Return in Peace

by Emma Styles-Swaim

When Ruth Larson’s alarm tore the silence of her darkened room, she was already awake. She often was. Sleep had become like a shadow that flitted across her face and body for an hour or two at a time. As she smoothed her blankets and patted her pillows into shape, she thought about the deep, drowning sleep she had known as a child. Engulfed, she thought. No longer. She almost sighed.

When she opened her bedroom door, her three rescue dogs, Francis, Zelda, and Lucky, greeted her with the composed exaltation of painstakingly well-trained dogs. She waded through the wagging tails and wriggling bodies to pour food into their dishes in the corner, and then sat at her tiny kitchen table to have a cup of coffee before she went out. Every morning, Ruth Larson did exactly this. Next she would walk to the small store in town to buy her food for the day (an egg, half a loaf of rye bread, two apples, some mixed greens, cheddar cheese, and a piece of chicken or fish. Occasionally the vegetable changed—she sometimes bought green beans—but there was little variation) and then take her dogs for a long, brisk walk on the beach. Ruth Larson liked routine.

This morning, when Ruth stepped out the door of her tiny gray-shingled house on the edge of the mesa, she stepped into a world blanketed in delicate, slow-dancing mist. This was normal. The mist poured into the seaside town of Bolinas every morning and every night, filling all the dips and crannies in the landscape and settling lightly on the mesa that rose above the town. Ruth Larson walked straight-backed through the silent mist down the road to the little store. There was no one about. As she walked past one of the neat, yellow-painted rental houses on the main road, a sparrow standing in the tangle of a rose bush twittered in her ear. The high song penetrated the swelling silence of the mist that surrounded her. Ruth found herself wanting to cover her ears, to keep herself wrapped in the stillness. Engulfed.

In the store, Ruth Larson chose her items carefully and brought them to the register. The store owner eyed her groceries and punched the same number he always did into the cash register. Muffled voices rose from the radio on the counter next to him, and the words “earthquake” and “sleeper waves” hung in the air.

“Dangerous tides out there,” the grocer said conversationally, as Ruth handed him her money.

“Mmm,” Ruth nodded, looking past him to a display of fruit in the window. “Are those strawberries?” The grocer turned around.

“Yes, they sure are. Early for strawberries, we were lucky to get them.”

“Why, you know, I think I might get some.”

He eyed her from under a thick layer of eyebrows. “Don’t get carried away, now, Ruth.”

Ruth Larson laughed. “I have never yet been carried away, John.” She smiled down at the strawberries in her paper grocery bag as she walked out of the store.

Forty-five minutes later, John the grocer watched from his window as Ruth Larson and her three dogs made their way down the sandy road to the beach. Francis and Zelda trotted obediently at her sides, but Lucky strained at the end of his leash, still too young and unpredictable to walk untethered. The beach was narrow and littered with sticks, shells, chunks of Styrofoam, and sweeping tangles of kelp. High on the shore where Ruth walked to save her shoes from the fast-stretching waves were wandering trails of yellowed sea-foam, evidence of a wild night.

Ruth walked briskly, as she usually did, but today she found herself wanting to linger. She stopped suddenly, impulsively, and looked out to sea, the wind surrounding her and blowing through her short white hair. The ocean had a silver sheen to it, but beneath the surface it looked iron-gray and mysterious. Ruth watched a pelican fold its wings and fall from the sky like a knife into the churning water. She imagined the pelican beneath the surface, surrounded by the wild pulling of the waves, and almost laughed with the excitement this thought stirred in her. She looked down at Lucky, tugging impatiently at his leash, and shook her head.

“Today I feel like being swept away,” she said into the air.

One morning two weeks later, John the grocer walked quietly through the mist up the splintery wooden steps of his store. He paused in front of the bulletin board by the door. He blinked the mist away and stretched out his fingers to a flyer with stiff, curling edges. The paper was stained yellow from exposure to the salt-damp air. John read it with the skin below his eyes sagging and his fingers lightly gripping the paper.

Missing: Ruth Larson

Bolinas resident, age 70, last seen on Sunday, January24th,

walking with her three dogs toward the beach around 8:00 a.m.

