Come
The driftwood found her foot first.
She nearly kicked it into the water. Stopped. The wind off the Atlantic pushed her hair across her face and she left it there, both hands shoved into the pockets of Denny’s old barn coat, the one she’d taken to wearing because it still smelled like him if she didn’t wash it. The smell was fading anyway, would be gone soon. She didn’t think about it. Couldn’t.
She had walked out a long way. Low tide at Ecum Secum pulls back farther than people expect, exposes the rock shelf in wide dark plates, and she had followed it out without meaning to, the damage drawing her forward. Three days since Fiona and the beach was still chaos and carnage. Kelp roped over rock. A plastic crate split open against the granite. The sand pushed back to show the dark under-layer that was always there and never seen, like raw skin under a bandage. She understood her impulse to look and bear witness. She had been doing a lot of cataloguing and reflecting of her own recently.
The cup on the counter she didn’t remember filling. The road to Tangier that felt strange and foreign for a handful of moments. Familiar gone unfamiliar and then familiar again. Her sister had called from Fredericton. Carol meant well. Carol was four hours away and had her own life and called every Sunday and that was the whole of it.
The bird stopped her.
It lay in a hollow between two rocks. White. The white of bone, even wet and grounded. A tail feather, long, trailing into a shallow pool of rainwater that hadn’t drained. A black mask through the eye, sharp as paint. She crouched. Put her hand near it, not touching. Close enough to know. Cold. Already cold. The granite wet through her jeans at the knee, the hem of the barn coat moving against her legs.
A black mask. Denny hadn’t worn his. Twenty years of suiting up, of walking into rooms that were on fire, and a virus was not going to be the thing. She was proud of him. She was proud of him still, and some mornings she wanted to take every dish out of the cupboard and smash them all to hell.
You weren’t supposed to be here, pretty bird. And then, quieter, before she could stop it: Neither was the storm. Neither am I.
She stood. Her knees cracked and ached. The air was heavy, post-hurricane wet, warm in a way that sat damp against her face, like the season had lost its footing.
Behind her, far enough away to ignore and close enough to matter, the tide was coming in.
The driftwood, again.
Salt-grey, smooth. The size of a good walking stick snapped in half. She picked it up, absent and by reflex. She turned it in her palms. Her thumb tracked the grain along one face: a ridge, a long curve, a narrowing near one end.
She held it against her left wrist, the inside, where the scar ran from the base of her thumb to just short of the wrist bone. A knife, 1987, trimming bark from a branch she was making into a garden stake, blade skipping. She had bled into the dirt and said a word she never dared say in front of her mother and stood at the sink watching the water go pink and then clear. She’d been so young. She remembered being surprised by how much a small cut could bleed. That scar was more familiar than her own face.
Denny used to trace it with his thumb. Every time he held her hand, without making a thing of it. Just that. He had come home smelling of smoke and rain and sweat and not said much. Then he was gone.
The grain of the wood traced the scar exactly.
The curve. The narrowing. The place near the wrist bone where it thickened before it thinned to nothing.
Is this real? Is this something I would do and not remember. How would I know.
She blinked once and the cup on the counter flashed in her mind. Not enough water in it. Or too much. Something off by a finger-width.
She noted the incoming tide’s progress by sound off the rock shelf, the water filling in, the air above it going dense. Maybe twenty minutes. Maybe fifteen. She didn’t move. Her hands were cold. The wood was not. Warmer than it ought to have been.
She turned it over.
His handwriting.
She knew it before she read it. The C, open at the top, never quite closed, like he couldn’t commit to finishing it. She had watched that hand write grocery lists, birthday cards, the names of his crew on the whiteboard in the hall. She had kissed that hand in the hospital and told him to come home. He had said he would.
One word.
Come.
The water was in her ears now, not close but present, the sound of the Atlantic filling a rock shelf, steady and indifferent. This beach, walked with him for thirty years. She knew what it sounded like when the tide had ten minutes left, and it sounded like this.
She took off her sneakers and set them beside her on a barnacle-crusted rock, one and then the other. She sat on the rock edge and put her bare toes into the first wash. Warm from its long crossing, and nothing else.
The next one came higher.
Cold found her ankles. Then her calves. She stood into it, the rock dropping away in stages she knew from thirty summers on this shelf.
The driftwood stayed in her hand. She crossed both arms over it, against her chest. Same grip she used on a cold mug, waiting for the woodstove to catch.
Den.
