Norma
MARRIAGE IS A FUNNY THING. THERE ARE SO MANY PEOPLE in the world, and
you decide to commit the rest of your life, the rest of your emotional energy, to just one. You assume that the mysterious connection that ties you to one another will hold. A connection that can’t be trusted, one that probably manifests in that same mystical space where stories come from. A place that allows you to suspend your disbelief. Marriage assumes that you will bend and twist and adjust to one another. It assumes that your desires will forever be interconnected by the placement of a piece of gold around a finger. For many people this is true. I envy those people who can dig deep and find that thing that originally allowed them to believe they could spend their entire lives sleeping in the same bed, sit across the table from one another day in and day out, make a family, make memories, good and bad. My aunt June has called me a cynic. But I didn’t always feel this way. I was more than willing to suspend my disbelief for the sake of Mark. Then something happened. Those ghosts from so long ago came back to haunt me, and Mark wasn’t ready for the measures I would take to rid myself of them. And I don’t blame him.
We held a small wedding in Aunt June’s backyard. My mother and father attended and gave us their blessing—my father more so than my mother. An accountant wasn’t a doctor or a lawyer, but it was respectable enough. Aunt June convinced me to leave it alone and just be grateful they liked him. So, in August of 1983, I became a wife. I was still looking for a job, and my parents wanted us to move closer to them. Aunt June, Alice and Desiree wanted me to stay in Boston. Mark didn’t mind where we lived— he could get a good job anywhere—so I applied for every position from Boston to the Maine-Canada border, with no luck until mid-September
when the English teacher at a small school just outside Augusta had a heart attack while watching the news and died in his armchair. I got the call and packed a bag. I stayed with a friend of Aunt June’s until I found an apartment. By Christmas, Mark had found a job and we were living back in Maine. My parents were happy.
Life settled into a routine. Work, home and the occasional dinner party or backyard barbecue. Dinners out on Fridays. Mark and I cultivated a small group of friends in Augusta, a few people from Mark’s work and a few from mine. Mother pleaded with me to attend church, to meet “good” people, yet she refused or was unable to define good when asked. We went to church when I was young, or at least Mother had. Once I turned fourteen, I begged to be allowed to sleep in on Sundays. Father and I tagged along only on holidays. After I left home, church became a second child to my mother, one she would take great comfort in until she couldn’t anymore. She attended Tuesday evening Bible study, went to Wednesday afternoon quilting club in the church basement, taught Sunday school and, when she turned fifty-five, started going to Golden Age, a group of seniors who made sandwiches and date squares, drank weak tea, complained about ungrateful children and occasionally read from the Bible. She even joined the choir. A woman who barely spoke in public and hid away in her home for the better part of our lives was singing for people. A little off key, but I was proud of her.
“You’re a teacher, Norma.” “I’m aware, Mother.”
“Well, think about how good you would be teaching the Sunday school, or the youth group.” Mother passed me a bowl of steaming green beans, and I placed them in the middle of the table.
“I don’t think so.” We had the same conversation every Sunday afternoon as we prepared for dinner at my childhood home. My annual school picture was replaced by a wedding photo of Mark and me flanked by my parents.
“Well, just think about it a bit more.”
“Actually, Mother, I’m going to be a bit busy for the next little while.”
She had her back to me, hands in the dishwater. “Never too busy for God, Norma.”
“Mom, can you stop for a minute? I have something to tell you.”
She wiped her hands on a dishtowel and leaned against the sink. I took a deep breath.
“Mark and I are having a baby.”
She stood in front of me, her hands wound up in the dishtowel, silent.
“Mother?” I walked across the small kitchen when she started to cry. I took her in my arms, her hands still wound in the towel.
“Mother? Are you okay?”
“Oh, I’m just so happy. A little surprised but very happy.”
“Okay, good. I couldn’t tell there for a minute.” I smiled and let her go. She placed the towel on the counter and placed her hands on my arms,
holding me there and looking at me. “I am so happy.”
I knew she was, somewhere deep down, but there was something in her eyes that looked a little like fear.
