Текст книги "And The Sea Called Her Name"

Автор книги: Joe Hart

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I look back at those days as the flatness that comes upon the water just before the black clouds are reflected on its mirrored surface. My father called thunderstorms ‘boomers.’ Boomer’s comin’, he’d say, and more often than not, the wind would die and the water would calm just as the low rumble would fill the sky somewhere in the direction of Canada. The stillness of the air full of electricity and the day losing its light as if something were leeching it away.

I still remember the look on her face the afternoon she came out from the bathroom, her mouth tremulous as if she might either smile or be sick. I was sitting in the living room reading a novel after having fished a half-day. She came to my chair and handed me a small white stick with a blue plus at one end visible through a little viewing window. I held it dumbly for almost ten seconds before all the implications settled on me and I looked up at her, my hand starting to shake.

“Is this?” I said. She nodded. “Are you sure?” Again the nod and the beginnings of a smile at my confoundment. My mouth was open but there was nothing else I could say. I stood and pulled her close, feeling her face against my chest and knowing that there was now another life between us, growing bigger and stronger each day.

~

I fished with a new vigor after that, as well as doubled my job searching efforts. If there was to be another person who would be depending on me, I was going to provide the very best I could. And I would be damned if I would have only a fishing boat and the sea to offer as a legacy when it was time to be passed down.

Del began a very strict diet consisting of only organic foods, making sure to balance her proteins, carbs, and fats with each meal. We took to taking long walks down the beach after work, Del insisting each night that we needed more exercise and that it was great for the baby, me grumbling beneath my breath that I got plenty of exercise casting and hauling in lobster traps all day, but always acquiescing to her suggestions.

There was a cove that we loved to walk to barely a half-mile from our house that bordered state land. It was shaped like a wide U with high croppings of rock rising on either side, flanked by a sickle of beach sand that had grown fine as sugar over the years. To the locals it was well known but not overly visited. Many nights we would climb the small trail leading over the northern mound of rock and sit for an hour or more on the beach, our feet and toes pressed into the sand. The water would be alive with the last day’s light, the waves gentle and lit with golds and reds that reminded me of Del’s flower garden. Our favorite pastime was to expound on what our child would become when grown, each guess becoming more elaborate and unique until we were telling each other complex fantasies that nearly always drew laughter from one of us. We would trek back to the house in the near dark, the surf gathering enough light for us to make our way home, if the moon or stars shone at all. Then, of course, there was the planning of the baby’s room, which I was converting from the former guestroom beside our own. Del would stand in the doorway and watch me work when she felt too tired or sick to help, her stomach seeming to grow each day, the tautness in her shirts more pronounced along with the clothing expenses that came with new maternity wear.

The first sign that anything was wrong was when she quit packing me lunches and snacks on her days off. Normally I rose an hour or more before she did and gathered something reasonable into my lunch bag before brewing a thermos of coffee and heading out the door. But on days she was off from the university she would get up with me, either cooking me something or piecing together a meal from leftovers. I didn’t notice her sleeping in at first, but as the weeks passed it became apparent that some days she wasn’t asleep but made no effort to get up with me. I didn’t question it, as I’d told her many times she didn’t need to wait on me, especially now that she was pregnant. But with each morning that I climbed from bed, her soft form facing away from me, I felt a slight but unquestionable rift that was left unsaid. It wasn’t that she couldn’t get up, it was that she didn’t want to. As I drove to the harbor on these days, I imagined her rising the moment she heard my truck leave the yard, going to the kitchen to make her own low-fat breakfast in the silence of our house. Our lovemaking had also tapered off to almost nothing. I hadn’t attempted any advances in over two weeks and she hadn’t shown any interest or passion whenever we would kiss goodnight or goodbye. Even then I cut the head off the snake of jealousy each time it reared inside me. It was simply a change, one of many I was sure, that came with pregnancy. I’d heard tales from other friends my age about how their wives had become strangers for nearly nine months and then returned to their usual selves once the baby had been born. Either way, I didn’t blame her and even went so far as to chastise myself about noticing something as trivial as food preparation.

