Rockaway

by Tara Ison

  But he doesn’t want that, she feels him pull away from her mouth. Her throat closes up without him there, and she wants to cry. He moves her gently onto her back; she just misses getting a clutch of his shirt as he sits up, rises from the bed.

  “Wait a minute,” he says. “I gotta get something.”

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, no, it’s really okay,” she says. “It doesn’t matter. Just come back.”

  “What do you mean, it doesn’t matter?”

  She can’t possibly explain to him why it doesn’t matter. She shakes her head.

  “Just hold on,” he says, walking to the bathroom.

  “Fine, okay. Whatever.”

  He comes back, rolling on a condom. He climbs on top of her, prodding her legs open with his knees. She knows she’s still dry, that his entering her will hurt, draw blood, but she wants that, suddenly, wants to feel pierced, opened up, made raw. She winces at the first drive of his hips, at the rasp, and reaches down to touch the thin rubber lip of the condom as it sinks flush against her. She holds him there a moment, inside, but he draws back a sudden, abrading inch or two. It feels he’s taking her skin with him. He pushes in again, and it eases. He pushes in, and the piercing goes sweet. He kisses her, and she sees them creeping forward together in the dark and he is holding a white candle out before them to shed light. Each thrust, each step, casts the light deeper into the darkness, illuminating it, brings the light deeper inside of her, and she wants it deeper inside of her, she wraps her legs around him to help, get it deeper, the light thrust fully inside. She moves her hips harder, wanting that burst between them, and feels a slip, something loosen. She tightens herself around him, squeezing.

  “Hold on a minute,” he says. He closes his face up tight, turns away from her.

  “What?”

  “Just . . . wait,” he says. His breathing comes hard, then slows. The loosening expands, and her insides sag as she feels him slip out of her. “Man,” he says.

  “What happened?” she asks. “What did I do?”

  “I don’t know.” He raises himself on an elbow, gropes between them a moment. “Lemme get this thing off.” She hears the snap of rubber, and he flings the condom off the side of the bed. “I don’t know,” he repeats. He drops down on top of her again, his face still turned away.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. She reaches for him. “Maybe—”

  “No, don’t do that,” he says, pushing her hand away.

  She feels found out. She feels like treyf, like unholy meat. Like a leprous soul. No, she realizes. She doesn’t have a soul. Because if she did have a soul, she would be precious to him. She would be a blessing, a thing to treasure and keep safe forever. He would open to her and shower her with light. But he’s looked into her, and seen nothing, and now he knows and now she knows, understands at last. She’s just been a body. A shell on the beach, a pile of compost. An illusion of depth. A plastic mermaid, left hanging on the rim of a dirty glass. No, falling, falling to the floor. No wonder she can’t hold on to anything, her plastic arms have been snapped off and she is a cheap fake thing, emptied out and wholly without grace.

  She waits until she hears him breathe in sleep, then gets up, gets dressed, and leaves.

  THERE’S A MOON. There’s a jumble of footprints. There are Drumstick and Baby Ruth wrappers, abandoned Fudgsicle sticks, a squeezed-out tube of Bain de Soleil. Crushed paper cups, their seams stained dark. Cigarette butts, sunflower seed shells, a broken plastic shovel, a tight ball of aluminum foil, a gnawed apple core. A pair of sunglasses missing one lens, an RC cola can, bent at the waist. Everything achromatic, a range of grays. The beach was so clean when she first arrived. She remembers her ritual of walking here, the breadth of warm, slipping sand, the tougher strip stiff with drying seawater, the wettest sand licked over and over by waves. Only seaweed and driftwood and feathers and shells when she arrived, and the endless hopeful sand. Now there’s the messy trash of it, and the dead strewn jellyfish, and there’s her. She remembers thinking the ocean looked different here, richer. Promising. She remembers wondering if women’s cut-up bodies ever washed ashore here, how you know when that begins.

  She hasn’t been out here at night before. She’s seen it behind glass, framed from her bedroom, the glints of wrinkling dark water, a ship’s lights through fog. But she’s in it, now, part of its depthless, toneless scheme. There’s the flat white moon and the flat blacks of crumpled trash and the flat gray canvas of sand freckled with broken shells. She sweeps her hand through the dry sand, tries to draw a clean line, but the sand falls in upon itself, obscures her finger-traces among the labyrinth of foot tracks to multiple nowheres. There’s a house alight with music and God to her left, and a house filled with photos of laughing, blood-linked people to her right, a house bursting with greens behind her in Connecticut, and far away west there’s a house full of what’s left of her own blood, facing another ocean, waiting for her. She tries to imagine another place, someplace left for her to go, but all she can picture is a 8’ by 7’ by 5’ vault, a storage space she owns, temporarily, and only saw once, with wood-slatted sides and concrete floor, where everything left that belongs to her is boxed and blanketed away.

