“Aw now,” he yells after me. “Just give a one-legged man some help!”
But he doesn’t follow me and I make it to the terminal doors, run across the terminal hall to the telephone cabins. I’m crying when I get inside that cabin door and grab the receiver. The man hasn’t followed me. I’m still crying but I know what to do. The telephone is sticky in my hands. I dial the operator and explain, how I’ve been taught at school, that I want to make a collect call.
While it rings, my breath comes in hard, sharp gasps. A few chairs away from the phone is a family of four, sitting in a row in those hard plastic seats. Father, child, child, mother. Both children—a little boy and a little girl—are drinking from a small juice box.
“Dad?” I say when he picks up.
“Oh my God, Ella, where are you?” I hear the rustling of a coat, the phone knocking against his jaw. “I’ve been frantic, you never called me this morning and no one’s here.”
“I’m downtown,” I whisper to my dad.
I want to ask him if we can drive around the city together, searching for her. I want to know if he thinks we can find her like that. But instead, I just stare at the family of four and at those kids sipping on their juice boxes. The boy has a Frisbee sticking out of his backpack and is reading a comic book, he elbows his sister and shows her a page which must be funny because the girl tips her head all the way back and laughs. Then she gets out of her seat and wriggles up onto her mother’s lap to better see what her brother is reading. The mother accepts her without comment, shifting her paperback further out of the way. With a free hand she smoothes the girl’s hair down.
“I’m downtown, I couldn’t find her,” I say. And I look down at my own hands. My fingernails are black moon crescents of dirt from our garden.
“I’m coming,” he says. “I’ll be there right away.”
And he is. He comes running into the terminal building twenty minutes later and he finds me sitting in my chair near the phones. We leave together, just the two of us.
In the car he says, “Listen, when school starts you can take the bus, you’re old enough now, and meet me at the Pier for my last two runs. Or you can go straight to George’s or over to Sonja’s.”
“We’ll figure it out,” he says.
He holds his hand up for me like we should give each other a high five. But when I reach out to put my hand against his, he pulls me close and hugs me instead. Right there in the cab of his pick-up truck. Tight. I can feel him shake, can feel his heart hammering away underneath the immaculately white shirt of his ferry captain’s uniform. I squeeze him back, crushing my arms together until my shoulders hurt. He doesn’t mention my mother, or how I tried to find her. How I failed. So I understand right away that this time isn’t like the others. I understand that we’re on our own finally and my mother isn’t ever coming back.
17
THERE IS ALWAYS A NO-GO ZONE, AND A WAY around it. This is what my dad taught me when we worked the different points of sail. He told me there was something useful in every angle—it all depended on the destination and the sailor’s impatience. So I know that I could attempt it. I would just have to work to windward, find Neil somewhere in the house and start the whole explanation with a single word.
“Footprints,” I could say.
His joy would ignite but I would just need to keep as close to the wind, keep us outside the no-go zone. He’s been hoping for this, optimistic against my warnings of difficulty. I could watch his joy course through him, get his arms and hands moving, set his face alight. And I might wonder—for those few moments—if the strength of his feeling might push us further to a reach, which is the fastest way to cut through the water on most boats. But no, because this boat can’t handle the speed.
So after footprints, I would pass him other words. There was never a reason to, so I haven’t told him about the countries of Before and After. I haven’t told him how my dad and I sailed from one to the other on a boat of our own design, how we left my mother at the border. There are reasons some women do not dream of children.
Neil is a biology professor and he doesn’t know boating but he does know genetics. He does this game with his students, asking them to flip a coin 46 times. Each side of the coin is labeled Mom or Dad, and the students record their results about the probability of inheriting a gene from one parent or another. He tells them it is even more complicated than this, but this will give them some idea. The students like flipping the coins, like thinking of their chances to have inherited Dad’s beaked nose or Mom’s olive skin. Often a student will ask about personality traits instead of physical traits and he will launch into a discussion of how much research goes on in this area. What is nature and what is nurture? Inevitably, the students will ask about diseases. How do we know we’re going to have cancer? How do we know we’re going to have Parkinson’s?