It was on the day before my first promising job interview that the rift seemed to widen between us. I’d applied at a law firm in Portland for a partner’s assistant position weeks before and completely written it off. I got the call on the drive home after having cleaned the boat of the sea’s detritus. They wanted to interview me the next day. Could I come in the morning? Of course. The man on the phone said that the firm had been thoroughly impressed by my answers on the application and that they were looking forward to meeting me.

I hung up consumed by an elation I hadn’t felt in years. A light had broken through the encasement that surrounded my career, a small chink that might widen into a hole I could pull myself through along with my family. The thought of the short commute to Portland wearing a tie and loafers instead of jeans and rain boots was like the dose of some glorious drug.

I entered the house and heard music playing somewhere upstairs. There was the heavy smell of fried food in the kitchen. And when I opened a white takeout box on the counter, I saw it held the remains of some type of noodles and dark, coiled shapes wound throughout them. I sniffed again, realizing what the oily forms were.

Eels.

My mouth puckered with distaste. I hated eel, and up until that point I thought Del had too. Her appetite had remained good until then, her tastes never including the stereotypical cravings of most pregnant women. Until now that was.

“Honey?” I called. No response. I moved through the living room and caught sight of her standing in the veranda, her back to me. There was a languidness to her posture, as if she’d fallen asleep standing up. “Del,” I said, moving closer. She turned her head a little, showing me a slight angle of her face.

“Yeah?”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“What are you doing?”

“Looking outside. What’s it look like I’m doing?” The acidic edge to her voice caught me off guard. Emotional swing, I figured, and tried a different tack.

“I got a call today from Edward and Towe.”

“Who?”

“The firm I applied to a few weeks back, remember?”

“Oh yeah.”

I waited, hoping she would turn fully to look at the smile on my face, but she returned her gaze to the sea instead.

“Yeah. I got an interview in the morning.”

“That’s great,” she said, but her tone said otherwise. It was as if I’d told her the mail was here or that my mother was coming to visit next week.

“I think it could be the one,” I said, still trying to engage her, but she didn’t respond. She picked up a glass of water from the windowsill and took a drink before setting it down.

“I’m really tired,” she murmured after a drawn silence. She moved toward the stairs, turning her shoulders so that she wouldn’t brush against me, and left me standing in the doorway alone with my good news that had deflated like a pricked balloon. Some quiet music clicked on a moment later upstairs.

I hovered there for nearly a minute before stepping into the porch to stand where she had. The skies were overcast and low, threatening a cool, fall rain. The ocean was a frenzied wash of whitecaps and breakers that tossed foam high into the air wherever it touched an outcropping of rock. A feeling I hadn’t felt in a long time began to invade me. The last time I’d encountered it was the first year of college when I’d seen my steady girlfriend of the moment out with one of our teacher’s aides at a restaurant after she’d told me she was heading to her parents’ house upstate for the weekend.

My hand trembled slightly as I reached out to pick up Del’s glass from the sill. A weakness flooded my muscles like poison as thoughts that I would’ve scoffed at hours ago whirl-winded through my mind. Absentmindedly I brought her cup to my mouth and took a drink.

I gagged, spitting onto the wood floor.

The glass was full of saltwater.

Abhorred, I brought the tumbler up and looked at it, holding it to the gray light. Particles and brown bits I didn’t want to identify swirled within it. I stared in the direction of our room and listened to the music pour down from where my wife had gone.

~

I didn’t get the job.

The interview had gone as wrong as one could. I couldn’t blame it on anything or anyone but myself. I had stuttered. I had gotten one of the partner’s names wrong, twice. Near the end, when I knew the job would never be mine, I answered in single words. It couldn’t be helped. I hadn’t slept the night before, there was no way I could after having drank from Del’s glass and realized what its contents were. I had tried to bring it up to her that evening, but each time I did I would catch the vacant look on her face, as if she were miles away, experiencing something or someone intimately, completely in a world of her own.

When I came home there was a note on the table. I approached it with the kind of dread a bomb squad member feels when reaching for a ticking briefcase. Del’s script was the same looping scribbles I had always known, but even through the ink left on the page I could feel her distance.

