The One True Ocean Read online

  Copyright © 2003 by Sarah Beth Martin

  Cover and internal design © 2003 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover images © Nonstock and Getty Images

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its ­publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Martin, Sarah Beth.

  The one true ocean / by Sarah Beth Martin.

  p. cm.

  1. Young women—Fiction. 2. Widows—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3613.A786O64 2003

  813’.6—dc21

  2003006750

  CONTENTS

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Part One: Aftermath

  One

  Two

  Three

  Part Two: The Origins of Things

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Part Three: A More Horrible Death

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Part Four: The Rift

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Part Five: The Color of Water

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Part Six: The Thaw

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Part Seven: Awakening

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Part Eight: The Calm

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Part Nine: The Living

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Part Ten: A Fertile Green

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Part Eleven: Buried Things

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Part Twelve: The Umbilical

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Part Thirteen: Undertow

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Part Fourteen: In the Wake of Green

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  This book is dedicated to my parents,

  Janet and Jack Martin.

  acknowledgments

  For their contribution to this book I owe a word of gratitude to the crew at Sourcebooks: Jennifer Fusco, for her vision and editorial finesse; Laura Kuhn, for her enthusiastic support; Vicky Brown, for friendly guidance; Megan Dempster, for pure artistry; and Dominique Raccah, for giving me this wonderful opportunity. Thanks for taking me in.

  I also would like to thank my agent, Stacey Glick, for her devotion and perseverance, and for seeing the light in this book from the very beginning.

  A special thanks goes to those who witnessed the evolution of this book, whose support I treasure: to my family and friends, for welcoming all the chronicles and excerpts; to Jim, for listening, always; to Dad, for passing down his love for stories; and to Mom, whose memory still guides me as I write them.

  And to a little yellow house in Maine that sparked this one.

  part one

  aftermath

  {renee

  one

  “Women are capable of horrendous deeds,” Renee McGarry reads from the textbook in her hands, while stunned, pubescent eyes stare up at her. She feels significant, powerful, speaking the words to her students; this aspect of the female mind is something many of them may not realize. They might not learn it in a physical science class, perhaps not even in history. The words might only appear to them in sensational headlines about violence and madness, murder. But sensational headlines are not what she is talking about.

  She looks out the window to the courtyard, to the transition from winter to spring: melting, dripping, dirty ice and snow, the waterlogged branches and soggy leaves left over from fall. It’s hard to believe it’s the same courtyard, the same thick lawn and colorful trees from autumn. And what about winter, she wonders; was there even a winter? The transition to spring was a blank, cold blue space of nothing. A post-death vacuum.

  It was autumn when her daughter’s husband died. It had been the most beautiful of autumns, with bright foliage that procrastinated and clung to limbs; beautiful, until temperatures dropped and light rain froze on roads, and the afternoon sun simmered the ice to a slick, invisible black. It all ended in autumn, at four o’clock on a bright, gauzy afternoon, perhaps at the same exact time that odd, circular wind blew the freshly raked leaves back onto the lawn.

  Looking out this bleak, gray courtyard window, Renee waits for spring—when dead things come alive again, and she thinks of all the things and people that won’t be coming back. This oncoming season—all this growth and regrowth—mocks her.

  Soon the russet and gold shreds of leaves will sift through the soil in mica-like flakes, and green will sprout from the hard, cold earth. Insects will twitch and flicker in the sunlight, and there will be that smell of green and dirt and wet—the smell of life. And the birds will return, the sparrows and goldfinches, arriving sooner than many realize—not yet showing themselves, not yet singing. Then the chickadees, who never left, but whose song changes with the seasons: they, too, will hesitate to chirp their spring song in case winter decides to return.

  An early robin perches on a naked branch, above the dew and flickering life below, barely supporting itself in the strong wind that smells of ice and metal. Acorns are on the ground, some with their tops and bottoms together, even after the winter.

  A young Renee, who loved spring and trees and living things, would paint faces on the acorns with hats. She would place them on top of tiny mud piles to give them bodies, something to balance their heads on. She would think about human bodies, designed by God, the way babies’ heads could not stand properly on necks, how heads had to be trained. Why did acorns have hats? she wondered. Perhaps she could ask her big sister Adeline, because she knew about living things.

  Renee would one day learn about living things too—not the green life, but human life—the insides of heads and why one wears hats. But she would learn from real life first, from the kind of reality others would not know for ten, twenty years, maybe never. And she was barely sixteen.

