Текст книги "And The Sea Called Her Name"
Автор книги: Joe Hart
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And The Sea Called Her Name
Text copyright © 2015 by Joe Hart
Published by Joe Hart at Smashwords.
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This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
“My mother disappeared for a week the day she turned twenty-eight.”
These were the words she said to me on our first date. We were at a dive restaurant in South Portland sitting at an outside table sipping beers. We’d known one another for nearly six hours by then and had broken off from our group of mutual friends who were bar hopping the evening away. Her eyes. That’s the first thing I noticed about her. They were gray, the way the sea was on days when the rollers would come in off the Atlantic and pound the rocks in unending fury. They caught me right away when we all met up at the first pub, and it wasn’t until she’d looked me fully in the face that I realized I was staring at her and seeing nothing else.
Delphi Arans. Her name was as strangely exotic as she was. The way she moved, gliding rather than walking; how she would keep her head tilted to one side while listening; the way she began a smile, then cut it off mid way through as if worried someone might see; it was all too much for me. I got swept away as if in a tide that wouldn’t let go. I was shocked when I finally got up the nerve to ask her if she’d like to find somewhere quieter to have a drink and she said yes. I’d expected a polite brush off, but instead she took my hand when we left our group behind, their teasing calls following us out the door of the pub.
“What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?” I’d asked. “Like ran off?”
Delphi, or Del as she insisted I call her, shook her head, her hair bouncing a little. It was tightly curled gold with dark streaks of bronze here and there.
“Disappeared. She and my dad were married the week before, and when she turned up missing from their house on her birthday most people said she’d run off. Scared of commitment. You know how talk is around here.”
I did. We were both kids of third generation fishing families, both breaking the mold of our futures that would surely exist on lobster boats or working in offices that kept track of lobster sales. Our careers were indefinite, both of us attending business classes at the southern college, possibly passing one another in the halls without having known it before the night we met, though I doubted that. I would have remembered her.
“They found her soaking wet and huddled in a cave south of York after a week. She was catatonic and a little malnourished, but other than that she seemed to be okay.” Del’s eyes had flashed as she took a sip of beer before continuing. “Not that she ever told me anything. My dad filled me in on the details after I’d caught wind of the story from my classmates in third grade. Eventually she came around and was herself again, but she couldn’t remember a thing from the missing week. She said she recalled opening the back door to the house and stepping into the wet grass, but that was it.”
“Very strange,” I said.
“The greatest mystery of my life.”
“What if you asked her about it now, would she tell you?”
She had looked at me and barely paused, saying the words like they were nothing.
“She disappeared again five years ago. We haven’t heard from her since.”
And just like that she switched gears in the conversation, leaving the morbid details of her family history in the wake of more pleasant talk. By the end of the night we’d walked down a strip of beach for over a mile and I’d kissed her beneath the moon. She smiled afterward, not the kind she cut off midway but a real smile. I’m sure I fell in love right then, and I’d like to think she did too. Such a long time has passed since then, it’s the one thing I still hold on to.
~
We were married a year later. It was apparent to anyone who was around us for more than twenty minutes that we were made for one another. I knew all her favorite songs by our fifth date. She began to finish my sentences a month after we moved in together. It sickened all our friends, how we’d found one another so easily, fallen into step like a dance both of us had known but had always lacked a partner for. When we announced our engagement, there were replies of about time and took you two long enough. We had our ceremony by the ocean, bare feet in the sand, my pant legs and Del’s simple dress wetting from the tide curling at our ankles. Now I wonder what I would have seen if I’d been looking out past the waves instead of her beautiful face. Was it there that day? I’m sure it was.
