Sea Change

by Karen White

  I went down the row of my brothers, standing in birth order from youngest to oldest, as was their habit—David, Joshua, Mark, and Stephen—and hugged each. Matthew followed, shaking each hand before turning to my father.

  “I’ll take good care of her, sir.”

  “You’d better. She’s very precious to us.” My father cleared his throat, uncomfortable with any expectations of expressed affection.

  My eyes stung as I looked down the row again at my brothers, each face mirroring the same sympathy. I’d never felt as separate from them as I did then, the lone dandelion in a garden of sunflowers. I was suddenly unsure of my reasons for leaving, whether what I felt for Matthew was only a temporary balm for the constant restlessness that had dogged me since I was old enough to reason with the world around me.

  I turned back to my father. “Tell Mama that I love her and that I’ll call when I’m settled.” I began to babble, something I’d always done when my emotions threatened to spill over. “My roommate is packing up all of my stuff and sending it, and I told her to keep the furniture, and we’re having somebody bring my car. And Matthew’s positive I won’t have a problem finding a job with my background and credentials. So there’s no need to worry, okay?” I wasn’t sure why I was rambling about things we’d already discussed. Maybe a part of me wanted him to break down and tell me why I had to be kept at arm’s distance. Or maybe I was killing time waiting for my mother to run out of the house and hug me and explain to me why, after all the years of feeding me and clothing me and teaching me right from wrong, she could let me go without saying good-bye.

  Matthew touched my arm. “It’s a long drive. If we want to get there before dark, we should go now.”

  As we turned toward the car, I heard my name shouted. I turned to find my mother’s mother, my Mimi, walking as quickly as she could, considering her ninety-one years and her insistence on still wearing heels—albeit low ones—and holding something in her hands. I’d said good-bye to her earlier as she’d stood guard at her daughter’s closed bedroom door, and wondered with some lingering hope whether she’d brought a conciliatory message from my mother.

  “Ava!” she called again, confirming that she had my attention. She stopped in front of us, her blond hair—courtesy of Clairol as if we wouldn’t suspect she should have a head full of gray hair—streaming around her face. We waited as she caught her breath, and I eyed the treasure in her hands.

  “You don’t want to forget this,” she said, stretching out her arms. Sitting in her open palms was a square wooden music box, the old-fashioned kind that when you opened the lid you could look inside to see the working mechanisms underneath a clear glass cover. The lid was dented and stained with watermarks, but even though I hadn’t seen the box in a number of years, I was sure the mechanism inside still worked. It had been refurbished by my brother Stephen, after I’d found it nearly twenty-seven years before.

  After a brief hesitation, I reached out to her, allowing her to gently place the music box in my hands. Of all the things I was leaving behind me, I wondered why this would be the one thing she wanted to make sure I wouldn’t.

  “Just to remind you,” she said, patting my fingers as I closed them over the top of the box.

  “Of what?”

  She had the odd gleam in her eye that always reminded me that she was half Cherokee, raised in the mountains of Tennessee without much of a formal education, but she was still the smartest person I knew. “That some endings are really beginnings. If you don’t remember anything I’ve ever tried to teach you, remember that.”

  She enveloped me in a tight hug as I smelled the reassuring scent of talcum powder and Aqua Net. “I will.”

  Mimi glanced up at Matthew, and I thought for a moment that her expression was one of accusation. But when I looked back at her face, it was gone.

  We said our good-byes and, with one last glance toward the house, I climbed into the passenger seat of the silver sedan and allowed Matthew to shut the door. I didn’t look back at my grandmother, or my father and brothers, standing like despondent scarecrows who’d failed to protect their crops, identical in their tall, narrow builds, their hair the same shade of dark brown that matched perfectly with the somberness of their black pants.

  I didn’t look back because once, long ago, Mimi had told me it was bad luck, that if you looked back it meant you’d never return. It’s not that this place held so much meaning for me; I’d always known I’d leave, even though until now I’d never figured out where I’d go. I suppose it’s one of the reasons why I’d never set a wedding date with Phil, having always felt beneath the surface of my life the constant current of restlessness. A sense that there was something more waiting for me somewhere else. The moment I’d met Matthew, I felt that I’d finally found what I’d been looking for.

  I sat back with my fingers still cupped around the small music box until Matthew took my hand and held it in his while he drove us to the other side of the state, to the island nestled against the great Atlantic where my new husband and his family had lived since the American Revolution.

  Matthew’s thumb rubbed the slightly raised birthmark near the base of my thumb on my left hand that looked more like a scar. My mother told me I’d had it since birth, but I’d always preferred to think of it as a scar from some daring feat I’d sustained in childhood with no memory of how I’d obtained it. There were times when I wished that all of life’s scars were like that, medals of survival for a pain no longer remembered.

  His thumb found the new gold band that encircled the fourth finger of my left hand and stopped. “You’re not wearing your engagement ring.” It wasn’t an accusation, but more a statement of fact.

