The One True Ocean

by Sarah Beth Martin

  So what, I think. It feels good to be destructive.

  And it is fascinating to see this green paper behind. This is the color I stared at as a seven-year-old when I came to visit Aunt Adeline that final summer, as I lay in the bed she had prepared just for me. It is the same paper she put over the old beige-and-blue. Strange that she wallpapered just two months before she took her own life.

  During those final visits I would awake to the sun on the wall and the smell of pancakes downstairs. “Jenna,” Aunt Adeline’s gentle voice would call from beyond the closed door, “time to get up.” It was such a pleasant feeling—the smell of buttery breakfast, my aunt’s velvety tone. And that wall: a subdued yet earthy green—a green that, with the correct lighting, was a forest I could explore when I wasn’t outside playing in the real one.

  In one of the corners at the far right of the wall, the edge behind the peach curls outward to reveal a thin slice of another layer behind—a heavy, plastic-like paper in a drab beige. This must be the old color, the color that was in here when I was a baby. Funny how those who lived in this house after we did never bothered to remove the paper first. “Such a lazy way of doing it,” Mom would probably say.

  I pull at the green edge; it is crisp and dry, and it flakes like piecrust as I touch it, then falls off. I try again, manage to grasp it with my fingernail, and pull.

  The green is coming off.

  The more it lifts, the more resilient and pliable it is. I peel toward the center of the wall, both layers at once, and peeking out between the two layers I see an edge of white, a corner. As I look closely at the tiny section of white paper I see something on it: the curve of letters in pencil or faded ink. Words.

  It could be old scrap paper to make up for uneven sheet rock and lumpy plaster, to smooth out gouges and cracks, to cover imperfections below. I pick at the white paper, but it’s wet from the glue-backed paper above it; thin and pulpy, ready to dissolve. It will only come off in shreds if I continue to do it this way. Mom would be correct for scolding me; I’ll have to wait until I have the proper tools.

  ***

  I open the bottle of wine I put in the refrigerator, a chardonnay Seth reserved for a special occasion. I pour myself a glass and take the drink upstairs, where I unroll my sleeping bag on the wooden floor, sit down, and drink. The wine is crisp and buttery in my mouth, and brings a warm, buzzing feeling to my head. I lie back and stare at the knots of pine in the ceiling in the dim glow of the nightlight until I am getting tired and the knots are starting to blend together. As I wait for sleep to take over, I wonder if I will have that dream again, the one in which I have children.

  In the dream the children are perfect—sweet and obedient, with cherub-like hands and twinkling voices that fade in and out like a ballerina music box, opening, closing. Boy and girl, I think, but it’s hard to tell because their faces are blank, no matter which angle I see them from: blank milky cataracts below dark mops of Seth hair that, as I reach out to it, slips right through my fingers.

  But I don’t dream this dream. Instead I dream about this house. It is present day, and Mom, Dad, and Elisabeth are with me, along with those who have died—Seth, Aunt Adeline, even Grandma, whose image I’ve conjured up from old photographs. The dead are more indistinct and less animated than the living; they stand like blurry mannequins around the house, speaking without moving their mouths, their voices muffled and cottony-sounding. Aunt Adeline is the blurriest of all, her face like a blob of putty, her voice gurgly, like a warped tape. Mom is upset, frantic because Montigue is coming over, because it’s going to rain and the furniture will get wet. As I look up I see how there is no ceiling on the house, how there is an upstairs and downstairs and a roof, yet every room is somehow open to the sky. There is a knock at the door and Mom rushes to open it, and there stands the silhouette of a man, a tall man with a broad upper body, dark hair, it seems. This man could be anyone, I’m thinking, perhaps not Montigue at all, as I try to make out the face within the shadows. The sky beyond him blinds me as it is beginning to brighten and swirl, even change color. So I wait for the voice, to distinguish this man from any other in my life; but he does not speak and he never moves his darkened face from the light. And suddenly the sky beyond looks like one of my book cover drawings: swirling and stormy, and an odd shade of green.

  eighteen

  In my eighth grade art class I painted Thumbelina. I was in awe of her leafy environment, of the fleshy vines and fuzzy lily pads, at the fact she was so small, almost invisible. I loved all characters whose worlds were colossal and green—Alice with her oversized, cartoon-like Wonderland, Dorothy with her vivid Oz colors. I created them all in my exaggerated way while other kids in my class chuckled and painted landscapes and boring bowls of fruit.

