The Woman from the Sea

It was the pain that sent her back to the sea.  A burning tingle in her fingertips, worse in her toes.  Even the smallest stub put tears in her eyes; a lukewarm shower scalded like hot oil.

            Neuropathy, the young doctor called it, wrinkling his smooth freckled forehead and holding her hand in an unprofessional manner. 

            He had red hair that he wore swept backward from his face, twice-monthly trimmed, and his skin was thin and tight and oyster-pale, with tiny agate freckles.  He had a fresh and fragile look, like the Easter lilies she saw on their mountain hikes, and the new creases of worry across his forehead, the tucked-in frown of his mouth, looked painful there.  She reached out a tingling thumb to smooth them, but the lines were marked into his skin.  A bent petal.  The beginning of the end of spring.

〜

She crawled from the waves tumbled and surf-tossed as jetsam, skin crusted with glassy sand, a wrecker’s weight of gold clattering at her wrists and neck.  She spit saltwater from her mouth and parted the hair that lay plastered thick and flat as wet weed over her eyes.  She tasted the air.  In the shattered sunlight her eyes wept out the last beads of the sea, and as she blinked them free she saw green hills rising up from the sand, clear as cut glass, a sharp and static landscape of sound and hungry light.

She came crawling from the sea on the whipping tail of an April storm, clouds tressing out bruised and blue and full of teeth, rosy skies beyond them.  Into this hectic light she came crawling, dragging the man with her.  His clothes bulged with seawater.  His face gaped, as pale as foam.  He was heavy, heavier without the surf’s assistance, and she staggered but hefted him, flopping, and found she was still strong.

Gold chimed in the wind on her flexing wrists.  Droplets danced like insects in the glare and the man was silent, breathless, close to death.

She climbed onto the sand, her feet sinking to the ankle in the ebb.  Above the waterline she lay him down and listened to his silence, there beneath the sound of the sea. 

She raised one white splayed palm and struck him hard, one, two, three, over his heart.  She bent and huffed cold breath onto his cheeks.   The man woke with a gasp, rolling over to vomit a frothy blend of ocean and bile onto the sand.  He rattled and shook, weeping phlegm, and his flailing fingers tangled in the long slick robe of her hair.  He saw her, then, through the narrow aperture of his confusion, crusted and golden and womanly, maybe beautiful, the only horizon in a great white glow, and his hand wrapped round and round and round in her black hair as though never to let go.

〜

The young doctor was sure of many things.  Of most things.  Mysteries were countable on one hand and he accepted them as charming and inert, conversation starters.  What women want.  The Pyramids of Egypt.  Placebo effect.

            He knew his standing in his medical class⸺neither top nor bottom⸺and at the clinic in which he now worked.  He knew his aspirations and how to achieve them.  Through diligence, hard work and efficient living he would become successful and modestly wealthy.  He would marry his girlfriend, Laura, in one or two years’ time.  They would own a home near the Arboretum with a view of the city and have children, two of them, and she would be a good mother.  Their values were nicely aligned.

            The young doctor had a very good memory and rarely was at a loss with a patient, as he could rapidly bring to mind many exemplaries and apply what best fit to the novel case before him.  He was organized and healthy.  He did not think of anything he did not need to think about and it showed on his face, which was smooth and milky as ceramic.  Some of his patients at the clinic loved him for this blemishless conviction and others despised it and tried to rattle him with rude remarks or difficult questions, but it didn't work.  The young doctor was a man of no imagination, so firmly fixed into the firmament of reality that he floated above it; all things nonsensical slipped off him like water, and all things explicable were accounted for. 

He was twenty-eight years old and every problem in the universe had a solution, like a slip on a pillow, a shoe on a foot.  His whole life stretched out before him and he confidently approached it, sure of what lay around the dark bend of each day.

And then he drowned.

〜

She slept in the bathroom at first, running the tub full of cold water and floating there until morning when she rose, chilled and sneezing, her skin puckered as a new baby’s or a crone’s.

