by Elizabeth Rosen
The only sounds as we sat on the dock, mother and daughter, our backs to the rising sun and bare legs dangling over the weathered boards of the pier, were the occasional splashes of fish leaping from the water and our neighbor, Arnie, re-aligning his motor boat now and again to stay near the docks as he fished. With his bucket hat pulled low over his craggy face, he’d bait his hook and cast it toward one of the piers where the game fish hung out at this time of the morning. Took about a minute for something to bite. He’d reel it in, re-bait and repeat.
They didn’t called it that. They called it a D&C. There was no fuss, just a medical assessment. The sheets had been stiff with bleaching, the warm electric blanket they’d put over me when I said I was cold instantly a cocoon I wished I could retreat to and sleepily wait to transform into something new.
Out on the water, Arnie yawned loudly. The sound carried across to us as we sipped our coffee, held our heads, trying to recuperate from your sister’s engagement party the night before, wild and joyous thing that it had been. We watched a crab swim sideways out from under the dock, yanking itself jerkily through the water, a thing that shouldn’t be able to swim, but could.
“You know he made her have an abortion last summer, right?” you’d said to me yesterday as we opened bags of ice and took saran wrap off platters of food.
I did know, but it was unkind of you to try to make your sister seem weak for the decision. It hadn’t been as simple as you had made it sound. I saw you were afraid to look at me, afraid of what I might see in your face if you did. All the pettiness and sisterly competition that mothers can see and do nothing about. All the fear of missing out, of never catching up, of never being loved the same way by a good man. I’d seen you force the smile to reach your eyes when you hugged your beaming sister who never seemed to put a foot wrong, and how you’d worked twice as hard to be loving to make up for it.
I scooted closer to you now and put my arm around your shoulder. I was a younger sister, too.
Under our feet, a school of tiny menhaden was circling. They swam all together in the same direction, like starlings at dusk, around and around, every hundredth turning parallel to the surface for a half-second, flashing silver in the morning light. They darted two feet over and began to circle again there. They moved as one, around and around, an impossibly graceful vision of cohesion. You could never see the reason they’d changed location. You could never see the one who’d made the decision.
The wind was starting to pick up and I could hear the pennants on the neighboring pier flutter and snap as the sun began to warm the estuary waters. Soon, we’d have to go back inside and start the clean-up.
“Did I ever tell you I had an abortion?” I asked, the smell of the pre-I.V. alcohol rubs suddenly there with me on the dock. That hadn’t been as simple as it sounded, either.
“Really?”
In the recovery room, I’d struggled to rise up through the anesthesia to the surface where your father waited for me to come back to him, to all of you. He sat on the edge of my bed holding my hand, and brushed the hair from my forehead. He smiled gently when I managed to open my eyes. I had groggily touched the thick pad between my legs, there to soak up the bleeding.
The gulls were going crazy, squawking and squabbling a couple of docks down. Sometimes I think they are gathering the troops, alerting everyone in the neighborhood that a fisherman is doing well, hoping that they’ll all benefit. Other times, I just think they are carrying on for the sake of carrying on.
Out on the estuary, Arnie lay his fishing pole down and bent to raise his anchor. The low growl of his motor rolled over the water to us as we watched him pull away from the piers and head further down the shore. I hugged you tight against my side. I kissed you above your ear.
“Yes, and it’s going to be ok, my darling girl,” I promised, the mesmerizing fish below our feet circling and circling, flashes of light darting in the watery depths.
Originally from New Orleans, Elizabeth Rosen lives in small-town Pennsylvania where she pines for fried oyster po-boys and misses telling tall tales on the front porch, but has grown to love snow and colorful scarves instead. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in places such as North American Review, Baltimore Review, Flash Frog, Pithead Chapel, New Flash Fiction Review, and many others you can read about at www.thewritelifeliz.com. Colorwise, she is an autumn.
Emerge Literary Journal 