Lilac

“I don’t feel lonely when I look at the sea,” Finch says. She shades her eyes with her hand and looks out over the Pacific. “I think about all the people who have sailed on it, all the places they’ve seen, and that fills me up.”

“The seas are rising,” I say. “They’re going to swallow us some day.”

“Everything goes back to the water eventually anyway.” She slips her hands over her bare arms, over the bumps the chill air has raised. Neither of us wears a jacket.

On the highway behind us, a single car drives by, going too fast, and the whine of the engine rises and then falls as it rushes past us, the passengers traveling on toward their own private shadowy depths.