And The Sea Called Her Name (4 page)

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.