It was Rei who at last gave me some hint of my mother’s demise. Rei had a quiet energy much like that of my father, but where my father’s attention was inconsistent, when Rei was near, I felt my every move observed. She wore an armful of colorful bangles that I admired and an enormous straw sun hat and a rotating assortment of overalls that always looked so crisp and clean that for a time I was convinced she stopped in Osha to buy them on her way to Horseshoe Cliff. She never raised her voice, but when her face went very still, and her eyes roved from my bare, dirty feet to my uncombed hair, her displeasure was palpable. She worried over me in a way my father did not, and never once came to our house without pressing some treat she’d baked into my open and eager hands. She worried over my father, too, bringing him strange-smelling teas and pots of honey for the cough that increasingly bothered him. Rei, I sensed, would have believed me if I’d told her how Bear treated me. And yet I never told her. I couldn’t say why, exactly, except that I had developed a notion that to do so would hurt my father, and I could not stand to be the one who made him sad.
Besides, though I would not have traded her delicious presents for nearly anything in the world, it annoyed me that Rei treated me like a child far younger than I felt myself to be. It was Rei who convinced my father that I should not be allowed to ride Guthrie beyond the limits of the pasture without an adult to keep watch, and that I should not be allowed to swimin the sea alone. (Thankfully, he lost track of these rules as easily as he was convinced to make them.)
And the cliffs. Rei was perpetually warning me to stay away from the cliffs.
She said it again on a day that she brought me a new blue swimsuit. When I tried on the suit, her keen black eyes clouded with a faraway look.
“Your mother loved that shade of blue,” she said. “She wore a blue scarf that was so light it seemed to float on her shoulders. Your father would laugh and ask her how it felt to have her head in the clouds.” Rei blinked. She looked down and brushed invisible lint from her overalls. “She was very beautiful.”
She had promised to watch me swim. I ran across the bluff toward the steep path that cut down to the beach, ignoring her calls for me to be careful. When I neared the cliff, Rei’s nagging grew urgent. I spun around to confront her.
“I’m not stupid, you know. I never go right up to the edge.”
Half of this was a lie. I did not believe myself to be stupid, but I did go right up to the edge of the cliff. I liked the thrill of it, the way it made my fear grow so big that it shook my heart and wrenched my stomach and pounded on my ears. I bellowed out at the sea and the sea bellowed back at me, and when I stepped away from the cliff’s edge the fear would drain immediately out of me and I would feel better—exhilarated and exhausted, like I’d won something for which I’d fought hard.
Rei pressed her lips together and gave me a look that told me she knew I was lying.
I shrugged and turned to keep walking. “Seriously,” I said over my shoulder. “What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal,” she answered, “is that the land at the edge of the cliff is not secure. Pieces of it fall into the sea every day.Peoplefall into the sea.”
This made me stop. “Who?”
Rei made a shooing motion with her hands and didn’t respond.
She meant my mother. I knew it like I’d always known it, like I suddenly remembered something that had been told to me long before.
My mother had died falling from the cliff.
This was the reason my father grew sad at night as he gazed out at the horizon—it was not the horizon he was watching, but the cliff.
And this was the reason my brother hated the beach so much that he had never learned to swim.
Knowing how my mother had died should have made me sad, but I felt a weight slipping off my shoulders: the weight of the unknown. For the first time, I’d found something I’d lost, and it was the most important thing of all. I understood then that I was drawn to the cliffs, and to the sea, just as my mother had been. I had always felt my father’s presence with me as I explored Horseshoe Cliff, but now I felt my mother’s spirit, too, surrounding me, emanating from the earth and the sky and the sea.
My brother’s attacks grew fiercer around the same time that I learned how my mother had died. It was as though he sensedmy new peace and it aggravated him. But understanding why my brother had never learned to swim helped me see that my brother not only avoided the ocean; he avoided the entire beach. From then on, I knew that when Bear threatened me, I could run down the path from the bluff to the sand below and he would not follow me. When I stepped onto the path down to the sea, I grew so light that I felt as though I’d sprouted wings. I was free.
I ran from Bear to the beach many times over the following years, and each time I did I looked up at the cliff and imagined my mother standing there on the edge, watching over me, keeping me safe.
