The One True Ocean

by Sarah Beth Martin

  “Mom?” Jenna is waiting.

  Renee doesn’t want to remember—the story she’d doubted then and doubted for years after. “There was a baby,” she says.

  It had happened in the spring, Renee tells Jenna, at least that was what Adeline had said. Her aunt gave birth to a seven-month stillborn baby in a college dorm bathroom; a boy, she said, now buried in the yard. As Renee tells the story, she thinks of how Adeline ­hadn’t looked as if she’d been through such a loss. In fact, that spring and summer she’d been her usual, playful self—­perhaps even more playful; rosier, prettier, more ravenous for the boys. It couldn’t be true.

  She never knew what to believe. Adeline had even been home for the holidays earlier that year. She hadn’t appeared fat or unusually radiant; she hadn’t said anything. When she arrived back home in March she wasn’t carrying any strange bundles or a coffin in her arms. How could it be true?

  Still, while Jenna grew inside her, Renee would look out at that lawn every morning and think of the night that Angus died. She thought of Adeline telling the story about the baby buried in the yard, and imagined the poor thing dead and wrapped up and carried home on a bus. How did she do it? she would think. It had to be a lie, she would tell herself, each time she looked out at the lawn, because Adeline had not sounded rational that night. Because Adeline was a liar, or so Renee had hoped.

  The father of the baby could have been anyone. There had been many boyfriends—several names in the letters she sent home from the dorm. Adeline had dated before, but after Father died that summer she’d grown hungry for boys, gone wild at college. And she was quick to tell Renee all about it.

  And after all that happened, Renee certainly wasn’t allowed to have anything Adeline could not. Because Adeline’s baby would have no real father, neither could Renee’s. If Angus was named as the father, Adeline would tell everyone what really happened that night on the water.

  Renee would abide by her big sister’s rules and come up with a name they both could agree on, one they could use that ­wouldn’t be recognized, but wouldn’t be a lie either. But in the eyes of anyone who might ask, he would never be a legitimate love; he would be nothing but a one-night stand. Renee knew she would acquire a new reputation; she would be a casualty of a promiscuity that never truly existed.

  Montigue was a disguise, but barely; much like the letter M on Renee’s letters, something she didn’t think Adeline would ever figure out.

  “You didn’t lie, Mom,” Jenna reassures her. “Montigue was real.”

  “But I could have told you,” Renee says. “Later on, after Adeline died...I could have told you everything.”

  But telling Jenna would have reminded her. For so many years Renee tried so hard not to think of Angus, not only because of what Adeline had said, but for herself. Even after Jenna was born she didn’t let herself think of him. Each time his face and name would come to mind she’d quickly erase it. She found she was quite good at this, too, and even wondered if one day he would go away completely.

  “I think I tried to convince myself,” she adds, “that your biological father really was just some man who passed by in the night, who never stuck around. It was easy to hate him for this, and hating him—this man named Montigue—was so much easier than loving Angus.”

  How powerful the human mind is, this made her realize.

  “Adeline changed after that.” Renee looks back out the window at the garden. “She became so engrossed in her work that she never had time for friends or for love. I don’t think she ever was with anyone after that. And we never spoke about Angus again. At least not until we saw Hunter playing with you. I think our worlds sort of came apart that day.”

  Jenna looks saddened, disappointed. Perhaps her aunt’s suicide all makes sense now. “She must have been so alone.”

  “Yes,” Renee says. “It was her penance, I think.”

  “And what was yours?”

  Jenna’s words are like a blow, a cold wind up Renee’s spine. But she is somehow relieved to have someone ask her this, such an honest question. She wonders how to answer it, though. She wonders if indeed she has suffered enough, or if she has only made others suffer instead.

  “Sorry,” Jenna says.

  “No,” Renee says, telling her it’s okay. “I should have reached out to her. In the end, I think plants were her only friend.” She reaches out her hand, touches Jenna’s arm. “And you were too, of course.”

  ***

  Rick is the first to arrive after Jenna invites him and Hunter over to the house.

  He seems uncomfortable without Hunter at his side, peeking anxiously out the window. He removes his hat but not his coat, and leans awkwardly against a delicate ladder-back chair that doesn’t support him and only tips forward. Jenna hands him a cup of the coffee she has made, invites him to sit at the table.

  Renee knows he most likely will not speak until they speak first. “I knew Angus,” she says.

  “He—” Rick says, “he was my best friend.” There is a warmth in his eyes that says this still is true today.

  In his slow, stuttering speech, he talks about how he knew Angus, how they worked together. He talks about the night Angus drowned, how he was there. He recalls Renee amongst the crowd as the coast guard searched the night waters, how everyone stayed for hours. And he recalls Adeline.

  “She came by Angus’s house that night,” he says.

  Renee leans into the table, a little closer to Rick’s face. “She did?”

  “Yup.” His eyes wander upward, up the wall behind Renee, trying to remember more, perhaps. “I was at his house. I was waiting for him to get back.”

  “From Carbur?”

  He nods yes, enthusiastically, as if he’s getting it right.

