Sea Smoke

He inhaled through his nostrils, using a sense that still worked, taking in the scents of medicine and bleach, mostly, but there was a new smell that he hadn’t expected. Something familiar and sweet. It brought to the surface a memory of biting into a ripe strawberry before plunging into the ocean on a summer day in his youth. The salt of the water washed the juice away from his cheeks, then burned his sinuses as he dunked in cool relief from the August heat. He could almost feel the water with just one whiff. More than just the smell, though, was the feeling of possibility in the air that the scent seemed to ignite. A bright future ahead that held nothing but certainty in its unseen opportunities. He tried to place the smell but couldn’t.

His curiosity was interrupted when the door to his room opened and his nurse, Pam, burst in, wrote something squeakily on the whiteboard across from his bed, and came to his bedside. She somehow emitted intense decibels even when she wasn’t speaking.

“Good morning!” she sang in an original melody that served no purpose but to annoy. He did not return the song with any acknowledgement in an attempt to dissuade her from future off-key greetings. “How are we today?” she sang in another melody that didn’t fit in any way with the previous one. It was like she was rehearsing a two-act musical of dissonant, inane greetings, purposely torturing him to get a reaction. He wouldn’t give in.

She leaned over his face, breathing an everything bagel on him, and gave him a big smile that he could hear in her annoying voice. “Handsome as ever!” she croaked, inexplicably moving into a country music twang. She then stopped, and made a slight grunting sound as she looked at him, like the beginning of a concern that she wasn’t ready to commit to yet.

“I’ll be right back. You just sit tight, Mr. Reynolds.”

Ain’t going nowhere, he thought, but still didn’t want to say anything aloud for fear it would continue the conversation or, worse, start the singing back up again. He heard the door close and her perky footsteps walking away, boorishly tapping on the poor linoleum. He focused again on the beat of the beeps and buzzes of the machines, trying to drown out the rhythm of her feet.

Then the strawberry smell came back, stronger this time, and he was again transported, although now it was not to his youth. It was in his late thirties, and he envisioned his daughter, Billie, as a young girl, laughing and teasing him for something silly. His heart felt full, both happy and devastated at the same time. He hadn’t spoken with Billie in two years, and he longed to go back to those days a quarter century ago and scoop her up in his arms and tell her that her daddy loved her. How he wished he could. He could hear her childhood laughter ringing in his ears like it had just happened seconds ago and there was a light echo in his head.

“Billie,” he whispered to himself.

“Dad, I’m here,” he heard her say. He looked and was shocked to see her standing at the end of his bed visiting him. He could see her so clearly without his glasses. The rest of the room held the blur, but he could see every detail in her face. It was as though the fragmented, murky data his eyes sent to his brain was then filled in, the missing pieces sharpened from memories of his child’s beautiful face.

The haze in the room, now more apparent than ever in contrast to Billie, reminded him of the fog that rose off the river near his childhood home. The cold morning air would hit the warmer water and create a vapor that rose a few feet off the water and temporarily gave off a concealing fog that hid the secrets from below. His grandmother had once said to him, “In the morning the creatures of the deep, that dare not break the surface when it’s clear, can come up and feel the air, for just a few moments, hidden in the sea smoke.” She cleared her throat violently, her weathered vocal cords as gnarled as her arthritic knuckles. “You stay out of there lest you want to spend an eternity in their world,” she choked.