No Mother

It occurred to Lucy, not for the first time, that if she died out here, no one would know. She would be a missing person, lost at sea, like the old sailors, swallowed by the deep.

Unlike those sailors, she had no sweethearts clasping tight to the foreign gifts she’d given them to remember her by. She had no children to abandon, an explanation always on their lips about where she’d gone. She would be leaving no abyss at home. That comforted her, even if the thought of dying did not.

The only thing left behind would be the dress. If her twenty-nine-foot sailboat were shipwrecked, the dress would just be a pile of wet ruffles at the bottom of the Atlantic. At that depth, things did not decompose. Bodies did not bloat and rise to the surface. The dress would never be completed, but it would never fray either.

Lucy thought of this every hour. She curled in the captain’s seat, staring at the endless blue. The only break was the horizon, where sea transitioned to sky. Again and again, she pushed the needle through the pale linen, embroidering blue waves and white froth. This was the first garment she’d made for herself in so long. No movie star would wear this. No director would criticize how it went against the story he was trying to tell.

No daughter would inherit this. She would not sneak into her mother’s closet and button it down her back for dress-up. There was no little girl to speak of. The dress was all Lucy’s.

This is what I would’ve given up if I had kids. Time sprawled endlessly into the future, unmarked by first days of school, dance recitals, and kindergarten graduations. Mothers can’t do this.

It was something she’d wanted to do for decades, right after her own mother had taught her to sail. It started with specific rules: Hold the mainsheet tight. When the wind gets heavy, let go, or we could capsize. Never face the wind. If you ever need to sail into it, you’ll have to make a zigzag pattern. Watch out for the boom. Push the tiller in the direction you don’t want to go. Be careful. Hold fast. Breathe.

Then, as with any art, it became more feeling. Lucy no longer needed to repeat these instructions in her head. The sail across the Atlantic might have been more interesting if she were a bad sailor. Instead, it was quiet. It was strange to see the ocean and not hear seagulls, but Lucy was the only living creature for leagues.

This was how it was meant to be. She was supposed to find herself, enjoy her freedom. She was supposed to make this dress.

The quiet did not last forever, though. Lucy must have gotten too prideful, thinking she could best the great sea alone. The old gods needed to humble her. The ocean churned beneath her, and rain came, slow at first, and then all at once. So did thunder.

Lucy had prepared for this while still at port, going through the motions over and over. She reefed her mainsail, switched her jib for a smaller one, and battened down every hatch. She threw her dress into the cabin and turned into the wind–there are times when every rule must be broken.

“What if there’s a storm?” a friend had asked when she’d told them about her journey. Lucy thought that was a dumb question. Storms were inevitable. She only wished someone had told her that before she’d gotten married.

Lucy closed herself in the cabin and waited. For the first few minutes, she could not see through the pitch black. Lucy thought of how, when one sense was cut off, the others were supposed to intensify. There was a metal clip that secured the mainsail to the halyard, and in the swirling wind, it ding ding dinged against the mast. The dampness of below decks permeated her nose. Salt had sat on her tongue so long that she no longer tasted it.

Then sight came back, in blacks and whites and so many grays. It was too dark to work on the dress, so she wrapped her blankets around herself and wedged her body into the V-shaped berth at the bow of her cabin. It was almost as if the boat were spooning her.

Her boat, bought with her hard work. Days on set lasted eighteen hours, sewing and mending the costumes of every actor. When she had slept, it was dreamless, always ready to return to work in a few hours. So many times, Henry had complained. After this movie, we’ll go on vacation, she’d say, just you and me. And then a new contract would enter her inbox, and it was changed to after this one, I’m serious.

But look at what it had got her! A boat in the middle of the Atlantic. Something that was all hers.

Playing house with her siblings, Lucy was always the mom. Even when everyone else stopped playing uncle or cousin or dad, she did not give up her role. She did not have the same authority as her parents, but being the eldest daughter made her a close second. Still, she’d heard “You can’t tell me what to do” at least once a day. Her younger brothers and sister would rage against getting dressed, eating vegetables, and always bedtime, but she would still tuck their blankets beneath their bodies to ward off the cold at night.

Lucy didn’t know it at the time, but a resentment grew for her parents. She could not see them as people until she grew up. As an adult, she saw herself in them, people who weren’t equipped to have kids. The only difference was that they had done it anyway.

In middle school, Lucy sprawled on the living room carpets of her friends’ houses and stared at the turning ceiling fan. She’d scream at her friends who’d taken the baby names she’d liked. You can’t have Daphne, I already called dibs! At the time, it felt like the most important thing in the world.

