on the East Coast, visiting another cousin. Of the Sofers, it is only the teenage cousins who really accept Risham as an entrant to the family unit, or, at least, are largely indifferent, and don’t engage in emotional guerilla warfare, the way Jonathan does. 

A few of the cousins go to Barnard or Sarah Lawrence or Princeton, which is where Risham had gone for graduate school and been Ilene’s advisee. And technically, she is still ABD; is just on a leave of absence; life’s possibilities are not yet foreclosed. Yes, technically, when Risham had told Ilene she was engaged to Max and Ilene had said, “I never expected this to be such an absolute fucking failure,” she could have been referring to any number of things at play in their conversation—motherhood, her academic career, the two over-steeped cups of Oolong on the table before her—and not just the fact of her mentoring Risham for all those years, only for it to end in betrayal.  

Risham catches her breath. She had begun the lap slowly, barely kicking her legs, counting each exhale. Now she is pulling too hard for air. She hiccups. She stops for a moment, treading water. From this distance, Max, Ilene, and Jonathan are reduced to three Sofer-shaped blurs.

She would never tell Max this, but she can remember the first time she saw Ilene with perfect clarity—first-year seminar; Ilene thrumming and severe; Risham frozen at her seat in awe—while she cannot remember when she met Max. He didn’t make a strong impression on her until after his divorce last year, and he started to come alone to Ilene’s, often lingering by her desk in the office to talk to her about the books he was reading. She remembered the day he brought her a bouquet of lilies, wrapped in green tissue paper. Ilene had been out, meeting with a student. Assuming they were for his mother, Risham had unsheathed the flowers, ready to arrange them in one of Ilene’s Ming vases. But Max shyly interrupted her, placing his hands over hers. “They’re actually for you,” he said.

Seven bouquets and five weeks later, once they were sleeping together, and Risham was sneaking to his apartment after work, and lying to Ilene about what she did on weekends, she finally asked him why he always bought her lilies. He said he once observed her complimenting a similar bouquet of Ilene’s. He was proud of himself for remembering, but Risham knew the real reason for her admiration. Ilene loved lilies, and whatever Ilene loved, Risham did, too.

Her breath settles. Overhead, clouds drift, covering the sun. The sounds of the beach are muffled and distant, the teenage cousins just the size of her pinky. She should turn back. But she doesn’t want to, no, she wants to keep swimming. Just a little further. In college, she was never the fastest swimmer, but she could always go for longer than the other girls. Now, however, the ocean’s resistance exhausts her, always persuading her back to shore.  

Ten, twenty more yards. Then she’ll lap back.

On their first night, she and Max went to dinner with the extended family to a seafood restaurant in Wellfleet. There was something disarming about seeing the entire family in their white bibs, stained with swipes of lobster and crab. Even Ilene, always poised and sanitized, had her hands stuck in a plate of bones and guts. 

Jonathan had taken an inordinate amount of time at dinner to explain the general taxonomy of buoys. There were lobster buoys, mooring buoys, control buoys, cardinal buoys. All of different shapes and colors and meanings, which he took care to explain in detail, to Risham’s increasing irritation. 

Jonathan resents her the most, because he is the closest to Max. The two of them often come by to Ilene’s for dinner and Jonathan always treats her like furniture. As if she is merely an appendage of Ilene, an extra hand, an additional leg, there to support the workings of the actual body. But Risham has the sense that Ilene, if she appreciated Jonathan’s fealty, never reciprocated his affections. Jonathan’s fawning characterizes Risham’s understanding of the Sofers in relation to Ilene’s relative celebrity. First, there is the sense of obligation and occasion created by Ilene’s arrivals, the over-enunciation of their casual intimacy, and the resentment of having to engage in this posturing, all layered with the knowledge that no matter what one achieved, it would never have any effect on the central gravitational pull of Ilene among the Sofers, who gathered here together every summer to see each other, but really, to see her. 

