A review by teniamonet
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

4.25

How do I begin to describe my thoughts on this and how it made me feel?

I remember the first time she went away, the first time I traveled to see her off. I remember the last time - the fact that she was supposed to be gone for three weeks and disappeared for six months, the fact that none of us knew what had happened, the way the Centre called several times to give out contradictory information before ceasing to call at all. 

More than once, Leah had been held up without explanation, had wound up home belated and weary and smelling of salt. Sometimes I think you prefer it down there, I had said to her, holding her face in my hands and wondering whether I meant it to sound like a joke or reproach, you go so deep you forget you’re supposed to come back.

It’s not grief, one woman posted, it’s more like a haunting. Her sister had disappeared two decades previously, run away or otherwise removed via the back door of their childhood home when she was fifteen years old. There was no proof that anything bad happened, the woman typed, no proof of anything at all. They told us hope wasn’t lost so often that it became impossible to live with it. It’s too hard, trying to exist between these poles of hope and death. You just find yourself imagining all these possibilities, all these possible sisters wandering around half-unseen like people with sheets over their head, except that somewhere among them, you know that one of them’s real - one of them’s dead, one of them’s the ghost.

I used to hope, I typed once, that I’d die before my partner, even though I knew that was selfish. I used to think that I hoped I’d die before she died and before the planet died and really just generally before things got any worse.

I didn’t send this message, specifically because it seemed to imply that my views had changed, when they hadn’t.

She is still scratching at the inside of her arm and this time she shows me, pulls the sleeve of her robe back father than i have seen in forever, reveals the changing texture of skin, the rubbed-raw glint of something unfamiliar. 

“What’s that?” I ask, and she shakes her head, pulls up her other sleeve, then parts the floor-length folds of the dressing gown to show me her legs, pulls the cord at the waist, and shows me everything. It is not at all what I expected, all those times when I looked at the scuffed-off particles of matter in the bathtub and imagined her flayed and fraying beneath her clothes. It is something else, and I don’t know what to call it or what to say. I look at her and think, briefly, of the strange oyster sheen of her underarms and elbow creases in the first long weeks of her return, of the way she had shown me and said, with a bland sort of certainty, that she’d been told it would go away. I think, too, about the way she had bled, from the face and the gumline, so many mornings of bleeding that have since petered out, as though there might be no more blood to lose. 

Now, from the midcalf to upper thigh, along her sides and then across her breasts and up along her arms to mid forearm, she is at first surf-white, uncertain, and then changing as I look at her, white to blue to green - her skin a drifting textured, somehow unmoored, as though it only floats upon the surface of her flesh.

Our understanding of the universe, so she said, comes from the ocean: It has taught us that life exists everywhere, even in the greatest depths; that most of life is in the oceans; and that oceans govern climate. Perhaps because we’re so terrestrialy biased, air-breathing creatures that we are, it has taken us until now to realize that everything we care about is anchored in the ocean. I had my back to the window as I thought this and found myself suddenly unable to bear the oppressive blanket of space beyond the glass. Where are you all, I wanted to scream, overcome with a sudden vivid grief at the thought of this nothing - no strange deep-ocean creatures, no bioluminescence, no life. Come on, I found myself thinking, give.

I think,” Juan says, after a pause, “that the thing about losing someone isn’t the loss but the absence of afterward. D’you know what I mean? The endlessness of that.” She looks sideways at me and sniffs. “My friends were sad, people who knew my sister were sad, but everyone moves on after a month. It’s all they can manage. It doesn’t mean they weren’t sad, just that things keep going or something, I don’t know.” She rolls her shoulder, shakes her head. “It’s hard when you look up and realize that everyone’s moved off and left you in that place by yourself. Like they’ve all gone on and you’re there still, holding on to this person you’re supposed to let go of. Let go of them in the water is something I read once. Seems a bit of a joke in the circumstances, but still. Something about how living means relinquishing the dead and letting them drop down or fall or sink. Letting go of them in the water, you know.”

But I can see it happening already, look down at her in my arms as the towels fall away, weighed down by the water that has saturated each in turn and left them too heavy to cling. Passingly, I think that this might always have been inevitable, that perhaps she had always known it but had wanted to hold on for me, for as long as she could. I can see it now, the way her chest begins to frill, the upward swell and tremor of the skin that registers its natural habitat, growing first translucent, then entirely clear. I can feel, as well, the way the body I am holding is becoming less a body, the way she slides between my fingers - first my Leah, then the water, first my Leah’s arms, her chest, her rib cage, then the water they are struggling toward. I think of nothing, then I think about the sea lung, the day on the beach with Leah where the ice sat on the water and the air around us seemed about to take some other form. This alchemist sea, changing something into something else. I think of this and I look at her face, the remains of her face, my Leah. She is looking at me - this now, the last of her - and she is still looking at me when i move my arms to release her, when she melts between my hands and into water, twisting down into the rolling tide.

What persists after this is only air and water and me between them, not quite either and with one foot straining for the sand.

Leah the wife that goes missing. Miri the wife left behind