Comes and Goes

Prologue ~ Author's Note

Sonia Henson went missing in the spring of last year. She went missing in April, on April 26th to be exact, one of the first days of the year that was finally beginning to get warm again. Spring was always a busy time of the year in Barlow, a time when teenagers were slipping from sweaters to t-shirts, when the stoners moved back outside from their garages, and the fishermen got ready for new shoals of fish in the bay.

Everyone sorta panicked for about the first two months after that.

Her mother said that Sonia had done everything she usually did that morning on April 26th. She got up early, far before the sun rose; did her hair, got ready for school, grabbed Lucky Charms for breakfast and skipped out the door and down the beach on the path she always, always, always took to the highschool.

And then she was just gone. Like a ghost.

Sonia was someone who everyone knew, when she hardly knew a soul. She was boisterous, loud and happy and her name got around, she said hello to everyone and everyone said hi back. No one really hated her. Of course, there was jealousy, there is always jealousy when other teenagers are involved.

The police thought three things. They thought one, she could have run away. The overdrive of a rebellious teen might have been just enough to drive her to hitchhike to the next town over and leave Barlow, since hardly a thing came out of here other than highschool graduates and loads of fish.

Her mother said no. Sonia would never run away.

So, they thought she had been washed away with the tide. She may have rolled up her leggings and stayed just a moment too long, wandered an inch too deep. They thought she had been swept away.

No, her mother said. Sonia knew better than to go in the water alone in the mornings.

Finally, they believed she had been murdered.

Absolutely not, Sonia's mother said. There was no explanation from Sonia's mother as to why she couldn't have been.

So for five months, the case went unsolved. My mom and I attended her memorial, a rock with her name carved into it being set at McKenzie Point. It had been damp that day, foggy, but not rainy. I remember my coat clinging onto me, and my mom next to me, while Mr and Mrs Henson stood and began to light candles. The whole place was alight with gold and pink, the candles standing upright and evident among the dark clothes everyone wore that day.

And after that, no one mentioned Sonia Henson. No one really brought up how miserable her parents had to have been feeling, or how dreary the town felt without Sonia skipping down mainstreet with a grin on her face, down towards the beach, towards the water.

I didn't know what to believe.

The old men, all the fishermen and boat captains, seamen and coastal scavengers, said she very well might have been swept away. But they said more than that. Some said she became seafoam, a kindred spirit returned to the sea where she felt she belonged. Some said the kindred spirits came to bring her with them to the world below the water. Those were the kinder of the men. Others said she had been dragged down as a meal for a siren. No matter what name they used, siren or dryad for most, meirenyu for my grandpa, it was always the same. She had been taken, or returned, to the ocean deep.

For five months, it was all up to everyone to decide what had happened. It was a nice closure, better than what things might have been like if her body had been found.

But she was found.

Sonia Henson was found in a shallow grave on the beach in early September, a gunshot wound in her chest and rotted half away and framed in a bed of seashells. Pockets of water sat where her lungs used to be, and some people said that pearls had replaced her eyes. They said her leg was missing, and that here was sand in her lungs. That she looked like a queen when they found her, even if she had been long dead. It was gruesomely poetic, a fate she both did and didn't deserve.