  So she knew what she was talking about when, years later, she would speak the same words to her daughter that her sister Adeline once had spoken to her.

  A baby will change your life.

  jenna}

  t
wo

  What happens to the dead?

  I am seven when I think of this, when I first experience death: my aunt, a woman who was gentle and velvety like a butterfly, whose life ended with the clatter of metal and the shock of cold salt water, and perhaps with fear and pain. But I do not think of fear and pain when I am seven; death is simple—it means only that one has gone to a better place, a place that is peaceful and pastel-colored, where there are no heartaches, no unexpected storms. I have no doubt in my mind that Aunt Adeline is at rest.

  Now I am not so sure.

  My adult life has been invaded by death, infected by chaos. My world is not the same. Whenever I look up at the night sky, I wonder how many more times I will see the full moon, how many Thanksgivings and Christmases will pass before my time. Probably fewer than I once imagined; the number had once seemed so ­infinite.

  Life is taken for granted by the living, is my conclusion.

  I don’t know if Seth lived this way—if he counted down moons and holidays. Better if he hadn’t; better if he never realized it was his last drive home from work, and that there would be no more night sky.

  The veneer-bladed ceiling fan spins above me, its hum rhythmic, buzzing like a big mosquito, reminding me that I am made of blood. With my eyes closed I see only mottled, veiny, red-black, but as I open them just slightly there is the flickering above: the shadow of the fan blades, propelled by air destined to go somewhere. Blades destined to turn, like age.

  Like life.

  ***

  Life with Seth started with geology. It was in physical geology that we had our first class together, where we first made eye contact. How Seth loved the science, the explicitness of it; because it was all about rebirth, he had said, about shifting—the upheaval of land. And in life, death is just another part of that shifting—the bones and cells becoming part of the land, the rock. Thinking this way helped Seth to not be afraid.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but I also would need to be fearless, as one day Seth suddenly would be gone, and I would be sitting on a church pew before the shell of his body, while voices told me to pray.

  Pray, they said, as I looked up to a great vaulted ceiling of ornate ivories and golds, to colored glass of amber and blue. The New England sun burned through, turning October cold to a hot, blinding glare, mocking me, while voices told me where my husband was. He’s with God now, they said, with Jesus. A simple solution, I figured, for all who loved Seth, and needed to know he did not simply vanish into nothingness.

  As the voices echoed through the chapel, I imagined his low, softish voice, remembered his dark chocolate eyes looking down at me. But I saw only the copper of his coffin up ahead, open like a museum display, exposing a gauzy white pillow of a bed on which his neatly dressed, miraculously unscarred body lay. My head felt fuzzy, a stuffed, cottony feeling. The muscle relaxants had kicked in, softening sounds and muzzling emotions—just enough so I could still respond loved you too. I was like a machine reacting to signals, to each button pushed—perhaps reacting better than I normally would, my brain void of the usual questions and analysis, that mirage of morality.

  And how strange it was—how surreal—to display his body in such a way; but Seth had wanted the open coffin when his time came. “It’s healthy for people to see,” he once said. “The body is just a shell.” Of course not realizing his own death was so near.

  I had seen a dead body before. Aunt Adeline’s, twenty years ago, another young body stitched and painted and plumped with preservatives. But in contrast to my aunt’s, Seth’s body looked more alive on this day, as if he might just open his eyes and laugh, tell everyone he was kidding. As if this terrible thing could never have happened to a sweet, funny man like Seth.

  This was not real.

  In the front row pew Dad sat on my left side, holding my sweating hand. I could barely feel my own fingers, only my father’s cold, wet palm cupped with mine, and the tiny pockets of air where our skin did not touch. I imagined the lines on his palm, crossing over my own, but not like rivers exactly; more like bridges over rivers—like our genes. He is a dad connected to me in a different way, a special way. A dad who came along years after I was born, who saved me from illegitimacy, and saved Mom from shame.

  Natural child Elisabeth sat to my right, turning her head toward me several times during the ceremony. When I looked back I saw the tiny pale face, harder somehow—without its usual delicate cast, a face refraining from grimace, perhaps experiencing horror for the first time. Horror, I thought, when a young person learns that untimely death is possible. With the exception of thirteen-year-old Elisabeth, the whole family had been there, many years before.

  Especially Mom.

  I couldn’t see her—she was sitting to the left of Dad, but I could feel the wall with which Mom had surrounded herself for this very occasion. I figured that when she looked ahead to that coffin, she was seeing her sister Adeline again. Aunt Adeline, who had left this world too early for things between them to be resolved. I thought of Seth, of the things we never resolved, never even spoke about again.

