SeaWater

Lea Smith

People didn’t go on Anabelle’s dock. Certainly not the other fishermen.

In the summer, a tourist might wander on, trying to capture the experience of a boat on the Maine coast without paying for it.

But this morning, it was early spring and town was quiet, cold at sunrise and not much better by midday. Going up and over the hill with her fishing gear, Anabelle surveyed her dock, upon which a pile of legs and arms were slumped.

It was a familiar image, one from long ago, and no less unsettling now. Back then it had been Anabelle’s mother, though she had been crumpled in the belly of the boat instead of on the dock.

Anabelle slowed when she recognized the pair of purple galoshes in the pile — the same from the day before when the girl, maybe twenty-two, or nearly there, had approached Anabelle when she was loading the boat. Said her name was Lorelai and that she’d like a job and would never be late.

It hadn’t occurred to Anabelle that the girl would take rejection so poorly. Paused at the crest of the hill, she tried drumming up a new way to say no. Lorelai had been so earnest, innocent. Not yet tarnished by the years spraying by, wet and cold and drying. Now she was wilting on the dock — drunk, probably. Ready to complain.

Anabelle’s operation needed only one person, that much she had already told Lorelai. A single restaurant in town bought her catch. Chef put an asterisk on the bottom of their menu:

*Fish caught by a woman.

People went crazy for it. The restaurant took any amount she could catch. Three fish meant three specials. Two meant two. They charged their customers an astronomical price and always sold out.

To pay another person was to throw the whole system off kilter.

The pile of limbs started to shift, and Anabelle went down the hill with her reasons and a smart quip about the fine line between annoyance and persistence.

The girl pushed herself up to sit facing Anabelle. There was a charged silence as if after a drawn out scream, and the hairs on Anabelle’s body pulled away from her skin. Lorelai’s face was frighteningly changed from the nervous sureness of the day before. A structure caving in on itself. Another town drunk with no means to deal with choppy waters.

In Lorelai’s left hand was a fishing pole. Clean, free of salt damage. Probably had never seen an ocean. It would be destroyed in this water. Eaten away like sandpaper on fingernails.

But the unsaid knowledge among Anabelle and the fishermen couldn’t be ignored: the ocean was a balm for the most gruesome of spirits.

There was no other choice. Send the girl home in this state? She’d fall into the water. 

“You’re not going without a hat,” said Anabelle. From her backpack she pulled a knit hat, like the one on her head, only this one had ear flaps. She placed it over Lorelai’s head and motioned for her to get in the boat. She couldn’t smell any booze on the girl, yet Lorelai swayed slightly.

“You can leave that fishing pole. It won’t do shit out here.”

The girl looked at Anabelle as if the pole might take skin if she tried parting with it. Anabelle gestured again for Lorelai to get in the boat, saying nothing about the pole.

The girl sat in the front and turned around to watch the shore move away. The mainland was consumed by fog, and for a moment, the girl closed her eyes, still with her head turned at Anabelle.

They moved past a line of islands dotted with pine trees, then Anabelle cut the motor.

Lorelai’s eyes opened.

“You’re not even a quarter of the way in the bag, are you?” asked Anabelle.

“I’m sorry,” said Lorelai, almost whispering. “What do you mean?”

“Drunk. Blitzed.”

“No,” said Lorelai. “Never.”

“Hm,” said Anabelle, rethinking her choice of bringing the girl along. “Well, whatever it is, I’m sorry.”

For a while, they looked across the still water. A seagull cried somewhere in the distance. It could be nice to fish with a woman again; hear the breath of another person out here.

“I won’t be able to pay you until you start catching fish. But you can take one home each night if we catch more than three.”

“Ok,” said Lorelai. “And this is a job?

Anabelle heard her decision laugh at her. “Yes?”

“This is my job?”

“Yes,” said Anabelle.

“Can you say, ‘Lorelai, you’re hired?’”

“Lorelai, you’re hired.”

Again, Lorelai looked across the water. Did she know the direction of the shore? She was gazing west of it.

The girl whispered, “See, I did it.” Then she looked back at Anabelle, eyes watering from the cold or something else. “Can you show me how to cast?”

“Yes,” said Anabelle. They would start from the beginning.

Lorelai watched Anabelle. The movement was swift as she timed the release. The lure flew through the mist, thunking through the top of the water, then a retrieval. Sometimes a striped bass or bluefish fought the ride back. Anabelle brought the fish toward the boat with a strong and steady patience. Then it was Lorelai’s turn to try. She glanced at Sam’s old pole in the bottom of the boat, and took the larger, sturdier one from Anabelle’s hands.

