Siren

by John Everson

  “You married?” the man said, pulling up a stool. He didn’t take his hand off her. Instead, he let it slip from her shoulder, across her back, to grip familiarly on her thigh.

  She nodded. “For about as long as you’ve been alive,” she said with a grin. She looked up at him with weary eyes, and maybe something there sent a chill of reality down his spine, because his easy hand slipped away. He threw down a couple bucks on the bar, nodded and slipped back to the pool table. From behind, Sarah heard low voices and laughter. She didn’t turn around. There was only so much heartache you could absorb in your life, and she had had her fill. If someone were making fun of her now, for sitting here old and empty in a bar…she wasn’t going to eat that. She wasn’t going to do anything at all, except take one more pull on the edge of her glass. Okay, maybe two.

  And then she’d go home. Home is where the heart is, she thought. “But where has my heart gone?” she answered herself aloud.

  The sound system—whatever happened to jukeboxes—now pumped with the beat of Britney, and the voices in the bar around her began to pick up in volume. It was amateur hour, Sarah thought. Time for the adults to go home. She looked into the neon lights of the bar signs above her head, and smiled sadly at the sexy tattooed thing behind the bar who made no bones against sticking out her rack and flirting with the pool table boys for tips. Sarah looked back to her beer.

  The foam on the latest pull of Guinness made her laugh. She couldn’t have explained why, exactly. It just struck her as funny…all this dark, heavy liquid coloring the bulk of her glass and then this white wreath of bubbles trying to hold it all in. She knew about holding it in. That’s why she was here. She held it all in.

  “Something wrong with your beer?” a voice asked from behind her. Sarah turned slowly, afraid that the pool boy was back. But then the tenor of the voice sunk in, and she saw the hard line of his jaw, and the soft care in his deep-set blue eyes, and she shook her head.

  “Nah,” Sarah said. “The beer’s just fine.” She lifted her glass and drained half of it in one desperate pull.

  “Let’s go home, huh?” Evan said, and pulled her off the stool. She only stumbled a little, as the bells of the door rippled to announce their exit, just as they did nearly every night. Behind them, the bartendress with the rack rolled her eyes and cleared the bar. She gave little thought to why the old girl had to be escorted home every night. She just pulled her T-shirt tighter to smile falsely at the boys drinking Bud as they shot eight ball.

  Damn drunks never left a good tip.

  Chapter Two

  Loss is an all-consuming passion. Kylie could have told you that in a heartbeat, if she’d still had one.

  “I never said I would take you with me,” Abram yelled in the dark corner of the beachside club. Nobody around them seemed to hear the outburst, though the girl with the shock white hair and the short pink skirt heard him loud and clear. She heard him in the marrow of her bones.

  On the stage, a short guitarist in glasses and a plaid shirt rambled his earnest way through CCR’s “Have You Ever Seen The Rain,” and Kylie suddenly wasn’t sure if it was Abram’s betrayal or the power of the song that made her cry.

  But she knew what it was that made her tears split into a smile as Abram explained that he didn’t have time for a relationship, he had an opportunity in the Bay Area, and he had to devote himself to that and make it happen. And maybe someday if…

  Kylie ignored Abram’s pathetic explanation for abandonment. Sucker ’em, suck ’em and dump ’em…she knew the drill. Now the plaid boy at the mic was singing, “Stop, children, what’s that sound,” and she was struck, not with the power of the old Buffalo Springfield lyric but with the memory of a group of Muppets singing a hippie song.

  Just then, as Abram tried to make his best earnest, brow-crinkled face to explain his urgent need to leave her behind, Kylie began to laugh out loud.

  Abram clearly was shocked and a little flustered. And as she kept laughing, the feeling building in her like an explosion—an explosion of emotion that only mildly included anything that should have resembled laughter—Abram faded away.

  Kylie realized he was gone a long while later, after the laughter and the tears and a bad John Mayer song had ended. She should have known that Abram would leave her. They always did.

