Surfacing

Abstract

Surfacing Carrie R. Moore (bio) Memory settles over the house like salt blown in from the sea. Spanish moss wilts green over the drive. Windows arch like glass lungs, breathing in her husband’s reflection as he cuts across the yard and searches the perimeter. For weeks, she’s wanted to come home, and now she relaxes in the truck’s passenger seat. Absorbs the feel of the place mothering her. She may fail in so many ways, but her body can remember these pleasures. Already, the island brings relief. It couldn’t have come fast enough. She’s missed the house where Olivia raised her. Olivia making Gullah rice in the kitchen, a mess of sausage and chili powder staining the counter red. Olivia bringing home work from her shop, threading charms from the den’s coral couch. Olivia disappearing around a corner, the flutter of pastel caftans over her dark arms as she called back: “I chose you, yeah child? So if you’re crying about some dance lesson ya want to take, I guess I chose your whining too. You’ll have it if it’s important to ya.” Not that she’d known sadness then. After turning eighteen, [End Page 582] she’d watched Olivia sink into the silence of brain tumors. She’d inherited Olivia’s savings and the house, cut fresh with death. Then fled St. Simons for college in Orlando, where she danced and met Dev and buried her grief in a new life. They’d studied at the library and shared breakfast at his uncle’s construction site, swapping stories. The eighteen-wheeler that, after crossing the median, blasted his family from the earth. Her childhood with Olivia, so lovely she didn’t mind that she couldn’t remember her first foster homes. She and Dev had married after graduation. Two people riddled with loss. Dev approaches her window. Raps it with his knuckles. She rolls it down, letting in the June smell of the Georgia coast, stickier than Florida’s. “You’ll stay in while I walk around back?” he says, worry weighing down his face. He thinks so much can go wrong here — wandering men squatting on the back porch, wild animals lurking at the lawn’s edges — believing death is always coming for someone he loves. “I’m good,” she says. True for the first time in a while. She watches him turn away, his bunned afro and cargo shorts and work boots disappearing around the house’s blue side. After a few weeks here, she’ll make her body hers. In January, her hips went weak. Pain streaking from her raised thigh all the way down her legs. A fluke, she’d thought, until every movement became less precise, the pain rippling through her pelvis. Until the director’s eyes measured her. Dev’s too, as he watched rehearsal one evening, early to collect her from the theater. “What’s the point in pretending it doesn’t hurt?” he’d asked when they got home. “Sacrifice for what you love, I guess.” She shrugged off her coat. “Well, don’t.” When she froze, he added: “I mean, doctors helped the first time around, right?” [End Page 583] “I guess,” she said. But she crushed her coat against her belly. Went into the bedroom. “What?” he asked, following. “What?” The implication too much: Sex used to hurt you too. And you got treatment for that. Only she hadn’t. After the doctors failed to treat her during those college years, the pain striking her whenever Dev pushed in, she’d lied, loving him, and said sex felt good. Part of the way she’d clung to him then. And so did this mean this painful change in her dancing would persist too? “I’ve — never taken care of it,” she said. “It’s never really gone away.” “Never?” he’d asked. Then again. He let go of her wrists. “This whole time?” They’d both needed space. Him to deal with her lying. Her to heal herself — from dance and sex — without the pressure of his presence. Not that moving out helped. She’d traded their life for...