“It’s okay, Mother. The baby is okay.”
She let herself smile. “Well, I guess I’m going to be a grandmother. Please tell me that I found out before your aunt June.” She smiled big and hugged me.
“Yes. You are the first to know.”
She wiped a few tiny tears from the corner of her eyes and turned back to the dishes.
“DO YOU THINK it’s a boy or a girl?” Mark sat on the couch beside me, rubbing my swollen belly. We were home from another Sunday dinner, months after I told Mother about the baby and left her to tell Father.
“I already told you. It’s a girl.” “How can you be sure?”
“A woman just knows.” I reached into the bowl that sat on his lap and took a few of the grapes, rolling one around in my mouth. When I finally bit into it, the juice burst out of the skin, sweet and cold. I turned my head and spit a seed into Mark’s hair.
“Nice, Norma. I hope you teach these manners to our daughter. Or son.” He reached up and flicked the seed into the bowl.
“Daughter.” I smiled and spat another seed at him, but it missed and flew over his shoulder. “Are you coming to the doctor’s appointment tomorrow?”
“I think you can handle it. Mom.” He winked at me. “I have a meeting.
I’ll take you out to dinner after.”
The doctor’s office was only minutes from the school, and I showed up promptly at 3:45 p.m. for my appointment. I remember the woman calling my name and giving me a smile reserved for pregnant women. Semi-sweet, bordering on sympathy.
“Norma, how are you feeling?”
“Good. A little tired, a lot of heartburn and a bit heavy.” I laughed the uncomfortable way I do when there’s someone in a white coat in the same room, a stranger who has seen me naked.
“To be expected. How is the little one’s movement?”
I think, but I will never be sure, that this is when the chill ran up my spine, when my tongue dried, when the edges of my vision went dark and my world became very small. “Actually, there hasn’t been much movement the last couple days.”
He looked up from the notes he was scribbling. “Okay, let’s measure you and get a listen to the heartbeat.”
The last thing I remember clearly is the quiet, the doctor breathing through his teeth, the din of conversation as people walked down the hallway, the hands on the stethoscope, then on my bare belly, cold and searching. Every hair on my body came alive. My skin tightened and the room closed in on me. The crinkle of the paper blanket under me sounded like lightning in my ears.
“Where’s your husband, Norma?” He wrapped the stethoscope around his neck, took my hand and helped me down into the chair. I pulled my shirt back down over my still belly.
“He’s at work.”
“Maybe we should call him.” “Why? What’s wrong?”
“I’m going to send you next door, to the hospital, for an ultrasound. In the meantime, could you give me his work phone number? And can you remind me how far along you are?”
I recited Mark’s number at the office, then said, “Thirty-three, thirty- four weeks?”
His assistant, the same one who had smiled at me earlier, walked with me over to the hospital, holding my elbow the entire time. She talked to me the whole short trip, but I heard nothing. We walked through the door, passed the emergency department and went into a cold room. A grey machine, dark and solid, stood beside the bed. Before I could take in all of
my surroundings, someone was squeezing cold jelly on my bump, and a woman with a severe face ran a contraption that looked like a deodorant ball across my belly. Again, there was so much quiet. I remember thinking that if I took a deep breath, the world would shatter into a million different pieces.
The exact sequence of events over the next few days are a blur and always have been. Everything is scattered and dark with little bits of faded light. Tiny fragments of sound and colour. I’m glad I don’t remember it all. I think my brain lets me have this one, lets me black it out for my own sanity. I was put into a room, by myself, the lights dimmed for my comfort. I don’t know how long I lay there alone, but it seemed like hours. I rubbed my belly and sang lullabies.
“Mark!”
He walked in and stopped five feet from the bed, his face long and older than it had been earlier that day.
“Norma, sweetie. The doctor needs to talk to us.”
I hadn’t noticed the doctor behind him. I’d been so focused on someone I knew, someone who might be as scared as I was.
The doctor whispered, even though we were the only people in the room. “Norma, Mark, I’m afraid the pregnancy is no longer viable.”