  “Do you remember—” Renee looks at Jenna, wonders what else to ask, how much to ask. Jenna gives a slight nod, approval. You need to talk about this, she is saying. “Do you remember why she came by?”

  Rick’s eyes squint a bit, and the lines deepen between his brows. There is something on his mind, something that isn’t right or shouldn’t be told. Or perhaps he simply can’t remember.

  “It’s okay,” Jenna says. “It was a long time ago.”

  “She said,” he begins, but hesitates, tilting his head to one side and looking beyond Renee again. Then he looks back at her, dead on. “She said she wanted to give him a message…to meet her at the jetty.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “Nope.” Rick purses his lips a bit in contemplation. “But she said he had to meet her or else.”

  “Or else what?” Jenna asks.

  “Just or else.” He smiles, as if proud to recall everything correctly. “So I gave him the message.”

  Renee imagines Adeline, her flurry of words earlier that day, the confrontation later that night, just before Angus died. What drove her to be so cruel? And could it be true that the child was Angus’s? She would have conceived the child in September, she’d said—mid-September at earliest.

  “Rick,” she asks, “was Angus ever in Maine any time except during the summer? Did he ever stay through the fall?”

  “His family always went back in August,” Rick says.

  “Back to Maryland, you mean?”

  “Always in August. He never stayed.”

  Perhaps Angus had told the truth. Perhaps he’d only been there that night to fix things, to explain. Or to keep Adeline from going to the police.

  “I wonder what Adeline really wanted,” Renee says, “or what she expected she would really get.”

  Rick looks off for a moment, considering the comment seriously, as if required to answer it like a question. “I think she wanted Angus to love her,” he says.

  She thinks of her big sister, how she once had sparkled with life, how her pain and loss turned into a small madness. But then Renee had a madness of
her own.

  She hopes Jenna understands all the pain she endured, living with such questions. Please forgive me, she thinks.

  jenna}

  forty-six

  As Hunter steps up the walk and through the door, I watch Mom’s face. I think of what a gift of immeasurable greatness he must be to her. His face, his bones and skin—the same blood as Angus, the same DNA. This matters.

  And perhaps she is a gift to him. Someone who knew his brother—how must that have been? he’s probably wondering. He shows it in his furrow-browed smile—anticipation—and in his trembling words.

  “Hello, Mrs. McGarry.”

  “Hello, Hunter,” she says, with a release of air as she speaks, a collapse of her chest, and the tension in the room suddenly dissolves, the way air clears after a storm. “You can call me Renee.”

  How much more powerful would this meeting be, I wonder, if Hunter knew about the blood connections? One day he will need to know that this woman and his brother bonded, that I am his niece and part of Angus. Odd, that just days ago I was confused about how I felt about him—before he was a real person, when he simply was a shadow of a boy I used to know.

  “I remember when I first met you,” he says to Mom, and I think of it—the backyard at Aunt Adeline’s, he and I with dirt on our faces, trowels and buckets in our hands, Mom’s stern eyes as she approached. And then finally to Hunter, as she pulled me away by the hand, Do your parents even know where you are?

  She’d had no idea who he was. Not until we got into the car, and I told her his name and where he lived.

  “I wasn’t very nice to you,” Mom says. She rests her head on her cupped hands, then glides her hands over her face and sighs into them.

  “Are you all right?” Hunter asks.

  “I’m fine,” she says, her hands sliding down her face and over her jaw. “I was just thinking about my sister, how that day...was the last time I saw her alive.” She looks up to Hunter, shading her eyes from the sunlight. “She died just a couple of days later.”

  “Yes,” he says. “I know.” He puts his hands in his jeans pockets. “I’m sorry.”

  Does he know the rest of it? I wonder. He could know; he could know and not come right out and say it. Perhaps his apology says that he does know. People don’t usually talk about such things twenty years later.

  “She killed herself,” Mom suddenly says.

  It’s strange to hear her say it, strange especially when she looks to me afterward with a half-smile—perhaps searching for support, for approval of the bittersweet confession. I smile back, but wonder what Mom is getting herself into.

  “Why?” Hunter says, shaking his head, his shoulders collapsing. It seems a hypothetical why, from the inert lift of his forearm—hand flopping back, fingers extending to nowhere. It’s a helpless hand that, along with that baffled expression on his face is saying Do we ever really know why? He may have known all along about my aunt’s suicide, but like me, he’ll never stop asking the question.

  ***

  In the afternoon Mom sits on the warm bedroom floor and reads through her letters again. She reads the bottom of the last one over and over, tears in her eyes.

  I love you, Renee.

  “He never had a chance to tell me,” she says.

  I take her outside to the garden, where the fragments of bone lie beneath the shovel. Perhaps I should have reburied them, I think, and paid respect for whatever soul may have passed from them. Or maybe it was right to let them be, to let them harmonize with the earth. I squat down, put my fingers on the blade, but can’t move them to lift it. The shovel will rust if I leave it here, and while this rusted steel blade will survive, the wooden handle will turn to pot roast, like the tiny coffin. Let the rains come, I think, and quickly melt them back into the mud, so I won’t have to bury them. So I won’t have to ever look at them again.

