Breathless
The sand is wet cement against her heels. Each step pulls, sucks, grinds.
Forty-one years of marriage. Thirty years in the ICU. She knows the exact vocabulary of deterioration: meniscus, synovial fluid, the slow betrayal of cartilage. Knowledge doesn't make it hurt less. Pain doesn't give a shit what you call it.
The horizon bleeds gold into bruised blue, the kind of sunset that makes tourists reach for their phones. She watches it with the dead eyes of someone who's seen too many last moments to believe in beauty. The air tastes like brine and rot, like something the tide forgot to take back. Behind her, Jim's shuffle scratches against the sand—scritch-scratch, scritch-scratch—one foot dragging a half-beat behind. After four decades, she knows every variation of his walk. This is his "I'm-tired-of-everything" shuffle. The one that started three years ago when his brother died. Never quite went away.
Their silence has mass. Density. The kind that accumulates between people who've shared beds and bathrooms and a thousand small disappointments. They don't need words anymore. Haven't for years. Their quiet conversations happen in gestures: a hand on a lower back, the way he leaves her coffee cup in exactly the right spot, how she pretends not to notice when he takes the longer route home from the grocery store.
Then—
A scream cuts through the waves.
Not a playing scream. Not a laughing scream. The other kind. The kind that makes your spine go electric before your brain catches up.
Her body moves before thought. Thirty years of code blues, of flatlines, of moments when seconds matter. Her hand shoots out, catches Jim's wrist. His skin is tissue paper over bird bones.
"Listen."
Down the beach: two figures. Young. Beautiful in that way young couples are before life breaks them. The man is carrying something. Someone. A child, arms dangling like snapped puppet strings, head lolling with each stumbled step.
Her stomach drops through the sand, through the earth, through everything.
She runs.
The beach fights every step. Sand grabbing at her ankles like desperate hands. Her knees scream frequencies only she can hear. Sharp notes of protestation, the grinding bass of bone on bone. Behind her, Jim's breathing turns wet, ragged. She doesn't slow.
The young father has collapsed where the waves meet sand, still clutching the boy. Six, maybe seven years old. Small. So fucking small. The mother's sounds aren't human anymore, they're something primal, pre-language, the noise grief makes when it's too big for words.
The boy is dead.
She knows it the instant she drops to her knees, cold Pacific soaking through her jeans. His lips are blue-purple, the color of a fresh bruise. Foam crusts the corners of his mouth like failed snow. His eyes are half-open, staring at nothing with that particular emptiness that can't be faked. No rise. No fall. No flutter beneath the delicate skin of his throat.
But the parents don't know. Can't know. Not yet.
She moves into the lie.
"We've got him." Her voice cuts through the mother's wailing, sharp and competent and absolutely certain. The voice she's used on a hundred families, a thousand. "Everything's going to be okay."
Everything's going to be okay. The first lie. The necessary one.