The Weight of Salt

At dawn, the sea was a pewter plate. Nia stood calf-deep where the tide nibbled at the shore and tried to forget what her body could feel. The women of the Morwynion Club shouted to each other and slapped their arms to wake the blood. They always seemed a few degrees warmer than the air. Their laughter was not cruel, just practiced. It had learned to rise in cold places.

“Ready?” called Siân, who wore a red bobble hat, bright and unmissable.

“In a minute,” Nia said, though she had come here for this minute and no other.

She drew the zipper up the back of her wetsuit, pulled on her cap and waded forward until her thighs ached. Breathing in the cold hurt in a clean way. It pressed on her chest, a hand to keep the world still. She went farther, almost to the waist. The little waves lapped her ribs. Two more steps. The next swell lifted her belly and said, now. She ducked under.

Sound left. The world narrowed to the drum of her own heart and a slow hiss across her ears. A ribbon of hair escaped her cap and drifted, weightless. She opened her eyes. The water was the color of old glass. A gull’s inverted body crossed the bright rectangle of sky above, then was gone.

She surfaced to a shout, “C’mon then!” Siân lifted her arm and sliced the water with her palm. “To the buoy and back.”

The buoy, squat and orange, bobbed a little way out. It was the club’s ritual, a short swim to feel alive without inviting trouble. Nia nodded and dug in with one clean stroke, then another, keeping her head low. She used to be strong. That was a few months ago, and also a lifetime.

By the buoy, she paused. Salt clung to her tongue. She touched the cold plastic ring and turned. On shore, a memorial cross leaned against the big rock that locals called the Anvil. Somebody had left a spiral of shells that must have taken time to find. She wouldn’t go up there afterward. Not yet. Not this morning.

Back at the beach, the women stomped in place, toes prickling back to life, and traded remarks about tea while the sky flushed with light. Siân tugged Nia’s cap off and wrung it out hard.

“Your third swim,” Siân said. “That’s what I’ve counted. You’re quiet. Quiet is fine. Quiet is also heavy.”

Nia let out a breath. “It’s easier in the water,” she said. “I don’t have to carry anything.”

“Cold gives you that. Puts things aside for a bit.” Siân peered out at the buoy and back. “You’re staying in the village?”

“For now.” The word was a pebble in the mouth. “I’m at Mam’s. She keeps feeding me as if I’m bound to grow.”

“Let her. That’s a mother’s right.” Siân softened and touched Nia’s elbow. “Come by the Cafe later. I’ll have bara brith for you.”

Nia promised and meant it, then walked the strand with her wetsuit peeled to the waist and her arms prickling in the breeze. The memorial cross waited at the anvil. She could avoid it or she could look. She could not do both. Today she looked.

The cross was simple. Salt had fuzzed its edges with pale crystals. Someone had arranged a circle of cowries and blue mussels. Someone else had tied a lock of hair in black thread. Nia crouched and touched the thread, then the shells, then the rock itself.

She said her sister’s name in the smallest voice. “Eira.” The sound vanished as if swallowed.

Six months since the storm. Six months since they’d called to say they had found a jacket in kelp. It had been red. It had been Eira’s, though the red was stained with seaweed and salt. No body. Only the jacket. Only a shoe later, silt-rimmed and green. A locket two weeks after that, the chain snapped and gritty with sand. Little offerings from a mouth that would not open.

Nia went home along the seawall where the town’s stones wore flaking paint. The houses leaned into the weather with their shoulders squared. When she reached her mother’s house, she was not ready to step inside, so she walked past and made a slow lap of the block, then went in anyway and kissed her mother’s cheek.

“Cold,” her mother said, smiling at the wet marks Nia left on her shoulder. “You’ll get chilblains. Nothing for them.”

“Mam,” Nia said, but the gentleness in it almost broke her.

Her mother set a bowl of porridge on the table. “Gareth came by earlier. He asked after you. He says you’re stubborn enough to swim with gulls and seals.

“Gareth would know.” Nia ate and watched steam curl off her spoon.

“He always stops by the Anvil before work,” Mam said. “I think it hurts him, having nothing to carry to a grave.”

They did not say Eira. They meant her. The porridge tasted heavy with salt and grief that someone had stirred and stirred. When Nia finished, she washed the bowl and left it upside down to dry.

By noon the sky had come out blue and hard. She found Gareth near the small coastguard station, hands in the pockets of his weathered jacket, face tilted to the wind as if taking orders. He had a face people trusted, the sort that must get tired being steady.

