Beth
1938
Beth wasn’t much of a swimmer, but that didn’t keep her from the beach any more than the March chill. Today, the sun was out and warming the sand; it was hard to believe it’d snowed just two weeks ago. She sat on a towel and dug her bare toes in, the cool, damp under layers sending a chill up her legs. The breeze rustled her skirt and hair, and she closed her eyes, breathing in the salty scent of the air.
Today, she was the same age her mother had been when she fell out of the second-story window. Tomorrow, she would be older. For the rest of her life, she would be older than her mother ever was. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.
She remembered that night more vividly than she remembered anything else. Watching from the doorway, she’d seen her mother’s face just before she fell. She’d been happy. And when she hit the rocks at the bottom of the garden—Beth flinched now, thinking of the way her mother’s head had split open like a melon—Beth had run to the window, reaching, screaming.
It wasn’t until her mother’s breath stopped that the lighthouse light flicked on, spinning as though nothing had happened.
The beach was empty except for a few birds that’d come to peck at the remnants of meager weekend picnics. What the tourists brought, the tourists ate. They licked crumbs from sandwich wrappers and ate apple cores and shook the last drops of coffee into their open mouths. Everyone was hungry, even the birds. One of them pecked at a pretty pink shell that someone had stuffed with a wad of paper. Beth pried out the greasy paper only for the brave gull to snatch it out of her hands. She tucked the shell in her pocket thinking she’d put it in the baby’s room, next to the crib.
While Beth watched the waves roll in, the rest of Cape Disappointment surrounded their radios for updates on the war. Everyone was worried about getting involved and what that would mean. Her in-laws still talked about the Great War like it was yesterday. Rations. A country turned poor with the cost of defending its people. Beth didn’t care about any of it. She ate to survive, and money was just something that changed hands—a sentiment her husband hardly shared. He was constantly worried about where the next dollar would come from, more so lately because of her second, unexpected, pregnancy. There’d be no money for dinner out, for new clothes, for trips out of town…but Beth didn’t care about any of that either. Never did. Where other people saw the world in color, she felt like she was walking through life experiencing shades of gray. Except when she looked at the ocean.
“That’s because you’re cursed,” her brother told her once. He’d been twelve at the time. She was ten.
“Am not.”
“Uncle William says you are.” He blushed. “Just like Mom was.”
She’d punched him then, earning a switch to the backside for her trouble. Truth was, though, she’d heard the same thing. When Uncle William came over at night between his fishing expeditions, he and her father drank until their pores leaked bourbon, loosening tongues and bringing out old grievances. Uncle William blamed her father for not keeping her mother safe. Her father blamed Uncle William for not “doing what needed to be done.” Whatever that meant. Their arguments almost never devolved into physical fights but continued throughout her entire childhood, into her adulthood. It wasn’t until she married that the tension seemed to settle between them. And then Beth had a daughter, Diana, and it all flared up again.
This, more than anything, drove her back to the ocean time and time again, looking for something to make sense of it all. And if the answer to everything didn’t exist out there, well, then it didn’t exist at all. Sparkling and blue and wild, the ocean teemed with life undiscovered. When she pressed her ear to the ground, she could almost hear their hearts beating.
Her back ached from sitting, but she wasn’t ready to leave. Her sister-in-law would be waiting to taunt her for what she called Beth’s obsession. When she thought Beth wasn’t listening, she called her touched. Slow. But Beth was neither, her pensive nature foreign to her husband’s family of clucking chickens, obsessed with rumor and speculation. They itched for a scandal. This, her sister-in-law said in a moment of pure meanness, was why she and her parents had allowed her brother to marry Beth in the first place. Stories of Beth’s family would provide them endless entertainment.
Legs cramping as she stood, Beth stretched her arms up and back. A soft groan escaped her lips. She had to remind herself that the ocean would always be there. Every time she left, there was the knowledge that she could come back. The thought was almost enough.
Three times her father had tried to send her away.
The first was in the weeks following her mother’s death. Beth had been inconsolable, blinded for days by her tears and anger at anyone who said her mother had jumped on purpose. An alcoholic and obsessed with the disappearance of her own mother, they said Grace had been a woman teetering on the edge of insanity. Her father sent Beth to a girl’s school in the city, where she lasted a total of four days before she found her way back. Thinking of it now, it was a miracle she hadn’t died. She remembered walking for hours in a sort of fugue state, a single thought circling her mind—she needed to get back to the water.
