All the nurse knows of Clara's life at its end is what the body reveals: how frail it is, how breakable: skin, bones, lungs. The nurse, checking, lays his fingers against her pulse, a faint stuttering that tells him nothing about a day along the cold Atlantic shore, Clara dancing in the waves, ignoring her mother's calls. Come out of the water! Your lips are turning blue! Eighty years later, Clara is again and still a child at the beach, muck between her toes, gulls shrieking in the bright salt sky and the tide, like breath, flowing in, flowing out.

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