II

Eleanor sits in class, notebook cracked. She pretends to take notes as the professor drones on: Louis Pasteur, Leeuwenhoek. But outside, the day has turned gothic: the sky, a sickly puce; the trees, swaying like cilia in the breeze. The world pulsates to a new vibration. She writes a line in her notebook, then another line, then another, in classic abab form. Outside, rain batters the windows, leaks onto the windowsills, pounds the brass gutters of the mammoth college hall’s roof. Her hand quickens. Ink blots the page.

She needs only the couplet, but the professor has excused the class. The wind whines, sending up debris from the ground below. Eleanor stuffs her belongings into her valise. She has not brought her raincoat. No one expected this.

III

Caroline has come to this beach again. Forty-five years have passed since the last time she took the cut from the breachway, past the beach club, by the shingled sprawling post-war mansions, headed for the state beach. But time is fluid. It washes through her hands like the salt water she trails her fingers through, leaving behind the salt of bitter memory. She is well aware she is not alone. Here are three, she thinks: Mrs. Dinsmore, my mother, and me.

The air is September bright, the sky blue as a shard of beach glass. The last time she walked this shore alone, it was winter, harsh cold January, the sand like concrete beneath her shoes. Summer, and love, had left her behind. At night she dreamt of tow trucks washing up on the waves, because she had been wrecked, and no one was coming to rescue her.

By then the dunes had returned, built up in their pillowy mounds, anchored by Marram grass that had bent to the harshest winds and bounced back. It was as though nothing had happened — as though no literal hurricane had destroyed this beach in 1938, and no figurative one washed over her forty years later. Houses were built, hotels repaired, roads resurfaced. Life went on. In her time she knew only acres of beach blankets, juke boxes blaring from clam shacks, purple Vettes cruising Atlantic Avenue.

Now that life is gone, too. Oh, the teenagers still come to the beach, and the bands of yore play nostalgic sets on the town beach pavilion. But most of the bars have disappeared. The Wreck, with its ship’s wheel and pier-like pilings. The Atlantis with its blinking disco ball. The Blue Sands, a sprawling shell whose back doors opened onto the pond. There are meteorological hurricanes and there is the erosion of time, slip-slip-slipping away from us, undermining all we remember.

IV

After lunch, Mrs. Dinsmore walks the beach, looking for life. Gulls do not migrate. She has looked up this fact in the bird guide she found in the cottage’s bookcase. So where have they gone? She could ask her neighbors, but they have closed up their house for the season. The only people she sees are a group of church ladies way down the beach, having a rather blustery picnic. They will not be here much longer, she thinks, with this wind. It tosses grains of sand against her silk stockings. It plasters her hair against her skull. She must look a fright; she would not want to be seen like this.

She walks east until she can walk no more. The inlet at Miss Chapman’s novelties shop — shut up now, post-season — rushes like a river. The tide is coming in. It laps at Mrs. Dinsmore’s feet, higher on the beach than she remembers seeing it. She feels uneasy, and then, turning toward home, silly. The church ladies have not left. This is autumn on the beach, a little wild, but no different than a cloudburst over the lake back home. She will return to the cottage, make a cup of tea, and presently it will be time to make supper, and then Joe will be home. He will sit on the porch smoking his cigar. They will talk of his day. He will know where the gulls and terns have hidden themselves.

But the ocean reaches home before she does. Its surf is topping the dunes. She looks behind her. Her footprints are already gone.

V

Eleanor sits on the stone steps of the farmhouse. She has a pencil in her right hand and her notebook on her lap. She fills line after line, but only in prose. Poetry has abandoned her; her thoughts, disorganized, shattered, want only to write facts. As though somehow she could make sense of this. She does not write of the harrowing train ride home, which took six hours, or the stumbling walk in pitch black to her grandmother’s house. She does not memorialize her sisters’ and brothers’ worry, her father showing up (casually) the next morning, guessing where she took refuge.

There is a different story Eleanor must write: the houses blown away, the beach washed clean, the dead bodies floating in the pond.

She does not know if or how this account might be useful. She only knows she must get it down on paper.

