Broken Tides

Chapter One

The ride back from the hospital felt forever long. Aunt Katrina sat in the front driver seat, quiet. Tension in the car was thick, heavy. She knew I was feeling a whirlpool of emotions, and neither of us knew how to handle it. She raised her hand to the radio knob and hesitated for a moment before turning the volume down. 

          “Hey Marlowe?” I glanced up to her gaze in the rear view mirror, but didn’t turn my head. “How was your mom?”

    Katrina was my mom’s younger sister. She had gained custody of me when I was little, about five or six. My mom was a patient at a treatment center a ways inland, being there most of my life after honest to god losing it after my father went missing. She claims he’s alive, out in the middle of the ocean; nevertheless the police declared him dead after he was missing for a month and the only thing they found were his clothes and shoes at the top of a cliff’s edge. 

    “Mar?” I heard my name called again. 

    “Hmm?” I didn’t really feel like talking. 

    “Did your mom say anything different this time or-?” 

    “No, not really. She called me ‘Lance’ though.” I paused. “I think she’s really lost it.” Hot tears pricked behind my eyes, welling up and demanding to be released. Lance was my father’s name.

    “Damn-” Katrina brought her hand up to her mouth “oop- I mean, darn.” She smiled sheepishly at me in the mirror. 

    I didn’t say anything, cocking an eyebrow at her; it was always funny to me, how she was so afraid to swear in front of me. I wasn’t a little kid anymore-far from it, but she still felt it important to rear me not to have my father’s ‘instinctual sailors’ tongue’. I couldn’t give a shit either way. 

    “Do I really look that much like him?” glancing down to my hands in my lap, I fiddled with the small bronze band on my pinky, that matched the one through my lower lip. 

    Katrina was silent, but staring at me in the mirror. 

    “Aunt Kat?” 

   

    She sighed heavily. She put on a fake smile, looking at me. I knew I wouldn’t like what she had to say and she knew it too, and her facade of a smile faded as she stammered “ I mean, other than the faded blue hair- which I have that new lavender color by the way- piercings and tattoos,” she stopped. She looked away from the mirror and back to the road. “I mean, a little. Kinda.” 

   

    I rolled my eyes and glanced back out the window, leaning my head against the window. My head bobbed against the glass, but honestly I didn’t care at the moment. I was angry and hurt. All my mom ever did was rant about my father; ‘He’s still out there!’ She’d insist. ‘You look like him.’ ‘You’re just like him!’ ‘Don’t leave me either!’. I really couldn’t take it anymore. 

    Today when I tried to convince her I wasn’t my father she insisted I had the same distant gaze, everything. I had no clue what she meant or why I had to be at the hospital to hear it again, over and over, once every month. Aunt Kat always felt bad that I could only see her for so little time, but honestly I was just glad that I didn’t have to endure it any longer than that. It hurt; it hurt me, it hurt her, watching her struggle to grip and hold on to reality. 

    To be fair, her version of reality really seemed to slip through her fingers like sand all at once. I want to say that I loved my mom, but I never really knew her. Just what I knew of her before. But all I had experienced was the chaos my father left behind. I couldn’t say I hated him either, because I never really met him.