“You look better,” he said. “The sea’ll chock some color in.”

“It shocks something,” she said, and he huffed a quiet laugh.

He glanced past her to the water. “Tide runs off today. Low early. Watch for the shoals near the point.”

“I saw it,” she said. “The bar falls more than last week, doesn’t it?”

“It does.” He studied her face, then looked at the Anvil. “You went there.”

“I did.”

He nodded once, slow. “You don’t have to. There is no must in grief. People will try to tell you there is, because talking makes them feel useful.”

She looked down at the pebbles scuffed by his boots. “So like you’re doing then?”

He chuckled. “Yeah…guess so.”

“Do you ever think she’s still out there? Not alive, I know. Just…out there. I dream of that. The sea breathes. It opens. It closes. As if it might return something if I just learned its rhythm.”

“I think of currents,” he said, careful. “Of what water is where you cannot see. I think it keeps more than it gives. That’s not cruelty.”

“I just wish I could hear more,” Nia said with a small sigh.”

“A lot of people say that, by the water. The sea speaks in ways that feel real. It isn’t words. But it can comfort you if you let it. I believe that.”

She nodded. She did not say that comfort and compulsion were cousins.

That night, when the house had settled and her mother’s television murmured in the other room, Nia put on her coat and walked back to the beach. The tide lay low. The shore widened, rocks usually submerged jutted black and slick. Phosphorescent algae glowed faintly where the water worried the edges. The night smelled of salt and a bitter green she could not name.

She took off her shoes and rolled up her trousers. The first step into the cold was always like this, a bite that made the throat tighten and the mind go quiet. She waded toward the point where the shoal bared its teeth and listened. Not a tune. A pressure. A presence.

She went deeper. The hem of her coat got wet and pulled at her hips. She shrugged out of it and left it on a rock. The water reached her waist. Her breath came shorter, little clouds, then less. She took the breath she wanted to be the last one above, closed her eyes, and went under.

At first, darkness. Then the dark lightened along a seam, the way eyes adjust slowly to a room where someone left a lamp on in another house across the street. The sound curled around her head. The cold slid into her. She kicked and sank, then steadied, arms stretched wide, unfurling against the waves.

There. Below. A pale shape where there should be none. Not a fish. Not a seal. A human outline, soft and lucent as if lit inside by a small candle. It hovered above the sand, hair rippling. It turned its face to her. It looked like Eira the way dreams look like people. The mouth moved as if singing or speaking words the water chewed to mush.

Nia reached. The current yanked her sideways, bumped her shoulder hard into the sharp lip or rock, jolted her and sent her flailing to the surface. She came up coughing and gagging, eyes streaming, chest heaving. The song cut cleanly to the slap of wind and the hiss of small waves and someone’s voice, perhaps her own, saying no no no.

She crawled up on the sand on all fours, something newly made and lay on her back while the sky wheeled its indifferent stars. Her coat draped the rock nearby. She was not sure how long she lay. When the shaking stopped and the cold went from pain to ache to stubborn occupancy, she got up, carried her shoes home and did not wake her mother.

Gareth found her the next morning at Siân’s cafe. She was warming her hands around a mug when he slid into the opposite chair and did not bother with hello.

“You went out last night,” he said. Statement, not accusation.

She watched the steam climb inside her mug. “Yes.”

“Don’t,” he said after a small stretch of quiet. “Not alone. Not after midnight. Not with the bar that low. You know this.”

“I know.”

He waited. When she said nothing further, he sighed. “I have to tell you something.” He shrugged at the window. “It’s the season of storms. The anniversary hits this week. People will ask questions. They will ask if you’re all right. They will not know what they are asking.”

“You’re doing it again,” she said. “The talking to feel useful bit.”

“I know. Listen, I can go out with you if you need to swim at night. I’ll bring a torch, keep a line on you.”

She pictured the torch beam slicing through water. Pictured the line as a leash. “No,” she said softly. “Thank you.”

He stared at his hands, knuckles chapped, cuticles ragged from winter. “It gets easier,” he said, sounding like a liar. “Or it changes at least. Doesn’t stay this sharp.”

“I used to swim with her,” Nia said. “Every week. We would go out and say the names of things. Runnel. Spindrift. Wrack. We loved those words. It wasn’t the black water that late, but the words for it. She said them like a prayer.”

“I know,” he said.

