We walk down to the edge of the water. A chill blows off the ocean and it burns my lungs and it has cooled the wet sand underfoot. My young daughter, shivering in her swimsuit, announces this is her first trip to the real ocean. But she has been here, to this same beach, years ago, before the divorce. She has simply forgotten—she was three then.
We stand side by side. The ocean rises up and the water that stops near our feet is clear and cold and we can still see the sand underneath and then the water recedes. Further out the water is green and brown and dark. Four times the water rises and falls. My daughter seems to believe she is safe from the water so long as she remains standing in one place. Now the ocean rises and washes across our ankles. My daughter is awestruck, electrified, made fierce: the ocean will do what it wants.
This time she is ready. When the water draws near she jumps before it reaches her. She looks like a foal learning to walk, all legs and kicking as she tries to avoid touching the water. She stops fighting. She plays in the water. She dances in the water. With her hands, she scoops the water. She moves away from me into deeper water, chasing the waves as they diminish.
I notice a little boy walking nearby. I turn to see a woman in a scarlet dress. Does she belong to you? the woman asks, looking towards my daughter. I nod. The little boy and the woman walk on. The woman’s dress melts into the horizon.
I have papers that prove that this bony ten-year-old girl is mine. In a manila folder in my credenza at home is a Decree of Adoption, signed June 19, 2007. The Decree, which terminated the parental rights of my daughter’s biological parents, transformed my ex-wife and me into the legal parents of this child, and we are authorized to make decisions for her until she becomes an adult. We can choose her religion, we can put her in a private school, we can ask the surgeon to remove her appendix. My ex-wife and I have our own paperwork that has severed the formal ties between us, but this daughter, according to state law, is ours. Her skin and her hair and her blood and her soul belong to us.
My daughter has drifted thirty feet away. She looks back and seeing the distance between us returns to my side. She asks if I was moving away from her. I say that I was standing still the whole time. She has a realization. She says that the ocean tugs at her sideways and downwards, not straight out into the deep. She goes back into the water. She removes the white ribbon from her hair and lets it go. She is right. The ribbon drifts sideways and then is pulled down into the water. The ribbon reappears another ten yards to the side, further out. I remember that the earth is an enormous ball of rock flying through outerspace; the ocean is not being pushed and pulled in a straight line, it’s being whipped around the sun and it can hardly contain itself.
My daughter has grown bold. She is waist deep, forty yards away, with her arms outstretched for balance. The white ribbon has disappeared from sight. A gust of wind drives her hair back; her petite face in profile is set towards the sunset. She nearly falls backwards into the water. But she does not. Resolute. She looks out across the waves, anticipating their movements, rocking her feet side to side to stay nimble against the next surge. I am proud. I am forsaken. I know that she has never belonged to me, but to something infinitely more grand and redoubtable.
