On a Dark Tide

by Valerie Geary

  Then, five years later, Marshall got down on one knee at their favorite Italian bistro. She cried as she said yes, as he scooped her off her feet and twirled her in the air. They were so young. She would be twenty-one on their wedding day, barely, but that night with the candlelight and violin music going to her head, she was twenty, and all she could think was, what took you so long? Because she had been waiting for this day since the night of their first kiss. She would have married him right after high school if he’d asked, but Marshall had needed more time. To grow up and find himself. To try life without her.

  Her mother cried at their wedding. His mother sat stoic and unmoved beside his father. You’re making a mistake, Clara had overheard his mother whisper during the reception dinner. But Marshall shook his head. You’re wrong. Clara is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. She loves me in a way no one else ever will. They got married in a pretty little church at the top of a hill on the first Saturday of August with the bay sparkling in the distance and the trees flushed green. The whole world spun through with love and golden light.

  They danced cheek to cheek until everyone else went home. When they were alone again, she in her wedding dress three months pregnant, her feet aching, he in his tux and a little drunk, with a love song playing softly through the speakers, he caught her staring. Do I have something on my face? He wiped his hand across his cheek. You’re perfect, she said, tracing her eyes along the slope of his regal nose, the solid line of his jaw, his lips that would, from that day forward, only ever touch hers.

  It was only much later after Marshall had fallen asleep, that Clara thought about her mother. She’d sat alone at the wedding, the seat beside her reserved for a man who had left them both decades ago for another life, another wife, another family. Clara was eight-years-old when her father packed a suitcase and moved to Ketchikan, Alaska with a retired stripper named Cherry. She hadn’t seen him since. And he had never tried to contact Clara, either, never even sent so much as a birthday card. Her mother had dated a few men over the years, but none of them stuck. I’m destined for loneliness, she would say. And Clara couldn’t help but think that everything could have been different if her mother had tried harder. If she hadn’t given up so easily.

  Love wasn’t complicated. All it required was cultivation, sacrifice, and a heart unwilling to break.

  As soon as Marshall got home from work, Clara would ask about Brett. She knew there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for why the two of them were coming out of his office together earlier this morning. Still, she had to ask. Just to be sure. As she waited, she distracted herself with the mindless task of laundry.

  She grabbed a crumpled jean skirt from Elizabeth’s basket and shook it out, checking the pockets. The skirt was acid-washed with rhinestone decorations on the back pockets and a hem that looked ripped. Clara thought it a hideous thing and too tight, but Elizabeth loved it. She would wear it every day if she could. Clara was about to toss the skirt into the washing machine when she saw the blood.

  A dark spot on the back inside of the skirt—barely anything, the size of a quarter. Clara sprayed a stain remover on the fabric. She searched through the rest of Elizabeth’s hamper, looking for underwear with blood stains to match but found none.

  Clara had been embarrassed about her period when she was a teenager, too. What girl wasn’t? For nearly all of the eighth grade, she’d stuffed her underwear with toilet paper, trying to keep blood from leaking through her skirts. Finally, her best friend had told her about sanitary napkins.

  When Clara was a teenager, her mother had been impossible to talk to. She was always too busy or too depressed. Clara strived to be a different kind of mother to Elizabeth, a better mother. She tried her best to be approachable, supportive, and even-tempered. And yes, she loved her daughter fiercely. And maybe she was too suffocating with that love sometimes. But wasn’t that better than Elizabeth wondering whether she’d ever been loved at all?

  Clara thought she had proven herself to be the kind of mother a daughter could talk to about anything. Apparently not.

  She grabbed a box of pads from under her bathroom sink and left them on Elizabeth’s bed along with a note that read, If you have any questions, please ask. I’m here for you whenever you’re ready to talk. Love and kisses, Mom.

  She went back to sorting laundry.

