The Difference Between

Two women, sisters I’m sure, wrap their mother in a midnight blue blanket where she sits a few feet from the shoreline. It’s clear she’s dying. She is dying in a way that is bright and brittle and glittery, like the wide smile she gives me as she catches my eye before I can safely pass.

“My girls are adorning me this morning,” she calls out to me. Her girls have shrouded her until all but the woman’s pale face is covered, and just a peek of her bald head.

It’s cold, the wind off the water, the wet sand.

Upstairs, in the little room we’ve rented for the week, where I have left him after our love-making that morning, he is sleeping. He doesn’t know that I am gone.

I smile at the dying woman, that fake smile I reserve for white folk, but otherwise I ignore her. I just keep walking.

Mornings come quickly here. Breaks the sky open wide and I would like to get in at least 6 miles before the sun burns away the cool and the day’s heat becomes too oppressive. It happens just that fast, the change in temperature here. Something to do with the sea. The salt. The sand. Sunlight reflected off water. I don’t know.

I walk until the room with him in it has disappeared and nothing is behind me except sand dunes and black craggy rock.

But the white woman is still there.

Miles later and she is still sitting right behind me, like a child, like a girl herself, letting her girls care for her the way she once cared for them, and I can see the entire landscape before me: summers spent in weathered beach houses. Suntan and calamine lotions smeared on tender white skin to fight against burns and bites and heat rash. Lunches, of ham salad and pimento cheese sandwiches, and fried pickles.

Wading the waves.

The dying woman is young, and sunburnt, and so beautiful I want to cry. In the water, she holds her daughter around the waist, first one and then, years later, the other. She is teaching them to float. She is teaching them to thrash their feet and maneuver arms still chubby with baby fat.

“Kick your feet as if you’re trying to run away from me,” she will tell her girls. “Kick as if you’re trying to escape.” But her girls will never understand this kind of desperation. They will never have a need to get away.

She would have been the kind of mother to teach her girls how to get away. First, to drive, a clutch, no doubt, the dying mother, who isn’t dying yet, sitting in the passenger seat trying hard not to clench the dashboard, or press invisible brakes, smiling that bright, wide smile at her beautiful, fearless girls.

I wonder if he is still sleeping. I wonder if he is dreaming about me, about us, how this trip is supposed to keep us from becoming what we have already become, though he refuses to see it.

I could have been one of the dying woman’s girls. Me, with my brown skin, my nappy hair, and little starvations, my mother-hunger. When we first met, and he found out my mother had left me before I could make memory, I remember his hands under the gray comforter, between my thighs, pulling, constantly pulling at me. I’ll be your mother, he’d said. I’ll be your mother and your father. They always say that. They always believe it, too.

When I finally reach the spot that has become mine on these morning walks, the sun is a brutal ball of white heat hovering above the water. Seagulls salt the beach. Some float the drift. They sound like women, off in the distance, screaming, crying frantically for help.

I breathe in the smell of salt, of washed up, rotting shellfish and seaweed—that deep scent of sea. Decay. Above all this I can still smell him, on my skin, in my hair...