Off-Season Tide

*This story came from wanting to write something quiet and coastal, where the danger was cold instead of loud, and where tenderness didn't have to be safe. Thanks for reading it in the off-season.*

June Carroll sat in her car in the motel lot and watched the rain bead up on the windshield. Forty-two years old, and this was the view. Water growing, water sliding, water starting over. The ocean hissed somewhere behind the motel, close enough to hear, too dark to see.

She had driven from Phoenix in three days. Two-thousand-some miles, and she remembered maybe forty minutes of it total. Wasn't that something? A person could cross half a country and lose most of it the way you lose a week in March.

The lot was half empty, mostly out-of-state plates. A guy fleeing something in Idaho. A family from Nevada pretending this was a vacation. And June, Arizona plates, rental contract in the glove box she hadn't opened since Reno.

Why Port Trancas, Oregon, in February? She'd asked herself that at every gas station since Sacramento. The answer never got better than "why not." Twenty years of repo work in the desert had taught her a few things, and one of them was that the best places to hide were the places nobody wanted to be. February on the Oregon coast, that was the spot. God's own closed sign.

She was tired. Not the good kind, the kind a nap fixes. Tired of running from a country she no longer recognized. When had that happened? Somewhere in her thirties, she figured. Somewhere between the third repo and the last man who never stayed for coffee. The whole place had gone strange on her, and she'd spent five years driving around looking for a piece of it that still made sense.

A bed that didn't move. That was the entire dream, really. Salt air and silence and a bed that stayed put.

"Okay," she said out loud, to nobody, because there was nobody. "One night. Then south."

She did not believe herself. She hadn't believed herself about one nights in years.

The diner was called the Salty Cue, which was a terrible name, and it was open at nine at night because in an off-season town, the night shift is the only shift that matters. June ordered coffee and pie from a counter that stuck to her elbows.

The waitress was maybe thirty-nine, blonde ponytail through the back of a cap, arms like a person who actually uses arms. She set the coffee down and then, and this was the strange part, she didn't leave. She just stood there, pot in hand, looking at June's Arizona plates through the window, then at June.

"You drove here in February?" the waitress said.

"Everyone keeps asking that like there's a good answer."

"There isn't one. I checked." She refilled a cup that didn't need it. "I'm Reba. You're staying at the Sandpiper, right? Half those cars are rental plates."

"June. And guilty. One night only."

"Sure. One night." Reba smiled like she'd heard that before, lots of times, from lots of people who were still there a year later. "Pie's safe here. Pie and the clam chowder. Don't ask about anything else."

"Noted. What about the bar down the road? Blue sign, looked like it lost a fight?"

"Anchor's End. That's Bruno's place. It's fine if you like warm beer and men who talk about fish." She paused, wiped a ring off the counter that had probably been there since the Clinton administration. "Which, honestly, in February, is the whole menu of human company around here."

"I like warm beer fine."

"Then you're in luck, because that's all there is."

The pie was actually good, which felt like a betrayal of the town's whole aesthetic. June ate it slow and Reba kept drifting back, and neither of them ever said go away. There were long silences, and June noticed something odd about them. They didn't itch. Usually a silence with a stranger felt like standing on a train platform with your fly down. These silences felt like somebody had put a blanket over her shoulders. That was new. She decided not to examine it too hard, the way you don't poke a bruise.

"Off-season's the honest season," Reba said, leaning a hip on the counter. "You find out who actually lives here and who's just hiding here."

"Which are you?"

"Both. Two years in March." And then she changed the subject so fast June could hear the gears grind, asked about Phoenix, about driving, about whether the desert really gets cold at night in winter. It does, June told her. People never believe that.

"Go to the Anchor's End," Reba said when a kid came in to cover the counter for her break. "Tell Bruno I said the beer better be warm."

That got an actual laugh out of June, her first in, what, months? She honestly couldn't remember. Something about this town was already working on her, and she hadn't decided how she felt about that.

The Anchor's End was exactly as advertised. Blue neon, half of it dead. Bruno Dubois was fifty-five and built as if he had spent twenty years pulling drunks out of the Pacific, which, it turned out, he had. He set down a warm beer without being asked.