~
Before he died, my father had a fishing boat along with a lobster license passed down through the generations that had stopped with me. An only child, there were no others to gift the inheritance of long days in the salty, stinging air, the smell of fish and the sea never leaving your hands. I’d hated the idea of being a fisherman but hadn’t voiced my opinion until my senior year of high school, having already worked for six years on the boat with my father. My mother told me this was when his health began to decline, after we’d had our row. Because for some, the sea is their first love, one that can’t be replaced by the passion of flesh or the warmth of a baby in the crook of an arm. For some, the sea fills their hearts like the chasms of unending darkness in the deepest reaches. Sometimes there is no room for others among the waves. My father was one of these people. When I told him I didn’t plan on continuing his life’s work, I saw something go dark in his eyes. And maybe it was the black love of the water there behind his blue irises. Whatever the case, that was the end of our relationship. I almost heard it break, like a stick frosted in winter and crushed beneath a boot. He left on his boat the next morning without me, and I began to make plans for college and the rest of my life.
On a cool September afternoon, a day when I was sitting in an advanced economics class, the way Del’s body had looked in the semi-darkness of my dorm room the night before consuming my thoughts, my father fell down at my childhood home, steps from the front porch, and didn’t get up. The day’s mail was still clutched in one of his callused hands. A massive heart attack, the doctor said. Nothing that could’ve been done. But my mother’s eyes, they told me different. That I could’ve been different.
I inherited their house when she moved away the following spring. Florida offered easy winters and other people her age in the same position—widows, widowers, and I assumed cynical as well as thoroughly disappointed by their offspring. But it was more than that. She blamed me for his passing. Never spoken aloud, but there, like a noxious gas between us in the room whenever we saw one another. I tried not to let it bother me, but ghosts don’t simply haunt you, they speak in whispers of doubt.
The week after Del and I were married we moved into my childhood home. It was an old house with wide-planked floors that never squeaked when you walked across them. The windows looked over a short yard to where the rocks began, tumbled against one another by time beyond meaning. Then the ocean. The entire Atlantic stretched away from us in a horizontal swath of sky and sea that blurred into one another on a clear day. The house was paid off from the countless hours my father had spent freezing his hands in the Atlantic, pulling out its fruits to sell to tourists or restaurants, whoever was buying at the time. But even though our bills were fairly low, they still existed, and when our job-hunts both came up without any true prospects, I settled into the thorned knowledge of what I would have to do. Most people know necessity’s next-door neighbor is irony, and this was not lost on me when I started fishing in my father’s boat to make the money we needed. I could almost hear his thick chuckle between the waves that rocked the craft in the early morning hours after rising from the warm bed beside Del. I hated him then, knowing he was having his laugh and had gotten what he wanted after all. But I hated the sea more for always being first in his heart.
And Del. She was more solid than any of the great stones embedded on the shoreline. She got a job waitressing at a decent restaurant on a harbor south of town. The old money would come there in the evenings, crawling out with jaundiced eyes from their five-million-dollar homes to sit and sip cocktails. The yachts would float beyond the lights, bobbing there for everyone to watch while Del brought the food, the pants issued by management too tight but were that way on purpose so the geriatric men could lay their gazes on her ass as she hurried away to get them another ‘tini.
I hated it. I hated everything that we had to do then. We barely saw each other in that first year of marriage, both of us so bent on making it. Some of our friends, the very same that jeered us out the pub door on the first night we met, were doing well in Boston. The city gave opportunities that we didn’t have further north, but then again nearly all of our friends descended from the same old money that Del served most weeknights and every weekend. They were the same who bought the lobster and tuna that I caught. Their trust funds dripped with cash while they surfed their industries until they found the perfect position. I so wanted more for us. More like our friends had. The hate was strong in those days.
But the love was stronger.
We would come home exhausted, almost too tired to speak, but our bodies had their own agendas and I expected we would have a child within a year, but she didn’t get pregnant.
Seeing an expectant mother now sends sickening gooseflesh down my arms and back. My stomach rolls with revulsion and the nausea is almost too much to bear.
To say that we were happy in those first years would be an understatement. We were young and so in love with one another that each day held colors for us that I’m sure others couldn’t see. We were broke but content with where and who we were, and that was more than many of our friends could say for themselves.
