by Devin Murphy
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.
“Just looking,” I said, hesitant to start a conversation after we had avoided them for so long. Though what I wanted to say, more than anything was, My God, you’re a gorgeous woman. How do I keep you?
The rest of that day we gathered all the driftwood we could find into an enormous pile. It was the first task we’d done together. When we each grabbed an end of log and hauled it across the sand, it was clear we’d gathered enough for many nights of campfires. When we laid the log down on the pile, the gesture felt like a silent agreement that this was a spot where we both wanted to stay for a long time, as there was nothing there—nothing to remind us of where we had come from.
For almost half of a year, we had kept 3-D ultrasound pictures of a baby that looked like a doughy octopus hidden in some shadowy underwater cave stuck to our refrigerator under a Home Depot magnet. The head was mashed in fleshy folds, and we took the pictures down each night and looked at them, talking each other through the magical asymmetry of the heart pulling to the left, the liver developing on the right and the lungs taking on their distinct shapes. The genetic counselor told us afterward those pictures never hinted at a problem. She used a flip chart and pencil drawings of chromosomes to explain what went wrong, named the problem omphalocele, but none of that ever added up when accounting for the crushing fatigue that set in when I saw my daughter born. A dark snake started writhing inside of me, and the soft nudges of anxiety I’d been feeling during Jamie’s pregnancy exploded into crushing disbelief. She came out blue and silent. There was a fist-size opening in the middle of her abdominal wall and a thin layer of slick bloody membrane at the base of her umbilical cord was the only thing that held back her protruding intestines. She gave a quick cry from the corner of the room and began to turn red under the lights. That was the only time I saw her before the doctor swept her away to the operating room. That was the only time I ever saw her.
After we came home from the hospital we turned some awful corner of our life. Because we’d already weathered the years of my deployments, injury, and the long passage back into each other’s inner lives, I felt like the future, just as it was laying itself out in front of me like a wide, flat sky, was snake-bit and soured.
The ultrasound pictures stayed under the magnet for over a month after my daughter was born until one day they were gone. I don’t know what Jamie did with them, if she put them in a box where she kept scraps of her secret life or if she got rid of them completely, but those pictures had somehow been keeping me together. Without them I was left with a need to know what happened. I understood what the genetic counselor showed us but I wanted to know more than that. I wanted to add things up, to know what forces led things to go so wrong.
I watched Jamie through the smoke of our driftwood fire our first night on that Mexican beach. The ocean breeze kept the flies away but at night moths fluttered blindly around our campfire, dodging the floating embers. We cooked sausages and drank warm beers by the fire and then walked after the sunset along the strand. When our feet cut through the soft surf and the breeze brought the sweet smell of seaweed and smoke, it was easy to fantasize about living there forever.
Night after night I took out my telescope and spun it around the sky as the moon was bitten down to a small thumbnail and then was blotted out.
When she was young, Jamie’s father had left their family in an attempt to save himself and his kids from his alcoholism and went back west. After that, the West became a mythical place to reinvent yourself for her. That was why she had come, though now, we were realizing the sky and land were so vast that to make a place for yourself was no small thing.
During the day we walked for hours on the shore, amazed by what washed up: trees, shells, large strips of fishing nets, life jackets, glinting pieces of sea glass that sprawled about as if the sand had eyes.
I grabbed a drink from the ice chest and went to piss behind a scrub bush. There was a little lizard sunning itself on a rock. Along the shore a sandpiper was running up and down with the surf, dancing in that in-between place of land and water. Out at sea, pelagic birds bobbed on the surface, dipping their heads under to snatch at some plankton bloom. Jamie was coming out of the water and she was shining—her shoulders and long limbs tan. I craved to know every endless illumination of her body as I once had. I wanted to know how she felt about me. We were faced with a choice: to want each other or to be away from each other. The question hung over us and our movements.
