Maritime Trance

I awoke in another world. The tide licked at my toes as it rolled in towards where I lay on the sand. I tried to breathe, and a wall of sand in my throat stopped the effort in its tracks. My eyes snapped open and I scrambled clumsily to my feet and towards the surf, retching and coughing out a mouthful of the stuff. The water lapped at my waist as I threw myself into it, collapsing into the sea. I took in gulps of salt water to flush out the sand and gasped in the cool air when I surfaced. With salt coating my tongue, I could breathe again.

I dragged myself back to shore, able to take in for the first time how unfamiliar my surroundings were. I was on a beach, but it wasn’t warm. I began to shiver; this place felt nothing like California. The sky, dark grey and foreboding, cast no shadows over the beach but covered everything in a dim navy hue. Oceanic salt and grime coated my skin so thickly, it made me sick. The beach wasn’t entirely sand; it was mostly rock, and it was devoid of any people or signs of civilization. Blank. It looked as though it might rain, and dense clouds stared at me from above as if they didn’t recognize me, either. My own otherness and lack of belonging weighed on me like shackles.

I looked down at my body. My skin was darkly tanned in a way I wasn’t used to, and it shimmered with a salty brine. I wore a long white dress that I was sure I had never seen before. It clung to me, thoroughly soaked with seawater.

After venturing around the desolate coast, I found a single gravel road leading… elsewhere. I followed it with my arms crossed over my chest, feeling confused and exposed. Gradually I was becoming more aware of the cold, shivering under my soaked dress. I walked on the mossy edges of the gravel path. The last thing I remembered was being with Angela, happily strolling on the boardwalk…

I heard something. A car engine rumbled faintly from around the corner up ahead. I picked up my pace, gathering the skirt of the dress in my hands as I ran towards the noise. The mossy trees lining the gravel path gave way to reveal a muddy black Jeep. I waved my arms frantically, and the Jeep stopped. For a moment just afterward, I was uncertain, distrustful of strangers. But I had no other options; I had no clue where I was, and the nearest town could be miles away.

The door of the Jeep opened, and an old woman stepped out. She looked at me, perhaps with the same distrust that I directed at her. Then she took a few steps towards me.

“Are you alright?” she called at me. Her voice sounded husky and old.

“Do I look alright?” My voice cracked, and I started coughing.

The woman closed the distance between us, patting my back until I could breathe normally again. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Eva,” I responded.

“What are you doing out here?”

“I can’t remember.”

“What, you just woke up here?”

“I washed up on the beach.”

“What?” The woman’s wrinkles deepened into a frown. “People don’t just wash up on the beach unless they’re dead.”

I shrugged. “I dunno what to tell you.”

“You seem pretty casual about it,” she said. Then she looked uncertain. “Where are your parents?”

I gave her an annoyed look. “Do I look that young?”

“Well, what’s the last thing you remember?”

“I remember being on the boardwalk with my best friend Angela. And I remember seeing my ex-boyfriend. He looked upset.”

“Boardwalk where?”

“The one at Santa Cruz beach.”

“Santa Cruz?” the woman asked, frowning. “In… In California?”

“Well, yeah.” I frowned back at her. “Is that not where I am?”

“You’re near Hug Point on the Oregon coast.”

“Oregon?” I asked.

“Oregon,” she repeated.

“...I’m in Northern California.”

“No, honey. This is Oregon.”

“Oregon?”

“What’s your last name?” the old woman asked.

“I’m Eva Desoto. Where in Oregon am I, exactly?”

“Well, we’re about ninety minutes from Portland,” she said.

I paid attention to the details of her face. She was very wrinkled and freckled with age spots. She was white and her eyes were blue, but looking closer I saw that one of them was clouded and grey, much like the sky here. I wondered if she was blind in that eye.

“What are you doing here?” I asked her. “Are you alone?”

“Yes, I’m alone. I was going to the beach.”

“Now? It’s freezing.”

