Photo by Javardh on UnsplashBeginning 1:
Ramona died for a long time. I got to Dune Grove in September and left in mid-April to help Poppy ferry her body to the mainland. Of course, I wasn’t held there against my will—Ramona had hired me as her personal doctor—and even though she was paying me less than any hospital would, I’d have stayed for as long as it took. People who knew Ramona, even superficially, can attest to the force of her inverted charisma—that aloof intensity that made you lean over the edge of her event horizon just to feel the power with which she shoved you away. I think Ramona mostly liked me because I didn’t flatter her. I liked her paintings—I could recognize the skill, the objective merit in her fine, subtle brushstrokes—but I didn’t understand them. I always suspected that anyone who said they did was lying.
Beginning 2:
I’ve been able to speak to the Ocean ever since I tried to drown myself. I was nineteen when it happened—I say “it happened” as if I were a passive observer in the act rather than its perpetrator—and I won’t say anything more about the “why” of it other than I wanted to sleep without dreams. I rode my bicycle for two hours until I reached the shore.
In the gullet of the Atlantic, probably a mile off the coast, I overturned a stolen fishing canoe and fed my body to the waves. It was an overcast day—windy—with rough dark waters, and at first, I flailed and fought the current on pure instinct, my hands already going numb from the cold. I inhaled. Drowning didn’t burn like I thought it would. Instead, it crushed, swelling up my lungs till my ribs strained against them. The longest I spent underwater that day was probably about two minutes—every time I thought I was about to go unconscious, I would reemerge, gulping, at the surface, nose and eyes scorched with salt.
It was a crabbing boat that found me. After I was hauled from the water and bundled in a towel, I picked barnacles off the floor and thought about what the owner of the fishing canoe would think when he found it missing. I wondered if he would blame himself before he blamed someone else.
I’m sorry you didn’t get what you wanted, said the Ocean, speaking to me for the first time.
I didn’t answer. She told me later on that she thought it was quite rude of me to ignore her.
Beginning 3:
Poppy tells me that Jesus saw the devil fall like lightning from heaven.
To watch the Ocean at storm—a true, wild storm—is to watch the final battle between all things living and unliving.
And so it is written, says Poppy: “Darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
Beginning 4:
Ramona’s affliction was an odd one. Over the past year, she had subjected herself to the prodding of countless doctors far more established than myself, only to receive the most tenuous and uncertain of diagnoses, each one contradicting the other. It appeared to be some kind of neurological disease, but not one that anybody could name. Her symptoms were erratic and wide-ranging, the only pattern being one of vicious deterioration: quivery hands, rapid weight loss, migraines, decreased mobility, a sense of impending doom.
“The one thing they can all agree on,” said Ramona over the phone, “is that I’m dying, and it’s going to be rather unpleasant.”
“Are there any—”
“No.”
“Have you—”
“Yes.”
“What about—”
“Janey,” she said, “you misunderstand me. I need a doctor, but I mostly need a friend.”
I was confused and flattered.
If you needed a friend, I wanted to say, why did you call me?
Beginning 5:
I loved Poppy—of course I loved Poppy—but even at the best of it, in the moments after we made tepid, floundering love on the porch hammock in the dead of winter, I couldn’t look at her without feeling a distinct twist of pity. It was something about her face, I think.
Beginning 6:
The Ocean’s voice is difficult to describe, but not impossible. She speaks in a raspy sort of hush. She is fond of metaphor. She talks plainly and without pretense. She is always honest.
This is perhaps most important of all—she is always honest.
Beginning 7:
A few mornings after I arrived in Dune Grove, Ramona and I sat on the top step of the porch that overlooked the calm green Ocean and fed sunflower seeds to the seagulls. Poppy was in the kitchen doing something or other. The doors and windows were open. We watched, Ramona and I, as the gulls squawked and splashed, basking in the small glories of birdhood.
“God, Janey,” said Ramona, “what is it they live for?”
Beginning 8:
I want to say something about death and love and the terrible, bottomless mysteries, but whenever I try, it comes out sideways. My freewheeling brother chases solar eclipses across the globe. Last month, he sent me a photograph enclosed with a request for money to be wired to his hostel in Australia. I sent half of what he asked for, because he always asks for double of what he really needs, and I know all his tricks by now. I thought, looking at the photograph, that the blacked-out sun is everything I want to say, and the little flares of light escaping around it are what I can manage on a good day.
Beginning 9:
The Ocean had a lot to tell me when I got to Dune Grove. It had been a long time since we’d spoken—I had gone to medical school in the Midwest and stayed there to start my career, working night shifts at the ER in Kansas City and volunteering at a diabetes clinic during the odd hours in between.
You’ve gotten taller, said the Ocean when I approached her. Your face is more serious.
I asked her how she’d been.