Went to an appointment today for an ultrasound at Megan’s clinic. Was going to do some shopping. Be home later.

She hadn’t even signed it.

We had decided to doctor at the clinic where her high-school friend Megan worked as a nurse when we first found out Del was pregnant, and I had missed the initial checkup nearly a month ago due to another failed interview. Del had assured me then that we would do the first ultrasound together and decide if we wanted to know the baby’s sex. Now she had gone ahead and scheduled the appointment without me.

I sat down at the table after finding a dusty bottle of tequila in the lower set of cupboards and a shot glass with the Route One road sign emblazoned on the side. The bottle was nearly full, neither of us had touched it since learning of the pregnancy. But now, at the table in my mother and father’s house, in the mid-day light, after having lost my chance at the first promising job in years, I drank.

I poured shot after shot, losing count after four. When the bottle was half empty, I took it with me out to the enclosed porch and sat staring at the sea. If asked in that moment I would have told anyone that I would have preferred the blank and barren reaches of some Oklahoma prairie to the undulating waves. Even the buckling thunderheads and swirling masses of air that signaled a tornado would have been welcome to the indifferent crash of the sea.

“You’re so fucking pathetic,” I said, slurring the last word. I didn’t know who I was speaking to, the sea or myself. “Everyone thinks you’re so majestic and wild, but I know the truth. I know you. I know you.” I took another shot of the liquor and sat back in the chair. “You’re all washed up.” It was a beat before the laughter broke from me like the bray of some wild animal. I didn’t like the sound of it, alone on the porch, but I laughed anyway. I laughed until tears clouded my vision and I had to hold myself to keep from falling to the floor. Slowly I came back to an upright position and the giggles trailed off. I must’ve fallen asleep sometime shortly after that because the next thing I knew, Del was shaking me awake.

“Jason, what the hell are you doing?” she said, stepping back as I arranged myself in the chair. My head shadowed the beat of my heart, throbbing in pulses colored a reddish black. There were coils of rusted wire in my neck and the vision in my left eye kept blurring.

“I…I think I fell asleep,” I said stupidly.

“I can see that. It looks more like you passed out.”

“Yeah.”

“What the hell’s wrong with you, Jason?”

The anger was there in a second, rising like a cobra. “Me?” I asked, standing from the chair while trying not to lurch forward. “You’re asking me what’s wrong?”

“Yes, that’s what I said.”

“I want to ask you the same question, Del. Is there something you want to tell me?”

“Like what?”

“Like why you’ve been so distant lately. Why you ignore me half the time when I’m in the same room with you. Why you’ve quit talking to me.” I paused. “Is there someone else?” The words were out there, floating between us, absorbing the air in the room until it was only the contact of our eyes that held us in any semblance of place and time.

“What are you talking about?” she said in a low voice.

“The way you’ve been acting over the past weeks, I want to know, is there someone else?” With my fears now released like the lancing of some wound, all the anger flowed out of me as well. “I just want to know, honey. Was I not paying enough attention to you? Did I do something?”

She shook her head. “There is no one else. You’re delusional.”

“It doesn’t feel that way.” All the fight had gone out of me. My stomach slewed with nausea and I couldn’t stand the way she looked at me. “Did you find out what we’re having?” I asked, hating the weakness in my voice.

“No. The baby’s healthy,” she said, then paused. “I think you should sleep down here tonight.” She placed one hand over her belly and hesitated for only a heartbeat before leaving me on the veranda. I fell back into my chair and listened to the sounds of her preparing for bed. Sounds I should’ve been making right beside her in our small bathroom. Soon there was only silence, except for the steady beat of the waves on the shore. I stretched out on the davenport below the window and stared up at the whitewashed ceiling. Something was slipping away from between us. Inexplicably and surely, my wife was changing. A part of my mind tried to take on a reassuring stance by telling me it was a phase. The second half of the pregnancy might be this way and it might become something else very soon. I needed to be patient and kind, and maybe give her some distance.

A little hope flared briefly for me in the dark as I slipped into sleep, the house creaking around me like a lullaby played by the wind.

