And The Sea Called Her Name

Text copyright © 2015 by Joe Hart

Published by Joe Hart at Smashwords.

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This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

“My mother disappeared for a week the day she turned twenty-eight.”

These were the words she said to me on our first date. We were at a dive restaurant in South Portland sitting at an outside table sipping beers. We’d known one another for nearly six hours by then and had broken off from our group of mutual friends who were bar hopping the evening away. Her eyes. That’s the first thing I noticed about her. They were gray, the way the sea was on days when the rollers would come in off the Atlantic and pound the rocks in unending fury. They caught me right away when we all met up at the first pub, and it wasn’t until she’d looked me fully in the face that I realized I was staring at her and seeing nothing else.

Delphi Arans. Her name was as strangely exotic as she was. The way she moved, gliding rather than walking; how she would keep her head tilted to one side while listening; the way she began a smile, then cut it off mid way through as if worried someone might see; it was all too much for me. I got swept away as if in a tide that wouldn’t let go. I was shocked when I finally got up the nerve to ask her if she’d like to find somewhere quieter to have a drink and she said yes. I’d expected a polite brush off, but instead she took my hand when we left our group behind, their teasing calls following us out the door of the pub.

“What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?” I’d asked. “Like ran off?”

Delphi, or Del as she insisted I call her, shook her head, her hair bouncing a little. It was tightly curled gold with dark streaks of bronze here and there.

“Disappeared. She and my dad were married the week before, and when she turned up missing from their house on her birthday most people said she’d run off. Scared of commitment. You know how talk is around here.”

I did. We were both kids of third generation fishing families, both breaking the mold of our futures that would surely exist on lobster boats or working in offices that kept track of lobster sales. Our careers were indefinite, both of us attending business classes at the southern college, possibly passing one another in the halls without having known it before the night we met, though I doubted that. I would have remembered her.

“They found her soaking wet and huddled in a cave south of York after a week. She was catatonic and a little malnourished, but other than that she seemed to be okay.” Del’s eyes had flashed as she took a sip of beer before continuing. “Not that she ever told me anything. My dad filled me in on the details after I’d caught wind of the story from my classmates in third grade. Eventually she came around and was herself again, but she couldn’t remember a thing from the missing week. She said she recalled opening the back door to the house and stepping into the wet grass, but that was it.”

“Very strange,” I said.

“The greatest mystery of my life.”

“What if you asked her about it now, would she tell you?”

She had looked at me and barely paused, saying the words like they were nothing.

“She disappeared again five years ago. We haven’t heard from her since.”

And just like that she switched gears in the conversation, leaving the morbid details of her family history in the wake of more pleasant talk. By the end of the night we’d walked down a strip of beach for over a mile and I’d kissed her beneath the moon. She smiled afterward, not the kind she cut off midway but a real smile. I’m sure I fell in love right then, and I’d like to think she did too. Such a long time has passed since then, it’s the one thing I still hold on to.

~

We were married a year later. It was apparent to anyone who was around us for more than twenty minutes that we were made for one another. I knew all her favorite songs by our fifth date. She began to finish my sentences a month after we moved in together. It sickened all our friends, how we’d found one another so easily, fallen into step like a dance both of us had known but had always lacked a partner for. When we announced our engagement, there were replies of about time and took you two long enough. We had our ceremony by the ocean, bare feet in the sand, my pant legs and Del’s simple dress wetting from the tide curling at our ankles. Now I wonder what I would have seen if I’d been looking out past the waves instead of her beautiful face. Was it there that day? I’m sure it was.

~

Before he died, my father had a fishing boat along with a lobster license passed down through the generations that had stopped with me. An only child, there were no others to gift the inheritance of long days in the salty, stinging air, the smell of fish and the sea never leaving your hands. I’d hated the idea of being a fisherman but hadn’t voiced my opinion until my senior year of high school, having already worked for six years on the boat with my father. My mother told me this was when his health began to decline, after we’d had our row. Because for some, the sea is their first love, one that can’t be replaced by the passion of flesh or the warmth of a baby in the crook of an arm. For some, the sea fills their hearts like the chasms of unending darkness in the deepest reaches. Sometimes there is no room for others among the waves. My father was one of these people. When I told him I didn’t plan on continuing his life’s work, I saw something go dark in his eyes. And maybe it was the black love of the water there behind his blue irises. Whatever the case, that was the end of our relationship. I almost heard it break, like a stick frosted in winter and crushed beneath a boot. He left on his boat the next morning without me, and I began to make plans for college and the rest of my life.