Mark moved to take my hand as I stared at the doctor, waiting for him to finish. Waiting for him to tell me how they were going to make it viable. Waiting for him to explain what viable meant when he was talking about my daughter. She was viable, she was in my dreams, she was in the notes I wrote to her, her blood was my blood, I sang to her, and I loved her.
“We want to induce labour to evacuate the fetus.”
Evacuate the fetus. Deliver my daughter. My dead daughter.
The next thing I remember is being in a different room, watching a needle break the delicate inside skin where the elbow bends. I didn’t feel the pinch, didn’t feel the flow of liquid into my veins, or the nurse putting my feet in the stirrups. I don’t recall pain, although I’m sure there must have been. I’ve heard that there’s a chemical that women produce when they give birth, which helps them forget the pain so that they can bond with the baby. I wonder what happens when the baby is dead. Where do those chemicals go? What purpose do they serve? All these years later, I can close my eyes and see Mark, a little blue hospital hat on his head, looking down
on me, and I can feel the tear he let free. It landed on my lip, and I remember the salt. I wonder what he remembers.
When she came into the world, she came in the quiet, all five pounds, two ounces. I had carried her in my body, sang to her, decorated a room for her, bought clothes for her, tiny and delicate. I had set up the Noah’s ark lamp on the dresser that held those tiny clothes. I’d softened. I had written her messages in a little yellow journal. Messages that I hoped we would read together when she was older, after the years when I was an embarrassment and before the years when she left me to become her own person. And I swore, to myself and to Mark, that the love I was going to give her would be full of light. There would be no heaviness in the love I intended to give. She was the thing that I was missing, that piece of me that always seemed hollow. I had looked forward to filling it with her laughter and her cries.
But in the end, I couldn’t even hold her. They asked but I closed my eyes. Tight. So tight that stars danced in the darkness. I couldn’t handle the idea of my ghost having a face, especially one that might look like mine. So, they took her away. They gave me something to help me sleep, and I prayed that it would last forever. But it didn’t.
When I woke, I returned to my own nightmare. “I’ve done everything right. I ate properly. I went for regular walks.” My eyes burned, and Mark was holding a tissue to my nose. I could barely catch my breath. My stomach had started to deflate, the eviction so real and true. In between sobs, I tried to explain, tried to defend myself for something that never needed defending, something that Mark never blamed me for. “I rested when they told me to. I took my vitamins.”
“Shhh, Norma, this is not your fault. This just happens sometimes.” He had his arm around my shoulders and pulled me in close. I rested my head against his chest. He smelled of the cologne he always wore, clean and familiar. To this day, when I smell that cologne on a stranger, I’m thrown back to the day I lost my girl. A scent can bypass logic, can circumvent time.
They placed her in a casket that should never have been a casket. A month after we buried her, Mark told me they had dressed her in the little yellow dress I’d bought with the knitted coat my mother had made, wrapped in the quilt from Mother’s church quilting group. I trust him in this because I refused to look. Baby Sarah was buried at the edge of the
graveyard a mile from our house. Years later, I placed her grandparents beside her.
I TEACH WORDS. How to put them together to create fear or beauty or suspense. How a long line of words strung together can take you to a dinghy out on the ocean searching for a whale, can sit you beside the witch as she tells her story of the white man, bringing him into existence. I teach words that can take you to places that exist only in the imagination, introduce you to people so peculiar, so interesting that they can’t possibly be real, yet they are, on the page. That’s why I found it strange that no word exists for a parent who loses a child. If children lose their parents, they are orphans. If a husband loses his wife, he’s a widower. But there’s no word for a parent who loses a child. I’ve come to believe that the event is just too big, too monstrous, too overwhelming for words. No word could ever describe the feeling, so we leave it unsaid.
