The Shell That Waited
Juno waded out through the warm shallows with Mo close beside her. The water came to her knees and let her pass. Sand shifted under her toes, soft in some places, gritty in others, like sugar and salt stirred together. Mo swam a slow circle around her ankles. His shell was olive-tan and scuffed smooth, warm as a stone left out in the sun. The moon lay flat on the water and broke into pieces whenever Juno moved her legs. Ahead of them was the long tide pool she had found that morning. She had been thinking about it all day. She walked faster. Mo did not.
The tide pool was as long as a rowing boat and only as deep as her arm. Juno knelt at the edge and put both palms down. Barnacles rasped under her hands. Weed slid between her fingers like ribbon. In the middle, half buried, sat the ridged grey shell, shut tight as a fist. Around the rim of the pool lay Mo's pebbles, set out that morning in a slow curling line, each one chosen and nudged into place. "Still hands, and the shell will forget we're here," Juno whispered. She had said it that morning too. She had not managed it yet.
She tried. She truly tried. She held her hands flat and counted her own breathing. But the shell stayed shut, and her knees ached, and a crab went by with its small hard clicking, and Juno leaned forward too fast to see it. Her heel swept back through the water. Mo's pebble line scattered with a dull click and a puff of sand. The curl became nothing. Juno sat very still then. Mo lifted his old head and looked at the rim of the pool, and looked at the water, and said nothing at all.
Juno could have let the water take the blame. The tide moved things. Stones rolled. Nobody would have known. But the not-saying sat in her chest like a swallowed pebble, heavy and cold, and she did not want to carry it home. "It was me," she said. "I kicked your stones. I saw them go and I didn't tell you." The words came out small. The pool went on lapping. Then Mo pushed through the shallow water, slow as always, and set one round pebble into her open palm. It was warm. Her chest felt lighter, the way it does after a cough.
So they built it again, together. Juno found the stones by feel in the dark water: one chalky, one ribbed like a fingernail, one furred with green so soft it was nearly velvet. Mo nosed each one to the place he wanted it. The curl grew, stone by stone, out from the middle of the rim. It took a long while. Juno did not hurry him and did not hurry herself. When the last pebble went down, the line looked better than before, wider and rounder, with a bright white stone at the tail that neither of them had noticed that morning.
Then there was nothing left to do but wait. Juno lay on her stomach at the edge of the pool with her chin on her wrists, and Mo rested beside her with one flipper against her arm. "Still hands, and the shell will forget we're here," she said. The water settled. A shrimp walked across her thumb on legs like eyelashes. An anemone opened its sticky orange fingers, closed them, opened them. The moon slid a little further up the sky. Juno's hands stayed where they were. She stopped thinking about waiting and started noticing instead, which is not the same thing.
The shell opened while she was watching a strand of weed. A thin dark line appeared along its ridged edge, no wider than a hair. Then wider. Then wide enough to show the inside, pale and smooth and shining, like the underneath of a cloud. A small soft foot came out and tasted the sand. Juno did not move a finger. Mo did not move either. They watched it breathe out a tiny cloud of grit, and settle, and breathe again, and the pool held all of it in one still bowl of moonlight. "There you are," Juno said, so quietly it was almost nothing.
After a long time the shell closed again, gently, the way an eye closes. Juno stood up. Her knees were printed with barnacle rings and her fingers smelled of salt and green. She waded back with Mo drifting at her side, over sand that was cool below and warm on top. "Still hands, and the shell will forget we're here," she said, mostly to herself. On the shore she sat down in the dry warm sand. She laid her hand flat beside her. Mo set his flipper across it and left it there. Juno held on, and the tide came in a little, and neither of them let go.