“You should sleep in bed,” the young doctor told her.  “You’ll get sick.”

She was scornful, or perhaps fearful, but at last joined him on the wide mattress, wriggling and twisting between the sheets and duvet like a fish flopping.  She nuzzled close to him, though, cool and smooth-backed in the warm tent of blankets, kicking her feet free to flex in the open air.  Her body stayed cool, cool as the sea, even when she began to pant and sweat, while he grew hotter and hotter, his fair freckled skin flushed.  Her veins blossomed green in the dimness.  Their breath became thunderous, with a rhythm like surf striking, and the doctor shut his eyes as if pretending, as if only dreaming the slap of her hair and the pressure of knees and hands and hips.

〜

The doctor’s surety dissolved like salt in water.  Like ice that drowns in its own transmuted substance, floundering, a shrinking white isle. 

How had he ever been so sure the world would do what it should?  The arrival of the unknowable bowled him over completely.  He staggered, staring into the immensity of things he could not remedy, could not alter, could not even understand.

Was this a normal feeling?  He wondered.  To love the world and hate it, both so absolutely? 

It was exhausting.

When he looked in the mirror over his bathroom sink, he often found his face twisted, frowning and tragic as a mask.  Other times he struck himself as so absurd, so hilarious, everything hilarious, that he laughed until his occiput ached like a tooth.

He took on the habit of lying, and found it surprisingly easy.  Disturbingly satisfying.

He lied to his colleagues about his brush with death at sea, a lively story that involved only himself, a foolhardy and inexperienced surfer, tricky currents, and a lucky ending with paramedics swarming the beach.  He left out the long-armed, gold-bangled woman who dragged his body from the churning sea, who struck the water from his lungs.   The woman who now stared greenly from his darkened windows, wandering the path from sofa to kitchen sink and back, trailing her robe of black hair, luminous, quiet as night.  Her he didn’t mention to anyone.

He lied to leave work early, or not come in at all, finding it harder and harder to leave the soft dampness of his bed, the body of the woman from the sea.  The world began to feel like a great blurred wheel, rotating slowly around that cool and beautiful face, yawning beside him the watery morning light, smiling, kissing him with salty breath.

〜

Laura texted.  She called.  She came by the doctor’s apartment on the east side of the river, though she lived on the west.  This was a surprise; they always made plans before seeing each other.  Always his name appeared in a bright yellow rectangle in her phone agenda: “Dinner with Edgar”, “Coffee with Edgar”, “Sleepover at Edgar’s⸺ bring suit 4 meeting + blow dryer!”.  Even spontaneity was cataloged with a text message such as: “Surprise tonight!!! b ready 6pm wear something nice but fun!!!” 

Now her agenda read under the Wednesday heading only: “Edgar???!!!” and she came to the young doctor’s door unannounced while the other woman⸺ she was, he realized suddenly, with misty guilt, another woman⸺ was in the bathroom, drifting in cool bubbles.

It was not a pleasant conversation.  The sunlight gleamed on Laura’s blond head like chrome, making the doctor’s eyes water.

“What’s going on with you?” she cried and hugged him, letting go quickly as if he were hot to the touch.  As if he had become mildly repulsive to her, but she was trying to hide it.

“You almost died, Edgar!” she said.  “That is a very big deal!  Don’t you want to talk about it?  Are you seeing a therapist?  Where have you been?  What is going on?” 

Nothing, nothing, he said.  Just work.  He’d just been so tired.  They were understaffed, he said, plus he was volunteering.  With refugees. 

Lies popped into his head like ripe fruit, their seeds tiny truths. Lying, he realized, was an art.

〜

The doctor called the woman Esther, after the beach where she found him.  He asked her name, later that same tangled day when he drowned, but she laughed.

            “You could not speak it,” she said.

            “Try me,” he replied, and she laughed again and let out such a shriek, such a glottal groaning, that he covered his ears.

