MELISSA FLORES ANDERSON
Wading Through
The retreat started at the ocean. With the blues and greens swirling beneath her brown limbs, Lainey watched Derry dip out further than she could touch her toes. She called out to him, but he couldn’t hear the words she said over the roar of the waves breaking against the shoreline.
He told Lainey once if you get out beyond the break, the water stills. It’s warm and tranquil and you could float in it just like a pool or a bathtub. She had never floated calmly in a pool and the only bathtub she’d ever seen was the old clawfoot tub at her grandmother’s. It wasn’t elegant like the ones in movies, but stained with age, water spots along the linoleum from where two generations had splashed water out of it.
Lainey wanted to believe him, but her body had never learned to float or swim, so instead she turned back toward the shore into the sudden cold breeze that came up off the water against her dripping body. The sun sat high in the sky and she thought it must be noontime, and if they wanted to beat the traffic back, they’d have to leave soon. But Derry didn’t follow traffic patterns, just like he didn’t follow ocean currents. His long, white limbs cut a path through wherever he wanted to go.
She sat on the towel she’d brought for the impromptu trip. In the six months with Derry, she learned that his ideas were often of the moment and she now kept her car stocked with things she might need with him. Towels and a bathing suit, a pair of flip flops worn thin under her feet; or hiking boots he’d surprised her with for her birthday and an anorak; or a dress in case he drove them to a fancy restaurant without telling her where they’d be going.
Derry, whose name was short for Alexander, had a last name that matched the elite families who built the east coast in the 1800s. He had the kind of confidence that comes with centuries of family money. He could walk into a white-linen dining room in a faded pair of blue jeans and sneakers, flash his dimpled smile and bright blue eyes, as bright as the ocean he swam in at the moment, and get a table without a reservation. But Lainey knew, she knew there were rules for how to dress and how to be. She knew when Derry held her hand in those candlelit spaces people wondered why he would be with her.
Lainey watched Derry’s dark hair bobbing in the distance and waited for him to turn back toward her. She closed her eyes and the breeze settled so now the sun warmed her face, turning it a darker shade of brown than it had been when she first met Derry. Back when she had spent long hours waiting tables during all the daylight and she spent her evenings in class at a community college, with three years invested on a two-year degree. The restaurant she worked at sat a few miles from the campus she attended, blocks from a tech company headquarters.
Derry had come in and sat in her section dressed in a suit and tie, and at first, she’d only hoped for a good tip. But then he caught her dark eyes with his blue ones and she thought she saw the color of love in them.
She played it cool, of course. She gave him the same generic smile she gave to all the men in her section and asked him if he’d like a glass of wine. Instead he ordered a diet Pepsi and a French Onion soup. She checked herself from checking on him more frequently than the other patrons.
At the end of his meal, he walked out before she brought him the check, and left two crisp $20s on the edge of the table. More than double the cost of his meal. More than a tip should have been.
Lainey finished her shift and changed out of the crisp white shirt she wore for work and back into a T-shirt that didn’t smell like the kitchen for the long bus ride home to San José. When she stepped out onto the sidewalk that evening, Derry stood there with a sunflower in his hands and Lainey looked behind her to see who he was waiting on. But then he held the flower out to her and said, “This is for you because you’re the brightest thing I’ve seen all week.”
And then he asked for her name.
“It’s Lainey,” she said, though no one had ever called her that. Her proper name was Lareina. Her family called her Reina or Queenie. But in the moment, Lainey seemed like a nice, normal name to share with this handsome man who stood before her in a suit.
“Everyone calls me Derry.”
So she became Lainey, a girl who said yes to everything Derry asked, even if it meant skipping class or missing a nursing practicum. Yes to hiking at Castle Rock Park though she hated the mountains. Yes to wine tasting in Napa though she couldn’t tell the different between a rosé and a pinot noir. Yes to a sunset cruise on the Bay though she’d never been on a boat before. After all the trips and the expensive dinners, the only thing she had to offer Derry was a home-cooked meal in her tiny kitchen. She lived in an old Victorian that had long-ago been converted into apartments, with a not-up-to-code set of stairs for her back entrance.
“This place is quaint and cozy,” Derry said when he stepped inside and she loved him for not making her feel small or poor. She cooked with the spices of her childhood, cumin and chili and coriander, and the scents clung to Derry’s polo shirt and short hair, the smell foreign on his skin.
That night, in her twin bed, with his weight pressed deep into her, he whispered, “I love you, Lainey.” And she caught his mouth with hers instead of answering.
* * *
At the beach, Derry smelled most like himself, like salt water, like wind, like surf. No matter where she went, Lainey smelled like the spices that settled into the cheap paint of her home, the cheap fabric of her clothes, part of the DNA of her skin and hair.
On the beach, Derry began to swim back toward the shore and she watched the waves crash and retreat in a pattern she could never quite predict.
Derry sat next to her on the beach and pulled a shiny, white thing from his pocket and held it out in his hand.
“Look what I found for you underneath the waves,” he said.
He held his hand palm up, curved into a bowl for the trinket. It glinted in the sunlight and Lainey held her breath. Derry dropped down onto a knee, his legs the same color as the light sand below his skin.
“What do you say?”
Lainey didn’t say yes.
“Did you really take that out into the ocean with you?” she asked. “Weren’t you worried it would slip out of your pocket?”
“I know how to keep things safe,” he said.
Lainey picked it up, a princess cut diamond on a gold band. Torn between an urge to put it on her finger and an urge to toss it out as far as she could, she put it back into Derry’s palm.
She couldn’t say yes until she knew if she could say no to Derry. She turned away from the water as it ebbed from the shore, not watching to see if it would come back.
Melissa Flores Anderson is a Latinx Californian and an award-winning journalist, who lives in her hometown with her young son and husband. Her creative work has been published in more than two dozen journals or anthologies, and she received a 2023 Best of the Net nomination for CNF. She is a reader/editor with Roi Fainéant Press. She has a co-authored novelette, “Roadkill,” forthcoming with Emerge Literary Journal. Follow her on Twitter @melissacuisine or IG @theirishmonths. Read her work at melissafloresandersonwrites.com.