The Rotten Lure

When the ocean called to my mother, I had just turned 17. A month later, when life became too excruciating for him to go through without her, my estranged father turned to the comforts of booze to soothe his sorrows. I thought our relationship couldn’t get worse. He was a fisherman off the coast of a small New England town, the name of which I won’t say. Don’t want anyone to go seeking trouble where it lies.

It was hard to lose Mom for a number of reasons, none of which being that we were particularly close in my teenage years. She’d gone so abruptly, like a deletion from our lives. A supposed death rather than a certain one. The absence stung like a dull needle prick every time my father’s drunken glance lingered on me with an intensity that made me uneasy. I looked a good deal like her: long brown hair that hadn’t been cut in years, blue eyes that were muddled with hazel, and as he called it, a “housekeeper’s frame.” That meant skinny and overall unsuited for working on a boat. He stopped making outright demeaning comments when she disappeared, instead stumbling around the house in the morning and night smelling of Irish whiskey and acrid sea salt that had caked to his skin, giving me those piercing glances that singed with bitterness.

Dad blamed me for Mom’s death. I didn’t know why. It pissed me off that we never talked about it, but he and I were usually on the outs anyway. Only now it was an inescapable state of being, a palpable air that flowed through the two-story house we lived in right next to the docks where he worked. At least he managed to stay on a consistent schedule of leaving early enough to avoid me.

A part of me wasn’t surprised that he could twist it to be my fault. Who else was there to blame for her stroll into the ocean in the middle of the night? His certainty of my betrayal was foolish–even for him–and it wasn’t like Mom hadn’t been saying cryptic shit the past few weeks. To me, the note she left was proof that she had made her own choice.

I had to dig it out of the trash after he tried to hide it from me. My stomach hardened as I read it, noticing that she had addressed me instead of him. She didn’t mention him at all actually. The more he stewed over it, the more often I would see that stony grimace on his face. His temper managed to get even worse after that, so, way to rub salt in his wound, Mom.

She was one of those people that had an air of poetic melancholy to them, the last few weeks in hindsight were some of her most somber. Maybe she was writing the note in all those sessions of seclusion. I only read it once, and even that felt like one too many. The last sentence haunted me with its eerie and worrisome connotation: “You were worth the price.” It unearthed a pervasive and fevered guilt. Nothing within the rest of the flowery prose suggested blame, but that was what settled within me as I hid the note in the clutter of my dresser drawer. It was me, somehow. She had to go because of me.

My father and I were isolated together in that dark, gloomy house. Alone, fighting our own battles and each other. None of my father’s family wanted anything to do with us and my mother’s side was extremely limited. All I knew about the ancestry on her side was that my grandmother had disappeared when her daughters were young. In a desperate effort to restore his family, my grandfather went to go look for her but never returned. Mom’s voice would always soften at that point in the tale. I never really got more information than that. There were only a few children born every generation and it seemed that biblically rotten luck hung over us like a blackened cloud.

The only living relatives that I knew of were my mom’s younger sister Gracie, who was nice enough when I was a kid, and her son, who she would bring over to play with me. All I can remember about my aunt then was her sad eyes and how they would always be directed at me. Where my mother exuded a melancholy energy, Gracie’s was tighter, more anxious. It had been years since I had seen them. They were grieving the loss in their own way, away from us.

The day my father took me to the sea for the first time since her death, it was early in the morning. He barged into my room, not bothering to knock, and slurred at me loudly to get up. I was taken aback when he asked me, or rather told me, to help him on the boat.

“What happened to having a housekeeper’s frame?” I groggily snapped at him while laying in my bed, burying my face in my covers. While I had been awake, going through bouts of insomnia since Mom left, he was still standing in my door frame at 4 AM. The amber light from the hall was blinding me through my thin sheets and blankets.

His words caught on the drunken, stifled burps trying to escape. “The deckhand called out, and I got…I gotta get out there today an- hic I need an extra pair of hands.” His voice was always slow and garbled and annoyed, but today it sounded more so. “S-you’re coming, end of discussion.” Stumbling over the invisible clutter on my floor, he dragged his feet over to my bed and threw back the layers protecting me from the winter chill that channeled through the dilapidated house.