The quiet of her birth and her death followed us. It came home with us in the car. It stuck to my clothes, my hair. It burrowed under my nails, took up residence in Mark’s sighs. It slept between us. And it made me quiet again. The principal at the school allowed me to take the rest of the year to rest. I could go back to my job in August. So, I stayed home and craved the quiet. I sat in the chair by the window for hours, just staring. No radio, no television, just the quiet. I stayed out of the room I had made for her. I closed the door and tiptoed past it on my way to the bathroom. Dinners were ones of scraping forks and silence. Mark carried my heaviness through those first few weeks. And I guess I assumed that I would just wake up one day and everything would be normal again, with laughter and chit-chat at the table, dinner out on Friday evenings. Summer was coming, so there’d be trips to the beach and barbecues. But as the days grew longer and the air warmer, the quiet settled in, deep. I wanted to be me before there was her, but I didn’t know how.
I went to stay with my parents for a week, but that didn’t help. The heaviness that had always existed in that house seemed impossible now. Mother would get a headache anytime I tried to talk about it. I thought she, of all people, might be able to help me understand, if not ease, my burden. We, for the first time in our lives, had something in common, something that might bring us closer in the telling, in the grieving. But Mother didn’t want to talk. I’ve done my grieving. I can’t do it anymore.
I slept a lot instead, curled up in my childhood bedroom, missing the comfort of Mark beside me. I read the Nancy Drew books, the same ones I’d loved as a girl. I was reaching for one midway through the line of yellow spines when I noticed my brown paper–covered journals. I reached for one, pulling it off the shelf, disturbing years of dust. I ran my hand over the first one Alice had given me, using the tip of my finger to outline the coloured-pencil rainbows and pink hearts I’d been so careful in drawing. I opened it the way book lovers do, holding it to my nose and breathing in the scent of years of neglect. When I pulled it away, I smiled at my childlike printing, the letters large and in complete disregard of the lines. I’d drawn a moon with a blue halo. A pickup truck, something my parents had never owned, was crudely sketched alongside a house with crooked windows, drawn the way children always depict houses. Squiggly black lines indicated birds. There was nothing unusual, everything was so common, but it felt odd reading my words, trying to find meaning. And for the first time in a long time, I thought about those dreams, that confusion before memories solidified in my mind. The house that wasn’t my house, the mother who wasn’t my mother. I heard Mother coming down the hall, and for reasons I don’t understand, I closed the journal quickly and placed it back on the shelf. Mother opened the door without knocking, the way she always had.
“Your lunch is ready.” She looked around the room, and I had that feeling in my stomach I used to get when I was little and suspected that I was about to be in trouble for something I’d done.
“I’m coming.” I followed her down the hall to egg-salad sandwiches and plain potato chips.
I was relieved when Mark pulled in the driveway the next Saturday to retrieve me.
“Let’s get away from here for a while, Norma.” It was the end of June, and we were sitting on the back deck of the house, watching the sun set.
“That sounds nice, actually.” I surprised even myself.
Mark had been prepared for a debate and was relieved when I agreed. He got out of his chair and came over to kiss me. His lips lingered as he pulled the blanket I had draped over my shoulders for warmth. We made love that night, the first time since we’d lost her. He was gentle, more so than ever before, afraid I might break. But I didn’t, and the next morning, I felt an essence of normalness return. Some wounds cannot be healed. Some
wounds never close, never scar. But the further away from the injury, the easier it became to smile.
“Where should we go?” He poured the coffee as I removed some toast from the toaster.
“I don’t know. You pick. I just want to get away.” I buttered the toast and sat it on the table between us.
“A guy at the office has a cottage in Nova Scotia. The pictures look nice. Sunsets over the water, farms, some nice museums. We could take the ferry from Bar Harbor.”
“Sounds nice.”
“Okay, I’ll get some time off work and we’ll go.”
There was a joy in his voice that made me smile. That morning after breakfast, we drove to Bar Harbor to get out of the house and picked up a stack of pamphlets on Nova Scotia. For the next two weeks, I filled my time with planning the trip, calling little inns and reserving our rooms, planning our days while Mark was at work. And for the first time since junior high, I started to write in a journal, after a call with Aunt June and Alice.
“We’re both on the line, Poopkin. What’s up?”
“Nothing. I just wanted to tell you that Mark and I are headed up to Nova Scotia on a little vacation. Need to clear our heads.”
“Well, that will be nice—” Alice started to say.
