Pacific Grays and Blues

The beach is cold. Sierra’s never been on a beach that’s cold before. Back in Malibu, the only type of weather was beach weather: balmy skies, just enough salt on the breeze, and sunshine that kept her naturally pale skin tan year-round. This beach is most definitely not Malibu. Scruffy pines line the crumbling cliff faces, and everywhere she looks is gray: gray sand, gray sky, gray sea. Sierra had to whack her way through moss snaking down from bare branches and crush half a foot of limp brown leaves beneath her too-big boots before she could even set foot on the craggy terrain that passed for a seashore here. No white sands or palm trees in sight.

“C’mon, Sierra!” Lauren squeals, her voice a pitch that matches the shrill shriek of the wind. The younger girl streaks past Sierra, her small feet nimble amidst the roots and rocks of the beach trail, but her sister Katie lingers for a moment at Sierra’s side. Katie’s the softer of the two sisters, despite being older, the one who flips the hermit crabs back on their feet and wedges herself under the couch to retrieve tennis balls for Oscar, their dog.

“The beach is my favorite place,” Katie says with a little sigh. Her highlighter-yellow jacket and neon-orange sweatpants have the smooth vibrancy of citrus, channeling somewhere far more tropical than the Pacific Northwest in November, but at least they bring a bit of brightness to the dull landscape all around.

Mine too, Sierra wants to answer, but not like this.

“Do you want me to show it to you?” Katie questions, but Sierra shakes her head.

“You go on,” Sierra tells her. “I’ll catch up to you.” She wrenches her lips into something resembling a wobbly smile. Katie gives her hand a little squeeze and darts on after her sister.

Dad and Nancy are behind her being dragged along by Oscar-the-massive-slobbery-St-Bernard, so Sierra knows she has to keep moving if she doesn’t want to be sucked into a conversation. On their trek down to the water, Nancy tried to show her the different kinds of edible plants lining the trails, not that many of them are blooming in this frigid cold. Sierra figures Dad put her up to it, just as he had when Nancy was helping her start the campfire last night. After half a dozen broken matchsticks, Sierra had passed the box over to Katie. Just another time she couldn’t measure up to her dad’s girlfriend and her two alarmingly outdoorsy daughters.

Dad and Nancy had met at a work conference when Sierra was ten—Dad was designing the logos for the outdoor gear company where Nancy worked—and they hadn’t stopped talking since. Sierra knew they’d been dating from afar for years now, that Dad had even talked about proposing, but she’d never really thought he was serious until he’d broached the subject of the two of them leaving Malibu. Nancy’s girls were younger, he’d said, and her job wasn’t mobile like his. But Sierra didn’t understand why that meant she had to be the one to cram all twelve years of her life into boxes and shove them onto a van bound for Washington. She shouldn’t have to cooperate with Nancy’s impromptu wilderness lessons, just as she doesn’t need to talk to her dad about feelings or maturing or their growth as a family.

But Sierra didn’t understand why that meant she had to be the one to cram all twelve years of her life into boxes and shove them onto a van bound for Washington. She shouldn’t have to cooperate with Nancy’s impromptu wilderness lessons, just as she doesn’t need to talk to her dad about feelings or maturing or their growth as a family.

Lauren and Katie have taken off down the beach toward the water, laughing and shouting at each other as the blustery wind tangles their thick brown curls. The younger girls’ jubilance baffles Sierra. Maybe she was once that carefree at six like Lauren, or even at newly-nine like Katie, but that youthful joy feels a long way off for her right now. The wind howls again, swallowing the girls’ hollers. The icy gusts feel like they’re tunneling directly through her eardrums and into her brain.

Sierra pulls her baby blue puffy coat tighter around her shoulders, grateful for the warmth despite her protests when her dad had tucked it on top of her newly dubbed “camping” duffle. The last time she’d worn this coat was when Tasha’s family had brought her along on their trip to Lake Tahoe for spring break last year. Sierra had hoped to return to the resort with them in August when it was warmer—Tasha was going to show her how to dive from the high board into the clear waters of the mountain lake—but then the moving trucks had started showing up no matter how many times Dad had apologized, tried to explain to her. The day they finally left, Tasha had tied a brand-new friendship bracelet around her wrist and hugged her so tight her ribs ached before climbing back into her family’s Prius, and then Sierra was alone with the piles of boxes strewn across her shell-patterned bed covers, trying hard not to cry.

