By the Seashore

cw: references to homicide

You can’t keep a secret underwater. Sound travels faster through water than air, so you’re better off telling the truth on land than you are oil-spilling the contents of your heart into the Pacific Ocean.

I couldn’t tell if anyone else knew the things that I knew. No one at the beach that night looked in my direction. They were so preoccupied with searching for me that they never even saw me standing right there, inches, maybe even centimeters away from their vigilant, salt-stung faces.

As I lingered close by, just beyond the rescue boat, I looked at them looking for me. I wanted to angry cry, tear- and oceanwater-soaked lashes matted against my face. I wanted to throw my arms around the handsome agent’s big, warm shoulders and scream, here I am! I’m right here. Why don’t you see me?

But I was unable to speak. Not because I couldn’t find the words, but because my mouth, lungs, vocal chords and tear ducts had been decomposing underwater, cradled by a kelp forest and kissed by a thousand fish, ever since my body had been dumped there four days ago.

“The current’s pushing northeast,” said one of the rescuers. “If a body resurfaced, it would drift along this line.”

“Is that purple thing a shirt?”

The handsome agent pulled out a camera. “I don’t know. The beam’s barely cutting through the mist.”

I looked down at my shirt, once draped over a mannequin at the mall as Doja Cat played in the background. Now it was slung over a rock, the hushed roar of the ocean breeze whispering secrets no one but I could hear.

The camera flash went off and bounced off the shirt’s little rhinestones I used to pluck off with my fingernails whenever I felt anxious. “Yup, we’ve got a shirt.”

The search team hooked it off the rock and placed it in an evidence bag.

“I think it’s just a piece of a shirt,” said the handsome agent, disappointed.

"It’s called a tube top," said a female agent.

Another agent laughed. “Well, it looks more like a rag," she said. "Personally, I respect myself too much to wear something like this.” She squished my top around in the wet evidence bag and scoffed in a way that made me think of Becky.

Becky had never liked that shirt.

“Why do you want to show so much skin? Your in-laws already want you dead. Is it because you and Malcom are still having trouble?” She eyed my bare shoulders as I stood under the door frame to my closet. “Your husband’s a physicist. Literally a genius. He wants more than just skin.”

I faked a smile.

“What?” she demanded.

“We finally did it,” I lied. “He initiated, too.”

Her eyes got big, like she’d seen a ghost. “When?”

“I don’t know. Three days ago?”

She counted on her fingers. “So Wednesday?”

“Wednesday night,” I lied confidently. That was the same night Malcolm needed space to clear his head and decided to stay with his parents. I stayed home with Oliver sleeping in my arms, his crib still only half assembled in the living room with the rest of the crib pieces lying on the floor like a pile of shiny white bones.

“Last Wednesday night? That’s impossible,” said Becky, relaxed now. “You’re such a liar. Because Malcolm was at_.” She stopped. “I mean, it’s, like, Malcom was being so distant with you just a few days before. And suddenly he’s all over you?”

I picked a rhinestone off my shirt. “I guess.”

***

As more time passed, the media covered me less and less. They’d replaced the replays of my last Instagram selfie (a pathetic attempt to make Malcom want me again) with Simon the therapy llama.

And finally, tonight, something to make you smile, said the reporter. In my mind, I’d translated this to him saying, enough of that dead chick. Here’s a llama-in-a-bow-tie palate cleanser to get rid of that yucky dead-body aftertaste left in your mouth after shoving the name Sally Woods down your throats.

My throat. I could still feel the polyster scarf from my closet pulled tight around my neck. That face, unfazed as it watched me grow limp.

Although I could no longer speak, I could now see everything and everyone all at the same time. I saw my in-laws Patty and Arthur telling a tearful Malcom that everything happens for a reason. I saw little Oliver asking Malcom when I was coming home. I saw Becky talking to reporters with a full face of makeup.

“We just want to find her,” said Becky, surrounded by a crowd gathered outside my house. “If you can, please join my neighborhood search group.”

She pointed to the crowd of neighbors congregated on my front lawn, all wearing Sally’s Allies T-shirts.

“Literally every person standing here with me here today,” said Becky solemnly, “loved Sally.”

I looked for Malcom in the crowd but couldn’t find him.

***

In the following days, I watched all my little Sally Allies march around in broad daylight, following Becky in some kind of sick game of hide-and-go-seek. Like I’d suddenly pop out of a rose bush and shout, surprise! Here I am!

But only two days in they gave up. That was also the day Becky had unofficially moved into my home to “help Malcom” with Oliver.

“Do you feel a draft?” she asked Malcom, referring to the mysterious cold patches my restless, livid spirit had been spreading around the house.

“Not really,” said Malcom. “I run hot.”