  My painting of tulips won first prize. This surprised me because none of the kids in my class liked the painting. They said my tulips didn’t look real because they had purple stems and faces in the blossoms. I wasn’t trying to make them look real, I told them, but they only snickered and gave me dirty looks.

  The teachers liked my painting. They used words like “surreal” and “symbolic” as they stood in the hall and admired it while I watched from the water fountain across the hall. Some of the teachers spoke quietly; Mr. Roberts leaned over to Mrs. Darzio, his mouth close to her ear, but I could hear him.

  “It looks like the tulips are mating.”

  I took the painting home to show Mom and Dad, who were entertaining Dad’s parents and his sister Myrna, all up from Florida that week. It was a busy house so I had to speak faster, show them things more quickly than I normally would. Mom was in a hurry, as always—exhausted, as always. She was especially worn out with her growing belly, sometimes letting out a moan or two when the kicks and pains came, even leaning on me for support.

  “Show us, Jenna,” she said, but I could tell by her voice that there was little time.

  When I held up the painting Dad smiled and Mom made an overtly confused face. “Are those tulips?” she asked.

  Dad nudged her. “Of course they’re tulips, Renee,” he said. “And they’re almost...sexual.” It was something he wouldn’t normally say, something that seemed like it should feel forbidden. But it didn’t feel forbidden, for once. It felt normal.

  Mom sighed. “Don’t be putting ideas into our thirteen-­year-old daughter’s head.” Ideas? I wondered. Mom had no idea how much I understood already.

  ***

  On an afternoon during the relatives’ visit I went downstairs for snacks and could hear the chatter in the dining room next door. Aunt Myrna spoke in a high, shrill tone that seemed to rattled the glass knickknacks against the windows, while every now and then Gramps’ voice billowed and Grammy chimed in with a squeal. Mom was quiet, but Dad was a chatterbox as he began to talk about a funeral.

  Aunt Adeline, I heard, and I closed the refrigerator, moved closer to the doorway—something about car doors, how they don’t open easily underwater. I was confused and listened closely. “You should hear,” he said, “what an undertaker has to do...”

  I pushed through the wooden half-doors without even thinking, without considering that I was interrupting this adult party, and revealed myself around the dining room doorway.

  “Aunt Adeline drowned?” I asked. They all seemed surprised to see me, all open mouths and tentative smiles, except for Mom, who was glaring at Dad.

  “Yes, honey,” Dad said.

  I thought it had been a simple accident in which she died on impact. But I’d always wondered, ever since I’d asked on the day of the funeral and had gotten no answer. Mom continued to stare at Dad as if he had said something wrong again, as if he should have lied to me instead. And it would be a lie, I could tell by all these tentative smiles; Aunt Adeline’s car had gone into the water.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

  Suddenly Mom’s shoulder’s drooped a
bit and her head lowered, as if in defeat. When she looked up again there were tears in her eyes. She slowly stood and walked over to me, took hold of my shoulders. Her hands felt thin and hard, as if there was no flesh on them. Her face was pale, a yellowy-gray. Perhaps she wasn’t prepared to talk, to think about her dead sister again.

  “We would have told you eventually,” she said.

  I wondered if this was true. But I couldn’t be angry; I wasn’t allowed to get mad at Mom or Dad for not telling me. Mom was six months pregnant, perpetually miserable with her aching back and hot sweats, her abdomen like a Hippity-Hop. And Dad had to be there for Mom, always supporting, always agreeing. A Dad walking on eggshells who would do anything for his wife as he waited for their first biological child to be born.

