Despite all this, it would, as I said, have been better had they left me there to drown.
I am certain as well that you do not need to be told why I walked into the sea that day: for love, of course. For the sake of a man. I was twenty-five years old, a late bloomer, as they say, but then I was possessed of a lethal combination of being both intelligent and unattractive. These days a woman can buy permission to be smart or talented or successful with good looks for as long as she remains young, at least; in my day, being pretty meant you couldn’t possibly be bright while plainness was just an affront to everyone. By everyone, of course, I mean men.
I must have been almost unfathomably easy prey for Philip, the married man at the office where I worked who set his sights on me. (Philip, how funny to think of him now! He is either very old or, more likely, very dead. I cannot imagine encountering him now, doddering and senile.) In those days, for me, both virginal and naïve, he was the height of dashing sophistication. I had never even kissed a man, had presumed I would be a spinster my entire life, and as for sex, that was something I gave little thought to, and never in connection with myself. The result of all this was that a man I later came to understand was very ordinary was able to seduce me and convince me that without him, my life was worthless. After two months of surreptitious rendezvous in his car, twice in the office, once in a hotel room (I told myself then he must really love me), he informed me that he had no intention of leaving his wife; two weeks later it was clear he’d taken up with the nineteen-year-old secretary hired a week before he dumped me.
I was, as I said, naïve. I had imagined that there was something extraordinary in what passed between us, in the pleasures of sex, that anything that seemed so intimate must surely be intimate. I was in love, though not with him—people say in love with love, and that’s wrong too. I was in love with the man I thought he was, and in those short two months, I believed I was the best version of myself I have ever been although in fact I was alternately neurotic, terrified, giddy, hopeless, and consumed. Love can do that to you. And then it ends.
When it became clear to me that I had been no more than a passing fancy that he quickly tired of, I resolved to kill myself, both to send him a message and because I truly did feel that I would not be able to live with my pain. Better that he had cut me open and literally torn my heart from my body than this agony of drawing breath after breath. I did not yet understand how the most appalling pain can recede over time even if it never goes away. Time doesn’t heal, but enough of it and it begins to tell us lies that let us live in the present, if we allow it.
If the past does not come to you. Did you hear about the girl who walked into the sea? Did you hear what became of her children?
The story of my suicide that wasn’t is routine and not very interesting. I did very little planning. In those days, I lived in Savannah, Georgia, where my family had moved to in my teens, and so I drove to Tybee Island, and found what I mistakenly believed to be a deserted bit of shoreline. Fully clothed in a skirt and a sweater and heavy shoes, I walked out into the ocean. Had I put more thought into it, I would have chosen a more reliably empty beach; I would have weighted my pockets to ensure I did not bob to the surface. I would have forced myself to drink the salt water into my lungs. That I did none of those things, however, was no indication that my suicide attempt was merely a cry for help. I was serious; but with suicide as with sex, I was a complete novice.
Novice that I was, I was spotted, and saved by a nearby fisherman. I spent two nights in the hospital, and I believed that Philip would come to me there, having seen the error of his ways. When he did not, I understood at last that I had been a very silly girl, and that I was no different from many very silly girls who had come before me. I quit my job and found a new one and resolved to stay far away from men for the rest of my days.
I told myself that I had survived not because of my rescuer, but because as I loved the sea, the sea loved me back.
I have, you understand, been mistaken about love throughout my life.
Do you hear that? Some would say it is only the howling of the wind and the crashing of the waves, but I know the sound of my children’s cries. I must move along and finish my story for you before they come for me.
3
I had sworn to stay away from men, but the revolving door of dull office jobs that were available to no-longer-so-young women in the 1950s eventually brought me into the path of an even duller man named Bernard. He was everything Philip had not been; where Philip had been charming and smooth, Bernard was awkward and fastidious. But he had other qualities. He was steady and dependable. And we did have one thing in common: Bernard loved the sea as well. The first time he took me sailing, I thought this was a man who would never betray me as Philip had, because there was no room in his life for another love.
And so it was that almost five years to the day after they pulled me from the sea, I walked down the aisle with Bernard. No one could say that I had not done well for myself. In those days, I was considered an old bride, and fortunate to snag such a reliable man. Bernard’s boring nature extended to the bedroom. I told myself I didn’t care; with Philip, I had seen what passion got you. Having said that, it seems surprising to me to this day that we managed to conceive three children. I told myself I was content, and I settled into an unremarkable domestic life that was exactly the same as the content and unremarkable domestic life that most of my peers had as well. I no longer had to work or worry about the future.
But appearances deceive, do they not? Of all the dull, content, settled people around us, I would have said that Clive was the dullest of them all. Not that I am making myself out to have been a remarkable specimen myself: my oldest child, Deborah, was twelve, and I had long since passed from young and unattractive into aging and matronly, or so I felt. Clive said that was not the case; he said I kept myself trim enough to pass for at least ten years younger and that any man who could not see the unkindled fires banked in me must be blind. But he would say that, wouldn’t he? He said a lot of other things, too, things married men say in affairs, but I believed they were true: that Stella, his wife, was frigid and moreover didn’t love him. I couldn’t have been more different from her, he said, and what he meant was there was almost nothing I wouldn’t do for him, and he was right.