  She slipped out the side door of The Sand Trap and walked down the empty sidewalk of Fifth Street toward the ocean. The moonlight was high in the sky and she didn’t want to go home. There was nothing comforting about the idea of her empty bed right now.

  She kicked off her sandals on the edge of the cement path and walked barefoot in the cold sand. In moments she felt the even-colder kiss of the waves rushing over her toes. From somewhere, far away, she heard the high, pure voice of a song.

  Unconsciously she walked toward the sound. Music had always made her feel better in the worst of times, and this was definitely one of the worst of the worst. She had really loved him. She had loved all of them, to some degree, but this time, this time…she had thought it would be different. She kicked up a cloud of sand with her toes and laughed bitterly. It would never be different…because guys were all the same. They wanted one thing from a girl and once they got it a few times…they got bored. And then they wanted something else. Someone else.

  The music seemed to be coming from down the beach, near the rocky finger that stuck out into the surf. Gull’s Point, they called it, since in the summer months the stretch of treacherous rock was almost completely carpeted in noisy flocks.

  But now, the rocks were empty. Dark, jagged angles against a moody night sky.

  Someone was there, Kylie knew. And she sang beautifully. Kylie couldn’t make out the words, but the melody drew her, full of heartache and hope.

  She reached the edge of the natural jetty, and carefully threaded her way down its length out into the water. The song came from just around the top, but to get there, Kylie had to walk all the way out to its edge, and then climb around.

  The ocean was beautiful at night, she thought, as she stepped up on a boulder crusted with blackened algae. Between the quiet wash of the waves and the beauty of the song, she realized that she no longer felt angry at Abram. Or even sad. All the hurt and frustration of the day was stolen by the melody; the energy of the night seemed to slip away from her, and Kylie decided to rest for a moment on the rocks.

  She sat down and stared out into the faint white crests, the tang of the ocean warm and alive in her throat. She breathed it in and let it all go. The music was everywhere, quiet but all encompassing, and she closed her eyes and let it take her to a better place.

  Featherlight hands slipped up the back of her shoulders and Kylie relaxed and closed her eyes. She no longer cared. The music was inside her now, and its call was everything.

  Kylie didn’t feel the nails as they moved across her body, deftly stripping her of her clothes. She barely noticed them as they trailed across her chest and up her neck. Through a waking dream, she shivered, and struggled to break through the strange fog that enveloped her mind when the gold-flecked eyes suddenly stared into hers with the hunger of a predator, and she realized at last that she was exposed, and in danger.

  But by then it was too late.

  Kylie screamed once, as the song abruptly ended.

  But only once.

  Nobody heard as two cold hands dragged her body from the rocks and into the welcome embrace of the ocean.

  Chapter Three

  Sunlight fingered the rumpled bedsheets. Evan woke with one beam across his face. He squinted at the claw of dawn. So early. In the morning, the nights felt too short…yet when he stared at the ceiling at two A.M., they seemed far too long.

  Beside him, Sarah snored. She’d be out for a while yet. Since Josh’s death, she’d been sleeping later and later…because she’d been at the bar more and more. Evan would have been worried she was cheating on him there and picking up guys…but more often than not it was he who showed up to take her home.
They walked alone much of each night in their private grief…but they walked together still at the end.

  He kissed her lightly on the forehead and slid out of bed to shuffle to the bathroom. A year ago, Sarah would have been downstairs already, rattling around in the kitchen and waking up both Evan and Josh with her happy noise. Eventually “her boys” would come straggling down the hall, yawning and stretching into a kitchen warm with the scents of eggs or grits and coffee, and they’d gather at the table to talk about the coming day.

  Josh had been an eighth grader at Bayside, and talk of high school had already begun to filter into their breakfast conversations. Should he go ahead and take advanced-placement history? His grades allowed it, but if he went out for track and swimming, did he really want to subject himself to harder homework?

  Evan pushed for him to do the AP classes; they’d get him into a better college, and Josh had generally rolled his eyes. “What makes you think I’m going to college, Dad?” he’d taunt.