~

The next two weeks flowed by in an uneasy truce of sorts. We would pass one another in the hall or rooms, say the necessary things for a couple to co-exist, and go about our days with the wedge of unspoken frost between us. I was patient, something she always mentioned she admired about me, keeping all of my replies and questions to her short and polite. She did the same, and the time passed.

The barrier broke in the afternoon on a day so clear and bright, it was tempting to keep your sunglasses on even while inside. The wind was coming from the west, something I realized only years later as to what may have caused the change, and the air was redolent of fall. I’d quit early that day, hoping to send in a job application for a managerial position at a local bank via email before their offices closed. It was the last day they were accepting submissions and I’d learned of the opening only the day before. When I entered the house, Del was waiting in the kitchen and immediately I could tell something was different.

“Hi,” she said as I set my gear down inside the front entry.

“Hi.”

She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I’ve been wanting to say that for the last week but couldn’t find the right time or way to do it.”

I stepped forward into the kitchen and she rose, pushing herself up with one hand on the table. Her stomach looked so large in the dress she wore.

“I’m sorry too,” I began, but she shook her head and smiled but I could see tears in her eyes, almost ready to drop free onto her face.

“You don’t have anything to be sorry for. I don’t know what came over me in the last few months. I’ve been really cold and distant. But I was telling the truth that night on the porch. There’s no one else, there could never be.”

I tried to say something, but there were no words that could convey the relief I felt. I stepped forward and held her, kissing her with everything I’d been holding back over the months. The worry, the heartache, the longing, the jealousy, everything poured out in that single moment, and I was refilled with the love for her that hadn’t ever truly departed. She kissed me back and seconds later we were on the floor, groping at one another’s clothing, peeling it away like the barriers that had fallen from the gap between us.

We made love there on the hardwood, our caresses long and gentle, and when it was through, we held each other until evening crept in with placid shadows.

I cooked her lobster that night. I’d brought two home thinking that I’d be eating alone again on the back porch. Del devoured the entire meal with a gusto I hadn’t witnessed in weeks. When she began to playfully pick at the last few bites of my lobster tail, I slid the plate to her.

“You need it more than I do.”

She smiled. “I’ve had such a craving for seafood lately. Could you start bringing more home?”

“It’s the one thing I can do well, I guess,” I said. “No one else seems to want to hire me.”

She touched my hand. “It’ll happen when it’s time, just like everything else. Until then we’ll be just fine.”

And so throughout the next week I brought her the food she requested. Lobster, shrimp, tuna, cod. Some I caught and others I purchased from the market beside the harbor. Despite the jubilation at our relationship rekindling, a small part of me was growing more and more concerned. It was Del’s requests for how her food was to be cooked. Increasingly she wanted the fish cooked less, the shrimp boiled for only minutes. At times she caught me watching her tear through a limp and slightly slimy cut of fish, and I’m sure she saw a hint of revulsion on my face. I couldn’t always hide it, and she assured me that anything from the sea was perfectly safe to eat even raw. She would shrug and say the cravings must have come late, before popping another jellied piece of seafood into her mouth.

It was a Saturday when I brought the three small squid home for dinner. I’d spent the day in Portland, checking on several applications I’d dropped off and shaking hands with various managers at the businesses, making it a point to introduce myself personally each time. The need to be off of the boat was nearly a physical thing by then. I had even started to get seasick on days that the swells climbed anywhere over five feet. I hadn’t been seasick since my seventh birthday.

When I got home, Del was doing a load of laundry and humming something to herself. I carried the squid to the kitchen sink in the container the market had provided, the six inches of water inside slopping against the lid. I could see their shapes through the semi-transparent plastic the container was made of, their alien bodies interwoven and claw-like where their short tentacles trailed out. They propelled themselves through the water, bumping against the plastic barrier with soft thuds. Del had asked for them specifically the night before, saying she had such a craving for fresh calamari it wasn’t even funny. I had only cooked squid twice before and wasn’t relishing the thought of dispatching the live creatures with my fillet knife.

I left the container in the sink and returned to the truck to retrieve the last of the groceries. The air was cool and picked at my flannel shirt as well as the tops of the pines that bordered Harold’s yard. As I was pulling the last bag from the truck bed, I heard the old man himself call out to me from his porch. I hadn’t seen him in well over a week and had meant to call his son to see if he had gone on a trip or been hospitalized again by the pneumonia that had afflicted him the prior winter.