  She looks across the moon-bright, swaying strip of wavecrash. She picks out of the mazed sand the singular footprint trail that leads to the sea. She gets to her feet and walks, and the prints fit her step by step, fit each step’s heavy leaden weight until water touches her skin and the prints swirl away and she stops.

  She pictures plunging in to the wet acid cold. She pictures the water sweeping her out, the firm sand dropping away beneath her. She feels herself letting go, how she might float off and disappear. The stinging jellyfish will burn her to ash, the sharks will shred her flesh, the tides will pull her close, drag her off in their angry embrace and she will let the deep water chill take her, choke off above her the last of air and color and light there is, that she’ll ever have to see.

  She takes another few steps and the black water teases, brushes against her ankles, her knees, and dances out again. She hesitates. She closes her eyes, smells sun-baked sand and towels, sweet fruit. She used to be able to do this, didn’t she? Dive right in, blithe and carefree. The water is warmer now, and she leans, touches its softness, remembers frolic and splashing through waves. All by herself. Then a stumble, a crash, crashing and dizzy and getting back to her feet, looking toward land for assurance and applause and steadying foothold care to make sure everything was okay. To make sure she was safe in the world.

  She turns, looks back toward shore. This time: no one, nothing is there.

  She steps forward, deeper, the water rising to her thighs, her waist. A wave-ripple nudges her, lifting her up with gentle tease and catching her breath in her throat, then her feet touch sand again. But the water is insistent, pushing her about and off-balance. She turns her back to the next wave, digs her toes desperately for balance. She scans the deserted beach, the black blind shines of beach house windows, the vacant lifeguard chair. All of it, taunting her, daring her.

  She hears a deepening hum, the sound of rising churn, feels the water abruptly pulling away from her, luring and stumbling her, and she turns, too late, to see a moon-glinting dark rise of water surging at and above her and too late to swim away or escape, and she is finally knocked fully off her feet by the crash, flipped and sucked under into the gritty salt cold.

  The world blacks out and swirls, and she instinctively reminds herself not to breathe or swallow water. She feels her tumbling body intuitively unclench, uncompass itself, remember not to seek orientation. She feels her heart slowing down, her lungs pacing out the oxygen, her eyes recognizing the salt as ancestor. She feels her body relax and accept the roiling as truth. She feels herself lifted up again, the roil is sweeping her forward and her body is sailing, skimming, floating along toward shore, and she lets herself sail until she is lying victoriously safe, breathing hard
and her cheek pressed against wet sand, the to-and-fro flirt of water still swirling her hair.

  She remembers this. She scrambles up to her feet, remembers feeling this moment of alive and real and strong. I am here. That was the victory, she realizes. It was the emerging, the standing there on her own, panting and jelly legs and streaming salt foam, before ever looking for anyone or anything else to save her. It was her faith in the divine spark of her own life inside her little-girl belly and bones, the faith that allowed her to turn from the safe beach and race again and again back toward the chaotic, unpredictable waves. Because she will always reemerge. She will always get to her feet again, always be able to find her own way back to shore. Whatever awaits her or does not await her there. I am here, I am here.

  She feels the shadows shifting, sees the sky brighten to a palette of rich pigments, coralline, ochre, aureolin, sees the gray sand around her warming to cream, the driftwood and jellyfish and shells and abandoned mess taking on definition and depth. She looks at the sea, now a rich, faceted green. Emerald, viridian, streaks of malachite. She sees all the clashing, harmonious colors of the world.

  She drops to her knees, digs her hands into the sea-crisp sand. She traces a misshapen seahorse, a crooked mermaid. She scribbles them out with her fingers, levels the sand, draws them messily, imperfectly, again. She draws an entire school of joyous, unsymmetrical seahorses, a dancing gathering of clumsy mermaids. She draws a stick-figure little girl frolicking in the water, a mother and father waving from shore. She draws the swooping capital Ms of flying seagulls. She draws a big childish sun sending out illuminating beams, draws the ocean’s peaking, promising waves. She scrapes a castle into being.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I AM SO GRATEFUL for the many forms of assistance I received for this manuscript—the close readings and wise editorial feedback, the supportive shoulders and endless patience during all those crazed phone calls. I’d especially like to thank Bernadette Murphy, Eloise Klein Healy, Emily Rapp, Tina Gauthier, Michelle Nordon, Askoid Melnyczuk, Cyndi Menegaz, Ellen Svaco, Mary Vincent, Rick Moody, Douglas Bauer, David Ryan, and Dylan Landis.

  Boundless appreciation to my editor, Dan Smetanka, for his guidance, integrity, and impassioned faith, and to everyone at Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press. Enormous gratitude and respect to Michelle Henkin, and Mrs. Sylvia Perelson.

  Please support the Rockaway Rescue Alliance and the Rockaway Waterfront Alliance, at: www.rwalliance.org.

  © Michael Phillips

  TARA ISON is the author of A Child out of Alcatraz, a Finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and The List. Her short fiction and essays have been in Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Nerve.com, Publishers Weekly, and numerous anthologies.