“Well, it’s a good thing I did come, or you’d be alone out here, wouldn’t you?”

“You’re right.” I was shivering again.

“Come on and get in the car, honey. You should get to a hospital.”

“Hospital?” I questioned.

“Did you not just wash up on the shore like amnesic driftwood?”

“I guess,” I mumbled. “But I hate hospitals.”

“You young people are impossible,” the woman said, turning to head back toward the Jeep. The remark sounded textbook, like something she’d been programmed to say. “Come on, now. Let’s warm you up.”

I followed her to the passengers’ side, and she helped me into the car. The heater was already on, and I held my trembling hands in front of a vent, feeling guilty about getting the seat wet.

The woman climbed into the drivers’ seat, rummaging around the back through a mess of duffels and plastic bags, pulling out a thick, scratchy blanket and laying it across my lap.

“Why do you have a briefcase?” I asked, motioning to the backseat. It was a typical brown leather one, with a name embossed on it in gold that read, Christopher Farnsworth-Goddard. Sitting on the back seat, it looked out of place alongside all the brightly colored plastic camping gear. The woman didn’t answer, so I tried something else. “What’s your name?”

“Sandra,” she told me. “Sandra Goddard. Here, drink some of this.” She handed me a plain red thermos, warm to the touch.

“Coffee?” I asked hopefully.

“Tea.” I wrinkled my nose, but enjoyed the warmth blossoming in my chest as I drank.

“Thank you,” I said. I noticed that Sandra wasn’t moving. She didn’t make any effort to turn the car around.

“Why did you come out here?” I asked.

She breathed deeper for a moment before responding. “I told you. I came to visit the beach. I was going to spend a couple of nights here.”

“It doesn’t make sense to do that,” I said. “It’s too cold to go camping here.”

“You’re right,” Sandra said passively. “It makes no sense.”

Neither of us spoke for a moment.

“Do you normally make no sense?” I asked.

“More often than not,” she said.

“I don’t make sense, either.”

Sandra sighed, as if surrendering to her lack of sense. “We should get you to a hospital,” she repeated. “Portland isn’t too far.”

I nodded, but said nothing, still shivering underneath the thick blanket. Neither of us moved.

“I hate hospitals,” I told her again, in a small voice that was almost a whisper. She looked at me, making eye contact for the first time since I’d gotten into her car.

“So do I,” she replied. I nodded at her and she threw the Jeep into drive, heading back toward the beach I had just come from.

The ocean shore here was full of smoothed rocks and little pebbles, so Sandra chose to park near a stretch of relatively flat dirt just a few yards into the tree line to set up the tent.

“Does it get much colder at night?” I asked, teeth chattering. Sandra had given me a huge coat to wear, but I still wore the wet dress underneath.

“Below freezing, at least,” she said. “But I actually packed an extra sleeping bag, and plenty of blankets. You’ll be swimming in my clothes, but you can borrow some anyhow. You should put on something dry.”

Sandra had said the tent was meant for just one, but it felt spacious, and it would fit us both comfortably. All of her clothes were thick and very warm, but not very soft. She gave me a pair of black drawstring sweatpants and a huge flannel button-up of blue, green, and yellow. I got changed in the tent. When I emerged in her clothes and wrapped in her blanket, she had already set up two foldable chairs and was in the process of starting a fire in her makeshift pit, where she’d cleared the foliage and made a circle of rocks. She was efficient, clearly a more experienced camper than I was. I sat in one of the chairs, pulling the blanket tighter around my shoulders.

“I used to paint,” I told her, unsure of what to say.

“What did you paint?” she asked.

“Clouds, mostly. And beaches with lighthouses.”

“Seems ironic that you should end up here, then.” Sandra chuckled to herself as she spoke. Her voice was low-pitched and porous, like lava that had cooled and hardened into rock. She’d gotten the kindling smoking, despite all the moisture. I wondered if she had brought dry wood herself.

“What do you do?” I asked.

