7. Etta
ETTA
I brought the Charlene in just after dawn.
The sky was pale gray and the water was flat and the air smelled like salt and mud and the marsh waking up. I'd been out a day and a half and I could feel it in every part of me.
My hands were shaking on the wheel. Not from the cold. From the fact that I had finally stopped moving and my body knew it.
I cut the engine and let her drift the last few feet into the slip. The silence after the motor died felt enormous.
I tied off. My fingers fumbled with the lines. They'd handled these same knots ten thousand times but now they didn't want to work right.
When I stepped onto the dock my legs nearly went out from under me.
I stood there for a moment with one hand on the piling and waited for everything to steady.
It didn't.
Ray was there with his thermos. He was always there at dawn. He looked at me for a long moment without saying anything and I could see him taking in the state of me.
"You all right?" he finally asked.
"I'm fine."
He nodded slowly. He didn't believe me and I didn't care.
"Been out a while," he said.
"Day and a half."
"Alone."
"Yeah."
He looked at me for another moment. Then he said, "Yolanda's inside."
I nodded and started walking up the dock.
The boards under my feet felt strange. Solid. After a day and a half on the water everything that didn't move felt wrong.
My truck was still sitting in the lot where I'd left it. I didn't look at it.
Inside the shucking house the cold room was already running. The sound of it was low and steady and familiar and it wrapped around me like something I could hold onto.
The smell was fish and brine and ice. It had been the smell of my whole life.
Yolanda came out of the office and stopped when she saw me.
"Etta." She crossed the space between us. "Where have you been?"
"Out."
"I can see that. For how long?"
"Day and a half."
Her eyes went wide. "By yourself?"
"Yeah."
"Etta—"
"I need the room upstairs," I said.
She looked at me. Really looked at me. I knew what she was seeing. I hadn't slept. I hadn't eaten much. I'd been alone on the water for thirty-six hours and it showed.
She didn't ask why. She just nodded and went to get the key.
The room had been built by my grandfather for night shifts back when they ran them. Nobody had used it in years.
Yolanda unlocked the door and pushed it open. The hinges made a sound like something waking up.
Inside it was all old pine boards weathered gray. A stamped tin ceiling painted white. There was a braided rug on the floor that had been there since I was a girl. Faded blues and greens in a pattern I used to trace with my finger when I was small.
A cot against one wall with a thin mattress. A small table. A chair with a ladder back.
And a window that looked out over the water.
"I'll bring you some things," Yolanda said quietly. "Blankets. Food."
"Thank you."
She hesitated in the doorway. "Etta?—"
"I'm all right."
She looked at me for another moment. Then she nodded and left and I heard her footsteps going back down the stairs.
I stood in the middle of the room and listened.
The cold room was running below me. The compressor had a rhythm to it. A pulse. I'd grown up with that sound.
The air smelled like brine and ice and old wood. Salt that had soaked into the boards over sixty years. It was the opposite of the glass house in every way that mattered.
No glass. No steel. No clean modern lines.
Just wood and tin and the smell of the water.
I crossed to the window and opened it.
The air that came in was cool and clean and it smelled like the marsh. Like mud and cordgrass and things growing. I stood there for a moment and just breathed it in.
My chest loosened.
Not much. But some.
I turned back to the room and saw the bag I'd brought off the boat sitting by the door.
I'd packed it before I left. I didn't remember doing it but I must have. Some part of me had known I wasn't coming back to the house.
I picked it up and carried it to the cot and sat down.
The mattress was thin and the frame creaked under me.
I opened the bag.
Inside was a change of clothes. Jeans. A t-shirt. A sweater.
My toothbrush.
And the journal.
I pulled it out and just held it for a moment.
It was small and leather-bound. The cover was soft and worn. The edges had been opened so many times they'd gone smooth under my fingers.
I'd started it the year we married. I'd kept it all this time.
I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall. The boards were cool through my jeans. The rug was soft under me.
I opened the journal.
The first page was a photograph of the two of us on his boat. We were young and sunburnt and laughing at something I couldn't remember anymore. His hair was longer then. Mine was down around my shoulders. We looked happy.
We'd been happy.
I turned the page.
Another photograph. The two of us at the dock in the early morning with coffee in our hands. Steam rising from the cups. His arm was around me and I was leaning into him like it was the most natural thing in the world.
