Between the Tides

by Susannah Marren

  “Time to board!” Dougie jumps onto the boat and yanks on the ropes. “C’mon! Let’s go.”

  “Not many boats are around, Lainie,” I say. What I want to say is, You go with your older children. Charles and I will concentrate on the others, hold down the fort.

  “The commercial boats are in the water, Jess.” Lainie points to ten or twelve tired wooden boats that must smell inside from fish and brine. “And any minute, we’ll be on one.”

  Jersey Girl is the name of the boat, scrawled in chipped black paint. A “year-rounder,” according to Lainie, who has suddenly become an expert on boats, northeast winds, and inlet fishing.

  Tom is half asleep until Dougie revs the engine and hands out life vests. “What are these for, Mom? Didn’t you guys win that swim competition? Isn’t Matilde an awesome swimmer?” he asks.

  “Everyone is wearing a life vest.” Charles tugs on the clasp of his puffy, soiled version. I avoid his eyes when he checks that we buckle up.

  Dougie maneuvers toward the inlet as the waves slap at us.

  “Are we going fishing?” Tom asks.

  “Too choppy for newcomers,” Dougie says.

  “What would we catch if we were fishing?” Even Tom is slightly irritating. He moves to where Dougie pilots the boat.

  “Since when did you care, Tom?” I ask.

  “Since I got forced to take a boat ride.”

  “Well, yer mom wants a nice boat ride, that’s it, a short cruise,” Dougie says. “But today the flounder and striped bass are jumpin’. I hear the blackfish came in fast yesterday.”

  “Well, what if Tom and I fish, Dougie?” Charles asks. “The two of us?”

  Dougie keeps his hands on the helm with his eyes on the inlet. The water rises higher against the sides of the boat.

  “Can do it, y’know,” he says. “I got bait and rods for my next ride out with a fisherman. If ya go below, you’ll see ma stuff; the rods are on the floor by a bucket of iced bait. ’Member, the boat holds twenty thousand pounds of fish. Better catch sumpin’!”

  “Oh, Charles, I don’t know,” Lainie says. “It could be very unwieldy and frustrating too.”

  “They could try it and see.” The least I can do is defend Charles. “Look, Lainie, other boats have people fishing.”

  Lainie is skeptical, not convinced of what I mean since there are no boats near us at the moment. She takes out a small set of binoculars from her anorak and looks around, then hands them to Charles, who surveys the coastline.

  “I’m up for an adventure,” Charles says. “Lainie, Jess?” He smiles at both of us—his cheerleading squad.

  “I suppose it would be fun, Charles.” Lainie caves in. “Tom, you’ll have to hold the pole tight, and when the fish bite you’ll have to move fast to reel them in because of the wind.”

  “Are we expecting to catch that many fish?” I ask.

  “Mostly throwbacks,” Lainie answers.

  “Throwbacks?” Charles asks.

  “Yes.” Lainie sounds serious. “You remember, Charles … fish that are too small. Or the wrong kind.”

  “You would know,” Charles says.

  “I grew up here, Charles.”

  “Fishing?”

  “Sometimes,” Lainie answers. The parts he’ll never get. He’ll never imagine either.

  “She could be wrong, I tole ya, there’s tons out there. Let me getcha to the best area.” The boat turns starboard and we bounce wildly.

  Charles’s baseball cap that reads ELLIOT MEMORIAL blows off when he and Tom start to bait the rods. I’m relieved when Lainie and I laugh together at how Charles tries to catch it in the wind.

  “Thanks, ladies,” Charles says as the bait in his hand blows into the water too. Lainie opens the tackle box and takes a chunk of cut bunker. She baits the line without a hitch. I am on Charles’s other side, noticing as always how my blond hair contrasts with Lainie’s black hair against the bluest sky. Hers swirls around her face in a bizarre halo—an Edvard Munch Scream.

  The bay is wide open—nothing else counts, nowhere else exists. Dougie steers us near enough to the jetties that the gouges in the rocks show in the grayest and the lightest of the stones. Lainie takes Charles’s fishing rod out of his hand and casts the line for him.

  FORTY-TWO

  A narrow trail of rocks juts into the sea. Charles is so relaxed it’s a joke, unlike those times that we’ve been together, sneaking around the city for an afternoon in each other’s arms. Those clandestine meetings were more stressful than I care to accept, and I loathe the comparison, the weightlessness of Charles today, on a boat. I move to where Lainie stands facing into the wind.