It’s a useful game, but this boat is already beating its way across this ocean and there isn’t much time. It’s running a close-haul because this is the simplest navigational technique for these waters. “Guess what?” I would say. And he would turn to me, he would listen to my unsettling news. I would be able to tell him that until the photographs flew from my dad’s wallet out onto the pavement and eventually made their way into my hands, the shipwreck of my mother had been buried at the bottom of the sea for so many years that I’d finally felt safe enough to consider having children. That word “until” is the one he needs to understand, the one whose letters can be arranged and re-arranged as often as you like, they will never spell “footprints.”
“It’s the genetics of it,” I would say.
“You mean you think it’s impossible?”
“No, I mean I think it’s far too possible.”
It would take him a moment but then: “I see.” Because he’d have to.
“But that’s not all.”
“So tell me.”
In this way, Neil would hear me confess that what terrifies me the most is that I don’t know how thin these boundaries are supposed to be. I don’t know the strength of the genetics and if one day I might end up creating my own countries of Before and After.
When the wind is right this would not be so difficult to say. I would say it. He would hear it. The boat would sail on. And then, “So let’s not be silly and romantic about this, okay?”
“Of course not,” he would assure me.
“I never should have agreed in the first place.”
“I understand.”
“I’m so so sorry.”
“I’ll go with you.”
And so on and so forth until all our worries and guilt would be smoothed away. Until our decision would seem as grand and clean as a full white sail, filled with its wind, pulling our boat forward on its course.
18
THE NEXT MORNING I FIND NEIL TALKING to the dogs in the kitchen. At least I think that’s what he’s doing—talking to Daisie while she sits at his feet wagging her tail, but he stops when I come in. He swallows his last word.
I sit on a kitchen chair and Trapp comes to push his head against me, rest his chin on my thigh. I rub his eyebrows. I press against his warm fur.
“I’m guessing the Ginz has gas?” Neil says.
But I’ve found a scratch on Trapp’s ear. I worry at it, feel along its ridge. Try to determine if it’s deep. He must have cut himself out at the lake. Or running behind the bushes at the far corner of the back yard, his head down, sniffing at the earth.
“He’s been out on it, don’t you think? Even this winter?”
I nod, still rubbing Trapp’s ear. My dad loves January Blackmouth fishing. He loves this. If he were in this room, he’d be telling us about his best spot, his best tackle. He’d be telling us how many he’s already caught and that he can’t wait to get back out there.
“Ella?”
I shake my head. I do not say, we are not going. I do not say, how can you ask me this? I think about those Blackmouth and my dad’s happy grin when he’s caught a
28-incher, and my anger rises into a sharp peak, throbbing up from my nauseous belly and radiating around my body. Such fantastic heat. My muscles are tight with it, my back straight, and for the first time in days I feel a wonderful energy.
I whip my cell phone from my pocket and call George, “You’ve been there, right?”
It takes him a moment but he catches up. I know vaguely that Hat Island is off the coast of Whidbey, but I don’t know exactly how to get there. George tells me how, and he tells me where the rough water is, where the dangers are.
“I need to know when he told you,” I say.
There’s a pause. “I don’t even remember, Ella. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. Maybe a year ago. Right after he bought it. Honestly. I don’t understand any of this.”
I think I’m going to ask him if he wants to come with us, but those aren’t the words that come out of my mouth. “If he told you a year ago, he didn’t tell you right after he bought it. Do you want to know how long he’s had it?”
There is another pause. Now I’m talking about their friendship.
I say it without waiting for his answer, “Six years.”
George whistles low, breathes through his nose.
I see the frown on his brow. See Lisa hovering behind him, wondering what I’m saying, why George’s face has gone so sour. And why does it feel so good to know that I’ve done this? It shouldn’t, but it does.
He says, “What about your mom, Ella?”
I tell him that I’ll call him later, put the phone in my pocket, turn to Neil, and say, “What are we waiting for?” because I can’t answer George’s question if I don’t see this cabin. “It isn’t George’s fault and it isn’t my fault, you know.”