“Alright,” said Anabelle, “flip the bail on the spinning reel,” she pointed to the coil of line and the curved metal bar over it. “Now put your finger on the line, hold it steady, and pull the rod back, then swing it forward. Keep it fluid and release the line.”

On Friday nights, Lorelai and Sam used to grab quarters from the change jar and walk to the arcade at The Icicle Inn. They played skee-ball mostly, or Captain Fantastic pinball.

When they didn’t have extra quarters — since Lorelai quit her job, this was happening more often — they would split a can of noodle soup and walk past the arcade doors to the history room instead, which had free coffee and lots of old photo albums. Lorelai loved the way the women looked in the black and white photos, with their furry hats and thick scarves.

One Friday morning when Sam was at work, where he fixed telephone poles, and Lorelai was pacing and checking the classifieds again and waiting for call-backs and opening and closing the bare pantry doors, she saw across the street a bin of clothing and a sign that said free.

Lorelai cracked a window at the front of the house, so she’d hear the phone if any employers called her back and tiptoed across the street.

The bin was full of sweaters, slacks, and a floor length, periwinkle cotton dress. She tucked it under her arm and walked, chest up, back into the street, nodding at empty open windows and smiling, though the corners of her mouth were quivering and her cheeks cramped.

The kitchen shears did well on the dress. And soon she had a scarf five feet long. She cut into the ends of it in quarter inch intervals for fancy tassels and wrapped it around her neck like the women in the photos.

The bait fish jumped so quickly it sounded like rain.

Lorelai’s first cast flew twenty feet and disappeared into the water.

“Start winding,” Annabelle said. “As soon as it hits the water, that’s when you start.”

She came back with nothing. Over and over again.

“It might be one of those days,” said Annabelle. “Don’t worry.”

Lorelai’s failure found the last place in her body, somehow hidden from the hurt, and settled in.

“Thanks,” said Lorelai. Though she wasn’t sure what for. The job, the patience, the pity.

“We’ll come back tomorrow and try again,” said Anabelle.

Lorelai pondered the concept of tomorrow on the way back to the shore, and the way that it meant more of the boat and of the fishing, but also more of everything else.

Sam started to work Saturdays, too. They went to the arcade less, on Sundays instead of Fridays, so Sam could rest his body while Lorelai scrambled to stretch cans of beans and large bags of white rice with broth and chopped onions. One cold Sunday in April, Lorelai had her scarf on, and she’d dabbed some Crisco on her lips for shine.

They sat in chairs in the history room with steaming cups of coffee with lots of sugar and they looked at old hotel tycoons shaking hands outside the same front door they’d just entered.

“How’s the job search?”

Lorelai sipped her coffee. “Fine,” she said, her default answer. The deconstructed dress around her neck suddenly felt hot, scratchy. She’d checked the answering machine seven times that day while Sam was at work.

Her resume was brief. Receptionist, hostess, receptionist again, but she’d been with the first two jobs for two years each. That had to count for something. (Though much of the time at the second job had been spent staring out the window at a slice of ocean caught between two brick buildings in the village). Maybe it was the third job, lasting just two months, that scared potential employers away. She’d thought of slipping a small note on her resume about the working conditions, but that felt like a slippery slope, and she hadn’t even told Sam. I slapped the manager’s meaty hand away and then they fired me.

For a week, maybe two, with no lingering gazes from her manager, no comments aimed at the hem of her skirts, she had felt elated. She weeded out their fridge, cleaning every shelf with a wet rag, wiping away dried pieces of carrot and dots of juice. She took walks along the shore, finding pieces of green and blue sea glass, and once a purple shard that sadly wasn’t ready. But the euphoria didn’t last as Sam spent more time at work and her aimless hours stretched to days.

But with the lengthening silence after submitted resumes, the little blonde girl that had been appearing in Lorelai’s mind for weeks had started to feel real. A daughter; a family. They were always in a bathroom somewhere in a big house. Sam was trying to braid the little girl’s hair, and the three of them laughed as pieces came sliding out of his hands and the braid never seemed to get longer. But the reality was that Sam was gone before dawn and back after dark, there would be no time for a child if they were to continue like this.

“Any leads?” Asked Sam.

“Not yet,” she said. Her face burned and she loosened the scarf away from her chin again.