  * * *

  Marshall got home around seven, a little later than usual. He came into the kitchen where Clara was chopping onions for spaghetti sauce, grabbed her waist, and spun her around. When he kissed her, he pressed his whole mouth to hers, seeking with his tongue. It reminded her of their first kiss. Fervent, devouring. It was the most enthusiastic he’d been with her in a while.

  She allowed herself a moment of pleasure, then nudged him away and returned to chopping onions. “Where’s Elizabeth?”

  “She’s not here?” Marshall loosened his tie and reached into the cupboard for two wine glasses. He uncorked a cabernet and poured them both a drink.

  “You were supposed to pick her up from practice.” She scooped the onions into the pan. They hit the oil sizzling.

  “I did,” Marshall said. “I tried. Coach said she didn’t show up today.”

  Clara froze with the knife against the cutting board. When she’d found Lily in her crib last year, blue around the lips, not breathing, she’d called the ambulance right away. But it had been too late. Minutes, seconds even—this was all the time it took for everything she loved, her whole world, to be ripped from her arms.

  “Hey.” Marshall touched the back of her hand. A feather-light brush of his fingers, and yet it was enough to bring her back into her body.

  She took a deep breath and moved a bell pepper onto the cutting board. The knife came down hard, the pepper obliterated by the sharpness of the blade.

  “I’m sure she’s fine,” Marshall said. “She probably went to June’s. I’ll call over there and find out.”

  He moved toward the phone, but before he could pick up the receiver, the front door opened and slammed shut.

  “Elizabeth?” Clara set the knife on the counter and wiped her hands on a towel.

  Footsteps pounded up the stairs.

  A few seconds later, Clara burst through Elizabeth’s door without knocking. “Where were you? Your dad said you weren’t at practice?”

  Elizabeth stood staring down at the pads on her bed, a frown pinching her face. She picked up the box and turned it over, inspecting it a moment before tossing it onto her dresser with a disgusted curl of her lip. “What are those for?”

  “I was doing your laundry this afternoon—”

  “You went through my stuff?” Elizabeth whirled on her, a horrified look on her face.

  “I sorted your dirty clothes. I’m sorry for doing you a favor.” Clara’s voice was edged in sarcasm. She crossed her arms over her chest.

  She knew matching her daughter’s attitude would only escalate their fight, but she couldn’t help herself. Fear bunched at the base of her throat and trembled behind her eyes. She could feel Elizabeth pulling away from her and feared this was the beginning of a slow separating as she tested her boundaries into adulthood. Already Elizabeth was keeping things from her. If she wasn’t careful, Clara would know absolutely nothing about what went on in her daughter’s life. She couldn’t let that happen.

  Parents were supposed to protect their children, even as their children pushed them away. They were supposed to set boundaries and keep their kids from giving in to their worst natures. She refused to be like her own mother, caught up in misery, so self-absorbed she hadn’t seen Clara pulling away and falling apart. She hadn’t noticed, or she hadn’t cared—was there even a difference?

  Fourteen years ago, the day Clara found out she was pregnant with Elizabeth, she’d vowed to be a better mother than her own. One who paid attention, who knew what kind of person her daughter was becoming.

  Elizabeth threw her backpack onto the floor and
sat on the edge of her bed. “What happened to you giving me more privacy?”

  “You want to start washing your own clothes? Fine.” Clara tossed her hands in the air, frustrated. With more cruelty than she intended, she added, “Next time you have your period, make sure you spray your skirts with stain remover right away, or you’ll never get the blood out.”

  Elizabeth crumpled and buried her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking uncontrollably as she started to cry.

  It wasn’t the reaction Clara had expected. She stood a moment, uncertain. Marshall was still downstairs, finishing up dinner. If she called for him, he would be here in seconds to do what he did best, what he had done since Elizabeth was a baby—comfort, soothe, kiss away her hurts. Except for a teenage girl’s churning emotional anxieties were a bit more complicated than the skinned knees that Marshall was used to. Whatever was going on with Elizabeth, she needed her mother now.

