She Waited by the Docks

She waited for him by the docks, but he wasn’t coming.

Hair so blonde it was white. Thin, flat-chested. Legs like reeds, arms like twigs — no curves at all.
She was the kind of beautiful that makes you forget what beauty is supposed to mean. The kind that carries presence instead of prettiness.

He’d left about a year ago on his submarine. Why? Because he could. Because he was so consumed with building that damned thing — so desperate to prove everyone wrong — that he forgot his kids. He forgot her.
He said he was coming back. But the letters slowed.
And while she knew him well enough to trust that his handmade submarine would never fail him, she knew him even better than that — he would fail her.
She could fathom it. But she couldn’t bear it.

This was her penance, she supposed, as she kicked her feet in the water.
Barefoot, she felt the sea rush between her toes — salt, cold, alive.
Every so often, a small guppy nibbled the space between them. The tickle brought her back to being fourteen, when her first boyfriend would rest his hand on her bare stomach — that helpless, electric kind of touch that made you want to laugh and cry at once.
It was the kind of tickle that sent you backward in time: vulnerable, uncomfortable, perfect.

Time with men wears that sensation thin.
Now only the guppies could spark it.
And so she sat there, hoping — praying — that he would come home.

Amsterdam.
He’d long since found freedom from religion.
Sexuality, now, was fluid — or so he told himself.
Why should it belong to marriage?
Why not ascend to the top floors of a luxury brothel and be pleasured by women more skilled than his wife?

She was beginning to realize they were no longer married.
They had children, yes.
He had promised: They’re too young to remember this gap. This is my only chance to do this while they’re too young to remember, and I’m still young enough to be capable.
He said that when he returned from his voyage across the globe, things would be better.
She knew it wasn’t true. But what can you say to a man so drunk on his own destiny?

Without any decree or legal document, she had to admit it: he was missing in action.
Off the radar.
And even if he still thought of her as his, she refused that label.

So what was she really waiting for on that dock?
She knew he’d never return.
Maybe she was waiting for peace — the kind that comes from watching waves move, oblivious to the moon’s pull.
Peace that comes when you realize you’ve been orbiting someone who was never really yours.
Closure, she thought.
But closure, she was beginning to realize, would never come.

As the whore — and that’s what she was, and she had no shame — began to pull down his pants, he finally allowed himself freedom.
Freedom at thirty-four.
Freedom from monogamy, from the Christian morality of his youth, from the boundaries he’d mistaken for chains.
Freedom to indulge.

And yet, as her hands moved, his mind drifted.
What harm was here? She was paid. It was legal. “Ethical.”
But did that make it moral?
Morality — was it relative after all? Less like a building and more like the ocean he traveled: inhabited by creatures who moved by instinct, not ethics.

This is Walt Grace, he told himself.
In my basement I built my submarine. I’m done with this world. I’m done with her. With them.
His friends had told him he’d fail.
But all he’d ever needed, he thought, was a library card — a way to study the fluidity of morality and make it his own.

Who was hurt? His wife?
A small price to pay, he thought — even as he climaxed — for the life he wanted.

Maybe closure could still come.
Not in the arms of another, but in the eyes of their children.
She’d raise them to be better — or at least less damaged.
She didn’t even blame him.
He’d always been broken. Seven years of marriage and broken from the start.
Maybe this was the only way he could feel alive.
But she would never know.
So all she could do was pity him.

The whore dressed him like a child.
He thought, This moment will pass for her. This life will live forever for me.
Her grief would pass.
She knew he was gone.
It would be awkward to call her — to close what he’d already closed in his mind, far out at sea.

She rose from the dock, brushed sand from her pants, and shook the water from her toes.
From her pocket, she pulled the handkerchief she’d brought for tears that never came.
She used it instead to wipe her feet clean, so no sand would stick as she crossed the pier to her 2008 Subaru.

She climbed in.
And felt a small, private pleasure when she saw that, indeed, she had not dragged a single grain of sand inside.

She drove home to her children.
And maybe they’d never remember their father.
But she knew something he never could — something he would never comprehend:
that children carry loss in their subconscious.
They carry joy there too.
That forgetting and remembering are not opposites — they’re twins.

Her burden was to guide them through that unseen pain.
His burden?
Hard to say if we’ll ever know.