Unfurled

by Michelle Bailat-Jones

  She brings me a box and I slip a dark gray cardboard sheaf off the plastic box and open it, only to find just another box inside.

  When I turn to her, not understanding, the woman whispers, “Ashes are very fine. This is a kind of protection. It keeps everything together.”

  But nothing is together, I want to say. Nothing about this day or about this box has anything to do with being together. I open the final box with fumbling fingers. They are fine, very fine and unevenly colored like gradations of wet to dry sand on a beach. My dad would have said this, it is his voice in my ears making this remark. I’ve seen ashes before, many times, always in the context of my job—dog and cat ashes, other animals—but there is just so much this time. More ashes than I could have imagined. And yet it is all of my quiet giant of a dad, reduced to this little square box.

  14

  SHE’S AT THE KITCHEN TABLE MOST MORNINGS now. And most afternoons. This is July of that last summer. And I’m to leave her alone because my dad keeps saying that she needs rest, that she’s still recovering from the flu and pretty worn out. It isn’t too hard to stay out of her way. I know how to keep busy, work on my science project or watch TV. But this afternoon she looks up from the kitchen table when I come in to get a Popsicle from the freezer. Her eyes focus in on me and she jerks her head back, like she’s surprised to see me. Just for a second. Then she draws herself up and says, “Your fish is turning green. There’s something wrong with the water.”

  “I’m changing the pump today,” I say. Quiet, no sass. “And she changes color like that. It’s her special trick.”

  “There’s no one else here. You don’t have to worry.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  “Then why are you whispering?”

  “I’m not,” I say.

  She drops her pen then, in an angry way, and I explain that she’s right, Lizzy is maybe sick and I was just going to check the mail to see if the new pump is there. I tell her that Lizzy has been hanging around at the bottom of her tank—no jumps, no gliding along. I ask her if she wants to help me change the pump.

  She’s rubbing her temples. She takes a deep breath. “Anyway, your dad’s out. God knows where.”

  “He’s covering for Bill,” I say. “He told me last night. He said he left you a note.” And like every morning now, he also told me exactly what time he’d be home and to call him at the pier if I needed anything. I told him not to worry. I told him, “Clear seas, Captain.”

  “Oh well, that’s just what he said,” my mother says then.

  “It’s true what he said.” I can’t stop the note of pleading from entering my voice. She never believes my dad anymore. She’s always calling him a liar. But she’s the one who makes things up. She’s the one who tells stories that aren’t true.

  “A lot of things may be true,” she says, now rubbing her forehead. “But that isn’t what matters. True is what we think will save us. But that’s just hope.” She picks up the pen and clicks it twice. “And that’s probably not going to be enough.”

  She shifts in her seat, is focusing again on her writing, her notebook, and I know that if I keep really still she might forget about me. She’s wearing a dress that I love, one she made for herself out of a purple fabric with tiny white sailboats. She made me one, too. Years before. But I’ve grown out of it. It strikes me then that it isn’t just children who grow up and out of their clothes. My mother doesn’t fit her dress anymore. Not the size. The person. She’s wearing this dress that has been hers, but she isn’t herself. I start to back away.

  But she clicks her pen again and says, “Maybe you can take it.”

  I wait. I know I just have to wait.

  “There’s so much to explain,” she continues. “And it’s hard to know how much I can tell you. You’re not a little girl anymore. But you’re not grown up yet, either.”

  “I’m ten, Mom.”

  “What?” Again, she raises a hand to her face. Tips her head at me.

  “I’m ten,” I repeat. She is staring at me.

  “Of course I know that. Why are you telling me that? There’s no need to repeat everything.”

  I say nothing. She looks just like my mother—her wide green eyes, the line of her mouth, those slender fingers. But she isn’t my mother. I don’t know who she is and all I want to know is how I can get away from her.

  “I’m going …” I start but she isn’t listening.

  “Hey, do you want to help me with something?” She waves me toward the table. “Come on.”

  “I just have to change the pump on Lizzy’s tank,” I say. “Then I have to work on my project.”