In the second year of our marriage Del took a job at the college we’d both graduated from. She started out as an assistant in the admissions department stuffing orientation packets and guiding tours of potential students and their parents who would be paying the tuition. Less than six months later she was promoted to a managerial position after the man who had held it for fourteen years went home one Friday afternoon, loaded the shotgun his wife had given him for their tenth anniversary, and took it into the shower with him before turning the hot water on and ending his life. Del hadn’t wanted to celebrate her promotion and I didn’t push the issue. She spent several of the following nights looking out our kitchen windows and watching the undulations of the sea. I can still see her there now, her slim outline before the sink, so motionless it seemed that she’d become part of the house.
Meanwhile I still hadn’t found work. The days in the boat were long and tiresome but became a routine that I’d forgotten from my youth. One morning, as I splashed hot water on my face in the dim dawn light, I looked into the mirror and saw my father staring back at me. I had his same chin and hadn’t shaved in several days so the stubble bore a resemblance to the short beard he’d worn. I left the bathroom that morning on legs that were partially unstable. Looking back I wonder if somewhere in the sleeping place that resides within everyone’s mind I knew something was coming. It is beyond instinct, that area within our psyche that has never truly awakened after being lulled into a slumber through the centuries since we stepped out of the jungle and began to fashion tools to protect ourselves. I believe at times it opens its eyes as a warning and that’s all we get from it before it submerges again into the depths of the unconscious.
When I came home that night from fishing, Del wasn’t in the house. I called for her after dropping my gear in the entryway, and when she didn’t answer I made my way through the dining room and into the kitchen. At first her absence didn’t alarm me since she sometimes came in late, her new responsibilities keeping her past quitting time. I walked to the fridge and drew out a cold beer from the top shelf where we always kept a six-pack of our favorite brand. I was in the middle of the first lovely swallow when I saw her car keys and cell on the table. Taking the beer with me, I went to the single-stall garage off the right side of the house and popped the door open.
“Del?” I said into the darkness. When I turned the light on, her Toyota was parked in its usual spot, its windows black with no movement behind them. I cupped a hand to one just to make sure before exiting the garage and moving back to the house. I called her name again when I entered the kitchen. The only response was the soft ticking of the clock my mother had left behind. I climbed the stairs and checked our bedroom, as well as the guestroom, before walking out the back door to the yard.
The air was still warm for a late May evening, and I felt the sweat from the day begin to run anew as I jogged down to the rocks overlooking the beach. The narrow stretch of sand was a coffee-colored strip in the evening light. Garlands of seaweed were strung below the rocks in the impression of the latest tide. A white crab scuttled between the green tendrils, climbing up and over several before disappearing beneath a cracked stone. The rapid beat of my heart had little to do with the short run to the edge of our property. Panic had wormed its way into my stomach, creating the same cramping sensation as being struck in the groin. I scanned the vacant beach, looking for her from among the rocks, but there was nothing, only the answer of the sea to my yells. I ran to our closest neighbor’s home, an elderly man named Harold Broddinger, who was, at times, in and out of touch with reality. Most days he spent on his porch, watching the ocean as well as the road that curved past both our houses. He had little else to do since his wife had died giving birth to their daughter who was now in her forties. As I banged on his door, I prayed that Harold was having a good day and would know who I was speaking of when I asked about Del. After knocking for several minutes I realized that it was Tuesday. His son always drove up on Tuesday afternoons to take him out to dinner in Portland, and tonight was no exception. I cursed under my breath and returned to our home, already running through a list of people to call when something to the left caught my eye
I turned and froze, my guts sinking in on themselves.
The sea was fairly calm and the last of the daylight played on the water from the west. I stared at the spot that had drawn my attention and waited, hoping against what my eyes had told my mind they’d seen.