The discussion of buoys had turned to the literature of Cape Cod, and who at the table had read Moby Dick. Somehow all of the teenage cousins had read it in various freshman year seminars. Risham could tell by the way Ilene was staring into the middle distance that she was already tired of her family, and that her indifference to the conversation made Jonathan testy. 

“Isn’t that what you were writing your thesis on, Risham?” Jonathan said, reaching for the last lobster claw. “When you met Ilene?”

“I hadn’t decided on a specific focus, yet,” Risham said. 

“Right,” said Jonathan, looking pointedly at Max. “I’m sure that came later.” 

Risham was silent. Max coughed into his bib. 

“Remind me of your research area, again?”

Risham dipped a hunk of crab in a paper cup of butter. Swallowed the meat without chewing. She refused to take the bait. But it was Ilene who answered for her, in her driest voice: “Cross-cultural feminist engagements with the immigrant novel in America.”

Jonathan whistled. “Well, that sounds like a very complicated topic,” he said, cracking open the lobster claw. “I’d probably prefer being someone’s assistant, too.”

The next morning, Max took Jonathan aside and received an apology and a promise of better behavior. But Risham hadn’t cared much about what Jonathan could and could not give her. No, the promises she wanted were all from Ilene. 

At the one-hundred-yard buoy, Risham looks back to shore again. There is movement on the beach, the man she spotted earlier with his baby is pointing at the water, waving at the kids to come in. It is time for them to go, likely, off to the next part of their endless summer. At this distance, the ocean is cooler, the current a little faster. She watches her legs cycling beneath the crystal surface of the Atlantic. Risham shivers. Then, a shadow passes underneath her, some darkness rushing to shore.   

She grabs onto the buoy, her hands slipping off its bright surface. The color sparks the memory of Jonathan at the restaurant. The coast guard installed new buoys this year, he had said. They are yellow, for detecting sharks. 

By the time she clips back, a consensus has already formed among the beachgoers that the approaching animals are just seals. A stray coast guard, on patrol further up the beach, is enlisted to watch the water for some emergence of fin or maw—but it seems that in May, the water is still too cold for the Great Whites to descend upon the Cape. 

The Sofers have no appreciation for the speed and clarity of Risham’s stroke. All she has proven is that she is quick to scare. Jonathan has already returned to flipping through The Ghost Writer, and the teenage cousins are engaged in a lawless game of beach volleyball. One cousin calls the ball out, and then another contests the ruling, each time setting a new border to their court. Ilene is nowhere to be seen. “Want to play?” Max asks, draping a towel over Risham’s shoulders. She is freezing. What she wants is to throw the towel off, strip off her swimsuit, lie alone and naked in the sun. Instead, she politely nods no and heads to the showers to rinse off the cold.

There are no clean surfaces. Sand sticks to every crevice; a lingering smell of wet earth and salt and Oxiclean. The shower doesn’t get warm enough, and Risham settles for the lukewarm water and half-pumps of pink soap that form in milky puddles on the ceramic tile. When she emerges from the showers, she still feels the ocean on her skin.

A little girl is by the communal sinks, humming to herself as she washes her hands. Risham recognizes her as the referee from the game of chicken. The girl’s hair is still damp and curling at the ends, leaving wet spots on her shoulders. She wears an oversized shirt advertising a local drama camp and her arms are pale and bangled with faded friendship bracelets.

The song she is humming is familiar, and as Risham dries her hair with her towel, she tries to place it. It’s from a musical. Some old Hollywood movie.    

“Excuse me,” the girl says, and Risham smiles at the performative manners of children. “Could you help me please?”

She is reaching for the paper towels. Risham passes one, and the girl diligently wipes her hands, using up every corner. 

“Are you waiting for someone?” Risham asks.

“Yes,” the girl says. “My friends are coming.”

Risham looks around the bathroom. If there are other children around, she can’t see or hear them. “Are they nearby?”

But the girl just shrugs and hums, ignoring Risham completely.