Restless, she said. Always restless. There’s never enough room.
She told me about the Moon—her sometimes lover, her sometimes not—and how she pulled and prodded, splitting the seams of her waves, stretching at the hems. She told me about the boats and planes she’d swallowed and the skeletons that had putrefied in the mouth that was her body, dissolving with the salt and nitrate, and with them, the fizzled synapses of knowledge and memory funneled through them into her. She told me about spilled oil and plastic shrapnel, how they clogged her breathing like phlegm in the sinuses. She told me she would outlast it, that slow poison, outlast it as surely as she would outlast me.
I missed you, I told her.
It’s alright now, she said. You’re home.
Beginning 10:
Beginnings are a sacred thing. That being said, I find it impossible to start this story. I hope you won’t take my lack of a proper opening as something flippant or blasphemous. It’s just that if I don’t start somewhere, I won’t start anywhere.
Beginning 11:
At the time Ramona hired me, she and Poppy had been married for about four years and had been together for seven. I wonder, sometimes, if they would have reached a double-digit anniversary if they had both lived. My first instinct is to say no. But then I remember that night—a few nights before Ramona died—when they got in that terrible fight, and I paced the shore for hours to lose their shouting in the black waves. I talked with the Ocean about fish, and which one she loved best—the Atlantic sailfish, she said, and also a very small and bizarre creature who lived at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, whose name she did not know. When the lights in the windows had all gone out, I slipped inside and went to Ramona’s room to check her vitals. To my surprise, Poppy was in bed with her. She was lying on her side, awake, watching Ramona sleep. Her hand rested on Ramona’s concave stomach, rising and falling with the soft swell of her ribcage. I started to back away, but Poppy heard me, and lifted her red-rimmed eyes to my face.
“I can’t go back to being the person I was before her,” she said.
“You won’t,” I told her. “Even if you wanted to.”
Poppy nodded, and then nodded again. She turned from me, and I retreated down the hall.
Beginning 12:
It was never a question of whether Ramona would have left—she was too stubborn, too stoic, too desensitized to unhappiness. She would have weathered anything Poppy stormed up, thinking herself too much of a woman to be chased off by her tempestuous young lover.
Poppy was the flight risk because she had the most to lose by leaving. She wanted to stay so badly that all she wanted was to run away.
Beginning 13:
Ramona died in the middle of the afternoon on April 17th. She was very calm that morning, which makes me think she either knew exactly what was about to happen, or had no idea at all that it, at last, was coming.
Beginning 14:
It might be best to start with my own origin. My mother and father—if you’ll forgive me for bringing up my mother and father so early on—left their high school sweethearts at the altar and hotwired a decaying minivan, rocketing out of town on a cloud of dust and hot rubber. Some misadventures later, they stumbled into a wildly overgrown cemetery a few states over and named themselves its unofficial caretakers.
They squatted in the ramshackle house that the old groundskeeper had abandoned half a century before, and that spring, the scraggly graveyard birthed itself anew. Grass sprouted soft and tame, ivy bloomed in corkscrew curls, and lilies popped up in orderly rows. The groundskeeper’s house repaired itself and grew a second story. Even the insomnia-riddled ghosts seemed to sleep easier. The mayor’s office put my parents on the town payroll, sending them a modest but livable paystub every two weeks. For the next twenty-odd years, they spent their days dancing on the mausoleum steps and kissing lavishly in the pits of the freshly dug graves.
The garden of their union choked out the weedy, needy saplings of me and my brother, perceiving us as interlopers who would siphon off their magical, healing love for ourselves. It was a love that did not recognize us as its mirror—the echo of the sky and sea into each other—but as something diametrically opposed to it. At some point, I too began to see myself as disconnected from the love that bore me. I was, at best, its unsavory offshoot.
Beginning 15:
In medical school, I spent a year elbows-deep in a cadaver. For a lot of would-be doctors, cadaver lab is what does them in. Two people in my cohort dropped out by the end of the first week. They both told me separately that what broke them was our assigned corpse’s dark blue nail polish.
“How do you gut a body that still has nail polish on?” they asked me.
“I’ll let you know,” I said.
Beginning 16:
The morning after I arrived in Dune Grove, I woke early and went to sit with Ramona, who could still walk and dress herself, at the kitchen table. Neither of us ate. I opened a window, and the salt wind tossed the waves of our sleep-rumpled hair.
“I have strange dreams here,” said Ramona. “I always have.”
“What do you dream about?” I asked.
“Oh, lots of things. Every night since I got sick, I’m visited by the spirit of someone I used to love. They sit with me for a while, and we talk about life and what comes after it.”
“What comes after it?”
“It’s a secret only the dying know,” she said. “I’ve been let in on it, and I can’t betray the covenant.”
I laughed, a little uncomfortably. Ramona didn’t laugh at all.
