“My mother disappeared for a week the day she
turned twenty-eight.”
These were the words she said to me on our
first date. We were at a dive restaurant in South Portland sitting
at an outside table sipping beers. We’d known one another for
nearly six hours by then and had broken off from our group of
mutual friends who were bar hopping the evening away. Her eyes.
That’s the first thing I noticed about her. They were gray, the way
the sea was on days when the rollers would come in off the Atlantic
and pound the rocks in unending fury. They caught me right away
when we all met up at the first pub, and it wasn’t until she’d
looked me fully in the face that I realized I was staring at her
and seeing nothing else.
Delphi Arans. Her name was as strangely
exotic as she was. The way she moved, gliding rather than walking;
how she would keep her head tilted to one side while listening; the
way she began a smile, then cut it off mid way through as if
worried someone might see; it was all too much for me. I got swept
away as if in a tide that wouldn’t let go. I was shocked when I
finally got up the nerve to ask her if she’d like to find somewhere
quieter to have a drink and she said yes. I’d expected a polite
brush off, but instead she took my hand when we left our group
behind, their teasing calls following us out the door of the
pub.
“What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?” I’d asked.
“Like ran off?”
Delphi, or Del as she insisted I call her,
shook her head, her hair bouncing a little. It was tightly curled
gold with dark streaks of bronze here and there.
“Disappeared. She and my dad were married the
week before, and when she turned up missing from their house on her
birthday most people said she’d run off. Scared of commitment. You
know how talk is around here.”
I did. We were both kids of third generation
fishing families, both breaking the mold of our futures that would
surely exist on lobster boats or working in offices that kept track
of lobster sales. Our careers were indefinite, both of us attending
business classes at the southern college, possibly passing one
another in the halls without having known it before the night we
met, though I doubted that. I would have remembered her.
“They found her soaking wet and huddled in a
cave south of York after a week. She was catatonic and a little
malnourished, but other than that she seemed to be okay.” Del’s
eyes had flashed as she took a sip of beer before continuing. “Not
that she ever told me anything. My dad filled me in on the details
after I’d caught wind of the story from my classmates in third
grade. Eventually she came around and was herself again, but she
couldn’t remember a thing from the missing week. She said she
recalled opening the back door to the house and stepping into the
wet grass, but that was it.”
“Very strange,” I said.
“The greatest mystery of my life.”
“What if you asked her about it now, would
she tell you?”
She had looked at me and barely paused,
saying the words like they were nothing.
“She disappeared again five years ago. We
haven’t heard from her since.”
And just like that she switched gears in the
conversation, leaving the morbid details of her family history in
the wake of more pleasant talk. By the end of the night we’d walked
down a strip of beach for over a mile and I’d kissed her beneath
the moon. She smiled afterward, not the kind she cut off midway but
a real smile. I’m sure I fell in love right then, and I’d like to
think she did too. Such a long time has passed since then, it’s the
one thing I still hold on to.
~
We were married a year later. It was apparent
to anyone who was around us for more than twenty minutes that we
were made for one another. I knew all her favorite songs by our
fifth date. She began to finish my sentences a month after we moved
in together. It sickened all our friends, how
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