He even begged me to leave Bernard. And I might have; I told myself that Bernard, preoccupied with sailing and his accounting work, would hardly notice my absence. We no longer lived as husband and wife; we hadn’t slept together since before our third child, Joann, now six, had been born. We even had separate bedrooms. Because I had long ago proved myself to be a poor first mate, too dreamy by far, he hadn’t taken me sailing with him in years. It was just as well. I was content to sit on the shore or wade into the shallows with the children. The truth is, I liked the sea less with the children along. There seemed so many more hazards with these tiny, vulnerable people at my side: stinging things, and big waves, and tropical storms and hurricanes, and the sea itself, always pulling away from shore, too eager to take everything with it. The idea of its unfathomable depths, which had once exhilarated me, had come to terrify me instead. I suppose you could say that motherhood made me dull but I would argue instead that motherhood made me aware. The world was so full of danger. It was a wonder any of us managed to navigate it for any time at all.
And the sea is terrible in other ways, haunted as well—by millennia of drowned sailors. By pirates and their prey. By captains and their passengers and their crew, by mercenaries and soldiers and lost explorers, by unwary fishermen and swimmers and beachcombers and people who did not notice the tide drawing in. The sea is heaving with corpses and dead souls. It is a stew of old bones and rotten flesh.
It is my single consolation: that wherever they are out there, my children are not alone.
But still they need their mother. All children need their mother, do they not?
I know what you are thinking. That they are going to be horrors when t
hey come in from the sea. That the loving embraces I imagine will be grips of death. That they will be foul, decayed, mad creatures, that they will fall on me with salt-puckered eyes and mouths and suck the life out of me. Or that I am mad myself: old, and mad, delusional, that I ought to have been put into a home long ago, and that I need help. Help you, hang you, burn you. You are ugly, female, and old: three strikes and you’re out, but you are worse, you are alone, you are reclusive, you are not kind and grandmotherly and comforting. Your eyes do not twinkle. We are too enlightened to call you a witch but we will steal your life away from you anyway and lock you away and feed you drugs and call it a mercy.
So, you see, this is a risk I am willing to take. And what mother would not willingly give up her own life for her children’s?
I would have, you know. What happened to them was not my fault. I couldn’t have saved them. No matter what anyone says. I loved them and I lost them but I did not kill my babies.
4
They say that you never really know a person, and they are correct. Case in point: my Bernard. I thought him incapable of passion, save for his love of the sea. I thought the children and I were little more than props in his dull life. I even thought he might be the kind of man to turn a blind eye to the fact that his wife had a lover. What did he care? He didn’t seem to want me.
I was wrong. Bernard found out about us, not in a dramatic fashion. He didn’t stumble upon the two of us in bed together or anything so crass. He saw a look here, a touch there, noticed an absence or two that could not be explained. He is an accountant, after all, and he added it all up, and he knew.
He need not have done anything. Ours was a business arrangement, I had explained to Clive, but a business arrangement with children involved, and as such, I couldn’t think of leaving him, at least not until little Joann was off to college. It wasn’t fair to either Bernard or me or to the children, who adored their father.
Why could that not have been enough for Bernard? Why could he not have allowed us to go on living with a small lie within the much larger lie that we were all living, the one that said we were a happy, contented family?
Even now, I do not believe what Bernard discovered inside himself was a passion for me, or for his family. There is a certain type of man who has a passion for the things he believes to be his. His own feelings for the things are not the issue; his ownership of the things is.
I do not know how long he was aware before he took action, but he did not give me any indication that he had noticed anything. One late-spring day, I went to pick up the children at school, only to find that none of them were there. Their father had come and taken them out of class in the middle of the day.
From the moment they told me, an icy lump of fear settled in my belly. He knows. I told myself it was something else, something innocent, but I knew better. And yet even then, the worst-case scenario that I could imagine was that he would divorce me and be able to keep the children, because what judge would leave children with an adulterous mother? And then Clive would abandon me as well, and there I would be, middle-aged, alone, unskilled, unemployed, a pariah among all who knew me and with no resources to seek out a new community. My parents were dead, and I had no family left. Where would I go? How would I live? Why would I live? What would be the point of anything at all?
I phoned Bernard’s office; his secretary told me he was not in. I couldn’t bring myself to speak to Clive. It was as though if I did not say anything to anyone, whatever was happening would not be happening, would not be true.
I sat there in our home and I waited. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t eat or drink anything. I didn’t read, or watch television. I couldn’t. I smoked, compulsively, one cigarette after another. It grew dark. And then I heard the sound of Bernard’s car in the driveway, the doors slamming—and the children’s voices. I almost sobbed with relief. I had half-convinced myself I would never see them again.