But I’m already out the door. We load the dogs into the truck and drive to the marina through a dense fog. We speak in the truck but none of it matters. We discuss how long it will take us, whether we need to be careful of the weather. I focus on the hard edge of my anger and enjoy the fire in it. When a station wagon pulls up beside us and two small dogs in the back window start to bark at our dogs, baring their teeth and scrambling at the glass, I think, yes, lunge farther, bark louder.
“Ella?”
I relax my hands in my lap and I say, “I’ll drive the boat. You’ll need to keep Trapp calm.”
The Ella Ginz is a small center console, an easy ocean fishing boat for which my dad spent years saving up. At the sight of her my belly flips from rage to sorrow—quiet hours, watching my dad at the wheel—but I think of where she will take us and it flips right back. I breathe in a salty lungful of fury. I think, lunge farther, bark louder. Neil takes the dogs into the front seats. I motor the boat out of our slip and out of the harbor. Daisie is comfortable on the Sound, excited, moving between us or standing in front of the small wheelhouse like a mascot, her body rigid in the breeze. Trapp has never loved the ocean; he’s only been out a few times since we rescued him. He keeps his body in contact with Neil’s leg and barks when we hit the wake from a passing trawler.
We’re well beyond the marina in a few short minutes, out into the open water, with the mountains looming against the gray sky. There is a strong mist today that feels almost like rain. It will soak into our jackets, soak into our jeans, into the dogs’ fur, and later tonight we will all smell of the sea. We will smell like my dad after a day of ferrying or fishing. At work, my dad always took a turn on the deck or opened his window in the wheelhouse. At play, my dad could sit for hours in his quietly bobbing boat, waiting for the perfect Halibut or Rockfish. He was the smell of the sea and in my anger I want to be this, too. I want to think about the truth of him for these hard, bright minutes. Out here on the water. I know this water. I know this sky and this ocean, and this boat, and I know myself. I know my dad.
Because this is what happened—I had a mother, I had a dad. The three of us lived together in a small wooden house. This was a country named Before, which was a silly, even a fantastic place. But that didn’t last. Silly turned to strange turned to scary. Then my mother left. And so my dad and I moved to a country named After. She was no longer there. Eventually we forgot about her.
A slight gap has opened up in the clouds. A hint of blue sky. A patch of water glints as we race across it, blinding me for a moment. I hold the Ginz steady as it leaps and crests the waves. I am going a little bit too fast but the speed feels just right, the hum of the engine working my shoulders and the way I have to hold myself firm not to be unsettled. Trapp and Neil and Daisie keep themselves low to the sides of the boat, unmoving, facing forward.
No, I think, this is not what happened. Somehow those two countries blurred in a way that I do not understand, that I was not allowed to see. I stretch my mind backward, trying to gather up the facts but the facts have slipped from my fingers and fallen into the water. I’d have to dive deep to find them and this water is too murky for that. No one opens their eyes in this water. It would sting.
The shoreline of Hat approaches, with its gray rocks and sandy ridges. Several small coves stretch east along the coast. The forest beyond these coves is a vibrant green whose upper limit is broken only by one massive rock. The peak of the rock juts above the tree line like a raised finger. A warning or a plea for silence. Without even bothering to check whether Neil can see me, I lean over the edge of the boat and vomit into the ocean. Nothing but crackers and tea, it comes quickly. I wipe my mouth on my windbreaker. Breathe. Take in more anger with the smell of the water and the salt and the seaweed.
I maneuver the Ginz into Hat’s tiny marina, wind around to slip 82. My dad’s name will be next to the slip tag and this gives me another little jolt. John Tomlinson. Written out for anyone to see like this isn’t a secret. The slap of this gets me moving quickly. We dock and tie, jump out and log our arrival on the marina clipboard. The dogs leap happily around the dock while I scan the clipboard for my dad’s handwriting. There is nothing on the first page but on the second I find it. John Tomlinson. Just over a week before. I throw the clipboard back onto its hook.
Neil catches up to me, “I checked a map. It will be just over there.” He points away from the marina to the northwestern tip of the island. “Number 15.”
“George said he had the old anchor chain from The Kalakala. That’s how we’ll know,” I say.
