On the second night of our trip, around midnight, Fausto and I went out to our little balcony so we could hear the ocean crash. But as we settled into the faux-wicker chairs and oriented ourselves towards the sea, we realized the waves were drowned out by the sounds of birds we couldn’t identify. Their calls pierced the air, whooping and whistling unseen, while we sat in darkness so deep I hoped my body would melt away until I was just a pale pair of ears absorbing the bird cries.
And as I imagined myself disappearing, I remembered a flight we took years before to visit Fausto’s family in Florida. The plane was cramped and overcrowded, but the baby on the other side of our row didn’t seem to notice. From her mother’s lap, she waved a dimpled hand at Fausto, who sat nearest to her in his aisle seat. He waved back, so she excitedly began a series of poses, holding each one for only a few seconds. She rested her chin on her hand, then shyly laid her face against her mother’s shoulder before leaping up to wave at Fausto again, her face blooming into a joyful grin. We chuckled, and her mother laughed in surprise, as if she had never seen her baby do such a thing. The rows immediately before and after us took notice, and soon they were also watching her and giggling softly. Across these rows, our laughter fused and lifted upwards like a cloud, even as our bodies sat belted in tight seats.
III.
In the days after Nicholas died, I kept asking Fausto when I would be done grieving. I wanted to pinpoint grief’s place in my body and root it out. “I don’t think it works like that,” Fausto would gently explain. But I wanted a hard date and decided that my grief would be over when I didn’t cry for three days in a row.
The first day was always the easiest: I would get through it by weeding the garden or cleaning my kitchen cupboards. On the second, I’d feel the urge to pull up one of Nicholas’s many photos, but I would put my phone in another room and pick up a book instead. On the third day, I’d be triumphant, convinced that I had conquered my grief, and I’d boldly tell Fausto that I was ready for another pet because I had already weathered the worst of it.
Then, I’d go for my nightly walk and see my neighbors who’d wave at me cheerfully as their own dogs trotted beside them. In response to their greetings, which always felt carefree and content, fat tears would roll down my cheeks, and I’d rewind the clock to give myself three more days.
IV.
In Cape Elizabeth, the surf was rough, as were the winds, but the ducks rose and dove unbothered. Fausto and I were watching them from our perch, a bright red picnic table outside of the Lobster Shack where we were eating greasy trays of clams and fries—we didn’t come for the food, but for the view. Now that we had finished eating, we were staring at the vast stretch of rocks before us, and when my eyes finally adjusted, I realized that one of the brown orbs in the distance wasn’t actually a duck; it was a harbor seal.
I had never seen one outside of captivity before. Gasping, I pointed it out to Fausto who followed my finger towards its place in the ocean. The seal rose up, its speckled belly winking in the sun, and plunged under again. From what we could tell, it was alone. We watched it in silence, our bodies tense and eyes squinting. After the fourth time the seal surfaced, it went back under the waves and swam out of sight entirely.
The seal’s sudden appearance seemed to mark the end of dinner, and we took our trays to the trash and away from the eyes of two seagulls, who moments before had raised their throats and called out to their peers to come share the spoils of our crumbs. But as we neared our car, Fausto remembered that he wanted to take a few pictures of a cave, so we walked back to the shore. While he knelt down to photograph the green-brown moss along the cave’s side, I sat on the beach and scanned the ocean for seals.
We were only in Maine for one more night, and I hoped to see another one before we left. I wondered if it was unusual to see seals in late May, so I pulled up information about them on my phone before wincing. The first article I found referred to them as the “dogs of the ocean.” Grief washed over me, and I was struggling to come back to myself when I noticed a group of friends on a nearby cliffside. Three of them, young women, were screaming playfully as their fourth friend, a young man, was waving his arms and pretending to fall backwards. Any fall from the cliff would be fatal, and it appeared he knew this because he was exaggerating his moves and flailing his torso. Despite his frenzied yelps and gestures, the man’s friends seemed to understand this was a game because none of them showed any real concern. Nevertheless, they giggled and rushed to save him, grabbing his arms to pull him away from imaginary danger.
V.
I first read Stevie Smith’s poem “Not Waving but Drowning” in graduate school, when I asked for extra help with poetry. Curiously, I knew that I could analyze poetry just fine, but I had started to do this lately, claim I didn’t know a subject well when I did. Graduate school was eroding my confidence—after class, I would look up the terms my classmates used like “ontological” and “epistemological” in my dictionary, confused by how breezily they used them. And after I finished a book or poem, I’d read plot summaries online because I was convinced I couldn’t trust my interpretations.
The morning the instructor and I were discussing Smith’s poem, my lack of self-confidence was on full display.
“The poem is about people on shore misinterpreting a drowning man’s gestures, so he dies,” I said falteringly before I continued, “They think he’s just waving—and he is waving—but he’s actually asking for help.” At this, I shrugged helplessly before explaining that I always had problems with extrapolating.
But the instructor insisted that there was far more to the poem than I could see. When I asked for insight, he merely sat back in his chair and smiled as if the answer was so obvious he didn’t need to offer it. Perplexed, I looked down at my book, and when I glanced up again I realized that he was openly leering at my legs.
