IT WAS SEVEN in the morning.

Instead of Terry Emo at her bedroom door, it was Judah. He stood, hands pressed against the doorframe, wearing a beige t-shirt and baggy cotton shorts. His hair was wet—had he gone to the beach already? No, a shower.

"It's early," Sophie mumbled, her voice sounding dry and crackly. The room was too warm for her taste, the comforter trapping heavy heat over her legs and feet. Still, she was in no mood to get up.

"It is," Jude replied. He paused, removed his round glasses, and wiped them on the beige. "There's something I want to do—remember the sandy swing?"

Of course, she remembered the sandy swing. But she didn't want to think about it. It made her limbs feel weak. "Jude, I can't," Sophie replied, already feeling lightheaded. "I can't go there.

It was one of Eomma and Appa's favorite places in Westmere.

Judah bit the inside of his cheek, nodding as he put his glasses back on. He nodded again. And again.

"Alright," he said softly. "That's okay."

The two stared at each other for a moment. She opened her mouth, closed it. Judah cleared his throat.

"I just..." he sighed. "I want to bring something back to their... graves. When we go back to Jersey." That was their Judah, he was always thinking about the future.

"Jersey," Sophie repeated, feeling how the location tasted in her mouth. She hardly thought of their abandoned apartment anymore. While Dawn and Judah would be returning for school in the fall, Sophie had no plan of what to do next. "What are you going to bring back?"

"Seashells," Judah replied simply.

He was too thoughtful for his own good. Sophie almost smiled at her brother. She sighed, tossed the heavy comforter from her body, and dangled her feet off the bed. "Alright," she said, making up her mind.

"Hm?"

"I'll come with you."

Her brother lifted his palms in the air in protest. "No, no," he said. "You shouldn't go if you don't feel up to it."

She smiled at him, exhaling through her nostrils. Too respectful for his own good, as well. "I do." She grabbed one of Dawn's baseball caps from the wicker chair by the bed. "I want to come."

—

The siblings didn't speak until their feet hit the sand.

The familiar cry of the gulls waved through the salty air, and a warm wind swirled upwards, tangling their hair and brushing sand against their ankles. Sophie turned to her brother. It looked as if he was too nervous to say anything, afraid to trigger another episode.

Judah lifted one arm to point, and the other to shade his eyes.

"There," he said quietly, his voice almost swallowed by the sound of the waves. Underneath a small wooden structure sat the famous beach swing, surrounded by seashells.

Both Sophie and Judah knew it was a bad idea to bring her here, and she was starting to feel the consequences of her decision as the wooden swing creaked in the wind. The creaking was a sound of the past, a sound paired with the sensation of bumpy seashells, the taste of watermelon popsicles.

Sophie's vision went blurry around the edges and she expected to feel that same crash of dizziness and nausea she did a few days prior, but instead she felt only sadness. It dripped over her like tree sap, weighed on her body like summer humidity. She knew this was a bad idea. The memories were too strong, too clear here. If she closed her eyes and opened them again, her mother and father would be sitting on the swing together, their feet barely grazing the ground.

She glanced up at her brother who was watching her as if she had a storm cloud over her head. Sophie spoke before he could ask if she was okay.

"So," she started, pausing to clear her throat of all traces of sadness. "What kind of seashells are you looking for?" She knew it was a useless question.

Judah gave her a weird look. He glanced down at the porcelain stars in the sand, pausing to push his windblown hair from his eyes. "I guess I'll pick out what Eomma would like," he said with a shrug, humoring her question.

It was strange to see Judah against this backdrop. Here—where the blue sky beamed behind him, where there was always a breeze tangling with his baggy shirt, where the sun made his pale skin a little warmer—he looked younger, freer, healthier. She was used to his crisp, ironed, cream colored dress shirts, solid toned ties, and the brown briefcase he always carried to work. Watching her brother rummage through seashells with sand greens on his knees allowed her blueness to ebb for a short moment.

"Jude," Sophie began, kneeling to help him gather.

"Mm."

"What are you going to do when summer ends?" Sophie asked. She found a dark shell with white ridges running across its surface. It was cracked but she put it in her pocket anyway.

"I have to go back to work," Judah replied simply. "And Dawn is starting school in the fall too. We both have to go back to Jersey."

Sophie stood still, blinking. This information was nothing new, but she had forgotten her baby sister was starting her first year of college in the fall. Judah would be returning to his job as a teacher's assistant at Columbia.

Though she had no items on her to-do list, that didn't mean time stood still.

He pursed lips, his hands stopping for a moment. He glanced up. "Are you... going to go back to work?" His voice was filled to the brim with caution and concern. Lately, everything he said was filled with caution and concern.

Sophie shrugged her shoulders, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet. The past school year was her first as a teacher, but her plans for the future were thrown off after the fire.

Sometimes, she thought about the breathless smiles and sticky hands and skinny limbs of her second-graders—they made her heart soften. She thought of how they would peel their jackets off after running around on the frost-dusted playground, cheeks rosy and noses runny. And she missed her students. But she didn't know if she had the mental capacity to continue in the coming months.

"I don't know, I'll have to see where I am in August."

It seemed Judah didn't want to push anymore, so he nodded, grabbed a few more seashells, and placed them gently into the tote bag he had brought along. The shells clacked in high pitches as he swung the canvas back and forth.

"Do you remember when Eomma and Appa brought Dawn to the swing for the first time?" he asked with a chuckle.

Of course she did. "No."

"You don't?" Jude gaped. "You don't remember that you pushed the swing so hard, she fell off and landed face first in the sand?" He laughed lightly. "Appa was sympathetic, but Eomma was laughing."

Of course she remembered. Of course she remembered Appa's gentle hands as he brushed them down her sister's head, as he wiped sand off her puffy cheeks. Of course she remembered the way her mothers face creased as she attempted to hide her giggles behind her manicured fingers. Of course she remembered the sound of Dawn's crying, of Jude trying to help soothe the baby.

But she shook her head.

"You were young, I guess." he stood up and dusted the grains from his legs. "I think we have enough," he said.

Sophie nodded, saying nothing.

"Thanks for coming with me, Soph."

She nodded again. "Let's go home." Her voice sounded strained and wobbly, but Judah didn't seem to notice. She was the first to leave, hurrying away from the faded memories, leaving a trail of sapphire melancholy in her wake.