Winds of Change: Short Stories about Our Climate

by Robert Sassor

  A dog bayed from across the mudflats, and Belinda snapped out of herself and crept to Rowan's side. Her breathing was raspy but steady, and Belinda's shoulders eased. Her own breathing was still labored, but that was because of all the lard she carried around her "mid-section" as her doctor called it, like she was a cut of beef. She hated the needy part of herself that made her reach for food when her own strong emotions had her by the throat. The nightlight shone on Rowan, lighting up one side of her buttery, plump face. Ten years old and already "obese," as they said in school. Now there was a word gone awry in the system. It used to be reserved for problem fatties, now it was attached to kids like Rowan who were merely on the pudgy side. Some of that—maybe a lot of that—was because Belinda was afraid exercise would trigger an asthma attack so she kept her out of sports. No lean athletic body for Rowan. Not like her dad, the robust one. Yet he was the one who didn't make it. Jim was a fisherman in a fished-out sea. His captain had been forced to go farther and farther out to catch anything at all, in all weather. On a day the birds were blown inside out like umbrellas, Jim got snagged by a line and swept off the deck. The crew tried, but Jim never came up once. Not once. After a few unfathomable words from the Coast Guard, her future dissolved like salt in water. She buried an empty coffin and called him dead.

  Belinda did not want to wake Rowan, but she could not resist a single touch. She let her palm drop on her child's chest, just to feel it rise. Rowan's shoulder was moist beneath her Little Mermaid nightgown, and while Belinda pondered what that might mean, the Banshee wail rose up again and she pulled her hand away as if she'd been stung by a jellyfish. But the unearthly sound hadn't come from her daughter, or even from inside the house. It—a deer? coyote?—was in the backyard. The noise was so alien it could even be a bear. They hadn't been seen in coastal Massachusetts in a hundred years, but then again, neither had coyotes, and yet they'd recently returned as suburban pests. Nothing seemed impossible anymore when it came to nature. But whatever "it" was, it was in trouble. The barks and gasps were like the worst of Rowan's attacks, the ones that sent them to the ER for a few hours on the nebulizer.

  Rowan rolled over with a grunt, but did not wake up. Belinda tip-toed out of the room and back to her own. She looked at the clock. Four a.m. The hour of the wolf, as Jim used to say, the time he got up nearly every day of his life. She pulled a sweatshirt over her head and stood at the window, staring out into the gray world of the salt marsh where no artificial light reflected off the water. The moon was long gone. The plaintive moans continued, so there was no use trying to get back to sleep. She held the nylon curtain like a security blanket against her face and waited for the sun to catch up with her. The outbursts continued, less frequently but more disturbing, like something out of a horror movie. "What are you?" she asked. A young animal calling for its mother? An old one pushing hard against the inevitable?

  In time, the first yellow glow of the sun began to organize the yard into light and dark. She watched featureless birds shake themselves awake in the branches and fly off. The house cast a long shadow. By the fence, the sunlight fell on the broken swing set with its cracked slide and Rowan's turtle-shaped sandbox, things she'd long outgrown but they had not known how to get rid of. The same with the lobster boat up on a wooden cradle. It was shrouded in a tarp streaked with gull shit, and the keel was hairy with dried green slime. A boat out of water was a sorry thing. Belinda kept putting it on Craigslist, hoping for a nibble, but it was too far gone. Jim had bought it cheap to fix up and start lobstering, since apparently there were still bugs for the catching. Mostly though, he wanted to stay closer to shore for Rowan's sake. So much for that.

  She realized that the sound had become silent, and the silence was nothing short of ominous. The sun rose higher, making the house shadow shorter, letting her see farther down where the yard began to morph into tidal marsh. She squinted her eyes. "What the …?" A black lumpen form. A giant trash bag? It was too far up on the lawn to have come floating in at high tide. Maybe someone got rid of a dog, or even a litter of puppies, tossed like garbage in her yard. It made her sick to her stomach. She was glad it was Saturday so she could take care of it one way or another before Rowan woke up. She didn't want her to know the worst about the world.

