The One True Ocean Read online

  I had awaken from my nap to this police officer’s face at my front door, to the horrible news. As he spoke the words I choked, gagged on my own breath, and my stomach turned inside out. I hunched over, curled my body like a shrimp, then crumpled into the doorway, and he had to pull me up and walk my shaking body to the couch. As I sat down I heard sounds coming from my own mouth—a scraping, guttural cry, like a baby does after screaming for hours. Now when I cry or see anyone else cry, or especially when I hear a baby cry, I replay the words the officer spoke as I opened that door.

  “Are you Jenna McGarry, the wife of Seth Morton?”

  Wife of Seth, I keep hearing, along with the strange noises throughout my building. Floors creak with life and walls tick with water pipes, making me jump. The dim hallways seem unusually hollow, echoing, and voices floors below resonate through the house. Then there is the traffic outside—the engines and horns of anxious commuters, the distant groan of the subway. Never before have such slight sounds been so painful.

  And I can hear the leaves. Outside the living room window on the street below are the rotted, recycled leaves from fall, dark and drenched with melted snow and exhaust. The sound they make is different from the crisp, autumn leaves that scratch against the sidewalk in an elegant sweep, like the crackle of a fire. These late-winter leaves are lower-toned and sluggish as they scour the pavement, making way for spring.

  The oncoming spring terrifies me. I will have to emerge then, to come out from hibernation. In winter I was not expected to get better, to be happy; I did not have to grow, or even face the sunlight. I could hide from the world, from reality. Some people I don’t have to hide from; many avoid me. But from those who stare and scrutinize, I have to look away. It hurts—this surveillance, this waiting for them to ask me how I’m doing. I wait, knowing exactly what they are going to say.

  Sometimes in the morning I feel stuck to my bed, heavy and immovable, like a piece of iron pressed into the soft cotton. I lie there for hours sometimes, wondering if someone will find me that way. I don’t like going anywhere—the agency keeps calling, asking me if I’m ready for more work—fruits this time, they say, line drawings. Coloring books. “Another week,” I keep telling them.

  The telephone rings and it frightens me. I’m not sure if I fear bad news or just voices in general, but I don’t answer it anymore. I let the machine pick up, the machine with the message that must confuse people, make them wonder about my state of mind. I haven’t changed the message on it. After five months it still says in Seth’s deep sandy voice, We can’t come to the phone right now...

  And I know that all are listening and thinking how I need to get over this: When will she be over this?

  ***

  I awaken from one of my Seth dreams, in which I hear his voice on the other end of a phone line, talking from far away. I can see him, but he’s cloudy, two-dimensional almost, as if on a movie screen that’s far away. He tells me that he’s going somewhere—he doesn’t say where, and I want to tell him to be careful, to take a different route, but when my mouth opens to speak, only a strange gasping sound comes forth. I exhale gasping sounds but I cannot form words, while his voice says are you there, are you there? I can barely make out his face on the screen with its gauzy layer in front of it; I can’t tell if the gauzy layer is in front of the screen or in front of my eyes, like a cataract. He is ready to hang up, but still I try to speak, to yell. There’s so much I want to tell him, but it’s too late.

  So this is why so many believe in God and heaven and afterlives, I realize. With God and heaven, there is no too late.

  His breath still floats around this apartment and this room. When I lie in the stillness of my bed I can feel it whisper against my cheek, my bare arm. But with this fan spinning above I know the air and his breath will move past quickly, and not stay too long. Still, as I drift off to sleep I feel waves of air sweep warm and soft over my face, and I feel him near me.

  I’m still here.

  Each morning in bed I think I’m done crying. Every day is the last day I’ll cry, then each day following. The dreams I’m having are wearing me out. I’m drowning in his memory. My soul is dehydrated.

  And there is this apartment: this tiny, attic third floor of a house with colored layers stacked like Legos, where each level pretends to live in private, to feel safe and anonymous. I feel ­stifled up here, hot—even in this early March, while I lie static below the spinning fan blades. I am smothering in this apartment—no longer anonymous or safe.

