I'm Fine, but You Appear to Be Sinking

by Leyna Krow

  Your loving sister,

  Dahlia

  She could just call Isaac to talk about Squid Days, but Isaac, a lawyer in New York (still practicing at sixty-eight, more likely to die than to retire) often uses the time difference and his hectic work schedule as excuses not to answer when Dahlia phones. And also not to return her messages. It seems to Dahlia that she and her sibling have always communicated better in writing than in person. Somehow, it’s easier for both to say what they mean in notes, letters, and postcards, with no risk of being interrupted mid-thought by the other’s voice. And so, these days, they talk mostly by e-mail.

  After she’s finished writing, Dahlia browses for books. She finds a display of items on local interest. There’s one book on the history of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and another on surf culture. Both show old pictures of crowds gathered at Cowell Beach, children playing in the surf, and families on beach blankets. But neither mentions Squid Days, or squid at all for that matter.

  An hour later, Dahlia gets back on the computer and sees Isaac has responded to her e-mail. His note is brief.

  Sorry, Sis, no idea what you’re talking about with the Squid Days or this Mr. Stills fellow. No recollection. Your dream sounds nice though. My regards to Joanie and Maddy. Be well. –Ike

  So Isaac doesn’t remember. But Dahlia remembers Isaac in his bright blue bathing trunks and sun hat, sitting in the sand, ink pop in one hand, plastic shovel in the other, digging and sucking, his lips an ink-stained smile. A fussy toddler, he was his happiest at Squid Days.

  Dahlia knows Isaac’s response shouldn’t surprise her. Indeed, throughout her life, her brother seems to have made it a point to always disappoint, or undermine, or side-step Dahlia somehow. Why should this be any different? Yet, she had so hoped he’d be willing to share in her recollection of Squid Days! She wants someone to join her in the memories of this magical event, so many years in the past—to agree with her that, yes, Squid Days was truly something special, and what a shame it no longer takes place. She knows she can’t talk about it with just anyone. It’s too strange a vision, and too far removed from the modern day realities of Cowell Beach—burrito shacks and boogie board rental shops and a peculiar smell, not as bad as rotten eggs, but similar—for most to appreciate. She needs someone who was there. Really, Dahlia thinks, her brother should be that person. Dahlia decides she will try Isaac again the following day. Perhaps it is simply a matter of providing more detail to ignite in him some spark of reminiscence.

  But the next morning, Madison is gone before Dahlia gets up. There’s a note on the table that says “Went to school early to study.” This means Dahlia will have to take the bus downtown to the public library if she wants to write to Isaac again.

  Strangely, though almost everyone at the public library on a weekday morning is Dahlia’s age (if not older), she’s less comfortable there than at the community college. There’s this feeling of time being wasted, as if everyone is just counting the minutes until they can go somewhere else. Dahlia does not like this feeling. She much prefers the studious, focused atmosphere of the college. She finds an open computer and responds to Isaac’s e-mail from the day before.

  Dear Issac,

  Oh, I do wish you’d make an effort to recall Squid Days! I suspect you’ll find it there, somewhere in the recesses of your brain, if you really try. I have a picture in my mind (as clear as if it were a photograph!) of you reaching out like you wanted to catch each squid with your tiny hands before the men could throw them back in the sea. You were so fascinated by all the goings-ons there at the beach. Once, a magician came up to us and made a small wooden carving of a squid appear behind your ear. Daddy paid him a dime so you could keep it. Does none of this ring any bells? Do let me know.

  Fondly,

  Dahlia

  She hits the “Send” button. But in her heart, she knows Isaac will still not give her the response she wants. He won’t even consider it. In true little brother fashion, even if he does remember Squid Days, he’ll deny, deny, deny, until empirical evidence forces him to admit he is wrong. It’s so silly, Dahlia thinks, this lifelong rivalry. But she’s not above it herself. She decides she will find proof of Squid Days and send it to Isaac. She’ll force him to say she’s right about Squid Days—that he was there, that he remembers, and that he liked it.