  I stared down at my hand. I hadn’t meant to leave the beautiful diamond solitaire ring in my jewelry box. I had worn the ring for three days—as that was all the time we had between the time we decided to get married and the actual ceremony. I loved the ring, the antique setting and blue-white round stone. But when Matthew had placed the gold wedding band on my finger, it had felt somehow wrong to wear it with another ring. I couldn’t explain it, couldn’t think of a way to tell Matthew that wearing two rings gave me the feeling of walking into my house but finding all the furniture rearranged.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I keep forgetting it. I know I’ll get used to wearing them both, though. Promise.”

  He nodded, focusing on passing an eighteen-wheeler. I sat back and looked out the window, imagining our car on the map headed east toward the ocean. I’d never been to the coast. My family, mostly grown by the time I joined them, had been too busy for family vacations to the beach. Despite friends returning with summer tans and shell collections, I’d been secretly glad. There was something unnerving about the ocean, with its endless horizon lapping at the earth’s edge. Matthew spoke of taking me sailing, and of kayaking through the endless marshes of his island, but I could only nod noncommittally. I was in love and eager not to disappoint, and hopeful, too, that he would help me to love the water as much as he did.

  Late-afternoon sun slanted into the car as we reached Savannah, the warmth lulling me into a quiet doze. I half awoke to a familiar scent, realizing in my groggy state that Matthew must have opened the windows, as the breeze I felt on my face was warm and carried with it the scent of something I found familiarly intoxicating yet alarming at the same time.

  Still only partially awake, I tried to turn my head toward the smell, and to push my feet against the floor of the car to prop myself up. But I was paralyzed, being held down by an invisible force as I tried to extract myself from the dark space between sleep and wakefulness. I heard the radio and Matthew’s soft humming, but I heard something else, too, a sound like water rushing over sand. The old nightmare hovered just out of reach, dodging the periphery of my consciousness, threatening to descend and pull me to a place I didn’t want to go.

  The music box fell from my lap and slipped to the floor, my hands too numb to catch it. I struggled to open my eyes, to se
e what I was smelling, what I sensed creeping up on me, but I couldn’t. The lid of the music box opened and the familiar song began to play, its tinkling noise unexpectedly jarring against the rush of the wind. I focused on it, on the feel of the box pressed against my paralyzed foot, and listened to a small whine of sound that grew gradually louder, forcing my eyes open in time to realize the sound was a person screaming. And that the person screaming was me.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It began the summer I turned seven: the summer of tornadoes and the wail of weather sirens and sleeping in our basement. Or maybe it all began long before then, before I understood the concept of time and how it runs in perpetual loops, spinning its spiderweb of hours until the past, present, and future are no longer separate, distinct entities.

  On the day after my birthday, I stood in front of my house and watched as other people’s lives fell into our yard. Most of it was trash—paper, ruined photographs, scraps of wood that could have been furniture or a house, but rendered so small and splintered that it had been impossible to tell. But there’d been a few treasures, too. An Instamatic camera, with the film still inside, had fallen into my mother’s rose garden. And into the boxwood in front of my bedroom window, as if it were a gift meant for me, the music box had landed wet and scratched, but otherwise intact.

  Gripping the box, I’d run inside to show my mother, to play the tune that I knew but couldn’t place. She’d begun to sing words, words she said she’d sung to me as a baby. The song was an old lullaby and she’d sung it to all of her children. But there was something wrong with her explanation. Maybe it had been her insistence that I was looking for a story where there wasn’t one. Or maybe it was because the words she sang seemed wrong to me, as if I could recall different words to the song if I thought hard enough, words that eluded me even now.

  That had been the beginning of the nightmares, of dreams of being pursued and out of breath, of being surrounded by water and sucked beneath it while the air from my lungs rose in bubbles like tiny fish, floating to the surface while I lay on the sandy bottom. They’d been infrequent during my childhood, and almost nonexistent since my twenties. Until now.

  I pressed my head into Matthew’s chest, trying to register his words. He’d pulled the car over into a drive that crunched under our tires, holding me close while we both tried to understand what was wrong with me. And why in the two short months since I’d known him I hadn’t mentioned my dreams to him. Even after we’d decided to marry and live on St. Simons, I’d not told him about my fear of water. Maybe because there were too many other things we wanted to talk about in our brief courtship. Or maybe I was hoping that my dreams and fear had been something I’d left behind in my twenties along with my need to please my parents.

  “I’m okay,” I said, raising the bottle of water he’d placed in my shaking hands to my mouth. “It’s just…I didn’t know where I was. And I couldn’t move, and the windows were open and…” I stopped, not yet able to explain what it was that had terrified me.

  His chest rumbled under my ear as he spoke. “It’s probably the lingering smell of the paper plant in Brunswick. It’s much better now that the EPA changed some rules, but some people are sensitive to it. I’m sure it’s just something you need to get used to.”

  I nodded, hoping he was right. “I’m sorry,” I said. I looked into his worried eyes, needing to reassure him. “I just want to get home. To start our life together.”

  He leaned down and kissed me softly. There was so much we still didn’t know about each other, but the connection I felt to him when he kissed me, or touched me, erased any lingering doubts. It had been that way since the moment we’d met. Before I’d known his name, I’d known him in the same way a newborn baby knows his own mother.

