Darcey Steinke: Up Through the Water

The author would like to thank Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis for her good advice and encourage, ment. And also Judy Sandman, Craig Mueller, and Paul Ross Leslie for their careful attention to the book.

If you come as most do, down 17, it's around Elizabeth City that the air gets the first sting of salt and handfuls of lost and disoriented gulls circle dumpsters. Then come the ten-shack towns of Camden, Shiloh, Jarvisburg, and Point Harbor, the road between them shaded on one side by low lush woods, green so deep its nearly black, and big-leafed tobacco plants lined out on the other. Warm blond peaches and watermelon are sold from stands at dusty intervals along the road. The bridge begins at Old Point and four miles later, the car delicately balancing like a high-wire acrobat over Currituck Sound, the outer banks swing out from the coast of North Carolina like the bony curve of a woman ship. Then the long descent past Duck Beach, then Kitty Hawk where Orville and Wilbur first flew, then Kill Devil Hill where a witch that makes the fish run lives in a shack on the dunes. Down by the arcades and Dairy Queens of Nags Head, past the birdish cottages on stilts in Waves, the road flares out to Avon and Buxton, where on bad days surfers play pinball and check the water every hour for a rise. The zebra-striped lighthouse signals Hatteras and road's end. Farther still the blue smear of the Atlantic and the wait for the boat that will ferry you across to Ocracoke Island.

L ike a razor-thin fish she sped to the top, pushed up toward a light near the surface: a small patch inside the silvery vision of her eyelids. Even now, as close as she was, close enough to see clouds beyond the veil of water, she knew she could fall back like a rock to the dark floor. The tiny ripples of her fingertips grazed the underbelly of the sea's surface, then broke into air. There was a kind of slow opening, like sluggish hands working back an orange's peel.

They paused a moment before he rolled them both over to the night table and picked up his glowing digital watch. His jeans were slung over the bedpost; he slipped out of bed, pulled them on, and leaned forward so as not to catch himself zipping up. Emily watched him button his shirt and snub out what was left of his cigarette. He looked through the darkness toward her and said, “John Berry will be back soon.”

Emily heard Eddie through the walls of the cottage mentioning places she'd never heard of: Twin Falls, HumpBack Mountain, Dragon's Tooth. Once in a while girls’ names: Anne, Rachel, Elizabeth. She presumed he knew them from the winter months spent with his father. Eddie murmured again.

“That boy never shuts up,” the man said as he pulled his jacket on.

Earlier, at Paolo's she'd been attracted to this man's gray-blue eyes and the way he mulled over his beer. “What's it to you if he talks in his sleep?” The man didn't answer. Emily watched him move away through the kitchen, past the counter, stove, and refrigerator, around the rectangular table. Nearing the door he looked back at her briefly — she was unable to make out his expression — before the screen door rattled behind him.

She felt vibrations in the panel wall, two staggered sounds on the floor, then steps through the kitchen to the bathroom. Emily heard Eddie at the toilet, then the water flushing. He passed by her open door. In the dark he looked like a stick man, his long legs making a simple inverted V. He paused, stared in at her, and then shuffled back to his room. She heard him settle himself in bed. When he was little, she'd check on him, hold a hand over his mouth, always worry it would stay still and dry and she would look closer to see his skin, from his shoulders to where it disappeared beneath the covers, blue and cold as winter stones. But Eddie had stood there, not to see if she was breathing, but to focus his eyes on the pillow near her, to see if there was a man with her in bed.

Emily rolled over to John Berry's side. It was still warm. Half the day and night he worked the ferry traveling back and forth, to and from the cape. She would hear him arrive: thud of the car door, boots on gravel, and then his big frame in the doorway, his mammoth hands already fingering buttons on his uniform. He smelled like the water, and she let her mind see him as a wave moving toward the bed.

He knew nothing yet, suspected nothing. Emily thought — after the first time in May, with the tourist — that he would find out. She'd only spoken a few words to him in a low indecipherable language before they walked a mile down the beach and into the dunes. The winter had been long and boring — but suddenly there they were in the spring, two bodies in the shallow valley the sand dunes made, sea oats crackling around them.

Sometimes she thought it would be a relief to have John Berry find out. It would be easy. There would probably be one tense encounter, which she wouldn't have to initiate, and then he'd leave resolutely, not meandering around the way he might if she suggested separating. She could leave, but the feeling — that any kind of pattern, even a fraudulent one, was better than nothing at all — kept her on. It amazed her that he hadn't heard.

Nearly everyone had heard him at Paolo's. A couple drinks into the night he would start up about Emily and the cottage he would build on the soundside and how they would sit looking out over the water to the thin line of North Carolina, watching the light fade, birds wading long slow mechanical steps in the marshy shore.

She thought of how he slept near her, how he slung his angled arm back behind him, how his shirt would rise on his belly. The slight slope of his stomach seemed vulnerable. His cheeks and forehead were pinker, more vibrant than during the days. His eyelids curved, perfectly shaped like tiny plums.

The door yawned. John Berry's shadow moved around the rectangular table, refrigerator, stove, countertops. He came into the bedroom and threw up the sheet, making it billow for an instant. “Are you awake?”

Eddie said something.

“That kid's been smoking. I can smell it.”

She rolled away into a loose oval. He pulled his pants off, got into bed, molded his body around hers, and pressed his knees into the hollow hers made. His arm slipped through the tunnel between her neck and the mattress. Emily could hear blood traversing through his veins. His sea smell collided with her own in the air above their bed like weather fronts.

A few hours later, in the restaurant kitchen, Emily kneaded dough: warm and alive, spreading under her fingers like a man's back.

At first she had waitressed, but after a few seasons it had be, come hellish, the sneery customers, the way some people ate, her greedy fellow waitresses. And then once, after her fourth season, while explaining a particular sauce to a customer, someone else at the table burnt her with a cigarette. She'd switched to motel work, and the easy order of that had been comforting: clean linens and towels, water glasses in waxed paper bags, each mirror shining under her rag. But it was the repeating and relentless mess of the job that eventually got to her. The last switch, three years ago, was to this kitchen where she did the morning prep work.

The kitchen was still except for the occasional churn of the ice maker and the general hum from the refrigerator. It was T-shaped, with sinks and dishwashers on one end, and stoves, gas ovens, and warmers at the other. The back door was in between. The long part of the T had high shelves for spices and oils, and there were counters for preparation. She stood at one of these now. All the bulk supplies were stored up in the attic. At the foot of the T, the part nearest the dining room, were two swing doors, the big soup heater, and rows and rows of glasses.