A Tear in the Ocean
Page 20
One day, Putnam’s father took Artie to a house where there was a woman musician with a double-stringed instrument made from gourds. The instrument was shockingly hard to play, so Artie went to the woman’s house every day to learn.
Weeks passed. Weeks and weeks. And they were all good. She still had nightmares, but the days were sunny and sleep was bearable.
One afternoon as they sat on the south dock, back-to-back in the sun, eating strawberries out of the same bowl, Putnam asked Artie if she still wanted to go to the little island and live by herself. “No one will bother you there if my father tells them not to. I promise.” His back was stiff against hers, but his voice was calm and careful. He was making the choice all hers.
Artie ate the last strawberry, licked the juice off her fingers, and put her hand to her luck pouch. The little stone bear shifted under her hand’s weight and then stilled—moving so slightly that it might have been her imagination. In addition to the stone bear, her luck pouch now held a fragment of the first string she’d broken learning to play the kora; and the tiny pencil stub she’d first learned to write her name with. And there could be more things later, more reminders of goodness and bravery and, yes, of pain and trauma, too. This world was so many things, but one of them was that it was sometimes good. The pain would never go, and maybe not the fear either, but there would be brightness as well. And people to love. And a whole life to live.
Artie reached back and squeezed Putnam’s hand. He squeezed in return, still waiting for her to speak.
“I want to stay here. With you.”
They held hands, slightly sticky from the strawberries. With her other hand, Artie lightly traced the dotted scars on her neck and running down her arm. She was made of constellations. And she alone could decide what their shapes meant, because these stars were all part of her. Dragons and goddesses and dolphins and whatever else she decided. She had survived so much, and so had Rayel and Putnam. Whatever happened next, they weren’t alone.
“Let’s find Rayel,” she said, “and see if she’ll tell us a story.”
Author’s Note
FANTASY STORIES are about escape. We read them to disappear into a new world, someplace where our own complicated problems can be left behind for a while. We read to experience magic. We can escape with Rayel, with Artie, with Putnam, from things that are unbearable—grief or trauma that is too hard to look at straight on.
And yet, as in real life, the escape can also be a way to come to terms with trauma—or at least to begin to. Like Artie, Rayel, and Putnam, we all have bears that follow us. We all have scary things that will not let us go. And sometimes a story, a story with magic and escape and other worlds, can help us see our own very real bears in a new way.
When I wrote A Crack in the Sea a few years ago, I was thinking about how we can study history to help us understand our present. I was thinking about how real stories, from our real collective past, might come together and help us reconsider how we see each other and what it means to leave our birthplace and have to find a new home.
With A Tear in the Ocean, I was again thinking about what home means—and what it means to feel unwanted in your original home. Artie, Rayel, and Putnam all in their own ways feel unwanted and unloved. While A Crack in the Sea was largely about involuntary mass movements of people (people who were enslaved, refugees of war), A Tear in the Ocean is about individual choices to leave home—though “choice” in the case of Artie and Rayel is maybe making it sound too easy. They aren’t given a lot of other options, not options that keep them safe, anyway.
Instead of bringing in historical events as I did with A Crack in the Sea, with A Tear in the Ocean I wanted to fold in some of the fairy tales and magical stories that I grew up reading and thinking about—as well as some I learned later in life. Fairy tales were important landmarks to me as I grew up, and they are still the stories that I think of when I consider the various paths my life has taken. And I’m not alone. People often compare friends and relatives to fairy tale and folktale characters; and there are many people who (for example) take online quizzes to see which Harry Potter character or TV show heroine they are most like. We connect ourselves to stories.
But even though I love fairy tales, I didn’t want A Tear in the Ocean to be a fairy tale retelling. I wanted to think about a handful of fairytales at the same time. I wanted to pull a bunch of stories together, to mash together fairy tales, myths, and legends, and make a manticore of a book, part one thing and part another (in the manticore’s case: human head, lion body, and scorpion tail). I wanted something strange and familiar at the same time, yet, wholly fantastic. Putnam and Artie and Rayel each have their own fairy tale, and when they come together, they can combine to make a new story—and a new life together.
When I was a kid, my sisters and I had a giant map on our bedroom wall—a print of a watercolor painting by Jaro Hess called The Land of Make Believe—that we spent a lot of time studying. In this print, the Shoe Where the Old Woman Lives was located within calling distance of Cinderella’s cabin, and Jack the Giant Killer lived right across the road from Old King Cole’s castle, while on the horizon one could see the Emerald City of Oz, the Castle of the Giants, and the little house where Here the North Wind Lives—just to name a few places. You could put your finger on the glass and trace the path (which I did, often), traveling the whole mixed-up world, making up stories as you journeyed.
I love a world with so many possibilities for stories.
In A Tear in the Ocean, you won’t find a map, but you might, as you read, run across strange retellings of (or references to) different fairy tales, folktales, or myths. And you might consider which myths or folktales you’d refer to if you were writing a story. What are the important stories in your own life?
Mostly, though, I hope you read this book and see how brave Artie and Rayel and Putnam are, and how much they’ve survived. And I hope you can see how much you have survived, and how brave you are.
You know the bear that torments you. You know, too, that people around you have their own bears to deal with. You know what icy land you travel through. You have some ideas of your powers—or maybe you are still waiting for those powers to be revealed. You have choices to make, journeys to take or to turn back from. And you have people you can travel with, even if you haven’t yet met these people.
Books never end. If they mean something to you, they live on in your head, and the story becomes a part of your own life. Your own story, meanwhile, is incomplete. What pulls you forward into the unknown? From whence will you someday return, and as what kind of person?
Our lives are gold-threaded with stories.
Go be a hero in your own story. I know you can.
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• • •
THANK YOU to Swati Avasthi for reading and commenting on this manuscript, and for telling me to keep working on it, and for hundreds of hours of discussion about writing, reading, and life. Thank you, Swati and Megan Atwood, for insightful comments on this essay. Thank you, Sarah Ahiers, for the eleventh-hour manuscript comments and pep talk. Tricia Lawrence, thank you for your untiring support; you’re a truly fantastic agent and friend. Thanks to my brilliant editor Stacey Barney for knowing exactly how to respond to a very messy first draft to keep me revising, and to Courtney Gilfillian for early questions about characters and for timely responses to my own questions. Thank you to Ana Deboo for thoughtful copyediting (and for catching those pesky continuity errors!) and to Jacqueline Hornberger and Rob Farren for proofreading. I’m deeply grateful to the University of St. Thomas for a University Scholar grant that allowed me writing time; I’m grateful, as I have been since I started teaching at St. Thomas, for a department of thoughtful colleagues and friends.
Thank you, thank you, once again to Yuko Shimizu for the amazing art; everything you draw makes me gasp with wonder.
Finally, thank you to my three sisters, with whom I traced out The
Land of Make Believe and with whom I have shared so many adventures and stories. And thank you to my two beloved sons, my first readers, for whom every book is intended.
About the Author
H.M. Bouwman is the author of The Remarkable & Very True Story of Lucy & Snowcap (Marshall Cavendish, 2008) and A Crack in the Sea (Putnam, 2017). An associate professor of English at the University of St. Thomas, she lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her two sons.
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