‘Castles II’

There was a morning, when I was a boy, that began without expectation.

Children are fortunate in that way. You wake without demanding anything from the day. Whatever happens next is usually decided somewhere above you, by people with car keys and money and some vague understanding of where the day is supposed to go.

My mother was a single mother, and whatever world existed beyond our house was largely hers to reveal to my sisters and me.

That morning, she decided on the beach.

A trip to the beach was never simply a trip to the beach. It was an all-day affair.

My mother packed sandwiches, fruit, juice boxes and potato chips into a cooler. If we were lucky, somewhere deep in a closet there would still be a bucket or a shovel that had survived the previous summer. They never seemed to last very long. The plastic would crack or warp, and my mother was always reluctant to buy another one.

We gathered our towels, packed the car, and began the long, hot ride.

I could hardly wait.

When we arrived, the excitement immediately became labor. We dragged coolers, bags, towels and whatever beach equipment had survived from the car toward a piece of sand my mother selected with extraordinary seriousness.

Once our little territory had been established, there remained one final indignity before freedom.

Sunscreen.

My mother never applied sunscreen gently.

There was a small ritual to it: arms pressed obediently against my sides while she rubbed it relentlessly across my face, shoulders and back. My body rocked forward and backward beneath the force of her hands while I stared beyond her toward the water.

And when she finally released me, I ran.

Straight toward the ocean.

But I never jumped in immediately.

That first run was simply to let the water know I had arrived.

I would kick at the edge of it, let the cold water run over my feet, and then turn around and run back toward our towels. I only needed to make that trip once. After that, I knew the route between the water and the small fort my mother had made for us.

The beach was crowded.

There were people everywhere, all strangers, but children do not seem particularly bothered by strangers. The world has not yet taught them to be.

And somewhere among all those people was a girl.

She had arrived there in much the same way I had: through no decision of her own.

Two children, delivered to the same patch of earth by their superiors.

By accident, really.

We began to play.

I cannot remember who spoke first. I cannot remember what either of us said. Somehow those things seemed less important then. There was sand, there were shovels, and therefore there was work to be done.

We dug an enormous hole that served absolutely no purpose.

We collected shells.

We shared our shovels.

Hers were pink.

We splashed around the edge of the water and eventually dug a trench from the tide toward one of our holes. When the water came in, it filled the hole and made a small pool.

There was an entire ocean several feet away, but for some reason we were enormously pleased to have made our own.

It belonged to us.

For a little while, there was the beach everyone else had come to, and then there was ours.

Eventually our mothers interrupted us.

Food.

Even in the middle of perfect fun, mothers have an irritating commitment to keeping children alive.

We returned to our separate family forts.

I had a sandwich, crushed potato chips pressed into it, and a juice box—which, in fairness, was difficult to argue with.

The interruption did not last long.

We refueled, suffered through another application of sunscreen, and returned immediately to construction.

This time, we decided to build a castle.

By then we had been at the beach for hours.

I noticed the sun was much lower than it had been when we arrived. The lifeguard had moved farther down the beach. Every so often I looked back toward my mother.

I was watching for movement.

A folded towel.

A closed cooler.

Anything that suggested the beginning of the end.

But she was still lying there, tanning.

So I returned to the girl.

She had already decided that our small pool would become the moat.

She was intensely focused and completely delighted. She filled her bucket with sand while explaining all the things our castle would need. I do not remember the details of her plans, but I remember how she looked up at me while describing them.

She smiled constantly.

By then, I was entirely in her grasp.

If she had asked me to dig to the center of the earth, I probably would have tried.

Instead, she told me to fetch water.

So I did.

Again and again I ran toward the ocean, filled the bucket, and carried it back while she piled sand and mixed it with the water. We packed the wet sand into buckets, turned them upside down, and slowly began building something that looked, to us, magnificent.

I have no idea how long we worked.

It might have been thirty minutes.

It might have been thirty hours.

Children experience time differently when they are happy.

We decorated the castle with the shells we had collected earlier. Whenever I found one particularly beautiful, I gave it to her so she could decide where it belonged.

She told me where parts of the castle needed fixing.

I fixed them.

Anything we found nearby that looked as though it belonged to our little kingdom was added to it—

By then her skin had been browned by the sun and there was sand glittering through her hair.

Then, from somewhere far behind us, I heard a name.

She heard it too.

She looked up.

Her parents were calling her.

Something in her changed immediately.

Not dramatically. Children rarely have the language for dramatic goodbyes.

The happiness simply dimmed.

She turned back toward me and said,

“I have to go now.”

That was all.

Before she left, she asked me to protect the castle until I had to leave too.

I told her I would.

She gave me her pink shovel.

She did not ask for anything of mine.

Then she smiled at me, turned around and ran back toward her family.

I did not watch her leave.

I stayed with the castle.

For a while, I protected it exactly as I had promised.

I added a few things myself. I changed some parts where I thought they should be changed.

It did not look as good.

The tide continued coming in.

The moat filled higher.

Eventually, my mother called my name.

I stared at the castle for a moment before walking back toward her.

The first thing she asked was,

“Whose shovel is that?”

I told her it belonged to a girl.

My mother smiled.

She said I could keep it.

We began packing everything.

I helped as best I could, but every so often I looked back toward the castle.

By then it was mostly a wet mound of sand. The towers had collapsed, though I could still make out the moat surrounding what remained.

We gathered the towels.

Closed the cooler.

Collected the bags.

Then began the miserable walk back toward the car carrying everything we had dragged down only hours earlier.

I pulled my towel behind me through the sand.

Before leaving the beach, I turned around one last time.

The castle was gone.

The tide had reached it completely.

The place where we had spent the entire afternoon was now only shoreline again—flat, wet, smooth.

There was no trench.

No pool.

No moat.

No castle.

I couldn’t tell we were ever there.