Back at the beach, there is a woman talking to Max and Jonathan, the three of them standing beside the crooked umbrella, the teenage cousins circling them. She walks up to Max, and squeezes his elbow hello, but he is listening to the woman, who is speaking very slowly. At first, Risham thinks it is because she is angry—maybe the teenage cousins are too rowdy—but she realizes she is scared. Her daughter was playing in the water, she is saying, and when she returned from a run to the snack stand, she was gone. The kids she was playing with had left for the day. 

“There was a girl in the bathroom just now,” Risham says. The group re-orients itself toward her—the cousins peering, Jonathan eyeing. Max wraps his arm around her. The mother looks through her, as if she were made of the thinnest paper. Risham describes the girl, and the mother nods: that was her daughter.

“Where did she go?” she asks. “Was she alone?”

“I’m not sure,” Risham says. She wishes she hadn’t spoken. Better to have never seen the girl than to have seen her and done nothing. Now she feels complicit in her disappearance. Out of a sudden need to absolve herself, she adds, “I assumed she was with someone.”

As she speaks, Risham spots Ilene in the crowd. She has taken off her hat and is standing beside the cousins. How long has she been there? It disturbs Risham that she didn’t notice Ilene’s absence or arrival. That has never happened before.

“You were talking to her,” says Ilene.

“What did she say?” the mother asks.

Risham looks at Ilene, but she still avoids her gaze. She must have been in one of the stalls, listening to their conversation. Risham tries to remember if any of the doors were closed. All that comes to mind is the song the girl was humming. The melody clicks: “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.” “She was humming a song from Oklahoma,” Risham says. “And said she was waiting for her friends.”

Neither piece of information seems relevant to the mother. “Do you think she’s still there? Or did she come back here?” she asks.

“I would have passed her on the way to the beach,” Ilene says, pointing past the shore, where the woods began. “She could be in the forest, or further out by the dunes.”

“I’m sure she’s nearby,” Max says to the woman. “We’ll help you find her.”

For a moment, it seems as if the woman is registering her surroundings, before worry and fear clouds her face again. All she can see is her missing child.  

When they check again, the bathroom is empty. Everyone breaks into groups. The teenage cousins go one way, two of them with the mother, while Jonathan and Ilene walk off on their own, leaving Risham and Max in the woods. Max’s confidence drops once they are alone, the mother out of earshot. “Do you think it’s possible she went out into the water?” he asks.

The possibility is gruesome. The girl drowned somewhere; a shark circling in the shallows. Risham has read about sharks mistaking surfers in black wetsuits for seals; deer walking too far down the shore, their carcasses washing onto the sand the next day; the warming seas pulling the sharks closer and closer to the Cape each year.

 “Ilene is right,” she says. Lately she has been tempted to say: your mother, but there is something about the phrase that pains her too much. “We would have seen her if she had walked back to the beach.”

 She takes his hand, and he takes hers, twisting her ring with his thumb, a tic, like he wants to make sure it is still there.

 Ilene said a lot of hurtful things when Risham showed her the ring. That Risham was taking advantage of Max’s vulnerability after the divorce. That she always knew there was something about Risham she couldn’t fully trust. That she felt betrayed beyond belief. If Risham had known it would be the last time they spoke, maybe she would have said something hurtful back. She knew Ilene’s weak spots. But she had never known how to react to Ilene’s cruelty—she had only ever been a bystander. Ilene: vengeful at a blundering departmental meeting. Ilene: dismissive of her meek graduate students. Ilene: rude to a hovering waiter. At her side, always, was Risham, to whom she had been nothing but kind and generous. So much so that Risham and Max agreed that she should be the one to tell Ilene the news. He loved her, in part, because she understood his mother so deeply, and by extension, understood him in ways few other women could. 

Well.

At least they have equal responsibility in how wrong they’d been about his mother.

No sightings in the woods, just deer freezing, then leaping away. They find Jonathan near the forest’s edge, his khakis torn and glasses frame cracked, ready to give up the search. He tripped on a tree root and is heading back to Chatham. The teenage cousins will find the girl, he says. Guarantee it. 

