344. A Good Woman

As unspoken as moon accords planet, Em accompanied her father’s umbra down an oak paneled hallway, the deck rolling before her mind, the bulkhead creaking under swaying thoughts, her heart beating as war drums, her defenses rising a flag not white. Movement of mind and heart, ticking against the percussion of anticipation could play those games. The captain knew. There were instruments and there was gut; one sterile, one living. Choices. Always choices, he thought as one then the other touched the familiar worn frame above the doorway of his alcove.

Her father’s study, with memorabilia scattered in every cordaged nook, a virtual history of love of sea, of relationships formed and friends buried, exhaled solemn tones of wood and brass, of midnight stories of trial and tribulation, of ghosts and heroes, of a life lived above fear, beyond regret. Without speaking, from device of hand and deliberation of eye, Em knew something was not in place; and, as if to look for the scotoma, her mind begin to spin faster and faster with each reluctant exchange of silence, of downy eyes burning with an emotion only a father could feel on bended knee before his defenseless child. His hands, those leathery warm mitts opened before the witness of a heart lost in the shoals of waters unknown, of territory uncharted. A silk breeze blew from an open paned window, brushing Em’s hair with gentle strokes across her creamy olive complexion as her eyes peeked with the shine of inevitability, blinking rapidly for focus above cheeks not long for dry.

The captain, heavy of lid, planted his competent hands on the edge of his desk and leaned over. His lips opened as if to speak but instead crackled words destined to haunt the halls of a child’s memory like a eulogy, “Emy, your mother is a good woman.”

Em looked from cheek to cheek as if seeing words in creases, sonnets in furrows and love in the wrinkles of a Hynerian who suddenly looked older than he was. “Father, you’ve always been straight with me. What’s wrong?”

“I’ve never been one for fancy words.” He hesitated as if lost for the very locution practiced the evening long.

Em released her troubled shoulders into a shrug when she realized the sonic boom was not forthcoming and immediately regretted the solicited ineptitude that overcame her father’s countenance like a grotesque mask. His steady hand began to shake and his eyes looked dim, faraway, his mind spinning for light in the dark, for answers within a book not written. With an act of mercy, she took his trembling hands and with lips slow and tender kissed away the salty anguish on his glistening cheek. “Tell me father. Tell me what you called me here tonight to say. I am stronger than you think.”

The captain pulled his walty head back as if a stranger had just spoken. He surveyed his Em, a young female Hynerian full of promise, and in one of those moments that changes everything while changing nothing, she appeared not as child but as Hynerian. “Your mother,” he began in effort of force, of spine stiff, of commander straining under the weight of advancing unrequited hordes, “is dying.”

Em knew what was coming. And, and still, she felt slapped by an invisible hand from behind her father, one laughing and grinning in the pain of mere mortals, a hand with a knife to her father’s neck. From sting to anger to resolution to compassion occurred in the space of a breath. “You know what we must do?”

“Tell me. What must we do?”

“We must fight. We must fight this thing with everything we’ve got.”

“Emy—“

“I want to know every detail.”

“Emy my dear—“

“I want to know now, right this instant. We must devise a plan. That’s what you always said father, that we need a plan, that we must win the fight in our minds before we take the fight to our enemies.”

The captain squeezed tears down his cheeks with a smile he could not repress. She was wrong and she was right. His wife, her mother, was dying and nothing known on land or sky was going to change that. But that wasn’t really the point.

“We start with flowers.”

“Flowers?”

“Flowers brighten everything. We need flowers in every room, a signal, our standard. Mother will know. She will see and when she can no longer see she will smell the aroma of our untiring efforts. We will bathe her senses in our love and our strength will become her strength, our hope her hope, our conviction, the road to recovery. We will carry her father. We will lift her upon our stout shoulders as victors and she will know, know a love unlike any other.”

He ran his fingers under her bangs as if to see the face that was speaking such words. “My dear child, you are the fruit of your mother’s womb.”

“Oh, I’m just getting started. Now, tell me everything you know.”

Reading and Commentary: A Good Woman