I had bought licenses and saltwater fishing stamps. Read about fishing from the coast and how to wade out into the surf. The book explained how to use weights and bobbers to fish for midrange and bottom feeders, redfish, and sea bass. Jamie made a pitcher of tequila drinks, squeezed in a fresh lime and dropped in spoonfuls of salt to cut the sharp taste. When we had drunk enough and were starting to feel a heavy buzz, we built up a giant driftwood fire that we left burning on the beach until the haze from the fire rose in a column and mushroomed out overhead.
There was a high wind coming off the water when we walked into the shallows, knee-deep the first fifty yards, gradually dipping up to our hips about fifty yards past that. Clouds were hurrying past the moon. Spray misted our faces. When we were deep enough, we spread out from each other and hurled our hooks baited with freezer-dried shrimp into the dark waters where we couldn’t see them land. Jamie swayed each time a small wave passed through her, and the bait bag she’d draped over her shoulder rose up on its side and sat on the water. Sparkling orange firelight lit the water’s surface behind us. I slowly spun the reel, culling the lure back before tossing it back out to be lost in the enormity of the ocean around us.
On my sixth or seventh cast, something big struck at my line and the tip of my rod curved violently downward until my fists were both underwater. I let the line run out and listened to the wheezing of the reel.
I yelled to Jamie, who was ten yards from me, hip-deep in the ocean like she was the only person on earth.
Whatever it was, it was stronger than I was expecting. I yanked the rod to set the hook, put the lock on the reel, and started backpedaling. I fought the fish, arching the rod upward until it bent so much I was afraid it would break, then cranked in the reel as I leaned the rod down. We were a long way from our fire. Our sleeping bags airing out in the sand looked like wilted slug-skins. The line stretched over my head and disappeared into the water somewhere out of sight. The image of an old Far Side cartoon of a submarine streaming along with a fishing pole dragging behind it popped into my head, and I almost laughed, but then the line darted toward Jamie.
“It’s coming toward you,” I yelled. “Shine the flashlight out there.”
She let her beam of light search out the spot where my line submerged and found it a few feet in front of her. I kept reeling, fighting, until I saw a triangular dorsal fin cut the surface and slide across a swell.
I felt it in my bones that the future wasn’t promised to us.
“Jesus,” Jamie gasped, and started running toward me. Freezer-dried shrimp floated loose from her bag and fanned out in her wake.
Please, please, please. I took desperate, heart-pounding strides toward her, both running and swimming, fueled by that old feeling of loving her more than myself. Please don’t sink beneath the waves.
It was a hammerhead shark, probably five feet long, with that gray board planked onto its head, holding those dark globe eyes out to the side. When Jamie was next to me the dorsal fin swayed closer to us and began to thrash at the water’s surface. I pulled my fillet knife from my side and cut the line loose. I staggered backward and Jamie caught me. Her arms wrapped around my ribs and met in a fist at my heart.
The shark slipped off and disappeared.
I cut her bait bag loose and tossed it away.
“Can we be done doing this now?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, and we held each other’s hands as we worked our way back to the shallows. What else might ha
ve been swimming around our legs?
On shore, we stuck the ends of our rods into the sand and passed another pitcher of her tequila drink between us. I let the salted liquor slide down my throat and spread out in my stomach and felt that warmth settle there. Jamie took off her bikini bottoms, wrung them out, and draped them over the back of the camp chair. She put on her baggy blue cargo shorts and a faded yellow tank top with spaghetti straps that pressed tight over her shoulders.
In the dark by the firelight, having navigated a knife-edge, our fear slowly began to slip away like a whisper and something finally gave way between us.
“I’m not sure what we’re supposed to be doing,” she said. She was looking down at her feet. Her voice was soft and I knew it was time we showed each other our own sad truths.
“I am trying,” I said.
“Trying what, John?”
