Ἐμμανουήλ

Mare

My father called my mother Mare. He liked the shortness of it, and maybe the sea in it too, though he never said so. By the time we drove down to Galveston, their marriage had already broken apart like something left too long in salt water. They were separated. He was living with a woman named Birgit in a tower by the shore. Mom was just visiting us at the shore. We wanted to see him. We wanted to believe we could do it cleanly, without crossing whatever line had formed between the past and the new life he had chosen.

But there are no clean lines in a broken family.

We tried to avoid meeting her, yet the meeting came anyway—forced on us in a parking lot outside their building. She stood beside him like a fact we had not agreed to. He asked if we wanted to come up to the apartment. The four of us said no. It was simple and it was loyal, and it was all we had left to give our mother.

Afterward we found her on the Galveston beach. Evening light on the water, a hard wind coming in. A fishing boat rolled close to shore, its net arms stretched out like a tired insect. The sky was bruised and the surf was up. We were shaken and she could see it. I approached her alone.

“Did you meet her?” she asked.

“Yes.”

The word struck her. She seemed to fold in on herself, made smaller by something she had tried to brace against. I told her we refused to go up. That we had not spent time with them. It did not undo the hurt, but it was all I could give.

We faced the sea together. The silence grew around us, wide as the gulf.

Then she turned slightly, not looking at me. “Do you smell that?”

“What?”

“Roses,” she said. Her voice was soft, almost startled. “It’s so strong.”

I smelled nothing but salt and wind. But I knew what she was sensing. It had happened to me as well in the past so I was able to recognize it. Mare, my mother, standing before the sea, cloaked in the scent that belonged to the Mother of God.

“I don’t smell it mom.” I stood waiting for the scent that didn’t come.

Then I turned to her, “This is for you,” I said. “It’s Our Blessed Mother. She sees your pain.”

I put my arm around her. We stood that way a long time, watching the dark water rise and fall, and we cried quietly, the way people cry when the sea is close and the world has already said too much.