Sea of Tranquility

by Lesley Choyce

  Sylvie thinks more clearly now, with the right side of her brain compensating for the damage to the left hemisphere. She has found a way to balance strong and weak. Brian stays on even though she can manage on her own. He’s involved in the work down at Front Bay. Working with the men, young and old, in boats. Many had been disbelievers from the start. Money from seaweed. Never in a million years. Dollars for dulse? Right.

  But then the paycheques began rolling in. A Japanese businessman with a taste for kombu, a yearning to live by the sea, an astute business mind, and a big heart. Sylvie sees the thread of things and it amazes her: a little girl gets trapped by the sea and is saved and her family is transformed, decides to stay on an island. Her father has a friend. The friend has a dream. The dream has a reality and people have jobs. Children stay home on the island. They do not have to attend mainland schools until grade ten. Greg and Kit continue to teach in the island’s school. Generations will continue living on the island. Others will move here.

  But nothing is linear. Not for an old woman close to eighty-one. She reads their lives in their faces and words and gives something back with a look or with her own halting words. She still mistrusts speech, knows she sounds funny and even scary to some. She’s weeded and nourished the flower garden of her handwriting until it has been restored to some beauty. Carries notebooks and tears out pages with messages to show people sometimes. For the children. For visitors. Draws little pictures for her friend Taeko, who then paints over her drawings with water-colours and puts them in frames.

  When January arrives with a vengeance, the cold drives like hard nails straight into her bones. The wind howls and yelps and wants to carry off her house with her in it, but she has a certain amount of faith left in gravity. Brian keeps the fires going, writes some on his own when he isn’t reading. The plant is closed for a month due to the conditions on the water. No need for men in small boats to risk life and limb. Yoshi had taken this into consideration. Plenty of stock on its way in container ships. “Lots of dulse burgers for the Japanese,” he says, picking up on the local joke.

  Dulse burgers. Soups from kelp and rockweed ragout. And a livelihood for all involved. Plenty of notches up from catching fish or, worse yet, whales. And steadier work than a summer cabbage crop. What next? Sylvie wonders. Someone will decide the pebbles on the shoreline are each worth a dollar.

  Sylvie does not think she will live long enough to see the whales return. This is not a troublesome matter. She has a few more years in her, a few more good years. The stroke was not some kind of error. Her trip to sea, not some kind of mistake. The events are like the man in the moon. Sea of Rains and Sea of Serenity for two eyes, a Sea of Moisture and Sea of Clouds close enough together to appear like a mouth in the night sky. But the Sea of Tranquility, nearly invisible, large as it is, unless you use a telescope.

  The winter wind so angry you’d think someone had a grudge against humanity. It blows nor’east for three days, then stops. Just like that. So quiet that silence is like a refugee on your doorstep. The sky quits all that dark, grey brooding and gives up. The sun cracks clean through at sunset with a big sword blade of horizontal light that throttles the impending darkness.

  Sylvie bundles up into two or three coats and old rubber boots, goes outside alone. Snow up to her ankles. She makes her way down to the shoreline, studying her frosty breath in the air as she proceeds. Looks out across the water. Dark stones are capped with white fluff. The sea chop is dying down and waves lap against the rocks. It is an old, familiar song. Across the bay she sees the snow on the winter spruce. Dark green and white.

  Sylvie feels young. She still has dreams, waking dreams not of the future, but of the present, stirred around with the past. She knows that lives are imprinted upon the things she can see, just as the sea is imprinted upon the shoreline. We are shaped by the geography of our place and our heart. We collect raw energy and give it form and meaning. And it goes beyond the mere naming of things. Names and language always, always fall short of true meaning.

  Sylvie can feel the heat of the sun on her face even though the cold is all around her. But the sun is dropping quickly now. She hears footsteps from behind, turns and sees a little girl bundled in a winter coat, with a long scarf wrapped around her face. The girl is waving, and in the dying light Sylvie thinks that she is some kind of illusion. Sylvie is observing herself as a little girl, recently bundled up by her mother, let out into the snow by her father who has opened the door and told her to be careful. Is it getting darker or is it just her eyes not adjusting well to the dying light of the sun?

  When the girl is right before her, Sylvie sighs and realizes that this is Angeline, the beautiful child from away, spending her first winter on the island. How unfamiliar it must seem in some ways to her. All that wind and cold. Sylvie wants to reassure her that it’s just part of island life, nothing to be feared, but right now she’s having a hard time forming words again. The muscles of her mouth get stubborn. The cold makes it that much harder.

  Angeline has one hand in her coat pocket, clutched around a perfectly round grey-white stone that she thinks looks like the moon in the night sky. She has kept the rock warm inside the oven of the old wood cookstove at home and it feels wonderful in her hand as she walks around outside in the cold. As long as she cups the stone in her hand, it stays warm and so does she. At home her brother laughs at her for trying to “cook” rocks in the oven, but she doesn’t mind.

  “I have something for you,” she says to Sylvie, giggling a little and pulling down her parka hood with one hand. A few stray snowflakes fall from the heavens and create a kind of constellation on the tips of Angie’s dark hair.

  Sylvie looks into her eyes and feels the childlike wonder flood over her like a powerful energizing wave.“What is it?”

  “Summer,” Angeline says, and holds out the spherical stone in her bare hand.

  Sylvie doesn’t understand at first, but then takes the offered gift with her left hand and feels the wonderful warmth of it. She holds it to her cheek and it returns her to a sacred place a long time ago on a day when every stone along the shore was warm and giving and full to overflowing with the generosity of the sun.