“Sweetheart,” said Sam, lowering his voice, “it’s been almost three months.”

Lorelai closed the album and stood up. From this angle, she could see the dark rings under Sam’s eyes.

“I’m not going to be a receptionist again,” said Lorelai. Someone within reach, she wanted to say.

“I could talk to Mr. Channing about a position in the office; I’ll put in a good word,” Sam smiled. “Then we can go to the arcade again.”

But Lorelai was returning the albums to the shelves. She’d seen photos of Mr. Channing on some company pamphlets Sam had brought home when he got hired. The ruddy skin, thick neck. His hands were not pictured, but they were all the same to Lorelai. She left her coffee on the table and went back into the lobby and out the door.

Lorelai woke early one Monday morning before Sam, antsy, wanting to be near the water, where her mind washed clean on those long walks. She dressed in the dark, watching a sliver of moonlight across Sam’s face. He would be up soon, back to work. She slipped out of the room and to the front door, where she put on her brightly colored rain boots. The street was quiet and cool; nothing was open yet. She turned a corner and the iron-grey waves of the harbor came into view. In the distance, Hog Island, white caps, and fishing boats. They were awake here.

Out of the protection of the buildings, the wind was stronger. Lorelai sat on the single bench overlooking the docked boats, bobbing in the wake.

When she was thinking hard, she would fiddle with a small gold locket around her neck. A gift from Sam on their one-year anniversary. She’d spin it around until it pulled tight, then let go. Her fingers found their way there, and she continued to sit.

Voices echoed across the water, and every so often, a gull or two would swoop overhead. Two fishermen on the dock smoked cigarettes, talking slowly, piles of lobster traps stacked as high as them nearby. Her great uncle had been a lobsterman, and he lived to be ninety-three, telling stories of barnacled mermaids until the end. Lorelai suddenly wished her family had kept with the tradition of working down here, instead of moving inland.

A woman, middle-aged, probably, clad in bright yellow bibs and a matching jacket, a knit wool hat, and thick rubber boots, trudged down to a blue fishing boat, a couple of docks over from the men. They took their cigarettes out of their mouths, looked at the woman as if waiting for something. Lorelai held her breath. When the woman met their gaze, they nodded deeply. And she nodded back, the slightest movement. Lorelai breathed again, standing. She would make a living by fishing.

The woman wasn’t middle aged after all. Late thirties, maybe, but she moved as if slightly stiff, and the lines on her face seemed more prominent than Lorelai would be comfortable with on her own face at that age. Lorelai introduced herself and asked for a job.

“Go talk to them,” said the woman, pointing to the docks where the men were still smoking, before she continued loading her boat. “They’re always looking for people to scrub traps.”

“I don’t want to work for them,” said Lorelai. “I want to work for you.”

“Sorry,” said the woman, rubbing at her cheek with a gloved hand, her eyes sweeping over Lorelai, “my business doesn’t work like that.”

“Like what?”

“With others,” said the woman, stepping into her boat.

 At home, Lorelai went through the classifieds again. She closed her eyes, drew her finger in a circle in the air and shot it down on the paper, then looked. 

Administrative assistant wanted.

Lorelai threw the paper on the ground, breathing hard. She looked at the clock; six more hours until Sam would be home. She picked the paper back up, tried the game again.

Seeking dog walker, friendly schnauzer. Skittish around falling leaves.

They could play more skee-ball, at least.

She took the number to the phone, reaching for the landline receiver. It rang before she could touch it. This was it. Someone was calling back for her.

In the terrible silence that followed the news, the technician — stumbling over his words — tried to explain the mechanisms of a pole and the gear to Lorelai, as if it might serve as a salve. But Lorelai could not hear him. There was a nauseating sequence of snapping noises in her ears, as she watched wood, rotten at its core, seemingly sound to onlookers, toppling like a building with someone trapped inside. In her mind’s eye she stared at the top end of the pole — where the remaining jagged pieces of wood stuck up like splintery turrets — and not on the ground.

He’d fallen. A forty-year-old pole. Should have only been in service for twenty-five.

Lorelai pressed the switch hook while the man was still talking and he disappeared. The receiver fell from her hand, swinging, then smacked into the wall on which the phone lived.

Lorelai whirled around, staggering, her toes grinding so deep into the carpet that she could feel the grit between the fibers. She turned around again, as if something was circling her and she could not see it. The air in the house was compressing her lungs and threatening her brain.

