On a cool September afternoon, a day when I was sitting in an advanced economics class, the way Del’s body had looked in the semi-darkness of my dorm room the night before consuming my thoughts, my father fell down at my childhood home, steps from the front porch, and didn’t get up. The day’s mail was still clutched in one of his callused hands. A massive heart attack, the doctor said. Nothing that could’ve been done. But my mother’s eyes, they told me different. That I could’ve been different.

I inherited their house when she moved away the following spring. Florida offered easy winters and other people her age in the same position—widows, widowers, and I assumed cynical as well as thoroughly disappointed by their offspring. But it was more than that. She blamed me for his passing. Never spoken aloud, but there, like a noxious gas between us in the room whenever we saw one another. I tried not to let it bother me, but ghosts don’t simply haunt you, they speak in whispers of doubt.

The week after Del and I were married we moved into my childhood home. It was an old house with wide-planked floors that never squeaked when you walked across them. The windows looked over a short yard to where the rocks began, tumbled against one another by time beyond meaning. Then the ocean. The entire Atlantic stretched away from us in a horizontal swath of sky and sea that blurred into one another on a clear day. The house was paid off from the countless hours my father had spent freezing his hands in the Atlantic, pulling out its fruits to sell to tourists or restaurants, whoever was buying at the time. But even though our bills were fairly low, they still existed, and when our job-hunts both came up without any true prospects, I settled into the thorned knowledge of what I would have to do. Most people know necessity’s next-door neighbor is irony, and this was not lost on me when I started fishing in my father’s boat to make the money we needed. I could almost hear his thick chuckle between the waves that rocked the craft in the early morning hours after rising from the warm bed beside Del. I hated him then, knowing he was having his laugh and had gotten what he wanted after all. But I hated the sea more for always being first in his heart.

And Del. She was more solid than any of the great stones embedded on the shoreline. She got a job waitressing at a decent restaurant on a harbor south of town. The old money would come there in the evenings, crawling out with jaundiced eyes from their five-million-dollar homes to sit and sip cocktails. The yachts would float beyond the lights, bobbing there for everyone to watch while Del brought the food, the pants issued by management too tight but were that way on purpose so the geriatric men could lay their gazes on her ass as she hurried away to get them another ‘tini.

I hated it. I hated everything that we had to do then. We barely saw each other in that first year of marriage, both of us so bent on making it. Some of our friends, the very same that jeered us out the pub door on the first night we met, were doing well in Boston. The city gave opportunities that we didn’t have further north, but then again nearly all of our friends descended from the same old money that Del served most weeknights and every weekend. They were the same who bought the lobster and tuna that I caught. Their trust funds dripped with cash while they surfed their industries until they found the perfect position. I so wanted more for us. More like our friends had. The hate was strong in those days.

But the love was stronger.

We would come home exhausted, almost too tired to speak, but our bodies had their own agendas and I expected we would have a child within a year, but she didn’t get pregnant.

Seeing an expectant mother now sends sickening gooseflesh down my arms and back. My stomach rolls with revulsion and the nausea is almost too much to bear.

To say that we were happy in those first years would be an understatement. We were young and so in love with one another that each day held colors for us that I’m sure others couldn’t see. We were broke but content with where and who we were, and that was more than many of our friends could say for themselves.

In the second year of our marriage Del took a job at the college we’d both graduated from. She started out as an assistant in the admissions department stuffing orientation packets and guiding tours of potential students and their parents who would be paying the tuition. Less than six months later she was promoted to a managerial position after the man who had held it for fourteen years went home one Friday afternoon, loaded the shotgun his wife had given him for their tenth anniversary, and took it into the shower with him before turning the hot water on and ending his life. Del hadn’t wanted to celebrate her promotion and I didn’t push the issue. She spent several of the following nights looking out our kitchen windows and watching the undulations of the sea. I can still see her there now, her slim outline before the sink, so motionless it seemed that she’d become part of the house.

Meanwhile I still hadn’t found work. The days in the boat were long and tiresome but became a routine that I’d forgotten from my youth. One morning, as I splashed hot water on my face in the dim dawn light, I looked into the mirror and saw my father staring back at me. I had his same chin and hadn’t shaved in several days so the stubble bore a resemblance to the short beard he’d worn. I left the bathroom that morning on legs that were partially unstable. Looking back I wonder if somewhere in the sleeping place that resides within everyone’s mind I knew something was coming. It is beyond instinct, that area within our psyche that has never truly awakened after being lulled into a slumber through the centuries since we stepped out of the jungle and began to fashion tools to protect ourselves. I believe at times it opens its eyes as a warning and that’s all we get from it before it submerges again into the depths of the unconscious.

When I came home that night from fishing, Del wasn’t in the house. I called for her after dropping my gear in the entryway, and when she didn’t answer I made my way through the dining room and into the kitchen. At first her absence didn’t alarm me since she sometimes came in late, her new responsibilities keeping her past quitting time. I walked to the fridge and drew out a cold beer from the top shelf where we always kept a six-pack of our favorite brand. I was in the middle of the first lovely swallow when I saw her car keys and cell on the table. Taking the beer with me, I went to the single-stall garage off the right side of the house and popped the door open.

“Del?” I said into the darkness. When I turned the light on, her Toyota was parked in its usual spot, its windows black with no movement behind them. I cupped a hand to one just to make sure before exiting the garage and moving back to the house. I called her name again when I entered the kitchen. The only response was the soft ticking of the clock my mother had left behind. I climbed the stairs and checked our bedroom, as well as the guestroom, before walking out the back door to the yard.

The air was still warm for a late May evening, and I felt the sweat from the day begin to run anew as I jogged down to the rocks overlooking the beach. The narrow stretch of sand was a coffee-colored strip in the evening light. Garlands of seaweed were strung below the rocks in the impression of the latest tide. A white crab scuttled between the green tendrils, climbing up and over several before disappearing beneath a cracked stone. The rapid beat of my heart had little to do with the short run to the edge of our property. Panic had wormed its way into my stomach, creating the same cramping sensation as being struck in the groin. I scanned the vacant beach, looking for her from among the rocks, but there was nothing, only the answer of the sea to my yells. I ran to our closest neighbor’s home, an elderly man named Harold Broddinger, who was, at times, in and out of touch with reality. Most days he spent on his porch, watching the ocean as well as the road that curved past both our houses. He had little else to do since his wife had died giving birth to their daughter who was now in her forties. As I banged on his door, I prayed that Harold was having a good day and would know who I was speaking of when I asked about Del. After knocking for several minutes I realized that it was Tuesday. His son always drove up on Tuesday afternoons to take him out to dinner in Portland, and tonight was no exception. I cursed under my breath and returned to our home, already running through a list of people to call when something to the left caught my eye