It had looked like a person had been bobbing in the water, only their shoulders and head visible. But when I turned there was nothing, only the empty expanse of ocean reaching out into the gathering dark that crept in from the east.
I was climbing down the stone path to the beach before I even knew I was moving, shedding my shirt and shoes as I ran. When I reached the surf, I took two leaping strides into the water and dove under. As I swam toward the spot where I had seen the figure, I tried to undo the image with explanations of a surfacing seal or possibly a chunk of driftwood that had floated up from the bottom, but they both disintegrated as I ran through the split second that the person had been visible. I knew it was a person in that briefest glimpse, and worse, I recognized who it had been.
The water was frigid despite the warm air, and I tried to ignore its freezing embrace as I neared the place where Del had been. I submerged, diving ten feet or more into the brackish water, my eyes stinging with the salt and cold. There was nothing below the surface but several boulders encased with scum, their gray-green humps like the backbone of some buried giant. I rose for breath and dove again, and again. Each time I broke the surface I scanned the water around me, hoping for Del’s face to be there, smiling at my needless frenzy. She loved to joke and had played numerous tricks on me, but why would she do this? Even her sense of humor had bounds.
When I couldn’t swim anymore due to the shivering of my muscles, I treaded in to the shallows and ran up the path to our house, bursting in through the door, a fear inhabiting me unlike anything I had ever known before. I picked up the phone and punched in numbers that were utterly surreal to be calling.
“Yes, my name is Jason Kingsley. I think my wife is in the water near our home. I need someone to come now. Our address is—” But my words were lost as I looked out into the yard at Del standing with her back to me upon the grass. I dropped the phone and ran back to the yard, unwilling to let the relief rush in that longed to snuff out my terror.
“Del!” I yelled when I was a few steps from her, but she remained motionless. She wore a simple skirt that came down below her knees and above it a long-sleeved blouse. Both were plastered to her skin and I could see the outlines of her dark underwear and bra beneath them. “Del,” I said, coming even with her. I put a hand on her shoulder and looked into her face.
My breath snagged in my lungs.
Her eyes were black.
They were like two pools of used oil that reflected nothing. Her mouth hung open, her jaw limp. A bit of seaweed trailed from her lower lip. I drew a breath in, sure I was going to scream, when she looked at me, and her eyes were gray again. The blackness had gone from them in a flitting second that already didn’t seem real. It was her, my Del, standing before me in wet clothes, her hair drenched down her back like a cascade of gold.
“Jason?” she asked. Her voice was hollow and far away, as if she were speaking to me from the bottom of a well. Tears formed at the corners of her eyes and she reached for me.
I embraced her and brought her inside, leading her to the bathroom where I started hot water running. I drew her clothes from her and helped her into the bathtub as it filled. She shivered, bringing her knees to her chest as she stared at the wall.
“Honey, what were you doing?” I asked, pouring cupfuls of warm water over her back and shoulders.
“I don’t know.” Still the void in her voice, an emptiness that made me shudder. “I don’t remember.”
“What do you mean you don’t remember? You were in the water. What were you doing?”
She turned her face to me, her lips trembling as she shook her head. “I don’t know.”
I continued to pour water over her until the bath was full. By that time the beginnings of sirens were coming from Route 1, and I hesitantly left her huddled in the bath while I went to our drive and met the first responders, throwing a jacket on as I went. The emergency personnel were all understanding, their nods and smiles that of those who have seen terrible things and who were relieved to not be witnesses of another tragedy. Several offered to come inside and take a look at Del, but I declined knowing that she would be uncomfortable with more people in the house while she was vulnerable. I thanked them and said that I would bring Del in to the hospital if there seemed to be anything seriously wrong with her. As the last vehicle pulled out of our drive, I returned to the bathroom and found the tub empty.
“Del!”
