When Regina was three, Michael bought an old vacation place on Mustang Island. It was an anniversary gift but he needed a few days to convince me it wasn’t a hoax. A stupid husband’s joke, slandering me with cobwebs somehow. I hated him for telling it. Even when I accepted it was true, I hated it its hoax-residue.
Beach vacations were not as I remembered. Everything was sand-colored, including the air and sea. The horizon, too, which looked like a frayed brown rope, tied between north and south and barely taut.
Nevertheless, Regina loved the house, the clay-looking ocean most of all. Voices reached her from Tampa and Havana, Eleuthera and Campeche, though she mostly ignored them, the salt-ghosts wandering an empty gulf.
She found a painting in the attic, an amateurish piece, but full of
