Cape Cod was originally called Noepe, or “Land Amid Streams,” by the Wampanoag tribe that inhabited it before the Mayflower nearly came upon its shore. Under the Spanish Crown it was known as Cabo de las Arenas, or “Out of the Sands.” Bartholomew Gosnold gave the peninsula its final and lasting name in 1602, thanks to the plentiful amount of codfish. These are things Anna picked up during high school, random history facts about the Cape. Anna was used to just calling it “home.”

Six years have passed since she left for college, following a life farther inland. Now she is back, briefly, for family gatherings and an attempted reunion of friends. They’re all orphans, Anna and her friends, geographically speaking. The flexed arm of Cape Cod punched them out, and coming back now is not as much fun as they had hoped. Rather than gathering at a bar where they used to drink underage, they make excuses and stay in their parents’ houses instead.

Anna has made her way to the beach, a ten-minute walk down the road from where she grew up. It’s fall, which means no one is there except a lone dog walker or two. The weather is gray, gray like the aging population of the Cape, their hair silver and skin translucent like the Atlantic. Anna was shocked to come home and find how much her own parents have aged. Her father’s hairline continues to recede and her mother rotates through three different eyeglasses during the day. Their joints have become rusty from years of exposure to salt air. They move more slowly, less deliberately, and talk about selling the house and moving over the bridge. Even though Anna comes home no more than once a year, the thought of not having this place to come back to makes it hard to breathe.

The sand on the beach is coarse, not like the pink beaches of Bermuda or even the sloping California dunes. With the wilds of Maine to the north and the richness of the Hamptons to the south, tourism has slowed here, or at least that’s what Anna’s mother said. But to Anna, those destinations seem like continents away, hardly a substitute for here. The Cape warped her mind of relative distance. Everything has been measured in “how far off-Cape is it.” For years she thought that New York City was a day’s drive, at least, so far off-Cape. It wasn’t until college she realized it was a short four hours away.

The Cape is still centric in her mind, but more like a pole on the earth than a home base. She remembers Thanksgiving breaks, coming up to the Cape Cod Canal and sighing in relief when the Bourne Bridge came into view, lights peering over the horizon. There is no clearer portal to home than those few seconds driving over it and into the first rotary.

Anna lies out on the beach, on a blue-checkered blanket that she found in her father’s car. It brings back memories, as she rubs against its wooly surface, of nights when her family would pack sandwiches and come watch a sunset.

“It’s too scratchy to sit on,” Mom would complain.

“Then bring a different one next time,” Dad would respond. Then the itchiness of the wool would be forgotten as soon as the blanket was tossed back into the car.

Anna wishes the sun was out. There’s a constant sea breeze skimming over Falmouth, the armpit of the Cape where she is from. The breeze burrows underneath her sweater and laps into her ears and nose. She develops a crust of salt on her skin, so that when she moves it cracks. She licks her hand to taste it. Like the rim of a margarita glass.

There are few cars on the road that runs along the beach. Most of them are rusted-out Volvos owned by the marine biologists who live in Woods Hole, or big trucks for landscapers who work year round to keep the summer homes manicured. Most of the boys Anna knew in high school have inherited those trucks and businesses from dads, uncles, grandfathers. 

The day is fogged in, so Anna can’t see past the first few whitecaps out on the bay. When it’s clear, she can see the houses speckling the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. The foghorn bursts through the air like a pulse, warning boaters of jetties and coastlines. The lighthouse at the end of the beach also works to illuminate dangers. Every minute or so, its light swings around and touches everything in sight. A lighthouse on Martha’s Vineyard responds with its own omnipotent light, like Morse code.

Cormorants are the only birds brave enough to go in the frigid water today. Anna has always loved the matte-black cormorants—the way they sit on hurricane-beaten piers left to rot, the way they duck under water and don’t come back up. Anna counts the seconds they are gone, a relaxation technique her mom gave her as a teenager.

