Safe Passage

When the first of the last coughs come, I take my father to the sea. I know he likes it there. Every time memory resurfaces and reveals his previous life—before my mother, before me, long before the sting of IV lines and the smell of disinfectant—he talks about all the places he’s been. The Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, the Isthmus of Corinth. Tiny, cramped spaces that are neither here nor there. All these in-betweens.

Make sure to put a coin in my mouth.

Does Charon take euros these days?

He can still walk and we walk together over sand and pebbles and green glass shards. A year ago, we were in The Hague, salt-whipped and chilled to the bone by the North Sea. Our Aegean is calmer, even this time of the year, but he’s bundled up in the same coat because he can’t handle the cold anymore. The shore is quiet, empty. The seagulls have come back to take their rightful place.

We used to come here when I was a kid. Every summer spent swimming and building sandcastles. My father, in the same bathing suit since his Navy days, coffee and cigarette in hand.

Did I tell you about the time we jumped in the Atlantic?

Yeah. Tell me again.

He tells me a gasping, wheezing story. He remembers some things wrong or maybe this is the first time he remembers them right. It was so cold, he tells me, they had to huddle up for hours afterward. In past retellings, he was back on duty in the engine room, sweating as the others shivered.

He shivers now, either with cold or with the echo of that day. I haven’t hugged him since I was twelve and so I don’t. He puts his red, steroid-swollen hands in his pockets instead and gazes at the waves, the lace of foam draped over the rocks. The skin on his face is taut, stretched thin over his skull. Smooth as the stones beneath our feet. I can’t remember him any other way. When I think about childhood recitals, birthdays, those days at the beach, he looks like this: old but not old enough, too-thin torso, too-big limbs. His past selves overwritten.

I brought him here for a reason. I brought him here because his lungs are failing him and the air hurts, so maybe he doesn’t need his lungs and he doesn’t need the air. I take off my shoes, my socks, my jacket, lay them on the sand. My father watches, shakes his head. He always needs some coaxing.

Come. It’s only water.

She cradled him once, this wine-dark sea, and she’s called for him ever since. The crash of the waves, the crunch of sand. Her ghost in the conch shell he brought with him from the Caribbean coasts. He can answer her now. There’s nowhere else he has to be.

We stand ankle-deep in the water and it stings like a hundred little jellyfish. It soaks the cuffs of my jeans. The cotton sticks to my legs like a second skin. Beside me, my father begins the long, laborious trek out to the deep and I follow him, hands flying out to steady him when he falters.

And then the sea holds us, and we’re weightless despite our soaked clothes, treading water as if we were always meant to. A homecoming.

But we’re not built for this, not really, and transformations are slow processes. Flesh torn and reshaped, forged into something new. The sun path is short these days and by the time the first gill appears, reddened and tender on the expanse of my father’s ribs, the seawater shimmers with the last of the light. He coughs, the bone-rattling cough of a dying man. He spits salt and saliva, beats the discomfort out of his chest with a fist.

Does it hurt?

No. I just have to find my sea legs.

I wait until he does. I wait until three gills form on each side of his torso, until his lungs finally rest. Until he draws water into his mouth and doesn’t choke, until the last of the coughs is silenced.

Grief is to the body as silt is to water.

My stomach is full of brine when I drag myself to shore, my clothes drenched and heavy. It’s dark now and I have to feel my way to my jacket, fingertips over pebbles and grit and sea glass. I gather my things and his. He’s left behind a coat, a pair of shoes. A few people.

The waves crash in, reaching inland, lapping at my feet. I like to think I can still see him, in the distance, though it’s dark and he’s too far into the sea. In his coat pocket, I find a coin, small and shiny, round like the moon that pulls the tides. Payment for a safe passage.