Inland

Also by Kat Rosenfield:

Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone

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Copyright © 2014 by Kat Rosenfield

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for my parents

INLAND

People that build their houses inland,

People that buy a plot of ground

Shaped like a house, and build a house there,

Far from the sea-board, far from the sound

Of water sucking the hollow ledges,

Tons of water striking the shore—

What do they long for, as I long for

One salt smell of the sea once more?

People the waves have not awakened,

Spanking the boats at the harbor’s head,

What do they long for, as I long for,—

Starting up in my inland bed,

Beating the narrow walls, and finding

Neither a window nor a door,

Screaming to God for death by drowning—

One salt taste of the sea once more?

~Edna St. Vincent Millay

1
5
Y
EA
R
S
AG
O

IT IS NOT YET SUNSET
when the tall young woman who lives on the cliffside makes her way down to the beach. Sure-footed on the wooden steps, worn smooth by sand and weather. She treads lightly, her feet naked and white against the earth, leaving only the barest impressions as she steps over the driftwood remains of a tree and around the jagged cluster of rocks, where the small, pale body of a crab floats idly in a tide pool and its brothers sidestep hastily out of the way.

The beach is empty in all directions, the only sign of life a trio of seagulls wheeling high arcs overhead. Other days, summer days, there are people here. Children playing in the shallows; a young man and his dog sprinting through the surf; the elderly couple who lives down the beach, wearing matching Windbreakers, strolling hand in hand. Their names are Peter and Polly, but she doesn’t know this, nor do they know her name. Theirs is a passing acquaintance. They only smile and wave, nodding their white-topped heads in polite recognition at the woman with broad shoulders and striking blue eyes and waist-length tumble of hair, so windblown and wild that only its own weight can keep it under control. Some days they see her on the beach, on her way to or from the water, and pause to say hello; others, she is in, swimming, when they pass by. On those days, they’ve learned not to bother with greetings. She never looks back at the beach, never seems to notice them, not even if they stand at the water’s edge and call out across the waves. Peter, who used to work as an electrician and still prides himself on figuring things out, tells his wife that he thinks the young woman must wear plugs to protect her eardrums, that she probably has tubes in her ears.

“I’m sure you’re right, dear,” Polly says, and they walk on down the beach. But later, when she’s alone, Polly will think to herself that she’s not so sure, not at all. She has seen the young woman’s face peering out from the water, as still and blank in the sunlight as a silver coin. Even from twenty yards away, there is something unsettling in the way she gazes back—as though from across a great distance, and without seeing anything at all.

—

There are days, too, when she doesn’t appear, and the couple wonder out loud to each other where she is, if she might be ill. It never occurs to them that she’s not like them. Like most creatures of the earth, Peter and Polly keep time by the sun, enjoying the way its last rays warm their backs as they make their way back down the beach. They like to watch comfortably from their porch, a bottle of wine between them, as it sinks below the horizon in a blaze of pink and crimson.

The woman, though, keeps time by the moon, and the way it holds the oceans in its inescapable thrall, bringing them up to cover the coast and then rolling them away, back and back, to expose the briny mudflats, the gleaming beds of deep blue mussels, the slick and slippery rocks crusted over with barnacles like small, brittle teeth. She comes when the tide is highest.

—

Today, the beach is empty. Peter and Polly have long since passed by, and no children play in the surf. Autumn has cooled the water, chilled the evenings, driven away all but the most intrepid swimmers. But she has never minded icy water. When she peels off her dress and steps into the waves, it is like cool silk brushing her skin. She places her palms on the surface, and breathes deeply of the sea.

“I’m here,” she says softly. “I’m yours. Yours as I have always been, as I always will be.”

The answering voice seems to come from everywhere, rising up from the depths of the water, ringing out from inside her own head. She doesn’t look around, not anymore; after so many trips to the water’s edge, she knows that no one can hear it but her.

You are mine.

“Yes,” she says gently, lovingly. Her fingers stroke the undulating surface, leaving tiny furrows in their wake that vanish as fast as they appear. Her voice is a purr. “Yes.”

The child is mine.

“Yes. She will love you as I love you, always.”

The man is nothing.

“Nothing
,
” she breathes, and the word sends a chill through her heart. She steels herself, and says it louder. “Nothing. He is only a man. A means to an end. He gave me the child, but I have given him nothing, and nothing is what he is.”

It isn’t the first time she’s said these words. She has been saying them for years, offered them up willingly every day, ever since that first moment when she stepped into the waves with the sun glinting like fire off her wedding band. She speaks them like vows, from the depths of her heart, a promise she has always intended to keep.