  Leaving here would be difficult. It would be leaving him behind. But this place is just a shell, I remind myself daily, as if taking a vitamin; like his dead body, it is a shell. To stay would not be a symbol of my love for him; to go would not indicate a too-early recovery.

  I am not to feel guilty for leaving.

  It would only feel like I’m leaving Seth, because the place is alive with him. His skin, his dust, lies in the thinnest, unseen layer on top of the furniture and upon the walls. It lives in the cracks and corners of floorboards, within the bedroom rug. There are invisible hairs in the corners of drawers, the fine powder of fingernail on the dresser. Traces of his fluids permeate the mattress pad. He is here still—remnants of him.

  Move on.

  three

  The aftermath of death was not what I had imagined it might be. It was like a dream—a blur of faces and condolences, and I endured the pain the way one endures the extra mile when running uphill. A gush of adrenaline was perhaps what it took, a different, dreamy kind of adrenaline to make it all okay.

  Even the after-funeral gathering was surprisingly endurable, not the nightmare I had anticipated. Mostly because it was not me wandering amongst family and friends, telling everyone I was okay. It was someone else—someone able to answer, able to smile. I had not imagined that I would be able to smile on such a day.

  What I had imagined was a confined, bottled-up feeling, and that I could not wait for them all to leave and just let me explode. But having all those people around me for those two, three hours ended up being exactly what I needed. On that afternoon, Seth’s parents’ house had been transformed into a diorama of sorts, a façade, and being there was like watching a movie with me in it. And with all those faces, all those stories told only during such occasions, surrounding me like a cushiony wall, a big blanket.

  And just hours later those faces and stories suddenly were gone, and sorrow hit me like a wave, knocking me over so I could not move or breathe.

  I am drowning.

  ***

  The waiting room of Brookline Psychological Health is air-­conditioned, even in March. The air is stale and bland, and there is the smell of year-old dust, hot metal, cold plastic. On the wall above the couch is a watercolor print—a farm field and country farmhouse, with a mauve-colored plastic frame to clash. The waiting room furniture seems to match the frame; there is the same mauve color in the chairs and a couch, both in a hard, scratchy nylon. The room could use some comfort, I think, some warmth. Maybe some earth colors—a little red, the color used in film to imply danger, in restaurants to increase the appetite. Any new sensation to smooth out the edges.

  When a loved one dies tragically, there sometimes are social workers and doctors to help, to surround like bees—ready to comfort, console, whatever. I am lucky to have my private meetings, that I’m not just on some survivor’s roster at the emergency department, the next one in line. I wonder if Mom had that kind of help after the police found Aunt Adeline’s waterlogged car.

  Dr. Chase reminds me of Mom. She is slim and tidy and ­conservative-looking, with the same high brunette bun on her head, the wispy bangs cascading onto her forehead. She wears thin-rimmed glasses that outline her small raisin-eyes, and clutches a clipboard to her chest the way doctors do in movies. Her office is warmer than the waiting room, with a thick plush carpet in emerald green, a shiny mahogany desk. An English ivy crawls up th
e back corners of the room to the ceiling, then over the window. I take one of the heavy wood chairs in front of the desk, wondering if anyone actually lies on the black vinyl sofa against the wall.

  Dr. Chase positions her glasses on the end of her nose, looks down to the stack of papers in her hands, and begins. “Let’s talk about the accident again.”

  I take a breath and repeat the details, the story I’ve gone over so many times now that I wonder if the words are the same each time they emerge from my mouth: The driver of the other car was speeding...roads were icy that day, one of those rare, black ice days in October...

  Such an ominous autumn day, I think, cloudy but luminescent; a soft, velvety gray. It was startlingly cold, too; I could feel my eyes drying—freezing open in the coldness, and I could see Seth’s breath in the air as he spoke those last words to me outside of his car.