Outside she could breathe better. She careened through streets, past the pub, the granite library. The phone in her house now contaminated by the words of the technician, she used the payphone outside the bank.

Her mother had already heard; by his mother; by the technician. They’d all tried to call Lorelai, but the line had been busy.

“Don’t be alone,” they said. “We’ll come get you.”

And what they didn’t say: We know it has been hard making friends there after you moved back. It’s such a terribly small town.

She told them she’d like to be alone and hung up on them when they tried to protest. The outside world was condensing too. If she was going to be suffocated, she wanted to be at home.

Someone across the road pointed at her bare feet. Asked a question of the person standing next to them. Lorelai was aware of none of it.

Curled into a ball on the newspaper she’d picked through earlier, Lorelai hugged a pillow from the couch, biting it when the tears and her breathing came too violently fast.

When she briefly slept that night, she dreamt of the little blonde girl in the bathroom. She wasn’t laughing. There was no one to braid her hair, and so she left, and the bathroom filled instead with seawater that roared and beat against the window and walls and softened and spread the towels hanging on the hooks.

Lorelai woke sore, as if she’d been clenching every muscle. She stretched onto her back, spread on the carpet. Suddenly, she sprang up, running to the bathroom. Vomiting bile into the toilet, her hands clutching her hair, she couldn’t remember when she last ate. She drank from the faucet, then looked around the bathroom, imagining what it would be like to be underwater. She would go to the dock again.

No hat, but she’d put on her boots, Sam’s coat. At first, she’d laid the jacket over her head like a sheet ghost and stood in the kitchen and let out a long, muffled scream.

She wanted to hurl a skee-ball into the wall, wade into the numbing water, pour packet after packet of free sugar from the history room down her throat.

On the dock, with Sam’s fishing pole in her hand, she sat and slowly leaned to the side in a stupor, watching the hill, watching for a head bobbing up and over it.

At the shore, Anabelle gathered her things from the boat. Lorelai had already jumped out with the fishing pole in her hand again.

Anabelle noticed the cavernous landscape opening in the girl’s eyes again.

“Since there’s only one fish, I can’t give you any today. But I’ll have some for you tomorrow.”

Lorelai’s mouth quivered. She stuck her thumb in the air but didn’t move. Sure, her thumb said. Fine.

Anabelle made for the hill with her single fish, looking back once to see the girl still standing on the dock with her thumb up, as if waiting for a ride to somewhere else.

First, Lorelai walked toward her house. A nausea at seeing Sam’s shoes lined by the door grew in her, then she saw them. Her mother was at the door; her father peering into a window. Lorelai turned sharply around and half walked half ran to The Icicle Inn. If she saw them up close, their familiar faces, and let them help her, she would sink to a place so dark she might not return. Around strangers, out in the world, on the sea, she could restrain, conduct herself to course out the pain in doses, then let it tear at her in the evenings alone. During the day, though, she’d swipe back at the hands reaching at her out of shadow.

Though it was early afternoon, the lobby was warm and bright. Lorelai squinted as she walked in.

“Room please,” she said to the attendant. She could hear the pinball machine in the arcade. Every click of the levers a small knife in her side.

The attendant put his finger on the page of a planner. “I have a room with two twin beds. $65 a night. How many nights are you staying?” He eyed the fishing pole.

“I can’t pay until tomorrow afternoon. I’ll have money after I catch fish.”

The attendant cocked his head to the side. “No,” he said, “I’m sorry, we need payment up front.”

“Ok,” said Lorelai. “Ok…” She slid her arm off the counter and walked toward the arcade, where a family with a small child were playing Pac Man.

She sat on the carpeted floor. There were crumbs and pieces of lint everywhere. At some point, the family left.

There was a small opening under the ramp of the skee-ball machine, and Lorelai wedged herself underneath it, face up with the fishing pole next to her.

Footsteps in the room. A kid running. The slam of the skee-ball above her. Lorelai squeezed her eyes shut as the game thundered over her. Someone shrieked with delight. Another groaned. The game was over. It went on like this for hours: silence, then noise.

At some point, much later, the attendant, or someone else, deemed the room an empty one, turned off the lights, and closed the door.

Lorelai could hear people talking in rooms on the floor below her. She rolled onto her side. Her shoulder and hip pushed into the carpet and the concrete below it.

Every so often, the games would burst out with noises, bits of theme music and a jovial voice inviting someone to come play. And during those loud moments, Lorelai would let slip her greatest wails.