“Harold, where’ve you been? We were starting to worry about you,” I said as I approached the porch. Harold sat, reclined in one of his chairs, a steaming cup of coffee on the table at his elbow. His white hair, normally in slight disarray, had been trimmed and combed, and I noticed the jacket he wore appeared to be new.

“Went and visited my daughter down in South Carolina. She and her husband were goin’ ta’ come here but they got waylaid by his job. He’s a good man, but a lawyer, so I’m not overly certain he’s completely human.”

I laughed, shifting the grocery bag from one hand to the other. “Well, I’m glad you got a trip under your belt before winter showed up. Don’t think it’ll be long now before it snows.”

He regarded the skies like a weatherman studying a barometric pressure reading. “Be a day or so and we’ll be gettin’ a storm. Not snow yet but wind’n rain for sure.” Over the years I had come to trust Harold’s predictions when it came to the weather. The old timers had something that the forecasters could never attain with their technology and weather models. It was as if time bestowed gifts to certain people when they reached a definite age, secrets that were normally out of reach becoming knowledge after so many years alive. “You and that pretty wife a yours should stop by soon, cook me up somethin’ off your boat there. I got a nice bottle of Cabernet that my daughter gave me and the doc said not to have more’n one glass at a sittin’.”

“We might take you up on that,” I said, starting to sidle away. “Give me a shout tomorrow if you figure out a night that would work good.”

“Any night’s good for me,” he called as I strode toward our house. “Ain’t got no one waitin’ on me but the reaper, an he can sit an spin for all I care.”

I laughed and threw a final wave over my shoulder as I made my way up our walk. I chuckled, stepping into the house, making a note to tell Del we’d have to bring dinner to the old man sometime this week. Del made a mean blueberry pie and we still had some frozen from the hours of picking I’d done in August.

I stepped into the kitchen, opening my mouth to ask Del which night she thought would work best to visit Harold, and stopped.

Del was standing at the sink. Her hands pressed to her mouth.

Her jaws worked, feverishly chewing. I could see the muscles in her cheek bulging each time she bit down. For a moment I thought she was having some kind of seizure or that something had happened while I was outside. She had fallen maybe and the baby had been hurt inside her. I took a step forward, reaching out, terrified to look down at the floor, knowing somehow that I would see blood there, pooled beneath her, running from her in a torrent of life that would never be.

There are sights that a person can witness that will not fit within the normal boundaries of consciousness or recognition. To put it simply, there are limits to the human mind that horror can surpass, and when it does, there is nothing but the void of madness waiting beyond.

Something was moving between Del’s lips. Squirming.

For a brief moment I thought it was her tongue, but then I saw the glossy blackness, the wet movement I always attributed to sea life, and a tentacle wriggled free between two of her fingers.

“Del, what the hell are you doing?” I said. She neither looked at me nor broke her gaze out the window. Her teeth ground together with a wet crunching.

I stepped forward and in that instant something let loose. It seemed like a physical presence had relinquished its grip on the room and fled, leaving the air cleaner and lighter. Del’s eyes narrowed and she turned her head toward me, her glazed stare slowly clearing.

Her mouth opened and the partially chewed squid fell out into her hands. It was a mangled, slimy mess of slick skin and broken tentacles. One limb death-flailed and wrapped around her little finger. Del’s jaw worked and her fingers opened, the writhing squid dropping free to the floor with a wet plop. The scream that burst from her was a rending of sanity, a shriek so full of repulsion and abhorrence that I flinched.

She shrank away from the squid that was turning itself in a slow circle, its remaining legs twisting obscenely. Del took two steps back, one of her hands coming up to cover her mouth, surely to stanch another scream, but just then she slipped. Her feet tangled and she began to fall.

I leapt over the dying cephalopod and snagged her hand, ignoring the slime that covered it, and pulled her to me, stopping her fall. She was stiff as a wooden timber and shaking. Her whole body trembled beneath her clothes like she had been hooked to high voltage. I stroked her hair.

