Free Torch by Cheryl Strayed

borrowed everything—the sleeping bags and the Coleman stove, the flashlights and the tarp, even the enormous suitcase on wheels that she’d packed it all into. They stayed for almost a week, going to town only once to get more food, hitching a ride with an elderly couple who’d been camped near them in a ramshackle RV.
    At night they played Old Maid and Go Fish, sitting at the picnic table, holding the flashlights to see. Teresa had been twenty-four, Claire almost seven, Joshua, five. This was their first real vacation.
    They spent the days on the beach. It was beautiful, desolate; almost always they had it to themselves. Strange sharp reeds grew where the sand ended, a kind of ocean swamp that kept people from building houses there. They walked the beach up and down, finding shells and chunks of glass that had been worn and polished by the sea. The kids did gymnastics, yelling for her to watch every time. Cartwheels, backbends,tricks they’d practiced as a team, then performed. Each of them could do a complete back flip, somersaulting in the air from a standing position and then landing in that same position. “Do it again,” she’d say, amazed each time. But then, after a while, she commanded them to stop. They were doing it too much. Surely they would tire and falter and land on their heads and break their necks and die. She had a precise image in her mind of what her children would look like with broken necks. She clutched their shoulders and forbade them from jumping when not in her sight. They laughed at her, giggling and giggling. Her kids were always giggling, as if a pair of invisible hands were tickling them, and also they hopped, up and down, down and up—so much hopping and giggling she thought she would go insane at times.
    When they ran ahead of her on the shore she walked intentionally slowly so that she could pretend for a while that she was a normal person, not a mother. That those children in the distance belonged to someone else. That she was a woman on the beach contemplating things, letting the day go, or greeting it with calm, thinking ahead or back, instead of the endless present tense in which she lived. Or thinking nothing at all, thinking,
I wonder if God exists?
And then the kids ran toward her giggling, hopping, shrieking, “Mom! Mom! Look what we found!”
    Joshua offered her his palms full of wet sand, and he and Claire told her to dig into it, to get her surprise, and she found the shell with the hole bored naturally, perfectly through it. She would wear it around her neck for the rest of her life.
    “Thank you,” she said, the tears rising in her eyes.
    “What’s wrong?” they both asked, in a chorus, walking back to the campground.
    “Nothing,” she answered, though she began to cry harder. “It’s that we’re so happy,” she said at last. She put her hands on their heads. The three of them had the same hair. Not blond, not brown, but something in between: the faded yellow of grass where an animal had slept.
    On the way back to Minnesota they got off the bus in Memphis to visit her parents. When they arrived, tanned from Florida, tired from the ride, her parents were so overjoyed to see them that they all five grabbed onto one another in one big embrace. Her parents weren’t rich, but Claire and Joshua thought they were, running victoriously through the house, not used to such things. Cars without rust, walls without cracks, rooms with beds that no one slept in, things in the cupboard like bags ofDoritos and Chips Ahoy! cookies that hadn’t been immediately ripped open and consumed. Teresa had not grown up in Memphis, but this is where her father worked now. They had moved all over the country when Teresa was a child, following her father’s job selling a special kind of paint that held up when exposed to extreme heat. The last place she’d lived with her parents was in El Paso, when she was seventeen and pregnant, a few days out of high school.
    Her parents had