Noreen

Oyster

Mom in her forties is a pragmatic worrier. Forty of years of bad decisions, of choosing herself and strangers over her children. It took Chris dying for her to try and be a parent, and even today,  as we stand on the cold Maine coast in a heavy fog watching the tide roll out,  she makes it seem like she's doing me a huge favor, coming out this way. She takes another drag of her thin cigarette, breathing smoke into the white gloom surrounding us.

"Nor," she says tiredly, turning the cigarette. "We've been here three fucking days."

"This is his beach," I say resolutely, warming my hands in my sweatshirt. "He'll be here. Once you meet him, you'll understand."

"Look," she snaps, bony fingers fumbling with the zipper on her hoodie. Her body is thin and frail, worn and used like the needles she spent years sticking into her veins. "You didn't see a mermaid."

"Siren," I huff.

"Whatever." She takes another drag, bounces on her heels. "I've been there. You took some powerful, bad shit to forget about Chris and it made you wonder off into the ocean. It's okay. You can admit it. I won't tell anyone unless you want me to."

"I didn't," I insist, looking down at my bandaged calf. The doctors said I'd been extraordinarily lucky, and that if I had been out there a little longer, I might've passed out and bled to death. The marine biologists and any practical thinkers who'd read the newspaper article on me, meanwhile, were a bit baffled as to why a shark would attack, and furthermore, what the hell I was doing wading into the frigid ocean waters on a fall night.

Mom stays another ten minutes, then trudges back to the jeep to smoke and warm up. She thinks I'm nuts. I'm beginning to think I am nuts, that there's something wrong with me, that Liam wasn't real and none of this ever happened. 

Mom leaves for home the next morning, with a warning that I won't have any money left for college if I waste it all on hotel rooms, if I stay in Maine chasing ghosts and mythical creatures. The absent days will add up on my report cards. My grades will suffer. I'll dig myself into a hole I can never climb out of.

When I make it back to the hotel at night and go through my ritual process of cleaning the wound and eating a bag of chips from the vending machine, I do stop and think about my life. I sit in the dark beside my window, looking out at the starry sky and I am scared about ruining everything. Whether or not Chris is alive, I am. I can't afford to look for him forever. 

What keeps me up at night though, isn't that. It's the thought that he might be alive. He might be alive and never came to find me. Why? Why would he do something like that to me? 

The day Mom leaves, I try a new strategy. Before going to the beach, I stop in at a local convenience store, browsing the shelves until I've come away carrying a bag heavy with a cat's paradise: sardines, tuna, and frozen shrimp.

I trudge out to the sharp, slippery rocks where I'd last seen Liam, and scan the waterline for signs of a seal. There aren't any. There never are. But for a week I walk out and open a can or packet or shake some shrimp onto the rocks. The gulls will get them, greedy-eyed birds always circling from above. They seem to gather in heavier numbers, either because they expect my daily dinner delivery or the lack of beach-goers has finally cut into their food supply. 

But everyday, beside the food, I leave a little, ziploc bag with a note inside: For Liam. Sometimes the tide takes it; often I find it the next morning waterlogged and stuck in the pools left behind.

Saturday night, when my wallet can't take any more, Saturday night is the night I decide to call it quits. The sun sinks below the horizon as a man and his dog play fetch on the shoreline. When a hazy gloom overtakes them, they load into their truck and I exit my jeep. Wrapping the blanket from my hotel bed around my shoulders, I limp to the edge of the water with my last bag of frozen shrimp.

"I brought dinner!" I shout, and to myself grumble a few choice words. Reaching into the cold bag, the icy shrimp stick to my fingers until the heat from my hand warms them. One by one, I fling them into the sea. One by one, they thaw and drift out towards open, black water. "Come and get it!"

"You think that will work?" an amused, hoarse voice calls from just behind my shoulder.

Screaming, I whirl around and jam my fist straight into Liam's nose. He falls onto his elbows on the sand. Huge brown eyes blink into mine, and then the siren wipes the blood off his face and laughs.