I thought about it. The doctor said I could have died and I knew he wasn’t exaggerating, but I’d gone searching for my father and I believed I’d found him. I had the book of stories, which was more than I’d ever had before.
“It was worth it,” I said.
Granny Clem asked if I needed her to come for me. I thought about how nice it would be to have Granny Clem serving me hot tea and soup, but I didn’t like the idea of her driving so far alone. I heard her cough and the slight wheeze in her breathing. I knew Granny Clem would drop everything for me, but I was grown now and I couldn’t ask her to do it.
“I can take care of myself,” I said.
As promised, Willet and Cheryl came by in the early evening with supper from the Crab House. They laid out Styrofoam containers filled with fried fish and sliced pickles. Audie came along. I ate from a tray while they pulled chairs around my bed and ate off their laps. The nurse came by. I offered her a hush puppy.
Willet and Cheryl and Audie asked me questions, but they didn’t pause long enough for me to answer. I wanted to tell Willet about the man who’d saved me, but I knew Cheryl and Audie would think my story was ridiculous. They would say I’d imagined the whole thing. Our father was supposed to be dead. We’d buried him. How could I say he was alive without sounding foolish or delusional? It was a story for my brother, a family story; I couldn’t blurt it out in front of anyone else. So I told them about the raccoon and how I got lost, despite my map and my compass. Audie kept saying he was sorry I’d gotten lost. He apologized for the bad channel markers. It would be months before I understood why he felt responsible.
After I left the hospital, I stayed with Willet and Cheryl for a week. I hated it. Cheryl’s father wandered through the house in the middle of the night, opening doors or banging on them if they were locked. He mumbled to himself and shouted at us for no reason. My wound and my sunburn healed bit by bit. I went to the hospital every few days for injection boosters and a checkup, but after five days I insisted on going back to the apartment. I’d gotten used to living alone and I liked it.
When I told the story of the man who’d dressed my wounds and cared for me, people assumed I was rescued by one of the Everglades hermits. And I suppose I was, though I believed I knew the identity of this hermit. Willet, when I told him, was skeptical. I’d been hallucinating and babbling when they brought me to the hospital, and he thought I was imagining things. When I showed him the newspaper photo and article, he went pale. He recognized Daddy.
“It can’t be him,” Willet said.
“But it is.”
“No, he’s dead. We buried the sonofabitch.”
“Willet—”
“No!” Willet slapped the paper down between us. He seemed angry.
“Look at his eyes, Willet. Look at his smile.”
“It ain’t possible.”
He knew it was possible. If any man could disappear and become someone new, it was our father. I told Willet what I’d been doing on the kayak, how I’d been searching for Daddy. “I was looking for him, but he found me.”
“Come on, Bert.”
“It’s true.”
I produced the book of stories as evidence. Willet flipped through the notebook and shook his head. “It can’t be,” he said.
“He’s alive.”
“It ain’t possible.”
Willet fixed me a glass of juice and watched while I took the prescribed painkillers and antibiotics. “I need you to promise me something, Bert.” One of the pills had wedged in my throat and I gulped more juice to force it down. “I need you to promise me you won’t ever go looking for him again.”
“But, Willet!”
“Not on your own,” he said. “Not without me. Promise?”
“But you’re always so busy. You’re always working or with Cheryl. And now you’re going to have a baby …”
“Goddammit, Bert,” he said. “This ain’t a negotiation. It’s too dangerous. We can go back out sometime, you and me, but not on a fucking kayak and not alone. Understand?”
“Really?”
“Yeah, but I won’t go stirring shit up before the baby comes. Cheryl’s dad is enough to handle. The last thing this baby needs is two batshit crazy grandfathers. Can you understand that?”
“But the baby won’t be here for months,” I said.
“I need you to trust me, Bert.”