Lucy pictured her little boys and girls, their features an amalgamation of hers and whichever boy she’d had a crush on at the time. She would be a perfect mother. She would be nothing like her parents.

This was the way of life. She’d been given a baby doll when she was little more than a baby herself. From infancy, she was supposed to practice being a mother. It did not seem like having kids was an option, so she made the dream her own.

Then Lucy graduated from high school. Her college roommate learned how to do laundry, and she learned how to be alone.

“Alone?” people had asked when she talked about sailing across the Atlantic. “You can’t do that alone!”

Of course she could. All her life, she’d been looking out for herself. She'd known for a long time no one was going to kiss her boo-boos. Why not do it alone?

But there was a difference between independence and loneliness. Those long hours with a needle and thread on the bow of her boat, Lucy often found that forbidden whisper at the back of her mind: I wish Henry were here.

No man is an island, but plenty of women are.

Henry and Lucy married when they were both in their late twenties. In those first few years, it was easy to make the excuse that they were too young to have kids. Grandparents would scoff, but she and Henry were fine. They worked, saved, and traveled as much as they could.

In their thirties, the conversation was less avoidable. Lucy had her ways, curtly answering with no elaboration anytime they talked until Henry forgot about it or something else came up. When she felt she was in the clear, Lucy finally declined to work on that next movie. It had been five years since she and Henry had gone on vacation, and she was excited to see the Bahamas.

The two sat on the deck of an island bar, drinking Mai Tais and laughing. A few sailboats milled about the marina. “I want to do that one day,” Lucy had said.

Henry laughed, and his eyebrows pinched together in confusion. “Do what?

She gestured with her drink towards the water. “That’s the best way to travel the Caribbean, you know? You get a small boat and live on it, hopping from island to island. Just like those people who that live in vans, but on water.”

He bit his straw, hesitating to answer. At last, he worked up the courage: “Will you ever have the time for that?”

Lucy tilted her head. “What are you talking about? I can take off anytime. I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Yeah, but you have, like, an addiction to working. It’s all you do, movie after movie. Can you give it up for that?”

“Yes”

“The sailboat's more important than me.”

Lucy’s jaw dropped. She was being overly dramatic, and she knew it, but if Henry was joking, then she might as well play along. “Are you feeling neglected, poor guy?” she mocked, her lips pursed like she was talking to a baby.

“Oh, come on, don’t do that. Don’t pretend my feelings aren’t real.”

Lucy blinked. Was he being serious? “Henry, you know how much this job means to me. Making dresses for Hollywood was my childhood dream.”

“Wasn't your childhood dream to be a mother?”

“I’m not having this conversation right now,” Lucy said immediately. She looked back across the island below them, focusing instead on the marina. Dreams change, but these were the two that stuck: costuming and sailing. They were her two great loves.

“Lucy…” Henry tried before thinking better of it. They ate dinner without words, listening only to the lull of conversation around and the terrible reggae music the bar was playing.

In the hotel room, he brought it up again. “Why do you shut down every time I talk about it? A few years ago, you were still open to it.”

“Because we were younger,” Lucy explained. “I didn’t have to be ready.” Lucy was sitting on the edge of their king-sized bed, staring at the art over Henry’s shoulder. The hotel had designed the room in typical Caribbean bright colors, and the painting that caught her eye had bright blue waters intricately swirling around a wooden sailboat. Come Sail Away! was printed in yellow letters at the top.

“I’m not saying we start now, but we can at least talk about it,” Henry said.

Lucy shook her head. “If we talk about it, we have to face the fact that the biological clock is running out.”

“We still have some years–”

“Are you ready?” Lucy blurted out. Henry kept trying to meet her eyes, but the sailboat painting had her focus. “Come on, you act like it’s so easy to birth a whole living person and take care of it. That’s fucking insane.”

“I never said it was easy, but I know we can do it together.”

“Bullshit,” Lucy said. “You don’t have to carry it. It won’t split your body. It won’t ever feed off of you. For you, it’s easy.”

“Don’t blame me for basic biology.”

Lucy shook her head. “That’s not the point. This is so much more of a physical burden for me, not to mention the mental toll. I can’t come home from work and spend my only hours off taking care of this kid. The point is that you won’t even give me a moment to think about it.”

“You’ve had years to think about it!” Henry said. “This is our child we’re talking about. Don’t act like your job is more important than them.”

“Okay, will you be quitting your job?” Lucy asked.