“I think she’s there,” Nia said. “Not a ghost. Not…Anything. Just there. A part of the water where the current folds back on itself. A song.”

“Water plays tricks,” he said gently. “And grief always makes meaning of it. Don’t mean you’re wrong. Just be careful what you ask of it?”

The day of the storm came with a sky that would not make up its mind. Sun, then shadow, then a sudden spit of rain too fine to bother with. By dusk, the wind had climbed. The Anvil grew a rim of foam. The memorial shells made a clatter. Her mother turned on the radio and then off again. Nia put on her wetsuit without comment and, at the door, her mother laid a hand on her cheek.

“You will come back,” her mother said, not pleading.

“I will,” Nia said, and carried the certainty with her.

Down at the strand, the sand had gone coarse under the wind’s fingers. Spray lifted and blew. The Morwynion Club had sent out a flurry of messages telling each other not to be fools. The shore belonged to the storm tonight. Nia walked into its teeth. She kept her hands at her sides. She did not look at the Anvil.

The shock took her breath, then gave it back. She kicked and dove for the deeper quiet where the surface breaks and breaks and the underneath stays steady. The light thinned and went green. The song was there at once, a pressure that settled across her head and lifted the hairs at her nape.

Eira was there. Closer now. Close enough that Nia could see the faint freckles across a nose blurred by water. Close enough to see the birthmark near the left eyebrow, a little comma of darker skin. Her mouth moved. The sound was the song and the song was the sound. Words without words. Then, as if the water made space, Nia understood.

The storm last year. The way the sea had picked at them. Eira’s hand on Nia’s shoulder. Eira’s laugh at the first slap of spray, then no laugh. The clean shock when the wave lifted them wrong. The spin and the drop and the bright little thought in Nia’s mind that said up is not where you think. Eira’s hands on Nia’s hips and the push that sent her up and out and toward the air that tasted of iron. Nia’s fingers slipping from Eira’s wrist. Eira did not panic. Eira focusing on the angle and the current and Nia. Then the pull. The powerful hand of the undertow that takes you sideways and down. A jacket snagged. A locket snapping. A last look that said stupid, I love you, go.

Nia reached. Her hand met Eira’s hand. The song brightened. The pressure shifted from outside to inside, a chord resolving. The sea around them flickered with strips of light. She could hear her own heart. She could hear her sister’s. The two softened until she could not tell one from the other.

When Nia broke the surface, it was as if the storm exhaled in surprise. She gulped air and tasted salt and metal and a faint sweetness that hit her memory: Eira’s cheap summer perfume, white flowers and sugar. Another wave rolled and lifted and lowered her and she let it. She found the rhythm and kicked toward the shore.

On the walk home, Gareth met her halfway. He looked so tired. He opened his mouth, then closed it, then put his hands on her shoulders and checked her pupils.

“You went,” he said softly.

“I did.”

“You came back.”

“I did.”

He breathed out slow. “What did you find?”

“The water keeps what it keeps,” she said. “It gave me enough.”

“What is enough?” Gareth’s voice was careful.

“To know she is not suffering.” Nia swallowed. “To know she is not angry with me. To know I can stop asking for a body and ask instead for a morning.”

Gareth’s jaw worked as if he had something to say and could not find the words that fit. He nodded instead. “All right,” he said, as if promising. “All right.”

The Morwynion Club sent a message that the day would be fair. Siân added three emojis of suns. At mid-morning she went down to the strand and joined the women again. The water swayed. The buoy bobbed as if proud to be included.

“Ready?” Siân said.

“In a minute,” Nia said, and then pulled on her cap and waded in. The first dunk took her breath and gave it back. The second washed the sleep from her eyes. By the buoy, she turned and floated on her back and looked at the sky. How thin the skin between the air and ocean. How strange that we pass between them as if we own them both.

On shore, she rubbed warmth back into her arms. Siân came up behind her and handed her a towel.

“Better,” Siân said.

“Yes.”

“Lighter?” Siân said, peering at her.

“Not lighter,” NIa said. “I don’t think that’s the word.”

“What then?”

“Stronger,” Nia said. “I can lift it now.”

She dressed and walked to the Anvil with bare feet that stung at the edges. The memorial circle of shells had lost a few to the storm. She knelt and set new ones in place and pressed them into damp sand until they held. She did not say a prayer. She did not need to. She sat with the sea for a while and listened.

The sea was heavy that morning. She carried its weight easily.