Ladder of Years

“Oh, excuse me,” she said. She started down the wooden steps to the beach.

There were advantages to coming so early in the season. True, the water had not had time to warm up yet, but also the beach was less crowded. Blankets were spread at civilized intervals, with space between. Only a few children splashed at the edge of the breakers, and Delia could easily count the heads that bobbed farther out.

She and Eliza unfolded a blanket and arranged themselves on it, while Sam worked an umbrella pole into the sand. Susie and the boys, however, walked a good twenty feet beyond before stopping to set up their own station. They had been keeping apart for several years now; it no longer hurt Delia’s feelings. But she did always notice.

“Now, you two are not stirring from here,” Linda told the twins, “until I get every inch of you covered with sunblock.” She held them close, one after the other, and slathered lotion on their ski

Susie’s radio was playing “Under the Boardwalk,” which had always seemed to Delia a very lonesome song. In fact, “Under the Boardwalk” was rising from other radios as well, on other blankets, so that the Atlantic Ocean seemed to have acquired its own melancholy background music.

“Believe I’ll go for a jog,” Sam told Delia.

“Oh, Sam. You’re on vacation!”

“So?”

He shucked off his beach robe and adjusted the leather band of his watch. (The watch was evidently part of his new exercise routine; in just what way, Delia wasn’t sure.) Then he walked down to the surf, turned, and started loping northward, a lanky figure in beige trunks and gigantic white sneakers.

“At least here they have all these lifeguards who’ve been trained in CPR,” Delia told her sisters. She folded Sam’s robe and packed it away in her tote.

“Oh, he’ll be fine,” Eliza said. “The doctors told him to jog.”

“Not to overdo, though!”

“To me he looks just the same as always,” Linda said. “If you consider that a good thing.” She was shading her forehead to gaze after him. “I never would have known he’d had a heart attack.”

“It wasn’t a heart attack! It was chest pains.”

“Whatever,” Linda said carelessly.

She was wearing a one-piece swimsuit held up by a center cord that encircled her neck. It made her breasts appear to droop at either side like a pair of weary eyes. Eliza, who scorned the notion of a whole separate outfit for one week of swimming per year, wore denim shorts and a black knit tank top rolled up beneath her bra.

Delia took off her shoes and dropped them into her tote. Then she lay down flat on her back, with the sun’s mild warmth soaking into her skin. Gradually sounds grew fainter, like remembered sounds-the voices of other sunbathers nearby, the high, sad cries of the seagulls, the music from the radios (Paul McCartney now, singing “Uncle Albert”), and under everything, so she almost stopped hearing it, the ocean’s rush, as constant and unvaried as the ocean inside a seashell.

She and Sam had come to this beach on their honeymoon. They had stayed at an i

Someone’s feet passed in the sand with a sound like rubbing velvet, and she opened her eyes and sat up. For a moment she felt light-headed. “Your face is burning,” Eliza told her. “Better put some lotion on.” She herself was sitting sensibly in the shade of the umbrella. Linda was down in the surf, braced for an incoming wave with both plump arms outflung and her hands posed as liltingly as bird wings, and the twins had returned from the other blanket and were filling buckets near Delia. Damp sand caked Marie-Claire’s knees and made two circles on the empty-looking seat of Thérèse’s swimsuit.

“Did Sam get back from jogging?” Delia asked Eliza.

“Not yet. Want to go for a dip?”

Delia didn’t dignify that with an answer. (As everyone in her family well knew, the temperature had to be blistering, the ocean flat as glass, and not a sea nettle sighted all day before she would venture in.) Instead, she reached for her tote bag. Delving past espadrilles, Sam’s robe, and her billfold, she came up with Captive of Clarion Castle. Eliza humphed when she saw the cover. “Guess I’ll leave you to your literature,” she told Delia. She got to her feet and set off, dusting the back of her shorts in a businesslike ma

“Aunt Eliza, can we come too?” Marie-Claire shrilled.

“Wait for us, Aunt Liza!”

When they ran after her, they looked as skittery and high-bottomed as two little hermit crabs.

Eleanora was begi

“Whew!” Sam said. He was back. Sweat trickled down the ridged bones of his chest, and he had the drawn, strained, gasping look that always distressed Delia after his runs. “Sam,” she said, setting aside her book, “you’re going to kill yourself! Sit here and rest.”

“No, I have to wind down gradually,” he told her. He started walking in circles around the blanket, stopping every now and then to bend over and grip his kneecaps. Drops of sweat fell from his forehead to the sand. “What have we got to drink?” he asked her.

“Lemonade, Pepsi, iced tea-”

“Iced tea sounds good.”

She stood to fill a paper cup and hand it to him. He was no longer breathing so hard, at least. He drained the cup in a single draft and set it on the lid of the cooler. “Your nose is burning,” he told her.

“I want to get a little tan.”

“Melanoma is what you’re going to get.”

“Well, maybe after lunch I’ll put on some-”

But he had already picked up Linda’s bottle of sunblock. “Hold still,” he said, unscrewing the cap. He started smoothing lotion across her face. It smelled like bruised peaches, an artificial, trashy smell that made her wrinkle her nose. “Turn around and I’ll do your back,” he told her.

Obediently, she turned. She faced inland now, where the roofs of cottages hulked beyond the sand fence. A flock of tiny dark birds crossed the blue sky in the distance, keeping a perfectly triangular formation so that they seemed co

“Delia,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“I was wondering about the old woman who came by the house Saturday night.”