The Shark Wife

Her father owned the beach on which she’d spent the happier days of her childhood and young adulthood. It hugged the shelf of rocks that kept their house elevated and safely separated from the highest of tides. A largely glass structure, the house always fixed her in her father’s sight. He was a successful screenwriter who mostly worked at home in the study that faced the ocean and all her antics. 

Sarah had grown up a wild, yearning girl with tawny skin and sun-bleached hair and eyebrows. Only a trace of sorrow in her green eyes marked her as different from all the other eternally summer sprites who did cartwheels on the sand or flirted with the waves, running forward, then leaping back, with shrill screams. Sarah’s sorrow was a vestige of her mother’s care, not her departure, for things were much more peaceful in the house now that Tania had gone. 

When Tania had lived with Sarah and her father, she had spent much of her time rattling her metaphysical chains and muttering about the real world and how far removed it was from the glass house on the ocean. Tania occasionally wept over her daughter and bottles of murky alcohol. She was Cassandra to Sarah’s Pollyanna, she would mutter. Sarah didn’t understand either reference but she could not help but feel that a Pollyanna was something inferior and to be despised. Like those roly poly bugs that she and her friends would poke at with sticks.

When Sarah’s mother left, her pessimism seemed to leave with her. Sarah grew up mostly convinced by her father’s view of things. His words, always neatly packaged for popular consumption, could usually soothe any angst that gripped her. Still, a trace of the wondering, wandering Tania remained in Sarah, shadowed in the young girl’s eyes which were always looking seaward. But if the shadow Sarah slipped out sometimes at inopportune moments, she had to laugh it off and pretend it was inconsequential. Invariably, she had to apologize for something she’d said during one of these moments. Her father bit his lips, refraining from retorting, “That’s something your mother would have said,” but they both knew it to be true. Sarah feared becoming a Cassandra as much as she hated the idea of being a Pollyanna.

When she was older, Sarah and her friends began to surf the tumbling waves that shook fists against the shore. They knelt, then stood on their boards, bodies curved and arms extended for balance, and rode the roaring ocean that swept them quickly to shore or inverted them beneath furious swirling waters. The girls never perceived their activities as dangerous. They’d grown up by this ocean. They could hardly believe it could harm them. When they grew tired, they stood or tumbled their boards in the sand, their bodies colorful in wetsuits that smelled of salt and neoprene and hope. They waited for their energies to return and then ran back into the sea.

As Sarah grew older, her forays into town became a series of journeys through the local school system, each school better at developing her talents than the last. Her father had exacting tastes and did not suffer mediocre teachers; for surely they were to blame for her disinterest in all things academic. Sarah didn’t mind these “experiments” for she could always find balance upon her return home to the beach where she and her cadre of friends engaged in their joyful pursuits under the watchful eyes of her father and a handful of maids.

Then there were the boys who came, boisterous and ocean-slicked, like seals with dark or golden skin, with raucous laughter and proprietary airs that Sarah’s father disapproved of but wisely refrained from attempting to quash. Better to let it all sort out here under his watchful eyes than at the mall, or worse, at one of the nightclubs he sometimes frequented for business reasons.

Sarah flitted from one boy to another, allowing herself to be touched for the briefest of moments before she slipped into the ocean. Whenever a boy became too moony, his advances too lecherous, Sarah’s girlfriends converged around the hapless teenager with a fierce protectiveness while Sarah ran off into the surf. The boy soon withdrew and was often never seen again on Sarah’s beach. The censure of teenage girls can be a powerful thing.

But then a time came when Sarah herself bought a boy to the beach and did not shy away from him. Almost instantly, her father recognized the boy as the one who would take Sarah away from him. He’d been standing in his study, absently looking out at the rough ocean as he conducted some business on his cell phone. He saw the cant of Sarah’s head towards the boy, the way her form leaned into the concavity of the boy’s side. Backlit, the two formed a monolithic darkness against the setting sun. It filled Sarah’s father with foreboding, but he was distracted by his call.

Attending to his work, Sarah’s father moved to rustle through papers on his desk and just when he paid attention again, he found that the boy had grown a beard, that the arms encircling Sarah were more muscular, and that Sarah’s body had grown fuller. In the reflection of the window, Sarah’s father saw his own face lined with concern, his hair flecked with streaks of gray. The tide was advancing, the ocean creeping towards his child who was no longer a child. Sarah’s father felt the return of the nameless dread that had slipped away while he’d been busy and distracted, but he gritted his teeth and vowed to support his daughter if this indeed was her choice. For a rare moment, he thought of how Tania would disapprove of this vapid boy. He tried to congratulate himself on his enlightened superiority.