  “Strange how much fun this is,” I say.

  “Yup, quite something,” Lainie agrees.

  Dougie shouts, “What about the jetty game?”

  Is he suggesting it because we’re vigorous and daring? Lainie shakes her head. “Not smart, too risky.”

  “What’s that?” Charles asks. “What’s the ‘jetty game’?”

  “When the boat bounces on the rocks. A fisherman’s sport,” Lainie says. “Not a good idea—it’s too dangerous.”

  “Let’s watch the horizon,” Matilde says. She’s been quiet, clutching that portfolio of hers as if it will be swept into the current.

  “We can do both,” I say. “Fish and watch the horizon.”

  “Yeah, let’s catch some big ones!” Tom says. He has his fishing rod in the water and is clueless as to what’s next. Charles, rod in hand, steps toward Dougie. “Dougie, are you a good captain?”

  “Have to be,” Dougie says. “I do it every day. Jetty jumpin’.” He steers the boat into the heaviest waves. “We’re almost there, almost jetty jumpin’ ourselves. That’s what we gotta do!”

  “Charles,” Lainie says, “let’s skip it. We’ve already added fishing to the trip and we’ve stayed at the estuary even with the velocity of these winds. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “C’mon, Lainie. What’s up that you’re so cautious?” Charles turns to me. “Jess?” He has a stiff upper lip that’s impressive. Why not—we’re on a fisherman’s boat, for chrissake. How ironic that I’m not as squeamish as Lainie; I’m the one who is enthralled by what Homer calls “the loud resounding sea.”

  Matilde tugs on Lainie’s arm with a sense of urgency, her portfolio in her arm. “Mom, we’ll go below.”

  Yet Lainie is mesmerized by the billows. “Jess, you realize my concern. The waters are too rough. Very sloppy waters,” she says.

  “Mom, let’s go below,” Matilde insists.

  “Wait, my darling girl, a few minutes is what I need.” Lainie is watching Dougie, who is turning the boat into the waves, head on. We bump and jar, rise higher, and are dropped with a bang. It’s exhilarating, actually, breathtaking. Until we are too near to the jetty and Dougie is immersed in a game he knows, one that we have never played before.

  “We’re courtin’ the waves!” Dougie screams. The boat lunges forward toward the outer ridges of the jetty. “Closer to the rocks!”

  Tom’s fishing rod falls into the water and disappears, washed away in seconds.

  “Let it go, boy. Ain’t cheap, but there’s nothin’ to be done.” Dougie yells louder than the crashing waves. He steers us to the rocks. Lainie arches her back and steadies herself. Matilde is beside her, grabbing her hand.

  That’s when Charles’s pole starts to vibrate with a huge fish on the hook. The pole curves and almost busts under the weight.

  “Holy shit! Bring it in—it’s a striped bass!” Dougie yells.

  Charles tries, his surgeon’s hands winding the line tighter as a squirming fish is raised out of the inlet and flops back into the water. Charles is tugging at the line while we lurch toward the rocks. Then, in the blink of an eye that changes your life, he is gone. Charles tumbles into the churning foam so quickly that none of us sees how it occurs. There are no witnesses, only the desperation when he doesn’t bob up and his tattered life vests surfaces. In t
he seconds that count, I look at his children and not at Dougie, who must know what to do. Matilde is stricken and Tom is leaning over the edge, screaming, “Dad! Dad! Dad! Daaad!”

  Lainie pries her hand out of Matilde’s and kicks off her boots. She dives off the side of the boat inches from where Charles has fallen. She is wedged between the rocks and the side of the boat before she pierces through the water with her famous crawl.

  Matilde, Tom, and I wait. Lainie emerges with Charles’s head in the crook of her arm, holding him up and keeping him safe. She swims to the boat like a pro, a deep-sea diver, pushing Charles forward with the strength of Hercules. Dougie has tossed an anchor and is waiting to bring Charles over the rail, dragging him as he sputters and spits water, then opens his eyes. Tom holds his father’s head while I wrap him in a boat cover.

  “Lainie?” Charles is limp; I barely hear him. “Lainie?”

