Photo by Andrew George on Unsplash
There is no end to the water, no beginning either. Wherever it seems to dry up there is then more. Ocean to bay to rivers to snaking creeks to a steep fall that runs back into the harbor. That’s how it is in the marsh. The tide rises, the tide falls, water goes in and out but never vanishes. Wetland birds step languidly, their webbed toes tipping the center of a small swirl, delicately scratching at rock and weed. Nothing is as alarming as when they dip forward with the speed of a blink to catch a meal, barely breaking the surface of glass. Even when they emerge with nothing but grit on their bird tongues, their elegance persists.
Pauline tried to channel these birds. A mother for three full weeks, she grazes through the kitchen, stopping in this corner or that, dawdling as new mothers do when their babies are sleeping, aware they should be resting but restless. She picks up a magazine. She washes a fork. She brushes crumbs from the butcher block countertop and refills water in a vase of wildflowers collected from the hill behind her house.
The hillside is shiny green fabric that undulates in the slightest breeze. It moves like the waves that come in perpendicular to the shore, those dangerous rip currents that Pauline was taught to avoid. A parent now, Polly prematurely worries about Jenna being swept away. Motherhood changed her in that way the most: her body had bounced back, the hair she’d lost was regrowing, but Polly wasn’t sure she could ever return to the free spirit she was prior to having Jenna. She loved her daughter so much it made her heavy.
Pauline wasn’t expecting things to sweep so far sideways. Friends had warned her the baby would leave her spent: “Please reach out if you need anything.”
There were casseroles and cards, tiny crocheted booties and pastel hats that seemed too small for a human skull but that surprised her with stretchy abundance.
Feeling the exhaustion catch up now, Polly lazily swipes a dish sponge over the tabletop, closes an errant cabinet door (she regularly blamed California soil for their ghost openings), and bends sluggishly to scrub the drops of blood spattered across the floorboards. She moves slowly, careful to mute the harsh bristles scraping across thick planks. It’s true, the baby had taken every shred. Waking Jenna would be the worst mistake of the day.
The blood releases easily from the grooves of the seventy-year-old maple floors. Polly pauses at the memory of her grandmother, scouring those same floors in a lace bonnet that kept her blue foam rollers in position.
“Polly, one day you’ll have to keep after the place.”
Pauline saw her 8-year-old face, scrunched, shaking her head no, she would never clean like Mami. Her grandmother hollered at the back of Polly’s head as her cheerful granddaughter ran out the door, raced to the hill, and dove in the wildflowers, swimming between land waves before plunging into liquid sea.
Though she’d grown up in the lonely shingled house on the beach and spent every free moment in the water, the ocean regularly surprised Polly. No one should ever give their trust to it, yet people did, regularly. It always shocked her when tourists turned away. “Never turn your back to the ocean, Pauline!”
Mami’s memory popped and spit like bacon on a griddle, but just as instantly as the Saturday morning warmth came over her, Mami’s face gave one last hiss and fizzled out. A new face emerged.
Billy wasn’t all bad. When they were teenagers, he was Polly’s most reliable drug hookup—always available, always supplied. Billy never asked Polly out in high school, likely hindered by acne and sweat. Back then, Polly wore a pixie hairdo, smudged eye liner, combat boots, and a lava rock choker around her neck. Billy wasn’t cool enough for her in high school, but a West Marin townie that stuck around long enough usually struck gold eventually.
At The Moondrop, on the night of the summer lunar eclipse, the bar felt different, like the earth had decided to spin in the opposite direction. Pauline, feeling the globe’s reversal, was drawn to Billy’s off-putting stare and pock-framed smile.
“Smoke?”
They’d shared plenty of joints two decades ago, leaning against the white brick wall behind Mr. Casey’s history class. It backed up to a field of foxtails and ivy and was tall enough and long enough to hide the plumes that wafted up and around the potheads. The stoners thought they were clever. Years later, Polly realized the White Wall existed to keep the burnouts hidden from view of the other students. It was probably gone by now. Kids today have gummies and better excuses.
Beneath a darkened moon, Billy looked almost cute. He charmed Pauline into bed as the moon slowly began to show itself again, filtered in from the drapes that Mami had sewn with linen cut from her bedskirt.
The real problem with Billy was that he stayed too long—through the unexpected pregnancy and beyond.
“Shit!” Polly’s palm hooked a raised nail as she slid a dry rag over the cleaned floor. The finishing hammer was where it was supposed to be, in a drawer next to the stove. Funny how she’d had the wherewithal to put it back the night before.
***
She thought she was playing—pantomiming. The hammer hit him straight in the temple. Blood shot from his mouth as he fell, but that was it. The science of it astounded her.
He wasn’t much to move. His addiction kept him ghostlike; it was his shadow that weighed the most.
The tide comes in, the tide goes out.
***
Polly taps the hammer too hard. Again. The nail falls flush and Jenna, awakened, calls out in squeaks.
Somberly accepting her fate, Pauline rises and shuffles to the nursery. She takes a seat in Mami’s rocking chair, Jenna the perfect weight in her arms.
“Pretty girl!”
Out the window the hillside ripples, free as the amaryllis that bends softly in the breeze beneath the gaze of the headlands.
Joscelyn Willett's fiction and poetry can be found in lit mags such as Sundog Lit, The Molotov Cocktail, Spry Literary Journal, The Vestal Review, Third Wednesday Magazine and others. She has a BA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State and is the Director of Communications for a video game publisher in the Bay Area. Her hobbies include day trips with her husband and kids, gardening, drinking champagne while watching reality TV, and cuddling her one-eyed cat named Uno.