I shriveled into the fetal position as the draft hit my bare legs and arms. It was like he was trying to set a record for the earliest fight we’d ever had and I was being pulled into it without full consciousness yet. “Jesus, Dad, I haven’t even said I’d go yet, just give me a damn second…” I grumbled daringly, plunging my face into the pillow.

I snapped up as a scratching pain, raw and sharp, grinded through my upper thigh as my father dug his class ring into my skin. I shot to the other end of the bed, defensively kicking back his arm. My breath caught and muscles stiffened in an effort to stifle a wince, but he had managed to dig into the last bruise he left, the ache amplifying as I rubbed the spot with my palm. I scowled at him and his eyes narrowed on me.

“I didn’t ask, an- I…that’s all I’m gonna say, you’re coming with and hic you need to get dressed,” he muttered, his balled fist going slack and reaching for the door handle. “We leave in five.”

I gave him a curt acknowledgement, crossing my arms in finality. He huffed before closing the door behind him. Alone again, I spent a moment aggressively throwing middle fingers at him before getting up. Juvenile as it was, I was able to breathe easier afterwards. I started getting dressed as the silver light of the morning poked through my window shades, knowing better than to argue with him once the ring came out.

Our path to the docks was short and he walked five paces ahead of me the whole time. It was bitingly cold, I felt like an icicle was beginning to form out of my nose. I was wearing my father’s spare puffer (because he wouldn’t let me wear Mom’s) with sleeves that were too long and a hood too big to stay on in headwinds. The morning drowsiness hadn’t worn off yet. When we got to the boat, my father gave a vague set of instructions about how to cast off and griped at me that he would do it himself when I couldn’t untie the bulky rope from the dock. I probably rolled my eyes at him a million times before we were on open water.

As he was steering the boat and told me not to bother him, I set about to familiarize myself with the deck. Well, more like re-familiarize; it had been a decade since I had heard those creaks beneath my feet. Nostalgia hit me like a truck. The creaky wooden planks holding the rickety thing together, the salty smell of the ocean, the loud purring of the motor. I took a moment, stood as still as I could and just closed my eyes, pretending like nothing had changed as I let the winds pass me on their way to the endless ocean. The only thing missing was Mom. She would try to get me to sing sea shanties and tickle my ribs to get me off the edges of the boat.

The serenity of that moment was fleeting. There was no thinking of Mom without acknowledging how Dad would ruin everything. The older I got, the colder, meaner, and more distant Dad grew. Mom was always there to stick up for me behind closed doors. I can still remember her delicate voice diminished to those protective, hushed tones. I was eight when I snuck into the dark hallway, in pajamas with bare feet, and overheard the first of my parents’ many arguments about me. My dad would boil like a kettle while she would whisper the same phrase over and over: “It’s not her fault.” There was little doubt in my mind that it started with him blaming me for our financial difficulties. After that, he managed to associate my troublesome presence with everything that was bad in our lives. Another shitty consequense of losing Mom–no more avoiding every blatant accusation.

We had pushed off from the dock about an hour before my butt began to freeze to the crate I sat upon. The vessel finally idled. As far as I could tell, we were in the middle of nowhere, fog clouding our view of the mainland. The constant, frigid gusts were finding their way past my downy defenses. I shivered intensely, my puffer dancing around me. A thought flickered across my mind that it was probably the farthest out I had ever been.

As I was meandering through daydreams, my father shouted louder than he needed to for me to get up and help him. I cringed with sheltered irritation and stood, but took my sweet time admiring how creepy the fog looked as it was slinking towards us on the surface of the water. Then I was rudely knocked to the floor by something sticking up from the splintered wood enough for my shoe to catch. I thankfully wasn’t too hurt, just frustrated by my forgetfulness. That warped, rusty nail had been there since I was a kid and I had a seemingly unavoidable fate of tripping over it. I think Dad not-so-secretly enjoyed seeing me fall on my face, that was why he had never bothered to pull it up.

“Andromeda!” His voice was like the growling of a bear.

I got off the deck. “Andie, Dad. It’s Andie,” I nagged quietly back at him. He would tell me he only used my full name when he needed to get my attention, which was always because I had an annoying tendency to zone out. No surprise to say that it made my ears bleed, my least favorite name in the world.