  So I didn’t get mad. “Do you think she suffered?” I asked.

  Mom didn’t answer, but her grip on me tightened and her body leaned, as if suddenly she was unstable, unable to stand and needed me to support her. I then knew that each time Mom would touch me in the future, I would think of her cold, bony hands on my thirteen-year-old skin, this moment of truth.

  When I went to bed that night I saw Aunt Adeline’s face. Not her living face, but the one I’d seen in the coffin six years before. I could see through all her orangey makeup to her skin, all veiny and green-blue, all breathless from crying out. I could see her eyeballs moving beneath her lids, and then suddenly her spidery lashes began to twitch. The stitches ripped apart and her eyes opened.

  But she was not scary. She was looking right at me, her big sad eyes confirming this story I hadn’t known all these years. She had died underwater where others could not get to her, where it was too dark for them to even see her. How would they ever know when she really died?

  ***

  That January Mom had the baby, a girl. It was strange to have this new living thing in the house, strange to have to be quiet and cautious all the time. But Mom and Dad seemed happier when Elisabeth came along. They hadn’t used to seem so happy.

  Their attention toward me teetered off, especially Dad’s. He gave this newest and natural child the expected amount of attention, and more. It made me realize how, for all those years before, he had tried so extra hard to be my “real” dad. Maybe it really was better to have a child that wasn’t part of some stranger. Maybe the blood connection had gotten to him after all.

  So I thought about Montigue. I wondered if Mom thought about him, too, and if one day I’d have the guts to ask her. How could she not think of him? Sex was such a wonderful, powerful thing a person didn’t forget. It was two people giving part of themselves, two people blending, becoming one; it was something that made you different forever.

  Or so I was told.

  ***

  While Mom and Dad were busy with Elisabeth, I spent a good deal of time exploring the nooks and crannies of the house in ways I’d never cared to before. I would sneak into the attic chest and look at Aunt Adeline’s old things. There were dried flowers pressed in plastic, leaves matted and sealed with shellac. And there was Aunt Adeline’s will.

  I was shocked when I read it, when I discovered that Aunt Adeline had left the house in Maine to Mom. I had known only what Mom had told me: that we had to leave Maine all those years before, that the bank had taken the house. The truth was that Mom must have quickly sold the house her sister had left to her so that she could move us more than a hundred miles away. What was supposed to happen didn’t; we were supposed to move back into the yellow farmhouse I loved, to live there forever.

  It was not the first time Mom and Dad had concealed something concerning Aunt Adeline’s death. I had to confront them, even though I knew I’d get in trouble for sneaking into the attic chest; it was worth it.

  “Tell her, Renee,” Dad said when I asked, and immediately I knew it had been Mom’s choice to keep the truth from me. Mom’s reply was as lame as all the others.

  “If we had told you then,” she said, “you would have hated us for leaving.”

  What Mom didn’t realize was that I hated her for lying about it all those years. The feeling made me want to do bad things, to make her angry. So I tried hard to do the one thing Mom ­wouldn’t want me to do.

  To think of Montigue.

  nineteen

  On my first Monday morning in the house, Dad calls just to say hello. “Does the town look the same?” he asks. “Can you smell the ocean from the house?” Because he can’t remember, he says.

  Sometimes when I talk to Dad on the phone—when I hear the rich, low-toned words but cannot see his face—I imagine Montigue. It is only for a second, but when it happens, this faceless, missing father is a glint before my eyes—a single flash—and I feel a strange swirling in my stomach. For this reason, I do not like to talk to Dad on the phone.

  But I do love his deep movie star voice, and picture him with his Cary Grant hair and cardigan sweater, like a 1950s TV dad. I wonder if he looked this way when Mom met him, or if marriage and fatherhood did it to him. Mom told me that Dad had been ready for, even desiring, such a life. He was a nineteen-year-old man who loved babies and who was more than willing to love a woman who already had one. Dad must have been eager to impress Mom, and Mom must have been impressed.

