And The Sea Called Her Name(2)

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.