Later that day, as they made egg-salad sandwiches to carry down to the beach, Dr. and Mrs. Shapiro fought bitterly, for the fifth time since their arrival. In the cottage’s kitchen was a knife — a small, new, foreign knife, which Mrs. Shapiro admired. As she used it to slice neat little horseshoes of celery, she praised it again. “Such a good little knife,” she said. “Why don’t you just take it?” said Dr. Shapiro. The air in the kitchen was suddenly full of sharp, caramel smoke, and Dr. Shapiro ran to unplug the toaster.
“That would be stealing,” said Nathan’s mother, ignoring her husband’s motions of alarm and the fact that their lunch was on fire. “We are not taking this knife, Martin.”
“Give it to me.” Dr. Shapiro held out his hand, palm up.
“I’m not going to let you — make me — dishonest anymore!” said his mother. She seemed to struggle, at first, not to finish the sentence she had begun, but in the end she turned, put her face right up to his, and cried out boldly. After her outburst, both adults turned to look, with a simultaneity that was almost funny, at their sons. Nathan hadn’t the faintest notion of what his mother was talking about.
“Don’t steal, Dad,” Ricky said.
“I only wanted it to extract the piece of toast,” said their father. He was looking at their mother again. “God damn it.” He turned and went out of the kitchen.
Her knuckles white around the handle of the knife, their mother freed the toast and began scraping the burnt surfaces into the sink. Because their father had said “God damn,” Ricky wiggled his eyebrows and smiled at Nathan. At the slamming of the bedroom door, Nathan clambered up suddenly from the rickety kitchen table as though he had found an insect crawling on his leg.
“Kill it!” said Ricky. “What is it?”
“What is it?” said his mother. She scanned Nathan’s body quickly, one hand half raised to swat.
“Nothing,” said Nathan. He took off his glasses. “I’m going for a walk.”
When he got to the edge of the water, he turned to look toward the Sandpiper. At that time in Nags Head there were few hotels and no condominiums, and it seemed to Nathan that their little ring of cottages stood alone, like Stonehenge, in the middle of a giant wasteland. He set off down the beach, watching his feet print and following the script left in the sand by the birds for which the motel was named. He passed a sand castle, then a heart drawn with a stick enclosing the names Jimmy and Beth. Sometimes his heels sank deeply into the sand, and he noticed the odd marks this would leave — a pair of wide dimples. He discovered that he could walk entirely on his heels, and his trail became two lines of big periods. If he took short steps, it looked as though a creature — a bird with two peg legs — had come to fish along the shore.
He lurched a long way in this fashion, watching his feet, and nearly forgot his parents’ quarrel. But when at last he grew bored with walking on his heels and turned to go back, he saw that his mother and father had also decided to take a walk, and that they were, in fact, coming toward him — clasping hands, letting go, clasping hands again. Nathan ran to meet them, and they parted to let him walk between them. They all continued down the beach, stooping to pick up shells, glass, dead crabs, twine, and all the colored or smelly things that Nathan had failed to take note of before. At first his parents exclaimed with him over these discoveries, and his father took each striped seashell into his hands, to keep it safe, until there were two dozen and they jingled there like money. But after a while they seemed to lose interest, and Nathan found himself walking a few feet ahead of them, stooping alone, glumly dusting his toes with sand as he tried to eavesdrop on their careless and incomprehensible conversation.
“Never again,” his mother said at last.
Dr. Shapiro let the shells fall. He rubbed his hands together and then stared at them as though waking from a dream in which he had been holding a fortune in gold Straightening up so quickly that his head spun, Nathan let out a cry and pointed down at the sand beneath their feet, among the scattered shells. “Look at those weird tracks!” he cried.
They all looked down.
Speculation on the nature of the beast that went toeless down the shore went on for several minutes, and although Nathan was delighted at first, he soon began to feel embarrassed and, obscurely, frightened by the ease with which he had deceived his parents. His treachery was almost exposed when Ricky, carrying a long stick and wearing a riot of Magic Marker tattoos on his face and all down his arms, ran over to find out what was happening. The little boy immediately tipped back onto his heels, and would have taken a few steps like that had Nathan not grabbed him by the elbow and dragged him aside.