He had me watch the lobster traps as they were lowered into the water, making sure nothing went awry. They bubbled on the surface and sank down until they were obscured from view. After a moment or two I heard the rope snap taut. I turned to give Dad a thumbs up, but his back was facing me in a severe hunch. I shrugged and turned back to the murk below. If I had actually cared, I might have noticed then that his shoulders were shaking. Though I’ll never know for sure, it could have been either tears or barely contained rage. Or both. For him, strong emotions flowed out there as easily as sea foam.

I quickly grew bored of the scenery, as gazing on the horizon left me with almost nothing to look at. It was like the gloom had wrapped us in a blanket, a frustrating comparison to make as I remembered the nice, warm bed I had been dragged out of to spend precious sleeping time in a barren, cold, and wet wasteland. That reminded me, I had forgotten to ask why, so I posed the question as he came out of the cabin. “So why did Arlo call out? Did he have another doctor’s appointment this morning?”

Looking barely recovered, he shook his head. “Said he was moving.” He sniffed loudly and spit off the side.

My eyebrows perked up. “He quit?”

I got a silent answer. No wonder he was in an especially foul mood. A former military man with a kind smile and a bum knee, Arlo was a good guy; he worked for basically nothing and got treated like shit everyday. I couldn’t think of anyone else more than him who deserved to get out of the town that fed you the tantalizing bait of stability to distract from the fact that it had hooks in you. Hearing that put a small smirk on my face until it disappeared at the sobering realization that I might be stuck in this new arrangement while he searched for another deckhand.

The groaning of the hull echoed Dad’s footsteps as he walked over to check my work like a tyrannical teacher. As he leaned over the side next to me, I dared to inhale through my nose. Thankfully, the usual booze smell was being masked by the brackish stench of fish and sea.

He sucked air through his teeth as he looked. “You are never allowed on this boat again, child. One of the traps caught the side of the hull and scratched it there, see?” He pointed down at an infinitesimal dink in the already crumbling light blue paint.

I stifled a pleased exhale. Thank God I was getting a free pass from work for being so shit at it. “It’s not like I asked to be here, Dad. You literally made me come with you.”

His small hazel eyes were slitted when they met mine. The tone in his voice was soaked with venom. “See, that is your problem, Andromeda, you complain too much and act like the world revolves around you.”

I didn’t expect him to come on so strong, especially since those comments of mine would usually go in one ear and out the other. I stayed silent with a perplexed expression.
He rose and paused for a moment, hands moving erratically at his sides, swinging and clenching and unclenching. The deck made long scraping sounds with the agitated shuffling of his feet. After his show of mental stuttering, finally, he managed out words to wither me. “You will…you will never be even half the woman your mother was.”

I spent a full minute looking at him for where he found the gall, then blistered, my pale face blooming with red. I didn’t even care about what he meant at this point. I was freezing, I was tired, and I was stuck on a stupid fishing boat in the middle of the ocean with the person that despised me most in the world. All I wanted to do was hurt him. “I can’t believe she married someone as awful as you,” I seethed.

“I can’t believe she had a child as horrible as you,” he retorted. He made it so easy to want to strangle him.

Rare, salty tears pinched at the sides of my eyes. “Well, I didn’t get that from Mom.” There was a pause in the argument. We could have left it at that, though I don’t think it would have changed the events that came after. But for once, the bruise he’d given me wasn’t from the ring. I decided to add one final twist of the knife. “You probably drove her off, asshole.” Those icy words set my dad off like grand finale firecrackers.

“No, YOU DID!” His anger rocketed off the water and reverberated in all directions. I’d struck a raw nerve. Sudden surprise had forced one of my feet to retreat from him. The silence to follow was lethal.

I felt angry tears welling up more and said nothing else, just walked towards the bow and put my elbows on the point of the wooden railing.

He was breathing hard, his bright red face beaded with sweat. “And you…you’ve brought this on yourself,” he said in a trembling voice with ominous finality.

