Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

She drops the thumbtacks from her palm onto her dresser and rips the clippings free, tearing them into pieces before she lets them go. When the wall is nothing more than a study of pinprick holes in plaster and the floor a mess of tattered white, she grabs a dustpan and brush and a garbage bag. Sweeps everything in, refusing to pause even when Emily’s face appears.

Utter madness to try and find reason in the unexplainable, and Tess knew, without a doubt, she’d never find an answer. Let the doctors claim Emily was depressed — ignoring everything Tess told them to the contrary — and committed suicide, but they weren’t there that night. They didn’t see what happened, the way the ocean receded—

(the shape in the water)

—the way Emily kept walking, murmuring a word too low for Tess to discern.

She pulls a face. Ties a knot in the bag. Emily was only seven years old; the word suicide wasn’t even in her vocabulary.

Tess tosses the bag near the front door on her way into the kitchen to wash her hands. On the living room television, a commercial is listing side effects for a medicine to treat high cholesterol, side effects the stuff of nightmares. Background noise, its only purpose to swallow the silence.

“Mommy?”

The voice is muffled, but Tess would know it anywhere. She whirls around, soap bubbles dripping from her fingers, her heart racing madness in the bone-cage of her ribs, and pads into the living room.

“Mommy?”

Now it’s coming from behind; Tess races back into the kitchen. “Emily?”

Nothing but the rush of water, then she hears another voice, too low to decipher, speaking under — inside — the water. Her stomach clenches.

Not possible, not possible at all — Emily is gone and all the pennies in the world tossed into a fountain won’t bring her back — but Tess grips the edge of the sink hard enough to hurt. “Emily?” she whispers.

Only water splashing on stainless steel answers. Reason kicks in; Tess turns the faucet off and steps back from the sink, wiping her hands on a dishtowel. Through tears, she glares at the boxes piled in the corner — a sandcastle built by sorrow’s hands.

From the kitchen window, she can see a small playground just beyond the parking lot. Two children are on the jungle gym, their mothers sitting on a nearby bench. Occam’s Razor, Tess thinks. Sound travels in odd ways.

With one hand in her pocket and the other clutching Emily’s favorite teddy bear, Tess takes the narrow pathway leading to the beach. Her apartment, the second floor of a converted house, is far away from the tourist trade, and the night is quiet and calm.

The soft whisper of her footsteps in the sand is masked by the susurration of the night waves kissing the shore. Once upon a time she loved the ocean, loved the feel of sand on her skin, loved the sound and smell of the surf — it’s the reason she moved to Ocean City the summer after her nineteenth birthday, why she stayed after David took off, leaving her with no warning, no money, and three-month old Emily — but now it’s a thing to be tolerated, endured.

She stops well above the waterline, afraid if the sea comes in contact with her skin she’ll follow it out, screaming for Emily as she did that night a long year ago. Only this time she won’t get knocked back to shore; this time, the waves will pull her in, and she’ll let them.

After a time, she lifts the teddy bear to her nose, breathes in, but it no longer smells of Emily, merely terrycloth and fiberfill.

“I’m sorry, punkin. I’m so sorry,” she says, her voice hitching. “I love you.” She hurls the teddy bear as far as she can; it bobs on the surface for several long moments, and then the waves suck it down.

Clouds scuttle across the moon, turning the ocean black. The weight of the air changes, a pressure Tess senses in her ears. The thunder of the waves striking the shore amplifies, and a stabbing cramp sends Tess doubling over. Her vision blurs, the salt tang of the ocean floods her nose and mouth, and a sensation of swelling fills her abdomen.

She staggers back. Presses both hands to her belly, feels the expected flatness there. The clouds shift again; something dark and impossibly large moves deep in the water, and she flees from the beach without a backward glance.

It’s all in your head, she tells herself. All in your head.

When she gets close to the apartment, the bright end of a lit cigarette glows from the shadows of the front porch. Tess waves a still-shaking hand; the orange glow makes a responding arc, but neither she nor her neighbor says a word.

Tess slides a box into the trunk of her car, wipes sweat from her brow, and heads back to the house. Her neighbor is sitting in her usual spot — the battered lawn chair in the corner of the porch — with a lit cigarette in her hand and a glass by her side. Gauging by the bright sheen in Vicky’s eyes, the liquid in the glass isn’t water.

“What are you up to, lady?” Vicky asks, her smile turning her face into a tissue paper crumple.

“Getting ready to go to the thrift store to drop some stuff off.” Tess cups her elbows in her palms, hunches her shoulders. “I finally boxed up some of Em’s things.”

Vicky nods. Exhales a plume of smoke. “Good on you. It might help, you know?”

“I hope so. I kept putting it off, kept thinking I should leave everything the way it was, just in case, but I guess I’m ready to try and let her go. That’s why I went to the beach the other night, to—

(see the shape in the water)

—say goodbye.” She touches her stomach. Swallows the unease.

“Grief is a bitch of a monster.” Vicky stubs out her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. “You think it’ll kill you, but it’s a hell of a lot more clever than that because it lets you live. Only thing you can do is give it the finger and move on as best you can. Only thing anyone can do.” She shakes her glass, rattling the slivers of ice inside. “I need a refill. Want one?”

“How about a rain check for later?”

“Absolutely.”

Tess strips off her dusty clothes in front of her full-length mirror. She’s all arms and legs and narrow hips and small breasts and her belly has no loose skin, no “pooch” that says a child once sheltered there.

Morning sickness lingering well into her second trimester and a waitressing job kept her from gaining too much weight, but now she wishes she’d gorged on ice cream and chocolate and gained fifty pounds, slashing her skin with stretch marks in the process and turning her breasts to sagging teardrops.

She pushes out her stomach, runs her hand over the curve, remembering the fluttering of butterfly wings and later, the heel of a tiny foot, the point of an elbow.

The air goes heavy and thick with the smell of the ocean. Beneath her palms, her skin ripples, and she yanks her hands away. She feels the tremor again, from the inside, and makes a sound low in her throat, then both the smell and the sensation vanish. Frowning, she pokes her abdomen with her fingertips and doesn’t stop until her skin is patterned with tiny red marks like overlapping scales.

When Tess stands, the world swims around her, and she grabs the porch railing with both hands, swaying on her feet.

Vicky laughs in commiseration, not mockery. “Need some help?”

“No,” Tess says, cupping one hand to her forehead, although it doesn’t stop anything from moving. “I got it.”

She takes each step to her apartment with careful measure, ascending one tread at a time the way Emily did as a toddler. Tess can’t remember the last time she drank this much; long before she got pregnant, of that much she’s sure. Thankfully, she left her door unlocked because sliding a key right-side up in the lock would require a bit more dexterity than she’s currently capable of.