by Jim Lynch
“Well, I live on Skookumchuck Bay,” I said, then paused. “I’ve never heard my voice so loud before.”
The audience snickered. “You won’t even notice it in a minute,” she promised. “Don’t pay it any mind.”
“Well, I live on Skookumchuck, like I said, and I read a ton. I’ve read every book in the library on marine biology and quite a few they don’t have, but I guess what got me going is when I learned that about eighty percent of life on earth is in the ocean, and that about half of the ocean is so deep that sunlight never even reaches it, and that it’s been dark down there from the very beginning. Plus, we still don’t know that much about it, really, which makes it a whole lot more exciting than land.” I was full of Pepsi and talking so fast I didn’t know where to stop or even pause. “And since I live on the tidal flats it’s hard to resist, because that’s where it all comes together. It sounds phony, but if you’re out there enough you eventually think about the beginning of life on land too, because it probably started with stuff like mussels and barnacles so there was something for the first land scavengers to eat. You know what I mean?”
I sipped Pepsi to give her a chance to tell me to be quiet or to admit that this was a dumb idea.
“So when you found that squid,” she said, “that tied some of this together for you, didn’t it?”
“Well, the squid lives in the deep, so yeah, it showing up the way it did was amazing. And so was that ragfish. Everyone asks about the squid, but the ragfish was awesome too. Lots of scientists figured that fish was already extinct, see, yet there it was lying on Evergreen’s nude beach. Maybe the squid and the ragfish simply got lost. A coincidence, you know? Most people think the squid is so ugly with its huge eyes and all that, but you should have seen it that morning. It was the coolest purple and such a brilliant design when you think about it. Makes sense—doesn’t it?—that you should have the biggest eyes on the planet if you have to survive in its darkest waters.”
The crowd giggled, but I couldn’t see any of the faces, which relaxed me even more.
She asked what I meant when I said the earth was trying to tell us something.
“I really, really hate that question,” I said.
Laughter bounced through the auditorium. “Okay,” she said. “Try this one: You really love Rachel Carson’s work, don’t you?”
“She was the greatest.” I felt words piling up inside me. “She’s still the greatest.”
“Can you quote from her?”
I smiled. I’d quoted her to people before, but nobody had ever asked for it, and nobody but Angie or Florence had ever seemed to enjoy it. “She has this one quote I really like in Edge of the Sea about how our search for the meaning of life draws us to the tidal flats: ‘It sends us back to the edge of the sea, where the drama of life played its first scene on earth and perhaps even its prelude; where the forces of evolution are at work today . . . where the spectacle of living creatures faced by the cosmic realities of the world is crystal clear.’ And then she later says, ‘So the present is linked with past and future, and each living thing with all that surrounds it.’”
Mrs. Powers looked to the crowd and smiled. She could talk with her eyebrows alone. The loud clapping surprised me. I felt like a circus seal.
“What else have you seen or learned that amazes you?” she asked. “Please give us examples.”
“It’s endless,” I said. “Abalones make shells harder than ceramics. An octopus squeezes through a hole one-tenth its body width. Arctic fish can freeze solid then spring back to life when they thaw because their organs are somehow protected. But it’s the little stuff that gets me, the way that life scatters like dust in Puget Sound in the spring, that a cupful of water might contain thousands of living plants and animals, including baby barnacles and oysters the size of salt grains that already know enough to drop down during ebb tides so that they don’t drift too far from their parents.”
“You speak so eloquently about sea life,” she said once I finally stopped talking.
“I’m just describing what’s there and what I’ve read. When Rachel Carson accepted the National Book Award, she said, ‘If there is poetry in my book about the sea it is not because I deliberately put it there but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out poetry.’”
I admit it. I was indulging myself. It was my first big audience.
“What about that Japanese street sign you found near your house? What did you find out about that?”
I smiled. “My aunt Janet has a friend who was an exchange student in Japan, and her friend told me the post says ‘Odyssey Drive.’ At least, that’s her translation. She also says Japan hasn’t used that kind of street sign since the sixties.”
She held up her hands, as if stopping traffic. “How about that earthquake? Why did it strike right below your bay, and what should we make of that? Or should we make anything of it?”
“I think when the ocean spits interesting stuff up on the beach it might be sending us postcards we don’t know how to read yet,” I said. “And when the earth shakes that violently, but doesn’t kill anyone, when its tantrum is so selective that it picks which classroom, chimney and fountain to destroy, I think it’s probably telling us something, but I don’t know what.”
She smiled at the audience. “Is he a wise child, or what?” Over murmurs that sounded like amens, she said, “Okay, Dr. O’Malley, now we’re getting to the hard questions: Do you believe God is in all of us?”
“Wow,” I said. “If there is a God I’d guess He’s in nothing that lives or everything that lives. Why would He just be in us?”
She bobbed her head thoughtfully at me, then at the audience. “Should I tell him God is a She?” She cut short the laughter. “You quoted from Rachel Carson earlier about looking for the meaning of life in the sea. Is that what you’re doing?”