“Who visited you last night?” I asked.
“My old pet parrot. His name was Polly because I didn’t know he was a boy. Last night, he came to see me with all his beautiful green feathers, and he told me that he forgave me for forgetting to clean out his water dish. He told me that when I go, he’ll sing for me so I don’t get lost.”
“That’s lovely,” I said.
She scoffed. “I’ll see if he keeps his word. I never trusted that little fucker.”
Beginning 17:
How to describe the house at Dune Grove, I wonder? Not much furniture, very airy, which made it feel bigger than it was. Gray slate roof, peeling paint. It was a summer cottage, not intended to be lived in past early fall. There was no heating, and electricity only on good days. The kind of place that had been purchased when land was plentiful and cheap, and had remained largely unchanged as more extravagant homes sprang up around it, each one an unheeded warning to keep up or cash out. The tap water needed to be boiled before consumption.
Beginning 18:
This is the problem, I think: I wanted to be someone else so badly that the wanting made a home in me and called itself human.
Beginning 19:
Ramona and Poppy met at the Kafka Museum in Prague. I myself never met Poppy until I was summoned to help her wife die. Ramona insisted—till the very end—that I had been invited to their wedding, but unless my invitation had gotten lost in the mail, this was simply untrue. I sent them a present anyway—a dainty golden hourglass with the inscription “Love is timeless.”
“Come in, Doctor,” Poppy said when I appeared on the doorstep, damp and scraggly from tramping through the sand and fog.
Her tone was cordial, but her lip was pinched. Poppy was taller than me, strawberry blond, with round, childish cheeks and small eyes that were neither blue nor gray. Her face, I thought, was a craterless moon.
Once I was over the threshold, I eagerly set down my hefty bags. I had walked nearly two miles from the ferry. The cottage was in a state of disarray. I wondered if Poppy needed a maid more than Ramona needed a doctor.
“You have a beautiful home,” I said.
“It’s Ramona’s.”
“Is she awake?”
“No.” She made no move to usher me deeper into the house. We looked at each other. I swallowed a request for water, and then a request to sit.
“Should I leave my bags here?” I asked.
She nodded, not looking at them. “You probably packed too much.”
I glanced around the room for something to comment on. Nothing grabbed my eye, so I settled for Poppy herself.
“Ramona tells me you’re a scholar of the Bible,” I said. “What’s your area of specialty?”
“Revelations,” she said.
“How’d you get into that line of work?”
“The only book my father owned was The Field Guide to Nautical Knots,” said Poppy. “When I got to college, I ate the entire library. I learned that all Western literature stems from the Bible, and I became curious. Tell me, Doctor—are you curious about anything?”
I shifted in place, scuffed my feet on the sand-flecked hardwood, unsure where to step.
“I’m curious about how I might help Ramona,” I said. “And you, of course.”
There was a small creaking from someplace I couldn’t see. Ramona peered around the corner, rubbing her eyes. It had been a long time since I’d seen her, and it showed. Her choppy black bob was bled with white, and her face—which people described as having “character”—had eroded fresh rivulets of wrinkles.
“Poppy,” she yawned, “I told you to wake me up when Janey got here.”
“Sorry, darling,” said Poppy. “You just looked so peaceful.”
Beginning 20:
Death did not part my mother and father. On vacation for some anniversary or birthday, their rental car plummeted from a cliffside road after my mother lost control of the steering wheel. The Ocean told me all about it, later on. She said they died on impact with her body, that there was no suffering except for how hard they clenched each other’s hands as they fell. Their flesh fed a litter of orphaned sea lion pups for weeks.
My parents had purchased plots in their cemetery years earlier, but it ended up being a waste of money. My brother and I filled their empty coffins with lilies.
Beginning 21:
Ramona was raised in an insane asylum and Poppy in a lighthouse. Both upbringings left distinct impressions on their characters. For example, Ramona was reared by the rotating staff who helped care for her mother, a catatonic schizophrenic. There were fifty other adult patients confined to that grim state institution, but no other children. The sterile halls echoed with chemically imbalanced sobbing and screaming and muttering, as well as the eerie lack thereof. The food came from government cans. Ramona passed the time by stealing supplies from the art therapy room and pretending that her mother knew who she was.
On the other hand, Poppy’s lighthouse meant that she was isolated not only from other children, but from all other people but her glum, widowed father who had no vices and no virtues. He homeschooled her with the only book he owned—The Field Guide to Nautical Knots—and fed her nothing but unseasoned fish. He kept the hungry lantern well-oiled, and Poppy spent her afternoons helping him scrape barnacles from the lighthouse’s rusted body.