Her dogs were found on the mesa near her home, alive and well.

If you have any information concerning Ruth Larson’s disappearance,

please call the police.

Below the words was a black-and-white photograph of a tall, thin woman with short white hair looking squarely into the camera. Her smile was tight and close-lipped, but around her eyes were faint glimmers of a strangled laugh trying to break free.

John sighed and dropped his hand. He had been the one who had seen her last, and the one who had told the police the story of her last morning. They had asked him endless questions, but he had not been able to give them many answers. He knew few details about Ruth Larson, but suspected there were few to know; she was simply a quiet old woman who was very set in her ways. Ruth, he thought. How very unlike you to disappear. How very unlike her, in fact, to do anything other than exactly what she always did, in her precise and no-nonsense way, lips pursed and back held straight, with her obedient dogs by her side… People like Ruth Larson didn’t have such drama in their lives. He smoothed the flyer, and as he looked up his eyes caught the red of the strawberries displayed in his front window.

“I have never yet been carried away, John.”

That evening John closed up early, practically shutting the door in the face of a grinning, rum-scented surfer. He turned up the collar of his fleece jacket and made his way down the dark road to the beach.

The mist was creeping in, and the lights of Stinson glowed eerily across the lagoon. The smell of the sea was sharp and the sand sifted coldly into his shoes as he walked slowly along the curving line the waves made in the sand. About halfway along the beach, he turned and looked out at the ocean. The water swayed slowly around itself, spreading out gently on the sand as if it meant to stay there forever, then pulling back with surprising suddenness. John thought about the sea, and the strength that boiled beneath its calm surface. He had heard of waves that would tower above buildings, had seen huge chunks of cliffs bitten off by the sea, been in houses that had now long since fallen victim to the incredible power of water. The sea had the power to shape the landscape of the earth as well as that of human lives. The ocean is a mighty harmonist, John thought. Wordsworth.

John turned and walked to a log at the base of the cliffs that towered above the beach. He was about to sit down when he noticed a dark shape on the other end of the log. He approached it and stretched his hand out cautiously toward it—it looked suspiciously like a snake. It wasn’t. It was a coiled up piece of—rope? No, a leash. A dog’s leash. John ignored his swelling thoughts and uncoiled the leash until the metal clip at the end swung inches from the sand. He ran his free hand down the smooth nylon thoughtfully, but paused when he felt the texture become bumpier under his fingers. Holding the leash up to his eyes, he was able to make out the name “LUCKY” embroidered in block letters. This, then, was Ruth’s—she had often talked to him about her rescue dogs. Lucky, he knew, was the youngest, and still rather unruly—she didn’t trust him to be without a leash. Why, then, was the leash here? What would have caused Ruth to release her dog? John coiled the leash back up and put it in his pocket before turning to look at the sea again. There was something powerful, almost alluring about those swelling waves, something that invited release and abandon, flinging oneself to a fate unknown. Dangerous, yet almost womb-like, in that one would be surrounded, engulfed, by the ocean’s strength. Like a sky full of stars. “I would like to step out of my heart and go walking beneath the enormous sky,” John whispered. “Rilke.”

John glanced at the sky, smiled, and then walked back toward the sea, stopping where the sand changed from a soft shadow-color to bright silver . He reached into his pocket and took out a small paper bag. From it he took a strawberry, fat and gleaming. He held it up and spun it in his thick fingers, and then stared out to sea as if he were considering throwing the strawberry into the water. But instead he smiled gently and put it in his mouth. Ruth Larson had not been his lover, nor did he see her that way, but we are all lovers, in a way, joined—

And after he had chewed and swallowed the strawberry, and wiped its juice from his fingers, he threw the green stem into the waves and said,

“’Return in peace to the ocean, my love; 
I too am part of that ocean, my love—we are not so much separated; 
Behold the great rondure—the cohesion of all, how perfect! 
But as for me, for you, the irresistible sea is to separate us,
As for an hour, carrying us diverse—yet cannot carry us diverse for ever; 
Be not impatient—a little space—Know you, I salute the air, the ocean and the
land, 
Every day, at sundown, for your dear sake, my love.’ Whitman.”