Things Withered (16 page)

The sky burst and flashed and we jumped. Wine sloshed in my glass, but didn’t spill and so I said
look ma no spill—

Just as another flash—

Not a flash. An eruption. A cannonade. A bombing.

Whatever fist had busted through the sky hit the water’s surface and flared. What had been black burst into a flash so bright it stunned me, I lost all sense, heard nothing, certainly not the explosive blast that must have followed. Instead, everything just stopped, hovered under the audacity of that blaze.

For a moment the face of the water was absurdly keen, every wave scored, the water such as I had never seen it, still, serene, flat, as if not water at all but a piece of glass laid over it. Then sound.

A low rumble like the expected thunder, it rolled and rolled, a build so long that I looked at Donna, maybe my eyes like dinner plates, like a child, because Christ would know it, I was scared.

Donna said
what the fuck?
And I heard that, and it did
not
help since unlike me, she is not a natural curser, but saves them up for the most appropriate time.

I would have answered but then the sound hit us, a crack that made me shriek, that got lost under it, although I knew I did it, just as I knew I dropped my wine and clapped my hands on my ears. My own shriek or the thunder was the reason we didn’t hear the roar of the ocean, heaving up its contents.

That we heard as the thunderclap died away, as they all ultimately do, in spite of how it seemed it was going to last forever. The silence afterward was just as terrible. I spoke for that reason alone.

“What was that?”

Donna didn’t answer. She ran her sandal through the wine draining towards the corner of the porch. She held up her glass. It was empty.

I poured us both a couple of doozies. We drank those and had some more. And then again.

At some point, I remember she asked me
what came out of the ocean?

I meant it to be funny when I said
everything.

Maybe I should have said
afternoon
of the fish.

I woke up on the wicker sofa and Donna was gone. My head was pounding. When I got my ass moving, slowly, slowly, I made coffee on the woodstove and drank it in the kitchen with my hands shaking. So I didn’t see it at first.

I smelled it. Fish.

I’ve lived at the beach all my life. My mother used to say I had sand in my veins. I’ve certainly not known a time when I didn’t have sand in my hair, under my nails, or on the floor, and the smell of fish in my nose.

Not like this.

This was heavy, oily, also familiar, but in the worst sort of way, the kind you would stumble upon rock-walking, the picked-over corpse, usually just the head and spine, the gulls circling overhead. It got into your clothes, your hair. A smell you carried with you all day.

I changed my clothes after that and cleaned up as best I could in the bathroom. The water was working only intermittently then, but I had filled the bathroom and Dick’s room with buckets of water, some of it from our taps when they worked, some of it at the empty houses of neighbours. What did it matter where it came from? I washed up and changed and felt nearly human and went back into the veranda. I would clean it up, I thought, and see if I couldn’t find some kind of track to get back on.

The storm had scared me in the same way falling down the stairs can scare a person sober. That, thankfully, had not yet happened. But the storm had freaked me out enough to make me want to sit up and take notice.

To look things in the eye, so to say.

I went out to the veranda, plastic bag in hand to fill with bottles and corks and broken glass and cushion stuffing and bits of life that hadn’t worked out the way they were supposed to, written on pieces of paper rolled into balls and tossed into corners and under chairs and sofas. I unfolded the piece I found in the corner of the kitchen, drunken sprawl hard to decipher, although not hard enough.

. . . 
always I expected to be happy when I was alone alone alone and yet I . . .
I rolled it back up and stuffed it in the bag.

It was then I guess I looked outside for the first time and saw the shoreline.

At first I thought it was nothing more than sea foam, the saliva of the sea, ocean vomit, as Dick used to call it. Over the last few years, it had been getting worse, or more prevalent and so at first—

At first I thought
holy shit what a lot of ocean vomit—

Of course it was too much for that. What I was looking at was wide enough from the edge of the water as to be nearly halfway to my fake seagull on the post.
Halfway
. I pushed open the screen door and squinted. The sun was out.

There was Donna, with her plaid treasures bag, coming up the beach.

“Hey!” I called. She waved.