  Mom reaches down and lifts the shovel, gently touches the bones. Perhaps this really is the body of Adeline’s stillborn baby boy, or some other ghost, a shadow of what could have been. We can’t know for sure without asking Adeline. These are unnamed bones, and they rest here in place of another body that never came back. We will name this unknown grave Angus.

  We carefully wrap the remains, arrange the slivers of the wood box around it as best as possible, and put it back in the ground beneath the forsythia bush, where Adeline’s garden used to be. As we shovel the dirt and pack it onto the grave I imagine the tiny skull pieces crumbling, crackling more. Nothing but white chips of a shell, a life that was once. Perhaps this tiny life existed for only minutes, seconds, outside of the womb. Or it didn’t make it into the outside world at all, and simply washed itself out of its mother too early.

  Because this happens sometimes.

  Mom says she doesn’t want to be angry with Adeline. She wants to forget all of this. She wants to remember her as the complicated, sentimental woman that Adeline was capable of being, the Adeline who could give out warmth and love as well as she could dish out anger and hostility. She was someone who felt so much that it must have boiled her blood and burnt her brain, and she just couldn’t take it. Then there was Mom, who after a complete collapse willed herself back with denial, trained herself to handle things fine. All the lying, the self-control—it worked after all. It became the much less painful way to live.

  What was it, I wonder, that really killed Adeline? Which pain drove her heart and mind inside out? Was it the baby? Was it Angus’s death? Or could it have been a guilt that came from the subtle torture of her little sister? Mom and I will never know. No written word, no date book, ever could explain it.

  forty-seven

  A self-portrait never is easy to do. There is a tendency to draw oneself in a safer, more ambient light, perhaps with fewer lines between the brows, more lift to the eyes. In each portrait from my high school classes, I have a cautious rigidity to my face, as if I am holding my breath.

  The one I’ve attempted today seems amateurish, a fruitless attempt at dark and light—the shadow over my eyes has too much transition; there is too gentle a blend from dark to light, as if I fear definition, the true dividing line. And the detail within the shadow is too visible, the outline of my eyes still too vivid—each lash a stroke of thin horsehair bristle. Even the color of my eyes seems too bright—a sudden green emerging from the blackness, like glowing emeralds.

  But I will try again.

  Mom and I look at my painting, and Mom observes how while there is no Dad in my face, I have over time developed his dimpling frown and plummeting brow, not to mention the tendency to cross arms tight across my chest. How did Angus stand? I wonder. One day soon we will talk about him again, and I will not be afraid to use his name.

  There is so much in this portrait which is Mom: the mouth, with its deep curve above the upper lip, its tight corners, the eyes deep and smallish, hiding within thick brows and straight black lashes. The color of my eyes is brighter, though, where Mom’s have only a hint of green in their kaleidoscope. And Mom’s cheekbones and jaw are strong and sharp, while mine are a bit more delicate, perhaps from Grandma or Great-Grandma or someone else I don’t remember.

  I wonder how difficult it was for Mom to lie all those years, to tell everyone that her baby’s father had been a stranger, that she had no connection with the young man she loved, who died in the ocean. Perhaps it was easy because it was worth saving her dignity—sacrificing her sexual reputation to save her moral one.

  Because she, too, had killed.

  I will continue this portrait for now. Perhaps it will end up looking more like Mom than me. Then after I am done I’ll get back at what I’m good at—drawings alive with green and dew and living things. I may start with the wall in the small bedroom—the one now masked over with paisley, a pattern Mom says is drab and morose. Maybe I’ll just paint right over it.

  ***

  As Mom and I look out to t
he water from the stone jetty, we see dark patches on the water—shadows from clouds, schools of mackerel, perhaps. Or something else. There could have been a dark patch in the water on that day Angus died, or the day after. Someone may have seen it, mistaken it for the school of fish, and moved on. How many were that close to him and didn’t know? How many people saw his body and didn’t know they were looking at a body? What a shame that would be.

  It’s just a body, I think. A shell.

  But unlike Seth’s, it’s a body never found. What was it like for those who knew Angus? To never have closure, to never even know for sure? It’s the stuff of Sunday night movies—all those missing bodies. Except in the movies the missing often have done this intentionally; they’ve pretended to die so they can escape their life and emerge someplace else as some new person.

  If Angus were alive today and I were to run into him on the street, would he know me? Would it be better to know? Does blood mean something after all? Cells join, DNA tugs. I used to be glad he never knew about me. Until I heard his name, and saw his face.

  The breeze is crisp and fresh. I feel Mom’s fingers brush against the palm of my hand, dangling, then searching, then her palm cupping, and remember the last time we held hands. It was just before we moved away nearly twenty years ago: we stood on this very spot in a cold, raw November wind. I was amazed that Mom had taken me to this spot—to the ocean she despised. And when I looked up and saw her red eyes and face streaked with wet, I knew that it was her last look at the Maine ocean, that we never were coming back. I just hadn’t realized then that Mom was leaving part of me behind too, and that she had no choice.

  But today, as I look into the eyes of my mother standing next to me on these rocks where lives and love ended, I know where the pain comes from. I can read the words in Mom’s eyes because they are thinking the same thing I am right now.