The Body in the Kelp by Katherine Hall Page Page B

picked up and was now sound asleep.
    She had no trouble sleeping that night either. Her last semiconscious thought was that she had never realized Nature was quite so noisy—crickets, owls, bullfrogs, and always the sea, just close enough so she could make out the faint rhythmical lappings of the waves on the rocks.
    The next morning Faith was up virtuously early. If she was a jogger, she’d go jogging, she thought. It was that kind of day. Newborn and sparkling. She packed a lunch in one of the two or three hundred knapsacks hanging from nails in the barn and set off with Benjamin for the beach at the Point. She had her bathing suit on under her shorts and shirt and thought they might even go wading, which would be something to tell Tom when he called next.
    By the time they got to the beach, she was worn out. It wasn’t
that Benjamin didn’t keep up. He could match her pace for pace, but he was stubbornly determined to forge his own trails, and it took all her energy and patience to keep him on the track. Now he could roam at will over the beach and had already found a little stick with which he was furiously digging his way to China or whatever was directly below. Faith opened the knapsack and spread out a towel next to him. She sat down and looked at the water. The tide was out and had left a wavy line of seaweed, shells, odd pieces of wood, rope from traps and buoys, and other assorted flotsam- bleach bottles, which people cut to use as bailers, a waterlogged shoe, a sardine tin. The beach itself was arranged in layers. Farthest from the sea, near the wild roses, sea lavender, and spreading junipers, the sand was covered with stones and broken shells, pushed up by the waves. A line of dried, blackened seaweed separated this layer from the sand that had recently been underwater and still glistened in the sun. When it dried, it would be soft and almost white. Down near the water’s edge the rocks started again.
    One of the big schooners sailed by, and Ben jumped up and down waving excitedly. “Wanna ride! Wanna ride!” He was actually beginning to make sense these days, and the next step might be conversation. In a way it was nice to concentrate on Ben, although a few days would have more than sufficed. Before he was born, she hadn’t realized that there would be times when husband and child would pull at her from different directions. Like that poem of Robert Frost’s that compared a woman to a silken tent with “ties of love and thought” binding her to the earth. They were either holding her up or pulling her down, depending on the day, or as Frost pointed out, the movement of the wind.
    Faith and Ben ate their sandwiches and wandered out to the receding water. This wasn’t a clam flat and there was no mud. Faith held tight to Benjamin’s chubby little paw. He was racing toward the water crying, “Swim! Swim!” Faith stuck her big toe in and promptly lost all feeling. She decided her shoes would fit better if she did not get frostbite and managed to steer Ben
away from the beckoning deep, over to the tidal pools that had been left behind in the warm sun.
    â€œSweetheart, we’ll go look for little fishes and shells in the pools, okay? We’ll swim another day.” And in another place, Faith added to herself.
    She helped Ben climb up onto the flat ledges that stretched around the Point, and they began to explore the endlessly fascinating pools. At first Ben wanted to jump in or at least stick his hand in right away, but Faith was able to get him to pause and look first—to see the busy world of tiny fish darting among the sea anemones and starfish, small crabs making their way across the mussels and limpets clinging to the pink and orange algae that lined the bottoms of the pools. They went farther away from the beach, carefully avoiding the sharp remains of the sea urchins the gulls had dropped on the rocks and the lacelike barnacles that covered