Low Water

The flats were out past the last of the road, where the land gave up and the estuary took over, and at low water you could walk a mile on the sand and never put your foot on anything a person had made. Ines came out at the ebb, when the channel was a wet ribbon and the wind had room. She had come every low water since the spring, and she had never told a living soul why, because saying it to a face would have made it a fact, and she was not ready to be a fact.

She had come today to say what she had become.

She stopped where the sand went soft and stood with her back to the shore and said his name into the wind. The wind took it and kept it, the way it takes everything. She said it again, the way you knock at a door you know is open on nothing.

"I'm not the same person," she said. "That's what I came to say. You should know what's here now."

The tide had turned somewhere behind her. You could feel it before you could see it: the flats going from grey to sheen, the channel starting to breathe. Gulls came off the water in a line. Nothing answered her, which was the arrangement, which had always been the arrangement.

She walked the channel the way she walked it every low water, and she talked. That was the other half of it. He had never once answered and she had never once stopped expecting him to, and somewhere in the summer she had understood that the expecting was not a hope but a practice, and that a person could live inside a practice the way you live inside a house. Except that she had come out here precisely because there was no house, because the wind and the tide did not care whether she spoke, and that was why she could.

"I know what you'd say," she told the water. "You'd say go home. You always said go home." The wind came across the flats and lifted the top of the sand into a fine moving veil, and she stood in it and let it salt her face. "It isn't home. That's what I'm telling you. I don't know what it is yet."

A seal came up in the channel, twenty yards off, and looked at her without curiosity, and went down. She watched the ring close and thought that the seal would forget this afternoon before it reached the far bank, and that she would not forget it as long as she was anyone at all.

She kept talking. That was the whole of it: that she did not stop when it became strange to go on. Anyone could walk out on the flats and say one sentence and leave. The speaking was supposed to cost something. So she said everything she had, in order, and then she said it again out of order, and then she told him that the town had changed and that she had not changed with it, and that she was beginning to think a person who does not change with a town is a person who has to be something else instead.

The water was coming back up the channel, faster than it looked, the way it always did. She should go. She stayed. And then, where the channel widened, the water did a thing she had never watched it do: it stopped. Not stilled. Stopped, holding its level, neither rising nor falling, as if the tide had forgotten what it had started. There was no wind on it. She looked at it for a long time without moving. If she had been a different person she would have called it an answer, and gone home changed. She was not. An answer would have finished it, and the speaking was the only thing left that was hers alone, that had never belonged to him: the tide's, the wind's, hers. So she made herself not take it, and she stood in the low light with the salt drying on her, and she began again from the beginning: I'm not the same person.