I Am Sorry by Bruce McAllister

There was a girl I liked very much in the fifth grade. We were both in the fifth grade. Once she pretended to kiss me, to make her real boyfriend mad, but I think she liked me a little, too.

Her baby sister died. She was sick with something for a couple of days, and then she died, and no one knew why, not even the doctors downtown.

I spent a lot of time on the beach. It was the beach that went from the Navy Base where I lived to the civilian beach that was called “Kellogg Beach,” and the sand was always whiter on Kellogg Beach. I could get to Kellogg Beach by waiting for a low tide and walking around the dividing fence (the end of the fence would be covered with mud and seaweed), or by crawling under the fence where it looked like dogs or seals had dug their way under the fence in one spot.

One evening I crawled under the fence to walk a little while on Kellogg Beach before going home to dinner. It wasn’t Daylight-Saving’s Time, so it was dark even though it was still early. I was covered with sand from going under the fence at that spot, and I saw a flashlight out there ahead of me on Kellogg Beach. When I got closer, I saw that it was being held by this girl I’m trying to talk about, the one who pretended to kiss me. I liked her very much. She was sitting cross-legged on the sand, and her knees had sand on them. They were skinny knees.

I asked her what she was doing.

She didn’t say anything, and then she said she was looking. She was holding the flashlight out in front of her so that the light didn’t move from one place on the sand.

I waited with her until it was too late to wait any longer.

The next day, I wondered if she would be there again. I went there and she was, and I waited with her until I had to go home for dinner.

She was there every evening for four days.

On the fourth evening, as I stood there waiting with her, looking down at the sand near her feet (the sand was lit up yellow by the flashlight’s light) I saw the sand start to move by her foot. She jerked her foot back, and we watched.

The sand kept moving, and then the top of a hairy head began to appear. It was wriggling there, the top of it just below the sand, and I thought at first that it was a baby’s head, so small there. But there was too much sand to tell.

In a minute I could tell that it was like a dog’s head. Its eyes were closed, to keep the sand out of them. The head was almost up out of the sand now, and it was beginning to flail its head a little to get the sand away from it, to breathe. The head hit her knee, and she didn’t even seem to notice. She was staring at it hard, and I was bending over to look at it as close as I dared to.

The neck was stretching now, and the sand was almost completely off of it. We could see that it was a baby seal.

Then the girl said, “No.” She said it again, and got louder. She started screaming then and hitting at the baby seal’s head with the flashlight, and when I tried to stop her, she hit at me, and I stepped back away. She hit at the head again and again, and even though it wasn’t bleeding very much, it stopped moving before long, and it lay down sideways on the sand, its eyes open without blinking, and some sand on them. It looked like a fish, when fish are dead in the sand, covered with it because they are wet and dead.

She was looking at me and she said, “It was you.” She said, “You made it turn out the wrong baby. You shouldn’t have been here. I knew you shouldn’t have. I hate you. It could have been my baby sister! It could have been, but you had to be here!”

After that day she never liked me. She wouldn’t talk to me at Cabrillo Elementary School, and she never again pretended to kiss me.

She was right, I know now. I didn’t think she was at the time, but now I know. It was my fault. When I was sitting or standing there next to her on Kellogg Beach, waiting with her those four evenings, I’d thought about crabs, and fish, and leopard sharks, and butterfly rays and skates, and all the other things from the ocean. I collected those things, and thought about them constantly in those days, and I never played sports with other kids, or went around in a group. This is probably what made the wrong baby come up. If I’d only been more interested in people in those days, and during my entire life. Many people have said that to me. My mother and grandmother and others have said it to me (even without knowing they were saying it, or without knowing they were saying it about me when they talked about it).

If I ever am a father, and my wife is about to have one, I promise I will think only of people—not about fish and porpoises and stingrays. I’ve learned my lesson. Since we are here on this earth, we must be interested in people. If we’re not, bad things can happen. I know this now and I am sorry.