  She shrugs, her smile tight. “I don’t want to scare you. But this is more important.”

  There are ripped papers and newspapers and pencils spread out on the table. Scissors and an open glue stick.

  “I have to work on my Lizzy project.”

  Her smile falls, her face darkens. “What you need to know here is vital. I mean it, Ella. More than your science project.”

  “Okay,” I say quickly. “Okay.”

  She smiles then. “I want you to write exactly what I’ve written here,” she says, thrusting a sheet of white paper in front of me. “I need to send a lot of these letters out but I can’t use a Xerox because they would think I wasn’t serious. It has to be handwritten.”

  I nod, sit down at the table across from her, and reach for a pen.

  “Not that one. We both have to write in blue.”

  I take the blue pen she holds out to me.

  “You can write just like me? It has to be identical.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You can,” she says, her eyes closing halfway. “Anyway, I’ll check it when you’re done.”

  And then she sits down with her pen and another sheet of paper and is already writing.

  I scoot my chair to the left. I try reading the letter she’s left for me to copy but the words are swimming, my eyes are watering, so I tell myself to stop being such a baby. She is writing fast, scribbling. Her handwriting will be very difficult to copy. There are a lot of questions in the body text of the letter, some of them even marked with multiple question marks. Proper procedure is important, one sentence reads, so is identifying the risks from all angles?? And farther down the page, If we can’t trust the school system to keep our children safe, then who can we trust? This is a matter that bears careful scrutiny. I don’t know what “scrutiny” means, and I don’t understand what the letter is trying to say. I read it and read it, wondering who it’s for. But then I stop reading it.

  “Hurry up,” she says. “We need about twenty of these.”

  I move the piece of paper in front of me, I hold the pen over the blank sheet and make a show of reading the model letter again carefully. But my mouth has gone dry. My legs begin to prickle with the need to get up and move. She has misspelled several words. Easy words. Words like “comming” and “ignor”; and she’s repeated others, like two “the’s” about halfway down the page. She’s written “an bridge” instead of “a bridge.” Has she done this on purpose? I start copying out the letter.

  “Remember, I always loop my l’s—you can do that, right?”

  I nod. I listen to the scratching of her pen on the paper, listen to how furiously she’s writing. This is not how she usually writes. She’s usually a careful person. She usually has small, neat handwriting that spools off the end of the pen. Today her hands are chapped and inkstained. A paper cut bleeds on her knuckle and she licks it from time to time. I glance at the model letter again, at those misspellings and the smudges of ink. At the way the lines tilt. I know I will have to write fast to mimic her. To make the same kind of messy fast handwriting. I try for a few sentences, but it doesn’t work. So I carefully fold my first paper and tuck it onto my lap. Grab another one.

  I check the clock. Again and again, I check the clock. I am thinking that I have to be really careful. There’s no way around it even if my dad should be ho
me fairly soon.

  So I write quickly, as quickly as I can, looping my l’s and making those same spelling mistakes. When I finish the letter I turn it face down on the table and take another piece of paper. My mother is still writing. She’s on her fourth letter. She’s said we need to do about twenty of them.

  She checks on me and I nod at her. Show her that I’m writing quickly, like she wants me to. I keep my face still. Concentrate on the task she’s given me. She doesn’t get up to check my letter and I let out the breath I’m holding. Finish my second letter and flip that one over too, then start on a third. And while I write, I keep hoping that my dad will come home before we reach twenty. Before we reach twenty she will get up to check my letters.

  This is sometime in late July. When we all still lived in the country of Before. But this is the last day that everyone will pretend that everything is really fine and that all my dad has to do is tell me when he’s coming home, tell me to keep a bit out of her way. Because by the time my dad does come home, my mother has checked all my letters and she’s holding my hand for me, helping me, writing the letters with me instead of next to me, and we are on letter number 36 and she’s broken my pinky finger by accident, just by squeezing my hand a little too hard.