  She starts with an Internet search, but finds nothing corresponding to “Santa Cruz Squid Days,” or even just “Squid Days.” Searches for “Squid in Monterey Bay” yield a plethora of results, but not the thing she’s looking for. She tries the library’s own card catalogue, unsure what books might be of use. She decides, ultimately, that newspaper clippings are the best, something proclaiming “Squid Days Is On Its Way!” in bold block script.

  She flags down a library aide, a young volunteer from the local high school, and asks for help accessing the microfiche collection. She doesn’t tell the girl exactly what she’s looking for, only that she wants old articles about squid in the Monterey Bay. She doesn’t want to sound batty, talking about some weird beachside squid party from the olden days. So she keeps it simple. The girl gets Dahlia set up with the machine and brings her a reel of microfilm with a story about a squid fisherman who was killed in a bar fight in 1939 and several about the impact of pollution on the bay’s marine life. But no Squid Days. Dahlia shakes her head. “No, I’m afraid this isn’t quite right,” she says to each article.

  “I’m sorry we couldn’t find what you were looking for,” the young library aide says after twenty minutes, signaling to Dahlia this project has exhausted her patience. Before she returns to the reference desk though, the aide mentions to Dahlia that the university has a marine lab out by Natural Bridges State Beach.

  “They do all kinds of research about the animals that live in the bay,” she says. “So you might try them with your questions.”

  Dahlia decides that’s exactly what she’ll do. A trip out to Natural Bridges seems like a lot of effort just to prove her brother wrong. But Dahlia doesn’t like to give up on a project once she’s started. She’ll get her proof of Squid Days; she’s certain it’s just a matter of looking in the right place. She thanks the aide for her help and for the information about the lab.

  Across the road from the bus station, the protestors are out, waving their signs that say “No More Blood For Oil,” and “U.S. Out of Iraq,” and “Regime Change Starts At Home.” It seems to Dahlia they’re there almost every afternoon and she’s glad for this. She herself is not in favor of the war. She worries, though, that these particular protestors—mostly students from the university—lack a sense of history, and what good is political action if it takes no heed of what came before it? At least, that’s Dahlia’s feeling.

  Once, she tried to engage the protestors in conversation, telling them her husband had died in the first Gulf War. But this information only seemed to baffle them and she could not tell if it was because they couldn’t see how the first Gulf War connected to the current one, or because they assumed her far too old to have lost a spouse in combat just twelve years prior. And it was true that Terry hadn’t died in combat, per se. He was an engineer whose company had been contracted by the Pentagon to design portable plumbing and irrigation systems that could be easily assembled at bases in the desert without much know-how on the part of those assembling them. He was touring an army camp in Kuwait when he’d suffered an embolism and died. He was sixty-two years old, leaving Dahlia a widow at the same age.

  So now she doesn’t say anything as she passes the protestors on her way to the bus, but she does offer a quick thumbs up, which is returned by a skinny boy in ripped corduroy shorts with natty, knotted hair.

  When the bus driver sees Dahlia, he lowers the bus’s wheelchair ramp and comes out to help her up and secure her and her chair into a space in the front. He chatters away in a false-friendly voice as he does this. His yammering is mostly about the weather, and then also something about birds. Dahlia isn’t sure if he’s talking to her,
as though she were a child, or talking at her, as though she were a piece of luggage. Dahlia smiles back and acts as if what the driver is saying is all part of a perfectly normal adult conversation. She offers the periodic “Is that so?” and “How interesting” until he’s done and then she thanks him for his help. She could be rude. She could embarrass the man by haughtily stating that just because she’s in a wheelchair that doesn’t make her dumb. But Dahlia’s never been that way with anyone. She knows it’s a little cliché, but she always says her philosophy is just to treat others the way she wants them to treat her and hope they catch on. Like with the bus driver. Except he doesn’t catch on, and the whole charade repeats itself when the bus stops at the marine lab ten minutes later and Dahlia has to be unloaded.