The first fish that Lorelai pulled into the boat was a moderately sized mackerel. It wasn’t the first fish to bite the girl’s line, but the first to make it all the way in. Anabelle hadn’t told Lorelai what to do when she caught one.

Lorelai let it run, taking the line with it, then she lifted the rod tip toward the sky and reeled, slowly lowering the rod back toward the water.

“Keep pressure on the line,” said Anabelle. “And change the direction of the rod as the fish does.”

Anabelle smiled as she watched Lorelai wrestle the line. A week on the water and the girl wasn’t going to be dead weight anymore. Up to that point, Anabelle had been catching fish as usual, and Lorelai had been casting and reeling, casting and reeling, her eyes watering when she thought Anabelle couldn’t see her. Anabelle started to pay her anyway. Whatever was ailing Lorelai’s spirit was fighting hard against the curative nature of the ocean. At least Anabelle hadn’t found the girl slumped again on her dock in the mornings. She arrived standing, sometimes not meeting Anabelle’s eyes, but there wearing Anabelle’s hat and sometimes a pale blue scarf.

When the shiny fish burst from the water, wriggling in the air, Lorelai steadied herself, let the fish flop in front of her, then at Anabelle’s words, knelt and removed the hook from its cheek. Her fingers shook as she fought to pull it out.

“Put it in the bucket,” said Anabelle, but Lorelai was holding the fish down on the lid. Its wet, beady eye flashed around, the mouth gaping and closing. Anabelle slid the bucket closer to Lorelai.

“Put it in the bucket, Lorelai.” And the girl made her first full catch.

Back on the dock, they unloaded.

“Would you like to come over for dinner tomorrow?”

“Yes,” said Lorelai, without hesitation.

“Five o’clock,” said Anabelle.

“Five,” said Lorelai. She made to leave the dock.

“You’re like a parrot,” said Anabelle.

Lorelai pinched her lips together as she looked down at her feet.

“Sorry,” said Anabelle, “I was just trying to make a joke. Forget it.”

“I know,” said Lorelai, her shoulders plunged forward. “I’m just using what’s in front of me.” Lorelai turned to leave.

“Wait,” said Anabelle. “I saw you pull a scale from your teeth today. Let me show you how to gut one.”

Anabelle figured the girl was eating every fish she took home — Lorelai never said no — but Anabelle had been cleaning and gutting them for her. From her pocket she pulled her sharpest knife.

“Grab one of the fish from the bucket. The lid too.”

With the dull side of the knife, Anabelle scraped the bluefish from tail to head, dunked it in the water, repeated the cycle. She cut off the head, made an incision from the neck down, put her finger in the abdomen and pulled out the guts. One final dunk in the water. Then she held it up.

“Your turn.”

Lorelai’s face, which had been red from the sun and sea air, had drained of its color. But she pulled a fish from the bucket and scraped off its scales, beheaded it, cut the belly open. She paused before gutting, and Anabelle saw the girl’s pulse in her neck.

“Pull yourself together, Lorelai. There’s no turning back now.”

The words worked. Anabelle knew they would. Her own mother had used them on her.

Lorelai finished the final wash of the fish and put it on the lid next to the other.

“The heads made a good stock,” said Anabelle. “Want them?”

Lorelai shook her head. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she said.

“Don’t forget about dinner,” said Anabelle.

The concaving of Lorelai’s heart didn’t get easier as the months went on and summer took up its post — just different.

Her house smelled of fish. She could not sleep in their bed. After that first night in the arcade, she hung in a limbo between sleep and lucidity on the couch in a cocoon of Sam’s clothing, with the radio on low, so she could hear murmurs but never make out words.

In the darkest moments, she’d spread Sam’s coat over the couch cushions, then wail her fists on it, shouting nonsensical words until she collapsed on the rough canvas. If she happened to walk by a payphone in the village, she’d dial her parents, wait until they picked up or met the answering machine, say she was doing better, not to worry, then hang up.

Dinner with Anabelle was always a light; a chance to be in a house that did not contain memory.

The night before her third time going over to Anabelle’s, and before ultimately becoming comatose on the couch, someone knocked on the front door, which had not happened for months.

When she opened the door, she saw Sam’s brown eyes, the detached earlobes, despair warping two mouths she’d known. His parents.

Anabelle checked her watch, then she checked it again. I’d like to work for you; I’ll never be late. There was worry instead of annoyance. Lorelai was always early.