Sierra twists the bracelet around her wrist. Already the pastel yellows, pinks, and blues are fading together into a blur of murky gray, as if the setting is bleeding the color right out of it, or maybe it’s the gray surrounding her that’s infiltrating even her memories of home. Back home, she would never have complained about a beach day, not even for Katie’s late-November birthday. In Malibu, there would’ve been no fuss about what Nancy called “appropriate camping attire,” and no morning downpours prompting Lauren’s animated recounting of the last time they’d camped in the rain and woken up with an inch of water at the bottom of their tent. Her dad had squeezed her shoulder as the little girls were exclaiming over puddles. “This’ll be an adventure, honey,” he murmured, and Sierra could feel the scratch of his day-old stubble against her cheek and the thin press of his wired glasses. “It’ll be good for both of us.” She had responded by stuffing her earbuds into her ears and barricading herself into her tiny sliver of space by the car window as Nancy loaded the muddy Subaru with the last of the coolers and thermal blankets.

Aside from her own patchwork of a poorly-stitched-together family, the beach is empty. No one else is crazy enough to come camping this late in November, Sierra thinks, and it’s true, all she can see in either direction is massive hunks of driftwood that look like they could’ve floated in straight from Pangea. She wonders whether it ever snows on the beaches in Washington. It certainly feels cold enough, and wild, like a landscape from another time. In Malibu, the beaches were always teeming with surfers and college students and kids digging sand pits deep enough to climb into. If she listens hard enough now, she can almost hear the lifeguard’s whistle and the whirring of tourists on Segways making their way down the boardwalk. She scrunches her eyes, tastes cotton candy dissolving on her tongue. 

But her eyes open again and the beach is before her, quiet except for the wind and the waves and a lone gull circling the sky. The silence is ruptured by a great baloof of a bark and frantic footsteps. It’s only then she realizes that Dad and Nancy have caught up with her, Oscar straining for the seabird. “How’s it hanging, sport?” says Dad, resting a hand on her shoulder. Sierra hates it when he calls her that. He only does it when he’s trying to encourage her to lighten up, have a good time.

“I’m fine,” Sierra insists, shrugging his hand away. “Why do you all keep asking me? I’m here, I’m fine, you can leave me alone.”

But Nancy’s coming up on her other side, her bouncy curls restrained by a scarf and tucked up under a hood. Her skin is a soft brown, bright despite the wind and the weather and smooth in a way Sierra doubts she could achieve with all the powders and creams north of Oregon. And along with her comes Oscar, strands of spittle dribbling from his fat lips and haywire tongue, and oh, now he’s rubbing up against her and getting spit all over her puffy coat and even on Tasha’s bracelet, and Sierra wants to scream so loud that the seabird dives for cover. But she’s not little like Katie and Lauren anymore, so she settles for pushing the dog’s clumsy nose back toward Nancy and trying to wipe off her arm on the side of her jeans.

“Whoa—sorry about that!” Nancy gives Oscar’s leash a little tug and the dog lumbers back towards her with a goofy grin on his face. “He’s just being friendly. I’d let him off if it weren’t for all these darn birds.” Indeed, two more gulls have joined the first, and now Oscar’s making such a ruckus with his deep throaty barks that it’s a miracle the birds haven’t scattered after all.

“Silence, beast.” Nancy quiets him by thrusting a bit of leftover breakfast sausage under his nose. “So, Sierra, what do you think? Katie said this is her favorite beach in all of Washington.”

Sierra doesn’t respond. What does Nancy want her to say? That the sand feels hard and gritty beneath her borrowed boots instead of slipping between her toes like velvet, that the surroundings here are gray and dreary and lifeless, and that no one should ever have to wear a coat at the beach, let alone one now covered in slobber?

Nancy tries again. “My girls especially like climbing up on the driftwood as the waves are coming in. They run out as close as they can to the water and then try to jump back on the log before it catches them.”

“Does it work?” Dad asks.

“That’s why I pack extra clothes in the car,” Nancy responds.

Sierra lets out a snort. She packed extra clothes too, but not because she wants to get any closer to those monstrous waves, nipping and biting at the edges of the shore and surely her ankles if she gets too close. The whole atmosphere of this place—the clammy sand, the noxious smoke spiraling from the campfire last night, the dirt on her shoes when she trekked over to the grimy little outhouse to pee, not to mention the cold—it all makes Sierra want to sink into a tub with her mom’s favorite lavender bath salts and never get out. Not until next summer, when Dad has promised they can fly back to California—back home. Maybe Tasha’s parents would let Sierra just stay with them at the end of her visit. She and Tasha could share a bed—they’ve done it before—and they could take the bus together up into the twisting Santa Monica hills for school, and her dad could fly down to visit her every couple of weekends. Sierra doesn’t think she’d mind that arrangement. Maybe he’d be happier too, with less time spent worrying about Sierra and more time for Nancy and the girls.