  She pulled her shell pants on over her pajama bottoms and slipped on Jim's old rubber boots. They were too big, but they worked, and she could not afford to replace anything that still worked. Her job at the diner paid for shit. The little bit of insurance money had run out, and she was wearing out her welcome at the Fisherman's Widows and Orphan Fund. She closed the back door quietly behind her and picked her way down the slope towards the marsh. There had been a mean downpour a few days before. The lawn still squished with the weight of her step. The air had that murky morning stink, and the shadows were so dense she was surprised she could even walk through them.

  She stopped at the woodpile to grab a stick of kindling, just in case. There was plenty of it. Their poorly insulated house had been mostly heated by wood, with just a few electric baseboard heaters that she could not afford to turn on. But Rowan's doctor said no more wood stove. "How can she be allergic to wood smoke?" she'd asked him. "Didn't humans evolve with it? Didn't fire jump-start civilization?" He'd shrugged. "Maybe we're devolving," he'd said, with a chuckle. This was the same doctor who told her to get air-conditioning to keep Rowan from coughing up garden slugs, but he did not tell her how to pay for it.

  Holding onto her stick, she approached the bag with caution. In the half-hearted light, she saw the bag move. She stopped about twenty feet away. She hadn't thought about how she could safely open the bag. She patted her pants. No phone. That was dumb. As she was wondering if she should just go back and call the police, the pointy end of the bag lifted up and stared at her with mournful eyes.

  "A seal? Are you a harbor seal?" She looked around as if the answer were to be found in the reeds. It was far from home, separated from the sea by miles of marsh. She turned back to this baby-faced animal, still not quite believing it. "What are you doing here?" The seal lowered its head, but kept its eyes on her as she inched closer. His dove-gray body was mostly neck and chest, and his head was like a peeled egg with whiskers. As she got closer still, she caught the scent of deep ocean on him, the way Jim used to smell at the end of a long trip.

  She stood still, not knowing quite what to do, and as the sun rose, she saw that the seal had deep cuts all over its body and his stomach was raw. "Poor thing," she said. He must have been pulling his blubber on land for some distance. If he was not exactly dying, he was as near to it as to make no matter. She took a step towards it, still clutching her stick, and it lunged towards her with a snap of its yellow teeth.

  She jumped back. "Okay! I get it." Because of Rowan, she'd been so used to seeing seals as cute plush toys or cartoon figures, she'd forgotten what they were really like. At the town dock, they lounged on their backs eating live lobsters they'd stolen from traps, holding the struggling crustaceans between two flippers like ice cream cones, crunching through the shells with a bite that could tear off your face.

  * * *

  A man from the Aquarium, with rimless glasses and a dense beard, looked down towards the estuary. The sky was an even dead white, and the air was warm. It was autumn only by the falling leaves of the swamp maples. "He hauled himself all the way up here?"

  Belinda shrugged. "He started making a fuss sometime after I went to bed. I thought it was a human crying or something."

  "They can be like that." A woman from the rescue team put down her satchel. "When explorers first landed on Cape Cod, the sailors thought the seals were mermaids, calling to them."

  "Want to hear a mermaid joke?" asked Rowan, shyly.

  Belinda wished Rowan had stayed up at the house. The yard was lousy with wet leaves, and she could smell the spores blooming at their feet. The "aspirgillosis monster" she and Rowan called the fungus. Besides which, this whole thing might end poorly. But how could she keep her
from seeing the seal? Rowan loved animals, yet they could not have a dog, and a cat was out of the question. And here, an animal appears right in her yard. A sick animal, but a real one.

  "Shoot." The woman studied the seal with a squint, walking around its six-foot, tapered body. She was almost as tall as the seal was long, but thin as an eel. She wore jeans and a t-shirt and was so tan she had sunburnt eyelids. Belinda was glad she'd made the effort to change out of her dumpy sweats and put on a nice shirt and jeans, even though they were so tight she could barely breathe and her cell phone in her pocket dug into her hips. She even put on her good sneakers, knowing they'd get soaked in the grass. For some reason, she had wanted to make a good impression on these people. Same as Rowan, apparently.

  "Okay," said Rowan, squeezing her hands together. "A man and a cat are on a desert island. They see a mermaid on a rock. The man imagines the mermaid as having a pair of legs, and the cat imagines her as all fish." The tanned woman laughed, causing Rowan to squeal with delight. Belinda worried laughing would lead to coughing.