“You have to see this,” was what she screamed back. And for the first time, I thought maybe I did.

The smell hit me bad as soon as I landed sand level. It was the smell of the sea, of the dark beach at night, of fall at the shore. This was peaking, under the familiar smell was the dead smell, waiting. It would not be long. It was overwhelming.

Fish. Everywhere. Dead. Fish.

Sunlight glinted off the silver scales, sickly white bellies, thin red jelly under the gills, nothing moving.

Thousands of them, all sorts, I could have named maybe six of them, maybe eight, no more. Enormous mounds, in an uneven, meandering ribbon going along the coastline, as far as I could see to the east and as far as I could see to the west.

I had no words. My mouth simply hung there. Donna was crying.

“They’re dead,” she said. She pointed needlessly up the coast. “I walked the whole length, and it’s the same, all the way up as far as I was going to go—”

I put my hand up. “It’s okay. This shit happens. I’ve read about it.”

“I saw a shark!
A goddamn
sand tiger shark
! There’s tuna, and whitefish and swordfish, a ray, a fucking
Finding Nemo,
Rosie, they don’t even
live
here—”

“Okay,” I said, but I didn’t have the stomach for it, to stop her, to comfort her. I wanted to fall over. The smell was horrible. It was getting to me. I wanted to swoon.

How?

Donna dropped to the sand on her butt. She dug her skinny heels and fingers into the sand. She dragged them through, making patterns, deeper and deeper. Then she read my mind.

She got up and brushed the sand from her hands on to her skirt. I watched and she picked up one of the fish. Just before she threw it in, she looked at me. Hurt. Not that I had hurt her, just hurt. She tossed it into the water.

We watched it arc and then it hit the surface. There was a tiny flash—like a glint of sun hitting the chrome on the side of a car as it drove by, nothing more. Might have been the sun hitting the scales, except there really wasn’t any sun. The sky was grey, like it had been.

“What the hell is happening? There’s no mark on them, no blight or tumors or anything. Nothing bit them. Tide brought them in. They’re still coming.” I looked out to sea. It was true. With every comforting—

—Dick used to say the tide said
mensch mensch mensch—

—wave, more fish dropped and were dragged back out, pushed in, pulled out.

“Electrocuted?”

“I think so. Must have been.”

Mensch mensch mensch.
The water slapped hollowly against the slabs of flesh. It was hard to hear it, but I forced myself to listen. To not hear it as it was supposed to sound, would be to go crazy. I heard it. I listened until I could feel my heart and breath slowing down. Donna dropped back to the beach, curled herself up, tucking her head into her knees.

“What now?” I said.

She stared out to sea. The horizon was disappointing, the sun bright through a single, white cloud.

“You’re going to get your skirt dirty. How’ll you wash it?” I said, trying to smile.

“Do you think they’re all dead?”

I shrugged.
The whole ocean?
No. I couldn’t think that.

“Ann’s gone,” she said.

I had an urge to lie down on the sand and make an angel like I used to do when I was a little girl. I couldn’t even remember being a little girl, except for that feeling, suddenly so clear, of damp, cool sand on my back, scratchy and giving. I tried to say that I needed a drink.
Now we can have the schnapps
, but the effort seemed not to be in me. It was all I could do to stand there.

“Do you think the water’s safe?” She said it so plaintively that we might both have been children, making angels in the sand.

“I don’t know,” I lied.

I went back to the house, leaving Donna on the beach. I tried to coax her into coming with me, but she waved me away. “I’m just going to sit here a minute. I’ll come later, Rosie,” she said. When she said my name, I felt something break inside me, but I left just the same.

Honestly? I had no words in me anyway.

I’d had an ongoing argument with Dick for the forty years we were married about who should die first. We would have this argument after lovemaking, after fighting and making up, over dinner in the city, sometimes in the car on the way home from a night out with friends when you perfectly tag-teamed every quip, every story, and left feeling so good about yourselves that the very best parts of yourself were then on display: every generous notion, every forgiveness, every single
oh no, after you dear
. When things were at their very best, those moments in the marriage when you feel for a little while like it hadn’t been a big mistake, I of course always said that I wanted to die first.