“Why do you have a dog on your face?” said Nathan.
“It’s a jaguar,” said Ricky.
Nathan bent to whisper into his brother’s ear. “I’m tricking Mom and Dad,” he said.
“Good,” said Ricky.
“They think there’s some kind of weird creature on the beach.”
Ricky pushed Nathan away and then surveyed their mother and father, who were talking again, quietly, as though they were trying not to alarm their sons. “It can’t be real,” said Nathan’s father.
Ricky’s skin under the crude tattoos was tanned, his hair looked stiff and ragged from going unwashed and sea-tangled, and as he regarded their parents he held his skinny stick like a javelin at his side. “They’re dumb,” he said flatly.
Dr. Shapiro approached, stepping gingerly across the mysterious tracks, and then knelt beside his sons. His face was red, though not from the sun, and he seemed to have trouble looking directly at the boys. Nathan began to cry before his father even spoke.
“Boys,” he said. He looked away, then back, and bit his lip. “I’m afraid — I’m sorry. We’re going to go home. Your mom and I — don’t feel very well. We don’t seem to be well.”
“No! No! It was Nathan!” said Ricky, laying down his spear and throwing himself into his father’s arms. “It wasn’t me. Make him go home.”
Nathan, summoning up his courage, decided to admit that the curious trail of the crippled animal was his, and he said, “I’m responsible.”
“Oh, no!” cried both his parents together, startling him. His mother rushed over and fell to her knees, and they took Nathan into their arms and said that it was never, never him, and they ruffled his hair with their fingers, as though he had done something they could love him for.
After they came back from dinner, the Shapiros, save Nathan, went down to the sea for a final, sad promenade. At the restaurant, Ricky had pleaded with his parents to stay through the end of the week — they had not even been to see the monument at Kitty Hawk, the Birthplace of Aviation. For Ricky’s sake, Nathan had also tried to persuade them, but his heart wasn’t in it — he himself wanted so badly to go home — and the four of them had all ended up crying and chewing their food in the brass-and-rope dining room of the Port O’ Call; even Dr. Shapiro had shed a tear. They were going to leave that night. Nathan’s family now stood, in sweatshirts, by the sliding glass door, his parents straining to adopt hard and impatient looks, and Nathan saw that they felt guilty about leaving him behind in the cottage.
“I’ll pack my stuff,” he said. “Just go.” For a moment his stomach tightened with angry, secret glee as his mother and father, sighing, turned their backs on him and obeyed his small command. Then he was alone in the kitchen again, for the second time that day, and he wished that he had gone to look at the ocean, and he hated his parents, uncertainly, for leaving him behind. He got up and walked into the bedroom that he and Ricky had shared. There, in the twilight that fell in orange shafts through the open window, the tangle of their clothes and bedsheets, their scattered toys and books, the surfaces of the broken dresser and twin headboards seemed dusted with a film of radiant sand, as though the tide had washed across them and withdrawn, and the room was strewn with the seashells they had found. Nathan, after emptying his shoebox of baseball cards into his suitcase, went slowly around the room and harvested the shells with careful sweeps of his trembling hand. Bearing the shoebox back into the kitchen, he collected the few stray shards of salt-white and green beach glass that lay in a pile beside the electric can opener, and then added a hollow pink crab’s leg in whose claw Ricky had fixed a colored pencil. When Nathan saw the little knife in the drainboard by the sink, he hesitated only a moment before dropping it into the box, where it swam, frozen, like a model shark in a museum diorama of life beneath the sea. Nathan chuckled. As clearly as if he were remembering them, he foresaw his mother’s accusation, his father’s enraged denial, and with an unhappy chuckle he foresaw, recalled, and fondly began to preserve all the discord for which, in his wildly preserving imagination, he was and would always be responsible.