  15

  THAT EVENING A STORM MOVES ITS WAY across the city—rolling in from the ocean and up over the hills of the neighborhood. Lightning flashes across the rooftops; I stand at the guest room window and watch the rain fall in sheets across the swathe of yellow light cast by the street lamp. Cars dart in and out of driveways and garages. Neighbors return home and scurry inside their houses. I know the ocean will be rough, the winds high. The ferries will be operating carefully this evening. The captains and crews on alert. I wait to feel sleepy but it never comes. An hour passes. Then another. Neil comes in and out of the room, watches the storm with me. Trapp sits at my side, just as attentive.

  This is grief, they must be thinking.

  This is grief, I tell myself.

  At some point we get undressed and we align our bodies in the bed with our eyes closed. I don’t expect to but I fall into a deep sleep for two or three hours. Then I wake with the memory of a dream in which I am holding half an animal in each hand. In the dream it doesn’t bother me that this animal has been sliced in half, what is bothering me is that I cannot tell what kind of animal it is. I keep turning each hand and trying to find a face or a paw or a tail, something to indicate whether this is a cat or a small dog, a squirrel or something else entirely.

  I rub the palms of my hand against the sheets, trying to remove the feeling of slick fur and blood. My stomach turns. I can still smell the dead animal’s innards. I shake myself out of the dream fog and get up, go to the bathroom and drink some water. My face in the mirror is too thin, my skin tight and dry, my hair wild. I quickly braid it, tame it. I slip downstairs—quietly, quickly—which is at first just something to do instead of go back to bed, but when I walk into the small storage room and reach for the first file drawer I know this is why I’ve woken up. No matter the animal, I will not just leave it. An animal cannot be left to die in two distinct parts, it’s my job to sew it all back together no matter how futile, no matter how much blood has been lost.

  And it isn’t even hard to find. My dad keeps his files organized, orderly. Handwritten tabs stretch back through the drawer—HOUSE, TRUCK, Bank of A, just like that. Between the mortgage and insurance papers for the house, I find the deed to a small cabin on Hat Island, a residence permit, and a boat slip rental receipt. It’s all filed away for me, perfectly reasonable. Like it wasn’t a secret, like I was supposed to know about it all along. The deed is in both of their names. I blink on it. It isn’t possible.

  Because just the other day he said, “Harbor seals.”

  And he said, “What species are you up so early for?”

  He did not say, not once, not ever, “I bought a small cabin on Hat Island six years ago with your mom and never told you.”

  “Clear seas, Captain?” I whisper.

  A whisper answers me, “Watch out for whales.”

  I whirl around to an empty doorway. Close my eyes. Shut my ears. I do not want this—the ease with which I can imagine it all, conjure up a person, a reason, an idea. This is what she did. My heart skitters and my hands are shaking, but I breathe through it. I count the seconds. Beat one. Beat two. Beat three. Beat four. I catalog the physical items in this room: the shelves, the boxes, the rolled up maps against the wall. This is a real filing cabinet, a real room, I am a real person. The papers in my hands have weight and texture. These are impossible facts.

  How I have loved this phrase over the years. I see myself—white-coated and arrogant in my educated compassion—telling a client about the impossible facts: the growth of malignant tissue in a matter of days, the inexplicable expression of a genetic disorder in an otherwise healthy animal, the first-time occurrence of wayward and disastrous behavior. I’ve hidden behind these two words like they might actually mean something or they might help.

  But now these ownership papers in my hand. With their impossible dates and names. It can’t be possible. George said so, too. Said that no one lives there. My dad just wouldn’t.

  My fingers walk across the labels on the file folders. Nothing is in alphabetical order, my dad was organized but not methodical: INSURANCE, ELLA SCHOOL, his boat under GINZ, and then between LEGAL and WSDOT is a file called KEEP and I pull it out and place it on my lap. I open it right away.