  Clara sat on the bed and put her arm around her daughter’s shoulders, drawing her close.

  “Talk to me, sweetheart.” Her tone was soft. Her anger vanished the second Elizabeth started crying. “Is it those girls at school? Are they still bothering you?”

  Elizabeth shook her head.

  “Then what is it? Why are you so upset?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” She pulled away from Clara and laid down on her bed in the fetal position. Her sobbing had subsided to sniffles and shaking breaths.

  Clara rubbed her back. “It might make you feel better.”

  She shook her head against the pillow.

  Clara stretched out on the bed, tucking her body against Elizabeth’s, cradling her in a way she hadn’t for many years. When had her daughter, her tiny baby girl, grown so big? They were almost the same height. She smelled different too, like strawberry shampoo and a feral, teenage girl scent she’d forgotten about after all these years. Clara pressed her nose into Elizabeth’s hair, searching for even the faintest scent of her once milky sweet baby. But her baby was practically grown now and smelled grown too.

  “You know, sweetheart,” she spoke in a whisper, “those girls who are mean to you at school are just doing that because they feel threatened by you. They see how special you are, and they’re jealous of you. So don’t pay them any attention, do you hear me? Don’t give them any more of your energy. If they bother you again, I want you to come to me right away, okay? You don’t have to handle any of this on your own.”

  She was quiet, hoping the silence would be enough to get Elizabeth to talk about what was really upsetting her. The swings of emotion she was having seemed too volatile to simply be because some girls at school were mean to her. Puberty could account for some of it, but Clara sensed there was more.

  In the weeks following Lily’s death, she and Marshall had watched Elizabeth closely, but she seemed to take the loss in stride. She cried at the funeral, and once Clara had found her sitting in the nursery, hugging one of Lily’s stuffed toys, but for the most part, she seemed to move through her grief quickly. She hadn’t asked a lot of questions. She hadn’t wallowed. She was sad for a little while, and then she wasn’t. Or at least that’s how it looked to Clara, who had trouble getting out of bed for months. But maybe Elizabeth wasn’t done grieving. Perhaps she hadn’t even started, and these past few days, this acting out, was related to her sorrow over losing her baby sister.

  Clara stroked Elizabeth’s hair, wanting to say something about Lily, something reassuring and wise, but she could not push the words past her own tangled knot of lingering grief.

  From the bottom of the stairs, Marshall called up to them that dinner was ready.

  * * *

  Later that night, behind the closed door of their bedroom, as Marshall brushed his teeth and Clara rubbed lotion on her hands, she finally said the words she’d been holding on to all day. They bloomed hot in her chest, turning her voice hard-edged and sour. “I swung by the office this morning.”

  “Oh?” Marshall spat into the sink, rinsed, then turned off the light and came to join her in bed. He sat on the edge and removed his slippers. “When? I’m sorry I missed you.”

  “I saw you with her.” She set the lotion on the nightstand and swung her feet under the covers.

  He got in beside her, his brow pinched in confusion. “With who?”

  “Brett.”

  “Oh, right.” He punched air into his pillow, completely nonchalant, going about his nightly routine as if nothing at all was wrong. “She wants to sell her grandfather’s cannery. We did a walk-through of the space today. It’s a great piece of property. If I can find the right buyer, there’s a real opportunity to develop it into condos or retail space. It would be nice to revive that area of the waterfront, don’t you think?” He stopped fussing with his pillow and looked at her, his excitement fading. “What? What did I say?”

  She shook her head. “It’s nothing. It’s great. I’m proud of you.”

  She rolled her back to him. The bed jostled as he got under the covers, then bounced again as he shifted his body against hers, drawing her in. “There’s no reason to be jealous, Clara. She’s a client. She came to me, asking for help.”

  “There are other realtors.”

  “But I’m the best. Isn’t that what you’re always telling me?” His hand moved along the slope of her hip as he kissed behind her ear. “Besides, that property could easily sell for upwards of a million dollars. That’s a tidy commission that would be hard to turn down.”

