The Tide That Returns Things
The body came back at the turn of the tide, just as her father always said the worst things did.
Sera had been on the lighthouse stairs when she heard the bell — not the storm bell, but the small bronze one her grandmother had hung over the rocks for exactly this purpose, exactly this hour. She had not heard it ring in eight years. She had thought, in the casual way people think about old machinery, that it had rusted shut.
She came down the stairs three at a time, took the lantern from the hook, and went out into the wet grey morning without bothering with a coat.
The man was face-down in the gully where the tide always pushed things — driftwood, the occasional drowned gull, once, when she was twelve, the lid of a sea-chest that had taken three men to lift. He was wearing the brown wool jacket of the south-coast crews. His hands were swollen but his hair was clean. He had not been in the water long enough.
She did not know how she knew it was him until she rolled him over.
His face was older than she remembered, and softer in a way that the sea sometimes did to faces, as if it had been polishing him. But it was him. The small white scar above his lip from the time they had fought over a kite. The crooked tooth she had teased him about for an entire summer.
His name was Tobias Mar. He had been her brother. He had been dead since she was fifteen.
She knelt in the wet shingle and put her hand against his cheek and he was cold but not the cold of a dead thing — the cold of a thing that had been very far away for a very long time, and was only now coming back into the room.
She did not scream. Her father had taught her better than that.
She unhooked the small bronze bell from the rock, set it carefully into her pocket, and ran for the village.