Milk Tide

Three pump sets lay drying on a dish towel on the table, and only one of them was going back in the drawer.

She bagged the other two with the woodstove ticking behind her and the window over the counter gone black with dark and fog. She knew each piece by feel now. The flanges, the connectors, the soft white membranes that tore if you were rough with them, the bottles with their measuring lines worn half off from the dishwasher in Portland. Flanges nested in the bottles, membranes in a sandwich bag of their own, the lot into a gallon zip bag, and the bags into a cardboard box with the cooler and the last of the insulated mailers. She wrote CLOSET on the flap in marker. She put the third set in the drawer by the sink, and then she stood and looked at the box.

A week ago she had used all three sets every day, and the cooler, and a stack of mailers in the corner by the door. Now there was one set, and she was going to need it less every few days, and then not at all.

The taper sheet was on the fridge under a magnet from a Tillamook feed store. Velma Nakashima's square careful printing ran down it in blue marker, a column of dates and a column of sessions, with a line struck through each one Adriana had already dropped. The afternoon pump was struck through as of today. Velma had said the afternoon one would be the hardest to let go of, because it sat in the middle of the day where her body was used to it, and Velma had been right.

It was a little after six in the evening. She had last pumped at noon. The heaviness had started around four, high under her arms first, where it always started, and then lower and across, a tight warm weight that made her want to stand with her shoulders back and her elbows away from her sides. By five it had become an ache. Now it was an ache with an opinion. She pressed the flat of one palm against the side of her left breast, through the wrap top and the bra, and felt how hard it had gone, and let out a breath.

"Not yet," she said to the kitchen. "You're on the plan."

The rule was the plan. You dropped one, you let it be uncomfortable for a few days, you expressed by hand only to comfortable and never to empty, and your body caught on and made less. She had read the whole sheet twice in Velma's office and once more in the truck in the pharmacy lot. She was thirty-four, and she was a person who followed a recipe the first time and changed it the second. This time she meant to follow it all the way through.

Her phone buzzed on the counter.

It was Beth. A photograph, and under it: She finally gave up at 5. Adam hasn't moved in forty minutes. He says he lives here now.

Adriana picked the phone up and held it close. The baby was asleep face down on Adam's chest, on the gray T-shirt he wore to grade papers in, one small fist closed in the cotton and her mouth open against him. Adam's big hand covered most of her back. His eyes were shut too. Behind them on the couch was the blue knitted blanket Adriana had bought at a craft fair in Hood River when she was five months along, because it was the exact color of the river that day.

She smiled at it until her face felt it.

Look at her, she wrote back. Look at HIM. Tell him to stay put, that's his job now.

Then, because it was true and Beth liked to hear it: She looks so good, B. You both do.

Beth sent back a row of hearts and a photo of her own feet in fuzzy socks on the coffee table, and then nothing, which meant the baby had moved.

Adriana set the phone face down and leaned her hip against the counter.

It was a good thing. She had known it was a good thing from the first night Beth had cried about it in the walk-in at Lucca, where they had both worked then, and Adriana had said, without thinking about it for more than a second, Then let me. It had taken nearly two years from that night. Clinics and blood draws, the shots in her stomach, the transfer in December with Beth holding one of her hands and Adam holding the other and all three of them pretending not to cry. Then the pregnancy, which had been easy, and the birth in August, which had been fast and plain and ordinary, and the baby on Beth's chest before anyone had cut the cord. Their embryo, their daughter. Adriana had carried her and handed her over and gone home and slept twelve hours.

Then the ten weeks of milk. They had agreed on that together, all three of them, at Beth's kitchen table with a pad of paper between them. Every three hours on the pump, days and nights. The bags labeled and frozen flat. The insulated mailer packed every afternoon, and the overnight courier cutoff at four in Tillamook, so that she drove that road every day of September and half of October with a cooler riding on the passenger seat. The last box had gone out on Monday. Beth had called when it arrived and said thank you so many times that Adriana had made her stop.

It was done. She had chosen it and she had finished it, and the baby was in Portland asleep on her father, exactly where she belonged.

What was left was this. A cabin she rented on the bay side of the bay road, with a woodstove and a leak over the porch she kept a stock pot under. A trial in the make room at Salt Meadow Creamery, five in the morning to whenever the curds were packed. A pump she was saying goodbye to one session at a time, and two breasts that had not been told.

She took her black peacoat off the hook. It closed over her now, which it had not done in the spring, but it pulled across the front when she buttoned it and she left the top button open. She wound the thick cream scarf twice around her neck, stepped into her rubber boots on the mat by the door, and took the big yellow flashlight from the shelf.

The bay road was empty in both directions. Fog sat on it in the streetlight up by the boat basin, and past that the dark went all the way out. She crossed and went down the gravel cut between two shore pines to where the bank dropped off onto the flats.

The tide was nearly all the way out. She could smell it before she could see anything, salt and cold mud and the green rot of eelgrass, and under it something sweet and mineral that she had never smelled anywhere but here. She had grown up ten miles inland and had come out to this bay as a girl only for clam digging on spring mornings with her father. She had not known, then, that people worked it at night.

