Low Tide at Corvin Point

My father kept the light at Corvin Point for thirty years, and in all that time the tide pools below the rocks never once went dry, not even during the drought summer of '54 when the well ran to mud and the whole coast turned the color of old paper.

I asked him about it when I was nine, poking a crab back into a pool that should have evaporated a week before. He said only, "The sea forgot something down there, and it comes back for it now and then."

I didn't understand what he meant until I was seventeen and found, cupped in the deepest pool at the base of the rocks, a woman's shoe — leather, buckled, unrotted despite what must have been years of salt water, sitting as neatly as if it had been placed there that morning.

I brought it up to show him. He went very pale and told me to put it back exactly where I'd found it, heel facing the same direction, and to never take anything else out of that pool as long as I lived at the point.

That night I watched from my window as the tide went out further than I had ever seen it, exposing rock that should have been permanently underwater, and in the moonlight a shape moved along the tideline — not swimming, not walking, but something in between, dragging one bare foot and one shod foot across the sand toward the pool where the shoe waited.

By morning the shoe was gone and the pool was, for the first time in my memory, completely dry. It filled again within the week, the way it always had, and something new sat at the bottom: a comb, tortoiseshell, missing three teeth.

My father passed the keeping of the light to me when he grew too old for the stairs. I have never removed anything from that pool since, and I have never told the story to anyone who hasn't lived at the point long enough to already half-believe it. The sea keeps what it keeps. It only asks that we let it come back for the rest.