Waves
It was the principal of my high school, or the assistant principal, a teacher, the chaplain, one of them who came to my class and retrieved me. As I rose from my desk, he or she said to bring my bag along, and it was at that moment, or maybe the one before it, directly after it, that I knew what had happened. I was walked to the principal’s office, or to the meeting room next door, where my father was waiting to confirm what I knew. I didn’t cry, of that I think I am sure, maybe, I wouldn’t do that until the funeral. My father hugged me, he must have, surely, said he loved me, maybe, and we went to his car, where we sat in the humid heat or the A/C. I think he asked me what I wanted to do. It was morning, still. Her body was a flight away. I shrugged or was silent, exhaled, exclaimed a teenage whatever. My father suggested we look at the beach or else he just started driving. He said he had heard the surf was up and the wind was offshore. We might have both known that already. As my father turned his key in the ignition, as we merged on the highway, as we pulled up at the beach, my phone rang. The word on the screen was Mom. Panic began to build in me, or a freeze response, an emotion, all of them and their absence. I showed the phone to my father. He told me to answer it. He said nothing. I hit the green button too late or the red button, accidentally or on purpose. I held the phone to my ear. Silence, beeping, her voicemail. That’s weird, my dad said. He made a face that expressed the sentiment, or I wished that he did. I dialed back the number, or I didn’t. The call rang out. The surf was pumping. There were A-frames cresting and falling, pitching from the open ocean onto the sandbar, the barrels spitting spray that glimmered in the light, or they did another time I was there, and I have grafted that memory onto this one. There was a crowd or an empty lineup. Everyone was at work or had taken the day off to surf. We waxed our boards, rubbed sand between our hands. We paddled out. I thought of my mother and of anything, everything else. Who had called from her phone? Had it been her spirit through some sort of conduit? A question I can envision having asked myself in the water, but I’m not sure the waves of magical thinking had started yet. The call was from my aunt, my brother, my mother’s best friend, someone like that, but why would any of them have called from her phone and not their own? They had my number, is what I thought, either only much later or in the surf that day. I still don’t know. Who called me, I mean. All I know is what I don’t know, grief is like God in that way. Did my mother read the message I sent her late the previous night? I had texted to say I loved her, in direct words or ones that approximated them. I don’t know if she received it, whether the call that morning was a reply from the person who read the text, a person who might or might not have been her. The waves were hollow. They were fast-moving. It was easy to get into a barrel and near impossible to get out. Over and over, I slipped under a shadow, a curtain, a roof of water, wondering whether the force of the ocean would shoot me the right way, out of the narrowing corridor to the safe light of the channel. It never did, or I just remember the engulfments and not the escapes. I was thrown over the falls, slammed against the sand. I was held down in the depths until the turbulence was done with me, which it never was. It never would be. I had left land for ocean. Now it was one beautiful, punishing wave after the next, and with each I lost my grip on where I had been and where I was going, which direction led to darkness, which way to breath.
S Graham is an Australian writer who won the 2024 AWP Intro Journals Project Award and has work published or forthcoming in New York Tyrant, The Hopkins Review, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. You can read more of their writing at www.sgraham.me.
