It’s Been Burning for a While

by Anna Booraem

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On the shore, Helen hiked up her pants. She shaded her eyes with a freckled hand.

There, way out there. A plume of smoke. What was it?

“It’s a barge,” Frank said, shaking out his newspaper and digging his feet further into the sand.

“What do you mean, a barge?” Helen felt herself spit at him, the words like bitter little tacks all over his face.

In reality, she said nothing.

She knelt in the sand and dug in her bag: Neutrogena sunscreen, a crinkled People magazine, her tweezers and mirror, a warm can of Pepsi Max, tissues, loose change, and sand. So much sand. She saw herself screeching and stomping her feet like Agnes when she was three years old, tossing her purse into the ocean.

Instead, she clenched her teeth and continued her search. A bottle of open ibuprofen rattled past her scrambling hands before she finally found the binoculars.

Frank cleared his throat, shook out the paper, and dug his feet into the sand. All habits Helen detested, habits that frayed her very nerves to their very very frayed-est. She wanted to scream at him, tell him once again to stop.

“Do you need a drink, honey?” She said. “I have a Pepsi Max if you want one.”

“Nah, I’m fine,” he said, not looking up from his paper.

She pulled the binoculars out and walked to the water’s edge, wiping the lenses on her shirt before bringing them up to her eyes.

The plume of smoke looked like a corkscrew. It was really quite lovely from this distance, like a design on a latte or a tattoo she might have gotten on her ankle in college, instead of this damn dolphin she’d been stuck with for twenty-five years.

No fire. And she still couldn’t see the barge. Or whatever it was.
The waves lapped at her feet. She walked in further, oblivious to the water pushing past her knees.

“It’s been burning for a while,” a voice said, silky, yet raspy, and carrying surprisingly well over the water between them.

Helen was waist-deep in the water now, the bottom of her white shirt floating around her, jeans plastered to her legs. The voice had come from a bright yellow inflatable lounger floating a few feet from her. A woman about Helen’s age was lying on it, bobbing up and down on the waves, her face hidden under a large straw hat.

“Oh really?” Helen said as a wave lifted her feet off the ocean floor, and she found the water reaching her chest.

“Mind if I hang on to your raft?”

“It’s yours,” said the woman as she slid into the water, Leaving only her wide-brimmed straw hat floating on the surface.

Helen climbed awkwardly onto the float, her jeans heavy with water, her shirt stuck to her.

“Ahh…well… I see,” she said quietly as she raised the binoculars to her eyes again. She scooped up the hat from the water and made herself comfortable.

“It’s been out there for days,” the voice said again. Helen turned to see the woman’s head bobbing in the water next to her. The woman’s face was wrinkled and whiskery. Helen felt the familiar critique she’d always had for other women, noticing their flaws and wondering how she herself compared.

Leathery skin, deep wrinkles around her eyes and chin, and shiny hair all around her mouth – the kind honestly Helen had been battling herself for the last six years, coming fast and furious every time she looked in the damn mirror.

“You really have to get a little closer,” the woman said, turning her shiny dark eyes to Helen and winking. Her head disappeared under the water and popped up again a few feet further away. “To see what it is, you have to get closer.”

“Oh, I’m not a very good swimmer,” Helen protested. “I can’t believe I’m out this far. I’m usually back on the beach. I don’t know the last time I got into the water. Maybe that one summer when Henry was in the 11th grade, but that’s because he insisted on paddling me out in the sea kayak, which was a disaster because it flipped, and I was terrified…”

“I bet you’re better than you think,” the woman said.

Helen was surprised she could still hear the woman’s voice since the distance between them had grown immensely in the short time they’d been talking. She twisted on the raft to look back at the shore. Frank was just a speck, sitting in his beach chair. There was the house behind him. The one they’d been coming to all these years, where her children had spent two weeks of summer for most of their lives. The new owners had painted it bright pink, and it made Helen sad to see a beach house that colour– it just wasn’t right.

All the summers there; the babies, then toddlers, then that precious time of seven, eight, and nine, and then the awful teen years, and then they were gone. All gone. It was just her and Frank now.

And Frank. Who was this man she’d married all those years ago? Hadn’t he been her best friend? Like that was the main criteria for spending the rest of your adult life with someone? Hadn’t they been close, biblically, but in other ways too? And all those years, she’d wanted to run, but she held tight. She stayed put. For him, for the kids, for her job, for the book club, for the family holidays.

“Hey,” the other woman said. She was so far away now, heading toward the open sea, toward that plume of smoke, her head the size of a peach bobbing in the water, yet her voice was right in Helen’s ear.

“Come on. It’s time.”

Helen took off the hat, laid the binoculars on the raft and slid down into the water. For the first time in an age, her body felt light, lithe, and smooth. It hadn’t felt that way in fifteen years, since she stopped running and had started settling for walking the dog instead.

She held her breath and let go.