“I’m upstairs,” she called down, and I hurried up the treads, unsure of what I would find. She lay beneath several blankets on the bed, her hair still wet and fanned out on her pillow. She looked at me, only her face visible above the quilt. She was so childlike that for a moment I imagined we were only kids playing a game that had gone wrong. We were married, had a house, student loans, groceries to pay for, electric bills, a car payment due next week on a vehicle that probably wouldn’t last into the next year, and here we were, reduced to exchanging terrified stares over something neither of us understood or knew how to deal with.
“Where did you go?” I asked quietly. The air in our little bedroom was cloistered and my voice didn’t carry the way it should have. She shook her head, her hair making a rasping sound against the pillow. “I saw you in the water. I saw you go under, Del.” She seemed to consider this, her brow pulling down as she blinked.
“I remember coming home and putting my stuff on the table. And then I turned to the fridge, but…” Her words trailed off and she frowned.
“What is it?”
The shake of her head again. “I don’t know. There’s a hole there. It’s all dark.”
Dark like your eyes were, I thought, and madness picked at me with a single ebony claw. I hadn’t seen that. I’d been panicking and imagined that there was something wrong with her eyes. I’d imagined that when she touched me…
“I need you,” she said, drawing one pale arm out from beneath the covers. “Come lie down.”
“We need to figure this out. We can’t just go to bed. This is serious, Del.”
“I know, but right now I need you to hold me. I want you next to me.”
Slowly I came forward and stopped at the bedside, drawing off the jacket I’d used to cover myself. My jeans were still soaked and they clung to me coldly like a dead second skin. I stripped them off along with my boxers and when she lifted the blankets for me to crawl beneath I saw that she was still naked. The sight of her body in the soft light as well as the longing look on her face brought about a warmth in my center, and despite the anxiety that still gripped me, I felt myself stiffen as I laid down beside her.
She intertwined herself with me, nuzzling close beneath my chin and wrapping her arms around my back. We stayed that way for a time before my hands started to play across her skin that was now warm. She sighed and drew even closer, her hand sliding between us to grip me. We moved together for a time on our sides, a thankfulness in our caresses that I’m sure we both felt. It was as if something of great velocity had narrowly missed us and the only way to show our gratitude was to pour ourselves into one another. When she rolled onto her back and I moved above her, she whispered something that I didn’t absorb right away. The sinuous rhythm of our bodies was too much and it was only minutes before our climaxes rolled through us both, the simultaneousness of them leaving us breathless and shaking.
She fell asleep as the clock downstairs tolled eight times, and I stared up at the thick drape of shadows that coated the arched ceiling of the room. Del’s breathing became a metronome that lulled me into an uneasy drowse between sleep and waking. Images rose and fell behind my eyes. The outline of Del’s shoulders and head slipping beneath the water, her appearance in the yard seconds after I raced inside to call for help, the black pools her eyes had been for a moment. I shoved the thoughts away, sinking deeper into the mattress and closer to her. It had been one of the ‘stranges’, as our neighbor, Harold, had said to me sitting on his porch sipping cold lemonade one evening.
The stranges are those things that can’t be ‘splained away, he’d said. They’re like that house that caught fire a dozen years or so back south a Bangor in that little town called Cadence. No one knew how it started but by the time the fire department got there it was an inferno. Everyone had gotten out ‘cept a boy of nine. As you can imagine, his parents and sister were beyond with grief. They stood there watching their house burn along with the little boy inside it, nothing to be done but put out the flames. But lo and behold as the department finally started to get a handle on the blaze, they saw something moving inside. Harold had leaned forward in his Adirondack chair, its aged boards squeaking beneath his weight. And by God if it wasn’t that boy walking through the flames, right as rain. He came down to his mother an father without so much as a blister on him. Even his clothes were fine, only smellin’ a smoke. He said he’d woken up to someone holdin’ him while the fire raged around them. He couldn’t see who it was but they were strong and he couldn’t have gotten away if he’d wanted ta. He said that when the way was clear, that person let him go, but before they did they told him who had set the fire. They said it was a man who worked with his father and wanted to hurt him due to a business deal gone wrong. Well, don’t ya know they followed up on what the boy said and found a singed gas can in the fella’s garage along with clothes full a smoke. Never got an explanation for who or what could’a been in that burnin’ house with the boy, but it knew things that no person could’a known. That’s the stranges, son, and there’s lots of them in this world.