  Love ya.

  Dr. Chase flips through her paperwork. “You and Seth never had any children,” she says.

  “No.”

  “But you miscarried once.”

  The words feel foreign, intrusive. I’ve forgotten about all this information she has on me. “Yes,” I say. “Seven years ago.”

  “Seven years,” she says, perhaps doing the math in her head. “Were you and Seth married then?”

  “No. Not yet.” I look to a blank spot on her desk, see the reflection of the window in the shining wood. The bare branches outside the window are moving in the reflection and seem clearer the more I stare at them, as if it’s not a reflection at all.

  “And,” Dr. Chase’s voice wakes me up, “was it Seth’s baby?” She seems nonchalant about this question, as if the answer could very well be No. Then I think, how many women does the doctor talk to who have several men in their lives?

  “Yes, it was,” I say.

  “Did you marry because of this pregnancy?”

  “No. Well, yes...originally, yes.” The wooden chair feels hard beneath me; I feel rigid, aware of my stiff back and neck, the exact position of my arms and legs. “Then after I lost it we married anyway.”

  Dr. Chase looks beyond me for a moment to the wall, perhaps skimming the list of possibilities in her head. “Was there ever any question,” she asks, “about whether you still would marry—after your miscarriage?”

  Of course Seth would marry me; there was no question. That was one thing I would never have to worry about from him: duty, dedication, a lifetime of love. But there also had been so many tense conversations between us during that time, so many unspoken assumptions that led to unspoken decisions. So much of those days are fuzzy now; I can’t pinpoint any real conclusion. “No,” I say. “We never talked about it. But we did stay married, after all.” My voice sounds defensive.

  “How did you feel after you lost the baby?”

  “Terrible, of course. But you could almost say it was for the best. I wasn’t ready for a baby.”

  “Did you ever try again?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” Dr. Chase’s eyes move over my face, scrutinizing, it seems.

  “I don’t know.”

  She crosses her fingers and rests her hands on the desk. “And how do you feel about this today, in relation to the accident?”

  “I don’t. All I think about is that damn accident.”

  “Do you feel guilty?”

  “About the baby?”

  “About the accident.”

  “I guess so,” I say. “I feel guilty about being alive. I feel it every morning when I put my feet on the floor, when I drink a glass of water or brush my teeth, whenever I feel like smiling or enjoying life. When I breathe.” It feels good to tell her this, like I have just come up for air. “I feel like part of me is missing.”

  Dr. Chase smiles. “Part of you is not missing, I assure you,” she says. “But it does feel like that, because there’s a part of you that was devoted to Seth. That part of you doesn’t know what to do anymore. That part won’t let you move on.”

  I’ve heard this before. “I know.”

  She lowers her glasses and looks up at me. “Did you ever think,” she says, “that it’s possible you’ve already begun to ­recover, and that this is what you feel guilty about?”

  Heat rushes within my chest and up the sides of my neck, to my temples. I wonder how she can think this, how she can say such a thing. How many mourning people does she say this to? “No, I don’t think so,” I say. I look out the window beyond where she sits, through the valance of green plants and polished glass, see the street a half-story below where cars are rushing, rushing to nowhere.

  I’m getting nowhere too.

  ***

  After the session ends and I step out of Dr. Chase’s office, the tears come. This is how it happens each time, the gush of tears I don’t let others see.

  On my way out I pass through the waiting room and stare at the mauve-framed watercolor again. A lame attempt at style, I think with my artist’s eye, but as I inspect it more closely I notice the illustration within: a yellow farmhouse within an open field, a white picket fence and clothesline in the back yard. Typical, I think, like many paintings of country farmhouses, yet familiar. A little bit like the old house in Maine, where I spent my first few years.

  I exit the building and run down the front steps and get into my car. Traffic rushes past, so fast, it seems. I try to pull onto the street and I can’t; each time I’m about to press my foot to the gas I anticipate the crash of metal-against-metal, and again think of Seth buried in the ground.