            “Alright,” he said.  “Alright,” and she laughed and laughed.

〜

When he asked her where she came from, she said, “The sea.” 

            He pressed for details⸺an island?  A boat?  A coastal village? ⸺ but she shook her head and closed her eyes and described a place. 

Green light that moved like glass shadows.  Clouds that flew swiftly, changing shape, breaking into a thousand tiny fish rather than raindrops, spinning with the current away from danger, or following their own microscopic prey.  Darkness that was absolute and silvery with luminescence, stars that were plankton hanging overhead, the smooth bodies of ray and shark cutting the cold water, white-bellied, the intricate conversations of leviathan, who made their pilgrimage at each change of the season. 

A southern forest of feathery kelp, where brightly colored creatures hid.  Eel-filled caves and secret meeting places, lanced with light and the diffuse mood of the sun. 

She described spits of sand and rock rising in the middle of an empty sea where sometimes she watched the sky move and felt the strange cuff of the wind, so thin and cutting it slid unstoppable through the great weight of that world above the water. 

To the west it was darker and colder, she told him, and the dead of everything drifted there, slowly downward, growing smaller and softer.  Skeletons came to rest on the deep mountains at the edge of an abyss, bones of ships, wood and steel, some with cargos of treasure, some with cargos of the dead.  She told him of diamonds and rubies and emeralds and sapphires like the eyes of the south sea.  Cannonballs sunk into the grey softness.  Statues of bronze, jade, onyx.  Cutlery and cut glass.  Navigational computers, cracked under the strain, lay next to the brass spines of sextons, everything still and secret and sinking.

            And then she would go quiet, fingering her gold bracelets, her ropes of pearls and mother of pearl and jade, and the doctor was quiet too, picturing her naked body glowing in the reflected light of schooling fish, her long hair an ink cloud pulsing above her as she swam through the shadowed hulks of sunken galleons, her long legs pumping elegantly, or maybe legless altogether, wearing a green tail that churned the water, a fantasy creature, singing with a chorus of octopus and lobsters, dreaming of life on land⸺

He shook his head and the summer air billowed like an eddy.

This, he thought, is negligence.  This, he thought, as he pressed her thigh, cool despite the sun, is how people lose everything.

〜

The doctor often thought of calling a physiatrist he knew.  He dialed the number and then hung up, more than once.  Furtively, he flipped through the DSM-5 in the staff reference library at the clinic.  He went back over notes from med school, the course on mental health, searching. 

Delusional Disorder, mixed type.  Substance-induced psychosis.  Schizophrenia.  Pseudologia fantastica.  Mythomania.

He tried to review the facts.  He tried for objectivity.  He knew what he should do.  He wasn’t sure.  He didn’t do it.

〜

Summer came over the city hot and thick, sliding down the slopes of the Coast Range and the Cascades to coil in the parks and gardens and wide white sidewalks of the city.

            Esther had grown more confident.  She slept more and took fewer baths.  She borrowed the young doctor’s bike and darted along the river path and through downtown, falling often.  She licked her scratches like a cat, enjoying the bitterness of her bright red blood. 

            In the city the river was small and sluggish.  Esther hardly recognized it.  One weekend, the doctor took her up the gorge where the river was wide and whitecapped with wind.  They got beers and then walked out onto a long red bridge where the wind winged out their coats and made a kite of her black hair.  Below them windsurfers bounded across the water like skipped stones.  Esther heard the voices of seagulls and waves slapping.  She smelled salt, erosive and acrid.  She laughed and kissed the young doctor, and before he could stop her she was up and over the guard rail, leaping, her body upended like a flicked knife, flashing waterwards, a black streak, and the disappearing soles of her feet.

            “Esther!” the doctor shouted into the wind.  The splash was very distant.  The splash was so distant it was invisible to his ears.

