And The Sea Called Her Name

And The Sea Called Her Name

Text copyright
©
2015 by Joe Hart

Published by Joe Hart at Smashwords.

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal
enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to
other people. If you would like to share this book with another
person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If
you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not
purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to
Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own
copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission from
the author.

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.