“I was a math teacher for almost thirty years. But I painted, too.”

“What did you paint?”

“People, mostly. Sometimes animals.”

“Did you paint more men or women?”

“Definitely more women.”

“Why?”

She shrugged as she poked at the growing fire. “They’re more interesting. Men are just a bunch of straight lines.”

I nodded, narrowing my eyes. “Did you ever marry?”

Sandra looked up at me, and I wondered if I had stepped on something already. “I was married for a while.”

I picked at my fingernails. “How long?”

“Have you ever been married?”

“No. I’ve only had one boyfriend, and it was a long time ago.”

“You look pretty young. Can’t be that long ago.”

“It feels like a long time ago then. We were together for about a year when I was a sophomore in high school.”

“And you remember seeing him on the boardwalk, do you?”

“Yeah.” I thought of Cole’s desperate expression and felt a pang of guilt for not trying harder to contact him right away. “Sandra… you don’t have a cellphone, do you?”

“I do,” she said, “but there’s no service out here. Otherwise I would have offered it up right away.”

I nodded. “That’s okay. I figured as much.”

“You don’t seem all that eager to head back to California.”

“I never fit in very well there. Hate the heat, hate densely populated cities. I’m too nervous for California.”

“You and me both,” said Sandra, staring wistfully into space.

“You don’t seem too eager to tell me about your ex-spouse,” I told her, picking a gender-neutral word on purpose.

She made annoyed eye contact with me. “It’s not the happiest of stories.” I kept watching her, silent, until she sighed in resignation. “I was married to a man for almost nine years, but I wasn’t faithful for the last three. I was having an affair with a woman. I was about ready to leave my husband, but then he got sick. I cared for him diligently, did my duty. In sickness and in health, as they say.” Sandra paused, swiping a hand over her face. “It… worsened so quickly. It was a whirlwind. Then, just when I actually thought he was improving, he vanished.”

“Vanished?”

“We slept in separate bedrooms. I came in to check on him one morning after I got up, and he was just gone. Bed unmade, clothes unpacked. I never saw him again. I have to assume he’s passed on by now, given the state he was in… but nobody ever found him.”

Sandra looked up at me again and I tried to blink away the shock on my face. “What about the woman you were seeing?” I asked.

She looked sad. “That didn’t really go anywhere. I was riddled with guilt over everything; she probably got tired of hearing about it.”

I shook my head. “That must have been horrible.”

“It was over three years ago,” she assured me with a smile. “You learn to live with these things. They don’t define your life, so long as you don’t buckle under the weight. You can’t give yourself up to it.”

There wasn’t much conversation left to be had after such a story. Sandra cooked plain canned beans in a pot over the fire, apologizing every other minute for how boring of a meal it was. We sat together and ate, mostly in silence, until Sandra told me she was tired. She assured me that she was a heavy sleeper, so I wouldn’t wake her whenever I was ready to come in and go to sleep. Then, leaving me with a weakly crackling fire and a bucket of seawater to put it out, she disappeared into the tent.

I thought again about the last thing I remembered. Angela had said something funny; I remembered laughing. Then Cole appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. He looked nervous; maybe even scared. He tried to pull me aside, to the edge of the boardwalk behind a booth, so he could talk to me. Distrustful as always, I had refused to go alone. He’d brought both of us behind a booth… and told me something. Something important. He’d had tears in his eyes. What had he told me? I thought maybe I remembered Angela reacting to it. Had she been afraid?

After a while of sitting on my own by the dying fire, I heard light snoring from inside the tent. I didn’t feel very tired at all, in spite of all the crazy things that had happened. I thought about what Sandra had said before going into the tent; she was a heavy sleeper.

I got up from the fire pit and tiptoed over to the Jeep. The doors were unlocked, and a light came on when I opened one. I hopped into the backseat and looked at the briefcase that still sat there. It had a number lock, but when my hand brushed it, the top simply opened, unlocked. I looked again at the name engraved in a silver plate near the handle: Christopher Farnsworth-Goddard. Must have been her husband.