Sarah’s father planned the wedding on the beach and, in a strange bit of whimsy, tied a floating barge to a yacht so that the reception and dancing could take place both on shore and on the ocean. The band set itself up on the barge and Sara and her new husband, Jack, cut the cake to the cheers of their friends. When Jack leaned forward to push a slice of cake into Sarah’s mouth, she leaned back in mock horror. Unbalanced by the freight of the wedding dress she had not yet changed out of, she fell into the water. She sank down, watching in bemusement as all the bubbles swirled about her. It was as if she was inside the glass of Champaign that she’d been drinking. 

Whirling in the tumbling ocean, Sarah wasn’t afraid. She’d been conceived in those waters, and her mother, according to her father’s legend, had nearly given birth to her there as well. Sarah’s wedding dress weighed her down and wrapped around her. She could feel the heavy, wet mass of it. She tugged at it and when she felt a tug back, she assumed that she’d snagged her train on some part of the barge. It was with some sense of wonder that she lazily twirled about and came face-to-face with the shark.

It stared at her with dull, ancient eyes and a blood-flecked grin. “Oh my,” she thought somewhat inanely as more blood swirled around her dress. The shark seemed excited and moved rather quickly then.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked and a stream of bubbles flew up in front of her as the ocean received her question. Then there was another tug and she felt herself pulled up from the water, the shark retreating as planks from the barge were used to beat it away from her. As Sarah surrendered to darkness, she though she heard it say, “No else can have you.”

***

She was lucky. She’d only lost a foot. The shark had severed it just above the ankle, right above the tattoo ( a Celtic love bracelet) she’d gotten when she became engaged to Jack. Her husband. She had to get used to calling him that now. He hovered above her hospital bed, as did her father, and in the deep funk of a demerol  haze she thought she saw her mother briefly shaking her head. “There’s no hope for you now,” she thought she heard her mother say, but it might have been the shark’s voice.

Her father loomed above her, his face, a rictus of comfort. Jack and some of her girlfriends’ faces bobbed up and down, their skin stretching and collapsing. Her husband’s face had acquired stubble that reached up to his cheekbones and she could not help contrasting it with the shark’s smooth, grey skin.

“We’ll postpone the honeymoon,” she heard Jack telling her and she nodded but she wondered why. She was alright wasn’t she? Then her gaze travelled down to the length of the bed where one foot tented the sheet and the other foot did not. She sat up abruptly and all around her shouted in unison, “You should rest, take it easy.” But she had to see, didn’t she? She pulled back the sheet and saw the stump in bandages and the clever sock fitted on it. The bit of flesh she’d given to the shark, an absence that was, at the same time, present in her mind. She sank back down into the hospital bed and let the diminishing voices around her carry her back into darkness.

***

They moved to Jack’s condo, ten minutes from the beach by car. Too far to hobble to on crutches. She tied a gaily colored ribbon to the ankle of her chinos to where her foot used to be to signify that she was doing well, that she hardly noticed this piece of her that was missing. She would survive, adapt, thrive even. Jack promised that they’d get a car she could drive soon, but he delayed, as if afraid of where she might go if she had complete mobility.

One night he came home to find her sobbing. He asked her what was wrong and she wanted to strike him for his lack of comprehension. “I feel my life is on hold,” she told him. It was not exactly what she felt but it was close enough. 

He brushed his lips against her hair, taking in the smell of sea salt that always seemed to linger on her. “We should go on our honeymoon,” he said. “You need to put this behind you.” 

She sighed and he took her sigh for assent. Unable to express what she really felt, she smiled to show that he understood her after all, despising him because he did not understand her in the least. They made plans to leave after she was fitted with her prosthetic foot.

