She surfaces at different times.
"I told you, Nigel, she's too young to hear that shit. Go peddle it somewhere else." It was the whiny voice that brought her back. The sound of loving childhood. She snorts, even when she's here-not-here, that voice sucks broken glass.
"Mona, stop. She's a baby. I know she's a baby. You think I don't know that?" The rasp and drag of cigarette, smell of smoke, the comfort of Uncle Nige, warm lap, warm, long, strong arms around her middle. A shoulder to lean against. She snuggles in deep and goes back to where she was.
Forgets until too late it's where the things are. Comes back again like breath after a dive into the community swimming pool when she was 12.
"Tell you, baby girl, you got the tits and ass of a grown woman already." A voice like smoke and whisky, the smell of skin the day after. Always the day after. "You're going to be a fine woman when you're grown."
"I've told you Nigel. You stop. You just stop. She doesn't need that shit and she don't want it. You go on now, get out of here. Don't come back. I mean it."
Driven away, she drops back again, into the depths, but only awhile, and then she's drawn back to the dark.
"I only need a little cash until payday Nige. That's all. You always said I could count on you when I need, well, here it is. No milk, no bread, no gas in the car. Just until Friday." Mama always had flexible morals.
"Ten do you? Or, no, here," the ripple rasp of money from a flatfold, "take twenty. You don't mind if I spend the night on the couch here, do you? Just tonight. Too tired to head all the way home."
"Oh, sure, no problem, Nige. But you don't be telling our girl those stories anymore, hear?"
"I hear."
And into the depths, and then back to the dark…
He speaks in a whisper so Mama doesn't hear. "If you walk the shore, they say, at just the moment when the tide turns, and everything else is just right, when sea and land take over the sky and break the balance, then you can go somewheres else, somewheres new, or old, maybe older than this."
"Tell me more?" She snuggles in close to the warmth and the dark and the feel of strength, the smell of the day after and old cigarettes.
She can feel him smile by the set of his shoulders, the movement against her back. He whispers. "You gotta be a woman, only women can go, don't know what's there, no one comes back, but a girlfriend of mine said she'd do it someday, and she disappeared after that. I think she did it."
The snap of a lighter, light, gold against the dark, the smell of new burning, acrid. "What happens?"
She hears his harsh intake of breath, feel a movement that means fingers to tongue to remove a wisp of tobacco, an old movement. Feels the smile as she sees old ivory teeth flash in the dark. "It's all about the balance. Women have balance a man don't got. So, a woman who wants to go there, wherever or whatever it is, she just has to match her balance to the balance of the sea, the sky, the land, and when it wobbles, take advantage. A man can't do that."
She sighs and drops her head back on his shoulder.
"It's all about taking advantage."
I won't go back, she decides. I won't go back.
And then it's done. She disappears, the bubble's gone no turquoise now or gold; everything's just black.