by Sonya Taaffe
Alex said tightly, “Ours.”
The generous grain of her mouth moved in an expression he hoped was contempt; otherwise he did not recognize it. “I carried the sea inside me, Alex. For nine months I heard it, felt it displacing my body, tasted it in my mouth every morning, smelled it on my skin. And then it came out of me, as surely as she did, and I knew she was part of it, too. Sick she is and harbour-sick—O sick to clear the land! What will you do to her, when she finds out? Cut off her fingers and toes so she can’t follow? She’ll know anyway.”
“For God’s sake!” He held the sock balled uselessly in one hand, as though he could hurl it across the room and knock something off the shelves, the Belly CD that Annata had played nonstop for almost three weeks in February, the painted wooden tulip in a cobalt-blue bottle, an ammonite in a palm-sized slice of oil-black stone, souvenirs of trips or museums neither of them could remember, anything that could break. “First Shakespeare, now Lovecraft, Annata! If you’re going to be crazy”—so they had come to the word too easily, at last—“at least be original.”
Her face was turned from him, into night shadows and her rain-stitched reflection. “I take after my mother’s side of the family.”
This, she had made into her muddy guising, not the application of a mask, but its removal: so nakedly metamorphosed that she might have mimed for strangers the caresses and groans of their lovemaking, as private and essential a desire. This, he might have forecast, and asked not to hear. “You can’t leave,” Alex said. His voice pitched wildly. “I’d hold on to you. That’s how Peleus caught Thetis. He held on to her, like Tam Lin, and didn’t let go no matter what shape she took. She consented to marry him, Annata. The best of Nereus’ daughters: and in a year she bore him a child, the lucky driver of golden colts.” Myth for myth, as he took the next step toward her, “She was a sea-goddess, too,” and then he was close enough to touch her tightly hunched shoulder; his hand closed around her upper arm.
Pain slashed up his forearm; he jerked back more in shock than hurt, until he saw the red lines slowly welling where his sleeve flapped back. “Annata, fuck—” The sweat on his face was cold, sticky as the spent aftermath of fever. Fingers clawed into the bedclothes, she stared up at him with eyes that were not slit-pupiled as an octopus’, dark hazel and not chromatic gold, her lips drawn back to reveal no shark’s teeth webbed with his blood, only whatever lay beyond contempt, so scarred and absolute that he had no answer against it. She had laid his skin open with her nails; his blood was smeared blackly on the forest-green sheets, trickling unfelt to his wrist. “Don’t touch me,” the whaleman’s great-granddaughter said, more hoarsely than Caliban. “You can’t hold me here. Our daughter’s awake.” She rose and went past him; after a moment he sat down in the scarf-strung chair, and after another he wondered why he was not crying.
**
The houses are all gone under the sea.
—T.S. Eliot, “East Coker”
**
In the last light after sunset, the waves had turned as opaque and smoky as two-thousand-year-old glass, steely blue and bruised grey; quieter than the sky beneath the clouds that had drawn in with evening, streaked like Krakatoa. Over the headlands, the air would still be fire, red as any sailor’s delight. But to see for himself, he would have to turn and take his eyes from the sea, and in the moment that he looked away, his daughter might disappear into it again; her hair roiled back from her face in the dimming wind, a fine cold spray, the same color as the time-raked beds beneath them, and he said in a terror of blankness, “I wanted to name you Chryseis.”
Her last stone skipped nine times across the twilight water, vanished in a wave or the dusk; her fingers still curled around wet pebbles, picked from the silk-grey jumble where the tide had slid out with the sunset. Like a sandpiper, she had moved delicately, impulsively, between high and low tides, and Alex could not guess what attracted her to one sun-blackened pile of seaweed rather than another, the yellow iridescence of a jingle shell rather than a riddle of driftwood gnawed ash-colored by the waves, unless it was simple beachcomber’s curiosity, what the sea made of the land or gave of itself to the shore. When he held out a hand for a skipping-stone, she put a question into it instead. “Why?”