  Matthew started the engine and pulled out onto the tree-canopied road. “We’re on Demere,” he said, “and when we reach the small airfield we’ll go through the roundabout and take a left on Frederica. Those two roads and Sea Island Road are the main three arteries on St. Simons. Once you figure out where you are in relation to them, you’ll never get lost.”

  I nodded and tried to smile, but my jaw was stiff. The windows were still down, bringing the scent of the island into the car, an odd mix of salt and vegetation. It was new, yet strangely familiar, like when I was younger and would smell the newly waxed floors on the first day of school. The scent of the island tugged on my memory, a stubborn piece that refused to be dislodged no matter how hard I nudged it.

  I tried to focus on the few turns he made, to remember how I could find the house on my own, but I couldn’t. The large, lovely trees with their shawls of Spanish moss, and even the broken oyster shells on the roads were all new to me, yet, like the scent in the air, it was as if I expected them, expected to see them, and to hear the crunching of the shells beneath the tires. I knew how the spongy green moss would feel between my fingers and how the sun would look on the branches of the trees at sunset.

  “You did a good job,” I said, reaching for his hand and lacing my fingers with his.

  “Of what?”

  “Of telling me about this place. I feel as if I already know it. Like I’ve lived here my whole life.”

  He squeezed my hand. “I love St. Simons, and I hope you’ll come to love it, too. And to think of it as your home.”

  I smiled, then turned my head away to look out my window, hoping he couldn’t see the unease, the lingering sensation of the terror I’d felt earlier. Or the persistent restlessness that I’d thought vanquished when I said “I do” that seemed to cling to me like a stubborn web.

  A sea of gold and green grass filled the scenery to the right of the road, rippling softly, as if someone walked through it unseen. I shivered again and closed my eyes, knowing what it felt like to step on the marshy grass, to hear the rasp of the stems as they moved together as if dancing. To smell the peculiar scent of rotting vegetation that had wafted into the car—the same scent that now made me think only of coming home.

  Matthew slowed as he took another turn between two cement pillars with stone pineapples on top. The drive made no pretense of having once been paved. It was an ocean of white dust and crushed shells under a sky of green limbs that leaned down close enough to whisper, their thick foliage blocking the late-afternoon sun.

  We drove a short distance until the trees began to thin, tapering back to small shrubs as if paying homage to the house at the end of the driveway. I knew it was one of the few remaining nineteenth-century structures on the island, but still its antiquity startled me, along with the odd feeling of familiarity fueled, I was sure, by Matthew’s vibrant descriptions and stories of growing up as an only child in the old house.

  We climbed out of the car and stood together but not touching, the song of hundreds of cicadas whirring in the trees around us. The gritty earth beneath my shoes seemed to shift as if supported by water, and I reached for Matthew’s arm, feeling the need to anchor myself.

  It was a simple two-story farmhouse, with a raised foundation, a porch supported by four columns, and two brick chimneys affixed to each side of the house. Three dormer windows sat perched over the porch roof like protruding eyes. What made this house different from other houses I’d seen before from the same time period was its tabby construction, an indigenous building material consisting of equal parts lime, water, sand, oyster shells, and ash. Matthew’s description of it had been so good that I almost knew exactly what it would feel like under my fingers without having actually ever touched it before.

  What appeared to be flower beds lay abandoned at the front and sides of the house, while farther back, where the forest began its eager encroachment, I could see what looked like a miniature house. It was made completely of tabby and boasted a single chimney, and stood some distance from the house on the edge of the woods, its front door replaced with nailed two-by-fours with no handle for entry.

  With plans to explore the grounds later, I turned back to the house. The grayish tint of the tabby hel
ped camouflage the house against the sandy drive, making it appear as a shadow cast from the towering live oak trees. It seemed as if the house were hiding from time itself, content to let the years bypass it unchanged, in the same way the breezes stirred the marsh grasses, leaving them to return upright again.

  I took a deep breath, trying to fill my empty lungs with air. “You described it so well that it’s like I’ve seen a photograph of it. I just didn’t realize it was so…”

  “Old?” Matthew laughed and drew me to his side. “But it’s very livable, I assure you. I added the kitchen and downstairs bath three years ago, and added a bathroom and closet to the master bedroom. It’s not a palace, but I think you’ll be happy here.” He turned to face me, cupping my face in his hands. “I know you’ll be happy here.”

  His voice changed slightly, as if in reassurance, but I wasn’t clear which one of us he was trying to reassure.

  I stood on my toes and kissed him. “I will be. We will be.”

  In response, he swooped me up in his arms and, as if I didn’t weigh anything, carried me up the front steps. After fumbling with a key and opening the door, he brought me inside and set me carefully on my feet. Like a little boy, he watched my face as I took in my new home, his smile hesitant. I stood in a small, high-ceilinged foyer with wide heart-pine floors polished to a yellow gleam, a narrow staircase against the wall in front of us with a heavy dark wood banister, the newel post worn by hundreds of hands over more than two centuries. I took a step forward to place my hand on it, feeling the smooth, cool finish before my palm touched it. I forced air into my lungs again, wondering whether this was what it was like to see ghosts.