And The Sea Called Her Name by Joe Hart
“My mother disappeared for a week the day she turned twenty-eight.”
These were the words she said to me on our first date. We were at a dive restaurant in South Portland sitting at an outside table sipping beers. We’d known one another for nearly six hours by then and had broken off from our group of mutual friends who were bar hopping the evening away. Her eyes. That’s the first thing I noticed about her. They were gray, the way the sea was on days when the rollers would come in off the Atlantic and pound the rocks in unending fury. They caught me right away when we all met up at the first pub, and it wasn’t until she’d looked me fully in the face that I realized I was staring at her and seeing nothing else.
Delphi Arans. Her name was as strangely exotic as she was. The way she moved, gliding rather than walking; how she would keep her head tilted to one side while listening; the way she began a smile, then cut it off mid way through as if worried someone might see; it was all too much for me. I got swept away as if in a tide that wouldn’t let go. I was shocked when I finally got up the nerve to ask her if she’d like to find somewhere quieter to have a drink and she said yes. I’d expected a polite brush off, but instead she took my hand when we left our group behind, their teasing calls following us out the door of the pub.
“What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?” I’d asked. “Like ran off?”
Delphi, or Del as she insisted I call her, shook her head, her hair bouncing a little. It was tightly curled gold with dark streaks of bronze here and there.
“Disappeared. She and my dad were married the week before, and when she turned up missing from their house on her birthday most people said she’d run off. Scared of commitment. You know how talk is around here.”
I did. We were both kids of third generation fishing families, both breaking the mold of our futures that would surely exist on lobster boats or working in offices that kept track of lobster sales. Our careers were indefinite, both of us attending business classes at the southern college, possibly passing one another in the halls without having known it before the night we met, though I doubted that. I would have remembered her.
“They found her soaking wet and huddled in a cave south of York after a week. She was catatonic and a little malnourished, but other than that she seemed to be okay.” Del’s eyes had flashed as she took a sip of beer before continuing. “Not that she ever told me anything. My dad filled me in on the details after I’d caught wind of the story from my classmates in third grade. Eventually she came around and was herself again, but she couldn’t remember a thing from the missing week. She said she recalled opening the back door to the house and stepping into the wet grass, but that was it.”
“Very strange,” I said.
“The greatest mystery of my life.”
“What if you asked her about it now, would she tell you?”
She had looked at me and barely paused, saying the words like they were nothing.
“She disappeared again five years ago. We haven’t heard from her since.”
And just like that she switched gears in the conversation, leaving the morbid details of her family history in the wake of more pleasant talk. By the end of the night we’d walked down a strip of beach for over a mile and I’d kissed her beneath the moon. She smiled afterward, not the kind she cut off midway but a real smile. I’m sure I fell in love right then, and I’d like to think she did too. Such a long time has passed since then, it’s the one thing I still hold on to.