“It will be. Mark’s friend has a cabin, and we’re going to stay there for a few days. See the sights. The pictures in the pamphlets look beautiful.”
“Make sure you write things down. The good and the bad, but especially the good,” Alice said in her calming voice.
We left in mid-July. I packed the car while Mark checked the doors and windows and gave the neighbour the keys to water the plants and put the mail on the table. This trip was going to be the farthest I’d ever been. Mark had been to Arizona and California as a kid, but I hadn’t ventured much beyond the I-95 from Maine to Massachusetts. The drive to Bar Harbor was uneventful. We had a few stops for highway construction, but made it in plenty of time for the ferry. I’d been on boats before—canoes and tour boats in Boston Harbor—but never one as big as the ferry and never where I couldn’t turn and see land. When I got out of the car in the belly of the ship, the smell of engine oil and salt water invaded my nose. When the hull door closed, the faint yellow lights and the tinny echoes of the car storage area
were eerie. I took a deep breath when we broke through the top of the stairs and into the light.
It was a nice day with blue skies and calm waters. The trip took a little over six hours. We had dinner and a few drinks at the restaurant and walked around outside. I was amazed at the vastness of the ocean, even though we weren’t too far from land. There were so many blues. The only thing that wasn’t blue was the horizon, a thin grey line separating the water from the sky. When you’re on the beach, your feet in the water, land is always right behind you; there is a reference point. Out there, all reference was lost. We put our trust in the staff to ensure that we didn’t get lost in all of the blue.
Mark went on a tour of the ship and I settled into one of the chairs by the fake fireplace in the lounge area. I would like to say that I read my book, but instead I watched people and wondered about their lives. Where did they come from? What did they have for breakfast? What ghosts haunted their dreams? I watched an older couple eating soft food and drinking black tea. How long had they been together? How many children did they have? Were they going home or leaving home? A young man on his own was reading a book and looking intense. I tried to snoop and see what he was reading, but he had the cover bent back. Just as I was about to put my nose down and crack the spine of the book I’d bought for the vacation, I saw a young couple pushing a stroller. A baby a month or two old was asleep under a pink blanket. I could feel the heat of tears before they even started. I could feel them gathering in the back of my throat and pushing their way out of the corners of my eyes. When Mark came back, a smile across his face and excited to tell me all about the inner workings of a ferry ship, I was a mess. I’d left the tissues in the car and didn’t have the energy to get up to find a napkin. I was wiping my tears with the sleeve of my cardigan.
“God, Norma. What happened?”
“Nothing,” I sobbed. And I wasn’t lying; it was nothing.
“There’s got to be something.” Mark walked over to the bar and grabbed a handful of napkins. He handed them to me.
“It’s stupid.”
“Try me.” He sat on the floor beside me, his hand on my knee.
“There was a couple with a baby. I don’t know. I just started crying.
They looked so happy.”
He didn’t say anything. He just sat with me until the tears dried out. Sometimes I forgot that he was hurting, too. I tried to wipe away the sadness, tried to replace my tears with a smile, tried to push the lump in my throat back down, but Mark wasn’t buying it. He kept pulling me in close until I finally let him hold me still.
The rest of the ride was smooth, and when we landed in Yarmouth, the sky was still blue although the air was a little cooler. As we were driving off the ferry and into a new country, Mark said, “You’re not going to cry every time we see a baby, are you?”
I turned to look at him and he was smiling.
“Are you really making fun of me right now?” There was heat in my voice.
“No, no, no . . .,” Mark stammered.
“I can’t help it, Mark. I lost a child, for fuck’s sake. Forgive me if I can’t be the happy little woman you want me to be.”
“No, Norma, that’s not it. I’m sorry. I was trying to make a joke.” “Fucking funny, Mark. Fucking funny.”
I’ve heard it said that swearing can make you feel better. It did. For a minute. When we pulled over at the gas station just past the ferry terminal, Mark got out of the car without saying anything, and I felt guilt replace the anger. I got out of the car and followed him into the gas station. He was at the counter paying, so I grabbed a couple of chocolate bars and threw them on the counter, taking the time to whisper, “I’m sorry,” in his ear. Mark smiled, though not fully.