Nancy’s shoulder bumps up against her as she passes Oscar’s leash off to Dad. “Walk with me, girly-o?” she questions, herding Sierra along. Sierra shuffles through the sand beside her, even though being called girly-o is even worse than sport.

Nancy’s shoulder bumps up against her as she passes Oscar’s leash off to Dad. “Walk with me, girly-o?” she questions, herding Sierra along. Sierra shuffles through the sand beside her, even though being called girly-o is even worse than sport.

“I know this isn’t your idea of an ideal vacation. But our little trips can be pretty exciting too. You know those mountains we drove by to get here? The biggest one is called Mount Olympus, just like in ancient Greece.” Nancy raises her eyebrows and wiggles her hands as though this proclamation might make Sierra exclaim in fascination.

Ugh. Why doesn’t Nancy get it? “Um. Cool?” Sierra ekes out.

Nancy drops her shoulders and with them all attempts at pretense. “Look, Sierra, if you don’t care about what I’m saying, that’s fine, but can’t you at least pretend to be having fun, for Katie? Or your dad?”

Who does Nancy think she is, telling Sierra what to do? It isn’t Sierra’s fault she’s miserable. And no matter how much she pleads or spouts trivia, it isn’t like Nancy is actually doing very much to make Sierra more comfortable. Cooking meals over a fire that spat sparks straight into Sierra’s face. Sleeping on the hard ground in crowded tents that fog up in the morning from too many people breathing too close together. The timing of the trip itself, which means missing her weekly video-call with Tasha because the campground doesn’t have Internet. And all that alongside the constant presence of Nancy, in far closer proximity than back at the house, the living and breathing cause of all this disruption in the first place.

“I can’t help it that I’m not having fun,” Sierra tells her. If Nancy’s done pretending, then so is she. “And you can’t tell me what to do or not anyway. You’re not my mom.”

“Sweetheart….” Nancy’s lower lip catches between her teeth. Her nails bite into her palms, hard enough to leave little half-moons behind. But before Nancy gets a chance to break out in sobs or scream at the sky or any of the other reactions Sierra’s expecting to provoke, Dad is there with them, easing Nancy’s tense fingers enough to press the dog’s leash back into them, crouching down in front of Sierra so that she can smell the instant coffee on his breath.

“Hey,” says Dad with his hands on her shoulders, and for a moment it’s just the two of them again, like it had been ever since Mom died. But then Dad opens his mouth and wrecks it, any sense of normalcy in this new and strange and freezing place. “Hey,” he says again. “I know all this outdoorsy-ness isn’t really your thing. But Nancy was excited to bring us here, honey. This place is really special to her and the girls.”

Sierra doesn’t know how to explain to him that she knows this already, that she can’t help that all the places and people she loves are a thousand miles away, all except for him, and he’s so clearly chosen Nancy over her. If she was his pick, they never would have left Malibu. So she just nods and shrugs her way out of his grip, striding off towards whatever Katie and Lauren are so interested in down by the water. As she goes, she hears Nancy saying to Dad: “I just don’t understand, David. What am I doing wrong?”

Nothing. Nancy’s not really the problem here, only the catalyst. How is Sierra supposed to make Nancy understand that the only thing she’s done wrong is fall in love with Sierra’s father? And she knows in her heart that Dad has spent nearly a decade missing Mom now, and that Nancy is his chance at a new beginning, an end to his lonely days of just a daughter for company. But that doesn’t change the fact that happiness for the two of them comes in tandem with pain for Sierra. How does Nancy not realize that she can’t make it right? It’s too late now to fix it, this upheaval of Sierra’s whole world.

