Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

92 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Donna Hemans
Her gold wrap, her glasses, her purple-faced watch were bunched
together on a rock. Water flowed in between the rocks, and a hard
shell crab clawed its way back up a rock. Except for the crabs and those
of us who’d just arrived, the beach was solitary.
I stripped down to my underwear and took my first real dive of
the six days we’d been there. With the sun high overhead the water
was clearer. There was a school of the translucent fish, a plastic bottle
wedged in moss. I didn’t think of what I was looking for, concentrating
instead on the translucent fish, my body slicing the water as if I were
born to be there. There were other bodies around me, Brad, Shane, the
other men whose names I never learned. I came up for air, once, twice,
three times, until I stopped counting, and headed back to the sand. I
checked her watch. It was nearly 1 p.m., not enough time to make our
4:50 p.m. flight.
My cotton bra and panties, neither made for swimming, were
clinging to my body. I covered once again, waiting for the others to
come back in. They were staying longer than I could have, going under
water and coming up for air, one after another, after another. Red, who
was to drive us to Montego Bay, came back next. He too checked the
watch. He was about to say something and I walked away toward the
coral reef bared of the sand that covered it before a recent hurricane.
My slippers weren’t meant for walking on such rocks, but I continued
stepping over trees rooted from the rocks by the hurricane’s waves,
over rocks that looked like they were embedded with bones, over
plastic debris washed ashore from another beach. There was water
in some small holes, the shells of smashed crabs. I thought of Dad
waiting at home, Mom who wasn’t always so lonely.
And then I saw my mother’s orange bathing suit. She was lying
at the edge of the reef facing the water crashing violently against the
rocks. There was no way to tell if her eyes were staring or not. I waited
a minute to slow my breathing. There was movement. She lifted a hand
as if to catch a sprinkling of sea water. I thought again that it was her
stillness that I had always feared. There was no more land, no place left
to run. She seemed at peace as if this hard rugged rock, and not the
bottom of the sea as we had feared, was where she belonged.
Lucky, I thought. Born lucky.
We returned to Long Island and my mother began flying
lessons. The lessons I believed saved her from pulling out of our
lives entirely. When I see her bringing down a plane in these difficult