They came tumbling in ahead of him, and immediately it was clear to me that they knew nothing was amiss; moreover, they’d had a fantastic day. All of them were sunburned and windswept, having spent the day on their father’s boat, a rare treat, and they were all talking to me at once, and I started to think that perhaps I had been wrong. Perhaps Bernard had had a single unpredictable moment out of his entire life and decided that he and the children would enjoy spending a day sailing, with no ulterior motives or secret knowledge behind it all.
Then he walked in, and I looked at him, and I knew.
He said quietly, “Joann, Kevin, Deborah—go brush your teeth and go to bed. Your mother and I need to talk.”
They all stopped short at the sound of his voice, and I remember thinking how much like wild animals children are. Their emotions are one with their bodies, and they had been so excited as they all jabbered to be heard above the others that they were contorting themselves, jumping up and down, making hilarious faces, all long brown limbs and sun-bleached hair and laughter. But at the moment their father spoke, everything changed. They were suddenly as wary and watchful as a deer who has sensed a hunter in a nearby stand. They froze; their eyes twitched; their mouths closed. They knew that of all the moments there had ever been, this was not one to argue.
They hugged and kissed me in a perfunctory way and left the room. At any other time, I’d have scolded Bernard for speaking to them so sharply and cutting off their joy. But I had no speech left in me. I had nothing in me.
Or so I thought. Until Bernard spoke, and of all the terrible things I had imagined in the hours leading up to this moment, I never imagined anything as terrible as what he said to me:
“I took the children sailing today so that I could murder them.”
He let that sentence hang between us for a few moments before he continued. And as he did so, I thought some part of him was loving this. Meek, inadequate Bernard had the floor in a way he never had before in his life, in a way he’d never dreamed. I was as captive an audience as anyone could ever hope for.
“I thought it would be the best way to hurt you most. And it’s still what I want to do to you—hurt you, as badly as I can, in as many ways as I can. I was going to go through with it, and I actually had Joann in my arms, ready to toss her over the side, and do you know what stopped me? It wasn’t love of the children. I don’t love them and have never loved them, and I want you to be very, very certain of that, because one of the things I want you to know is that your beloved children are going to grow up with a man who does not love them at all. I know how much that is going to hurt you. I think it might hurt you even more than if they were dead, knowing I am going to bring them up, poison them with lies against you, and loathe them because they are the spawn of such a filthy, deceptive creature as you.”
He went on in that vein for a very long time. I do not remember for how long, or what all the things he said were, because it was impossible for me to move past that first point. He was going to kill the children. He was going to kill the children. And he had not done it today, but what was there to stop him changing his mind in the morning, or in a week or a month or a year? And what was this reservoir of pain and anger and hate that I had never seen in Bernard, who had never so much as raised his voice to any of us? Who was the man I had married?
Looking back, I suppose he was thinking something similar about me.
He kept on like that, haranguing me, and sometimes he would require me to respond, and I would, as best I could. I remember thinking that I had to keep him there, keep him talking, and morning would come and he would have to go to work—because surely he would not allow his routine to be disrupted for a second day in a row—and then I could do something. I didn’t know what, but I had to do something. He didn’t shout at me; didn’t raise a hand to me; in a way he was still my mild-mannered, soft-spoken Bernard, and that was what made it all the more terrible.
Even the most awful things come to an end, and that night did at last as well. Bernard went to shower and dress for work and I went to wa
ke the children for school. Their tired, drawn faces, so different from the elated ones that had greeted me when they burst into the house the previous night, told me all I needed to know about how much they may have overheard and understood.
5
My plan—I did not have a plan, or not much of one. I told the children we were taking a vacation and that Daddy would be joining us later. I do not think they believed me, but they knew something was wrong and they were too frightened to put up a fuss although Joann did timidly ask me once if I was going to tell her teacher why she had missed school. She was only in first grade, and was still very excited about it all. I snapped at her, which I will always regret, and she retreated miserably into herself.
I left Deborah to oversee their packing while I went to the bank. I was terrified that Bernard would make or had made this stop before me, and so as soon as possible after they opened I was there to draw as much money as I could out of our joint account. I remember how troubled the teller, a lady named Mrs. Cook, looked as she counted bills out to me, like she knew that something was wrong. Of course it was; married ladies did not turn up alone and make enormous withdrawals like that without some cause.
I do not like to include this part, but I am trying to be as honest as possible here—I knew there was a chance that shortly after I visited the bank, Bernard might stop in as well, in the interest of vigilance, and find out what I had done. For all I knew, they might phone him and tell him themselves. And I knew that if such a thing happened, he would immediately go home, and all would be lost. This was my one chance, the only chance I would ever have for a decent escape. And so when I returned home, the first thing I did was to make sure that Bernard’s car was nowhere in sight; the second thing I did was park my own some blocks away, and walk home from there. And the third thing I did was position myself near the window while the children finished gathering their things so that if Bernard did come home, I would have some warning; I would be able to flee, I would be out the back door and away up the street to my own car before he even realized I was there. I would make my getaway, alone. It was not what I wanted, but it was what I would do if it came to that.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Three Page 33
