LOOK DOWN UPON SAINT X from above and it will appear as if little has changed. In the Basin, children in pink and maroon uniforms still run and shout through the yard of Horatio Byrd Primary. Her Majesty’s Prison, eggshell-blue, still stands beside the bank. Along the winding ribbon of Mayfair Road there are now billboards for Digicel and FLOW broadband, but the white stucco churches remain, as does Perry’s Snackette, and the radio tower with its flaking red paint, houses with galvanized roofs and sandy yards. Float up and over Devil Hill and there it is—Little Beach. It is late afternoon, and everyone has gathered here. They have their umbrellas and picnic baskets, their coolers filled with cola and Carib. Constellations of families float in the sea. Children clamor out of the water and run onto the pier, not even pausing before leaping off the edge back into the water, again and again in an unbroken loop.

Search among the faces and you will see a woman seated on a blue and white cloth, a point of stillness amid a lively family gathering. Her eldest grandchild dribbles a football down the sand. The youngest is curled asleep in the shade cast by the woman’s own body. Her daughter-in-law hushes and soothes and doles out kisses and tamarind balls. Her sons, Bryan and Eddie, laugh together as they let the workweek’s troubles lift from their shoulders. Sometimes she cannot quite believe that all of this is hers. Sara Lycott is neither as young as she once was nor as young as she still feels sometimes, until she catches herself in a shop window, startled by the silver flash of her own hair. It has been years since she first laid lisianthus on her mum’s grave. Remarkable, isn’t it, that a woman her age, who has not been anyone’s daughter in a long, long time, still, hearing a funny story on the news, or picking the first ripe sugar-apple in the yard, opens her mouth to call out, “Mum”? On some nights, she is still laid low by a longing for her mother’s house. She longs for bedding that smells human and that has grown soft as oil with unwashing. The plink of a sink that leaked throughout her whole childhood. The odors of old fruit in the refrigerator, of her mother’s urine in the bathroom. In her own house, she washes and presses the sheets on Tuesdays. She keeps the bathroom scrubbed and smelling of bleach. When a thing breaks she fixes it. When a thing is empty she disposes of it.

The best thing she ever did was to behave in front of her children. If all she could give them was to contain the dark, squalid rooms within her, then that is enough. If to other people it seems like very little, well, she knows that it is everything. She has freed them from a burden they do not even know exists, that of being tormented by a deep, unsolvable ache for all the wrong things.

She has outlived them all. Her mother. The father whose name she never knew, whom she assumes must be long dead. Edwin, whom she nursed until his last breath but who never, not even then, truly let her in. (Yet did two boys ever have a father who adored them more?) Only Clive is still out there somewhere. Rumors reach the island. Last she heard he’d left New York for the West Coast someplace. According to a friend of hers, he got married out there and has a daughter. But this is secondhand knowledge at best. She does not think of him often. A difficult chapter in her life, from when she was very young. It has been so long since any of them were here with her that her own endurance confounds her. Lately, she has the oddest notion that she might go on living forever.

The baby beside her on the blanket stirs and cries. Before she can reach out for him, Bryan is there, scooping the child into his arms.

“There, there, my boy,” he whispers. “You’re all right. You’re just fine.”

TRAVEL TO the edge of the island’s south coast and you will find yourself on a different beach, where the sand is soft as cream. At the water’s edge, children turn cartwheels and bury one another in the sand. A boy lifts a conch to his ear and hears the secret sea. A mother considers grabbing her phone to capture this moment; instead, she just watches him. A cruise ship glides soundlessly across the middle distance. Somewhere, in another world that is also this world, it is snowing.

Farther up the sand, a little girl sits beneath an umbrella as a woman braids her hair. In the sea, brothers with matching boogie boards ride the gentle waves. A teenage boy picks up a girl and threatens to dunk her, and she squeals with delight.

A woman pauses on her walk down the beach and watches them all. This place is much as she remembers it. The pool in the shape of a lima bean, the open-air restaurant where last night she ate conch carpaccio and drank rum punch on the veranda and felt the cool ocean breeze. As with all places remembered from childhood, it appears smaller now, more ordinary. The domed ceiling of the marble lobby is not quite so high, the sand not quite so white, as they are in her memory. They’ve changed the name, too. Indigo Bay is the Royal Hibiscus now, and has been for years; a rebranding effort after the things that happened.

One more thing is different: Several years ago, a French conglomerate purchased the development rights to Faraway Cay. Now it is a private island resort and spa with bungalows built on stilts in the shallows. According to the resort’s website, the restaurant is helmed by a celebrated Nordic chef who “marries his farm-to-table ethos with the local Caribbean bounty.” The spa’s offerings include a hot volcanic-stone massage, a local salt scrub, and a two-hour “Arawak Ritual” that promises “complete purification of both body and spirit.” The downed planes on the cay have been preserved. There is a picture of one in the website’s photo gallery, a yellow wing choked in sea grape. Stroll past the island’s mysterious relics en route to your own private waterfall.

The goats are gone. Exterminated, one assumes.

When the woman reaches the black rocks that mark the end of the beach, she sits in the sand and looks out at the cay. The white beach. The cliffs tufted with growth, a vivid green unlike any she has seen before or since. She can make out the bungalows that ring the shore and, if she squints, people on the beach—husbands with wives, parents with children. The woman stands, brushes the sand from her legs, and walks back in the direction from which she has come.

On the volleyball court, a game is under way. The players are newlyweds and retirees, thirty-somethings and teenagers. They bump and set and spike. When a girl who is a bit of a weak link serves up a winner, both sides cheer. After a teenager takes a running dive into the sand to save a point, a retiree slaps him five. “Appreciate those,” the man says, and points to the boy’s knees. “They’ll betray you someday.”

The woman watches, as she watched years ago. It occurs to her that this game is always under way; that, in a sense, it never ends.

In the shallows, two pairs of legs poke out of the water—a handstand contest. A moment later, two sisters surface.

“I win!”

“No, me!”

“First one to the buoy!”

They are off, swimming away from shore.