Nora Wagner
After Ivan’s sister dies, he can’t sleep without the ocean waves sound machine. I go along with it, with all his grief rituals: indoor hydroponics, aqua pilates, saltwater baths. They still unnerve me. Kaia’s cause of death was drowning, after all. If a serial killer took me out, would he take up axe throwing? Fall asleep to chainsaw sound effects?
The sound machine gives me nightmares. I’m being waterboarded by my lifeguard ex-boyfriend; I’m being tied to the bed with seaweed tough as leather; I’m being gnawed away by a school of tiny fish, skin cell by skin cell. The bedsheets are drenched with a sweat I can’t tell is Ivan’s or mine. Before he wakes up, I trace the translucent patches, sometimes even lick them, imagining they’re the opalescent scales of a mermaid tail.
“What if we went away to the beach?” I ask him over dinner. We’re eating sardines on toast. Bone-in, skin-on, but so saturated in oil, they don’t crunch—they slide.
“The beach,” he says.
“The beach,” I say.
We do this repeating thing a lot lately.
The next day, we pack the car with bathing suits, beach towels, and sun lotion, and drive to an inn that borders the ocean. It’s mid-December, and the Bay Area, so we have no problems with booking. The website promises “spectacular sunsets” and “pristine coastlines,” and suggests that we “open the sliding glass doors to let the ocean sounds in.”
The key to our room is shaped like a seahorse; the headboard trim is embossed with shells; the bathroom tiles are the stormy blue-gray of Kaia’s eyes. “It’s perfect,” I tell Ivan, who keeps shaking his head like he’s trying to clear water from his ears.
I park myself on the beach in a sweater and fleece-lined jeans while Ivan takes a nap. My scheme is afoot: Ivan is sleeping, unwittingly being weaned off the sound machine. I’m in such high spirits, I don’t mind the sand spray, the wind whipping the pages of my book, or the churn of fog. The novel was Kaia’s pick for the last book club she ever hosted. I didn’t get to it in time—but I drank her wine, spread her salmon-flecked cream cheese onto bagel thins. The fishy taste fills my mouth now, and the words blur like exploded ink sacs.
When we meet for dinner, dark purple pouches have bloomed beneath Ivan’s eyes, and his hair stands in stiff spikes like sea urchin spines. “Were you able to sleep?” I ask.
“Sleep?” he says.
We devour crudo, crab legs, and razor clams thin as our pinkies. Ivan’s appetite resurrects out of nowhere, and mine rises to match his. He extracts the sweet, flaky crab meat with his fingers, scraping and sucking until the orange exoskeleton is dry. He lets me lick his hand clean, the most contact my mouth has made with his body in months. I’m hopeful, though, that sex is on the table for tonight.
But Ivan collapses into bed immediately, still wearing his coral shirt with tortoiseshell buttons. I undress slowly, hanging in the closet the dress that makes my collarbones look nice, placing my strappy sandals beneath it. They were a present from Kaia. They used to make my heels bleed, but during the stretch between her going missing and being recovered from the water (marbled, swollen), I wore them every day. Now they don’t pinch at all.
I take an extravagantly long, hot shower, the kind I never run back home. Ivan’s already rocketing the water bill high enough. The drain gulps down the sand strung through my hair and the crab caked beneath my fingernails like a whale swallowing krill.
When I emerge, Ivan’s eyes are shut, and a YouTube video of ocean waves is on full volume.
“Do you need the video?” I ask.
“Need the video,” he whispers.
I concentrate on distinguishing between the real ocean and the simulated one. It’s impossible to tell; together, they sound like a conversation happening underwater. I close the window we’re meant to keep open to let the ocean sounds in. Now there’s only one watery voice.
Nora Esme Wagner is a junior at Wellesley College. She lives in San Francisco, California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Smokelong, Wigleaf, JMWW, Milk Candy Review, Flash Frog, Vestal Review, and elsewhere. Her stories have been selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel and the Co-Editor-in-Chief for The Wellesley Review.
Photo by Christoffer Engström on Unsplash