It was fantasy and science fiction at first. And second. Third, fourth. Still.

One series with Faeries not Faries and I’ve spelled it with the a and e curving into each other ever since. I don’t remember which series said the good folk preferred that spelling, but I remember that claim of their preference. Robin Goodfellow was a character, and I was twelve. I started tipping my head to robins when I passed them, when they looked up at me, heads tilting and beady eyes holding mine. Within a year I was full on bowing low, head down, one arm swooped at my stomach and the other behind.

Provided no one was watching.

My dad remarried and this woman had Money, the kind where you’re liberal so you pretend you don’t have any money, but you still have a live-in-nanny and a cleaning service and your own kids get to go on all the big abroad opportunities my mom always had a reason I couldn’t do, and I was angry at my mom until I realized her snapped out excuses were all just a metaphor for how we were fucking poor, and then I was mad at my dad’s new wife.

She rented a beach house every summer for a whole week. She still does, but it’s a different one, now. The new one is all sharp clean lines and high ceilings. The old one felt like sand and warmth, and she complains about it, how rickety it was, how dirty.

My mom took us to the beach, too. For a weekend at most, and we stayed in a tiny blue room in a house half overtaken by salt. Just me, her, and my sister, and we went to the boardwalk every night, walked the beach every night and the ocean was vast and dark before us, the boardwalk bright neon behind, and my soul brimmed at the surface of me and it was quiet even with the noise.

My Dad’s new wife went to a different beach, one without a boardwalk, one with a tiny church and a cushy local town inland and the house was enormous and she invited all her nice liberal zionists and fiscal conservatives, and my sister and I would be there too, almost like an accident or an act of charity.

I spent very little time in that house. The beach was right there, there were running trails and fishing poles in the back and an outdoor shower framed by cedar that breathed smoky tree goodness when the hot water hit it. Sand clung to the backs of my knees at night, moved between my legs and the sheets when I rolled over, and the sun beat like another bright warm heart in my limbs after a long day of holding itself against me.

On my way back from a run, I saw a robin. I was fifteen by now, too old to believe in any God beyond the kind most grown-ups I knew liked. I bowed low, thinking myself alone, but one of the zionists saw me. I saw her when I looked up. She was behind the screen, sitting on the porch with her skirt long around her, and her eyes squinted, staring.

She was the one contained, but I felt abruptly the nature of myself as a spectacle. I was on display–look what his first wife made. Look how poor it is, how strange, how unmedicated. Jesus, what a saint his real wife is, letting it in on this gift of a real vacation.

“Hi,” she said, with that edge of juicy humor. I went tight lipped, ignored her.

Walked around to the shower, turned the water on hot, and breathed with the cedar.