The small comfort I felt at remembering the story was overshadowed by the sense of vulnerability it brought. Were we to simply get up tomorrow and go on with our lives, shrugging at one another over coffee and saying, Oh well, must’ve been a case of the stranges yesterday. I knew I couldn’t accept that and I didn’t think Del could either, but the longer I thought about it, the more smeared the details became. I was exhausted, and perhaps there would be a logical explanation for everything in the morning. My mother always said everything seemed worse at night, it was one of the small bits of wisdom she’d given me before my father died and her gaze had grown cold whenever she looked at me like a hearth that’d lost its fire.
I settled into sleep without meaning to, trying to focus on the sensation of me flooding inside Del as she pulsed around me. But one other thought kept returning that I’d shoved aside—another strand in the braid of panic that had wound around me. Her hands had felt strange in the yard when she reached for me. For a moment they hadn’t felt like hands at all. They had been somehow different, alien in a way that brought a shiver from me from beneath the covers beside her.
It hadn’t felt like there were any fingers attached to her hands when she’d gripped me. Her touch had curled around my arms in a liquid way, almost like—
But the idea was too much and I gritted my teeth against it, concentrating on her breathing beside me. She was safe and that was all that mattered. Even with my internal assurances, it was hours before I drifted into a fitful sleep. And it was only upon waking in the early morning light and listening to the renewed strength of the tide that I remembered what she’d whispered to me as I entered her.
It knows my name.
~
I thought there would be a long and arduous discussion that next day, but Del rose refreshed and lighthearted. She ate a huge breakfast that I cooked at the stove, the whole while talking animatedly about several new programs she was securing for the coming fall in her department. I watched her eat over my own eggs, toast, and bacon that cooled on the plate before me. When she finally stopped speaking and took in my stare she paused, letting her fork come to rest on the table.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m okay. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I know you’re worried about yesterday but I think I just spaced out and went for a walk along the beach. I must’ve decided to go for a swim.”
“Del, the water’s not even fifty degrees yet. Why the hell would you go for a swim?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, I don’t remember.”
“And you don’t find that the least bit troubling?”
She reached out for my hand then and I had the urge to draw it away. Mostly because of the irritation I felt for her flippancy regarding the previous night and only partially because I worried what her hand would feel like on mine.
But her fingers were thin and firm, warm and a little greasy with butter. She gazed at me, the grayness of her eyes like veils of fog.
“I’m not going to worry about it. If it happens again, then we’ll take the next step. Everyone has something like this happen to them from time to time. It’s like thinking about something while you’re driving. All of a sudden you’re to where you’re going and you don’t remember the last fifteen miles.”
I wanted to tell her that leaving your house to walk to the ocean over sixty yards away and dive in fully clothed was a little different than daydreaming, but held my tongue. It was the virility that she exuded that kept me from saying something. She was so alive and vibrant that it made the prior night’s events seem colorless and dull, like a half-remembered dream that pales as the waking minutes turn into hours.
So we went to work that day like any other before it and we didn’t mention her voyage into the sea again. The days and weeks strung together as the summer took full hold on the land. Grass grew and I mowed it twice a week in the yard. Del planted a garden that I tilled for her, growing a section of tomatoes and onions as well as a plot of wildflowers that spilled out in a medley of blues, reds, and yellows from the borders of the brown dirt to the edge of the leaning rocks above the beach. The fishing was bountiful those first months of summer and we began to get ahead on our payments. We dined most nights in the small enclosed veranda my father had built himself off the rear of the house that overlooked the ocean. We made love most nights of the week and we were happy.