“I had a crush on the Iliad.” The pebble she let into his palm was white quartz, a lopsided piece of foam; he tossed and caught it once, like a nickel in a gangster film, and hurled it overhand without looking. He smiled suddenly at the expression on her face, as though he had changed shape himself under her gaze. “Your mother never told you?”
“No.” Her feet on the cindery ribs of rock were soled with drying sand, not the sandals he had given her, but she said, “Tell me.”
Ten years old, she had been more eager to show him limpets and mussels and the Plimsoll lines of toothed wrack and dulse around the boulders on West Island than to listen to ramblings from either of their lives. “It’s not a secret,” Alex said. “I took Oral and Early Literature with Albert Lord; I was hooked…. The day you were born, I was even working some lines from Book 18 into Dead Sea Transcripts. It’s a two-person piece, I wrote it for a workshop and there’s a reason not even undergraduates perform it, but one of the characters is a woman who is both Thetis and the Virgin Mary, who knows and does not want to know, even before her son is born, that someday she’ll have to mourn for him—as a species, we’re very good at seeing portents in retrospect.” Another title that he would never have the chance to use: as impossible to fix on paper as the waves pleating darkly against the ledges, the tide far enough out that the barnacles he leaned onto with the heel of his hand were still warm from the salmon and lavender sky. The taste of brine was back in his mouth; he said steadily, “They sent me home from Beth Israel a little after midnight with assurances that nothing was going to happen for a few hours, so I might as well get some sleep. Of course I couldn’t sleep. I took a shower, and I put back on the same shirt I’d thrown on that morning when Annata—when your mother woke up with contractions, and I stalked around the apartment with an old paperback of Lattimore and a yellow legal pad and a pencil I kept chewing the eraser on, because I hadn’t written anything serious by hand since high school and I knew that if I settled down at the typewriter, the phone would ring. And that was maybe five minutes, and then the nurse called. And around two in the morning, you were born, and we were still arguing about your name. I wanted Chryseis, she wanted Elizabeth.”
A net of words: and he had caught her in it. Motionless, listening, her face took its color from the sky and the waves, a subdued and luminous strangeness. Any father could put an arm around his daughter’s shoulders, but only if she did not harden into whale ivory or collapse into a sheet of salt water; her lips were parted, drinking story in. When she spoke, her voice was as young as the child he remembered. “Which one did you pick?” He jarred, blinking, out of his past. “What?”
“Which name did you give me?”
“Which—” His mouth stayed open, as though the words had burned out of it: fury, or pain, or disbelief wedged into his throat instead; if he tried to choke it down, he would be coughing blood. So someone else must have been answering her, not quite calmly: “Your name is Adrian. We compromised on it. A name of the sea for your mother, a historical name for me. I had a great-uncle Andrzej and she had a grandmother Amelia. You don’t remember?”
She shook her head slightly; she had not even had to consider it. “No.”
“Oh, fucking Christ.”
One of the times she had stooped to browse the shingle in the fading light, her hair must have picked up a wet clump of weed, spring-leaf green; he would have reached to disentangle it, if he had not been gripping basalt and barnacles so hard that he could no longer feel them, but with her pale, sand-stained fingers she was already combing it free. A thin vein of water was rounding her wrist, salt and inexhaustible. “Father….” and he wished fruitlessly that she would call him Marcinko, Alex, anything but this kinship; she sounded only puzzled. “
It’s like neap tides, or postcards. It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters if you have nothing left of me. Nothing I could give you.” He laughed shortly; T-shirts, sandals, ice cream. There were seabirds flying low on the eastern horizon, but he had never been able to name their silhouettes. “Sometimes I dream—not daydream: dream,” but probably she had never read C.S. Lewis in her starfish-strewn childhood: or she had always identified with the little fish-herdess fathoms down in the shining sea of the Utter East, he could not pretend to know, “I still dream that the police are knocking on my door, telling me to come downstairs, I have to make an identification. Two bodies have washed up in Bristol County and one of them might have been a woman about thirty-five and the other might have been a small child, a girl, but after a week in the water with the fish and the crabs, even in the dead of winter, it’s a little hard to tell…. And sometimes I dream that I walk down to the shore, but it doesn’t matter how patiently I wait, because you aren’t what will come out of the sea to meet me. You drowned before your fourth birthday, because your mother couldn’t separate ghost stories from the air she breathed, and if I think I see you standing in the shallows, it’s only something in the sea that’s counterfeited your shape, like withered leaves and dirt are made to look like fairy gold—it’ll rot back into mud and seaweed if it stays too long out of the water, and sometimes I have to watch that happen. And sometimes, Adrian”—even if it was no longer her name, he knew nothing else to call her by—“sometimes I wake up and I start to tell my wife about this fucking weird nightmare I had.”
