The weekend my husband slipped from coma to silence, I made good on my promise to the kids, and we drove to the coast.

It had been four months with slim punctuation. He woke briefly and blessedly on Christmas Eve. The octogenarian notary drove straight from mass smelling of incense, driven out to our ranch by her novio. My husband signed trust papers with a shakey scrawl and said to no one or everyone, “I got you something,” and then closed his eyes for another few weeks.

I signed all the papers, the hospice nurse scooped up the morphine and meds. While the kids were at school, the Neptune Society van pulled into the driveway, clearly marked. Word spread through the neighborhood. The hospital bed, the Hoyer lift, the wheelchair all disappeared. My fridge filled up with lasagna.

“You guys want lasagna again tonight or fish and chips at the coast?” I asked when I picked brother and sister up from school. I’d already booked a room at the hotel where their dad and I spent anniversaries. It was, in fact, our anniversary, but the kids wouldn’t know that. They were 12 and 13, both high school freshmen. They wanted to ride quads recklessly in the dunes, an activity they used to share with their dad while I read novels on the beach.

In the morning, I woke early as usual. I whispered to sister that I was going to take a walk. “Stay inside, you guys can watch TV” (something we didn’t normally do). I walked barefoot, pressing my feet into the wet sand. The waves pulled back and returned to shore predictably. The ocean swelled and lifted layers of kelp and lacey foam. I turned a sand dollar in my hand, traced the petals etched on the bleached surface. I flung the shell, backhand into the waves, then another, then one more. The sun reached her fingers over the dune to my left. I turned around to face my single line of footprints and follow them back to the children.

The quad rental place drove us to the dunes in a Hummer, and brother got to sit up front while the driver showed off all the tricks his jeep could do. Sister was quiet but smiling. I was, frankly, terrified of riding a quad in the dunes, but fear was a distraction too.

The kids chased each other up and down the dunes. They joined another family of kids in some game, while I crawled my quad around the dunes, trying to keep them in sight. When sister flipped her quad at the bottom of a bowl of sand, I flashed back to a motorcycle accident I’d had when I was her age, but she came up smiling, spitting sand but unscathed, and the big brothers of the other family helped her back up.

At a café by the beach later, they mocked me for my cautious “toodling.” I said that at least I stayed upright. We acknowledged that we were lucky to have had that family beside us, that we were going to have accept help from time to time.

Driving back through Paso Robles, sister in front this time, both of them reading Ender’s Game for school, my mind rolled towards the future. Traffic was steady, all traffic headed home to the Valley. Then the oak trees along the highway started to undulate as if waving us down. Like a stadium wave, one tree reached up, then another. Cars pulled over, and so did I, and the earth rolled under the stationary car while we held our breath. When the rolling ceased, car doors flung open and drivers, passengers, stood, and tested their footing on the ground, now solid. The trees sagged, still and spent from their exertion. “We’re at the epicenter!” called the man in the car ahead of us, wanting to share the experience, to know it was real, that we were not alone.