  "That's a good one," said the bearded man. "We only see what we need, don't we?"

  A man in a hoodie and flip-flops was crouched down near the seal. "Maybe we should just put him out of his misery," he said. "He's in a pretty bad way." Belinda made a face at him and shook her head.

  "Misery?" said Rowan, softly.

  "Why is it here?" asked Belinda, to switch the subject.

  "Look." The woman pointed to its tail. "Fishing filament wrapped around his hindflippers and tail."

  "You know what the monkey said when it backed his tail into the lawn mower?" asked Rowan. Everyone stared at her. "It won't be long now."

  "That's not funny," said Belinda. The two men made polite ha-ha mutterings and went about their business, but the woman looked concerned, obviously wondering what child would joke in response to a distressed animal. Rowan had developed a sick sense of humor since Jim died. Her counselor at school told Belinda it was her way of distancing herself from pain.

  "The seal couldn't use his flippers to swim," the woman explained, as if Rowan's problem was that she hadn't understood the situation. "Looks like he got pretty battered when the tide pulled him in through the marsh channels. It's a wonder he didn't drown."

  "He can't drown," said Rowan. "He lives in the water."

  "He's a mammal, like us," said the bearded man. "He can hold his breath longer, but he still has to come up for air. If he can't swim, he sinks."

  "Probably why he was trying to escape above the tide line," said flip-flop boy. "He's a fighter, I have to give him that."

  "Well, let's give him a chance then," said the bearded man, dialing a number on his phone. The tips of his fingers were flat, like a frog's. "I'm going to try to snag a boat and move him that way. He'll be less stressed. Besides, we'll never get the rescue unit out of this muck if we bring it down here."

  "Then someone would have to rescue the rescue unit, right?" said the tan woman, making Rowan giggle. "Let's get this line off him first. Jason, go get the halter."

  "Will he get better?" asked Rowan.

  "We'll see what we can do for him at the Aquarium," said the woman. "He might just need a few stitches and some rest."

  Belinda didn't believe a word of it. None of them looked as if they really expected it to live. The seal was watching them, and Belinda thought there was a wordless intelligence behind those big eyes that knew it too.

  The bearded man put his phone away. "The harbor master will meet us at the dock. He's got a sweet little inflatable with a lift for us, but he said we might have to wait a bit for the tide to turn to enter the marsh."

  Jason came back with a canvas halter, letting it slip over the seal, tightening the straps to keep it still. It did not lunge at them the way it had gone at Belinda, and she was a little put out by that. The woman slipped on rubber gloves that went up to her elbows, protective goggles, and a surgical mask. The kind Rowan had to wear on high pollen days.

  "What are you afraid of catching?" Belinda asked, alarmed about a possible new danger for Rowan.

  The woman took a pair of curved scissors out of her satchel. "It's not for me. It's to protect the seal from any germs I might have. He's got a lot of open sores." She began to snip away the tangle of line. "What a mess. I think there's a hook imbedded too." The seal twitched, and Jason was having some trouble controlling him.

  "This is all we've done for days," said the bearded man, grabbing one of the straps to help Jason. Belinda pulled Rowan back. "A storm out to sea worked up these lines that just float around catching sea mammals like our buddy here. Mostly we've just been counting the dead."

  As the aquarium people worked, Belinda was touched that they would go to all this trouble to try to save him. She ought to try as hard to save herself. She looked around at the broken toys and unused boat, the vinyl clapboards peeling off the back of the house. Belinda became painfully aware of how shabby her life must look to them. Since Jim died over a year ago, she had not kept up with the repairs of the house. She had not taken care of so many things, and now it was all falling down around her. Maybe these people were thinking they would have to rescue her as well as the seal.

  Rowan coughed and then tried to stifle the next. She took her inhaler out of her pocket and took a hit, then another.

  "Come on, you," Belinda said to Rowan. "Grandma's going to be here soon to pick you up."

  Her parents both smoked, so Rowan could never go to their house, but they all went on road trips sometimes. Today they would be going to the mall to buy some school things, and knew not to smoke in the car with Rowan. They learned that lesson the hard way. Belinda was going to go along, but now she thought she'd stay and make sure things went smoothly with the seal. Maybe she could be of some help.

