by Hugh Howey
Finally, the readers. Thank you for your time, your emails, your tweets, your reviews, your friendship, and your feedback. And thank you for being as brave in reading outside your comfort zone as I’m trying to be in writing there. See you at the next wild place we find ourselves. Because you know this isn’t over yet. There’s always another page to turn in order to discover a little more …
The Beach: One Year Later
The best memories I own—the ones I choose to travel back to when I’m at my desk and should be working on my next article—are the beach trips my parents took me on as a kid. I travel back to the days when both of them were young, alive, and in love. Back to when my sister was my best friend in the world, my playmate, my fellow sandcastle architect. We would play a game in the car, seeing who could spot the ocean first. It was a parent’s ploy to keep us quiet, to keep us staring intently down the road ahead. And then someone would spot a glint of the summer sun on that wide blue, and all of us would erupt at once, fingers pointing, a family laughing.
My mother loved seashells, my grandmother as well. My father was into sharks’ teeth, and he had a knack for finding them. Some were fossilized and millions of years old. Those teeth will continue to wash up long after all of us are gone. They are glimpses of another time, when the sea was full of life.
I used to think my happy memories lay in the past because I’d never be happy like that again. Young and carefree. Surrounded by people I love. Still shells to uncover here or there that careless others overlooked. I thought we were destined to get old like the Earth does, for all that lives is bound to decline.
But that’s not right. Life is what we make of it.
When Michael and I lost our child, I thought there was something wrong with me, that I was dead inside, that Michael was right to call me an empty shell. But some of the beautiful things in life are grown and others are discovered. Some are made and some wash up and tumble into our lives. Entire generations of people have forgotten that we have a choice. Ness has shown the world what it means to grow beautiful things. Someone else showed me that a life can be found just as well as made.
“I saw it first!” Holly yells, leaning between us and pointing through the windshield.
“Seat belt,” I tell her. “I want to hear it click.”
“But we’re practically there!”
“And you practically have the ice cream I’m practically going to buy you once we get to the boardwalk.”
“Okay, okay.”
I glance at Ness and see him smiling as Holly buckles up. “Clickety click,” she says for emphasis from the back seat.
We find a parking space near one of the beach accesses. A wooden flight of stairs arches over the grassy dunes. Holly races ahead, flip-flops in one hand and snorkel mask in the other, while Ness and I carry the cooler between us.
“All the beaches I own,” he tells me, once Holly is out of earshot, “and this is where you want to spend our holiday.”
“This is where I used to come as a child,” I tell him. “Besides, how can we see if we’re winning the war unless we visit the front lines?”
He grumbles his disagreement. I think he’s worried someone might recognize him. But the last time that happened, he only had to pose for a selfie. No one spit on him. He’s still not used to that.
We stake out a space on the crowded beach. Holly has already—and unsurprisingly—made friends. She asks if she can go in the water. I make sure the lifeguards are watching the waves and not flirting with tourists, and I give her a thumbs-up. Ness and I lay out the blanket. He puts sunscreen on my shoulders, and I return the favor.
I had hoped to see shells washing up, being discovered, a sign that our illicit wildlife preserve just north of here was beginning to have some distant impact. Beyond the breakers, snorkelers dive deep, their fins kicking in the air, disappearing, and then their heads bobbing back to the surface with whale-like plumes of water spraying from their snorkels.
A good sign. Something down there worth diving for. But it’s the kid Holly’s age who comes running to his parents with an object in his fist that gives me hope. I watch as the father checks the boy’s shell and goes from being proud to horrified. “It’s still alive, son,” he says, and makes his boy rush as fast as he can to put it back in the water.
The parents look at each other in silence, eyes wide, while I squeeze Ness’s hand.
“This is why I wanted to come,” I tell him.
“If you love it so much, maybe we’ll come back for our honeymoon,” he says.
I nearly call his bluff and accept, but decide to tease him further. “I’ve got a better idea. There’s this great lake I’ve heard about in Scotland—”
Ness wrestles me down on the blanket and kisses me. “I don’t think so,” he says, rubbing his stubble against my neck. When he sits up, peering down at me, I reach out and run my thumb along the scar on his cheek.
“Stop it,” he says. And I know he means to stop thinking what I’m thinking, to stop blaming myself, not to stop touching him.
“I love you,” I say. It’s rare that I get to say it first. And while Ness gets mad when I apologize, he never seems to notice when I say I’m sorry in some other way.
“So what’s the plan tomorrow?” he asks. “Want to rent a boat?”
“It might rain tomorrow,” I tell him.
“The Society won’t be happy about that.”
I smile.
“Hey,” he says, “I can always take Holly to the arcade if you want some quiet time to work on your article.”
“I think we have to stop calling it an article,” I tell him. “It’s gone way past that. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a book.”
“Even better. I can’t wait to read it.”
I prop myself on my elbow and watch the boy reluctantly release his catch back into the sea. The ocean still has something to give, it seems. It just takes us giving a little back.
“You’ll be the first one,” I promise him. And this is how the book will end, I decide. How it should end. The story of the great shell collector will close with the death of his hobby. And the start of something else.
www.hughhowey.com
Table of Contents
— Prologue —
Part I: We Don’t Belong Here 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Part II: Drowning 12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
Part III: The Monster 23
24
25
26
27
Part IV: A Dive Too Deep 28
29
30
31
Part V: Surfacing for Air 32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
Acknowledgments
The Beach: One Year Later