  Sarah would support him, sort of, piping up from the stove, “I don’t see anything wrong with being a career lifeguard.”

  Evan stared at the dark circles under his eyes as he shaved and inwardly winced. What a difference a year made. The face that stared back at him looked thin and tired, and gray hairs now sprinkled his temples as well as curled amid the black fuzz of his chest. He had a slight paunch now—not bad for a guy in his forties, but he’d been tighter, healthier, a year ago.

  Sarah still slept when he got out of the shower and dressed for work, her mouth slack and open against the pillow. Evan longed to wake her up, to kiss her with the kind of passion they’d once shared in the mornings; “Something to remember me by while you’re at the office,” she used to whisper as her anxious fingers released the belt he’d only just buckled. But he knew better. Those days were gone with his son.

  He stopped in the hall for a moment, as he did every morning, to stare at the posters on the wall of Josh’s room above the bed. They’d touched nothing in Josh’s room since that day. The morning light trailed across an empty bed, and fingered a dresser covered in a jumble of books, magazines and rock band trading cards. Evan had been proud of Josh’s interest in music; it had echoed his own. The two of them had often sat, side by side, at the piano or with the acoustic guitar, singing folk and rock and nonsense songs together. Evan grinned at the memory of Josh way back when he was five. Evan had made up a lyric about Josh catching a lizard tail in the bathroom and using it to brush his teeth. The boy’s face had crinkled in disgust as he laughed and groaned, “No way, Dad, yuck! Gross!”

  A tear threatened to escape the corner of Evan’s eye, but he shook it away. And walked away. For the hundredth time he promised that soon, soon, he would go into that room with boxes. They had left it exactly the way Josh had left it that morning he and Evan had gone to the ocean. Sarah and he had thought somehow that still having Josh’s room intact would give them a way to still have their son in their lives. A visual memory of the time when he was with them. But Josh’s life and smell and sound had slowly leached away. All his magic was gone from that place now.

  Neither Evan nor Sarah had moved on. They were as mired in their grief as the room was tied to the dusty artifacts of a life long gone.

  “It’s time to let go and put it away,” Evan said to the empty hallway. But in his head he answered. But not today.

  The shipping yard already hummed with activity when Evan pulled into the lot. He dreaded Thursdays, since the fishing boats always seemed to dock the heaviest that day…and that meant he’d be humping to keep up with the manifests and invoices and all the other paper-pushing that working at a small seaport entailed. If you lived in a tiny port town like Delilah, you either worked in the fishing trade in some way or in the tourist-trap block of town. Once a secret duty-free port refuge for rumrunners, Delilah had grown to a minor legitimate port on the California coast where fishermen and small freight companies could dock with minimal fees and lots of personal attention. That lure rose and fell with the decades. Over the past twenty years, the town had sold itself more as a quaint tourist attraction than as a port authority.

  The downtown still boasted some of the original Victorian houses built at the turn of the last century, and with a coordinated effort by the town fathers and some business owners, the main drag of Serenade Street had been retrofitted and polished up to look like a row of doll-houses. The long, sheltered arc of Hidden Bay boasted a good stretch of golden sand before deteriorating into miles of rock and boulders, and in the summer and fall months that lone stretch of beach filled with umbrellas and coolers, largely from tourists. The townspeople were all busy selling to the interlopers; they had no time to use their own beach.

  Evan took the rock stairs up from the parking lot two at a time to climb to the “lookout” perch occupied by the Delilah Harbor Authority. He was late again; no matter how hard he tried lately, he couldn’t seem to hit the decks on time. The weathered wooden screen slammed shut behind him and he cursed under his breath. The noise would alert Darren, who had been a pain in the ass about everything lately.

  “Just coming off break?” his boss called from behind a pile of shipping records as Evan passed the port’s “big office.” Big was kind of a misnomer—Darren ran the yard from a ten-by-twelve room whose birch paneling and stacks of unfiled manifests made its space look even smaller than it already was. But…Darren did have the only office in the place.

