Page 69 of Until We Come Home

Mia

The tide is pulling back into the Pacific, taking the evening light with it, which leaves us maybe fifteen minutes before the sun drops behind the sea stacks.

“Last take!” the director calls down the beach over the surf. “This is the one, everyone. Mia, back to your mark.”

I jog across the damp, packed sand toward the gray driftwood log we’ve been using as a starting point for the past three hours. Noor meets me halfway with a towel and a bottle of water, since I’m soaked from the knees down.

At low tide, Ruby Beach turns into a sprawling expanse of mirror-flat, wet sand reflecting the twilight, dotted with dark tide pools and sea stacks looming out in the surf. It feels like standing at the edge of the world, which is exactly why Lark chose it back in our first week of planning the album’s final sequence.

“On that second phrase,” Noor says, handing me the water. She’s Lark’s lead choreographer, a tiny woman in her forties who never seems to get rattled by anything. “You’re rushing the drop. I know the ocean’s freezing and your body wants out of it, but don’t rush. Let it take the full count. Let the wave come to you.”

“Let the wave come to me,” I repeat, nodding, and take a quick sip before handing the bottle back.

“And after this, you can head back to the inn and sit in a hot bath until next week.”

“Deal,” I say, laughing.

The crew resets along the shoreline. The camera operator checks the track laid across the sand, and the playback op drags the big speaker a few feet closer to the water so the music carries over the surf. We got the partner section with Dante this afternoon, the lifts and the long carry through the water, so he’s done for the day and wrapped in a blanket by the fire pit. This last piece is mine alone.

Lark stands beside the monitor with her hands pressed together under her chin, holding her breath the way she has for every final take all summer.

“Rolling camera.”

My heel settles into the damp sand of my mark. The track kicks in, loud enough to beat the surf, the album’s closing ballad, the one about coming home and finding your footing again. One step forward, and the rest of the beach drops away.

The first phrase takes me across the wet sand on a long diagonal, arms sweeping back like a current’s pulling at them. At the water’s edge the turn goes slow as a wave slides cold over my feet, and then I sink, folding down through my knee and hip until my side meets two inches of icy water on one long exhale.

Foam washes over my hands and my hair and the sand before I roll and come back up with my eyes closed. A rise, and then the arch at the top, one leg stretched behind me, arms open wide toward the sea stacks, the sun sitting between two of them like somebody put it there on purpose.

Four, five, six, seven counts, and the balance releases.

The track fades out. The ocean keeps rolling in.

“Cut!” the director shouts, and then, after a beat, “And that is an official wrap on the Pacific Northwest segment of the visual album!”

The whole beach erupts, months of work boiling over into cheers and whistles. Lark comes sprinting through the shallows and hauls me into a fierce, wet hug, her face streaked with tears. We hang onto each other, laughing, freezing, giddy, the relief of being done hitting both of us at once.

The crew starts breaking down the gear, the camera operators and the director trading hugs, and a couple of people pop a bottle of cheap champagne into paper cups and wave everyone over to the fire pit on the dry sand.

“You did it,” Lark says into my neck, her voice cracking. “You did it, Mia. It’s actually done.”

“We did it,” I tell her, laughing and squeezing her shoulders. “You wrote the masterpiece. I just fell into the ocean.”

“You fell into the ocean beautifully,” she says, letting go of me to wipe her cheeks with both hands.

I look at her and feel so proud I could burst. Lark is a once-in-a-generation artist. Her music has this weight to it that hits people right in the chest, personal enough to feel like a secret, big enough to fill a stadium.

And she’s fearless about pushing things. Most of the commercial gigs I book are fun, but working with her feeds something in me. I’m grateful she trusted me with this, and grateful for the years we’ve got behind us.

We join the rest of the crew around the drift logs, passing paper cups of sparkling wine back and forth, everyone laughing and cheering as the final take plays back on the monitor. Lark is half Mexican, so the rest of the album shoots down in Mexico across a handful of coastal locations, with local dancers and a choreographer from the region to keep it rooted there. I’m excited for them just thinking about it, and I can’t wait to see the finished film.

But under all of it, there’s a restlessness in me that won’t loosen. A string of texts from Derek is waiting on my screen, full of cheerful congratulations. We only got back together last week, and we haven’t seen each other in person since.

He’s locked into an intensive choreography job, so he can’t make it up for the benefit, but he’s going to try to fly up the week after, once it wraps. Part of me feels guiltily relieved about that, which is probably not how you’re supposed to feel about your boyfriend. And for all his supportive words, there’s only one person I’m actually looking for as I scroll through texts.

I thought saying yes to Derek would fix things, that it would pull back the comfortable routine we had before everything got so intense and consuming.

Instead I feel more unmoored than ever, stuck in a limbo where I can’t sit still and can’t seem to move forward either. There’s a small, stubborn voice in the back of my head telling me I’ve made a huge mistake, and it makes every choice feel wrong and right at the same time. And through all of it, Mateo keeps pulling at my thoughts.