            It seemed to take the doctor years to reach the water.  Down and down, find a path, find the beach, a wooden pier, the confusion of paddle boats and sailboats and tourists moving glacially, purposefully slow.

            The water was very wide from down here.  Wide and grey-green, opaque, cold.  He ran up and down the rocky beach, ran to the end of the dock, shouted her name.  People looked at him.  A man asked him if he needed help.

            “A woman in the water,” he gasped.  “A woman jumped from the bridge.”

            Then a sheriff was there, River Patrol in a wedge-shaped, green and white motor boat.  Churning the river behind them, they quartered away downstream, radios cackling.  A black haired woman, jumper, body in the river.

            The doctor insisted on going with them. 

“I’m a doctor,” he said, again and again, until they relented and let him aboard. 

            Clouds arrived and the water was steely.  Is it evening now? he wondered.  The sun made an orange pass at the water as it dipped.  The doctor’s hands were cold claws on the railing.  He felt his skin aging in the wind.  He stared at the waving river until his eyes blurred.

            And then, there she was, her face glowing green and white from the mound of a wool coat, smiling, lifting a palm into the wind.  The two boats drew alongside and he scrambled across, the sheriff yelling at him, nearly falling into the waves, to embrace her.

            “Why did you do that?” he cried, holding her tightly, crying a little.

            “What?” she said.  “What?”  And pressed cold fingers to the creases of his frowning mouth.

〜

They did not go back to the water, nothing bigger than a fountain.  The doctor sold his bike.  They kept away from the river altogether.  It was autumn and Esther enjoyed the red and yellow leaves.  She enjoyed bacon and toast for brunch and the dance classes that they took at night, West Coast Swing and Salsa.  Neither of them were any good.

            When they saw Laura one night at a restaurant, Esther surprised the doctor by lying sweetly to her, lying better than he had.  Volunteer work.  Refugees.  Overseas.  No, she wouldn’t be staying long.  Edgar, a good man.  Laura, a lucky woman.

            Laura shone like a stroked cat, her blue eyes followed the flash of Esther’s bangled hands, the crossing and uncrossing of Esther’s long legs.  She was charmed, enchanted.  She kissed them both and went away, tipsy and teetering.

            “What was that all about?” said the doctor when Laura was gone.  “What do you mean you won’t be staying long?”

            But Esther didn’t answer, just smiled, drinking rum with one hand, dipping the fingers of the other into her ice water as if to cool them, as if they are burned.

〜

The trees were bare now, and the light was short.  The sky was pale and green receded to the timbered hills west of the city.

Esther went on fewer walks.  She slept late into the morning now, but the doctor sometimes still woke at night to find her sitting in the living room with her bare feet pressed against the cold window glass.

Her lips were chapped, he noticed, and her skin felt dry against his when they rub together, back and forth.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

“It hurts,” she said.  “Maybe it’s been too long.”

But he ignored this and booked her an appointment at the clinic.  He asked her questions about quality and intensity, duration and location.  He asked about triggers and referral patterns.  Provocation and palliation.  He acted like his old self, the one who slipped solutions onto problems like slip-covers on seats, like shoes onto feet.

Symptom: pain, burning or tingling, sharp, transient.  Location: skin, generally; hands and feet, in particular.  Onset: insidious.  Worse with heat.  Better with cold and salt and water.  Progressive.

“It’s neuropathy,” he said.  “Don’t worry.  There are things we can do.”  He typed on the computer that winged out handily from one white wall. 

She leaned forward to wipe the lines away from his eyes and the table paper crunched under her like dry sand.

“I need the sea,” she said.

“It could be psychosomatic,” he said.  “Are you stressed? Depressed?  I wish you would tell me where you really come from.  Did someone hurt you?  You can tell me.  You can trust me.  If you tell me the truth, I can help you better.”

He held her hand, even though if the nurse came in this would have appeared inappropriate.

“I came from the sea,” she said.

He didn’t believe her.  He had to draw a line, somewhere.