"Reba says it better be warm," June told him.

"Then it's warm." He looked at her a second longer than customers usually got. "New in town?"

"Passing through."

"Uh huh. They all say that."

Was there some kind of bulletin board? Did the whole town get a text? June took her beer to a corner table and let the place do its thing. Two old guys argued about crab quotas. A jukebox played something with a fiddle in it. The ocean hissed outside the door like it wanted in. She was two sips in when the door opened and a man came in who smelled like fish and motor oil, and she knew this without him getting close, which told you something.

He ignored the bar. He came straight to her table. Fifty or so, thin in a bad way, eyes as if he hadn't slept in a week.

"You're the one from the car lot," he said.

"Wow. The famous small-town welcome."

"Ronald Hahn." He sat down without being invited, which June, a former repo agent, strongly resented. "You need to hear something before you sleep tonight."

"Hard pass, Ronald."

"You hear her yet?" he said, leaning in. His breath was sour, and not with booze. Something worse, something like low tide left in the sun. "The woman in the shallows. She sings when the tide comes in at night. Most folks can't hear it. I could, before. I worked the crab boats thirty years, and I heard her twice."

"That's a great story, Ronald."

"It's not a story!" He smacked the table and both old guys looked over and Bruno reached for something under the bar, casually, the way you do. Ronald lowered his voice. "She's been waiting. That's the part nobody gets. She's not hungry like a shark. She's patient like a spider. And she's been waiting for somebody who tastes like iron."

June looked at her beer. Then at her hands, which had a little scar on the left knuckle from a boot clamp, old work, old blood.

"Well, that's dramatic," she said. "I'm a repo agent, Ronald. I taste like coffee and disappointment."

"Your blood," he said, quiet now, worse than the shouting somehow. "You ever been told you've got too much iron? Hemochromatosis? It runs in families. She can taste it. Through the walls, through the rain. She tasted you when you crossed the county line."

Bruno arrived with a glass of water and a hand on Ronald's shoulder, big and practiced. "Ronnie. Walk it off, buddy. Come on."

Ronald let himself be steered up, but he kept talking over his shoulder the whole way. "Lock your windows! The tide follows her, and right now the tide is following you."

And then he was out the door, into the rain, and the bar went back to its arguing like nothing happened, and Bruno stood there apologizing with a shrug.

"Seizure, four months back," he said. "Boat work does it, or maybe it did the boat work, who knows. Doc says the dreams are from the seizure. He says otherwise." Bruno collected the empty glass. "Sorry about your evening."

"Are the windows a concern? Be straight with me."

"They're a concern for a locksmith, maybe. Lock your windows, they're probably due." He almost smiled. "Go on home, June. It's just rain out there."

But when she got to her car, she stood a minute in the wet dark and listened. The ocean was hissing, sure. That was normal. That was just the ocean doing ocean things.

Except. Wasn't it louder on this side of the motel? The side her room was on?

"Don't be an idiot," she told herself, and went in, and locked the windows anyway. Old habits. Twenty years of repo work teaches you locks, if it teaches you nothing else.

She lay in the strange still bed and listened to the tide, and it really did sound like it had gotten closer. Like it had been told where she was.

She tasted iron in her own mouth, and could not for the life of her remember if that was normal.

The rain quit around eleven, which was a shame, because June had been counting on it as an excuse to stay in bed like a responsible adult. Instead she found herself standing in the motel parking lot at midnight with her jacket zipped to the chin, looking at the wet dark, wondering what exactly she was waiting for.

Reba's shift ended at midnight. June knew this because Reba had told her, twice, the second time slower.

"Stalker," Reba said, coming out the side door of the Salty Cue in a rain jacket, cap off now, ponytail loose.

"Witness. I'm a witness to your shift ending."

"Hm." Reba looked at the ocean, which was doing its hissing thing out there in the black, and then at June, and something in her face went loose and easy. "You want to see the beach when it's empty? It's the only time it's worth anything."

"Is this a trick question? I've been in town eight hours."

"That's a yes, then."

It was a yes. They walked down the access road past the dark bait shop, and then the sand started, gray and wet and reflecting a little light from somewhere, the moon being on strike apparently, and the sound of the