Start and stop in the same place? He can't even remember if this is where -- or when -- he wanted to start. "Funny little man," the Dahl twins wrote more than once, not "funny little man." The emphasis is on the sense of humor, something within his control, and not stature.
Barefooted Noemi does a face plant on a sand dune, moves her arms up and down. "Sand angels," she says, which, he thinks, only an angel can make. Children are conceived in deep hot sweat; parenting is a series of cold sweats. Tonight he sits in bed thinking he'd run the car through a stoplight and they were broad-sided.
Liam's last words before sleep: "Daddy, do you like Newport or Portland better?"
The beach, for all its connotations of play, teems with death: kelp torn from its foothold, broken shells, the corpse of a sea-gull, on its back, wings spread. Even rock succumbs.