Even though I was finished listening to him, my skin prickled in a feeling distinct from the chill of winter. Brought what on myself, I thought, being on a boat with my clinically insane father who hates me? His mental breakdown into insanity was an event I had been waiting for so I could throw his ass in an institution. Then the fog began to swirl a ways off the bow.
I turned my attention there and squinted. There was a shape wriggling in the distance, looking like one of those inflatable car dealership things at first, then jaggedly twitching, interrupting the thickened mist around it. “What…is that?” I questioned aloud, a cloud swirling on my breath.

Thinking it was someone on a dingy signaling for help or something, I half-turned back to my dad to make sure he saw it too. I had to do a double take when I saw how pale his face had become. I watched a thick gulp ripple over his Adam’s apple as he stared out at it without blinking. An ugly, irksome feeling weighed on me as I watched a harrowing smile slowly carve its way through his prominent age lines.

I thought I heard him say that he couldn’t believe it before I flinched at the loud and painful clapping of his hands onto my shoulders. An uncomfortable, plucky laugh escaped him. “Don’t move,” he whispered, “let it come to us.” It was a redundant request; his grip was like iron.

My mind swam with confusion and curiosity. Whatever “it” was was past where I could see clearly. As if to emphasize the building terror, a baleful, deep rumbling tore my concentration from the horizon to the apparent underside of the boat. My stomach pitched as the wood beneath my feet began vibrating. I wobbled like I was standing in the middle of a seesaw. My knuckles were white as I gripped the wooden rail and peered over the lip of the boat to see the inky water bubbling like a rolling boil. For a moment, I tried to convince myself that the wind blowing against me was just my sheets tangling around me as I dreamt–that I was stuck in some surreal nightmare and that there wasn’t…something…moving down there. Something big.

“Take her! Just take her!”

My father’s voice in my ear was like the snap of a rubber band to the skin, painful and alarming. I shrieked, jumping out of my skin as hoarse and desperate yelling that I had never heard before erupted from him. I swiveled to see his eyes–wild, wide and terrified–and watched him plead desperately with the human-like shape barely cloaked in the haze. “She’s right here, take her, please!”

The anxious slog of my brain trying to catch up was excruciating. My mind cycled through the simplest concepts at a snail’s pace. Take who? And why? What was doing the taking? The gears were turning like they had been covered in sap, painstakingly bringing me to a realization–improbable, yet terrifying–that turned my tongue to sandpaper.

“Take her and give Vivian back! Please! I know you can understand me!” He released my shoulders to move in front of me, leaning over the bow with outstretched arms ready to embrace the silent soma of mist that had moved closer, his hands opening and closing like a child saying ‘gimme’.

I inhaled sharply and noticed that the wind had turned sweet, no longer the pungent smell of the ocean. It smelled like perfume. Lavender and orange peel, an old-fashioned perfume that I hadn’t smelled since my mother was alive. It might have been a comfort to me if the fog hadn’t begun to take the shape of that familiar long hair and slender frame. A shape that should have been unfamiliar in the land of the living.

Paralyzed by shock, I didn’t register my father lunging toward me until my arm was firmly in his grip. His hand clamped down onto my arm like a beartrap and I howled in pain. “Agh- shit! Let go! Dad, let go of me!”

He began pulling me towards it, unable to hear me over his own madness. My feet scrambled uselessly against the brute force. He had squeezed so tight that I couldn’t even pull my arm out of the puffer sleeve.

Dad wailed again, vocal cords straining. “Take her! Take her!”

“Let go!”

I was nowhere near strong enough to stop him as he pinned me against the point of the bow with his full weight, my other hand still fruitlessly clawing at his calloused one. I was trying to get control of my breathing, probably babbling at him to stop as I tried freeing myself. As if in a trance, Dad was wearing this dreamy expression on his face, his eyes rising to meet the thing that had now fully approached the boat. My eyes averted, I nearly choked on my breath as I heard a name come out of my father’s mouth in greeting.

“Vivian…”

The sea quieted.

His hand forgetfully slipped from my arm; I took the opportunity to wriggle away from him and the bow, daring only to face the scene once I was out of reach. No words are truly fit to describe the feeling that overtook me as I saw my father and mother in front of me, one hypnotized and hopeless to recognize the grotesquerie of the other.