  I stand up and there is Matilde, gazing at the jetty as if in an Indian trance.

  “Lainie! Lainie!” I shout. “Matilde, do you see your mother? Do you see her?”

  There are egrets, white as snow, on the black rocks. The seagulls swoosh downward and drop the clams to their death and the fish leap over the waves. A Coast Guard boat pulls up behind us. Dougie gestures crazily toward the water. “She’s in the swells!” he shouts. “She’s in the goddamn swells!”

  “Woman overboard, woman overboard,” a voice announces from a megaphone. Three men in wet suits dive to exactly where Lainie saved Charles.

  “Lainie!” Charles’s voice crashes over the wind. “Lainie! Lainie!”

  Tom moves beside Matilde and wraps his arm around her shoulders and she pushes it away. She stands there, facing the brink.

  FORTY-THREE

  Claire sleeps on top of Matilde as she has for the last three nights. Her head on Matilde’s stomach and her hand knotted in her hair. In her sleep Claire whimpers, “Mommy, Mommy.” When she is awake she is with Jack, who shrieks, “Mommy, Mommy, come back soon.” Nonstop, a broken record that sears through my distress, stirring a trepidation deeper than anything I have ever known.

  Since the search began for Lainie, the divers have combed the inlet and tributaries that filter into the sea and the bay. Her life vest was found not three feet from the end of the jetty. Her scarf with the printed birds was discovered a few feet into the inlet. Matilde stared at the gray and blue birds of assorted sizes, spellbound. “She bought that at Urban Outfitters last year in the city. She called it ‘inauthentic’ but she loved it. ‘The birds are flying toward the ocean, Matilde,’ Mom said at the cash register. ‘I know it.’ That was the day she bought my sixth-grade spring clothes—the two of us…”

  We sit vigil in Cape May with our six children. Charles is not operating and I have not left his side. He and I speak together in the den that faces the bay and open the door only when a Coast Guard officer or local policeman comes by. The authorities are unable to report anything and are senseless to how much worse that is for us and for the children. Matilde constantly feeds Claire and Jack chocolate that she found in the freezer, old mints that someone once brought Lainie as a gift, no doubt. Although possibly not stale, they couldn’t be anyone’s favorite, either. Charles is on the phone with the Coast Guard, the local firemen, and the local police between their visits. A few journalists have come over with their photographers and Charles has surprised me by allowing pictures to be taken. “Maybe someone will see these, someone who has spotted her,” he said. I overheard the last journalist say to her photographer, “So much anguish.”

  Charles hasn’t brushed his teeth or washed his face in days; his hair is unkempt. Matilde gave him a quizzical look today, confused by his appearance, his affliction.

  “Your father will be neat and clean again,” I try to reassure her.

  “You mean what Mom calls ‘the surgeon image’?” she asks.

  “Yes, exactly, Matilde. The way that your mother likes it.”

  Mrs. Higgins fixes food that only Claire and Jack eat and wipes her eyes constantly. She loads platters of leftovers into the refrigerator, meatballs and spaghetti, fish and chips, roasted chicken with red bliss potatoes, with these long moans. Wasn’t Lainie complaining only last week that Mrs. Higgins’s moans reminded her of ambulance sirens and how they distract her when she is painting?

  An hour ago Mrs. Higgins was crying out loud and running her fingers over the rosary that she carries in her apron pocket. “It is your mother’s fate to save your father; she was born to save him,” she tells any of Lainie’s children within earshot. How accepting Lainie would be of her thoughts. That makes me miss her all the more. Everyone has to grieve in their own way, Lainie would say, excusing Mrs. Higgins.

  * * *

  Tonight Matilde finds me in the guest room at midnight, taking out my lenses. Everyone else is asleep. She stands behind me in the bathroom and we look at each other in the mirror.

  “No one bothers with what I know about Mom, Jess. No one bothers to ask me how it could have happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I once saw a Law & Order episode where a girl could teach the grown-ups about the accident, a homicide. Why doesn’t anyone wonder if I have any ideas? Why doesn’t anyone say, What do you know about your mother’s disappearance?”

  “Disappearance?”

  “Yeah. Why don’t they ask me? My mother is the best swimmer.”

  “The Coast Guards believe they know the waterfront, Matilde.”

