Aground

Three years after Sarah Bird's father sailed off—one year longer than her mother Martha could be expected to wait calmly—the widow walk that topped their house like a little spiky hat was closed. The fear was that Martha, would jump. She never did, but Sarah pictured it: her mother, only turned upside down, and falling, her bell-like skirt suddenly a tulip. A stiff gray tulip.

The men in Sarah's family: not just her father, but her uncles and her grandfathers and her three brothers, all turned to the sea, as did most of the men in her town. And only a handful of them were tossed back—changed creatures.

When the widow walk was gated up, Sarah went down to the rocky beach to have a talk with the ocean. She held her doll, also named Sarah, in one of her hands. The doll was stiff and wooden, her hair a black painted bun. There was comfort in the doll's severity. Sarah took a long look at the sea—stormy that day, stirred up, riled—and let her doll do the talking.

"See here," the doll said, "You ought to let the father come back. He can come back with a green beard, he can come back talking nonsense, blubbering and bubbling, but he ought to come back. The mother really loved him. She is so sad that her eyes are turning to the inside of her head."

While the doll spoke, Sarah took several steps into the cold water. The early waves soaked her white kidskin boots. She leaned down and tore off one of the small mother-of-pearl buttons and threw it as far as she could. She wondered what her father had seen from the salt-rimed deck of his ship. Did he look down into water so cold it was clear to the back of the whales? Did he watch sharks slide under him like nightmare shadows? Had he seen something more beautiful, or more terrible, than Sarah could even imagine?

She took a step farther, letting the ocean soak the lace of her petticoats as they lay on the surface like fantastic clouds.

________

Sarah's mother did not find a way up to the walk, as was widely predicted by the women in the village bakery, but she faded away. She blended in with the house's gray wallpaper, gray like the skirts of her dress. Everything in the house was gray and white, and it absorbed her slowly, so that she became hard to see. She floated around the perimeter, glimpsed only from the corners of her children's round and roving eyes.

Sarah was left to her sisters—who bullied and spoiled her—and made her steal handfuls of food from the kitchen, especially sweet things, to eat in that wooden house's many rooms.

It was her brothers Sarah followed though, down to the sea. She thought that if this became a habit one day she could just slip aboard with them. They did not allow this however.

"Go back to the house," they said.

"I want to see what's out there."

Her favorite, Jonathan, the tall one with the pinkest cheeks and bluest eyes picked her up and set her on the rocks.

"You ought to let her go," the doll protested.

"It's no place for a girl," he said.

"How do you know?" Sarah wailed.

They sailed away.

Sarah wondered what it was like for these men: to steal creatures from the sea they loved and sang of when they were back on land. Perhaps her father had decided it was better to drown among a thousand fish than to drown them in air upon the polished planking of his deck?

________

It's one thing to wait as a child, a girl. There were things Sarah was supposed to be doing: stitching, memorizing the small black marks of music, learning to turn her hands around and around upon her skirts, to count the minutes and put each one away with no bitterness—but she could pretend to do those things and then...