“Where’s mom?” Max asks.

“Still looking, somewhere. We split up early on because she wanted to head for the dunes.”

Jonathan’s lip is purple and dark. But an injured Jonathan brings Risham little relief, because she knows that Max would always worry for him. When Ilene’s ex-husband left, it was Jonathan who stepped in to be a father to Max. “I’ll drive you,” Max says to Jonathan. Risham wants to protest, but she doesn’t want to admit in front of Jonathan that she hates being alone. 

“Do you want to come?” Max asks Risham. “Or will you be okay here?”

She thinks of the mother’s face, her mouth twisting as she spoke. “I’ll keep looking,” she says.

“Watch out for sharks,” Jonathan said. Risham knows that he means Ilene.

In the years before Max, they’d always kept each other’s secrets. With Risham, Ilene was always honest. She could complain freely about the changing culture of universities; she could tell her which colleagues she would never truly respect. She had Max when she was very young, she often worried that she had neglected him in favor of her career, that this had stunted him in some irreversible way, that the problems of his adulthood and his failed relationships were all her fault. In return, Risham was truthful about her own troubled relationship with her parents. Her father: letting all bitter wounds fester. Her mother: suckled to his moods. Leaving Risham: unmoored by what remained. 

Another broken daughter of the immigrant middle class, is how she once put it to Ilene, who laughed, and said yes, as am I, and Risham hadn’t known how to say: it’s different for me.

“Meet my favorite daughter, Risham,” is how Ilene used to introduce her. And Ilene and Risham would look at each other, smiling at a joke only they understood.

Cold sand and a spring wind skim her ankles with each step through the dunes. There is that same resistance of movement as in the water, but where the Atlantic beat her back to shore, the dunes swallow her down. It is impossible to gauge the depth of the sand. Her first steps: sunk up to her knees. Then: clambering up a peak, searching for stable ground. From there: a sighting of Ilene.

She is no more than thirty feet away, walking in a strange, stilted manner. Curling along the edges of the dunes, as if she were guided by a magnetic force through the sand. Risham realizes that Ilene is trying to cut against the wind, to no avail. She wears a crisp white shirtdress that Risham ordered for her. Espadrilles purchased in Madrid during a layover between academic conferences. Straw hat, origin long forgotten, re-adorned, until the wind plies it off, teasing Ilene down the dune. Risham wonders if she should wave, or help, or yell. Instead, she watches Ilene grasp for the air, trip in the sand, look up at the sky in plea. The hat floats down next to her. Ilene grips it close. Risham is sure that she has not spotted her yet.

An ungenerous thought forms.

Who is this woman that Risham has founded herself on for all these years?

Nobody, really. Or: anybody.

The first to come along and say: it’s you that I want beside me.

A worse thought.

And now, who is Risham?

Ilene looks up. Risham looks back.

That unspoken thing they once recognized in each other cracks and crumbles apart.

The distant sound of yelling interrupts the current passing between them. Right, they both think. The girl. Where is the girl? Who is yelling? Are they calling from the forest or from the beach?

It is difficult for Risham to make out what the voice is saying. In just a half hour, she will learn that the teenage cousins found the girl tucked into the pantry closet of the snack shack. They heard humming; followed the sound. The girl had been engaged in a game of hide and seek with the boys that everyone else had forgotten. Upon returning to the beach, Risham and Ilene will find the teenage cousins celebrating their victory at Ilene’s house, where Max and Jonathan and the other Sofers will be waiting for them, behind a door that Risham will cross through, wondering when her new life will begin.

But just then: in that moment: further clarity is demanded. “What is it?” Ilene asks Risham. “What are they saying?”

The voice cries out. Risham listens. It sounds like Max, but it could be the voice of a stranger. For a moment, then, the words are clear, but when Risham repeats them, yelling across the dunes, a breeze picks them up and tosses them away, and all Ilene hears is the wind.