But at 5:37, when Anabelle was done loading the buckets and the rods into the boat, she saw Lorelai coming over the hill.

She barely spoke to Anabelle or looked her in the eye. Her hood was pulled low. In the boat they moved away from the shore without talking. When they stopped to fish, they turned, back-to-back, as they always were and cast into the water, reeled, and went at it again. Every so often, one of them grunted, wrangling a fish into the boat. Neither helped the other.

A similar scenario had played out once, when Anabelle worked for her mother. She was still drunk from the bar the night before, and Anabelle, a kid, had to carry everything down to the dock herself, taking multiple trips, while her mother wavered from the sidewalk to the cobblestones, trying to light a cigarette.

When they were away from shore, Anabelle wrapped her mother’s fingers around the pole, and propped her up on a bucket, then stood, facing the wind, and fished until she heard snoring behind her.

Her mother woke when they docked, three hours later. She woke talking.

“Anabelle,” she said. “Another day on the water. Let’s go.” She wiped spittle from her mouth.

Both their eyes fell upon the bucket with three fish.

The woman wailed at her daughter’s feet. Wailed so loud the fishermen out in the bay talked of it for months. The water vibrated as she beat the bottom of her boat with her fist until it bled.

“Damn you,” Anabelle’s mother said. “Damn you, damn you.”

And Anabelle repeated those words in her head as she watched her mother.

“His name was Sam,” said Lorelai. They had gone more than three hours without speaking.

Anabelle breathed in the understanding. The fishing pole. The oversized coat from the first day. The locket around Lorelai’s neck. Sam.

“The telephone pole he was servicing was rotten to the core.” There was a harshness in Lorelai’s voice.

The boat wobbled. Anabelle nearly sank to her knees: calling the girl a parrot, making her gut a fish, never asking what was wrong. All things she had endured as a kid. Loneliness hardened a person.

“Do you know how long telephone poles last?” Lorelai asked, her voice a bark.

“No,”

“Twenty-five years,” yelled the girl. The words echoed off the water and roared back, mocking them.

Anabelle’s knees buckled when Lorelai jumped out of the boat and it thrashed with the sudden weight change. She fell backwards, landing where Lorelai usually stood.

The water was so cold it was hot, then all feeling started to drift away from Lorelai under the numbing sea water. That was the point. For a little while, she bobbed weightlessly, her limbs suspended. Restraining the emotion. She had almost let it all crash on her at once.

She was hoisted by her armpits back into the boat by someone with a quiet reserve of strength.

Her face stung on one side; it was being slapped.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” asked Anabelle. She held the girl’s head in one hand, trying with the other to get her to speak. “It’s too cold out here.”

“They want to take his stuff,” Lorelai whispered, blinking the salt water rapidly in and out of her eyes.

“What? Whose stuff?”

“All of it, his clothes, his shoes…”

“Who?” Anabelle held Lorelai’s head with both hands now.

Lorelai squeezed her eyes closed. “His family,” she said.

“Sam’s?”

“Yes,” Lorelai said.

Lorelai sat up, her lips and fingers were blue, and she shook violently.

“They want his clothing and shoes and everything. I don’t know why.” Then she looked at Anabelle, her eyes wide and red from the salt. “I can’t let them. I can’t.”

Anabelle stood and grabbed the dry bag, out of which she pulled an emergency blanket, hand warmers, extra gloves, socks. With her teeth she tore the hand warmers open and handed them to Lorelai. She was shaking as much as the girl now. She touched the back of her head, where an egg was forming.

“No,” she said to Lorelai. “We can’t. But first, we need to get you warm.”

Though Anabelle didn’t lobster, there were buoys in her yard, sticking straight up like flowers. She didn’t have time to garden, so she made a mockery of one that would last year-round and wouldn’t yield to the snow.

Her house had lots of windows, capturing the sun when it came above the horizon line and the other buildings in the town. Through one of the windows, she saw Lorelai turning onto her street, with large bags slung over her shoulders.

Annabelle had made a stew with ginger and root vegetables, hoping to warm the girl up. Anabelle didn’t eat fish much anymore, yet her clothes had held on to the scent for months after she’d stopped.

When Lorelai walked in, she was reminded of the pungency.

“You can put the bags in here,” Anabelle said, pointing to a room off the entranceway.