“To see what will happen to us.” I took courage and kept talking, letting what might have been gibberish spiral out of me. “I think we’re both terrified to try to have another child together.” Shut up. Shut up, blared out in my head, but I kept going until it felt like some detached voice was speaking for me. “I’ve been too afraid to tell you how I felt because I didn’t want to guilt you into staying with me. I wanted to give you an out because you can still remarry and have your own children.” My voice was low. “But the thought of it kills me,” came out as soft as rabbit’s breath.
She didn’t say anything for a long time. Her hands worked at the hem of her cargo shorts. Then her lips started moving, teasing out empty words until she found her voice. “When we came home without her, I hated you for pretending some ordinary peace had settled over us.”
“You don’t love me anymore,” I said.
Her eyes shot up and narrowed on me. She was looking at me then. Full-on looking at me—taking everything about me in, and I felt her disdain for me puncture deep, far deeper than the exploding side of the navy ship did or the hammerhead’s teeth could have reached.
I waited for her to say something else, but she pressed her palms into her eyes and sat there. The fire popped and hissed as it ate into the dry driftwood. I wanted us to keep talking, getting everything out in the open. But she said nothing and eventually stood up and went into the tent.
I sat alone under the stars for what felt like hours until the wind picked up off the water and a storm started flashing in the distance. I crawled into the tent beside her and lay there without saying anything. I felt husked, like something essential had been pared back and bared my raw heart.
During the delivery at the hospital, we were each other’s caretakers. I wanted time to curve back on itself and find us like we were then, before we knew what was going to happen, before we went home where the absence of her large stomach did not match the quiet of the house.
Later that night an ocean storm blew in, churning the frothy waves up and smashing them on the beach. I unzipped the corner of the tent’s mesh window and pushed my face into the netting to feel the spray from the swirl of rain and see the ocean light up in the distance and listen to the storm crawl over us on lightning legs, its belly dragging like a heavy sheet.
“Let’s go out,” Jamie whispered.
I didn’t know she was awake.
“Let’s go out there. Let’s go now,” she said.
We went out and ran in the rain. It was warm. Our feet slapped against the wet sand. The rain drummed off my shoulders and rolled in big wet beads off my scalp and down the back of my ears. When we ran out of breath far down the strand, I hunched over with my hands braced on my knees. My ribs hurt. Jamie stood beside me, and though it was too dark to really see her face, I knew she was looking at me. Then she reached out and took a wild swing at my face.
“Don’t say that,” she said as her fist landed on the meaty center of my upper lip. Then she tried to leg-sweep me. “Don’t say I don’t love you.” I braced myself, pushed her to the ground, and when I climbed on top of her, she started pulling at my swim trunks and when they were down we started grinding each other into the sand. We let the waves ride up and pull us out until we were floating. We sloshed each other around in the water in a breathless struggle. Then we slammed back into the sand.
I laid there on the beach afterward, looking through the rain for stars in the dark sky. I’d heard how in the seventies NASA sent out sounds of the human body into space, the da Dum da Dum da Dum of a heartbeat; breathing, both steady and wild; greetings in fifty-five languages; and music by Beethoven, Blind Willie Johnson, and Chuck Berry. I thought of those thrumming sounds, pulses of interstellar vocals traveling so far. Jamie and I had let our hurt sit for too long. There were impossible distances between us neither of us knew how to address. We had only our suffering, our desire to send out to each other. Such meager wailing probes.
The night passed in a flash. I shut my eyes on the wet beach and then opened them and the night was over. The sun was already coming up. I woke alone and walked away from our tent for about a mile. There was a large hollowed-out fish on the beach that shimmered with iridescent blue flies bubbling out of a gash in its side. The steady buzzing sounded angry, hungry. Farther down the beach there were four men at the edge of the trees, shirtless, barefoot; each held a machete that dangled like menacing fangs glinting in the sun. They were facing my direction and I stopped before going any farther. There was no fat on any of them. Each had chestnut skin and glossy black hair. Their features seemed to blend together in the distance. They watched me for so long I imagined them running toward me, all swinging arms and steel blades, that these were the kind of people you read about in newspapers, chopping tourists up and scattering their limbs around the dunes. I imagined running toward them too, my arms wide-open, embracing that fate. Then one of the men turned inland and grabbed a large mesh bag of coconuts I hadn’t seen and the others followed, leaving me alone again with my wife on that empty coastline.