She had walked down on most low tides since September. At first it had been the only place she could stand to be between pumps, because nobody wanted anything from her out here and it was too cold to think. Then it had been because of the light.

It was out there now, a white point well out on the Gunnison leases, low and moving, going up and down along a row of racks.

She picked her way along the edge of the flats where the sand was firm, sweeping the flashlight ahead of her over the ripples and the worm casts and the glossy black of the low places. The mud farther out would take a boot to the shin. She knew better than to try it.

Her breasts swung heavy and hard under the coat with every step. She folded one arm across herself and walked like that.

When she was about level with the light she stopped and turned the flashlight toward it and clicked it off and on twice.

The white point lifted. It found her, held a second, and swung politely away so it was not in her eyes.

"Make room," a man's voice called across the mud. It was a low voice and it carried well in the fog. "You smell like feet."

"I've been home three hours," Adriana called back. "I've showered. It's in my hair."

"I can smell it from here."

"That's you. That's your bags. You smell like the bottom of a bucket somebody forgot about."

"These are clean oysters."

"Nothing on this mud is clean."

He laughed. She liked his laugh. It came out of him like it surprised him.

His name was Neil Ahlgren and he was a lease hand for the Gunnisons. She knew that much because he had told her the second or third night, shouting across forty yards of mud, and she knew he lived up the hill somewhere because she had seen the same truck parked by the boat basin on every tide. She did not know much else. She had seen him once in daylight, at The Wrack Line, from behind, a very big man in a brown canvas coat waiting for coffee with his knit cap in his hand. Out here he was a light and a voice and the shape of shoulders when he straightened.

She liked that it was only that. Most of the people she had talked to for two years had been nurses and doctors and Beth, and all of them had wanted to know how she was feeling.

"How's the curd," he called.

"It's Saturday. No make on Saturday."

"So what'd you do all day?"

Sat on the couch with a bag of frozen peas on each side and watched a cooking show I hate, she thought. "Cleaned," she called.

"Sounds terrible."

"It was great. What are you doing out there?"

"Turning bags." The light dipped and she heard the hollow rattle of oysters tumbling in mesh, a sound like a box of rocks shaken once. "Ozzie wants them shaken before the weather turns."

"Where's Ozzie?"

The light swung toward the far end of the leases, where she could make out, now that she looked, a second, dimmer point low on the mud. "Keeping an eye on me," Neil said.

The heaviness pulled at her again, a slow tightening right across her chest, and she pressed her forearm harder against herself and breathed out through her nose and waited for it to pass. It did not pass. It settled.

She swung her flashlight back to the sand in front of her boots. The beam flickered, went brown, came back, and went out.

She shook it. She smacked the side of it against her palm. Nothing. The dark came right up to her, and the fog with it, and for a moment the only light in the world was his.

"Hey," she called. "My flashlight just died."

"Batteries?"

"I don't know. It's a flashlight. It's from my dad's garage, it's probably older than me."

"Stay there."

"I'm fine, I can see the road."

"Stay there," he said again, mildly, and the light turned and came toward her.

It took him a while. He came straight across the mud and she heard every step, the suck of it and the slow pull of the boot coming free, and the light grew and swung and steadied. Then he was on the firm sand beside her and he was much bigger than he had looked from forty yards. He was a whole head and more taller than she was, broad through the chest and the shoulders in a pair of chest waders with mud to the thigh, his sleeves pushed up his forearms under the straps. He had taken off one orange glove and held it in his teeth. His headlamp was very bright, and he reached up and tipped it so it pointed at the ground between them.

In the spill of it she saw his face for the first time properly. It was broad and fair and reddened across the cheekbones from the cold, clean-shaven with the dark coming in along his jaw. His eyebrows were heavy and straight. He looked stern. Then he took the glove out of his mouth and smiled at her, and he did not.

"Here," he said.

He had something in his other hand. He unzipped a pocket on the front of his waders and took out a second headlamp, a smaller one, with a worn black strap.

"I keep a spare," he said. "This one's got the red light on it. Click it twice."

"I can't take your light."

"It's a spare. That's what it's for." He held the strap open with both hands. "Can I?"

She nodded.

He put it on her. He did it slowly and without any hurry at all. His fingers were cold from the mud and very large, and very careful. He settled the band over the back of her head, above her scarf, and found where her hair was thickest and drew the strap down so it would not slide, and then he tugged the little lamp straight in the middle of her forehead with one fingertip. She held still for all of it. She could smell him from here. He smelled of salt and cold mud and wet rubber, and under that, faintly, of woodsmoke.

"There," he said. He reached past her ear and clicked the button twice. A soft red glow came up around them, warm on his face and on the front of her coat and on the sand. "Red doesn't wreck your eyes. You'll see the road better than with the white."

"Thank you," she said.

"Sure."

He looked at her a second longer than he needed to under the red light, and then he looked down at his own glove and put it back on.

"You're shivering," he said.

"It's October."

"Go home and get warm, make room."

"Go shake your oysters."

He laughed again, and turned, and went back out onto the mud with his white light ahead of him, and the dark closed up behind him. She stood and listened to his boots going away.

Then it came.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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