  Inside the file are medical records. Receipts and charts and notes. For a patient named Maggie Tomlinson. I have to read everything twice to understand even if it’s all actually quite simple. At some point a Jane Doe checked into a hospital in Oregon, my dad was somehow, miraculously located, and Maggie Tomlinson checked out. But not before receiving bone grafts, blood transfusions, weeks of physical therapy. She was in a serious accident. A crushed femur. She must have been nearly unable to walk. I find my dad’s signature across many of these papers and hunt for dates. When did this happen? When did he visit her in the hospital? When did he go through all of this without telling me? And why not tell me?

  I flip back and find the earliest date, discover that he rescued Jane Doe six years before taking the cabin. And just like this a six-year lie becomes a twelve-year lie. I do the math. I was eighteen when he found her. I may have still been living in this house.

  I must have cried out because Trapp is immediately at my side, nosing my leg. I put the file down and keep my hand on his head, pressing and smoothing at his ears. He tries to lick my hand, something he never does, so I know I must be shaking.

  No, she ran a chute on us—I know she did. And yes, my dad and I were stuck in that dog-hole, but we knew how to get out of it. We held steady in the veer of the wind. We got into the clear and then we made our boat as seakindly as possible. No wave too big, no wind too strong.

  Captain? Where’s the bearing? Where’s the same-side object?

  There are steps at the door way, and Neil’s voice. “Ella?”

  I close myself around these papers but I’m too late. Neil walks into the room, wanting to see what I’m doing, wanting to help and understand.

  “Please, El. Let me look at all of this with you. Tell me what it’s all about.”

  “Okay, okay,” I say. I take a breath. “No, it’s okay.” I don't stop him when he takes the papers. “I know what it is.”

  Neil stares.

  “All I can figure is that we were just using opposite prefixes.”

  “What?” Neil furrows his brow as he reads the papers. His eyes are wide, he says, “This is her?” He reads carefully, but I put a hand out across the file and stop him.

  “Don’t you see, we were using opposite prefixes. He must have had the danger sighted on starboard and I kept it on port. So, of course.”

  Neil looks at me, looks at his papers. Shakes his head. “This means that she nearly died. This is incredible. It’s amazing they found your dad.”


  And then, “So this cabin, in her name, too …”

  “Yes,” I say, pushing around the angry, testing the surface of my sad. “It’s just another trade.”

  “Ella, look at this.”

  Don’t say, look, Neil. Don’t ever ask me to look.

  But he’s reading again, he’s going over the deed to the cabin. “My God, Ella, you don’t want me to, but I’m starting to understand. Your dad wouldn’t lie just to lie. There has to be some explanation. I mean, this whole thing is crazy. What if she does live there?”

  “No, she can’t. And George said …”

  He looks up at me and I see it now, the pity. He’s starting to understand so I shake my head. I refuse it.

  “No, Neil,” I say, “We’re heeling, can’t you feel it? And I’m not sure I can right us after all.”

  16

  I WANT TO TELL THIS TEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL in my memory to get up from the floor. To close the window and leave this bedroom. To leave the house. Instead, she keeps at it—shoulders tense, eyes fixed—watching. This is the best view onto the back yard and I’ve been stationed at it for the last twenty minutes this August morning. I’m wriggling my fingers while I crouch at the sill, thumb to pinky, thumb to pinky. The doctor has told me to work it like this, each day, to strengthen the joint that was snapped. It rained in the night and the window sill is damp, the glass a bit foggy. I’m a bit shivery in my pajamas, but I can’t seem to move. Below me is my mother’s beautiful garden—her tomatoes and dahlias, her sunflowers and zucchinis and green beans—but it’s a total wreck. All the plants have been dug up and tossed into a pile. She must have done this hard labor in the night, and now she’s just working the details, on her knees in the bare soil. She has a trowel in her hand and is plunging it deep into the earth, bringing up a load of dirt and scattering it back into place with her free hand.

  My dad is beside her, crouched down in the light drizzle. From my angle above him, he looks so small. I flex my fingers again, thumb to pinky. He raises a hand to his head and says something that is too quiet for me to hear. Then my mother stands up, throws the trowel across the garden and yells, “Oh, come on, John!” I duck down, I nearly fall, and I watch them with only half of my eyes over the window sill.