The man behind the counter looked at me. “You got your Indian card?” I looked behind me to see who he was talking to.
“You, lady. You gonna use your Indian card?” “I’m sorry, I don’t even know what that is.” “Oh, sorry. I thought you were Indian.”
I looked down at my July skin. “Italian stock, I’ve been told.” “If you say so.”
He took the money from Mark, and we headed back to the car. “That was weird,” I said, unwrapping one of the chocolate bars. “You are dark and more so in the summer.”
I held the chocolate bar so he could take a bite as we pulled out of the gas station. “Honest mistake probably.”
Nova Scotia was beautiful. We spent two weeks driving and sightseeing. We stopped in Digby for its world-famous scallops, then drove through the Annapolis Valley with its charming farms and rich history. We visited old, restored forts, once of strategic importance to both the French and English and battled over for years until the English finally took it all. We passed through small towns with Victorian charm, inherited from their colonial past, and apple orchards and cornfields that went on forever. We took our time, staying at Mark’s friend’s cabin in a little place called Kingsport, watching the tides go in and out for miles. Nova Scotians are very proud of their high tides, and they are something to behold—that much water moving in and out twice a day. I think that was my favourite stop, with its salt air and fresh local food. We ate greens and strawberry pie. The neighbour in Kingsport invited us to the community’s strawberry social, where we paid five dollars each for hodgepodge stew—fresh vegetables cooked in milk and butter—strawberry shortcake for dessert, and all the coffee and tea you could drink. The people were conservative but friendly. I felt a strange familiarity with the place, not with the people so much but with the landscape. There was an intimacy with the trees that lined the roads, the small towns with their big brick town halls. It was something I couldn’t place, and Mark, in a moment of humour, told me I must have been a local in a past life. We laughed, but if I had believed in such a thing, I may have thought he was right. One evening, near the end of our stay, I walked along a sandy beach at low tide and breathed in the salt air. I watched the sky turn from blue to pink and purple, the clouds erupt with pastels, and I was mesmerized by the murmuration of small seabirds.
A wooden staircase led from the beach to the cliffs above. The tide had gone out, so I sat on the stairs and watched the moon rise over the mud flats. The waves, reaching for the shore, whispered to me as they inched closer. I could hear children somewhere down the beach playing, but the moon wasn’t high enough to cast enough light to see them. Their presence, as I admired the steady ascent of the moon, turned the air around me cold. The soft breeze bit my arms where the skin was exposed as the children laughed. I looked down to see the silhouettes of uneven cliffs and weathered trees but no children. The full glow of the moon quieted the ghostly voices. Perhaps they stopped to admire it as well, or maybe they’d been called inside to bed. Perhaps they were the ghosts that the locals spoke so fondly of in this place, where ghost stories were told over generations
and wholly believed. I never knew what became of those children, but I understood the message they imparted. As the moon crested the water and floated on the tide, I wrapped my arms around my waist and cried. My mother lived with the ghosts of her dead children, most barely formed before she lost them. I lived in that house where the ghosts reigned. There, on a dark beach so far from home yet so familiar, I understood my mother and the ghosts that haunted her, and I understood I could not bring a child into the world knowing that I would do the same. That I would see their dead sister in their tiny features. That I would suffocate them with the love I was unable to give my Sarah. I breathed in the salty air and turned away from the moon. As the land above got closer with each step, a lightness settled over me, a relief almost. I knew what I had to do, and despite knowing that I was going to break Mark’s heart, I smiled—a real smile, the first in a long time.
WE FOUND HALIFAX charming, with its bars and sea shanties that everyone seemed to know the words to. We drank a little too much and danced until the sun was coming up. We checked out of the hotel just hours after we’d gone to bed.
“You seem to be having a good time.” Mark handed me a pain pill for the headache I could have challenged my mother with.
“I’m happy.” I swallowed the pill down with a sip of coffee. “I’m glad. Anything you want to tell me?”
“What do you mean?” “What’s changed?”
