Shore Leave Tides

Mavis woke up in a bed she did not recognize, and for a long minute she just lay there under a quilt that smelled faintly of cedar and salt, staring at a ceiling with a hairline crack running from one corner to the middle. The light coming through the window was soft and gray, the kind of light that never quite commits to being morning, and the air in the room was cold in a way that meant the heat had been off all night. She was thirty-four years old, she had come to this town on her own, and she could remember almost everything, which was either a good sign or a very bad one.

She sat up slowly and took inventory. Her jeans were folded over the back of a wooden chair, which felt polite. Her sweater was on the floor, which felt less polite. There was a glass of water on the nightstand next to her phone, and her phone said it was 7:42 on a Saturday, and there was one text from her friend Celeste back in the city that just said tell me everything, which Mavis intended to do, eventually, once she had figured out what everything was.

She could hear someone moving around downstairs. Cabinets opening and closing, the clink of a mug, water running. She pulled the sweater on and went down the narrow stairs, and Dylan was in the kitchen with his back to her, thirty-six years old and barefoot, pouring coffee into two mugs like he had been expecting her to come down at exactly this moment.

"Morning," he said without turning around. "I made it strong, I wasn't sure how you'd want it."

"Strong is good," Mavis said, and then, because it seemed like the thing to address, "So. Last night."

"So. Last night," Dylan agreed, and handed her a mug, and grinned at her in a way that gave nothing away and everything away at the same time. "You remember the important parts?"

"I remember most of it. I remember the beach. I remember thinking the tide was doing something weird."

"The tide here does something weird every day, that's just how it works," he said, leaning against the counter. "You want eggs? I've got eggs and I've got toast and that's honestly the full menu."

"Both, please," Mavis said, and sat down at the little table by the window, and looked out at the gray water, and tried to decide how much of what she remembered was real.

Because here was the thing she had not said out loud yet, the thing that was sitting in her chest, heavy and immovable. She remembered the beach at dusk, and she remembered the sound the water made when it went out, a sound like something enormous exhaling, and she remembered standing at the edge of the wet sand with Dylan and feeling, for just a few seconds, like the whole shoreline was paying attention to her. Like something under the water had turned its face toward her and was waiting. And she remembered that instead of running she had looked at Dylan and asked him to kiss her, plain as anything, and he had said yes before she finished the sentence.

She ate her eggs and did not say any of that. Not yet.

She had arrived in Dune Haven two days earlier, on a Thursday, on a bus that emptied out entirely except for her. That should have been her first clue about the town, that even the bus driver did not stay. The streets were empty in a way that felt deliberate, as if the whole place had been wound down and put away for the season. Half the shops had plywood over their windows or handwritten signs saying back in May, and the boardwalk café was open but served nothing but coffee and three kinds of muffin, and the woman behind the counter told her that was all there was and all there would be until spring.

Celeste had a friend from college who had a friend, and that was how the whole thing had been arranged, that chain of names that landed Mavis at the door of a man she had never met, in a town she had never seen, in the deadest week of the off-season. She had booked the weekend back in the city, sitting in her apartment on a Sunday night with takeout containers stacked on her coffee table, feeling the boredom press down on her like weather. Her job was fine. Her apartment was fine. Everything was fine, and fine had started to feel like a lid on a pot, and when Celeste said you need to get out of town, go somewhere with nothing in it, Mavis had opened her laptop and booked the bus before she could think better of it.

Dylan met her at the inn, because Peggy, who ran the bar there and had known him since they were kids, had apparently told him a stranger was coming and he should look out for her. He was tall and quiet and he had the kind of face that looked like it was amused by something all the time, and when he shook her hand he said, "Welcome to the emptiest town on the coast. You picked the worst possible week, or the best one, depends what you're looking for."

"I'm looking for nothing," Mavis had said. "That is the entire point. I want three days of nothing."

"Well, you came to the right place, we've got nothing in bulk," he said, and she had laughed harder than the joke deserved, and that was probably the second clue she ignored.

They had spent Friday walking the town, or what there was of it. He showed her the rock jetty and the shuttered arcade and the little historical society with a display about a shipwreck from the eighteen hundreds, and he talked about the tide the way other people talk about sports, with real feeling. "Low tide here goes out farther than anywhere on this coast," he told her, standing on the wet sand with his hands in his pockets. "My grandfather used to say the water was holding its breath. Everyone says that about every tide everywhere, but he swore this one was different. He said don't be out on the flats when the water comes back."

"Because of the current?" Mavis asked.

"Because of the water," Dylan said, and shrugged like that was an answer, and they walked on.

The night before that, Thursday, they had ended up at the inn's bar, which had exactly three customers, all of them locals, all of them nursing the same beer for an hour. Peggy worked behind the bar, thirty-two and quick-eyed, and she and Dylan talked in the shorthand of people who grew up four houses apart, and Mavis sat between them feeling something she had not felt in years, which was curious. About a place. About a person.

"So what do you do in the city?" Peggy asked her, refilling her glass without being asked.

"Software. I make the little buttons move when people click them."

"Exciting," Peggy said, deadpan.

"It pays well and it's killing me slowly," Mavis said, and Dylan laughed, and Peggy looked at Dylan for half a second in a way that Mavis caught and filed away.

"I used to visit the city," Peggy said. "Hated it. Too many people, all of them in a hurry to stand still."