  She rolled to face him, tucked her head under his chin, and pressed her hands to his chest. Maybe after the cannery sold, Brett would leave Crestwood. Clara could hope.

  “You are the best.” She tilted her head up to kiss him. “You’ll sell it in no time.”

  “We’ll see.” He held her a while in silence, then shifted his arms a little to get more comfortable. “How worried should we be about Elizabeth?”

  She’d sulked through dinner, eating a few bites before retreating to her bedroom, claiming she had homework to do. She’d turned down the ice cream Marshall brought her for a study break. She’d gone to bed without coming down to say goodnight the way she usually did.

  “Something’s wrong,” Clara said.

  “Those girls at school? We can talk to the principal again.”

  “I think it’s more than that.”

  A long pause, and then he said, “It could be about Lily?”

  The dark of their bedroom and the warmth of their bodies tangled under the covers cushioned the blow, but it still hurt to hear her dead daughter’s name spoken out loud. She sucked in a breath, surprised by the words that slipped from her mouth, “Marshall, I’m scared.”

  He rubbed her back.

  There was an intimacy to this moment. The shadows deepened. A sliver of moonlight played on the wall above their heads, and there was a feeling that they were two alone in the world, that the secrets they told here would stay here.

  “You have no idea how hard it is to be a teenage girl.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “The dangers that are out there, all the time, lurking around every corner. One wrong choice, and that’s it. Your whole life is ruined. Something happens, and you can’t come back from it. I’m trying so hard to keep her safe, but I—” The words choked her. She shook her head against his chest. “I’m so afraid something bad is going to happen.”

  “What do you mean? Like what?”

  When she was Elizabeth’s age, a girl had disappeared. A summer girl who flitted in and out of their lives, oblivious to the ripples she left behind. Margot Buchanan, Brett Buchanan’s older sister, and the girl who almost ruined everything. After her body was found, parents locked their front doors at night, and kids stopped playing in the woods. That summer, everyone was scared another girl might be taken and killed. Clara had been afraid, too. She’d spent so many nights staring at the shadows growing on her walls, waiting for them to take the shape of her worst nightmares. She had never wanted her own dau
ghter to feel that same kind of fear, the kind she still felt even after all this time.

  “Whatever happens,” she whispered. “We have to protect her. We have to keep her safe.”

  Marshall pulled her even closer. His chin brushed the top of her head, his chest rising, falling, steady, his hands firm, pressing the pieces together, holding her still. “We’ll be fine, Clara,” he hushed her. “She’ll be fine. Nothing bad is going to happen. I’ll make sure of it.”

  She wanted so badly to believe him, but they hadn’t even been able to protect Lily. A baby, who hadn’t gone anywhere without them, who had been asleep in her crib in the very next room with nothing but a thin wall between them when she died. How could they possibly hope to keep Elizabeth safe?

  It was a long time before Clara fell asleep that night. When she finally did, it was Margot’s voice she heard, calling to her from a dark woods, but it was her daughter she saw vanishing into shadowed trees.

  Chapter 15

  Brett called Crestwood High School the second she got to her desk on Wednesday morning. She spoke with a guidance counselor named Shep, and then with the principal, Ms. London. Neither was surprised to hear about Saturday night’s party—kids will be kids, after all—but they were upset to learn about the assault. She arranged a meeting with them at the school later that afternoon, hoping they would let her interview a few students, June’s sister specifically. She had five hours to kill until then. No new cases had come in overnight, and she was caught up on paperwork from older cases, so when Eli stopped by her desk and asked if she wanted to go for a ride, she said yes.

  “Where are we going?”

  He was dressed in plain clothes. Black pants, burgundy turtleneck, black windbreaker. His badge was clipped to his belt along with his gun and a set of handcuffs. He opened the door of an unmarked pool car for her and said, “Down to the docks to talk with Nathan’s boss again.”