Sand castles and survival training

“You don’t have any friends,” the nine-year-old says.

He doesn’t look up. Just packs wet sand into a turret, firming it with the flat of his palm.

His seven-year-old cousin, Reid, stops digging. The plastic shovel hangs in his hand.

“What about Emily?”

“Not Emily. Not anybody. Not with an active shooter. Your only job is to save yourself.”

I’m twenty feet up the beach, wrestling an umbrella that won’t take a stand. The wind keeps changing its mind.

Reid, the seven-year-old, studies his cousin Ellis with narrowed eyes. His shoulders slump. He starts digging again, but slower.

The boys build a wall around their castle with the sand excavated from its moat.

Lake Michigan pulls against the shore. The frothy waters pull, hiss, pull again.

Ellis, my nine-year-old grandson, draws a box in the sand with his finger, scratches an X in the corner.

“That’s where you go,” he says. “Where they can’t see you from the door.”

“What if there’s no corner?” Reid counters.

“There’s always a corner.”

Reid crawls forward, adds a second X in the opposite corner.

“That’s where I’d go,” he says, planting a small stone in his place.

“No,” Ellis says. He picks up Reid’s stone and moves it to his original X.

“Same corner. Everyone together.”

“You said we don’t have any friends.”

“That’s different,” he says. “This is classroom procedure.”

The boys only see each other once a year, when my son flies in from California to visit his sister. I’m grateful to have them here, but heartbroken to hear the world they’ve inherited in their play.

Reid abandons the first castle and starts another behind it.

“What’s that for?” Ellis wants to know.

“Backup. In case the first one falls.”

Ellis stands, lets the wind tousle his blond Californian hair, then steps into the surf. The water holds him there, mid-shin, before sliding back.

At Ellis’s school, they run drills once a month. Lights off. Door locked. They practice being invisible, practice how to breathe, how to stay quiet, keep still.

The surf rolls in, hisses, rolls out. Gulls skate the wind above us.

Ellis turns back and joins his cousin.

They work on the second castle without speaking.

The wind picks up.

Someone’s kite breaks loose.

It rattles and slaps against the beach in a self-destructing frazzle of plastic and twine.

Frenzied patterns etch the sand as it tumbles down the shoreline.

Reid sits back on his heels. “What if you’re in the hall? Where would you go?”

“Bathroom stall,” Ellis says. “Lock the door. Climb up if you can. Be quiet. If you’re with someone who gets shot, you can’t stop.”

The tide creeps higher. The moat around the first castle fills with frothy water first, then sand. The castle base darkens.

“It’s gonna fall,” Reid says.

“Yeah,” Ellis says, still working. “Wiped out.”

Reid finds a white shell and presses it into the wall of the second castle like a window.

The first castle slowly collapses. Towers slump into soft brown lumps—their shells scatter.

The boys don’t look back. They’re finishing the second. A flag made from a stick and a gum wrapper. Their moat, twice as deep.

“This one’ll hold,” Reid says.

Ellis wipes sand from his hands onto his swim trunks. Stands. Shuts his eyes against the sun.

“Yeah,” he says. “For a while.”

The umbrella finally gives up and folds itself flat.

I fold the towels and start packing as the sun turns everything gold, copper, and orange.

The boys keep fortifying their second castle.

“Five more minutes,” Ellis says.

I give them an hour.

When I was nine, Mrs. Hallman made us practice fire drills.

We walked single-file through the hall, down marble stairs, out a brown steel door to the asphalt playground.

We stood together, one long shadow in the sun, while she counted each of our heads with a tap. Twice.

Once, Michael Ferris stopped to tie his shoe on the stairs.

Mrs. Hallman made him lead every line for a week to teach him citizenship.

Nobody taught us to leave our friends behind.

By the time we reach the parking lot, the tide has taken the second castle.

I hear Reid say something about it, but the wind catches his words.

Ellis is already at the car.

Collapsible beach chair slung over his shoulder.

He stands like a sentry.

Waiting for me to unlock the door.