Black Bay
A short story written for the "Same Walk, Different Shoes" community writing project
“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a Substack community writing project that Ben Wakeman organized as a practical exercise in empathy. The premise is simple. A group of writers anonymously contribute a personal story of an experience that changed their life. Each participating writer is randomly assigned one of these story prompts to turn into a short story. The story you are about to read is one from this collection. You can find all the stories from the participating writers at Catch & Release. Enjoy the walk with us.
All stories are publishing simultaneously today.
It was too soon to be back here. Six years was nothing.
The truth of it settled in my jaw and gut as I locked the Toyota and crossed the parking lot.
Of all places, she had to choose this one.
I would buy her breakfast on Third. Anywhere but here, we could talk about whatever was on her mind.
Where the path forked — to the pier or the beach — I held my loose hair back and squinted into the bay wind.
She stood at the end of the fishermen’s pier.
I crossed the weathered planks, past bait buckets that smelled of sea creatures beached before their natural time.
“Sarah,” I called into the wind. She had not felt or heard my footsteps.
“Aunt May!” she greeted me, turning. We pulled each other into our customary hug. I held her a fraction closer and a beat longer than usual, though I wasn’t sure why.
“Thank you for coming,” she shouted over a sudden squabble of gulls. “Let’s go where we can talk.”
“A bakery on Third? My treat.”
She shook her head emphatically and pointed past a berm. “Over there.” Negotiations ended as she led the way.
Two grassy mounds and a footpath sheltered the bouldered beach on three sides. Water lapped in the pebbled shallows. Barnacles clung to the lower flanks of the larger rocks.
“How are you?” she began, leaning against a boulder.
“Hungry?” I tried again. “Can I tempt you to a nice restaurant?”
She unzipped the purse that hung criss-cross from her shoulder and pulled out a protein bar. “I work in an hour, but you can have this.”
I could not resist smiling at her quick generosity. “No thanks. I was thinking of something like a cheese danish for two. If you’re on your way to work, it must be important. What’s up?”
The confident young woman of thirty shivered for a moment, and I thought I saw the girl, age three, picking her way gingerly over these rocks, exclaiming, “Ouch! Ouch!” and holding up her hands to be lifted away.
She looked across Black Bay — blue today — toward the dark green humpback of Arbutus Island, straight across from us.
“This will sound crazy.”
“I can’t count how many times I’ve sounded crazy,” I coaxed.
She smiled at me once and looked back across the water. The smile dribbled down her chin and disappeared into the small waves.
“I don’t want to make a mistake.” The words came from a deep, liquid place in her. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, but not before a few drops of her went the way of the smile.
“Oh boy - mistakes. You called the right person. I’m an expert.”
“We decided to get married,” she blurted. The words took a moment to register with me.
“You and Maury? Okay.”
“On Sunday. It was nice. He made me salmon and macaroni and cheese.” She smiled at her misfit favorite foods, wiped her face again. “He bought me four dozen roses. They were everywhere.”
I looked suddenly at her left hand, where a black lace fingerless glove obscured the new shape of her fourth finger. “He gave you a ring!” I exclaimed, like someone beginning to get the message. I reached for her hand. She peeled off the glove to reveal a large solitaire diamond. Too large. Maury was a nice-enough guy with a good-enough job in the research division of a marketing firm. He had been a fixture in Sarah’s life long enough that some of her friends wondered what kept them together; others wondered when they would marry. I thought it best to have no opinion.
Sarah glowed for a moment, but like every expression this morning, it passed quickly.
“Aunt May, every night since then I’ve had this dream.”
Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Today was Wednesday. Three nights.
I steered us toward a boulder with a flat top large enough for both of us. We sat with a rocky slope behind us.
“In this dream,” she began, “I’m very young, playing here at the edge of the water. Then I’m in a wet suit, grown up - flippers, gloves, swim cap, the whole thing. Sometimes I’m on this side. Sometimes I’m over there.” She pointed at Arbutus Island. We could just make out the beach on the island’s south shore.
She looked uncomfortably my way.
“I don’t mean to sound weird, Aunt May, but in the dream I’m sometimes myself and sometimes, like, you. Is that weird?”
“The best dreams are always weird, sweetie. That’s how they get our attention. What do you think it was about?”
“There’s more.” She hesitated. “Danny was in it.” I felt her watching me, but I kept my eyes fixed on the glinting surface of the bay, sharp with light, painful to the staring eye.
“Aunt May, I’m sorry he’s gone. You two always seemed very happy together.”
I shivered in my hot skin, then turned to her. “Yes, we were happy. I was very lucky.”
She began to twist her solitaire, and the next question surprised me: “What did your rings look like? I don’t remember them.”
My breath was a high wire. I balanced on it, stepping forward oh so carefully.
“He gave me his grandmother’s sapphire when we got engaged. My wedding band was white gold with three little sapphires set in the top.”
She nodded. “What did his ring look like?”
Oof. I drew my legs up in front of my body as if to form a wall between her question and me.
. . .
“Don’t forget this,” called the chaplain while I slid like a block of January ice toward the door of the hospital room.
Can a block of ice be sick to the stomach? She was working the ring off his hand.
