The Salt God's Daughter by Ilie Ruby

on an adventure to save the world. We lived vicariously through them. At this point, I was thirteen and Dolly fifteen. They were almost the only thing we knew of love.
    We never met my mother’s new-old boyfriend. By the time we asked, they were over. She went to see him one last time. She didn’t return.
    Early the next morning, as we were getting ready for school, Dolly spotted her. We had been up most of the night waiting and worrying. “She’s back!” Dolly cried. I tore through the sand. My mother was sitting in the surf without shoes, her long black hair strewn across her shoulders, her face pale, streaked with mascara. Her low-cut Danskin dress was torn at the shoulder, soaked. She seemed lost, unable to move, letting the waves foam up around her, her hands fluttering at her sides like tiny fins.

    She had a bruise on her neck, which made her wince when I tried to reach for her. “Mom! It’s us!” Dolly cried, holding her face. She looked at us with bleary eyes. As the waves splashed up foam, pooling in tiny circles, we lifted her. We walked her back inside, her feet scraping along the sand. I asked what had happened, but she just shook her head, and I grew quiet, noticing the mustard-green edge of morning beyond the palms. She just needed to sleep, she said. I kissed her on the cheek, and she wished me a good day and slipped underneath a pile of blankets, shivering. She had been swimming in the ocean for hours, she confessed.
    We stayed by her side that next afternoon, noticing she had not moved. We skipped school the next day and tried to nurse her back to health. But she didn’t get better. The last guest had checked out of the motel. We had already turned the sign to FULL OCCUPANCY so no one would bother us.
    â€œWhat should we do?” asked Dolly.
    â€œDon’t make her mad,” I said. There was no one we could go to. Dr. Brownstein was gone, and my mother was incredibly secretive and didn’t want anyone to know what was going on, for fear they would take us away from her. Dolly and I took turns running to the corner to buy her Canada Dry ginger ale and saltines. I played the guitar at her bedside, singing Shalom Rav and songs from Fiddler on the Roof , as Dolly held my mother’s feet and gave her a massage.
    My mother refused any calls from her admirers. We didn’t hear from the new-old boyfriend. She trembled in her bed, fighting bouts of fever. I changed her sheets, listening to her labored breathing and the rattle of the ocean inside her lungs. Outside the wind spun turrets across the waves and howled so loudly it filled the apartment with an empty sound that made me shiver.
    â€œWhat if she dies?” I asked Dolly the next night, sitting on the carpet, my back pressed up to the bathroom door. Dolly
was inside, silent. She had been pulling her hair out in secret but leaving it everywhere. A tiny bald patch had appeared at the back of her head.
    â€œDon’t talk like that! It’s bad luck. Go away!” she yelled through the door.
    When Dolly came out, I pulled a blanket over my knees.
    â€œYou’re blocking me. Will you move out of the way?”
    â€œNot until you do something.”
    â€œShe’s not sick from the red tide, dummy. It’s called withdrawal from whiskey.”
    I no longer noticed the smell of it on her breath, I had become so used to it. I looked down at Dolly’s feet, noticing her purple painted toenails. There was dark red hair on the bathroom floor separated from a pile of red nail polish peels. I tried not to stare and moved out of the way.
    The next morning, several Belmont Shore residents, while putting out their trash, saw a green station wagon driving itself out of the Twin Palms Motel parking lot, no one at the wheel. They watched the car wavering to the right and the left, stopping abruptly in front of Ripples Dance Club for no apparent reason, before it eventually turned left on E. Ocean