The Rippling Pane
by T.w. Moran
Mosquitoes swarmed the metal-halide floodlights that muggy May night. I was always too wrapped up in work and whiskey to see a game. But suddenly there was Maggie, squatting at shortstop in a tank top and tight polyester shorts and three-stripe tube socks. She backhanded a grounder and flipped it to my second wife and I fell in love.
We carried on more than a year—“Ever tinkering with chance,” I’d quip—before our worse halves caught wind, but played on even after the rains came. And we kept playing for twenty more. I never did regret it. Not once. Not when my sons stopped talking to me. Not when my wife threw me out. Not when she spitefully took every penny I’d ever made.
When Maggie died, I promised myself and anyone around I’d never return to Conch Town. “That place was our place, and it died with her,” I’d say.
But there I was, against my better judgment, maintaining appearances, standing alone on that goddamned pier, a year to the day, crack of dawn, dumping her back into the sea.
I said nothing, but a message did cross my mind, like a banner behind a biplane:
And that’s how I let you go.
I was perched at Maggie’s favorite open-air joint as soon as they opened. This pretty young blond in bikini top and cutoffs tending bar strutted over. Reminded me of Cybil Shepherd in The Heartbreak Kid.
“Drink?”
“Beam, rocks.”
“Vacation?”
“Every February for nineteen years.”
She fixed herself a shot of Fireball, clinked my tumbler.
“Well, shit; here’s to twenty!”
I sucked down three fingers, rocks and all, then shoved it back, tapped the brim. She hoisted her eyebrows as she scooped some ice into the same glass.
“You okay, hon?”
“Maggie, my…well, she loved this place.”
“Your wife?”
“Something like that.”
“‘Loved,’ you said?”
“Huh?”
“Loved…?”
“Yeah…scattered her ashes this morning,” I said, stretching my eyes, nodding toward the water.
She clapped both hands onto her mouth.
“I’m so sorry!”
She reached out, laid her hand on mine, folded back the hair on my knuckles. No one had touched me in months.
Behind her this guy in a Marlins cap walked by, a leash dangling from his hand. He just stopped dead and stared; I figured his eyes got latched on Cybil’s caboose because when he went on, they stayed latched.
Cybil planted her elbows, rested her chin, reconquered my attention.
“What was she like?”
I told her how Maggie’d sneak out at sunrise to wade while I was sleeping one off, then crawl back into bed, wedging her wet legs between mine; how we’d sit on the balcony, drink añejo-spiked o.j. and smoke doobies she’d stashed in tampons to get past airport security; how she’d prop her feet and gawk at pelicans as I barked Miami Herald headlines, ad-libbing ledes in my best Tripper Harrison just so I could hear that throaty laugh of hers.
I told Cybil everything but the truth, then passed out on the bar before dinner.
Next morning, same balcony, I was ashing a doob into Maggie’s empty urn, trying to cloud year-old memories.
Ashes to ashes.
The deputy coroner employed the phrase, “serendipitous current,” to explain how Maggie’s bluish body had washed ashore.
“Hundred to one it dudn’t come back,” he drawled to two beach police before remembering me within earshot. “Apologies,” he called to me. “I meant, she…well, her.”
I recalled this lean guy, middle-aged, crisp teal cap, standing on the bluff, just watching. He cradled this dark puppy that was yipping up a storm.
You always did want a dog.
Two days prior, the pimple-faced concierge had stopped me.
“Hey! Passed on that message,” he said, very proud of himself.
“What now?”
“You know, ‘meet you tomorrow morning, got a surprise,’ all that…”
Kid had no clue.
I lay awake all night waiting for Maggie to slink out at dawn.
I grabbed her pelican peepers and found her standing about chest-high, just beyond the break. She waved, but not at me. I panned across the water, saw this guy hurdling waves to get to her. They embraced…kissed…gyrated.
I was four rocky martinis deep that evening when I slid the box across the table. Inside was this cheap Claddagh I’d bought Maggie as a joke: not married, but married to the idea of never being married again.
She placed the ring on her taken finger, pecked my cheek.
The waitstaff yelled, “Cent’Anni!”
Then she looked right into my eyes and lied when she said that she loved me.
Fool…first-class fool.
I persuaded her to go skinny-dipping like we used to, and she was eager, you know, to keep her mask up, and pliable from the Pinot Grigio, but I was still surprised how far out she let me tow her. The moonbeams danced across the rippling pane that night, and I remember, as I backstroked away, how she fluttered like a jarred moth for just a moment before slipping soundlessly out of sight.
You deserved worse.
Before my flight, I wanted to take one last swim. I ventured out to a distant sandbar. Once there, I toed the edges, my ankles drying in the breeze. I stretched my arms and confronted the rising sun.
Clearing my eyes in waist-high waves, I heard the dog barking. This lanky chocolate lab was chasing seagulls across the vacant beach.
I was knee-deep before I noticed him, but I recognized the faded Marlins cap. He was standing in the purling sand, my towel draped over his arm. He took a few steps into the water, dropped my towel into the surf.
A pistol glinted in his hand.
T.w. Moran (@tdubwrites) is an emerging author hailing from Humboldt, Illinois. His fiction has appeared in The Dillydoun Review and Emerge Literary Journal. Moran has lived and worked across the globe— including a decade-long stint in Beijing, where he taught writing at Beijing Language and Culture University. Currently residing in Riga with his lovely wife, Moran spends his days putting pen to paper.