  Having a child at such a young age nearly destroyed Mom, from what Aunt Adeline told me. But as soon as Dad came along, she magically transformed. She came back to life, as if the presence of a man had mended a deep, wide hole in her soul.

  Over the phone I ask Dad how Mom is doing, and he is quick with his reply. “Fine, she’s fine,” he says. “She’s thinking about you, too.” I wonder if he’s telling me the truth.

  ***

  There’s little traffic noise here compared to Cambridge—an occasional passing car, the mail truck, a delivery van. I can actually hear the wind against the side of the house. I change into my jeans, a T-shirt, and sweater, make some fresh-ground coffee, and from the kitchen window watch the chickadees feed out back where I’ve splattered seeds.

  The morning is unseasonably warm for late March—the window thermometer says seventy. Soon the grass will come up and the mud will dry and the sun will melt all the gray away. As I step onto the front step a wall of warmth hits my face and neck, a cloud of oncoming spring. I can smell something spicy next to the porch; the lavender bush, I think. The buds on the tiny bare rosebush suddenly seem plumper and have turned to a rosier brown with a hint of green. There is green emerging from the earth in the small plot along the side fence and next to the front porch. The air smells clean. I inhale deeply, removing the last traces of old city smells, of my old life.

  With my trowel I push aside dried weeds next to the porch, and with my shears, trim down what appears to be dead spearmint and thyme from last year. The pulling and sifting is invigorating, and I can feel sweat beneath my T-shirt and sweater. I move over to the large garden at the center of the lawn and trowel the edge of the plot, turning the soil just enough to drop Seth’s tiny seedling in. This plant is unidentified, premature, most likely. I just want to see if it survives.

  I head up the street for a walk through the neighborhood, recognize the house just over the hill a few houses down—the red colonial nestled within the spruce and mountain ash trees. Hunter Jones’s old summer house.

  The old-fashioned sign still hangs out front: STONYBROOK FARM. A gravel driveway splits into two, one side curving around the back of the house, turning muddy as it bends, continuing out through the field in back, appearing to end at a dilapidated gray barn. Next to the house is a smaller house about the size of a garage—a carriage house, perhaps. It also is red, but it seems newer with its more modern door and large, double-paned window. A shovel rests against the house next to a dark pile of freshly dug soil at the base of the blade. A sign of life.

  Hunter was seven, like me, when we first met. His family came to Maine most summers, but the summer we played together was hi
s first summer in Maine following a long stretch when his family stayed in Maryland. On weekends when I stayed over at Aunt Adeline’s we would ride our banana-seat bikes down the hill between the houses to a wide stream at the base. A gunpowder mill once stood there, Hunter told me, but it had been blown to bits more than a hundred years before. “Lots of people died,” he said.

  Hunter spoke about death a lot. He talked about how the gunpowder accidents killed dozens of people and about what the newspapers said about the victims’ remains—how bodies were dismantled and scattered over the landscape. He took me down by the river to show me the remains of wheels and stone, the metal strappings of casks and boxes. Amongst the ruins we found newer items, too: the shell of a burned-out car, the bottles, the beer cans. Some items we needed to dig at to get them out of the dirt: larger pieces of rotting wood, chains, horseshoes. Hunter even found something he thought was bone and cleaned it off in the stream. A squirrel or bird carcass, he said, but to me it just looked like a piece of plastic.

  I wonder if Hunter could be here now after all these years. And I wonder if he knew what happened to Aunt Adeline later that summer. I never had a chance to tell him. It might be nice to see him again, to see someone who knew me before adulthood, before all the damage.

  ***

  Main Street runs through the Cape Wood town center, past historic graveyards and a tall brick fire station, through rows of white colonials renovated into offices. It’s difficult to tell one building from the next, unless I look closely at the engraved bronze plate on the door reading Law Office or Historical Society. There used to be a drug store on the corner, and across from it an ice cream shop, but many of the other buildings were inhabited by families back then. The pizza parlor remains—Tucker’s, with the big red cursive sign out front.