“Thank you,” said Lorelai. Her face was pink, as if she’d been in a hot shower. She made for the doorway, then looked at Annabelle.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Anabelle waved the apology away.

While they ate, Lorelai couldn’t help but look over Anabelle’s shoulder at the bags in the next room or think about what Sam’s parents would say when they showed back up to retrieve everything. They said they were sorry, multiple times. They said it in lieu of an answer when Lorelai asked why they never planned a service. Though Sam’s father had pointed weakly behind Lorelai, before she closed the door on them.

When she turned and leaned her back to the wood, she saw the marking where the receiver had smacked into the wall, and the phone itself, still hanging off the hook.

Anabelle cleared her throat.

“The season will end soon,” she said. Then, quieter, “Shit timing.”

Lorelai swirled the food around her mouth.

“It’ll get too cold,” Annabelle continued. “What will you do?”

“Hm,” said Lorelai. “Dunno.”

“Well you can’t do nothing.”

Lorelai thought of her game with the newspaper. Of the long and empty days at home. The air threatened to close in on her again.

“The lobstermen, they can go ‘till December, and there’s always maintenance on the traps.”

“Ok,” said Lorelai. She looked up at Anabelle. “I have more of his stuff. Can I⎯”

“Yes,” said Anabelle. “Bring all of it.”

In the middle of the night, Lorelai woke. The skin over her collar bones felt taught, dry. She went to the bathroom and turned on the light. The locket was hanging open, and tiny bits of seaweed dotted her skin, and she touched the dried salt from the water with her fingers. It had seeped in when she plunged into the ocean. Just above her right collar bone, a small, blonde eyelash.

Sam had put the locket around Lorelai’s neck while she was playing pinball at The Icicle Inn, so focused and teeth-gnashing that she didn’t notice until the game was over, and he was pointing at her chest.

 Lorelai rolled the tiny locket around in her fingers, then slid her thumbnail into the crack and it opened.

“What should I put in here?”

Sam pursed his lips. “Hm,” he said. Then he reached up to his eye and tugged out a single eyelash. “Here,” he said, and he placed the tiny hair into the locket and closed it.

They laughed at the absurdity, closing their eyes as they did, and in that blind laughter, Lorelai first imagined the bathroom, and the little curly haired girl, and their teeth as they laughed at the braid that kept undoing itself and slipping through Sam’s hands.

Lorelai picked the lash from her skin, held it between two fingers, and walked toward the back door. September was moving in fast. Lorelai shivered and held her finger to her face.

The eyelash sailed into the wind.

Lorelai tried to watch it fall, but it was gone too quickly.

Before she’d left Anabelle’s house, Lorelai asked her what she did in the winter.

“Mexico,” Annabelle had said. A place she always rented. Lorelai could join her, if she wanted. There was always easy work down there. They’d start fishing again in the spring.

The next morning, on her way down to the docks, Lorelai had caught the eyes of the two fishermen, who smoked cigarettes every morning together. They had nodded at her, just as they had to Annabelle, and Lorelai whose hands were now calloused and the skin of her face dusted in salt, and who had become fonder of the cold than of the warmth, had nodded back.

Even after Lorelai left, and Anabelle cleaned the dishes from dinner, she couldn’t shake a feeling that had started to creep in when Lorelai had told her about Sam’s parents and their plan. It had compounded when Lorelai placed bags of Sam’s things in her guest room, which had not been occupied for some time. Yet if she pulled back the sheets, she would still see the imprint of her mother’s thin body.

She didn’t know the boy. What he looked like, sounded like, or if he had been good to Lorelai. Yet here he was, in her house. His shirts, jeans, winter boots.

She had sold much of her mother’s things. But she had kept the gutting knives, the fishing poles, even an old kettle that her mother had made tea in every day. Useful items, she had thought at the time.

Anabelle opened one of the bags and pulled out a shirt, held it in front of her, then quickly put it back.

In her basement, she found the kettle. She drank coffee, mostly. But she put it on the stove, on the back left burner, the one she never used.

On their final day on the water, they both cast and reeled in, sometimes in unison, sometimes apart.

Lorelai hadn’t slept after the eyelash disappeared into the wind, and she’d realized that she could not remember which eye he’d pulled it from — the recollection grainy now. She’d spend the night thinking, trying to hold on tight to what was left.

As Lorelai fought yet another catch, she felt the inches that the fish moved closer to the boat; the inches as they scattered out from between Sam and the ground; the inches that laid themselves down between Lorelai and remembering.