Marina

Content Warning: Postpartum mental illness, depression, and suicide.

Oizys was an old ship. Charles’ family had bought her in pristine condition off a Greek immigrant back in the ‘80s. Now her wooden frame was littered with dents, the copper plating turned green, and smelled like hell. The once brightly painted OIZYS now only read O ZY and Katrina would sometimes call her Ozymandian. In spite of these many flaws, she could be steered by amateurs and was what they had. All they had isolated in the Gulf of Mexico.

Charles stood in the June heat on the stern of O ZY, fidgeting with the ropes, worrying about when they’d get home if they’d get home when he heard his wife screaming in pain. A scream that was unclean with a distinct vocal fry beneath it. His weight pooled into his feet and the blood drained out of his face. He let the ropes go, and Oizys whined in kind. He knew he should run over to her, knew he had to assist her, but he was terrified because he knew. So he didn’t run, he slowly stepped backward, each step imperceptibly shifting the boards beneath him. Until he swallowed his fear and ran to the starboard end of O ZY. There he ran downstairs to find Katrina lying on the bed screaming in pain with water and staining the sheets. He swallowed his fear and knelt next to her. Desperately, he grabbed her hands and said comforting words he didn’t believe.

The baby was crowning.

Charles tried to focus on the present. To stay with his wife giving birth, but he found himself stuck inside his own head, cursing himself, trying to remember why they were out here. Why they were isolated in the middle of nowhere, with no doctors, no family, just the two, soon to be three of them. They thought it would be a short getaway before the pregnancy got too painful. They began to realize they were lost and he would catch his wife looking forlorn at the sun-soaked ocean. He couldn’t understand the storm inside of her body and mind, so he kept himself busy. Making repairs on the ship, categorizing and reorganizing their food supply, and trying his best to make his wife comfortable. Well aware he wasn’t doing anything impactful. As the weeks wore on their hope waned. Their navigation tools began to fail, they couldn’t fix their communication lines, leaks started forming on different parts of O ZY, and the tired ropes caused constant burns on Charles’ hands making it harder to work. Time was ticking and a third child was coming.

He could see the baby’s eyes now. Closed shut on its blood-soaked head.

Charles moved his shaking hands around the top of the baby’s head, trying to support the baby so the head wouldn’t hit the deck below, but he wasn’t a doctor. He’d thought of how the birth would happen, understanding it would be difficult but not realizing how traumatic it would actually be. And the same fear every father before him had consumed Charles whole.

The baby’s shoulders were starting to come into sight, soon the child would be in the world.

Eight months ago they were on dry land. Katrina and Charles found out they were having a child. After trying for so long the moment felt strangely anticlimactic. He remembered looking out the window at the grey storm clouds as Katrina held onto him. Katrina remembered his soft smile. They told their family and friends, began decorating a room for the new child, and Katrina watched her food like a hawk. They were by all accounts, perfect soon-to-be parents. But even parents have youthful flights of fancy. Katrina wanted to get away for a week. How time flies.

Charles brought the baby out into the light and cradled his head in his arms. The baby was a boy. For one sublime moment holding his baby atop the rolling tide, there was nothing else in the world.

He looked into his wife’s tired eyes and placed their child into her arms. Katrina softly cried from sheer physical and emotional exhaustion. She placed her forehead against the blood-covered head of her child and kissed it. Charles was finally in the present and not so worried, however, Katrina was not.

~

The next few days Katrina tried to keep busy with daily tasks to distract herself from the stress. Charles urged her to rest and lay down but she insisted on working pointlessly until exhaustion. The truth was she’d rather work than focus on her newborn. Every time she held him images of violence and death filled her head. A stone of dread would form in her throat. Would they have enough food? Would the baby be sick from the boat? Would they ever be able to return home? What if the child was a bad omen? What if she dropped him? What if she killed him? The questions weighed on her and the best she could do was distract herself. But walls never hold permanently.

Oizys wasn’t designed to be out at sea this long with just two exhausted amateurs. Every time Katrina moved she would panic at the sounds the ship made, it seemed the boat itself rejected her. At night when she couldn’t sleep she wonder if the ship was listening in to her thoughts. She would start to see red lights dance in the corner of her eyes on the walls, and she would eventually fall asleep. Only to repeat the cycle of despair the next day.