The second was when she was fourteen. She was out of town for barely a day when she woke in a hotel room, out of a dead sleep, clutching her throat. The nightmare lingered only long enough for her to remember a face—hollow, fish-eaten eyes and sunken skin—but the unease it planted in her remained until her father agreed to let her come home for a weekend. The relief she’d felt at seeing the water, of feeling the spray of it when she got close, was enough that she refused to leave again. She told her father, “I’ll kill myself first.”
The third almost stuck. She’d been pregnant with Diana, living with her new husband in his family’s house, at her father’s insistence. She needed women around, he’d said, not an old man and her brother. This was before the taunting, before the outward disdain. She didn’t hate it. They had a small property just outside the city, close enough she could venture to the shops without much trouble but far enough away that the skies were full of stars at night.
The pregnancy hadn’t been easy. She was sick every day, vomiting more than she could ingest, until she started to lose weight and her doctor became worried about the baby’s survival. She couldn’t explain why, but she knew if she didn’t go back to the cape, she would lose her child. Just hours after arriving home, her fever lifted, and her appetite returned with a vengeance. By the time Diana was born, her husband had settled into her family’s home. When her father died shortly after, leaving them the house, it was decided: they were home to stay.
Now, she walked toward the water’s edge, gliding her feet through the sand, relishing the soft scratch of broken shells. As her toes touched water, she gave a sharp intake of breath. The icy water pricked her feet and ankles, and her skin pinched with goose bumps. Chills danced down her spine, and she had to clamp her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering.
She looked out over the ocean to take in the roll and crash of the waves one more time…and saw a face.
At first she blamed the cold. Like heat, it did strange things to the mind. But the face didn’t flicker or waver or disappear when she cleared her eyes and focused. The face belonged to a woman, or something resembling a woman, wraithlike, with black hair that sparkled in the sun and pale, sickly skin. It was the face out of her nightmares.
Beth stumbled back toward the shore, sand sucking at her feet. It seemed to be studying her. Watching her. Looking for something within her. Those hollow eyes followed every movement, and it was almost like Beth could feel them on her skin, slick and cold. It sent chills down her body, skin pinching painfully.
For every step she took toward the shore, it only seemed to get farther away. She didn’t dare turn her back on the girl—the spirit—for fear of what it might do without her keeping it rooted to the spot with her eyes. Waves pulled like greedy hands at her clothes, her legs.
“What do you want?” she shrieked. “Leave me alone!”
She slipped on a slick rock and plunged beneath. It was like the world had been pulled away, all sound and color faded except for the girl and her voice, which carried through the water. She clawed her way back to the surface, sucking in a deep breath. Her eyes burned, and sharp bolts of pain radiated up from her ankle.
But soon the pain faded, and it was like being back under the water.
“Come in,” the voice crooned. Words tilted and spun. She could almost pluck them from the air.
She no longer felt her toes and worried about the cold, but the spirit crooked a gnarled finger, and Beth, instead of fighting for shore, took a step deeper. Another. Moving through the stilled ocean was like moving through sand. Her whole body tensed with the cold and smoothness of it. Her skirts wrapped around her legs, making it difficult to go any further, but she couldn’t stop. Diana’s face flashed through her mind, and for a second, she paused. What was she doing? She needed to get home to her daughter. Her hands found their way to her belly, and she could just feel her son moving around inside.
The spirit reached out to her then, a cry on its lips, and once again it was like she was below the waves.
Her feet shuffled, inch by inch, the water creeping up her legs until she was waist deep, but the girl seemed to move farther away. The music fell out of her voice, and her head tilted at a sickening angle. Like fingers gripping her ribs, Beth leaned into each wave, but her feet were stuck in the silt. Hot tears streaked down her face, blurring the girl into a swirling, black mass. It felt like her body, her soul, was split in two and the two sides fought against each other. With each step, she was being ripped apart.
But she didn’t feel the cold anymore. Her legs were like blocks of ice attached at her hips; they tingled but then that feeling went away too. She was close. So close. Bubbling up from under the pain and the terror was a shroud of calm. This was good, she realized. She would never have to leave the ocean again.
***
They took her legs at the thigh, leaving nubs of flesh that were angry and red at the ends. Her husband wept as the men spoke to Beth, only parts of which she caught between her brother’s tirade. Hypothermia. Dead flesh. Lucky.
On that last part, she agreed. Beth was lucky. The hardest part was over.
They told her that her mind was damaged, that there were no girls in the sea. No spirits. When her husband finally gained control of his emotions, he sent Beth to a home for people “like her.”
“Until you get better,” he’d said. “Get better again and we’ll bring you home.”
There was nothing wrong with her. She was fine. She was perfect. All she needed was to get to the water. Everyone else had it wrong. Her mother and grandmother were the only people who had seen what Beth saw. One day, her own daughter, Diana, would see too.