She can still remember when she meant it. When she believed every word that crossed her lips, because she believed so deeply in herself, in her own brilliance, in the solution that seemed foolproof and sure. She had done her research. She had taken her time. She knew the rules, and so she had carefully picked a man with whom she could follow them—a man she was sure she could never love. She had selected him, and then seduced him, all with a surgeon’s skill and clinical detachment. This passionless bore of a professor, all hard facts and cool logic. He was the kind of man with whom it was impossible that she’d fall in love. In fact, she’d strongly suspected him incapable of the emotion himself. Of deep feeling of any kind, for that matter. He was too cold, too staid, too set in his ways to let another person into his stony heart. He was buried in his books, his rocks, his papers.

Entirely safe, just as she’d planned. Just as she knew he would be.

She’d also believed, truly, that she was as perfect for him as he was for her. It had always been her intention to find a man who would be to her just what she needed, no more, but it had been her good luck to find one for whom she was sure that she would be the same. She could tell just by looking at him that this man, long past the age at which most men married, had no true need of a wife, no deep yearning for a woman to share his life. You could see that in the way he lived, alone, no family or friends close by, his few social connections merely professional. There was no loneliness in him; he did not ache to love, or be loved. It wasn’t in his nature. But he would appreciate what she had to offer: a well-kept home to come back to at night, a companion when he was lonely. A nubile, young body to warm his bed. And in return, he would give her the things she desired: a ring, a home, and—most importantly—a baby. Her daughter, her baby girl. The marriage, the man, were merely vessels for the child she’d always longed for.

Her husband could have her body, but not her heart. Never her heart. That was how it would happen, because that was what she’d planned. Because her heart had been claimed by another. It always had been, and would be forever. It was as she had promised, that first night on the shore, still in her bone-white wedding gown.

I’m here. I’m yours. Yours as I have always been, as I always will be. I will never leave you, and when the time comes, I’ll come willingly.

A gust of wind lifts her hair from her shoulders, sending a shudder down the length of her spine.

The rising tide rolls in, as it did on the first day and each day since, churning in lace-froth eddies around her ankles. The sand drags away beneath her feet, as it always has.

She makes her way into the water, as she always does.

And she thinks, as she has so often lately, that she wishes she could go back five years, to the day she first approached him with a smile on her lips and her hair tumbling free and wild over her shoulders, and slap herself hard across the face. She wonders, bitterly and not for the first time, how she could have been so stupid, so reckless, so shortsighted and full of hubris.

And she prays, desperately and not for the first time, that she still has some secrets left. That the way she feels for her husband, the way she’d been so damned sure she’d never feel, is hidden somewhere watertight and out of reach. That she is as good a liar as she always believed herself to be, now that it matters more than ever.

She has so much more to lose.

—

There are shadows in the water. She reaches for them as they reach for her, walking out against the rising tide. Her eyes close as the waves break against her hips, as she breathes in deeply, as she bends her knees and sinks down deeper, as she feels the lick of water beneath her chin. She swims, as the sun makes its last golden gasp across the sky.

Only the vanishing light tells her how much time has passed, as she turns back toward the shore. The sea crashes and seethes, rushing past her to kiss the shoreline, hissing through the narrows between the hulking rocks. The waves call her name as they strike the beach, with all the urgent passion of a lover’s breathless whisper. It is always this way, when it’s time to leave. It is always this way, when the one who loves you is powerful, and jealous, and loathe to let you go.

“When the time comes, I’ll come willingly,” she whispers again. “And so will she.”

But it isn’t time, not yet. It will be years—her body beginning to show its age, her daughter nearly a woman—before she trades in this little life for the endless one that comes after.

—

The wind dies away, leaving the chill of early evening to shudder across her skin. She turns and swims for shore, stroking gracefully through water that grows calm as she glides over the surface. Her pale legs trail behind her, long and strong, until her fingers brush the rough bottom and her feet settle again on the soft, gritty sand.

Overhead, a gull screams in triumph as it lets loose a tightly closed shell to shatter, glittering, against the rocks. It swoops down in the last, fleeing light of the day to pluck its dinner from among the shards. The sky above is ablaze in red; when she steps dripping from the water and looks out to the horizon, it is across an ocean the color of lava, gone glassy and still, the gentle swells rolling in lazy rhythm.

From a place far off, above the beach, comes the creak and slam of a thin screen door. A porch light is flicked on; a man, tall and slim and standing in inky silhouette on the porch of a weathered house, calls her name.

“I know who I am,”
she whispers.
“He is nothing to me.”

But the words hold no comfort, and no truth.

From the shadowed house above the beach, she can hear her daughter crying.