She fell asleep as the clock downstairs tolled eight times, and I stared up at the thick drape of shadows that coated the arched ceiling of the room. Del’s breathing became a metronome that lulled me into an uneasy drowse between sleep and waking. Images rose and fell behind my eyes. The outline of Del’s shoulders and head slipping beneath the water, her appearance in the yard seconds after I raced inside to call for help, the black pools her eyes had been for a moment. I shoved the thoughts away, sinking deeper into the mattress and closer to her. It had been one of the ‘stranges’, as our neighbor, Harold, had said to me sitting on his porch sipping cold lemonade one evening.

The stranges are those things that can’t be ‘splained away, he’d said. They’re like that house that caught fire a dozen years or so back south a Bangor in that little town called Cadence. No one knew how it started but by the time the fire department got there it was an inferno. Everyone had gotten out ‘cept a boy of nine. As you can imagine, his parents and sister were beyond with grief. They stood there watching their house burn along with the little boy inside it, nothing to be done but put out the flames. But lo and behold as the department finally started to get a handle on the blaze, they saw something moving inside. Harold had leaned forward in his Adirondack chair, its aged boards squeaking beneath his weight. And by God if it wasn’t that boy walking through the flames, right as rain. He came down to his mother an father without so much as a blister on him. Even his clothes were fine, only smellin’ a smoke. He said he’d woken up to someone holdin’ him while the fire raged around them. He couldn’t see who it was but they were strong and he couldn’t have gotten away if he’d wanted ta. He said that when the way was clear, that person let him go, but before they did they told him who had set the fire. They said it was a man who worked with his father and wanted to hurt him due to a business deal gone wrong. Well, don’t ya know they followed up on what the boy said and found a singed gas can in the fella’s garage along with clothes full a smoke. Never got an explanation for who or what could’a been in that burnin’ house with the boy, but it knew things that no person could’a known. That’s the stranges, son, and there’s lots of them in this world.

The small comfort I felt at remembering the story was overshadowed by the sense of vulnerability it brought. Were we to simply get up tomorrow and go on with our lives, shrugging at one another over coffee and saying, Oh well, must’ve been a case of the stranges yesterday. I knew I couldn’t accept that and I didn’t think Del could either, but the longer I thought about it, the more smeared the details became. I was exhausted, and perhaps there would be a logical explanation for everything in the morning. My mother always said everything seemed worse at night, it was one of the small bits of wisdom she’d given me before my father died and her gaze had grown cold whenever she looked at me like a hearth that’d lost its fire.

I settled into sleep without meaning to, trying to focus on the sensation of me flooding inside Del as she pulsed around me. But one other thought kept returning that I’d shoved aside—another strand in the braid of panic that had wound around me. Her hands had felt strange in the yard when she reached for me. For a moment they hadn’t felt like hands at all. They had been somehow different, alien in a way that brought a shiver from me from beneath the covers beside her.

It hadn’t felt like there were any fingers attached to her hands when she’d gripped me. Her touch had curled around my arms in a liquid way, almost like—

But the idea was too much and I gritted my teeth against it, concentrating on her breathing beside me. She was safe and that was all that mattered. Even with my internal assurances, it was hours before I drifted into a fitful sleep. And it was only upon waking in the early morning light and listening to the renewed strength of the tide that I remembered what she’d whispered to me as I entered her.

It knows my name.

~

I thought there would be a long and arduous discussion that next day, but Del rose refreshed and lighthearted. She ate a huge breakfast that I cooked at the stove, the whole while talking animatedly about several new programs she was securing for the coming fall in her department. I watched her eat over my own eggs, toast, and bacon that cooled on the plate before me. When she finally stopped speaking and took in my stare she paused, letting her fork come to rest on the table.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“I’m okay. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I know you’re worried about yesterday but I think I just spaced out and went for a walk along the beach. I must’ve decided to go for a swim.”

“Del, the water’s not even fifty degrees yet. Why the hell would you go for a swim?”

“I don’t know. Like I said, I don’t remember.”

“And you don’t find that the least bit troubling?”

She reached out for my hand then and I had the urge to draw it away. Mostly because of the irritation I felt for her flippancy regarding the previous night and only partially because I worried what her hand would feel like on mine.

But her fingers were thin and firm, warm and a little greasy with butter. She gazed at me, the grayness of her eyes like veils of fog.

“I’m not going to worry about it. If it happens again, then we’ll take the next step. Everyone has something like this happen to them from time to time. It’s like thinking about something while you’re driving. All of a sudden you’re to where you’re going and you don’t remember the last fifteen miles.”

I wanted to tell her that leaving your house to walk to the ocean over sixty yards away and dive in fully clothed was a little different than daydreaming, but held my tongue. It was the virility that she exuded that kept me from saying something. She was so alive and vibrant that it made the prior night’s events seem colorless and dull, like a half-remembered dream that pales as the waking minutes turn into hours.

So we went to work that day like any other before it and we didn’t mention her voyage into the sea again. The days and weeks strung together as the summer took full hold on the land. Grass grew and I mowed it twice a week in the yard. Del planted a garden that I tilled for her, growing a section of tomatoes and onions as well as a plot of wildflowers that spilled out in a medley of blues, reds, and yellows from the borders of the brown dirt to the edge of the leaning rocks above the beach. The fishing was bountiful those first months of summer and we began to get ahead on our payments. We dined most nights in the small enclosed veranda my father had built himself off the rear of the house that overlooked the ocean. We made love most nights of the week and we were happy.

I look back at those days as the flatness that comes upon the water just before the black clouds are reflected on its mirrored surface. My father called thunderstorms ‘boomers.’ Boomer’s comin’, he’d say, and more often than not, the wind would die and the water would calm just as the low rumble would fill the sky somewhere in the direction of Canada. The stillness of the air full of electricity and the day losing its light as if something were leeching it away.

I still remember the look on her face the afternoon she came out from the bathroom, her mouth tremulous as if she might either smile or be sick. I was sitting in the living room reading a novel after having fished a half-day. She came to my chair and handed me a small white stick with a blue plus at one end visible through a little viewing window. I held it dumbly for almost ten seconds before all the implications settled on me and I looked up at her, my hand starting to shake.