  The marine lab actually has two entrances—one for a small museum and aquarium whose sign proclaims “Open to the Public” in bright orange letters, and one for the laboratory whose sign does not stipulate who it is and is not open to. Dahlia picks the latter.

  Inside, the lab is really just one big room, sectioned into clusters of tables and equipment, hardly any of which is in use. There’s a strange quiet to the place. A young woman working a desk near the door notices Dahlia and stands to greet her. She looks like Madison, with her stringy dyed-black hair and excessive facial piercings. But her expression is kind.

  “Can I help you?” she asks.

  Dahlia is unsure where to start. Here in the lab, she feels her purpose should be more scientific than personal. She says she’s looking for information about squid migration patterns—historical information, if possible. Have the bay’s squid populations decreased in recent decades? Was there ever a spike in the population, perhaps for even just a few years in the 1930s?

  The girl shakes her head, says she doesn’t know the answers to any of it. Her research concentration is in salmon, primarily, she explains.

  “But you might ask Cyril,” she says. “He’s our cephalopod man.”

  She points toward a sturdy-looking young man wearing a lab coat that’s clearly too tight on him. He sits with his back to them on the other side of the room and the girl offers to escort Dahlia, but Dahlia declines. She doesn’t want to tax the girl’s kindness. She knows how quickly that sort of thing can happen.

  She motors up to the table where the young man is hunched, looking at slides and making furious notes on a laptop computer.

  “I’m told you’re someone who can answer my questions about squid,” Dahlia says.

  “Is that so?”

  Dahlia looks around, afraid she may have approached the wrong person. But there’s no one else in the lab.

  “You’re Cyril, right?”

  “Yeah. What’s your squid question?”

  His face has the quality of being both boyish and severe at the same time. He’s got freckles, a mop of curly hair, and wide puppy dog eyes set a little too close together. But he’s also got a square jaw that perfectly matches a set of broad, square shoulders just below. He reminds Dahlia of the Rock’em Sock’em Robot toys Madison loved as a child. No wonder he looks uncomfortable in his lab coat. This young man is not built for science.

  He doesn’t smile. This surprises Dahlia. Normally strangers smile when she talks. Sometimes these smiles seem genuinely friendly, but more often they’re patronizing, like the bus driver and the library aide. Regardless, they’re something Dahlia is accustomed to. This unsmiling face unnerves her and she finds herself flustered. She tries to say again what she said to the girl with the piercings, that she’s curious about seasonal swells in the squid population. Was it possible that sometimes there were so many squid that some would beach themselves in confusion? That hundreds of squid would beach themselves? Maybe this doesn’t happen anymore, she says, in fact she’s certain it doesn’t happen anymore. But it used to happen and what would have been the cause of that?

  Cyril shakes his head. “I’m not really sure what you’re asking me,” he says.

  Dahlia takes a deep breath and tries again. “When I was a little girl, every year in the summer squid would suddenly wash up on the sand at Cowell Beach. Men from the community went down to the shore to help them by throwing them back into the water. There was a festival that went along with it called Squid Days, which was organized by a man named Mr. Stills. People from all over town would come to watch. I know it seems strange, but I remember everyone enjoying it quite a bit, my own family included.”

  Finally, Cyril does smile, though only a little.

  “That sounds like something I’d very much like to see,” he says.

  “But I was so young at the time,” Dahlia says. “There’s a lot I can’t recall. So I’m trying to find out more about it.”

  Cyril tells Dahlia he’ll ask around the department and see if anyone’s ever heard of anything like what she’s described. He asks for the best way to get a hold of her and she gives him her e-mail address. She could give him a phone number, but she badly wants this young man’s help. There’s something about him—his bulk, and his no-nonsense attitude—that appeals to Dahlia. He seems maybe even a little Mr. Stills-like in these ways. And so, it is important to Dahlia that he take her seriously. It is important to her that he knows she is the sort of woman who can communicate by e-mail. He, in turn, gives Dahlia a business card identifying him as a graduate student assistant in marine biology, his own personal e-mail address written on the back.