Fifteen days after her child’s birth, Charles began to notice something was off. Perhaps you could fault him for not seeing the signs earlier but how could you? He was soaked in the warmth of being a new father despite the circumstances. Katrina knew she shouldn’t feel this way. She should be overjoyed. She barely spoke and felt remarkably alone. She was eating less and in constant pain. After two weeks she laid down in bed and didn’t get up. She would toss and turn in time with the waves. Charles tried to cheer her up. He would make art out of scraps he found in the nets and on the ship, and play with their baby, but it didn’t work. The days began to congeal and thicken together each one worse than the last as the waves that rocked the ship grew cacophonous. She knew they would get home eventually but that didn’t change anything. It would still be impossible to get through the day when a day was ten years.

She saw the terror in Charles’ eyes. She only spoke when the pain worsened. Most of the pregnancy weight was gone from not eating leaving her a wisp of a woman. When she fed her baby she turned away, she couldn’t look at her yellowing skin and the baby struggling to find what little milk it could. Time continued to slow. The lights grew larger.

Another two weeks passed. Nothing was improving. Her hunger strengthened enough to make her eat, but she didn’t gain any weight. On many occasions Katrina found herself weeping, not knowing when she started.

One night she got out of bed Charles didn’t wake at her motion. She smiled for the first time in a while, he always slept too deeply for his own good. Katrina took her first steps out of the room in a month and a half and walked onto the deck of the ship. There she stood at the heart of the boat. Standing in the moonlight she realized her skin was yellowing. The ship was rocking heavily in the rain and the wind. Voices filled her ears. She walked to the bow of the ship. Oizys was calling her. She felt the wind mess her matted hair. Is this was what life was like? A wind knocked her over and she vomited again. The pain in her abdomen was intolerable. Another blew her overboard. She was dead before she could really be a mother.

~

Charles stumbled out of bed at the sound of crying. He almost didn’t notice Katrina’s absence, but when he did, he started running. He ran through the whole boat. He wanted to cry but he knew he shouldn't. He had to find Katrina. The realization finally hit him. She was gone. The baby’s screams seemed distant now. And they may make it home. But that didn’t change anything.

When morning came, Charles managed to pull himself up from the deck, clawing at the wooden boards. Part of him thought it was a dream, his better half knew it wasn’t. The baby was still crying. No time to mourn, no time to grieve. He had to be a carer. And he had to get home; somehow, someway, someday.

The fastest way back home would be to simply ride in one direction, they’d hit land eventually, from there they could find their way back to the Louisiana swamps. He’d guide them west, it was easy to tell where east and west were based on the position of the sun and it would ensure they wouldn’t accidentally head into the Atlantic. God willing it wouldn’t take too long. Katrina was gone, and he considered abandoning it all. Stay at sea forever with his wife’s memory. But he couldn’t do that, he had a child, and they wouldn’t last much longer. So he kept going west.

He wrote everything down in a salt-stained notepad and cared for the baby. He found the latter infuriating and stress-inducing. Every time he looked into the baby’s eyes he saw Katrina’s, and every time he heard him cry he remembered Katrina’s last. He tried speaking, singing, rocking but nothing worked. One day Charles was rocking him softly against his chest. The baby did eventually stop crying, and Charles picked up where the baby left off.

But the pain of loss crippled him as a father. He would groan as he fed the baby and brim with regret over having a child at all. Hours of every day were spent on the deck or in the cabin staring at the floorboards and the walls. Katrina’s memory soaked into every grain of the wood, her image etched into Oizys’ frame and steeped into Charles’ heart, loss everywhere.

~

Francisco was tall for an eleven-year-old. He was an avid soccer player like his father and was a friend to all. His friends loved to hear his story. How he had been carried by his half-starved father from the Mexico shoreline to a small village. Where the only man who spoke English would become Francisco’s godfather, with whom he shared a name. His father told that story many times, and the character of his mother seemed downright saintly. On the outside, they had gone from a distant isolated ship barely visible on the horizon to a healthy family.

The inside was a different story.

Outside of those stories, Charles rarely spoke. He would spend days painting absurd pictures with garish colors and stark shadows while muttering to himself. He would lie in bed for hours, sometimes days, and would rarely eat. The house was a mess, hoarded wall to wall with trinkets and trash. Charles would never let anyone inside and never gain the strength to clean. He was consistently in between jobs, failing to pay bills, which made Francisco grow up quickly. It would serve him well, Francisco would find the next seven years of his life in between foster homes, and falling into the same gray pit his father fell into. And on the days he spent drinking away his feelings and constant pain, he would remember the last thing his father told him before he found his father swinging.

“There’s not five stages to grief, just one: madness.”