She stops well above the waterline, afraid if the sea comes in contact with her skin she’ll follow it out, screaming for Emily as she did that night a long year ago. Only this time she won’t get knocked back to shore; this time, the waves will pull her in, and she’ll let them.
After a time, she lifts the teddy bear to her nose, breathes in, but it no longer smells of Emily, merely terrycloth and fiberfill.
“I’m sorry, punkin. I’m so sorry,” she says, her voice hitching. “I love you.” She hurls the teddy bear as far as she can; it bobs on the surface for several long moments, and then the waves suck it down.
Clouds scuttle across the moon, turning the ocean black. The weight of the air changes, a pressure Tess senses in her ears. The thunder of the waves striking the shore amplifies, and a stabbing cramp sends Tess doubling over. Her vision blurs, the salt tang of the ocean floods her nose and mouth, and a sensation of swelling fills her abdomen.
She staggers back. Presses both hands to her belly, feels the expected flatness there. The clouds shift again; something dark and impossibly large moves deep in the water, and she flees from the beach without a backward glance.
It’s all in your head, she tells herself. All in your head.
When she gets close to the apartment, the bright end of a lit cigarette glows from the shadows of the front porch. Tess waves a still-shaking hand; the orange glow makes a responding arc, but neither she nor her neighbor says a word.
Tess slides a box into the trunk of her car, wipes sweat from her brow, and heads back to the house. Her neighbor is sitting in her usual spot — the battered lawn chair in the corner of the porch — with a lit cigarette in her hand and a glass by her side. Gauging by the bright sheen in Vicky’s eyes, the liquid in the glass isn’t water.
“What are you up to, lady?” Vicky asks, her smile turning her face into a tissue paper crumple.
“Getting ready to go to the thrift store to drop some stuff off.” Tess cups her elbows in her palms, hunches her shoulders. “I finally boxed up some of Em’s things.”
Vicky nods. Exhales a plume of smoke. “Good on you. It might help, you know?”
“I hope so. I kept putting it off, kept thinking I should leave everything the way it was, just in case, but I guess I’m ready to try and let her go. That’s why I went to the beach the other night, to—
(see the shape in the water)
—say goodbye.” She touches her stomach. Swallows the unease.
“Grief is a bitch of a monster.” Vicky stubs out her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. “You think it’ll kill you, but it’s a hell of a lot more clever than that because it lets you live. Only thing you can do is give it the finger and move on as best you can. Only thing anyone can do.” She shakes her glass, rattling the slivers of ice inside. “I need a refill. Want one?”
“How about a rain check for later?”
“Absolutely.”
Tess strips off her dusty clothes in front of her full-length mirror. She’s all arms and legs and narrow hips and small breasts and her belly has no loose skin, no “pooch” that says a child once sheltered there.
Morning sickness lingering well into her second trimester and a waitressing job kept her from gaining too much weight, but now she wishes she’d gorged on ice cream and chocolate and gained fifty pounds, slashing her skin with stretch marks in the process and turning her breasts to sagging teardrops.
She pushes out her stomach, runs her hand over the curve, remembering the fluttering of butterfly wings and later, the heel of a tiny foot, the point of an elbow.
The air goes heavy and thick with the smell of the ocean. Beneath her palms, her skin ripples, and she yanks her hands away. She feels the tremor again, from the inside, and makes a sound low in her throat, then both the smell and the sensation vanish. Frowning, she pokes her abdomen with her fingertips and doesn’t stop until her skin is patterned with tiny red marks like overlapping scales.
When Tess stands, the world swims around her, and she grabs the porch railing with both hands, swaying on her feet.
Vicky laughs in commiseration, not mockery. “Need some help?”
“No,” Tess says, cupping one hand to her forehead, although it doesn’t stop anything from moving. “I got it.”
She takes each step to her apartment with careful measure, ascending one tread at a time the way Emily did as a toddler. Tess can’t remember the last time she drank this much; long before she got pregnant, of that much she’s sure. Thankfully, she left her door unlocked because sliding a key right-side up in the lock would require a bit more dexterity than she’s currently capable of.
Not bothering to remove her clothes, she drops down on her bed, leaving one foot on the floor — she can’t remember if that truly prevents a hangover or if it’s an old wives’ tale — and squeezes her eyes shut. The gray lure of sleep begins to tug.
“Mommy?”
The word cuts blade-sharp through the haze of alcohol, and Tess struggles to sit, her eyelids at war with her intention. Her arms and legs tingle, then her limbs elongate, her fingers and toes deform, her abdomen expands, and a slimy, brackish taste slicks her tongue. She gags, staggers from the bedroom into the bathroom, her body a peculiar, heavy weight to bear, and makes it — barely.
The alcohol and the two slices of pizza she had for dinner come up with a burning rush; she retches again and again until nothing’s left but bile, and then again until even that’s gone. She runs frantic hands over her arms and legs and torso to find everything the way it’s supposed to be and rests her head on the edge of the bathtub, breathing hard.
She flushes the toilet and hears, “Mommy,” this time from the chaos of the Coriolis swirl.
“Emily?”
An unintelligible voice — too deep, too big, to be Emily’s — mumbles something Tess can’t grasp; black clouds of octopus ink coalesce in her eyes, and she slips to the floor into darkness.
“Hair of the dog?” Vicky says with a smile.
Tess shudders. “Oh, god, no.” She half-sits, half-collapses into a lawn chair and holds her water bottle against her forehead. “How much did we drink?”
Vicky shrugs. “Enough to make you laugh. Hell, you even flirted with the pizza boy.”
Tess’s cheeks warm. “Ugh, there’s a reason I don’t drink like that.”
“Plenty of reasons why I do,” Vicky says, her lips set into a grapefruit twist. “I lost a daughter, too, a long time ago. I was going to bring it up last night, but what’s the point? We were having a good time and you seemed happy.”
“What happened, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Course I don’t mind. I wouldn’t have brought it up otherwise. So, what happened to my daughter?” She lights a cigarette, exhales sharply. “Her boyfriend.”
Tess gnaws on a cuticle.
“He beat her. She hid the bruises from me, but I knew something was wrong, and when she finally got the gumption up to leave him, he came after her. And I wasn’t there to protect her.” Vicky takes a long swallow from her glass. “The bastard got his a couple years later. Got jumped in prison after he mouthed off to the wrong guy. Still didn’t bring Crystal back, though.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too. For both of us. And for the record, I don’t think you were lying about what you saw that night. Depression, my ass. Anyone who met Emily even once would know that child didn’t have a depressed bone in her body. Damn fool doctors don’t know what they’re talking about most of the time.”