“Nothing.” “Nothing?”
“Nothing.” I turned and got into the rental car, putting my sunglasses on to cover my eyes in case they gave me away.
The South Shore was majestic. Tiny fishing villages and lighthouses right out of a postcard dotted the coast. I think there is something to be said for salt air. I know we have it in Maine, but I believe that getting away from what you know, getting lost in the cold, northern salt air, is good for the soul. Mark felt it, too. We held hands, watched the sun set and made love like we did when we first met. It was a good ending, as endings go.
As we pulled onto the Yarmouth ferry, ready to set sail for Bar Harbour, I told him. We were still in the car waiting for permission to exit and head
up top. The eerie light added an element to the conversation that I hadn’t intended.
“Mark . . .”
He turned toward me, waiting for me to say something. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“And I’m sorry that I’ve been so . . . far away since the baby.”
He reached over and took my hand. “It’s okay. It was rough, but we can try again.” He leaned across the car to kiss my cheek, and I pulled away.
“That’s just it.” “Just what?”
“I don’t want to try again.”
“You’re still sad. Wait a while and we’ll see.”
“No, Mark. I am serious. I lived with the ghosts of babies my entire life, and I saw the toll they take. They suck the love out of every room; they make the world quiet and creepy. I won’t do that to myself. I won’t do that to you.”
Mark dropped my hand and it landed back on my lap. He gripped the steering wheel as if he wanted to speed right off the ferry, but there was nowhere to go.
“You don’t get to just decide these things on your own. We had a plan.” “Plans change.”
A man in a greasy uniform and a reflective vest indicated that we could leave our cars. Mark got out, slammed the door and disappeared up the stairs before I could catch him.
I felt bad for Mark—I did. I have never felt worse. I need that to be known. I wanted to talk to him, to explain, but he was gone, lost to the bowels of the boat. I wanted to cry. I wanted to stand on the deck with Mark and scream into the ocean wind. I wanted to let it carry the sadness and the anger out into the blue. It would get lost out there, and we would be free. But Mark had walked away into the dark.
As the ferry lurched away from the dock, I made my way up the stairs and into the bar. The people on the ferry were mostly families, and I was the only one to take a stool at the bar.
“Wine, please. White.”
“Six or nine ounces?” the bartender asked. She had blond hair that was dark at the roots and the look of someone who had once been thin.
“Nine, please.”
The wine was acidic and stung behind my ears. I winced and swallowed. The bartender was surprised when I asked for a second and then a third.
“You okay, ma’am?” she asked when I tapped the bar and slid my glass across to her, ready for a fourth.
“Peachy, I’m just peachy. My daughter is dead, and I think I just fucked up my marriage.” I could hear the words coming out slurred and angry. They were barely past my teeth when I wanted to pull them back in. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m being pathetic.”
“How about a glass of water?”
“No, I want another glass of wine. I’ll sit quiet and not upset anyone, I promise.” I slid a little off the stool, and as I was reaching out to catch myself, I felt a hand on my waist, hoisting me back onto the stool. “I want a glass of wine.”
“Give her one more. I’ll take care of her. And I’ll have a beer.” Mark sat beside me.
“If you say so. She pukes, you’re cleaning it up.” She winked at him, and I wanted to punch her.
I didn’t talk to him. I just let him sit there all quiet and sad. When it was time to go, Mark helped me off the stool. He held me as we made our way down the steps and into the car. As we drove off the ferry, after some of the happiest days in my life, I knew nothing would ever be the same and it was my own fault. I don’t have time for regret, or the emotional strength it requires. I see the world unfolding as it is meant to. Sometimes I have trouble finding meaning in the things that happen to me, but I assume that the universe knows what it’s doing. Perhaps it’s my duty to carry this grief, this grief that another woman might not be strong enough to carry. I lost a child and let my marriage fall to pieces so that someone else gets to find happiness in those things. Mother always said that God would never give us more than we could handle. And while I don’t believe in the God that brought her so much comfort, I understand the sentiment. Back then, at that point in my life, I needed to make peace with the decisions I’d made and carve out a new life for myself.