That afternoon we explored the dunes and swam in the ocean when the waves came in. We didn’t talk much for fear of stopping whatever dormant want had woken between us. That night we both drank too much and passed out in our tent. It was a bad night. I kept slipping in and out of half sleep and dreams about a black stone fist pummeling Jamie’s abdomen. When I woke I put on a pair of jeans that were bunched at the foot of the tent and grabbed a flashlight. Outside I shone the pitiful light beam on the dead embers of our fire and scooped a handful of ashes into my fist and brought it to my nose—the scent of something dead lingered. I took off my clothes, walked into the surf, and lay down so the water covered the bottom half of my body. I floated in the subtidal sands and let them pack me into the beach. The water seemed so immense that the ocean could only be expanding away from me. The residue of that strange old life was being scrubbed off my body. In the surf, it was like I was clear of the world.
I climbed back into our tent, water dripping on the thin nylon floor. I leaned over Jamie and pressed myself down on her, a salty flesh puddle. I peeled her from her L.L.Bean sleeping bag, and loose-fit yoga pants, and fingered the elastic of her cotton underwear so I could pull them down. I sunk my face into her soft, sweet neckline. The hot skin of her thighs clamped onto my hips so hard I knew I’d feel them long after we finished.
Afterward, lying at the foot of the tent I bent down and bit the toenail on her big toe so it snapped between my teeth and left a nasty white barb flailing off the end of her foot.
“Gross,” she said, and pulled her knees up to her chest where she hugged them close. I was paralyzed then by some voltage of light that flashed in her cool green eyes, her wet red mouth, and the momentary softening of her features that offered a glimpse at the unburdened woman I had married. I shut my eyes and kept that image of her in my head—stacked upon the layers of other moments with her.
I woke in the morning and everything was new and frigid, and when I realized Jamie wasn’t next to me I felt my heart giving. Above her side of the tent I could see where she’d traced little interconnecte
d symbols overhead in the condensation.
I sat in front of the tent until she walked back down the beach toward me. She was topless. She had suntan lines from wearing her bikini. I was arrested by the sight of her as I shamelessly studied her body. I knew that body so well. I had seen every minute of her pregnancy and held her close as we rocked back and forth, contractions racking her stomach and back, pain-induced moans billowing from her chest like the calls of a giant dying bird. I had seen how her chest caved in when the nurse came back into our room, her eyes revealing everything, after the doctors had done their best to save our daughter. How much more intimate could two people get?
Late that afternoon she poured us each a glass of her tequila drink. Condensation on her glass beaded up and streamed down like tears before she palmed it, drank, and then touched the glass to her cheek to feel the coolness. We finished that pitcher and made another as it got dark.
The beautiful beach and isolation on the unencumbered surf rolling up the sand had been enchanting enough to believe the escape fantasy we told ourselves. Jamie grabbed a pack of Mamba and put a few in her mouth. She sucked them into one ball she rolled around with her tongue until her breath smelled like raspberry. As I was sitting in the lawn chair she bent down and kissed me and pushed the chewed wad into my mouth directly from the pocket of her cheek. Quiet, secret messages passed between us. I prayed the most compressed prayer.
When we needed to resupply, we packed up our camp and drove back north to Zihuatanejo. We rented a room in the old part of town, away from the tourists, in a two-story hotel with high arched windows that looked down onto the honey-colored cobblestone street full of rusted cars below. The scent of wet trash and cooked meat rose up on the breeze that brushed back our curtains. Quick voices I couldn’t understand and a steady churning of vague noise drifted past, but at the windowsill with my wife it didn’t feel strange being there. This was as fine a place as any to face life. A hard knot began to unravel in my chest and I felt something was over and something else had begun.