Where I had expected to see my mother parting the gloom like wiping condensation from a mirror, I was sorely mistaken. I shuddered, taking in her deformed figure: the body too tall, limbs too skinny. It was a glistening skeleton covered in clothing so tattered it might as well have been naked. The bones were brown and black, covered in drooping, decomposing flesh repulsively intertwined with sea life that had made a home in her. I saw the slow-moving, pale tendrils wrapped around her wrists, ankles, pelvis, and head. I wish I could tear that memory out of my head, banish it forever from the darkness of my closed eyes. The image of thick, scaly, pulsing tentacles wrapped around that skeleton. Puppeting her.

My dad shouted to the thing that was manipulating its human doll. “Her for Andromeda! I brought you what you want, so give my wife back to me!”

There was no response, so he continued as I backed further away with light footsteps. I was so scared I could have swam home on pure adrenaline.

“You ruined her life! You ruined my life!” He was panting, openly weeping but thinking nothing of the snot and tears. His expression twisted further with anger; I wonder if he realized the futility of the words as the figure began rising slowly. “The least you could do is take this daughter and give me back my goddamn wife!”

I stopped dead as clarity hit me like a bullet straight through my temple. He had probably fired Arlo just to get me out here on this boat with him.

I watched my father turn on me, manic eyes and arms wide to catch his sacrificial lamb. I could do nothing and we both knew it. His footsteps were thumping in my ears, slowing down as his balance was being tested. As if by divine intervention, the movement of the boat began to pick up, the gentle, rhythmic rocking amping up until water crashed over the sides. Foam coated the deck.

Some sailors think of the ocean as a force, a living thing. I stared then into the face of God realizing that the flimsy human invention beneath my feet couldn’t possibly conquer the magnitude and ferocity of the sea. The wood creaked in protest. I desperately wished I was deaf to it. We were both thrown off guard as the boat listed.

My soul snapped back from its heavenly communion as the bow tipped forward. I was thrown harshly to the deck and my father grunted with effort as he stumbled but managed to stay standing. The wave below broke, showering the two of us with a freezing deluge and soaking the deck. It seeped through my skin and froze my blood to ice. As I felt the boat rock back, I knew I had an advantage: where I had four limbs to stabilize me, Dad only had two. His share in our biblical bad luck. Thrown off by the warring waves and the icy water he staggered around the deck with legs shaking like a newborn foal until his back met the lip of the bow. The name Vivian upon his lips, his gaze filled with horror and betrayal as he tipped over the edge backwards and fell out of view.

I heard a muted splash as his body hit the waves. An unearthly moan was dragged from the pit of my stomach. The uproar of the waves immediately calmed. Regaining my footing, I scampered to the edge to see if I could pull him back into the boat.

“Dad? Dad!” I shouted for him. My voice wavered with each unanswered call. The rumbling and the slapping of the waves on the wooden fishing boat answered in his absence. My eyes searched the dark waves, but it was useless. He had been swallowed by the black of the ocean. The smell had become even stronger with flowery perfume. It was so sickeningly sweet, I clapped my hand over my mouth to stifle a gag.

The bubbling from before changed to a rushing. I could feel whatever was moving under the boat now, caressing the hull with its uneven skin. It was like when you’re wearing a coat so big that the sensations of touch are muted, but still very much there. My brain felt like it was dripping with slime as that intimate feeling moved through the wood, under my feet, and up my legs to my spine. I backed away from the bow and my eyes met the skeleton–the visitor we had forgotten in the midst of the chaos–its head tilted ever so slightly to the side.
“Mom?” The question was ripped from the back of my throat; maybe some involuntary disbelief that this thing was anything but otherworldly punishment. My body was clammy and hot, even as the wind off of the waves felt like shards of ice tearing at my clothes.
She was hovering a foot above the water, bones sliding against each other with disgusting scrapes. The jaw wetly cracked open with the movement of the tentacle. Then it used her voice. Her voice.

“Andie, honey,” it cooed, the sound not originating from her throat, “what’s wrong?” The innocent tone took me from the scene marred by the unsightly mimicry of her to when I would toddle around her as she made my lunch in the kitchen: soft, cool hands brushing my downy hair from my forehead to place a delicate kiss. My face was sliced with the warmth of falling tears. I stared into the sockets in her skull, rimmed with sea-stained barnacles where her blue eyes used to be, and felt a sorrowful tug in my gut. My knees were shaking as I gazed out at a haunting replica of my dead mom.