“We’ll go on vacation,” he said.  “But no jumping off bridges.  No jumping off anything.  And no swimming.  It will be way too cold to swim this time of year.”

〜

They went to the coast.  It wasn’t a long drive, just over the round-topped coastal mountains.  The weather was moody and low and sleet streaked the windshield, soggy with ice as they drove over the pass.  When they arrived at the ocean the sky was so heavy and dark it met the sea’s horizon seamlessly, so that the west was a great bulge of purple-bruised gray, with the last cramps of winter clutching it.  There was a gale coming, a March blow, thundering in from the north, and they hurried into their cottage, clawed by the first fists of wind.

They made a fire and sat by it, drinking wine.  Esther smiled at the sound of rain pummeling the rooftop, the black roar at the north-facing and western windows.  She snuggled close on the sofa, and laughed, and in the little quilted bed kissed him energetically.  She tasted coppery to the doctor, as if the storm was buzzing through her, a live current between them.

Afterward she was drowsy, but stirred restlessly to the bedside window, round like a porthole in a ship, with a thick brass latch.

“I can see the waves!” she said.

“Tomorrow we’ll walk on the beach,” the doctor said.

He lied and told her he has cases to read, sitting up in bed with his laptop open while she drifted off to sleep, her black hair like spilled water, cool on his lap.

The doctor was planning to stay awake all night.  He used to do it in med school and he was determined to do it now.  He would watch.  He would not let Esther out of his sight.  He would keep her safe.

He drank coffee and read and read until his eyes blurred and the letters began to float, to wave-like drifted things, to fracture and bend like pieces of light into darkness. 

He was swimming in the smooth waves of Esther’s hair, searching.  He was trying to find her; she had to be near but the black folds seemed endless.  They flowed as if growing before his eyes.  All he could see was shimmering blackness.  All he could feel, even at the longest reach of his fingers, was cool and slick and shifting water.  Not hair, water, black and starry with small currents.  There was a light in the distance, the only seeable thing, and he swam toward it, following its faint beacon in the dark.  His body was light and sleek.  He didn’t need to breathe. 

Ahead the light grew stronger, a lightning blue glow, a globe, no, a figure, smeared with phosphorus, shining with flakes and scales of mica, bangled with gold and strings of pearls, mother of pearl, sapphires like the eyes of the south sea.

She opened her arms and embraced him, smiling a green-white smile, spreading her fingers across his face.  She pulled him close and her hair eddied around them in the slow current, blackness darker than the sea, until the light was swallowed by it and her mouth on his was cold and airless, and her hands on his face grew colder too, and wet, and there was a roaring in his ears, louder and louder. 

He jerked awake, laptop fallen to the floor, sideways.  The round window was open and cold rain soaked the bed.  His face was stinging and the wind roared in his ears.  The bed beside him was empty.

〜

The police combed the beach.  The doctor combed the beach with them, all the next day and the next after that.

            The weather was calm, now, and cold.  The sky was porcelain grey.  The sea, too, was smooth and pale, white-cuffed and quiet, giving nothing away but storm-torn kelp and bits of glass, rounded and edgeless.

The doctor stayed a week and then another. He looked at the DSM-5 again, this time with himself in mind. In the bed he found a gold bracelet, heavy, Spanish, old. He stood by the surf and felt angry. He pulled back his arm to throw the bracelet away, imagined it winking against the dull sky, disappearing into the dull sea. He didn’t throw it. He took off his shoes and the cold salty water burned his bare feet, tingled and burned, as waves plumed over his shins. He didn’t go any deeper. He saw his whole life stretching out before him, twisting and turning like a river, full of dark bends. Then, it disappeared into the sea. 

***

Mara Bateman lives in Boise, Idaho. Her work has previously been published in the 2021 Writer’s in the Attic Anthology and in the Boise Weekly. She is currently working on her first novel. You can find her at www.marabateman.com or on Instagram @jajabird.