Sierra looks out, out past the little girls, out toward the horizon and the place where the ocean and the sky seem to blend together, a perfect canvas of wild remoteness hardly touched by human hands. She thinks all of a sudden, Mom would have loved this place. Sierra doesn’t remember much about her mother, but there was a picture that used to sit on the mantel in their old house in Malibu. Her mom stands on top of one of those old Volkswagen vans in overalls and a wide-brimmed sun hat, with her silky blond hair tied up in two falling-apart braids and a crazy grin on her face. Her dad leans out of the window of the front seat, smiling shyly from beneath his glasses, his eyes fixed on the roof and its occupant above. It was taken in Yosemite, Sierra recalls, long before she was born. Mom and Dad used to go on all sorts of adventures before Dad started working as a graphic designer for tons of big companies and they had to settle just outside Los Angeles. That summer, they had hiked the Sierra Nevada, the trip that later gave Sierra her name. She hasn’t seen that picture around in a while. It’s definitely not on the mantel at Nancy’s: just pictures of Katie and Lauren playing soccer and catching a Frisbee and in dramatic makeup up on stage, with one perfunctory photo of Sierra tacked on the end, hugging Tasha tight in front of the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier.

Thinking about that photograph has tears welling in Sierra’s eyes, hot against her wind-chapped cheeks, and she swipes them away impatiently with the cuff of her coat, avoiding the dog slobber. She doesn’t want to think about Tasha, probably swapping friendship bracelets with Cassidy now. She especially doesn’t want to think about Mom and how much she would have loved the Pacific Northwest. Dad said Mom had always complained LA wasn’t wild enough for her. But Sierra loved walking past the street performers that would ham it up for the tourists on the boardwalk and all the way down to the end of the pier bordered by gruff men with spindly poles and the rank tang of the day’s catch. It may not have been Mom’s idea of an adventure, but it was just the sort of familiar chaos that Sierra adored.

She’s almost at the water where the little girls are playing. Lauren is dancing about, kicking up sea spray and shouting at nothing, and Katie kneels at her feet drawing something in the silt. Sierra watches as Lauren gets too close, spattering her sister with saltwater, and Katie retaliates by hurling a fistful of mucky sand. They’re both still laughing though. Sierra’s known Tasha since they were practically in diapers, but she’s never had a real sister before. Nancy’s girls share a closeness that Sierra can’t even begin to comprehend.

She rubs viciously at her cheeks again so that neither of them will notice any tear stains, but she must not be quick enough because now Katie is approaching and there’s nowhere for Sierra to go. On one side of her, Dad and Nancy hustle along with a still-barking Oscar, and on the other the tide rushes up toward the cliff, submerging any path of escape.

She rubs viciously at her cheeks again so that neither of them will notice any tear stains, but she must not be quick enough because now Katie is approaching and there’s nowhere for Sierra to go.

Katie’s in front of her now, smiling her gentle smile. Lauren, the whirlwind, is there a moment later and her dirt-caked little-kid fingers interlace with Sierra’s own hot-pink-polished ones. “Come see,” Katie murmurs, and Sierra finds herself once again being tugged along, this time toward the surf.

Puffs of sea foam cluster like clouds on the edge of the water, and this distracts Sierra enough that she doesn’t notice the ocean surging up over her feet—exactly what she had dreaded—but the boots Nancy dug up for her must be waterproof because her toes are still snug and dry. “Look!” cries Lauren, and Sierra sees what they were so eager to show her: three sand dollars, whole and perfect, nestled just beneath the water’s surface. Sierra’s never seen a real one before, only pictures in kitschy beach catalogs.

“You can have them,” Katie says. “We found them for you.”

In all the times Dad and Nancy have dragged the three girls together over the past several years, trying to help them get to know one another, Sierra can’t think of a single time she’s gifted either sister anything. She doesn’t even have a ninth birthday present for Katie; Dad let her sign her name on his card. It wasn’t that she didn’t like them—they were fine as kids go, a bit noisy and messy but sweet. She just never really thought much about them, as fixated as she’s been on Dad and Nancy and moving and the new place she has to call home. But she isn’t the only one coping with the presence of a new parent, a new family. When Dad and Nancy get married, they’ll be my sisters, she realizes. Sierra wonders whether they’ll come to love her the same way they love each other. She’s surprised to realize the answer actually matters to her.

She looks back at the sand dollars and notices how the shallow water on the edge of the surf reflects back at her like a mirror. She sees her own face, pink-cheeked and hiding behind her collar for warmth, and the two little girls with their windswept curls and matching brown complexions, gleaming like a photograph printed on glossy paper. She pictures the image framed on the mantel, front and center, then sweeps up the sand dollars from their resting place beneath the water. There is sand beneath her nails now. She takes the girls’ hands on either side of her, uncurls their fingers, and presses the treasure into each of their palms.