“I try not to ask myself impossible questions.” I was winging it. I’d never held that thought or the one that came after it. “We don’t even understand everything that can go on in a drop of salt water, so it makes sense to me that we can’t understand everything.”
I heard sighs, then applause. “You are amazing,” she told me, then to the crowd: “Isn’t Miles O’Malley amazing?” She interrupted the applause to ask, “How do we know when we’re moving forward? How should we measure progress?”
I frowned, my mind empty. I’d never understood the way people used that word, but by this point my goal was to not disappoint. “Crabs move sideways. They don’t worry about going forward or backward.” I stood up, raised my forearms at right angles and shuffled sideways with bent knees. I was good at crab impressions. The laughter was instantaneous.
“Do you fear that we’re killing the ocean?” she asked once I sat again, feeling ridiculous.
“We could maybe ruin Puget Sound, and that would be horrible. And we could kill off lots of ocean species—we already have—but the oceans are way bigger than us and they’ll be here long after we’re gone. That’s for sure.”
She amused the audience with her eyebrows again. “So what should we do, Miles O’Malley? You play the teacher. We’ll be your students.” The crowd loved that. “What would you have us do?”
“See as much as you can see, I guess. Rachel Carson said most of us go through life ‘unseeing.’ I do that some days, then other days I see a whole lot. I think it’s easier to see when you’re a kid. We’re not in a hurry to get anywhere and we don’t have those long to-do lists you guys have.”
She smiled that Fairy Godmother smile, patted a hand in the air to quiet the crowd, then asked if I saw things “coming.” “Is there anything we should be watching for?”
By this point I was hooked on the attention and couldn’t resist stretching it. I considered telling them about the oarfish, but it didn’t seem dramatic enough. “You might want to watch the high tide on September eighth,” I said. “It’s not supposed to be a big deal, but it’s gonna be way higher than predicted, the
highest it’s been in fifty years.”
She opened her arms. “I think we have to be open to the possibility that our teachers come in all shapes, sizes and ages.” Then back to me: “Thank you so much for coming to speak to us. And believe me when I tell you that God is in you, Miles O’Malley. God is definitely in you.”
It wasn’t until I’d shook the last warm hand and the Pepsi jitters started wearing off that I spotted that lanky reporter who’d told everyone that the beach talks to me.
She was hunched over on the fringe of the crowd, writing secretly on something that fit in her palm. She studied Mrs. Powers, then wrote some more. When she flipped her eyes at me, she saw that I recognized her and she froze, then slowly raised a finger to her puckered lips.
Chapter 22
Florence swore her nose felt terrific, but that was just her toying with perceptions again because it looked worse than ever. Two weeks since her last fall, and it was still turning darker shades of yellow and purple and muffling her voice and blocking her vision whenever she tilted her head back to make a point.
I’d rehearsed the best way to tell her what I’d told the cult, but chickened out and said this instead: “The judge says fifty years ago you were as pretty as Sophia Loren.”
Smiling looked like it hurt. “Norman always saw what he wanted to see. Still does.”
“Does he visit you?”
“Used to be a regular,” she said, “before he got elected. Norman has always been keenly attuned to public opinion. His affection knows many boundaries.”
“You used to give him readings?”
“Of course.”
I felt like an anthropologist digging up some ancient civilization.
“So when’d he stop coming?”
“After I told him he was gonna lose.”
That blindsided me. The judge was gonna lose? “Why doesn’t he help you?”
She snorted and her eyes bulged. “I’ve had people coming to me for help for as long as I can remember, but I’ve always considered it conversation. Life is something you do alone, Miles. You can only help and be helped but so much.”
I avoided her scolding eyes and drifted toward the kitchen. She’d said she wasn’t hungry but I didn’t see any signs she’d eaten. There was nothing in the fridge beyond moldy cottage cheese, a hardened wedge of cheddar and some slimy romaine stinking up the produce drawer. I stuffed it all into the overflowing trash bucket and set it outside. “Want me to call Yvonne to pick up some groceries?”
“She’s coming later in the week.”
“What’ll you eat in the meanwhile?”
“All kinds of stuff—almonds.” She picked up a sack next to her chair to prove it. Her left hand shook more than usual.
“You’re not a squirrel,” I said, absently finger-drumming my chest. “You can’t live on nuts.”
“What do you think the cavemen did when they couldn’t hunt?”
“Ate almonds?” I played the countertop as if it were a tall piano.
“That’s right,” she said. “Say whatever you want to say, Miles.”
I hesitated, then confessed: “I stole your prediction about that superhigh tide in September, and acted like it was mine so that the Eleusinians would think I could see the future.”
Her laugh released me and I told her the rest; how I’d relished an audience, how I’d performed for it, and how exhilarated and guilty and dishonest I felt afterward.
“You were as honest as you could be,” she said. “It’s not your words that matter anyway. It’s your outlook they’re after. It’s you.”
“They said God was in me.”
“Of course they did.”
“You’re not mad?”
“I didn’t realize you had so much faith in me, Miles.” She smiled wide enough for me to see she’d chipped a tooth.
“I pushed it though,” I whispered. “I said it was gonna be the highest in fifty years.”
She lowered her head and wiggled her skinny eyebrows. “Perhaps it will.”