Ramona and Poppy were both quite adept at solitaire. They played it together, sometimes, on good days, sitting across from each other with separate packs of cards, talking only to announce that they had won. Then they’d reshuffle their cards and switch stacks. I don’t know whether they would have traded childhoods, given the opportunity. I never asked.
Beginning 22:
I told Ramona my secret as soon as I determined that she was, in fact, dying.
“I can speak to the Ocean,” I told her.
She huffed out a soft snicker that made the page of her book flutter. “And I can speak to dead people.”
“It’s true,” I said. “Ever since I tried to drown myself.”
Her dark, dark eyes flickered up. “What would you do a thing like that for?”
“I wanted to sleep without dreams. I was nineteen.”
“Tell me something only the Ocean would know, then.”
I told her what the Ocean had confided in me—what she had known about Ramona ever since she first waded hesitantly into her shallows as a precocious and promising young woman.
“You’re afraid of fish because if you stand too still, they swim over and nip at your legs with their cold little fish lips,” I said. “It makes you feel like a corpse. Plus, you hate eyes that don’t blink.”
Ramona’s hand stilled on the page she had been about to turn. “Tell the Ocean to mind her own business.”
Beginning 23:
My brother Joseph saw his first solar eclipse when he climbed up on the roof of the school to evade detention. It was a few months after our parents died. He watched the moon slide across the sun and stood suspended in that surreal false night, watched the searing crimson outline singe the blackness behind it like an eye, watched it burn a hole darker than the void, stranger than time, the oldest new god, hypnosis, epiphany, inverse dawn. Joseph dropped out of school the following day and blew his half of our inheritance on a camera and a ticket to Bangkok, where another eclipse was scheduled to occur.
“How can I do anything else?” he reasoned from the airport phone booth. “I have to see it again. I can’t sleep.”
We argued, as we tended to do.
“You’re chasing a dragon,” I said, “or you’re in love with an idol. Either way, you have to go back to school.”
“Come on, Janey. It’s magic. It’s like being in another dimension. I’m seventeen.”
I was in my first year of medical school and was functioning on amphetamines and energy drinks. My hands shook. My temple throbbed. I had two exams coming up about organic compounds I wished had never come crawling out of the cosmic stew.
“Suit yourself,” I said. “Just tell me you won’t look directly at it, even if you will.”
“I’m telling you that I won’t look directly at it.”
Beginning 24:
The Moon is countless nights older than the Ocean. She was born from an aborted rock of earth and became its shadowed little ghost, spinning out on the horizon of exile. Because she can never rejoin the place that is both her mother and child, she contents herself with controlling the movements of its waters, its winds, its seasons.
The Ocean fell in love with the Moon because she was the only force that could overpower her. When you are your own god, you worship anything impressive enough to make you look up. Or so I’m told.
Beginning 25:
I had been hired as a doctor, but on nights when Poppy threw her fits, I doubled as a cook.
I walked down to the Ocean on one such evening and asked her for a fish large enough to feed three. She tossed me a flounder on the crest of her finger, and I let it flop around the sand until its gills shuttered like an abandoned house.
“Thanks,” I said.
It’s nothing, she replied, and it was true—a fish was to her what a fingernail clipping is to us.
I filleted the flounder sloppily and tried to compensate for my lack of finesse with a brown, salted crust. Poppy didn’t come to the table, but I left her plate in its usual spot. Ramona ate with gusto.
“What would I do without you, Janey?” she asked, scraping her fork along the rim of her plate.
“You’d do just fine,” I said. Because I thought Poppy might be listening, I added, “As long as you have Poppy, you’ll be fine.”
Something clattered in the next room. Then a dull thump, a foot kicking a soft wall. Neither Ramona nor myself stood to investigate.
Beginning 26:
Poppy dug a television out of a closet and spent two afternoons resuscitating it to sputtering half-life. One of its antennae was crooked, and Poppy’s efforts to right it only resulted in a clean snap. The other antennae dangled limply, the flag of a fallen nation. There were no channels. Static scratched and skipped across the little screen and needled Ramona’s increasingly sensitive ears.
“Does that have to be on all the time?” Ramona asked one afternoon in a way that didn’t sound much like a question.
Poppy was cross-legged in front of the television, her thin hair streaming flat down her back. The contours of her face were mottled by pale, glitchy light. “It relaxes me. I like looking for patterns.”
The wall of twitching gray matter moved in sync with the smash of the waves outside, only at certain hours of the night, only when I was alone in the room.
Beginning 27:
After, the Ocean wanted me to stay.
“I can’t,” I told her. “She’s dead. It’s over.”
I told the Ocean that I would take a cupful of her back with me in a glass bottle, back with me to wherever I was going. She refused, and when I reached down to scoop her up, she recoiled from the shore with a haughty lash.
You’ll have all of me, she said, or nothing.
I looked into what I imagined were her eyes.
They looked, I thought, a lot like stomachs.