"That's a pretty good summary, actually."

"Drink your wine," Peggy said, and moved down the bar, and Dylan leaned in a little and said, "She likes you. That's rare, she likes maybe four people total."

It was Dylan who suggested the beach at dusk on Friday, and it was Mavis who said yes too fast. They walked out along the flats while the water pulled back and back, farther than seemed possible, exposing sandbars and tidal pools and old dark stones that nothing had ever moved. The sky went the color of a bruise. And the sound started, that long low exhale, and Mavis felt it in her teeth and in the backs of her knees, and the whole shoreline seemed to lean toward her.

"You feel that?" Dylan asked quietly, and she could not tell if he meant the cold or something else.

"Yeah," she said. "What is it?"

"Tide's turning," he said, but he did not sound sure, and he had stopped walking.

And that was where the memory went soft at the edges, and that was the part Mavis kept turning over in her head while Dylan washed the dishes and the gray morning sat on the water outside. She remembered asking him to kiss her. She remembered saying yes was the whole word she needed. She remembered his hands and his mouth and the cold sand and the heat of him, and she remembered that the exhale sound got louder and she had been more curious than scared, which was unlike her, and she remembered walking back to his house laughing about something she could not now remember. What she did remember, clearly, was him asking before every single thing, and the condom, and her saying yes each time.

"You went quiet," Dylan said, drying his hands. "You're doing the thing where you're thinking too loud."

"Is the tide here dangerous?" Mavis asked. "Actually. Not the tour guide answer."

Dylan looked at her, and for a moment the permanent amusement in his face was gone, and what was under it looked almost like worry.

"Eat your toast," he said.

Mavis finished her toast. It was good toast, thick-cut, and the eggs had been scrambled with some kind of herb she could not name, and she ate all of it, which surprised her, because she usually picked at breakfast like a bird. Something about this kitchen made her hungry. Something about this whole town made her hungry in a way she did not have words for yet.

"Okay," she said, putting her fork down. "You've fed me. Now answer the question. Is the tide dangerous or not."

Dylan sat back down across from her with his own mug and turned it slowly on the table, and he took his time about it, and she let him take his time, because she was learning that about him already, that he circled things before he landed on them.

"It's dangerous the way any tide is dangerous," he said. "It comes back fast and the flats are big and flat and you can get cut off by the channel. That's the real answer. People have drowned here, sure, it's a coast, coasts drown people."

"But?"

"But my grandfather didn't mean any of that." He looked out the window at the gray water. "He meant it the way I said it. Don't be out there when the water comes back. He said it like a rule from when he was a kid, and his grandfather said it to him, and nobody in my family has ever said what the rule is actually for. They just say it."

"You're doing the tour guide voice again."

"I don't have a tour guide voice."

"You absolutely do, it goes up at the end, like you're selling me a postcard." She was smiling, and he was smiling, and then neither of them was smiling, because the exhale sound came again, faint in the distance, under the wind, and they both heard it, and they both sat there and let it pass.

"So last night," Mavis said, when it had gone. "On the beach. That sound got louder, and I remember being more curious than scared, and I'm scared of everything, Dylan, I worry about whether the dishwasher is loaded correctly. It's my whole personality. And I just wasn't."

"Do you regret it?"

"No," she said, and it came out fast and honest, faster than she meant it to. "No, that's the weird part. I keep waiting to feel weird about it and I just feel... warm. Like something filled up a hole I didn't know I had."

Dylan nodded slowly, like she had confirmed something for him rather than told him anything new, and that small nod bothered her more than the sound had.

"What?" she asked.

"Nothing. Celeste's friend's friend, the one who set you up here. That's a long chain of people for one empty weekend in Dune Haven."

"It was last minute. I booked it Sunday night in the city. Celeste's friend's friend had a place listed, cheap and available."

"Yeah," Dylan said. "Cheap and available." He said it like he was tasting the words, and then he stood up and took both mugs to the sink, and the moment was gone the way moments here seemed to go, quietly, without asking permission.

They walked into town that morning, down the dead main street with its plywood windows, and Dylan pointed things out as they went, the church with the bell that had not rung since before he was born, the bait shop that only opened on weekends now, the old lifeboat station that the historical society kept promising to restore. Mavis kept waiting to be bored. She had been bored for eleven years, steadily, professionally bored, since she moved to the city after college, and boredom was the thing she had come here to wallow in, three clean days of it, and instead she kept noticing everything. The way the salt sat on her lips. The way Dylan walked on the seaward side of the sidewalk without ever saying he was doing it.

At lunch they ended up back at the inn, at the boardwalk café side, where the muffin choices had expanded to include a fourth kind, which Peggy announced like a state secret.

"Cranberry," Peggy said, setting them down. "Someone's cousin ships them frozen. Don't tell anyone, the mystique will die."

"Your secrets are safe," Mavis said.

"So." Peggy wiped the table that did not need wiping and looked at Mavis with those quick eyes. "You survived the flats at dusk. Most visitors don't get the full tour."

"It's not exactly a tour destination in February."

"That's not what I meant and you know it." Peggy glanced toward the counter, where Dylan had gone up to pay, and lowered her voice. "Dylan doesn't bring people out there at turning tide. He's never done it, not once, and I've watched him turn down three women who asked, one of them very nicely."

Mavis felt something cold move through her that had nothing to do with the wind coming off the water. "Why not?"