“That’s not fair.”

“Are you not asking me to do the same? It seems perfectly fair.”

Henry sighed. “Alright, yeah, fine. I can take a few years off. This is a priority to me.”

Lucy took a deep breath, really letting the words sink in. She met his blue eyes. They were so much prettier than the ocean in the painting. “You will?”

Henry grabbed both of her hands. “Of course, but you also have to make time for us. You have to try.”

Try. Of course she could try. When she was a kid, she didn’t think being a mother was something women could opt out of. Now, once again, she felt she had no choice. Henry had just offered this big sacrifice, and she didn’t want to lose him. She didn’t want to be alone.

So she agreed.

Once she got off birth control, it was surprisingly easy for Lucy to get pregnant. She told Henry it felt as if there were a parasite inside her, feeding off of all of her nutrients. He said that was just pregnancy hormones talking.

But Lucy’s body did not feel like her own anymore, and Henry didn’t understand that. Something had taken root inside her, something foreign and wrong. She thought of mothers giving birth to demon children. She thought of La Llorona drowning her child in rage. She thought of faeries switching out babies with changelings. Who’s to say her child would really be hers?

When she started bleeding, she did not feel how she was supposed to. Her doctor delivered news of the miscarriage to only Lucy. It took her an entire week to tell Henry, knowing what he would see on her face as she said it.

“You’re relieved,” he noted. There was no emotion in it, just cold observation. Lucy did not waste time denying it.

In the end, she did lose Henry, even though she’d nearly lost her body to keep him. He knew there was no point in convincing her to do it again.

On the eve of her divorce and fortieth birthday, Lucy bought a boat. She did not take the next movie offered. She took the time off. She started designing a dress.

She traced over this sitting in the dark of her cabin, thrown around by the storm. There was a list of things she should’ve done differently. Should’ve never gotten pregnant, should’ve just told Henry the truth, should’ve never told him about her dreams of being a mother. What she did wasn't right. She wasn’t right.

Did she give up a crucial part of being a woman, or was the miscarriage a sign, as she’d always thought? If she didn’t die in a shipwreck, she’d have another forty years. What to do with all that time? Her pursuits thus far had involved collecting knowledge and creating as much as she could. How to make eighteenth century stays and glean the political climate from the popular styles. There were specific rules for making historical costumes, but there are times when every rule must be broken. As with any art, this had become more feeling. She’d have no child to teach this to. It would die with her. Her only legacy was a tiny name on the bottom of the credits. Was that enough?

Lucy was in tears now, but no one could hear her. No one would know if she died in this storm.

Children were not legacies, but people, ones that could grow up to resent their parents. They did not deserve a mother who was relieved when she’d lost one.

Lucy knew she had made the right choice, but it didn’t make her resent her loneliness any less. She had to make peace with it. She took a deep breath and let it go. Only then was she able to slip into sleep, not knowing whether or not she’d ever wake.

Lucy nearly died in that storm. When the rain and noise were over, she pushed open the doors to her cabin and gazed upon her deck. The mainsail hung in tatters from the mast. Fish and seaweed covered the floor. But the sun was bright overhead. It was still shining.

Lucy took a few deep breaths and began working on the repairs. It was lucky she had so many sewing supplies in addition to the safety kit. She checked the GPS and charts, surprised to find she wasn’t so far off course. It was another few days until Madeira, but she could survive it, and she could do it alone.

I survived it, Lucy thought, barely catching her breath. Her journey had been long and terrible, and this wasn’t the first or last storm she would encounter. It was certainly the worst she’d seen. There was always a calm sea on the other side of it. The old sea gods had not yet killed her.

Once again, Lucy found her place at the captain’s seat and began her embroidery. The ocean swirls were almost done, and after that, she just needed to put it all together. Was there really an end to all of this?

When she sewed in the brightness of a new day, it was easier to forgive herself. You have to let it go.

That dress was finally finished the morning she first saw the island of Madeira on the horizon. In a week or so, she’d reach the Mediterranean, the site of Odysseus's great journey. Unlike him, she would not struggle to return home to her spouse. Her odyssey was the point.

Lucy played dress up, buttoning the garment down her back. It was all off-white linen, save for the thousands of tiny stitches in every shade of blue. The spiraling waves poured down the bodice, thinning out towards the middle of the skirt. The top was masculine, with large, billowing sleeves like the old sailors she saw herself as. The skirt was all femininity, jutting outward with the weight of three layers of linen. It flowed and flounced, as ephemeral as a changeling. As fluid as the sea.