  "Just stay away from the seal while we're gone," said flip-flop boy. "He wants to rest, and a human presence could send him over the edge."

  "Don't worry," said Belinda, once again feeling a little put out. It was her seal after all. It was her yard. "Rowan's off for the day with her grandma and I've got work to do around the house."

  "What?" asked Rowan. "What work? I thought you were coming with us."

  "Off we go!" said Belinda, patting her daughter on the bum to get her moving. They hiked back up the slope to the house, neither of them breathing pretty.

  * * *

  In the end, Belinda couldn't help herself. After Rowan and her parents drove off, having explained to her mom, yet again, how to use the emergency call feature on Rowan's phone, she sat at the kitchen table with a coffee mug and looked out the window. The tide was slack, and the seal was quiet. Maybe he was feeling better now that the line had been cut away from his tail. Or maybe he'd just given up.

  "You must be hungry," she said out loud. She heaved herself out of the chair and made two tuna sandwiches, one for her, and one for him, stacking them on a paper plate. She found Rowan's unbreakable cereal bowl and covered them with it, then grabbed a plastic water bottle out of the refrigerator and tucked it under her arm. "Okay, then," she said, and carried the picnic down to her salty visitor.

  She was still wearing her sneakers, so she slipped a bit on the wet lawn going down to the marsh. The seal seemed to study her progress, wondering how a land animal could be so clumsy on land. She squatted close to him, but not too close. She remembered his pointy teeth. As she bent, she felt the waistband of her jeans slice into her flesh, so she unsnapped her top button and released her breath. "That's better," she said. She threw one of the tuna sandwiches to the seal, half expecting it to catch it mid-air like at Sea World, but it landed in pieces by his clawed flippers. She poured some water into the bowl and pushed it towards him with the piece of kindling, getting it as close as she dared. The seal gave her a look of warning and she backed off, settling herself on the ground well out of reach. She wished she'd brought a folding chair with her. The ground was damp and she was not sure she could stand back up without help. She had to take her phone
out of her pocket and put it next to her in order to get comfortable at all.

  She dug into her sandwich but the seal did not even look at his. "I know," she said, chewing. "I wish I had chips too. Maybe a pickle." But it wasn't funny. He seemed worse off than before, even without the fishing line. He wasn't moving and didn't blink. Maybe flip-flop boy was right, and he was too far gone after all.

  Belinda finished her lunch in a few bites and sighed. It was sad about the seal, but it was nice to be outside doing nothing. She rarely got to just sit. The warmth of the day made her sleepy. Even the wind was drowsy. Nearby was a circle of smooth beach stones with a charred center, all that was left of a few fine summer evenings, where, if Rowan stayed upwind of the smoke, they would sit outside and consider the stars. But the last time they'd had a campfire, Rowan had woken up in the middle of the night in trouble, so they hadn't done it since. It was getting so Rowan could no longer take part in the natural world. Maybe they should do what the doctor suggested and move to Arizona, where the desert air was too dry for spores, and the schools were air-conditioned. But Belinda couldn't imagine leaving this place. It was all she knew.

  She looked at the seal. The tuna sandwich sat untouched, attracting flies, some of which began to settle on his wounds. She slowly stretched towards him to wave them away with her paper plate and he bared his teeth at her. His breath smelled like a ship's hold, and she stopped. She wanted to say she was sorry—about the fishing line, about the flies, about everything—but he did not want her sympathy.

  "Suit yourself," she said. It's what she got for trying to help. She should just leave him alone and go back to the house, but some instinct would not let her leave his side. He was stranded, just like her. She was a bit seal-shaped herself, with almost the same number of chins. They were both full-blooded mammals, distant cousins, for better or worse. Here was a species who used to live on land but had decided against it. For some reason, the seals had chosen to go back to the sea. She wondered if they regretted that decision, now that the water was getting as dangerous for the seal as the land was for Rowan. In the meantime, the die was cast for them all. If he survived, he would return to his element. She imagined him healed and healthy, striking out for the sea, pushing himself along the sand with his muscular flippers, then merging with the water as if he and it were one.