I wanted to trust him. I wanted to believe he’d keep his word. I agreed, but I couldn’t trust anyone but myself. Willet wanted to take the book of stories, but I wouldn’t let him. At night I read from the book and wondered how much of it was true. Granny Clem had said Daddy loved to hear her stories just as I had. Now I knew how a story could take on new life in the telling and retelling and reimagining. If the stories in the book were true, it meant Granny Clem wasn’t my blood relation. It meant Chester wasn’t my uncle. It meant I had an aunt out there somewhere, an aunt who was raising my sister. It meant Pansy was alive. If the stories were true, then so many things I’d believed about my life were a lie. Yet I didn’t feel deceived. I felt enlightened.
My body healed, though I would always have a jagged scar on my leg. Iggy hired me to lead tourists through the mangrove tunnels. I pointed out the air plants and the turtles and the swamp chickens and the anhinga. I showed them how to use their monkey arms. Sometimes, if I sensed they wanted a tall tale, I told them the story of my kayaking trip and the rabid raccoon and the Everglades hermit. I had become one of the stories of the Everglades. At least I wrote it myself.
In January, Cheryl went into labor in the middle of the night. Willet was on the water with Audie. She’d planned to have her baby at the hospital, but she called me and told me she’d changed her mind. She asked me to stay with her. “Willet says you know how to do this.”
“Every woman knows how to do this,” I told her.
I wished for Granny Clem’s bag with the forceps and the painkilling herbs, but I made do with what we had. I boiled a pair of kitchen tongs in case I needed them. Thankfully, I didn’t. I rubbed Cheryl’s lower back as she moaned and breathed her way through the night. She cried out in pain a few times, but once she started pushing, the baby crowned and emerged with very little help from me. A girl, just as she’d suspected.
That baby was you.
She named you Rachel. I asked her if you were named for someone. She said no; it was just a name she liked. She said she didn’t want you to feel saddled with someone else’s name. Let me tell you, it’s a beautiful gesture. Meaningless, probably, because we are all saddled with the baggage of our ancestors, but at least you know your mama never intended for you to carry the sins of others. She wanted you to start fresh. You should be grateful.
You were a fat pink baby and I called you my little piglet until Willet made me stop. He said it sounded insulting. I loved your plump cheeks and the many fat folds across your thighs. You were healthy and strong and beautiful. Cheryl let me hold you whenever I wanted. I carried you around for months. Your milky smell rubbed off on me and anyone who saw us together believed you were mine.
I hated myself for all the times I thought Willet would be better off if Cheryl didn’t have a baby. I had no way of knowing that baby would turn out to be you. I had no way of knowing how different you would be from the babies I held at Granny Clem’s house. How can I explain it? When you looked at me, even in those first weeks, it was with a fierce sort of love and possessiveness. You grabbed my hair or my shirt with your chubby fists and held tight. Cheryl had to pry you from me, uncurling your tiny fingers one by one to force you to let go. And I never wanted you to let go. Even when you pulled out a hunk of hair from my head, I didn’t mind. I wanted you to have anything you needed from me. I wanted to be a part of you.
Willet spoiled you with toys and swings and playpens full of soft blocks. Cheryl dressed you in ruffles and bows, always in some shade of pink. I knew they meant well, but I also knew you didn’t need toys or frilly dresses. You needed me. I needed you
. When Pansy disappeared, I couldn’t understand why anyone would take a child from her mother. Could anything be crueler? But in the first months of your life, there were a dozen times when I fantasized about running away with you. I imagined us living in a small house with a small garden. Maybe we’d have a cat. I could picture you crawling, walking, running through the kitchen while I cooked.
It was an early morning in July, almost a year past my ill-advised kayaking trip, when federal agents arrested your daddy and Uncle Audie for smuggling marijuana. They arrested dozens of men. News reports from that week said they took all the men, which, of course, wasn’t true. They didn’t arrest Iggy or the man who snapped photos of tourists holding a baby alligator. They didn’t arrest Cheryl and Audie’s father. They didn’t arrest the man who’d pulled me to safety. They seized the sports cars, the four-wheelers, and the speedboats. They seized the stereos and entertainment systems, the Rolexes and the diamonds.