  “Like my mom knows it? The tides … the bends … If she aced the Raritan River, the Delaware Bay is hers … the Cape May Inlet is a piece of cake.”

  * * *

  Matilde leaves the guest room, and an hour later, I find her awake in her bedroom. The lamps are on, casting a wide golden light, and I realize that it is not only Matilde, but also Claire sitting on the bed. I stand outside the half-open door.

  “Look, Claire.” Matilde reaches for an oversize sketchbook. She flips through quickly—it becomes animation. “You aren’t allowed to tell anyone that you’ve seen my book, Claire. Ever. Okay? You’re the first person to see these except for Mom.”

  Claire bobs her head up and down.

  “I knew it from the time I was three that Mom is a sealy. I knew she’d die if she wasn’t near water,” Matilde says.

  Claire is sucking her thumb, hanging on to her blankie, preternaturally calm. “Mommy is a sealy.”

  “Mom’s tale about the selkies is the one where the fisherman makes the prettiest sealy his wife; you know the story, Claire. He hides her coat until she finds it one day and leaves her children and husband.

  “I told Mom I’ll draw my own story,” Matilde sighs. “Since Mom is gone I’ve been looking at my sketches again.”

  Claire is very still, pointing to Matilde’s open sketchbook.

  “I drew these—for you, Claire. Because you love the story about the selkies. We haven’t done the selkie story at night in a long time, maybe since we moved to Elliot.”

  Matilde turns to the next page. “Here’s a picture of the two sisters with their sealy mother at the ocean. See? I’ve made the sun too big to be real so that the selkie and her girls are … helpless.…”

  “Helpless?” Claire cries. “What, Matilde?”

  “That’s enough.” Matilde closes the book and wraps her pinkie in Claire’s pinkie. “Pinkie swear that you won’t say a word.” Claire nods solemnly and Matilde takes another sketchbook from under the bed.

  “Here’s my new book, what I was supposed to show Mom on the boat. I kept waiting to show her because she was working on her spring show.”

  “Please get Mommy for me now. Now! Matilde!”

  “Look at my pictures, Claire, my new pictures. Mom loves the spring winds, right?”

  Claire takes her wet thumb and streaks it across the first picture of the mother and her four children, two girls and two boys. Matilde grabs her hand. “Claire!”

  Claire stares at the picture.

 
“Everyone is on a picnic under a beach umbrella, Claire.”

  “Happy,” Claire says. “Matilde, the mommy is happy.”

  “So are her children, Claire.”

  Matilde shows Claire the second sketch of the mother and father standing in front of Bloomingdale’s.

  “In my story her husband brings her to the city and takes her shopping. She looks beautiful in whatever he buys for her, but her hair is really made of seaweed and her skin is light because it was covered for years by her seal skin.”

  Claire is concentrating on Matilde’s next picture, where the sealy mother is in the city with her children, along the banks of the Hudson River. Matilde turns the page.

  “They take the crosstown bus to the East River, to Carl Schurz Park, to play and watch the tugboats. She takes her children to school and back. She almost floats down the street, not like other mothers who walk or drive.”

  Matilde turns the page to a picture of the mother in her studio.

  “While her children are in school she draws pictures of the sea and sky. Just like what Mom told you, Claire, the father hides her seal coat so she’ll be his wife and the mother forever. See the closet in the hallway that I’ve drawn?

  “The mother is okay since she loves her children very much. Then one day she escapes and everyone says she’s gone back to be with the other selkies.”

  Claire becomes hysterical. She’s screaming and Matilde puts her hand on Claire’s mouth. “Claire, shhh. Everyone is asleep except for us. I’ll have to get Dad or Jess if you’re too loud.”

  Claire shakes her head.

  “Okay, fine … I’ll tell the story—what I think is the truth.”

  Matilde holds up the next sketch. It is of the older daughter in the attic searching for the missing skin.

  “Gone, Matilde, gone?” Claire whimpers. “Is the mommy gone?”

  Matilde kisses the top of Claire’s head as Lainie would do.

  “Look, Claire, the next sketch is of the daughter by the Narrows. See how she’s surrounded by blue and green? Then the next picture … here … see? One night, months later, the older daughter wakes up and finds a sealy coat left at the back door. The moon is out … the stars are out.” Matilde takes Claire’s finger and traces the picture.