VI

Caroline is looking for Mrs. Dinsmore. But Mrs. Dinsmore, it seems, has left an impression on no one else. She does not even warrant much of a mention in the paper. On the list of dead, the “i” of her name is left out, so she survives as a perpetual typo: “Mrs. Dnsmore.” She is not buried locally, and there is no obituary. Joe will bring her home, to Bloomington, Indiana, to be laid to rest with his kin: his parents, his brothers, and eventually, his nieces, his nephews, and himself.

When the medical examiner fills out Mrs. Dinsmore’s death certificate, he lists the cause of death as “Accidental drowning due to Hurricane and Tidal wave.”

The time of death is listed as 6 p.m., but Caroline suspects a bit of bureaucratic convenience. Perhaps that was when her body was discovered by her husband, or the Sanitary Corps. The storm made landfall shortly after 3 p.m., and three hours later already had reached Vermont. By 6 o’clock, Mrs. Dinsmore — whose fate was to be staying on the Atlantic Avenue oceanfront without a car when New England’s deadliest hurricane struck the Rhode Island shore — was most certainly dead.

No one knows how she died. Was she the old woman who, riding the roof of a house, was crushed between two structures as her horrified would-be rescuers watched helplessly? Did she climb as high as she could as the waters rose in the cottage, only to be trapped in the attic and drown? Did the tidal wave — what we would now call a storm surge — wash her right out of the house and away?

The librarian is officious, but she can find nothing more than that one erroneous mention in the list of dead on a newspaper’s front page: Mrs. Dnsmore. A woman without an “i.”

“She wasn’t from around here,” the librarian says, as though that makes Mrs. Dinsmore less important.

But she lived, Caroline thinks. Mrs. Dinsmore lived and was loved, and she made an impression on someone. Otherwise Caroline would not have that clutch of papers in her pocket, her mother’s account, a brief legacy of a woman otherwise forgotten.

VII

Now, walking the beach, Caroline thinks of paper. The newsprint that persists in the internet ether: The woman with the missing “i,” or perhaps more importantly, the missing “I.” The sheaves of paper Caroline’s mother left behind, carefully removed from a looseleaf notebook and secured with a paperclip that left a rust-red oval.

She stops and pulls the journal papers from her pocket, gripping them firmly against the wind, and reads:

Among the names of the dead are many people we know. Mrs. Dinsmore who used to buy vegetables from us is gone. The last time my mother saw her she picked up one of our half-grown [here the paper is ripped] and said she hoped she could live sometime in a place where she could have cats. She and her husband had been looking for a place to live.

It must not have occurred to her mother that, years hence, her words would constitute Mrs. Dinsmore’s epitaph. After all, who was Mrs. Dinsmore? Just a middle-aged woman who used to come to the farm to buy vegetables. Not that old — only 49 — but to Eleanor, probably ancient, so near her own mother’s age. A woman who, the last time she stopped by, had picked up a kitten or cat and remarked wistfully how much she wanted to live where she could have one of her own.

Eleanor left behind letters, and poems, and stories; how strange, of all that output, that her daughter is obsessed with this simple memory of Mrs. Dinsmore. It is not even her mother’s memory, but her grandmother’s, a woman she never met. Yet it has survived all this time, one thread from the present to the past, when Mrs. Dinsmore still lived, before the sea came onto the land to claim her, all those decades past.

Long ago, Caroline’s lover burned her letters. He let their ashes fall into the river, and float over the dam, rushing to the sea. Somewhere in this surf crashing now against the beach, the molecules of that ink and paper must persist. She alone remembers what the letters contained. She alone can put the ink back onto paper, can read the words. All those “i”s and all those “I”s so quickly consumed by fire. She is the last link in the chain of his memory, and when she is gone no one will know why he leapt off the breachway and into the black sea one January night, when not even a hurricane could be blamed for taking him away.

She pulls the paperclip off her mother’s paper and lets it fall to the sand. Then, one by one, she rips her mother’s diary pages into smaller and smaller squares. She tosses them into the wind, where they flutter, and then fall, one by one, like snowflakes onto the rolling waves of the sea.