  And I think of something else: a voice over the telephone—Pregnant, you’re pregnant, and remember my tense, upright posture on Seth’s living room couch, listening, thinking about the year to follow. We would be married, most likely, living in the same tiny third-floor apartment. And I would be sitting in the same living room, feeling the summer sun through the window, the heat from the pavement two stories below. And with a sticky, screaming baby in my lap, my cleavage and forehead sweating, my full hands unable to wipe. And stuck to that corduroy couch, the milk-spotted, veneered coffee table in front of me.

  I wasn’t ready.

  But in the end I didn’t have to experience any of those fears I had, fears I now know were selfish, inconsequential. I lost our baby, its body barely a shell. A body not even big enough to bury, someone at the hospital must have decided.

  I look back up to the big stone building and think of how cold the polished granite must feel in this raw wind, yet how indestructible it must be—so different from my tiny apartment in the city that now feels so fragile and so temporary. I feel raw, penetrable. Stripped of my skin. Seth would want me to forget about this terrible thing that happened to him. He would want me to take a deep breath and erase everything from my memory.

  And I can do this if I try hard enough—if I think of something else, something that takes me away from him. I close my eyes and see the waiting room watercolor, a painting that does not seem so tacky, so inert as when I first looked at it. Now there is something sunny and comforting about this yellow farmhouse that reminds me of my life before this one—before Seth, when my aunt was alive. Aunt Adeline, who, unlike my own mother, did not seem so far away.

  part two

  the origins of things

  {renee

  four

  There are times when she begins to remember. The wind will blow from a particular angle at her face, bringing with it the salty mist from the coast twenty miles away, and she will see Maine. Water, waves, sand, and rock ledges. She can’t escape it; she should have moved farther away from the coast if she really wanted to escape. But it must be in her blood to be near some kind of water—not the static, buggy inland kind of water but the fresh, regenerative kind. She settled for this west-of-Boston inland that lets her breathe but doesn’t smell like Maine.

  Renee looks out the front doorway, sees where Bill has j
ust cleaned the winter grit and salt from the walk, a sweep of mud across stone. Clumps of gold and rust peek out from the dirt—the soggy oak leaves from fall, her favorite season.

  She thinks of autumn in Maine, especially early autumn, before the first frost, when the smell of apples permeated the cool air. She remembers how sumacs and maples ripened like fruit, and forest floors were covered with brittle brown needles and fallen acorns with their tops removed. Rain was hard and cold as it soaked fields full of pumpkins and squashed, late-summer tomatoes. Spiders came inside and mosquitoes melted away; birds flew south and automobiles followed, towing boats and bicycles. And then suddenly, the yellow school buses appear out of nowhere.

  Here in the Bay State, one hundred miles away, autumn looks much the same. Even the coastal cities become speckled with fall—the reds, browns, and golds that thicken toward the suburbs, then explode into color to the west. But in the summer Renee feels safer here than in Maine. She feels secure in her western suburb well inland from the coast, within the plush collar of trees that protects her from the ocean she no longer loves.

  She used to live for the summer—for gardens and sun and warm, glistening sand, for the sharp, reflective ocean waves. But she no longer loves those waves of dark, blue-green, or that foamy edge that splashing creates. Her Maine summer waves were lost long ago, when summer evaporated, turned to death. So she turned to autumn, “ironic in its deathly beauty,” as she might describe to her social science students. Because she likes irony—that incongruent bridge between what is expected and what actually occurs.

  And now, with Seth gone, autumn may be lost too.

  On the shelf next to the door stands his picture in which he hovers close to Jenna, his head tilted down to hers, his shadowy eyes looking intensely into the camera. The outline of his shoulders, the deep eyes and dark crown of hair have always reminded Renee of someone else. It is an unsettling memory—not good, not bad, just unsettling—a feeling she longs for and, at the same time, deplores. A face from long ago.