“I think my parents are getting divorced,” I blurted.
She nodded, as if I hadn’t switched subjects.
I waited. “Did you hear me?”
“There’s nothing wrong with my ears,” she said. “True love is a tiny pearl, easily imagined and easily lost. But that’s for your parents to sort out, not you. I’m sorry for you, Miles, but I’m not worried about you because you don’t get in your own way. You never have, and believe it or not, that makes you extraordinary. The Eleusinians are going to school to try to become what you are when you wake up.”
I blushed because it sounded like flattery even though she’d lost me halfway through. But there wasn’t any time to dwell on any of it before we heard gravel crunching.
The lady who knocked was just a couple inches taller than me with perfectly spoked eye wrinkles that made her look tired of seeing whatever she saw.
She introduced herself as Julie Winslow, then explained with dramatic hand gestures that she was a case manager with Adult Protective Services, and that her supervisor had asked her to see if they could be of any help.
I watched Florence tighten, then speak in a strangely formal tone. “Thank you very much for your concern, but I am actually doing quite well. However, if I do find myself in need of some assistance I would certainly appreciate having your card handy.”
The lady’s smile was no bigger than a coin slot on a pay phone. She said she’d definitely leave a card, but she’d sure like to ask a few questions, if that was all right, of course. She looked for a seat that wasn’t covered with books, then asked who I was.
“That’s Mr. Miles O’Malley,” Florence said. “He’s my best friend.”
I would have done anything for her at that moment. If she’d asked me to chase this lady off with scissors, I would’ve.
Julie Winslow stepped forward and extended a small white card. Florence’s hand fluttered toward it. She now preferred her trembling left over her stiffening right? When had that happened? I saw her concentrate, but she couldn’t control the spasm. Her hand was a wounded bird coming in for a bad landing.
The lady could have made it easier. Instead she watched the card fall from Florence’s twitching fingers, then hunched forward to peel it off the floor, her nostrils flaring. Florence didn’t smell terrific that day.
“Do you have the heat on in here?” the lady asked. “Sure is hot.”
We shouldn’t have let her in the house, but we did, and that was that, and there we were, and her questions kept coming.
“How’s your nose?”
“Looks like hell,” Florence said, “but works just fine. That earthquake knocked me around a bit.”
“Where were you?”
Florence hesitated. “Near the kitchen there.”
The lady squinted in that direction, as if looking for evidence—dented countertop, a cracked window.
“Have you had someone look at it?”
“Oh, yes.”
The lady waited for more, then said, “What does Miles here do for you?”
“Keeps me company mostly. Saves me a few trips to the refrigerator. Don’t be fooled by him. He’s older and wiser than he looks.” She winked. Florence never winked. “I also have a friend who picks up my groceries and prescriptions, seeing how I try not to drive anymore—not that I can’t.”
That led to a flurry of questions about Florence’s neurologist, medications and diagnosis, which Florence waved off as a mild variation of Parkinson’s.
“So you’re ambulatory?” the lady asked.
“Oh, yes.” Florence smiled. In all the hours I’d spent with her I’d never seen half as many forced smiles. “Want to see for yourself?”
She took a breath, pushed down on both chair arms, then fell back into the cushions. She got up on her second try and gingerly steadied herself, feeling for that sweet spot on the balls of her feet that kept her upright.
I started to rise to steady her, then caught myself and recall
ed the judge telling me how helpless he felt watching little Angie teeter on a balance beam.
Florence forced another smile and took a huge breath at the same time, which made her look bug-eyed crazy. Then she rocked side to side until her right foot lifted enough to slide forward a few inches. She did the same to budge her left, then shuffled forward. There was tons of head and torso action, but her feet never left the floor.
The state lady glanced at me, her expression convincing me that Florence should have stayed in her chair.
The worst part was Florence thought she’d done pretty dang well. When she got to the counter, she clutched it, turned and beamed for real, as if she’d proven something. “I’m a little slow, but I get around.” She leaned against the counter and breathed, reading our faces, disliking what she saw.
This Julie Winslow said all sorts of encouraging crap, but it was easy to see beneath the words that she had a job to do, and that she was very confident in her ability to make decisions about other people’s lives.
“So, what about your perspective, Miles? Has Florence been getting worse, better, or staying the same?”
The question sounded harmless, but tightened everything inside me.
During the prior week, I’d started tapping her pills out almost every morning. Otherwise I found them on the floor. I loosened food lids and tried to leave her at least buttered toast or an apple if I didn’t make her a sandwich. I helped her to the bathroom twice and even pulled her off the toilet once. She’d claimed she was unusually stiff that day and promised she’d never ask me to do that again, but I wondered how long it would be before she couldn’t bring a spoon to her mouth or get up without me. Plus, I didn’t know how to get straight answers about how she truly felt, and didn’t know who else to ask, especially seeing how she’d sworn me to secrecy, without ever saying as much, about almost everything.
“Some days she’s stiffer than others,” I said vaguely. “The good thing is she doesn’t really have to get around that much because she reads most of the time, and even the fastest reader only has to get up so many times to pick out another book.”