And The Sea Called Her Name (2 page)

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.