Even these birds will leave soon, flying down to Alabama for the winter. Anna is always shocked by how quiet the Cape is now, in the off-season. The world seems to forget about this place. The main roads crumble on their shoulders, from fall rain and disuse. The houses along the beaches are boarded up as the community huddles in the nucleus of town rather than risk erosion at the outskirts. Her own parents seem to retract. They drive to work, drive home from work, and spend all their time in the house. Movies circulate through their ancient TV; bedtime is at nine and they rise again at five thirty. Anna worries about them, though she didn’t use to. She is scared. It appears to her that they are no longer learning, improving, growing into this world, but losing things—eyesight, hearing, the birthdays of her cousins, what they ate for dinner last week. These things are slipping out of their minds and into the cracks of wood.

Anna is losing things as well. When she and her father drove down Main Street yesterday, her favorite ice cream shop had closed its doors.

“The Gradys are in their mid-seventies, you know. I’m surprised they stuck with it for so long,” her father explains. Anna hardens to the thought of change in the passenger seat. 

But the beach, this beach, was somewhere she felt safe going back to. She knew that nothing would change. The tides still roll in and out, the lighthouse still rolls through, the stillness is still intact. She gets up from the blanket and shakes it out, then folds it.

Anna scours the piles of rocks and pebbles with her eyes. She smiles, thinking back to a lover she had let go before coming back home, a conversation they had.

“I’ll bring you back some sea glass,” Anna said as she lay on her back in bed, counting the pores of the ceiling.

“What’s sea glass?” her companion asked, rolling her body over to look at Anna.

“You don’t know what sea glass is?” Anna replied, in honest disbelief.

The woman rolled her eyes. “Clearly I don’t, so just tell me what it is.”

Anna took the woman’s hand in her own and began to rub her palm. “It’s when a piece of glass from a bottle or a window or a cup stays in the ocean for a very long time. The broken glass is rubbed down to a smooth surface, then makes its way onto the shore.”

She spies a piece now, a deep blue color, and picks it up. It feels like the woman’s palm. She tosses it back into the ocean for another twenty-year bath. 

The ocean at once makes her feel both steady and chaotic. This evening, the sea inserts itself with smell, stirred up by a storm far away, churning up seaweed and horseshoe crab carcasses and seagull shit. It smells ravenous.

Anna contemplates the life she has created far away from the ocean, over the bridge, inland. She is surrounded by mountains that cradle towns and highways, and lakes where she can see every shore. She thinks she prefers it to the coast. Not like her parents, who shell up the boatshed in their yard every spring, even though it’s empty, just in case. Their garage is crammed with lobster traps and beach toys and coolers and umbrellas, accumulations from a life spent on the beach. Inside the house there are driftwood mirrors, seashell picture frames, and sky blue dominates the color scheme. Anna feels like an orphan in that house. She has no place among the sea trinkets with her fleece jackets and hiking boots.

She finally makes her way to the lighthouse and rests her hand against its shell. There are a few boaters out on the water, but whether they’re using the light as a beacon or not is unclear. Lighthouses seem to be a relic of another time, when rocky shorelines were treacherous unknowns and sailors were without maps. Anna feels like everything on the Cape is becoming a caricature of itself: useless but historical and fun for the tourists.

“‘Cabo de las Arenas,’ ‘Noepe,’ it sounds so romantic!” The woman in Anna’s bed cooed and Anna regretted agreeing to talk about the Cape.

“That’s not it at all, not how I see it,” she said, disentangling her fingers from the woman’s hand.

“Do you miss it? Are you excited to go back?” 

“I don’t think I’d know how to miss it, even if I did. Where are you from?” Anna replied, changing the subject.

“Minnesota—land amid 10,000 lakes! Kind of like an ocean, right?”

“Not really.”

Anna shakes loose the memory. Dusk came quickly and now the stars pinprick both the sky and the sea far below. She scans the horizon but it has all but disappeared along with the sun, illuminated only by a crescent moon the size of a fingernail clipping.

But the stars and the moon aren’t the only light reflecting. Every few seconds the lamp, stored away in the house Anna leans on, washes light in and out. Perhaps this is what truly drew her to this spot. That light, infinite, leading her in like a moth to a lantern. Every few seconds or so it reveals the true sea, and Anna can see every whitecap of each wave and the outline of cormorants nested in dock ruins and Martha’s Vineyard far in the distance. For those seconds, the sea is so very close, and her distance, even when she is gone, is not so great after all.