Cheryl called me on the morning of the arrests. She asked me to come sit with you. She said Willet and Audie would be free on bail soon and we could all talk about what to do next. I told her I didn’t understand.
“My brother is not a criminal,” I said.
“He protected you, Bert.” She was annoyed with me. “He didn’t want you to know. He always protected you.”
I called Granny Clem. She told me to stay calm. “I’ll think of something,” she said. “There are ways to get him out of this.”
Cheryl bailed out Willet and Audie with her father’s money. When I said I didn’t realize her father had any money, she rolled her eyes and told me to stop being so naive. They’d been banking money under her father’s name for months. She said the feds would never take funds from a senile and sick old man. She was wrong. After months of investigations and questioning, they froze the accounts where the money was stashed.
When Cheryl’s father died, she said she was glad he never understood what was happening in those final months. “He’d have hated being mixed up in all this.”
I moved in with you and your mama in your grandfather’s home, which he’d owned outright before any of the smuggling started. The feds took all the cars and we were left with nothing but the old truck from White Forest. They took Audie’s fishing boat and they came for the kayaks, as well. It gave me some satisfaction to tell them one of the kayaks was lost in the mangroves.
Your great-grandmother tried to save Willet. She offered to set him up with a new identity, but said he’d have to make a fresh start somewhere. He wouldn’t be able to stay in Everglades City or return to White Forest. He said he couldn’t leave Cheryl and he couldn’t leave you. Granny Clem offered to create a new identity for Cheryl as well.
“Better than witness protection,” she promised. “Even the government won’t know where you are.”
But Willet said he couldn’t live the rest of his life pretending to be someone else. He’d always be waiting for someone to recognize him or learn the truth about his past. He pled guilty and got ten years. The lawyer told him he’d be out in seven with good behavior.
Your Uncle Audie got fifteen years. He’d been running drugs longer than Willet and was more deeply entrenched with the Colombians. During the months when the trials took place, I learned about the business of smuggling. It wasn’t complicated. The men took their fishing boats out to meet a mother ship in the Atlantic. Or they waited for helicopters to drop floating bales at a designated spot. They fished the bales from the water and stashed them among the mangroves of the Ten Thousand Islands until it was safe to load the bales in the backs of trucks. The same people who delivered fresh fish to grocery stores and seafood restaurants delivered marijuana across the east coast of the United States. The men kept the DEA agents confused by switching out channel markers, altering landmarks, and taking complicated routes to keep outsiders lost. Iggy’s map was wrong because men like Audie and Willet made it wrong. They were the reason I got lost among the islands.
Nearly everyone was in on the smuggling. Local sheriff’s deputies warned the men when the DEA started asking questions and told them where the agents were searching. The men moved the drugs, always one step ahead of the law. They were dubbed Saltwater Cowboys by the national media. They called their bales of marijuana “square grouper.” Everyone knew. Everyone but me. So many secrets and lies. From that point on, I vowed to know the truth and tell the truth, even when it was unpleasant. Especially when it was unpleasant.
Here is the truth: your father is not a bad man. He wanted to take care of us. He took care of me and Mama when Daddy and Pansy disappeared. He took care of you and your mama. I’m not proud of myself for being one of the people who took so much from him. Maybe if he hadn’t felt such a strong need to provide for us, he wouldn’t have fallen into the business of bringing bales of marijuana across the Gulf of Mexico during the “just say no” years of Reagan’s America. But maybe not. Maybe he’d have found his way to a criminal life no matter what. He is, after all, Daddy’s son.
