BUT WHAT IF IT NEVER GLOWS?

We were surrounded by water — water under the jetty boards, water slapping the pilings of the old boathouse, water stretching black and silent to the far shore. When Mira dragged her fingers through it, the plankton blazed around them, as if she had stirred a spoon through liquid light. She snatched her hand back, laughed, and asked her question again, and I gave her the only honest answer I had, which is that some years the bloom comes and some years it stays away.

Mira is ten. Her teachers call her formidable, and they are right. I had taken her out of school for a week — one week in June, when the sea-sparkle might rise in our estuary — because some lessons will wait and some will not. All day she had been gathering facts the way other children gather shells.

By nine o'clock the excitement and the tiredness were fighting inside her. She talked faster and faster, her arms windmilling as she explained something about jellyfish, and then, halfway through, the sentence simply gave up on her. She stood blinking at me, empty of words for the first time all day.

Her mother used to say that when Mira was thinking hard, you could hear her ticking. Watching her yawn, then wind herself up for one more question, I believed it. "Time to power down," I said, and steered her along the jetty.

She stopped at the boathouse door for one last look. The bay was a field of black glass. "The book says the bloom never comes before midnight," she said. "The book is wrong. I've decided." Such cheek. Such magnificent stubbornness. She was so me. She was so Ellie.

Inside, the boathouse loft was its own small world. A wide window filled one wall with the pale sweep of the estuary, a driftwood fire snapped in the iron stove, and the two narrow beds were piled with quilts my mother had sewn long ago. But the floorboards sloped so steeply that a dropped pencil rolled away to the wall, the whole place smelled of tar and damp rope, and the tap coughed rusty water before it ran clear.

My father's habits were still everywhere in that room: pencilled notes on the beams, hooks labelled in his careful capitals, a tide table nailed beside the door. Mira claimed the table under the window and laid out her kit: three glass jars, a hand net, a notebook, and a magnifying glass.

I told her that otters worked this channel after dark, slipping out of the reed beds to fish the slack water. She was gone before I had finished the sentence — up the ladder and back with her book, Rivers and Shores, already falling open at the right page. She read to me while I banked the fire, and I let the names of things wash over me like the tide.

Later she found the storm radio on the shelf, a heavy brass-handled box with no batteries in it at all. You wound the handle and it crackled into life, catching the shipping forecast out of the empty air. "It's magic," she whispered, winding. "You're the magic," I said. "You are the battery. Turn the handle and you make the power yourself." She stared at her own hand as if it had been keeping secrets from her all these years.

SHE WOKE ME IN THE DARK. A small hand hauled at my shoulder until I sat up, and through the wide window I saw it — the whole bay burning blue-green from shore to shore, every wave stitched with cold fire. It was half past eleven. The book was wrong. She had decided.

Out on the jetty, wrapped in quilts, she asked me how many of the tiny creatures were shining down there. I told her the number would need more zeros than her notebook page could hold — that she could count for her whole life and never reach the end of them. She took a breath and started anyway: one, two, three. At forty she groaned, flopped back against me, and announced that counting was for people with nothing better to look at.

We stayed out until the cold finally sent us in, her head heavy against my arm, her storm-grey eyes — her mother's exactly — closing at last above the shining water. I call her Miri, the way I called her mother Ellie, and on nights like this the two names feel like one.

Glossary
plankton: tiny creatures that drift in the sea; some kinds glow when the water moves
estuary: the wide mouth of a river, where it meets the sea
shipping forecast: a radio weather report for ships and boats
slack water: the quiet time when the tide is neither rising nor falling