BOOK DESCRIPTION
Told by four women whose stories nest together, She Never Told Me about the Ocean is an epic about a rite of passage that all humans undergo and none remember: birth.
Eighteen-year-old Sage has been mothering her mother for as long as she can remember, and as she arrives on the shores of adulthood, she learns a secret: before she was born, she had an older brother who drowned. In her search to discover who he was and why nobody told her, Sage moves to tiny Dragon Island where her mother grew up. There, she embarks on a quest to learn the superstitions of the island, especially its myths involving her mother. Gathering stories from Ilya, a legendary midwife who hires Sage as her apprentice; Marella, Sage's grieving mother who was named for the ocean yet has always been afraid of it; and Charon, the Underworld ferrywoman who delivers souls to the land of the dead, Sage learns to stop rescuing her mother and simply let go. But when her skill as Ilya's apprentice enables her to rescue her mother one final time, in a way that means life or death, Sage must shed her inherited fears and become her own woman.
First chapter narrated by Ilya, the midwife and wise woman
All right, Girl, here is the story I want you to hear. It is as real as the wood on this deck.
My story, like yours, is a story that only a daughter could tell. You think I am distant and old, but in truth I am just like you.
My family is native to this island. One of my ancestors gave Dragon Island its name. From where we sit, we can see why. See the black head and shoulders rising from the ocean? The green hips, the trees that bristle like spikes on the tail? My mother’s lineage has lived and died here since before the first flood. You can find all of my ancestors’ names and birthdates in the record books at Town Hall. Except my name and my son’s. Soon you will see why.
My father died of the island flu when I was six and as a consequence my mother was as lonely as a woman can be. There was a heavy sadness about her, and she did not like raising children. She opened her legs to many men who came asking, and each time my sisters and I were left to sleep outside, to see if this effort at happiness would catch. Always the next day she screamed my father’s name out to the ocean, frightening the other children. People in our village called her the howling woman. Some claimed she caused the great tsunami that nearly drowned the whole island. But she was not a witch and that could not be true. Many said she stole women’s husbands after nightfall. I would not argue against that charge.
I think she is why I turned out the way I did, not needing men at all.
When you live here a long time, you hear stories. And if you are curious, as I was at your age, you scratch at those stories to see what is true. I learned from somebody who learned from somebody else that in the rocks underneath a certain point of ocean, there is an entrance to the Underworld—Take that look off your face, Girl. Believe me, I am telling you the truth. There is no reason why a person would make this story up.
As you know, it is nearly impossible for a girl to grow up with a grieving mother and not wish to rescue her. I decided that in order to bring peace to my mother, I would go to the Underworld and bring back my father’s ghost. It was said that such things could be done. Why not by me? I would fix everything.
I began to read widely—anything I could that dealt with mythology and the dead. I knew most of it was fiction, but still I scratched at it in order to find some fact that I could use. And then something happened that I never could have expected: I got pregnant. I was fourteen. The boy was an island boy. Nobody had ever talked with me about contraception. When I had my first monthly bleed, I thought I had cut myself on a shell. When the bleeds stopped and the nausea started, I thought I was sick, until an aunt noticed and explained.
I was in trouble then. What could I do with the baby? It did not seem possible to take an infant on such a journey. But my mother was suffering, my sisters were suffering as a consequence, and I had to do something. So I fought through the first three months’ nausea and kept on with my preparations. I hid the pregnancy from my mother for as long as I could.
Do not think, Girl, that I faulted my mother. She had three daughters and that was too many for her. I knew that when it was my turn I would want to have as many children as I could, six, eight, and that number would still not be enough. We are always different from our mothers. I had thought I would name my baby, boy or girl, Ola. For it means life. My plan was to name all the others that followed “Life” in all the languages I could learn. But when the baby was born at the hospital in Middle, I came out of anesthesia and learned I could have no more children. So I thought of a better name for my first and only son: Adam. I had read all the origin myths from the west and it felt fitting, as he was the only man I could make.
I held Adam in my arms and read over his head, constantly. I don’t know how I thrived so well on so little sleep. I suppose that is the prerogative of the teenage mother. She has a strong supply of energy and can focus it anywhere she wants. And I only had two points of focus in my life then: take care of my son and take care of my mother. I told no one of my plans—if I vanished into the Underworld, at least I had tried.
I learned in my reading that the dead are eternally thirsty, so I packed a bottle of wine, stolen. I also learned that the dead have blue nails: a cobalt blue. It is a very beautiful color. Their fingernails and toenails are where all of their blood goes when they die. It’s how they recognize each other as dead.
I learned too that the spirits would be likelier to let me return home if I had a baby with me. The dead respect babies. They don’t like to see them unaccompanied. I knew from swimming with him that my baby instinctively held his breath when I put him in the water. One of many ways infants are built to endure. This reflex would be necessary for our swim beneath the rocks. We would need to go soon.
I practiced holding my breath.
I had no money, so I traded my body for one night to a cloth-worker so that he would make me a sturdy sling from hemp fiber, waxed with linseed oil, so Adam could ride on my back. Don’t look shocked, Girl. I had been sullied once. What was one more time?
My final job was to paint Adam’s tiny fingernails and toenails—as well as my own—blue. In those days, things like nail polish could not be found on Dragon Island; there were no drug stores, only medicine women. You think one generation can’t change everything? I went to the general store, where I found a suitable shade of blue furniture paint and slipped the bottle inside my dress.
At home, my mother saw me sitting on the bathroom counter, varnishing my nails while Adam slept on my back in his sling.
“Vain girl,” my mother said. “When I was your age, I didn’t have time for such vanities. I was busy helping my mother.” And she left it at that. So did I.
AUTHOR BIO
elisabethsharpmcketta.com
PUBLICATION DATE: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1589881532
CLASSIFICATION: Fiction
SIZE: 5 in. x 8 in.
FORMAT: Trade Paper
PAGES: 284 pp.
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