“Andie…” she repeated over and over. My feet dragged forward as if possessed. Inches were unwittingly turning to feet. I knew even as I was shuffling towards her that I would follow my father in his fate if I didn’t stop. But I couldn’t, literally: it had me. And tragically, some guilt-ridden, melancholic piece of me wanted to keep going. Her voice garbled and warped around my name, still my mother, but as if something was attempting to crawl out of her throat as she spoke it.

Then, I was falling. My stomach lagged for a moment before it plummeted forward with the rest of me. Something had snagged the bottom of my too-long jeans at the right cuff. I tumbled to the ground, bruising my knees, elbows, and jaw pretty badly. My body landed with a thud. If I wasn’t so afraid, I might have realized what had happened: that stupid nail on the floor that I nearly killed myself on earlier, the one my father never cared to rip out of the waterlogged wood beneath our feet, had tripped me again.

I don’t think my body was functioning anyway, but I resolved to not get up; the last five minutes alone were enough to knock me out cold from sheer emotional exhaustion. Instead, I looked out of the eye that wasn’t squished against the floor and stared at the blue paint chipping off the port side.

There was silence, not even the skeleton thought it necessary to keep talking. Then something big enough to cast a dim shadow over the entire boat rose out of the water. I thought for a moment that my eyes were playing tricks on me: there was a gloomy iridescence to its massive shape, like if the light caught it a certain way it would be transparent. I laid horrified and still as a statue as it rose out of the waves for an eternity; in trying to comprehend the size of the monster rising out of the water to loom over the boat like a skyscraper, I recognized the departure of the known reality.

The monster shuddered with a deafening flapping sound. It must have been where the rumbling was coming from, only now unmuffled above water. I looked at it in my periphery–the only angle I had–and was met with this ancient-looking reptilian creature, almost like a sea snake. My breath was stolen as it dipped its head to lean further over above me; its slitted eyes were a haunting pale cream color. One length of me could fit between them with room to spare. It was bigger than any living thing I could ever imagine, more like looking into the oppressive eyes of an ancient god than a real creature.

And the smell, a miasma of rot and ocean sewage and old blood filled my nose and made my eyes water. It was directly above me when it started heaving from the pit of whatever digestive system it had. I was in hell. It was a disgusting, reverberating, squelching noise that made me want to follow suit. After what seemed like an eternity of retching, I felt the threatening presence draw nearer until its labored breaths were blowing my hair and clothes flat. It warmed me against the freezing wind with heavy and putrid air from its cavernous mouth that gusted in and out.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any more nightmarish, some kind of undigested substance began dotting the deck around my feet. I let out a silent whine as it continued to drip along my body, hot sludge hitting and cascading down my legs and back, fat splotches of something goopy and red. The stench was overbearing. I clamped my mouth shut as a glob landed on my arm. The crimson ooze was rancid: fresh flesh coated in a slimy stomach acid. I vowed in that moment to burn my clothes if I lived through it.

I strained to see what it would do next with tears clouding my vision. Its mouth was agape, its teeth needle thin and each one the length of a bus, smeared with black grime. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the black hole of its throat. I waited for the end, the snap of its jaws on my body, that inescapable darkness closing around me. My body tensed in surprise as I heard something metal drop a few inches from my face. My gaze slid towards the small golden object glittering with mucus and putrescence. My father’s ring. All I could think about was how he would hate to see it so dirty.

I zoned back into its movements right as I was affronted by a massive forked black tongue dropping directly on top of me. I was so shocked that I screamed, finding the strength to curl in on myself, but it was drowned out by the whooshing of the tongue scooping back the air into its mouth. In and out. Over and over, just barely grazing the top of my clothes and hair. It did this all over my body, and while I was thankful not to be immediately dead, it was like going through the world’s most terrifying security scanner.

