The ocean wasn’t angry at Peter that morning, even though it surely knew what he planned to take. He was on the beach before the first pink brushstrokes of sunrise overtook the stars and the harvest moon still sat comfortably above the horizon like an overripe grapefruit. Anticipating the dewy chill of early September, Peter layered a gray sweatshirt and a flannel under his waders, but the usual sharp winds seemed to have vacated the beach, rendering his precautions unnecessary.
Beach grass rustled against the thick polyester of his pants as he uncovered his dinghy from the tall grass of a dune slack and pulled it toward the shore, its red hull leaving a rusty trail in the sand behind it. That morning, the waves did not fight him like they usually did; they whispered instead of crashing, gentle fingers that tapped softly against his battered boat as he rowed, their sharp claws retracted. For the first time, he wasn’t a trespasser or a foreign body; he was as much a part of the unfaltering clockwork of the sea as they were. Finally somewhere to belong. This is how it felt, at least.
By the time the dinghy scraped to a stop against sand, the moon had sunken into the sea and the first rays of the morning sun filtered pink-orange through the clouds. Peter was alone on the sandbar, this had been his intention, and only a seagull squawked in annoyance as he tossed his gear onto the bar and dug the dinghy’s rusty anchor into the still-wet sand. As he walked barefoot toward a cluster of promising bubbles that emerged from the ground, rake and bucket in hand, the sand swallowed his footprints, a reminder of the island’s own ephemerality.
The Orleans shellfishing community would have taken issue with Peter's clamming methods: he strictly dug with a five-tine rake and lined his wire bucket with a punctured plastic Stop and Shop bag in order to prevent the smaller clams from slipping through. He didn’t even own a gauge, despite his license requiring him to measure each quahog he pulled from the earth. Underneath mounds of black sand in his basket, Peter buried his below-regulation sized clams, bringing home with him a little piece of the island each time he departed.
The sandbar elongated as the tides sucked away the water, temporarily repatriating it out to the sea. The sun approached the zenith, but Peter’s eyes remained fixed on the sand, as if he could see what resided beneath. Sometimes he felt like he could, if he looked long and hard enough, like this was what he was meant to do. Over the years he had developed a sixth sense for these sorts of things.
~
Before she left, Mandy accused him of being a taker. She said he latched onto any piece of herself she put into their relationship until it felt like it had always belonged to him, claiming the best parts of her and never giving anything in return. Worse, she claimed, was that he never did anything with what he took, wasting both of their lives with his state of misguided stagnation. Peter didn’t see what was so bad about that, and he said so. He saw stagnancy as reliability. I won’t do this to myself anymore, she said. You can’t even see how unhappy we both are.
The rotting wood of his house’s weathered door frame rattled as she slammed the screen door behind her. Through the tiny checkers of the screen, he watched as she strode down the long dirt driveway, illuminated by the full moon above.
~
It was a successful day: he had already emptied the contents of his bucket into the boat three times, and more and more land exposed itself for harvest. A seagull watched the man drift stealthily over the sands as it hopped over to the abandoned dinghy. If Peter had looked up, he would have seen it pluck a steamer from the boat and crush its soft shell in its beak, but it was not in Peter’s nature to avert his eyes from the promise of something more.
Peter’s looming, ever-distorting shadow tracked the passing hours. As the sun dipped below the meridian, its shape further deviated from the man’s silhouette, eventually morphing into an autonomous entity, entirely unrecognizable from its source. It slunk through the wet sands behind Peter like a stalker, or an omen. If Peter had looked back, he might have been disturbed by this perverted version of himself, but the sands ahead were ripe and untouched, and he held his five-tine rake in his hand, ready to strike the earth at any moment.
Clamming was muscle memory to him, or maybe even something deeper, like the thrum of his pulse that beat to the rhythm of some ancestral desire. Regardless, his thoughts, unstimulated by the familiarity of this task, wandered without permission. While his body moved mechanically, his mind was adrift in the vast, unforgiving sea of memory.
~
Peter knew that Mandy had wanted to leave Orleans for years. Even in high school, she would tell him how she couldn’t wait to abandon the ever-changing ebb and flow of tourists in the summer, the “closed for the season” signs that adorned restaurant windows as soon as labor day crept by. She hated the bustle of unfamiliar faces and the stillness of this halfhearted ghost town. Mostly, though, she hated the faces she did recognize; it was always the ones that looked most like her own that bore the angriest expressions, the pair of lips near-identical to hers that spoke the ugliest words.
When she did leave, she didn’t go far. Boston University was a less-than-two hour drive from home, and Peter, who stayed in Orleans, promised to visit her every weekend. He thought her college friends were pretentious and condescending, but he was always happy to see her. Her four years in Boston were the most formative of her life, but even they couldn’t untangle her from her roots. Peter lived alone in his late-father’s cottage on the salt marsh, and suggested she move in with him until she secured a job in the city. His clamming business was off to a promising start.
So she agreed to live with him in that haunted house, afraid not of the ghosts who inhabited it, but that she might become just like them if she stayed too long.
~
As the sun sank west, Peter didn’t notice the sandbar dwindling into near-submergence until cold water lapped against his ankles. A wave ripped the grocery bag from the basket and caught the accumulated sand, returning it to the island and exposing the clammer’s forbidden pillage underneath. Shrieking, a gust of wind sent salty spray at Peter’s face that collected on his sunburnt cheeks and dripped into his beard. Delaying his return to an empty house, he had stayed out for longer than he intended.
The dinghy moved diagonally through waves, which rose and crashed haphazardly over the gunwale, simultaneously blinding him and adding weight to an already impossibly heavy load. Peter usually avoided rowing in chop like this; every few strokes one of his oars would miss the water and set him off course. Loose clams rattled with every wave that struck the boat, small enough to be shot up by the force, their hard shells dropping like toy missiles onto Peter's feet. His arms burned as he pulled the weight of the entire ocean around his tiny boat, discouraged by the amount of exertion required to displace the water only for it to surge back to its original shape moments later, taking him with it.
In the distance, the telltale orange bumpers of the Coast Guard boat flashed like a beacon. Peter held the whistle tied to his life jacket between his teeth but did not blow it. The sound of dozens of clams sloshing about the cockpit hummed along to the melody of a siren song dissonant to the sharp blare of a safety whistle. He couldn’t go home with nothing tonight; he had already lost too much. Peter turned his head and kept rowing.
Ten yards from shore, a swell rose and landed over the dinghy, pulling it down to reunite with restless water and smashing its wooden body on the barnacle-studded rocks below. All but one of the freed clams escaped this violent fate, the one’s shell cracking between a particularly sharp rock and the heavy handle of the rake that captured it. The rest, happily rescued, heard the muffled crunch of these impacts, saw the sea that enveloped their little shelled bodies run bloody with forsaken flakes of red boat paint.
Peter, held haphazardly afloat by his unbuckled lifejacket, was caught in the movement of the waves, which flung him shallower, close enough to swim until his frantic feet touched solid ground. Choking on salt water, he dragged himself onto the beach, sand sticking to his face, salty with sea water and his own tears.
He squinted out at the spot where swirling water swallowed up his livelihood, but found no proof he had ever been there. There was no reason to stay anymore; Peter could follow Mandy to the city uninhibited. He could let himself be happy.
Above, the harvest moon rose again, brighter than the night before. The ocean reached up, as if to meet it, as the moon’s golden countenance laughed down at the hubris of a haggard man. Yes, he would stay here forever.