The Short Way Home
Halle lifted the bundle of sea-rosemary and asked, "Is there a faster way back than all the way around?" Fern, who had said almost nothing since the tide pools, pulled her spines down and looked at the water. The bay curved ahead of them like the inside of a shell, long and patient and silver. Halle had walked that curve a hundred times. Tonight the herbs in her arms smelled green and sharp and warm, and she wanted them in Fern's sleeping hollow before the smell faded. "There," she said, pointing. A pale ridge of sand lay across the water, straight as a drawn line. "Across the sandbar. Half the walking." Fern blinked and stepped into the shallows after her.
The water took her ankles, then her knees, warm as a bath left out in the sun. Halle held the bundle high in the crook of her arm, and Fern climbed up and sat on it like a small grey passenger. Every step shook the smell loose, green and peppery, mixed with the clean salt of the bay. Behind them their cove grew smaller. The moon lay flat on the water and broke into pieces whenever Halle moved, then patiently put itself back together. "We'll be home before it clears the headland," Halle said. Fern said nothing. Her nose worked, though, reading the dark the way Halle read the shape of the shore.
The sandbar was not where it had looked. From the beach it had seemed one pale line, drawn straight across to the far point. Up close it split. One arm ran left, into a shine of still water. One ran right, toward a hump of black rock. One sank under the surface and came up again further on, like a stitch in cloth. Halle stood with the water at her shins and the herbs against her chest and felt the first small bloom of being wrong. "Huh," she said. The sea smelled of iron and cold stone here, the way a jug smells after rain. Fern's spines shifted. "Left," Fern said, so quietly it was almost the tide.
They took the left arm. It was good walking, firm and ribbed under her feet, and for a while Halle was sure again. Then the sand simply stopped. It slid away into a round pool, deep and black and still, with kelp lying across it like wet ribbon. The smell rose up, dark and brown, like strong tea gone cold. Small fish hung in the pool without moving at all, as if someone had set them down there and forgotten them. Halle crouched and watched. Fern leaned out over her arm until her nose nearly touched the water. Neither of them hurried. Somewhere under the kelp a crab turned over and went back to sleep.
Going back was slower than coming. The water had risen a hand's width and the ribbed sand had gone soft. Halle picked her way to the split and stood thinking, while the moon climbed a little higher than she wanted it to. "The short way is taking its time," she said. Fern made a sound that might have been a laugh, if hedgehogs laughed. "Right, then," Halle said, and turned toward the black rock. The smell changed again: warm salt, and under it something sweet and faint, like melon left in a window. She followed the sweetness the way Fern would have, nose first, feet after.
The sweetness was a bed of sea-grass, and asleep in the middle of it was a turtle as wide as a door. Her shell was dull olive in the moonlight and bearded with soft weed. She breathed out slowly, and the breath smelled of wet stone and green water. Halle stopped where she was. "We'll go around," she whispered. They went around in a long, careful arc, so slowly that the grass barely stirred, and the turtle slept on with one flipper tucked under her chin. Fern watched her the whole way, turning on the bundle of herbs to keep looking. The detour cost them a hundred steps. Halle did not mind a single one.
Past the grass the sandbar dropped away. Halle felt the shelf of it go out from under her toes and stopped with the water at her waist, warm as soup, the herbs held up over her head. "Hold on," she said. Fern gripped the bundle with four small feet. Halle waded the channel in six long steps, and the moon broke and mended, broke and mended, all the way across. On the far side the sand was dry and still held the day's heat. It smelled of warm stone and old rope. Halle set Fern down and they stood there dripping, both of them smelling strongly of crushed sea-rosemary, which was no bad thing at all.
Then Halle turned to find her cove, and found the wrong one. The sandbar had carried them to the far point, past the headland, further along the coast than she had ever walked at night. Their cove lay back the way they had come, small and dark, with its three leaning pines. Halle worked it out in her head and laughed, quietly, so as not to wake anything. The straight line had taken them around three sides of the bay. "We could have strolled," she said. Fern lifted her nose into the wind off the land, which carried pine and hot sand and the dusty honey of the cliff flowers, and set off along the beach.
The walk back was long, and it was the best part. The tideline was a stripe of smells, one after another, like rooms in a house. Dried kelp, crisp as paper. A knot of wet rope. Salt crusted white on a shell. A hollow log that smelled of rain from somewhere else entirely. Fern stopped at each one and read it, and Halle waited and read it too, badly, learning. Her arms ached, so she carried the bundle against her hip instead. The sea moved beside them without any fuss, pushing up and sliding back, pushing up and sliding back, like something breathing in its sleep.
Halfway along they sat down on a flat warm rock. Halle laid the herbs in her lap and the smell came up around them both. "I thought it would be quicker," she said. "It smelled better than the other way," said Fern. That was the longest sentence Fern had managed all evening, and Halle kept it, turning it over while the moonlight lay down on the water. Her feet were sandy. Her shoulders were warm. A moth came close, thought about them, and went. Above the beach, in the grass, the cliff flowers went on breathing honey into the dark whether anyone noticed or not.
The three pines came up out of the dark at last, leaning the way they always leaned. The moon had cleared the headland long ago and sat high and small and white. "The short way is taking its time," Halle said, and Fern made the sound again. Their own cove smelled of itself: warm sand, pine sap, the particular sourness of the weed on the low rocks. Halle knew it with her eyes shut. She waded the last of the shallows with her shoes in one hand and the herbs in the other, and the water was a ribbon of moon, and nothing in the whole bay was in any sort of hurry.
Fern's sleeping hollow lay under the lip of the dune, lined with dry grass and scooped to the shape of her. Halle knelt and shook the sea-rosemary out and pressed it flat with both palms, the way you smooth a sheet. The green, peppery smell went up and filled the hollow and then spilled over the sand. Fern walked into the middle of it, sat down, and said, "Oh." Halle lay back beside the dune with her feet still in the cooling sand. Above her the sky held more stars than it had when she asked her question, and the tide came up the beach and let itself down again.
Fern came out of the herbs and settled against her side, spines flat, belly warm. "Tomorrow," Halle said, "we'll go the long way." "That was the long way," said Fern. "Then we'll go it again." The water pushed up and slid back. The smell of the herbs moved over them in slow handfuls, green and salt and sleeping pine. "The short way is taking its time," Halle murmured, almost gone. Fern put one small paw into her open hand. Halle closed her fingers around it, and the moon went on lying on the water, and neither of them moved again.