  A tap on my shoulder surprised me. I turned and saw old friend Paula sitting in the pew behind, her over-rouged face bloated in sorrow, the blonde hair slicked dark and conformed to a bun. Paula, from my pre-Seth college days, now married and back in Maine, now tidy in her navy two-piece pantsuit with white piping—a Halloween sailor, I thought with my fuzzy head; so reserved, so not her. Sitting next to her was husband Gerard, his eyes dull and yellowy, the cheeks and nose blotchy, a too-much-drink look. He had met Seth only twice—seven years ago at Paula and Gerard’s wedding, then again at our own, just months later. But then even Paula’s friendship with Seth was limited to one beer-induced gathering with us on campus, before she became pregnant and was seduced back to Maine. It all happened so quickly; before Paula left I didn’t have the chance to tell her that I had become pregnant, too.

  It was a year since I last saw her—when Paula’s second of two was born and I visited her at the hospital in Portland. It was the time I took the long way home just so I could drive by the old house in Cape Wood. When I got there it was too dark to see anything except the outline of a roof behind the creepy silhouettes of spruce trees.

  Paula reached over from the pew behind and wrapped her hand around my upper arm. “We’ll pray for him,” she said. I could try to pray, but God wouldn’t be there, not after years of my not knowing what to believe.

  ***

  Sometimes I think about other ways he could have died—more horrible ways, so that the way it happened doesn’t seem so bad. A slit throat, a gunshot wound.

  More horrible.

  The truck came out of nowhere, supposedly, a jacked-up blue Dodge on steroids, hurling into his lane from the right, cutting in front of him. Seth must have seen it coming; he must have looked death directly in the eyes. But perhaps it happened ­quickly; maybe there was no time for fear, and his oncoming death was purely accepted. I hope so; that Seth passed into that dimension of peace and tranquillity without a breath, without the chance to feel any regret, any sorrow or guilt or shame.

  A death with dignity. Perhaps one thing all living beings hope for: a life that ends without wronging or without being wronged. In my dreams, the man in the blue truck is still alive, his face intact—not guilty. But in real life, he has crushed his body, his identity, and has taken my husband with him.

  Now sirens wake me in the night, and early each morning. I didn’t use to notice them; they are common in Cambridge, and I used to sleep right through. Now when I hear them I think of ambulances, police cars, and hospital emergency rooms. I go back in time, back to what Seth’s last vision may have been: the colors of October—late afternoon, orange and brown leaves across the dark road, followed by flashes of metal, a blue truck in front of the windshield coming toward him in slow motion. The rescue lights are there—perhaps he never saw these—the blindi
ng red bulbs of the fire truck, blue lights of a police car. I hear the sounds: sirens approaching, wobbling in and out of my ears, the same sounds that resonated through my sleep while I napped cozily on the couch, waiting for him to return from a quick trip to work. I must have thought that these were everyday sounds, that they were nothing. Now I wonder if those sirens I heard were sirens rushing for him, and if they were, if he ever heard them. Or was he dead already? At what precise moment did Seth leave this world?

  It is difficult to not know, to not have seen it. To hear only that he was unconscious when witnesses reached the car. Unconscious or dead, they did not know. They didn’t say dead until he reached the hospital.

  So I can only imagine. Each morning I see crumpled metal, the crashed windshield—all those pictures I saw in the paper of his smashed car after they removed him. I see the clusters of orange and brown and wonder if he saw leaves before he died.

  I live this way. For a few minutes of every hour, of every half or quarter-hour, I am Seth—seeing what he may have seen, feeling what he felt. I make his experience as painful and terrifying as possible, so that I know it could not have been as bad as I imagine. It feels strange—this solemnizing, this penance, because putting myself in Seth’s shoes is something I never bothered to do when he was alive.

  I remember his body at the hospital, the nightmare beneath the white sheet. When they lifted the sheet his sweet face and hair were clean, his body remarkably intact. I reached out, touched his still-warm head, and in my half-conscious mind sighed, because for a second, he was alive. He was not the bloodied, dismembered body I had imagined and feared as a policeman drove me to the hospital; he seemed whole. But this lie, this fantasy lasted only for a second, and the truth was what the officer had already told me at my front door: inside this perfect body Seth was dead, his bones were crushed, his organs liquefied. But it was quick, the emergency room doctor comforted. “Yes,” the policeman added, “he didn’t know what hit him.”

  But how did they really know?