When Javy was sixteen, Regina was no more. The details of her death were sketchy at best. Regina hated the sea. It terrified her, made her angry, was a source of endless paranoia to her. Then one day, she’d rowed out into it, never to be seen again. She’d borrowed their next-door neighbor’s twelve-foot rowboat. That much was known. The boat washed ashore three days later and Regina’s body was never found.

The hows and whys of all that were never explained. They could not be understood. Why would someone with that complete terror of the sea take a rowboat out onto it? Then again, why would someone who was terrified of the ocean live on the shore? What sense did that make? But of course, Regina made no sense. It was probably rooted in what happened to Javy’s father, but she learned better than to dare ask. Regina would stand in the kitchen in the dead of night with a single candle burning and stare out into the primeval vastness of the Atlantic. Sometimes, she’d walk out there in the darkness just before sunrise and stand at the very edge of the beach where the low tide had stranded all the dead things, seemingly watching for something no one else could see.

And on those few occasions when Javy dared ask her why, Regina had grabbed her like a sand crab seizing a fish. “Because I have to. Somebody has to keep watch. Somebody has to be alert because it can happen at any time, Alice. Sooner or later, they always return for their own.” That was it. An esoteric statement with no explanation.

Yes, she had been a woman of great contradictions and deep-set fears you did not want to know about. But what had been her plan when she rowed out there? Had it been suicide? Was that how Regina Javonivic wanted to go out, at the very mercy of the thing she feared most? Nobody knew. Particularly not Javy who’d gone to live with her aunt in St. Michaels.

The entire episode traumatized her, of course. There was no true sense of closure. She used to lie in her bed at night, listening to the ocean, imagining that Regina was out there, waiting. That she was somewhere in the deeps, tangled in seaweed, infested by sea snails and bivalves. Bristle worms living in her eyes and hagfish tunneling into her belly. A puffed, white, rotten thing chewed by squid, forever staring with eyes like hot glass, grinning with a mouth of black mud. And that some dark night when the dankness blew in off the sea, she’d come back and stand over her bed, dripping sea slime and rank saltwater.

“Enough,” she said. “Enough.”