All the things he had sworn he would never mention to her, the griefs and demands he had saved for her mother and no one else, but in thirteen years Annata Southworth had never resurfaced even as briefly as a one-night stand and his daughter had not yet slipped away into the dark. “The postcards.” There was salt dripping down the back of his throat; he swallowed and said with an eff ort, “The one from the Shetlands and the one from New Zealand? There was another one, posted from somewhere like Mauritius or the Seychelles; it came when I was still living in the old apartment in Cambridge, and I thought it was a prank. It couldn’t have been her handwriting. The investigation had finally—I reported it to the police. I thought it was some incredible, cruel joke, some ambulance-chaser or some friend of Annata’s who had never wanted to believe she killed herself, I didn’t even want to look at it. And I had nightmares for months afterward, of her calling out to me from the sea and I had turned my back on her: I had let her drown.” Now he did turn away from her, so that she would not have to see his face: a stranger in tears, shapeless with too many bitter words and tight-lipped nights until he could no longer tell self-pity from true sorrow. When he unclamped his hand from the rock, the barnacles glistened wetly in the mussel-pearl dusk.
“And I dream,” his daughter said clearly, “that I walk out of the water and there’s no one here to meet me, but I can’t go back. I dream that I swim out past the channel lights and the tankers and the sea is still closed to me, but there’s nowhere on land for me to go. I’m dying in the air; I can’t breathe; I’m drowning in the waves. When I wake, I can’t remember where I should be.”
Her fingers, working their way between his, were colder than the spume-flecked stone, sea-salt biting into his palm. He whispered, “It can’t be that easy.”
He thought she was crying, too, until she looked at him: the backs of her eyes were luminescent, as hauntingly blue as ghosts in the deep. “It’s like my name.” By the time he realized there was no other half to that sentence, at the edge of the night sky, the moon was beginning to rise.
**
And in the snowblind hollows of January and the scouring months that followed, Alex wondered if it would have changed anything, if he had told anyone about the dream. But he asked the same of everything, from late nights he had spent nowhere in particular to chapter books he had bought for their daughter’s next birthday, coincidences of obsession and half-forgotten arguments from long before Annata moved in, when she was only the ginger-haired woman from the next seat over at the Revels, who had pulled him to his feet to dance the sun back from the dead; all as critical or irrelevant, and as he faded from murder suspect to commonplace widower to solitary no one at all, he knew Annata was the last person he would have told, in any case: she might have believed him.
Not the slow coil of nightmares he had woken from, no details that he could recall and no less dread as he walked back from the bathroom in the solstice dark, the setting moon; the air thickened coldly around him and the floorboards were no warmer under his feet, ziggurats of books and laundry heaps of clothing darkly unidentifiable in the lime-leached light; he kept blinking away shadows that would not clear. Annata had barely stirred as he slipped out of bed, as uncomplicated in sleep as she would be unreachable in the morning, but he could not shake the sense that someone else, smaller, lighter-footed, had run past the doorway and woken him; their daughter had proved as nocturnal as either of her parents, this miracle that had cried them awake most nights of a year and he had walked back and forth until dawn with her, chanted rhymes and cradle songs and whatever had played on WCRB that afternoon until she calmed; told her stories until she began to tell them back in patches and headlong improvisation, aetiologies for clouds or fingers, dream-eaters and rain-makers, until each night’s bedtime was an epic in itself, stepping-stones leading her off into dreams he could not imagine. Worlds ringed on worlds, as close as skins and incommunicable. The winter stillness as though sound had frozen out of the air, only the snakeskin shiver of dry snow that the wind swept down from the roofs, the clicks and clanks that the old pipes made to themselves in the wall, impersonal as a snowglobe. But he was human, half-conscious, not some crystalline eddy through deep water or immutable cold; he almost knocked into the chair he had shoved too far back from his desk around midnight, as though the apartment were not enough of a minefield already: references and notes strewn across the typewriter keys, stray translations piled beside an empty water glass on the sill, hardcover library discards and a terrycloth duck that he sidestepped as he reached out of habit to push the chair safely out of the way.