With Willet and Audie serving time, your mama and I took care of you. She returned to work at the grocery store. She could no longer afford to be a stay-at-home mom. I worked for Iggy, leading river tours. For the most part, I worked in the mornings and your mother worked the closing shift at the store. In between, we handed you off and traded stories about what you’d done that day, when you’d eaten, whether you’d spit up, or if you were fussy. You were a good baby. You laughed often, slept well, and ate hungrily. The whole town came to love you. It would be a while before we saw any sort of baby boom in the Everglades, what with most of the strong, healthy men behind bars.
While Cheryl worked, I took you for long walks through town. I walked along the path beside the canal and stared into the eyes of the alligators sunning themselves on the banks. I pulled you closer into my chest when I saw the creatures and thought about all the things I would sacrifice to save you if you were ever in danger.
Everything. I would sacrifice everything for you.
During one of those walks, we passed the schoolyard as the final bell rang in the afternoon. I watched children run across the green lawn to a line of waiting buses and cars. I saw her. Long dark curls and bronzed skin. Green almond-shaped eyes, that familiar smile. My breath stopped and you must have sensed it, because you started crying. You never cried on our walks. Your sudden wail drew the attention of the girl and the woman who drove the car, the woman who couldn’t be her mother, but who looked so much like her I could hardly believe it. The girl met my eyes and something flickered across her face, recognition or concern. I opened my mouth to speak, but she ducked into the car and looked away. I stood there, dumbfounded, on a sidewalk teeming with children, and you, screaming in my arms. I didn’t know what to do next. I walked home.
For the next month, I paced our walks to pass by the schoolyard at the same time each day. Most days, I saw the girl. I believe she saw me. One day I got the nerve to speak to her.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “Are you safe?”
She stroked your cheek. “Pretty baby,” she said.
“She doesn’t belong to me,” I told her. What I meant to say was that I wasn’t your mother, but it came out wrong.
“Of course she doesn’t,” the girl said. “No one belongs to anyone.”
She turned and climbed into the waiting car. The woman driving the car gave me a suspicious look as she pulled away. I realized Pansy would be nearly thirteen years old by then, just one year younger than I’d been when she disappeared.
In that moment, I was back in White Forest, back in the old house with Mama and Willet and Pansy. I could smell the cornbread baking and the fresh towels from the laundry basket. I could see Pansy lolling on her back, sucking an ice cube in front of the box fan. I could hear Willet cussing the heat. What if we hadn’t gone to the quarry? What if the quarry was never dug at all? Would it have made any difference for us?
I went back to the school the next day and the one after that, but I never saw the gi
rl again. I asked around and was told they’d moved. No one seemed to know where. Most days I believe the girl I saw was Pansy, but then I start thinking it’s too much of a coincidence. It couldn’t have been my sister. When I first saw her, I considered calling the detectives who’d searched for Pansy years before, but the police never brought us any good news. I didn’t believe they would help us now. I called Granny Clem, told her I’d seen a girl who could be Pansy, but I didn’t trust my own eyes. So many years had passed.
Granny Clem sounded weaker each time we talked and I called her more often to make sure she was alive. I talked Cheryl into taking a road trip to White Forest during the wet season when you turned a year old. There weren’t many tourists then and I knew Iggy could spare me and the grocery store could spare her. We drove for two days, retracing the path Willet and I took three years earlier. You were such a good little traveler. You slept a lot and your mama and I sang silly songs we remembered from our childhood. Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I’ll go eat worms and They built the ship Titanic. Songs of isolation and death and tragedy set to happy tunes and I wondered how we could hand down so much sadness, but you laughed and clapped your hands and asked for more.
Granny Clem was so happy to see you. She said she could tell you’d been pulled into the world by skilled and loving hands. She cradled you in her lap and rocked you until you slept. She whispered stories in your ear, and I strained to hear them. She looked frailer and thinner, but she was very much alive. At night, while you slept beside your mother, Granny Clem and I sat up drinking tea and talking. I showed her the book of stories. She ran her hands across the ink-filled pages and her eyes welled with tears.
“Thank you for sharing this with me,” she said. “It’s not easy for me to talk about those days, when your father was a boy. We lost so much.”
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