Turtles

by Olivia Cyr

Jane, my college best friend, licks the back of her hand,
and closes her eyes. It’s the salt, she says. It tastes so earthy.
I say, it tastes like the saltwater, you mean. No.
She turns my palm over and licks it from the heel
to where my pinky finger begins. Like salt.
It takes me a minute to taste brininess the way that she does,
when I open my mouth and try a handful of salt water,
lapping it gently. Jane laughs, pulls me gently along.
We walk along the small, tucked cliffs above the shore,
looking out onto the Naples water.
My sandals work the backs of my ankles like sandpaper.
I stop, take them off, toss them in my drawstring bag
and step through the billions of pearls of sand and salt.

A bicycle whizzes past us, and Jane giggles. For a moment,
I think she is flirting with another pizza boy,
riding through the cobblestone valley in half-moonlight
on his way to the pizza parlor, al chiaro di luna.
But Jane grabs my elbow and squeaks.
When I look where she’s pointing, my cheeks go fat with a smile.
And suddenly we’re girls again, long before the throes
of college and career life, plucking ladybugs from each other’s hair
after swimming in the lake at camp; tanned, smooth legs akimbo
on the grass while we talked about dreading that first day of high school,
how we thought we’d much rather be squeezing lady bugs
until their plump, pearly bodies engorged, popped like little fireworks.

On the cliff, Jane pulls me, and we skid recklessly
down a sandy path that slopes between jagged rocks,
our bare feet sprinkled with bubblegum nail polish.
I land at her side, and as we come to a stop by the frothy water,
I put a hand over my sunned chest. I suddenly feel exposed
and want to run forward and scoop them up.
Baby turtles have hatched somewhere along the tiny,
bubbly waves of high tide. Five of them.
Barely minutes old, they sleepwalk, like blind little starfish,
their legs and arms tender flippers. They slog through the sand,
exhausted and oily, as it sticks to them
like granules of sugar on my grandmother’s whiskey cookies.

I pull my hand back to my mouth, lick the inside
of my wrist to taste the earth. We stand, perfectly paced monuments
on the beach, watching the turtles sluicing themselves
with water and coiling, clumsy. Beached, quintuplet sacks of flesh.
Jane is so careful to step around them, and studies their patterned trails,
divots in the sand from their pointed flippers.
The carapace of each turtle is a slick skin sectioned out into squares.
These are leatherbacks, I tell Jane from across the way.
We watch them, crouched over their trails, as they race to the ocean,
wiggling rhythmically, resting every few paces.

I imagine them dehydrated, desperate to reach the water,
breathing heavily with newborn aches all through the tender
curves of their limbs and I’m frightened for them.
I could pluck them from the race and carry them to the water,
past the hermit crabs and sand spiders. I want to mother them,
careful and reasonable. Now, my niece is almost five but
I think about my sister nursing her all those times
when she was a baby, when my sister was just twenty-two
and I was writing for newspapers. I worry about when
she will curl up beside her mother like that again,
and know it will be because someone broke her heart,
and not out of instinctual hunger. She will be desert rocky and mica strong,
and glistening all at once. She will be seventeen
squishing ladybugs on picnic blankets while I write in Colmar
with capfuls of Veuve Clicquot at my little kitchen table.
When she was just weeks old, I cradled her at my own chest
while she gazed up through pink eyelids, both of us full of wonder.
Nursing became fluid, it became competitive for her—her little mouth
grazing over her mother’s skin, my sister just running
her hands over her face so she could look at her, not wanting
to let her eat even when she fussed. That hard, rudimentary pit
in her body of motherhood would make her too eager
for her baby to stay that small.

I though often about how she would grow up,
how she would have to move and shift and be, without leaning on us,
and it choked me, that thought of growing— of them each learning
the push and pull of the other. How will my sister do it?

Jane and I have been in Naples for two weeks,
and Jane has finished her book review, while I have buoyed myself
on the beach in the evenings and written in broken Italian
on paper napkins. It is our last night here;
I dig my hands hard into the beach sand,
encouraging the nest of turtles to go, go, go.
And they move without assistance.
Where’s their mother? Won’t they drown, you think?
Jane shimmies her bottom into the sand next to me,
but the babies have dipped into the tide.