It had been the most natural thing in the world.
I kept turning pages.
Ticket stubs from the ferry to Ocracoke. Two of them. Round trip. He'd surprised me with a long weekend that first summer and I'd kept the stubs because they were in his handwriting. The dates. The times. His name written in that precise way he had.
A napkin from the restaurant where we'd gone for our first anniversary. I'd taken it off the table when he wasn't looking and folded it up and put it in my purse. He'd caught me and laughed and asked what I was doing and I'd told him I wanted to remember.
A shell he'd picked up on the beach one morning. We'd been walking and he'd bent down and picked it up and handed it to me without saying anything. Just put it in my palm and closed my fingers around it and kept walking.
I'd taped it to the page and written the date underneath.
More photographs. The two of us at the waterfront. The two of us in his truck. A sunset through the glass house window with his arm around me and my head on his shoulder.
I looked at that one for a long time.
The light in the photograph was gold and orange and the window took up the whole frame. We were silhouettes against it. You couldn't see our faces. Just the shape of us together.
I remembered that night. The way the air had smelled. The way his voice had sounded when he'd said my name.
I closed the journal and set it down beside me on the floor.
Then I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them.
And I broke.
Not crying. Just breaking.
Like something inside me that had been holding itself together for a day and a half finally let go.
My breath came in shallow and my chest was tight and my hands were shaking again but this time it wasn't from exhaustion.
It was grief.
I sat on that floor for I don't know how long. The light coming through the window changed. The sounds from downstairs shifted as people arrived for the day shift. The cold room kept running. Its rhythm never changed.
I didn't move.
Eventually I heard footsteps on the stairs and Yolanda came back in with a pillow and some blankets and a bag of groceries.
She stopped when she saw me on the floor.
"Etta."
I wiped my face with the back of my hand and stood up. My legs were steadier now.
"I'm all right."
"You're not all right." She set everything down on the cot and looked at me. Really looked at me. "How long have you been up here?"
"I don't know."
"Have you eaten?"
"I'm not hungry."
"That wasn't what I asked."
I shook my head.
She pulled a container out of the grocery bag and held it out to me. "Eat something. Even if it's just a little."
I took it. Inside was soup. Still warm.
"Thank you," I said quietly.
She nodded. Then she saw the journal on the floor beside where I'd been sitting.
"Is that?—"
"Yeah."
"From when you got married?"
"Yeah."
She looked at it for a moment. Then she looked back at me.
"You brought that with you," she said softly. "When you left."
I nodded.
She didn't say anything else. She didn't have to.
"What time is Daniella's appointment?" I asked.
Yolanda blinked. "What?"
"Dialysis. What time?"
"Eight," she said slowly. "But Etta, you don't need to worry about?—"
"I'll drive her."
"You don't have to do that."
"I want to."
She studied my face for a moment. Then she nodded.
I picked Daniella up at seven-thirty.
She was quiet in the passenger seat. She looked tired. She always looked tired on dialysis days.
"You didn't have to do this," she said after a while.
"I know."
"Mama could've taken me."
"Your mama has enough to do."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "You look tired too."
"I'm all right."
"Etta."
I glanced over at her. She was watching me.
"What happened?" she asked quietly.
"Nothing you need to worry about."
"That's not an answer."
"I know."
She studied my face for another moment. Then she nodded and leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes.
She didn't push. That was the thing about Daniella. She knew when to let something sit.
The dialysis center was in a low brick building twenty minutes inland. I'd been there before. I knew the way.
Inside it was all fluorescent lights and pale green walls and the smell of antiseptic. The chairs were arranged in rows with machines beside them and people sitting in them with lines running into their arms.
Daniella checked in and they took her back. Yolanda was already there waiting. She must have driven separately.
She stood up when she saw me and crossed the room.
"What happened?" she asked quietly.
I looked at her.
"Tell me," she said.
So I did.
We sat in two chairs in the corner while Daniella slept hooked up to the machine. The dialysis center was quiet except for the soft beeping of monitors and the hum of the machines.
"Tell me," Yolanda said again.
So I did.
I told her about the launch party two weeks ago. How I'd driven up late because Daniella's ride to dialysis had fallen through that morning and I'd taken her.
"You were late because of my girl?" Yolanda asked.
"It's all right."
"Etta—"