Blackthorn Winter by Kathryn Reiss

good-bye to Liza Pethering, and promised Mom we'd be back at the cottage in forty-five minutes, we walked to the end of the main road, where Blackthorn met the sea. I was so tired I was dragging my feet. As we approached the seawall, the dizziness started, and I felt tiny and unprotected. But I kept walking, and when we had climbed down the steep, stone steps from the sea wall to the rocky beach, and when I was standing at the edge of the sea with Ivy and Edmund, the cold salty spray swept my tiredness and dizziness away. In no time the three of us were hurling those round, smooth beach rocks into the water, trying to see who could throw the farthest. All of us were pretty good at tossing a baseball around, thanks to Saturday afternoons in the backyard with Dad, back in the days before his big promotion, when he wasn't always so busy with his job.
    "Hey, did you see
that
one?" crowed Edmund. "That one went almost all the way to that ship out there!"
    "Pretty good," conceded Ivy. "But watch this one!" She let fly a round, smooth stone. "I bet mine goes all the way to
Russia
!"
    "Mine went to Russia, too!" Edmund shouted back. Then he pointed. "Hey—I bet that ship is going to Russia."
    "Russia," I informed them, "is totally in the other direction." But it was the nature of Goops never to listen to big sisters, and so in two seconds they had completely forgotten our rock-throwing contest and were off into a game, pretending to be on board the big ship we could just see out on the horizon ... pretending that they were docking in Moscow (though from what I recalled of my geography, Moscow wasn't even on the ocean, anyway)... pretending
they were taking a train to the orphanage where we'd first seen Edmund nine years ago...
    "Hey, let's adopt some babies and take them home on the ship with us," Ivy said, and Edmund, who wasn't really into babies, agreed, because he
did
like adoption games.
    "Okay," he said readily. "Now we're getting off the train and going to meet the director of the orphanage. Her name is ... Mrs. Bobblehead.
Yes,
Ivy!" he shouted when she started to protest. "It really is! That's what the director was called when I lived there. I remember—"
    "Edmund, can you really remember anything?" I asked him suddenly. "I mean, really remember?"
    "He was only a baby," Ivy said severely. "I don't remember anything before I was about two and a half. Why should he?"
    I sighed, and the brisk wind carried my sigh out to sea. "Oh, never mind."
    "My first memory is of Ivy taking my bottle," Edmund yelled over the crash of waves. "Stole it right out of our double stroller and threw it in the road."
    "I never did that—," protested Ivy.
    "Oh, yes you did," I told her. "Because I was pushing that stroller, and I remember."
    "There, you see?" said Edmund comfortingly. "You do remember
some
things."
    "Not much, but a few things," I concurred.
    "Maybe the reason you don't remember more is because you got hit on the head and have amnesia," Edmund suggested helpfully. "Or—maybe you got taken by space aliens who did weird experiments on you, and it was so nasty you don't want to remember. I saw a TV show like
that once. Hey!—" He broke off, bending down to dig in the sand at the edge of the rock line. "Hey! Look at this, you guys. A bottle! Maybe there's a message inside!"
    Ivy ran to help him rinse the beer bottle in the waves. "Empty," Edmund said, disappointed. But Ivy took the bottle and held it up to the sunlight.
    I watched them, bemused, thinking about amnesia and aliens.
    "Maybe it's really old, Edmund," Ivy said. "Maybe it's an empty bottle of
mead.
And it was last held by King Henry the Eighth as he..."
    "As he sailed past this beach in his royal yacht—"
    "They didn't have yachts then, I bet," I said dourly, but nothing would shut the Goops up once they got into a story.
    "Maybe he was on his royal
barge,
sailing to Russia to visit Mrs. Bobblehead, and he drank his mead from this very