  At home that evening, Dahlia is enthused about her progress, happy to have enlisted Cyril’s help in her quest for information. She’s almost forgotten her original reason for trying to find proof of Squid Days—to spite Isaac—and now feels genuinely caught up in the research for its own sake. It’s strange that something so vivid in her memory has seemingly been erased from Santa Cruz history. She wants to know why. She feels like Indiana Jones, digging through the rubble for something valuable and lost.

  Over dinner, she chatters away about Squid Days, having forgotten her concern that someone who was not there could not possibly understand it. After all, Cyril seemed to understand just fine. She tells Madison about the beauty of the men working together on the shore, the way they threw each squid so gracefully, like they were doing a dance. She talks about all the treats at the food vendor carts and how everyone in her family, especially Isaac, loved the sweet, runny ink pops the best. She tells Madison about the kindness of Mr. Stills, how he wanted everyone to enjoy Squid Days, how every year he made sure Dahlia got to ride on his shoulders down to the water so she could see with her own eyes the magic of the men throwing the squid.

  “Jesus, Dahlia,” Madison interrupts, shaking her head, her mouth twisted in either concern or frustration, or both. “Tell me you haven’t told anyone else about this Squid Days thing.”

  Dahlia lies and says she has not.

  Dahlia’s dream is also a memory, but this time, the dream is different. Again, she is a little girl in the sand with her useless legs half buried. Somewhere nearby, Isaac is sitting in Mother’s lap, munching on squid snacks. All around, children with regular legs run like tops in stupid circles but Mr. Stills does not pick them out. Just as before, he comes only to Dahlia and scoops her up without asking. She squeals in surprise and delight. Again, he carries her on his broad shoulders to the water’s edge so she can watch the men throwing squid, the creatures strangely graceful in flight.

  What is different in this dream is that the other men are not standing on the shore. They are out in the bay on boats. They are reaching into the water and pulling squid out, then tossing them onto the beach. They’re not saving the squid; they’re killing them. Dahlia isn’t upset by this though. It’s all part of Squid Days. It’s the biggest day of the year for the town’s fishing industry. She turns to see the magicians and the food vendors and the running, screaming children. She looks back at the bay. The men on the boats stay small in the distance, but the squid get bigger as they fly toward the shore.

  Awake, in bed, Dahlia wonders about Mr. Stills. She has no memory of h
im outside of Squid Days. But in the context of Squid Days, he was always the man of the hour. He was in charge, overseeing everything, coordinating the vendors and the fishermen alike. She’s not sure how she knows this, exactly. She has no recollection of being told as much. She can’t remember anyone ever saying anything specific to her about Mr. Stills, and yet, she is certain he was someone all the other grown-ups held in high regard. She can almost hear her father, in his gravelly voice, saying, “That Stills, now there’s a man who gets things done.”

  And then there’s the question of how Mr. Stills knew to seek out Dahlia. Dahlia tries to remember this as well, but can’t be certain. Was he a neighbor? A member of her family’s church? Or had he simply seen her chair lying in the sand and sensed that here was a little girl who might like to see the squid, but could not make it to the water’s edge under her own power? And then, so thoughtful, he remembered to look for the same little girl each year after. Dahlia wonders if maybe Mr. Stills even had a young relative of his own who was in a wheelchair. A niece or a daughter perhaps. And so he knew how to offer attention in a way that made Dahlia feel she was worthy not just because her legs didn’t work but because she herself was a very special person. Like her legs, working or not, didn’t matter at all. That’s the way she felt, too, when she first met Terry. She remembers how he smiled wide whenever she talked, but not in that patronizing way most people smiled. How he’d sometimes get so excited when he was walking beside her chair, chattering away, trying to impress her, that he’d speed up and actually leave her behind. She’d have to call after him, laughing, “Terry, wait for me.” And he’d come slinking back to her side, embarrassed, but still smiling.

  Funny, Dahlia thinks, how some men know instinctively just the right way to be, even if they don’t know they know it.