It would not move; a weight was in it. Of themselves, his hands opened from the straight-backed wood, closed convulsively on the chill imprint left on his palms. Colorless in the three o’clock light, the fair-haired man in the dark peacoat turned his face toward Alex, a shell flung up on a darkening shore. The blood was roaring in his ears, or the sea. Out of the gathering wave, the man spoke.
“You do love her. I reckoned. I’m sorry.”
In shadow, he was younger than Alex, sturdy bones and scarred hands and his face still boyish for all its windburn, the sun at latitudes where winters flamed and sweated, summers where ships could founder on the ice. Then he leaned forward into the slanting moonlight, one hand around the neck of a glass onion bottle that he might have picked up from the floor or thin air, and Alex saw and forgot in the same moment that the man cast no shadow: his face was a ruin of shipworm and barnacles, like a sunken figurehead, and the hand that raised the bottle in a faint, sardonic toast was little more than crusted bone. When he smiled, the drowned boatsteerer, his mouth was full of pearls. “No,” Alex whispered. “No.” Whether he meant to deny that he loved Annata, or that a dead man should feel sorry for him, it did not seem to matter. “Not you.”
“Why?” This was the voice that Annata’s Caliban had only tried to imitate, whatever accent had rooted him to New England long since slurred away into the pitches of the sea. The nacreous glimmer behind his teeth ran and broke into water on the floor, a moonstone sheen of salt splashed across the boards, rising like a miniature tide on each fallen word. “There’s worse than me in this world. You’ll see worse before this tide’s turned. Both of us. She’s one of mine, too.”
Alex shook his head, dumbly. The chill that breathed through the panes behind him made him shudder, all his flesh locked against itself as though winter had welded him in place. O
n the far side of the room, the radiator bled noiseless steam and whatever Ezra McKay drank from his cracked bottle made as little sound as sand through an hourglass—he might have been drinking time, all the circling seconds as Alex opened his eyes too wide, straining through layers of dream toward the body-heat weight of blankets and the damp spot his mouth had made on the pillowcase, unable to wake. So he had never hauled himself out of nightmare, and the apartment lay vacant around him. No one in the bedroom to disturb, no one to scare awake with shouting. If he peered out the frost-blown window, the world would recede into snow unmarred by footprints, tire-tracks, roofs and balconies buried in tinsel silence and the earth frozen to iron under all. “One of yours,” he said finally. His voice scraped like a rowboat’s hull over shingle. “Christ, I—” before the rest burst out of him, “Haven’t you had enough of haunting this family?” Dead air that his cry clattered into. He wanted never to have discovered the sound a drowned man made when he laughed.
Only once, and humorlessly, before the boatsteerer slouched back in his chair again to regard Alex from the chill shadows. “And if I had?” He sleeved his mouth half-curiously, his face for the moment fleshed human and willful, wheat-stubbled. Where he rested the bottle on his knee, a corner of moonlight showed a tattoo at his wrist, or only the way shadow fell between the bones. His fingers dripped sea lettuce and mermaid’s hair. “With her every other night in my dreams? She haunts me. I’d rest easy if she’d let my bones alone.”
“Like your wife did?” The words were out of his mouth less gracefully than pearls, harder to bite back. Into the silence bent on him like the drowned man’s attention, Alex pushed on, “You came out of the sea for her. You came back for her. Or was she just haunting you, too?”
