The sun crested the horizon and burned the mist from the water. Helen sat at her writing desk and stared out the window at the calm sea. She hadn’t missed her morning swim all summer, and she liked these conditions. She wanted to feel the cool salty water against her skin.
She finished the letter she had been polishing for the last hour, folded it carefully, and slipped it into an envelope. In a trembling hand, she wrote, “For you, Jenny,” in the center of the envelope. She placed the letter in the middle of the desk next to a small silver urn, then walked into the bedroom and put on a one-piece bathing suit. From the corner of her eye, she caught her shape in the mirror. For a moment, she held the image in her mind, then looked away.
Helen sat down at the foot of her bed and thought about how much she still loved her parents. They had done their best to give her everything in their power in the absence of anyrhing other than the willingness to be decent people. She had betrayed their decency through the mindless arrogance of youth, through being herself, a wild young pseudo-intellectual who didn’t know any better. She had wounded them deeply, and she wondered if anyone still loved her. She doubted it.
She headed down to the beach and stood at the shoreline for a few minutes, studying the waves. Her stomach burned. She felt fatigued from a night of restless sleep. Her husband’s death had left her with a shared history that she struggled to remember. His last words to her were, “Let’s not do this anymore.”
Her daughter Jenny was in Costa Rica on some interminable quest, always absent from what mattered most. She was a rude, indifferent, drug-addled girl, someone Helen didn’t understand or even like. Blood was by no means thicker than water. That notion was absurd.
Even Helen’s 17-year-old cat Amelia had just passed away. The night that it happened, Helen cradled Amelia in her arms for hours, weeping inconsolably. Amelia had been a true friend, an unconditionally accepting confidant. It was all Helen could do to get her veterinarian to coordinate Amelia’s cremation and return the remains to her.
The swims softened the terror of aging. The sea was like thought, smooth and serene on the surface but primordial below. It was a split territory, a place where brave people could wander into decisions that needed to be made. Nothing could be more honest. It was the only place that made sense to her.
She strolled into the water and walked across a deepening sandbar until the waves pulsated around her hips. She dove in gently, letting the chill saltwater numb her to the bone. A flounder skimmed directly beneath her and into the deeper water, nearly disappearing in the sand with each stop along the way. She dove down a few feet and followed it until she could no longer keep up, then broke the surface and began swimming directly east, straight into the shimmering sun that now hovered just above the horizon.
Helen swam farther into the sea than she had ever gone, well beyond the sandbar. The water grew cold, dark, and deep. She continued on for another twenty minutes until she could barely tread water, then turned toward the shoreline. It looked like a foreign land.
The pain in her stomach was gone. It would never invade her bones. Life had been a strange dream, a glittering arrow shooting through the mist in the dead of night toward some invisible target. She wondered why it had been so hard to love and be loved. Nothing had lasted, and no one could ever own what remained. There was nothing left to do but be done with it. She exhaled, embraced the exhaustion, and surrendered to the waves.
