Safe in the Black Sand

Prologue

I'm nine years old. I turn off the shower, stand in the steam, pull back the curtain. As I reach for my towel—darkness.

There comes a warm breeze, the smell of salt, the splashy thump of waves. Sun bakes my body. I'm couched in sand like a fish coated with breadcrumbs—eyes closed, muscles numb, skin roasting in the sun.

I'm naked and wet, as I was in the shower. My eyelids part to the sight of waves crashing on sandy beach. Sunlight stings my pupils. The ocean waves slide up to my spot in the sand—black sand. I've never seen it so dark. Pounding water, lush mountains, colorful birds.

Rising above the surf and squawk there comes a human noise, the voice of a man asking, What's redder than blood?

The voice is my father's.

I try to move, to go to him, but paralysis keeps me still. I'm a fish coated in breadcrumbs, a body naked and wet, baking on a beach of black sand.

I push myself to scream. When I do, my body suddenly goes cold, the sky goes dark, and I awake on my bathroom floor. When I reopen my eyes, I'm naked and shivering. Instead of sun there is a light bulb. Instead of sand there is linoleum.

My head is pounding like ocean waves. My jaw aches, throat tingles, tongue scratchy like sandpaper. I move it over each of my teeth, searching nervously for gaps, but find none. The bathroom is silent, no tidal crashing or bird noise—only the hum of the light bulb above me. And pain. I feel the pain now. On the beach there was no pain.

Dad stands in the doorway, aghast. For him, it must look like a crime scene. My blood is seeping across the floor. Dad is muttering the same question I heard him asking on the beach. What's redder than blood?

He's stumped by his own riddle.

Mom shoves him aside and barrels in. She gets down on her knees and puts a hand on my head to inspect the wound. "My God, Jax. What happened?"

"The shower. Last thing I remember is..."

Hot sun, black sand. I keep that to myself.

"You poor thing," she says. "You must have fainted."

Mom tells Dad to call 9-1-1. But Dad keeps his eyes on the floor, lost in the linoleum's diamond pattern. I can tell he's counting the dots and squares, double-checking to see whether the lines are random or repeating.

"Kyle," Mom insists. "Go call for help."

"No ambulance," Dad says without looking.

Mom's eyebrows slope into a scowl. "Jax could have a concussion. Kyle, are you listening to me?"

Dad shoves the fingers of his right hand through his black hair. When his hand moves over the scalp, thin lines of hair fall one by one back into place.

He turns to me. His eyes lock with mine but he's talking to Mom. "Don't worry. Jax was safe. He was on Ms. Jakintsu's beach."

Mom stares at him, her face tense with frustration. To her, Dad's comment is out of the blue, bizarre, nonsensical, but he's right. There was a beach, and I was on it. Though this is the first time I'm hearing of anyone named Ms. Jakintsu.

Mom leans down to me, her long black hair falling in front of my face. It smells like orange peels. She kisses my forehead before taking a deep, tired breath. The breath is a heavy sigh, the sound of someone strapped with burdens.

"Look at this," she says, pointing to the bloody linoleum. "There's blood coming out of your son's head. This is real, Kyle. We're at home, in our bathroom. There's no beach, no such person named Ms. Jakintsu. Now for your son's sake—and mine—go call an ambulance."

All Mom can see is my blood on the floor. She can't see what Dad and I saw. She can't see the beach.

Dad clicks his heels like Dorothy in Oz—an attempt to exit this reality for a better one. He sees Mom's frustration pooling in her dark brown eyes. She's begging him to be sensible, to fight his own brain and accept this reality, to do the impossible.

Dad speaks like a bad actor racing through over-rehearsed lines. "Yes. Real. Of course. I'm sorry. Our son is hurt. I'll go now. To call for help."

That night, after my head is stitched up and scanned, I find myself in the living room, just me and Dad, no one else.

"How did you know?" I ask, feeling conspiratorial. "How did you know about the beach?"

He looks at me and frowns. "What do you mean?"

"This morning," I remind him. "You said I went to Ms. Jakintsu's beach, remember?"

He shakes his head and apologizes—his mind blank, his face red with embarrassment. "Sorry, Jax. I don't know what you're talking about."

I know how his memory works, or rather, doesn't work. Some memories engrave themselves forever in his mind while others pass through like impatient cars at a tollbooth. Memories he wants to keep often vanish while what he'd rather forget tends to linger. Whatever thoughts he had this morning about the beach are now tucked away in the deepest folds of his brain, inside a clump of neural mesh where no electrical signals can reach.

In time, in years to come, the same will happen to me. I will also forget Ms. Jakintsu's beach.

But to forget is not to delete. The brain is a network of roads. Some roads are highways—well traveled, busy. Other roads are unpaved and desolate, driven on once or twice before being abandoned to weeds. Those smaller, windier, more easily forgotten roads are precisely the kind often marked with signs reading TRAVEL AT YOUR OWN RISK.

And twenty years later, that's exactly what Dad and I will have to do.