“Thank you.” Tess touches her water bottle to her forehead again, thinks about what she saw—
(the shape in the water)
—and didn’t—
(the shape)
—see.
“Hell, at least your story doesn’t make you a cliché or a stereotype. Never sure which one is the right word, but either way, had to be some truth before the word made sense, right?”
Tess can only nod in reply. She closes her eyes; in the shadows there the waves recede, and Emily walks into the space they left behind, and Tess almost remembers what her daughter said.
Tess wakes and she’s cold, wet, standing in the shower. Although the faucet is set to hot, the water pouring down is ice, her skin is bright pink, and there’s a thickness in her head as though she’s been listening to someone speak for hours or for days. Her nightgown is plastered against a protruding belly; she blinks, and it’s gone. Her fingers distort, turning too long with jagged fingernails that resemble lobster claws, but the image proves no more real than her stomach; when she reaches for the faucet, her hands are fine.
“Mommy?”
With a grimace, she shuts off the water. Leaves the nightgown dripping on the edge of the tub and curls up in bed, shivering. Disoriented. Scared. She hasn’t walked in her sleep since she was a child.
Is this some sort of involuntary penance for thinking Emily was sleepwalking that night, even though she’d never done it before? Tess followed her, remembering how her mother always said waking up a sleepwalker was a bad thing, curious to see where she’d go, and she was only a few paces behind her. More than close enough to keep her safe.
When Emily approached the beach, Tess took her arm, intending to turn her back around, but Emily pulled free and kept walking, heading across the sand toward the water. And then the world changed, became a rubber band stretching Tess into one place and Emily into another with a huge distance between them.
As before a tsunami, the waves pulled back and they kept receding, the sea folding back on itself to reveal an endless stretch of wet sand littered with fish trapped in the throes of death, driftwood, and tangled clumps of seaweed. Tess screamed her throat raw, but Emily kept walking, and no matter how fast Tess ran, Emily remained out of reach. Between her screams, Tess heard Emily say a word (and why the hell can’t she remember what Emily said?), and then the waves curled into their rightful place again and Emily was gone. In the space between, did Tess see a shape, an unknowable being, deep inside the water? Her mouth yearns to say no; her mind says an emphatic yes.
Even if the police didn’t believe her, she saw something. It wasn’t an optical illusion, as one police officer suggested, not unkindly. The media shitstorm and the blame from the legions of armchair detectives seems a distant dream now. The press was all too willing to give up when they realized Tess didn’t make a good subject; she wouldn’t answer their questions, wouldn’t get mad and curse them out, wouldn’t tear her hair and break down in hysterics. Not in front of them anyway.
Two steaming coffee mugs in hand, Tess pads downstairs, knocks on Vicky’s door with her elbow. After she refills their cups a second time, Tess scrubs her face with her hands, clears her throat, and says, “I keep hearing Emily. Every time I turn on the water, I hear her saying Mommy.” She fiddles with the drawstring on her pants, hating the quiet desperation of her words and wishing she could take them back, inhale them like cigarette smoke.
Vicky takes several sips of her coffee before she answers in a soft voice. “Well . . . You’re trying to move on and you’re feeling guilty about it, and Emily disappeared in the water so it makes sense you’d hear her like that.”
“But it sounds so much like her.”
Vicky leans forward. Fixes Tess’s gaze with her own. “For a couple years, I used to see Crystal all the time. Once, I even followed a girl nearly a mile because I was convinced it was my baby. And I identified Crystal’s body, I knew she was dead, but I knew it up here.” She taps her forehead. “I didn’t know it here.” A second tap, to her chest. “Once my heart caught up, it stopped. You’ll get through this part of it, too.”
“Right now, I don’t feel like I will. Not today or tomorrow or forever.”
“But you will. One day you won’t hear her, and then a little while later you’ll realize you haven’t heard her, and then a little while after that, you’ll realize you don’t need to hear her anywhere but in here.” She touches her chest again.
Tess wants to believe her, but her fingers curl in and her fingernails leave half-moon bruises in her palms.
“Mommy?”
Tess’s head snaps around, the washcloth falls from her hand. She places her palms on the porcelain, bends over the sink. Takes a shuddering breath. No one there, no one there, she thinks, but another sound emerges from the water, an evocative yet inhuman voice, one she knows she’s heard before –no. She had too much to drink that night. She heard nothing then and hears nothing now.
Her belly curves, her breasts swell, her limbs are taffy caught in the pull, her mouth is salt tang and bitter.
“No,” she snaps. “Do you hear me? No.”
Her ears pop, and a dull throb spreads through her abdomen, radiates in a slow spiral to her back. Moaning through clenched teeth, she fumbles for the faucet.
The pain ebbs. Her stomach, her limbs, are perfectly normal, perfectly fine. She rinses away the taste of the ocean with mouthwash, hears only the normal rush of water when she turns the faucet back on.
Tess wakes in the middle of the night with her pulse racing. In her dream, she was on the beach, running toward Emily, and she stopped her before her feet met the water but when Emily turned around, she wasn’t Emily but other, her skin the white of a deep-sea creature and cold as the Atlantic Ocean in January.
Tess turns on her bedside light and scrubs the sleep from her eyes. The sheets are gritty against her feet, and she throws back the covers — sand coats both cotton and skin. Hands clamped tight over her mouth can’t keep in the shout.
Without curtains hanging at the windows, sunlight floods Emily’s bedroom. Tess lugs in paint, brushes, and a canvas tarp, and pulls the bed toward the center of the room. From behind the headboard, something thumps to the floor; Tess retrieves the sketchbook with tears shimmering in her eyes.
From the time she could hold a crayon in a chubby fist, Emily loved to draw and while not a prodigy, her passion made up for it in spades. The first picture is her favorite dinosaur, stegosaurus; the pages that follow show more dinosaurs, a picture of Tess wearing a superhero cape, the beach at night, a second sketch of the beach with a scattering of shells, and then the beach with the waves high and arcing and a dark outline in the raised water.
Tess sinks down on the edge of the bed. The shape in the water, done in crude strokes of pencil, is not a whale or a prehistoric shark. It’s alien and wrong with too many limbs, too many curves. Tess flips the page. Yet another sketch of the same, the lines more defined, darker, the likeness slightly different, but still improbable. In the next sketch, the shape has altered even more, as if Emily couldn’t quite capture on paper what she wanted. Tess’s fingers leave indentations in the paper. This can’t be real. It can’t be right.
“Who are you?” Tess says. “What are you?”
What she can’t bring herself to say aloud: why did you take my daughter?