A soul-chilling sound–like a slow, throaty laugh echoing through a cavern– vibrated the air around me. I flinched, awaiting the agonizingly drawn-out end, when I felt the whoosh of the monster’s head recoiling. I sat up. Our eyes met as its head disappeared, the waves silently enveloping it. Neither one of us blinked. I waited, holding my breath until the rumbling sound dissipated for the last time.

As soon as the ocean went still, I collapsed, the tension in my muscles snapping like a slingshot. The loneliness around and within me and the soft slapping of the waves against the boat lulled me to the deepest sleep I had ever had.

When I awoke, I was being lightly tapped on the face by a man with a strong voice. His words were encouraging me to wake up, as were the bright lights bobbing up and down that illuminated his dark form behind my eyelids. The guy picked me up off of the floor and carried me off of my father’s boat to another. I did not open my eyes the whole time–I was imagining that I could transform my wet clothes, the red sludge, and those cloudy eyes into parts of my dream if I only kept them closed.

The ring was left on the deck of the boat and must have gotten lost as the Coast Guard ship towed it in. I had no intention of going back for it.

Back on shore in the emergency medical center, Arlo confirmed my suspicions: he had come in late like my father had asked him to and found the boat and us missing. He’d waited until it was really starting to get late and then requested the Coast Guard search the nearby area for the vessel, just in case. He was awfully surprised at the bone-crushing hug I gave him when he explained this to me from my bedside. I never told him that both my father and I had expected me to die out there.

The story that I told people was that my father had died in a freak accident–which I avoided expounding upon–to preserve in my own mind a rational explanation of what had happened. I became an expert at deflecting every conversation that dredged up those memories. Anything not to think about those milky white eyes and blackened bones slinking around on the ocean floor somewhere.

On the day I moved out of my childhood home, I took one last somber breath of the mildewed air in my room and opened the window to let in the cold. It’s silly to think about, but I left it that way for Mom’s ghost, in case she needed a way in. A home to return to.
Aunt Gracie became my legal guardian; somewhat redundant as I turned 18 less than a year later. She lived much further inland, closer to the Midwest and away from the ocean. Different didn’t mean bad, it was a climate unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I went outside every morning dreading to smell saltwater and being soothed by the dry wind like a hand caressing my face. Gracie and I bonded over the loss we experienced, which led to my choice to attend college close to her. I still visit her and my cousin when I get the time.
Many years later, I have very little to do in between nursing a newborn and waiting for the next crying fit he has, so putting all this into a cohesive story is an interesting retrospective exercise. What else do I say? Bruises healed. The smell of liquor doesn’t make me angry anymore. I can look at Halloween decorations again without seeing my mother’s skull.
The guilt that I’ve held for my mother’s death has not subsided fully, but, with Gracie’s help, I’ve been given some sort of understanding. It’s bearable, but it’s a dull ache. I’m not sure what about our family set us on this cursed path, but I have a feeling that I wouldn’t want to find out.

When I had my son, Gracie told me what she determined to be the reason for being spared by my parents’ killer. The hypothesis that had been passed around as truth among the family who knew was that the monster left the women of our family alone if we had sons. My aunt to this day thinks that the creature had some strange premonition, that it knew I would have a son, so it didn’t eat me even when I was right in front of it. She had never been called either. I don’t know. There’s so little information about the rest of the family that I could never let my guard down based on a hunch.

If it is right, I can at least breathe easier knowing that it will end with me and my boy, the last ones in the line. In an almost impressive turn of fate, she and I are the first generationally to have boys instead of girls. On the other hand, Aunt Gracie is going to turn the same age as my mother next year. It’s a disgusting thought, but maybe the monster realized that I wasn’t ripe yet when my dad tried to trade me for my mom. I can’t rest fully knowing I might meet that thing on the water again.

My son is sleeping peacefully in the crib next to me right now, little fist balled up so tight on his blanket. I have to resist the urge to cradle him all the time, to coddle him. The bad thoughts seem to fade away when he’s near. Maybe one day I’ll even get to thank him for saving me from becoming a collection of bones rotting in the ocean.

The note my mother wrote me started making sense only after having a child of my own. I can understand what she felt as I watch my son sigh heavily, perfect and safe, in his sleep. Though I might never be called to the ocean, he would always be worth the price.

Credit: Erin Pope

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