I closed my eyes and turned away.
And then, with razor-like clarity, I realized this was not the first time I had done this. I had turned away countless times because I could only endure his staring by pretending it wasn’t happening at all.
Disgust rippled through me, but because it was too early for other faculty to be around, I was afraid to confront him, so I placated him instead. For the remaining thirty minutes of the meeting, I cracked self-deprecating jokes about my ability to analyze. I belittled myself, smiling widely as I did it. I became so lively, so effervescent that I was convinced when the meeting ended that he had to know how angry I was. As I gathered my things, however, he suddenly waved his hand between us. His eyes fixed on the floor, he stated shyly, “I’m glad that this was…” before he broke off, smiling.
I smothered the concern I felt when he did this and buried it so well that by the time I had left the building I was back to feeling nothing, almost nothing.
VI.
The last night of our trip, Fausto and I went to the beach behind our inn and stayed until the sun went down. There, we spotted a plover, a tiny, plump bird with a sweet whistle and black markings. Its nest was behind protective ropes, and while Fausto and I walked disjointedly over the sand, the plover hopped across it with ease.
Because it was freezing, even in May, there was only one other person near the shore, a woman who was taking pictures of her enormous white dog. She knelt on the cold sand while he held his green rope leash in his mouth, almost posing. We watched them for a while, giggling at the dog before the woman saw us. Fausto waved at her as an apology, but she misunderstood him and thought that we were beckoning her.
“Hello!” she rang out, her dog galloping towards us.
“I’ve never seen a dog so huge!” Fausto exclaimed, as they fell into pace beside us.
“His name is Beau! And yes, he’s part Great Pyrenees, but I’m so afraid,” she returned, her dark eyes wide.
We asked her why.
“He’s only six months old, so can you imagine?” she laughed, resting her hand on Beau’s great head.
We shook our heads no and stopped walking, imagining how big he would get. But Beau thought we wanted to play. His color and temperament were so similar to Nicholas’s that I didn’t want him to touch me, but when he stood on his hind legs and rested his oversize paws on my chest, I could only look into his happy eyes and smile.
The three of us then launched into a discussion of why she was in Maine (to care for her elderly parents) and where we had come from (North Carolina). We all admired the ocean, which had turned topaz from the sunset, and expressed surprise when we realized that she and I had both once lived in Delaware. When she asked where we were staying, I gestured towards the inn, which we could glimpse behind the trees.
“It’s so funny to see how built up that place is,” the woman chuckled. “I washed dishes there in the ’70s as a teen, and it was so crummy! And now of course it’s more like a resort.”
I tried to imagine the woman standing next to us as a teenager. I could see it: tan even then, sprightly and feisty, chatting with everyone on her shift. I stretched my imagination to envision the inn fifty years in the past, once ramshackle, now transformed into a polished resort with a fleet of soft-spoken waitstaff. From the outside, it bore no signs of its transformation.
“Thank you,” she said, out of the blue. “For not getting upset about my dog. I’m not supposed to have him on the beach, but he just brings me so much comfort.” And all three of us looked fondly at Beau, who still carried his leash in his mouth and wound circles around our legs.
As we neared the path to the inn, Fausto gestured to it and shyly explained, “This is us.” He and I waved goodbye to her, but she mistook our gesture once again.
“Oh,” she murmured, lowering her eyes, “I’m sorry to have taken up the last bit of your walk.”
“Oh no!” we both cried, moving our hands in the air as if to physically dispel her embarrassment.
“It was so great to talk to you!” “This was so lovely,” he and I reassured her, overlapping each other to demonstrate our sincerity.
I wanted to tell her that I normally didn’t warm up to strangers so easily and that Beau had unexpectedly eased my grief. I was poised to say all this, but the words suddenly died on my lips, and I shifted bashfully behind Fausto instead.
“Ah, I’m glad, I wish you both the best!” she replied warmly. We echoed this before parting ways, watching as she and Beau strolled back to the ocean, their bodies fading into silhouettes.
VII.
Some years ago, before we dreamt of Maine, we put Nicholas in the car and drove three hours east to Wrightsville beach. Fausto and I were broke grad students then, so we could only afford one night in a claptrap motel where the owner, despite advertising the place as “dog friendly,” downgraded us to a room with twin beds. When we tried to argue, he merely waved his hand impatiently and handed us the key. Later that night, we would push these twin beds together and Nicholas would sleep between us on the seam.
The next morning, we drove to the shore. When we parked, I held onto Nicholas tightly, worried he would be afraid of the ocean because he had never seen it before. But when I set him down, he began to run so quickly that his red leash went taut. For miles, he raced in front of us, his little body moving powerfully and unreservedly over the sand. Chopped-up shells littered the beach, but somehow none of us of slipped, even though I was barely holding onto the leash and Fausto was sprinting behind us. Our cheeks turned pink from exertion; we shed our coats and held them behind us like low-flying kites. Because it was January, the few people that were there turned to stare at us, but we didn’t feel self-conscious. That day, we had cast doubt far away from us. It was elsewhere, unwanted, tossing among the waves or at the bottom of the sea.