  “Yep,” Evan answered, trying to keep his voice light. “Breakfast.”

  He kept moving, not giving Darren the chance to lambaste him for not moving to the tick of the clock, and slipped behind his desk feeling like a scolded schoolkid.

  Evan, Bill, Candice and Maggie all had desks in an open area they called “the bull pen” just beyond Darren’s office. There was a small entry room beyond that where some of the ship captains came to go over their shipping manifests and complete other paper trail details. Not the least of which included paying port fees.

  None of the workers at Delilah Harbor Authority spent the day at their desks, as they were always called upon to help out at the dock with something. Evan was a jack-of-all-trades when it came to serving as the chief accountant. He also could throw a mean rope anchor and heft a barrel offish.

  Maggie raised an eyebrow at him and grinned as she whispered, “You’re going to get a detention!”

  “I know, I know. I’ve gotta get a handle on it.” Evan shook his head before confiding, “Sarah’s just been out late a lot…reeling her in isn’t always easy and then I can’t sleep and…”

  Maggie shook curls of wild chestnut hair across her eyes and then had to brush it away. “I’m not the principal; you don’t have to tell me.”

  She smiled, a little sadly. “Andy said she’s been up at O’Flaherty’s a lot lately. You know, he can’t come to bed without his beer either.”

  “I’m guessing he’s not drowning in his though,” Evan replied. Maggie opened her mouth to say something but then thought better of it. She didn’t have an easy answer for that. Bill looked up from his terminal and pursed his lips, but though a wrinkle passed his brow, he didn’t enter the conversation.

  The room stayed silent for a while after that.

  Chapter Four

  Evan watched the water fill in the indentations left by his bare feet in the sand. The waves were constant, lulling, in their predictable low roar inward and whoosh of instant retreat, and yet at the same time unpredictable. During his stroll up the beach his feet hadn’t gotten wet more than once, and yet now, his footprints suddenly glimmered with the wash of a strong surge of surf. Every few waves surged closer to his path.

  After dinner, he’d walked the long stretch up Safe Harbor and now sat on a cold, blackened boulder that marked the beginning of Gull’s Point. He looked back toward the twinkling lights of Delilah. The glimmer of his hometown barely registered against the brilliance of the night sky; the stars were out in full tonight, and the beach flickered with se
cret reflections.

  Evan leaned back and stared at the sky, as he absently fingered the half charm chained around his neck. Josh had worn the other half, after presenting it to him one Father’s Day, just a couple years before. A show of their solidarity, to wear two halves of a medal.

  He looked down the empty stretch of beach and wondered, how many days and nights had he and Josh crisscrossed this sand? How many times had Josh tried to lure him into the water? How many times had he refused to go?

  Josh had been a Pisces, and lived his sign; he’d always been in the water. As close as they’d been, that was one thing that father and son had never shared. Because while Evan loved the look and smell of the ocean, ironically, he was also an aquaphobe. Afraid of the water. More than afraid. Phobic. It was a crazy phobia for someone who lived near the ocean and worked at a port. But Evan had never been able to shake the paralyzing fear. He’d had it since he was a kid. It was more than that he couldn’t swim; while he could walk along the beach and admire the view, if you asked him to take a swim, his heart began to pound, and sweat leaked from his pores like rain. His legs grew palpably weak at the slightest suggestion of walking into the ocean to let the waves carry him. Even at home, his bathing consisted solely of a shower…he would never relinquish his body to a bathtub. Friends never understood why he refused invitations to their hot tub parties, and he could never have admitted that it was because he was afraid of immersing himself fully in water. At least, he couldn’t have explained before last year.

  Evan had lived with the phobia all of his life without needing to explain it to virtually anyone…until the day that Josh had died.

  He shook the water from his eyes and tried to think of something else. Something that had been good with him and Josh, something that had nothing to do with water. Some last thought he could console himself with, before he put his plan in action. Because he’d decided before kissing Sarah good night that he was actually kissing Sarah good-bye.