They took a ten o’clock flight from LAX and travelled for eighteen hours to Australia. They took a second plane from Sydney, to the Gold Coast, a bright summer beach fringed with resorts. Jack tried to distract her from the ocean with nightclubs, theme parks, and wild life sanctuaries. She gently tried to steer him to the water, as if he was the one who’d been shark bitten and ravaged. They lay on the beach bronzing, watching scantily clad boys and girls tussle with wild waves. Spitefully, Sarah wore shorts, a bikini top and a brave smile that Jack took as a sign of acceptance. He referred to her more often than not now as “my wife” or “the wife” as if he’d lost the memory of her name. He lauded her heroism to anyone who commented on her injury as if she’d done something more than merely survive. 

They had two weeks to spend in Australia. Two weeks to be indolent and carefree. Jack told her that he was all hers, even as he surreptitiously glanced at emails and text messages from work on his iPhone. Sarah tried to remember exactly when he had become her father.

One night, she let him go off to a bar on his own. She forced him really. She had a headache, she said. She just wanted to stay in their cool room and relax in the Jacuzzi or sip fruity alcoholic beverages on the balcony. She hadn’t decided which path she’d take yet, she told him. Jack put a guilty, sheepish look on his face but left at last and she exhaled as the door shut behind him.

Sarah waited nearly thirty minutes as she sat naked on the bed. She stared at her hands clasped on her lap, taking in the symmetry of her fingers, feeling the cold constriction of her wedding ring, the hard poke of the small diamond of her engagement ring twisted the wrong way.

She felt a sudden biting desire to feel seaweed between her fingers, to stroke the slippery slime of great strands of kelp rising from the ocean floor. She put a wraparound skirt on over a bikini bottom and a T-shirt over a bikini top. She walked through the lobby and no one looked at her twice. The long skirt hid her missing foot. A pair of sunglasses hid the look in her eyes. 

She walked onto the strip of dark beach outside the hotel, pricked by the sandflies and annoyance at her stumbling gait. Some couples strolled along the shore. Some college-aged boys and girls clustered around squares of beach towels. Drinking and smoking, their rude calls were rendered exotic by their accents.  She tried to remember a time when she found conversations of this sort amusing.

Sarah walked to where the sand was wet and looked out into the dark water, trying to separate it from the dark night. She limped forward. Her prosthetic foot didn’t fit well and it chafed against the nub of her ankle. She let the skirt fall away from her and watched the scum of frothy bubbles appearing and disappearing as the waves reached the sand and then retreated. She took her sunglasses off, ridiculous at night, and watched the waves sweep them away. 

It was peculiar to feel only one foot getting wet so she walked father in until her shins were splashed with water, and then her thighs, and then that part of her she hadn’t been able to give back to Jack after the “accident.” The water came up to her belly now and she spread her arms out, splaying her fingers on the water’s surface as she was lifted up and set down again. Up and down. Again and again. Above her, the moonlight burned the contours of her face, illuminating a trail of phosphorescent jellies in the distance. 

She felt as if she had to beg permission to be here in a way she never had to before. It was the same ocean but a different one. “It’s me,” she said. “It’s Sarah.” Her voice was small and lost quickly to the night.

She could feel a desolation deep inside her that she knew only her mother would understand. A wave rose and struck her violently in the chest and for a moment she was gasping and swirling beneath it. Once again she saw the bubbles, felt as if she was floating in a glass, barely distinguishable from the intoxicating liquid that might slide down someone else’s throat. But then she bobbed up, salt water sliding down her own throat. It felt good to feel the scrape of ocean water as she swallowed, to snort the water through her nose, like someone who might be close to drowning but not nearly close enough. She forced herself to laugh, to take some control of the situation. She patted the water like a child and her smile slipped away as she felt herself off balance, parting the water to either side of her and scissor kicking slowly, her movements both familiar and strange. She bared her teeth in a fierce grin to the moonlight. 

“I’m here,” she said.

When she saw the blue-white fin moving towards her, she smiled and now her words took on the tone of a seduction. “It’s me,” she murmured. The words “my love” silently tumbled from her lips, echoed in her mind, giving her a release she had not felt in a long time. She saw the darker shadow in the dark water find her, merging with her own shadow. She wondered why she wasn’t afraid. She supposed that she should shout a warning to others braving the night surf, but she didn’t want to share this moment with any of them. She took a deep swallow of air and submerged her head beneath the waves and found herself face-to-face with the shark. It was a different shark. It was the same shark. It gazed at her, its eyes filled with a dull, implacable understanding of who and what she was. 

“I’m here,” she said again and the bubbles rose up.

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