I had left it on purpose. What could be more final than removing the ring?
. . .
Sarah waited for an answer.
I relented. “We had them made together. His was also white gold with one sapphire set flush inside the band, where you couldn’t see it. It was like a secret between us.”
She had taken both my hands and was gripping them fiercely.
“That’s the one!” she croaked, the way a fish would sound if it tried to whisper sweet nothings without water.
She licked her lips. “I saw it, plain as this rock. This morning, right before I woke up, I changed from me into you, and he gave me that ring with the sapphire on the inside. He put it on my finger, your finger. I can’t explain it, but we — you — were incredibly happy. So together. Everything seemed — fixed.”
Closing my eyes did nothing to slow the deluge that dropped to my lap, my bare forearms, and the sand.
“Aunt May, it’s nothing like that between Maury and me.”
Right. This dream was about her, not me.
She was three days’ engaged to her long-time, live-in, nice-enough boyfriend who knew his way around a box of mac ‘n’ cheese. I opened my eyes and focused on her anxious face.
“Every time I woke up, I knew exactly what it felt like to be with the right person, and I don’t have that feeling with Maury. I love him, and he loves me, or I guess we do, but it’s not like that.”
We looked at each other, each of us searching the other’s face for some kind of affirmation.
She removed the solitaire and pushed it into her purse with the protein bar. “I don’t think I want this ring.”
Somewhere along the way, she had let go of my hands. Now I took hers and looked at her without any idea of the words to say next.
“I trust you to know what you want,” I said at last.
There was no shortage of salt water in our cove.
“I need to go to work, Aunt May. Can we talk more about Uncle Danny later? I want to know everything about the two of you. Can I see pictures?”
I hugged this woman-child, my courageous niece. I knew how hard it was to give up a ring.
. . .
After the funeral, my favorite place was the swimming cove at Arbutus Island. That morning, the sun dropped jewels on the surface of Black Bay. Out past the kelpy shallows, I floated into another world. Round orange fishes came close. I could not see them well without my glasses, but I fancied they met me with a playful curiosity. With swim fins and webbed gloves, I cavorted like a sea lion among them.
Did I only imagine the fishy interest in my left hand, where I wore both our rings safely under my swimming glove? Did they sense somehow a presence more than my own, concentrated in Danny’s ring so close to mine?
No matter. In deep water, my heart had only one job: to pump blood. My lungs filled and emptied, filled and emptied. The sun warmed my upper parts. The dark, living bay chilled my sore places from below.
By the time I stumbled up the beach, exhausted in body and relieved in spirit, clouds had moved in. I stood at the edge of shallow and deep water, admiring the way sea and sky saluted each other with complex textures of grey. The gloves were difficult to remove. I pried at them with hands and teeth before the suction broke and the left glove flew off — snap.
Plunk, plunk.
I could not see clearly without my glasses, but I felt and heard and knew with sudden horror that two white gold bands were sinking in slow, gracious motion at my feet.
I hurled the offending glove toward the shallows and reached down where I thought I had heard them fall, scooping underwater with my webbed right hand and groping with my free left.
My fingers brushed a metal band and clamped in slow motion toward my right glove. I put the ring in my mouth, and reached again for the mate.
Even with perfect vision, I’m not sure I’d have seen more than a grey churn of shadows.
I felt nothing but sand and rock — and shortly, rain. Neither that day, nor the next, nor all the days I came back to search, did I find my husband’s ring.
I tried to be grateful that I recovered my own, but questions haunted me without relief. Was it wrong to wear his ring? Did I break faith by seeking the comfort of water? Whatever the reason, I shouldered the guilt of my mistake, pledging never to put it down.
. . .
I had lost my appetite for cheese danish and drove blankly home.
Propping the phone on its charger, I noticed two texts from Sarah.
10:07 a.m. TY!! Feeling much better. Will call later.
10:22 a.m. Could I stay with you tonight? New life starts today!!
I texted back: Yes to staying over. Happy to have you.
I unfocused my eyes and tried to feel how it must have been for Sarah in her dream. What did she say? She felt things were — fixed?
I lifted the phone and added: “New life starts today” - I like that! How about two of us not worry about mistakes? 😘
Moments later came:
❤️ ❤️
This story is a work of mostly-fiction, inspired by a prompt about a late spouse’s ring lost in a bay. The prompt was beautifully, achingly written — differently from what I’ve written here, but with a few essential facts retained. I hope I have been a good steward of the story’s heart. This story took at least three different forms before I found Sarah and her predicament, and things fell into place. A grandson, a sister, and even the late Danny himself all took turns conferring the grace that came naturally from niece Sarah.
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Thank you to ringmaster
and the author of the prompt! ~ T. P.Photo credits:
Island by Ingo Joseph on Pexels.com
Rocky beach by James Wheeler on Pexels.com
Filled with emotional unfolding… I read this this morning Tara, while I was digging over the tiny patch of garden I have left that’s not taken over entirely by wild flowers. I found a ring, a cheap and cheerful thing but I still had to turn it and check for sapphires!
Absolutely loved the descriptions of place in this story. And the relationship between the aunt and niece was beautiful.