“Shhhh, it’s okay, I’ve got you. I’ve got you,” I whispered. My voice was surprisingly steady in comparison to how my insides shriveled and crawled, mirroring the squid’s feeble movements across the wood floor. My mind was screaming countless questions, a barrage that I had no answers for.

“Jason.” She sobbed my name, crying fully now and leaning all of her weight on me. “What’s happening to me?”

I continued to stroke her hair and stare at the squid, its movements slowing. “I don’t know, honey. I don’t know.”

~

I slept in bouts and fits through the night, mostly because Del kept waking and clinging to me as if she were falling. I had brought her up to our bathroom after the incident and bathed her, washed her hair, helped her brush her teeth, speaking as calmly as I could, reassuring her that she was okay, that she was safe. She didn’t seem to be fully conscious of what I was saying, her eyes drifting shut again and again. When I finally got her into bed, she fell asleep almost at once. I took the opportunity to go downstairs and retrieve the squid from the floor. It was dead when I tossed it into the container with its two healthy companions. I walked down to the ocean and stepped close to the tideline, emptying them all into the sea. I stood there for a short time, looking out across the darkening waters before returning to the house. I had no appetite and simply washed my hands and face before climbing into bed beside her, but not before I called the first psychiatrist I found in the phone book. I left a message on a separate line that was given, since it was after hours, and the doctor, a man by the name of Jeff Chave, returned my call in the morning saying he would be happy to see me before his first appointment.

When I left the house, Del was sleeping solidly for the first time all night, her hair splayed out on her pillow. She looked so peaceful I could almost pretend that the night before hadn’t happened. I locked the door behind me, jingling Del’s keys in one hand. I didn’t want her having access to her car while I was gone, and though I felt a twinge of self-loathing at taking her transportation away like a jailer, I would never forgive myself if something happened to her.

The drive to Chave’s office was fairly quick, and his receptionist greeted me before showing me into a comfortable room complete with a leather reclining chair and a small stool beside it. One wall held a tall bookshelf filled with tomes, and a wilting plant sat in one corner. A single window covered with a thin drape let in sickly light from the day that seemed would get no brighter. I sat in the recliner studying my hands until I heard footsteps approaching the door. Chave stepped into the room and greeted me with a warm smile and a handshake filled with strength I didn’t expect. He was middle aged, a small potbelly hid behind a yellow shirt beneath a hounds tooth coat. He had a full head of iron-gray hair and wore a beard the same color. His eyes were dark brown, magnified by the thick glasses he wore.

He took a seat on the stool beside me and scooted it back, giving us some distance to study one another.

“So Jason, normally I spend the better part of the first hour getting to know my patients, their interests, their familial records and whatnot, but you sounded urgent on your message last night.” Chave’s eyes ran over me, missing nothing. “What can I do for you?”

How could I begin? How could I speak of what had transpired over the prior months? My initial thoughts had been to test out the doctor, see if he would be a person we could trust before sending Del to him. But now, under his unflinching gaze, I faltered.

“Doctor, I don’t know what’s happening to my wife. I—” My mouth hung open and my tongue worked, but no words came. Instead, tears flooded my vision and one leaked out. I wiped it away and shook my head, trying to clear my voice with a cough.

“It’s okay, Jason, believe me, nothing you’re going to say is going to shock me. I won’t judge you or your wife. I won’t condemn any actions you’ve taken so far. I’m simply here to listen and help if I can. So why don’t you begin at the beginning, as they say.”

I took a deep breath, nodding, and began to speak.

Everything poured from me. It came out in an unbroken narrative threaded with patches where my voice failed me. I choked out last night’s events, barely keeping control of my emotions. My heels drummed on the floor and I felt the urge to bolt from the room, just tear the door open and run into the street, breathe the fresh air and keep going until my body failed me. When I finished, a deep silence invaded the room and Chave blinked, taking in a long breath.

“Well Jason, first off, I’m very glad you came to me because this does sound serious. The loss of one’s surroundings or conscious acts are not things to be taken lightly. Without seeing your wife and speaking to her, I can only make educated guesses as to her condition.”