Chapter 1 — Pawleys Island

The late-afternoon sun lays long shadows across the sand at Pawleys Island. Salt and coconut sunscreen on the air. Behind us the beach house stands where it has stood for forty-five of my family’s summers, twenty-one of them mine — sandy flip-flops on the wraparound porch, the screen door that never quite closes, last year’s coffee filters still in the cabinets, the evening walk down to read the tide lines.

It has not always looked like this. Hugo took the original house off its stilts in 1989 and set it down a couple of doors up the beach. My grandfather, my father, and my aunts and uncles moved it back, put it up on its pilings again, and built a second story over it, with glass facing the water.

The house is pine — pine floors, pine walls — and pine carries, so the house tells you everything: who is up, who is laughing, which dog just lost an argument with a screen door. There are always dogs. My aunts and uncles bring them, five and six at a time. Beach week still runs Saturday to Saturday every August. My grandparents started it with six children. Now we spill into several houses along the island. At six in the morning you hear the kitchen first, somebody making coffee, and then the screen door, and then nothing, because they've carried it out to the porch above the water or down over the dunes to the sand by the jetties to drink it there while the dogs run.

The beach here is nothing like Victoria. Softer, wider, waves that arrive without announcing themselves. Nothing here smells like the salt-and-kelp that used to come up to our cliff house on Nyes Place. Jessica stands nearby in her white sundress, a hand up against a Carolina sun that has always felt gentler to me than the California light I grew up under.

The kids are scattered down the beach in their usual constellation — seven between us, hers and mine, the oldest home from college and stretched out with an athlete's unhurried ease, two of the girls close together in their private sister-language, phones rising to catch the light and dropping for fits of synchronized laughter. Down on the flat sand the boys are at war over bocce. And Jack, my border collie, moving between all of them — into the waves, a dramatic shake, back to my side.

"Daddy, look!" Roxie, my youngest, holds up a perfect sand dollar. When she's puzzling over something, her brow furrows exactly the way Mark's did over his journal.

The bocce war breaks up in a run for the water. My sons go deeper into the waves, and I feel my muscles tense on instinct, though this water is nothing like the current off Victoria Beach. Pulled under at ten years old, the sudden certainty of drowning, and then Mark's hands on my shoulders and his voice steady over the waves. "You're okay. I've got you."

I was ten the morning my brother died in the room down the hall. Yet it isn't that memory but the day Mark saved me that stays on me like salt. Even now, decades later, on this gentle Atlantic shore, I can feel the Pacific undertow and taste the burn in my throat and hear the hollow roar as the water closed over my head — and his hands, arriving.

"Dad?" Roxie's voice pulls me back. She's holding another shell, this one broken, its edge catching the sun. "Why don't you ever talk about your brother?"

It shouldn't catch me off guard, and it does. Roxie doesn't let things go; her eyes hold mine with a sharpness that used to be her uncle's. Jessica moves closer, reading the weather on me. She reads my jaw first, then my mouth, then whatever my body is doing without my permission. She waits.

"It was a long time ago, sweetie," I say, choosing the words carefully. "My brother Mark had to save me one time, when I was a kid."

"The uncle Zach is named after?"

She's right. Zachary David, for David Mark — the brother the whole world called Mark. We've never told him the whole story. How do you explain to a child that you once lived in a place where beauty and success seemed to multiply without end, right up until the morning everything shattered? And the rest of it — the part I didn't have until I was nearly fifty — was in two boxes and a set of tapes I couldn't bring myself to watch.

Jessica's hand finds mine and squeezes. "Where are you right now?" she asks.

"1986," I say. "Laguna Beach."