“You are hot,” she replied. Malcolm pulled her in close to keep her warm. Seeing them together on the couch—my couch—made my spirit toss and turn, made the power in my house surge. One of Oliver’s battery-operated toys started singing not too long after. A stack of mixing bowls fell over in the kitchen.

“What was all that?” asked Becky. She held Malcom tighter. He got and walked to the kitchen where I lingered. “Just Sally’s cooking stuff,” he said. “You don’t really cook, right? I should probably take all this to Goodwill.”

He bent over and picked up the plastic bowls—put them in a plastic bag. We were face to face now, but he looked straight through me. It was no different from how he looked at me when I was alive.

To be fair, only certain people were sensitive enough to see me, those people being Oliver and then a girl I’d never met at the beach, who fell down onto the wet sand when she saw me and later described me to her boyfriend as "a lady with a face."

Becky, like Malcom, wasn’t sensitive enough to see me. She just stared at the TV in a daze, wrapped in the blanket that was once mine. “I honestly think this place is haunted,” she said as I shrieked my ghost breath in her face. “Come sit with me. I’m scared.”

Oliver was now three, but the plastic crib gifted to us at his baby shower still laid on the floor like a pile of bones.

“Once the baby comes,” my mother-in-law Patty said at my baby shower, “your life will be over.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

My father-in-law Arthur waddled over to me like he was about to teach me a lesson. “She means it’s not easy being a mom!”

“Unless you’re me, of course” said Patty. “Then it’s easy. Malcolm was such a good kid. So good! When he was little, everyone would comment on how advanced he was for his age. I guess I raised a genius!”

The same week that Becky had moved into my house, the detectives called her in for questioning.

“And when was the last time you saw Sally?"

She counted on her fingers. "Maybe three weeks ago. She invited me to her house."

"What were you doing there?"

"I was helping her choose an outfit."

"For what?"

"Something with her in-laws. I don't know what exactly. Maybe dinner? They really didn't like her. It made her overthink how she dressed and how she came off to people."

This prompted the detectives to call in Patty, along with Arthur and Malcom, of course, all in separate rooms.

"Sweet. Easygoing." Those were the words Malcom used to describe me when the detective asked him what he loved about me most. "But," he said, hesitating.

The detective perked up. "But what?"

"Nevermind," he said.

"This is a safe space, Malcom. You're going to feel a lot better getting whatever it is off your chest."

"Well, she was on antidepressants. She was just really embarrassed about being on them. I don't think she was well the last time I saw her." He buried his face between his knees. "I just hope she didn't do anything to herself."

In the other room, Arthur was chewing on a complimentary granola bar with his mouth open, his feet up on the table.

"Anything else we can get you?" asked the detective, annoyed. "If not, I just want to go over those questions you agreed to."

The other detective nodded. "You know, Arthur, we’ve heard from other sources that you weren’t a fan of your son’s wife. What was it about her that you disliked? Was she mean? Possessive?"

Arthur kept chewing, his dead canine tooth flashing.

"I have a daughter-in-law, so I know how it is," the detective assured him. “Tell us about__.”

“I can’t hear you!” Arthur shouted, cupping his enlarged ear. His mouth hung open with masticated granola. “You’re going to have to speak up!”

At the same time in another room, Patty sipped from her complimentary plastic water bottle. "The girl barely finished high school," she said, matter-of-factly. "My son is a genius and everyone knew that she couldn't keep up with him. I wouldn't be surprised if she just got lost somewhere and can’t find her way back home. She probably doesn't know how to ask for help."

As the world fell apart, I drifted over the ocean, seeing everything and everyone all at once. Still waters didn’t just run deep. They swallowed you whole and every single thing inside you. Every bone, every ligament. Every secret, both my own and the ones confided in me.

I imagined myself holding a seashell against my ear, the way I did when I was little and would listen to the ocean from my bedroom. Except this time I didn't hear the ocean. I heard truths. That my husband of thirty-eight years stopped loving me after the twenty-fourth. That I wasn't the pretty friend. I heard the voice of a million fish-skinned Beckies luring my husband away from me toward the cliffs.

But then I saw it—me, the person I had lost, my bloated, shirtless torso bobbing by the seashore. A surfer screaming for help.

At the same time, I saw my family flipping through old pictures of me. A picture of me, as an ode to my name, collecting and pretending to sell seashells by the seashore, the same seashore where the investigators were now collecting whatever fragments of me they could.

I saw Becky crying to her therapist that Malcom didn't want her anymore. I saw the Google search of 'how long for a dead body to sink' projected in a courtroom, and I saw the defense arguing that his client meant to type, 'how long for water to boil.'

When I saw the life sentence, my spirit felt light.

"The defense made up this ridiculous water boil Google excuse that tore the whole thing open," I'd later hear Oliver tell his girlfriend fifteen years later when she asks why she's never met his family. "So now my mom’s up there somewhere.”

”And your dad?” she asks.

“He thought he was a genius.”