I was lying.

Most women, I believe, have a dream of a time
in the future
when it was all over, when they were absolved of all responsibility for others when
go forth and sin no more
would be gloriously whispered in their ear.
In the future.
I don’t know that it comes very often for normal women, I don’t think children stop needing parents, or spouses stop needing each other, until someone dies. I saw a time when Dick would be gone—statistically before me—as a time when I would get my time. I would read. Write. Eat what I wanted. Let myself go.

Dick got sick at the beginning of all of this, but not like the others. Ann looked him over and said discreetly that she thought it was cancer, but unless she got tests done, she couldn’t say for sure. Tests of course, were out of the question. The world in which tests were done had disappeared. It must have been cancer though, because he died. It was mercifully fast.

There’d hardly been time for anything, but he told me a few things. He told me to change the batteries in the smoke detector. He told me there was a box of pornography—mostly nude pictures cut out of
Playboy
magazines in the ’70s—under the moving tarps in the garage. He told me that the key for the safe deposit box at the branch in the city was in his sock drawer. All things I already knew. Toward the end he babbled about these things over and over.

A couple of days before he died, he was sick, but lucid. Lucid enough that I accused him of palming his meds, a great sin because by then pain meds were not easy to come by, Ann had given him the last of what she had in her house. That made him smile, but not laugh, which still makes me think that I was right.

A fact extraordinary enough to remark on: he was braver than I would ever have been. No matter how well I would have wanted to go out, dignity, grace, etc., I would have taken the pain meds. The fact he didn’t makes me weepier about him than any of the other things he said, or tried to say. The fact he wanted to be present and with me the last few days showed me a courage I guess I’d forgotten to look for. He was a good man and sometimes I forgot that, and dear god I hated remembering it.

But a couple of days before he died, he tried to talk to me about what was going on outside there. A real Donna, he was.

It’s going to get worse. I read some awful things—

I shushed him.

Don’t go into the city. Stay here. Money’s not going to be worth shit. There’s the generator if you need it. Collect fresh water. Food for a long time—

I will, I am, I did, I will, I promised him.

Ann came every day. When he died she gave me a valium and said she’d come back in the morning and give me another one. I got up in the night and poured myself most of a bottle of burgundy. It’s my drug of choice.

So instead when she came back I made her and Donna help me get Dick into the boat. Ann tried to get Mr. Kruger to come and help us, but he declined. Bastard. I hope cannibals eat him. We were three old women. It took us better than an hour to get Dick up the dock and into the boat. I got him out to sea and rolled him over myself. I didn’t watch him sink and I didn’t look back. When I got home I didn’t tie the boat up. Haven’t seen it since.

Ann had been so good. But we all changed.

About an hour later, Donna was at my door.

“I found Ann,” she said. And then turned around to walk up the beach. I followed her.

“Should I come?” Donna shook her head.

She gestured towards Ann’s house. “She’s inside,” she shrugged, her voice flat. “I covered her with a blanket.”

I nodded. “Good.”

“I don’t blame her.”

I didn’t either. But I did. I wondered if it was because Kruger left. Maybe she and him had started something up. It was a crazy thought. We were all over seventy, Ann was probably seventy-four. Then I felt bad for thinking that, thinking of Dick.

And then I thought
apparently she saved some of the meds for herself
.

“You want a drink?”

“No.” She gave me a wan smile and held my gaze. “Later.”

I fired up the genny. It made a ghastly noise, but lit up every light in the house. I even went outside to look up at it from the beach. It looked like goddamn Christmas. I pulled a chair out onto the sand, sitting about a yard from the wall of stinking fish, and got my bottle and drank. I guess I was waiting for Donna. Didn’t see her.

I thought I would like being alone. I did, in a way. In the first weeks after Dick died, I tried to wrap my head around all of the things I said I wanted to do when he was gone. I stacked books on all the tables. I kept my notebook open. I ate apples while I walked around and cooked absolutely nothing, not even tea. I let myself go. My hair was wild, my makeup smeared, my belly out, my underwear off.