When I lifted the top of the briefcase, I felt my stomach drop, flinching at what I saw. There was a single sheet of paper, double-spaced, and sitting on top of it was a large handgun. I felt a sudden rush of fear, glancing out of the Jeep. I saw nothing outside. I didn’t know enough about guns to know what kind it was. Looking back at it, I wasn’t sure I had ever even seen a gun in person before. As that thought crossed my mind, a sudden headache rushed me.

I didn’t want to touch the gun, so I craned my neck sideways to get a better look at the sheet of paper inside. It was a letter, addressed to whom it may concern. The more I read of it, the worse my headache hurt. Nausea rose in my stomach. This explained what Sandra was really doing here.

I didn’t finish reading Sandra’s suicide note. Instead I clicked the briefcase shut, locking it properly, and moved it very slowly away from me, carefully leaving it right where I’d found it. I was in shock as I left the Jeep, put out the campfire, and entered the tent. Sandra snored away undisturbed. I climbed into the empty sleeping bag, listening. Would she be alive right now if she hadn’t found me? Maybe all this mess had happened for a reason. Maybe I was supposed to help her.

I closed my eyes, though I was sure I would get no sleep. I laid there for what could’ve been hours in the dark, my thoughts wandering from Sandra to her dead husband to Angela and Cole. I wondered how they were reacting to my absence. I wondered if they knew I had vanished into the sea. I thought about it for ages as I tossed and turned in Sandra’s sleeping bag, her snoring stopping and starting, on and off through the night. I grew no closer to sleep.

Then something happened. I thought of Cole, and I thought of the gun in Sandra’s briefcase. The only other type of gun I’d ever seen was a revolver… Revolver. Just like the one I’d seen Cole with. Why was Cole holding a revolver?

My eyes snapped open. I stared at the glossy plastic wall of Sandra’s tent, and I remembered everything. Cole had shot me. He’d brought me to the edge of the boardwalk, and then he’d shot me in the chest with a revolver. I remembered looking down at the blood in shock. I remembered Angela screaming like I had never heard anyone scream before and I remembered watching her run away. Then Cole had taken my shoulders in his hands. I had been stiff to his touch, trembling and crying, and he’d had tears in his eyes as he leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. Then he pushed me over the edge of the boardwalk and I plummeted into the water like a ragdoll. Sandra was still snoring.

Tears rolled over my face, dripping off my nose onto the pillow underneath my head. I put my hands over my face. It felt like a chore to keep quiet, my breath coming in loud gasps and muffled cries beneath my fingers. Slowly, feeling weak, I sat up in my sleeping bag. I unbuttoned Sandra’s flannel shirt to get a look at my own body, but there was no wound. No blood, no scar. But I remembered it. I remembered the pain.

I got out of the sleeping bag and left the tent, not bothering to zip it up behind me. How much time had passed since I’d been on the boardwalk with Angela? Had that even happened at all? Why would Cole try to kill me? Did he succeed? My head was throbbing.

I tripped on a root and landed hard on the ground, sucking in a breath at the sharp pain of landing on the rocks. Lifting the leg of Sandra’s black sweatpants, I stared at my calf. The skin had torn, but there was no blood; only a small amount of clear liquid, dripping down my leg faster than blood would. Water?

I got up and staggered toward the Jeep to stare at myself in the side mirror. A chunk of my previously black hair had turned stark white, along with parts of my eyebrows and eyelashes. I began to cry, wrenching myself away from the car and heading mindlessly toward the beach, the rocks painful to walk on.

“What…” I whimpered pitifully between the tears. “What is happening to me?”

I staggered into the water. It didn’t feel cold this time. Nothing felt cold. I wasn’t shivering, and I couldn’t feel my heartbeat. My knees buckled and I knelt in the tide, crying. The water rushed at me with anger and chaos. A hand was placed on my shoulder, and I looked up into the face of a man I had never seen before.