I crackle as I walk. Electric. I am taller, and faster, and stronger. We find a trail that heads off across the beach toward a row of cabins. My shoes fill with sand but I don’t care, nothing can slow me down. Neil keeps track of the dogs, leashing them at the sight of two other walkers. It’s a cold day, the wind is high. My hair is whipped across my face and I have to pull a strand that has gotten stuck in the corner of my eye. It slices on the way out and I blink against sudden tears.
It’s just there. A small cabin with weathered gray wood paneling. The window sills, door and porch trim are white. And I see the old anchor chain.
“That must be it.” Neil reaches for my arm but I’m already moving. Terrified but moving. The beach today is stark but breathtaking. Pine trees and overgrown rhododendrons, a line of stones near the waterline, the whole thing with a view upon the Saratoga Passage. If I squint I can see the dark line of the much larger Whidbey Island to the west. Beyond the last cabin—his cabin, I force myself to think—is nothing but empty beach. We let the dogs go and they race each other up a small hillside, Daisie leading the way.
The windows are dark and while Neil fumbles in his pocket for my dad’s key ring, I wait for one of them to brighten. What would I do? Would I run away? George said no one lives here, but what does George know? Neil tries all the keys and on one of them, the lock turns easily.
“Ok?” Neil says.
We step inside. I close my eyes while Neil calls out, but I can tell immediately the place is empty. The silence of it. The damp and the dark. No one could be here. Relief rushes over the sick feeling in my stomach. But this relief settles fast, turning back to anger. Okay, this place really exists but what the hell is
this place? The dogs scurry about while I begin a kind of halting tour. Neil keeps behind me. The cabin is all wooden floors with muted blue carpets; the air is cold, humid. There is a small front room with a sofa and a low table. One armchair. To one side is a door that leads to a kitchen. To the other is a door to a small bedroom and bathroom. I pace the length of the front room, turn around in the tiny kitchen, open the door to the little bedroom. I pace and pace, walking faster and touching objects as I pass with my angry, trembling fingers. I knock over a vase, right it too hard and have to set it straight all over again.
“Ella?”
I don’t answer him. I just keep walking around.
Sparsely furnished but clean, this place is exactly what I would expect a cabin belonging to my dad to look like. But the more I look around, the more it feels as though I have been here before and just can’t remember.
Along the window sills are shells I collected with my dad as a child, and on the table water polished stones in a jar that once belonged to me. Photographs of me, and of me and Neil, rest along the small mantle above the fireplace. Several books line a small bookshelf; many are ones I gave him as gifts. Neil’s gifts are here, too. Bits of forest treasure he has passed to my dad over the years. None of it makes sense. I swallow through another roll of nausea, grab a cracker packet from my pocket and tear into it.
“Ella?” Neil’s eyebrows are knitted closely.
I say nothing, just eat my cracker. Then I go to the kitchen, find a glass, open the fridge and pour myself some water from one of the plastic bottles I knew I’d find there. A 12-pack from Costco. What he takes on his boat, what he keeps in his garage.
I am throwing up the water and cracker before I can stop myself. Neil is instantly behind me, rubbing my back.
“Let’s sit down. Or do you just want to go? And you’re getting sick.”
I stand up straight, making him drop his hand. “No, I’m not.” I wipe my mouth and my hands are not shaking anymore. I’m empty now. I turn and walk back into the living room, thinking of the deed, the logic somewhere. My mother has been here. Why else wouldn’t my dad have told me? That injured woman he saved—with her limp or her wheelchair, or however it was she healed after her accident—she’s been in this room before, I’m sure of it, and I haven’t. And Cap’n Johnny has some fucking explaining to do. I open each drawer, check along each shelf, behind each book and photo, in each corner, under the sofa cushions. In my furiousness I have gotten the dogs excited and they race about, jumping up onto the couch and back down again. Daisie knocks Trapp into a wooden chest near the front window. I hadn’t realized it was a chest, that it might be something else I could open. I kneel down. Tilt. Breathe. Tilt. I remember this chest. I don’t remember when it was no longer in my dad’s bedroom.
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