Sea Creatures

by Susanna Daniel

  BEFORE GRAHAM GOT HOME THAT night, Frankie and I sat at the kitchen table with the American Sign Language Dictionary. I’d gotten pretty good at understanding the ASL’s descriptions of signs, and the jellyfish one was a breeze. Frankie and I did it together: one palm out flat, the other open above it, then all fingertips brought together, then open again, in imitation of the creature’s movement in the water. For pineapple, we made a P at the corners of our mouths and jiggled a little, which Frankie found hilarious. His mouth opened wide and out came quick gusts of breath, a silent guffaw.

  Graham struggled through the sliding glass door and dropped his panniers. He frowned at the dictionary on the table; he’d lost patience with the speech problem. He opened his arms to Frankie, who scrambled up the trunk of his father like a monkey, then sat complacently in his arms without holding on, as if perched on a throne.

  Over dinner on the Lullaby’s back deck, we exchanged details of the day. Graham had been assigned to a team that was developing a new kind of weather buoy, and he was in charge of improving the software that collected and transmitted the buoy’s data. I described our trip to Stiltsville. When I mentioned lunch, Graham cocked his head at me, his fork paused in the air above his plate.

  “What kind of job is this?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “So what’s he like, this hermit?”

  I thought about how to answer. “He’s intense, quiet. Kind of formal.”

  “Is he strange?”

  “Not particularly. Not that I could tell.”

  “Seems as if he’d be strange, living like that.”

  When he was done eating—Frankie relished snacks but at mealtimes became suddenly disinterested in food—he emptied the contents of his pockets onto the table, item by item. This was a habit he’d developed: he stashed things in his pockets during the day, and at night he presented them to us like treasures: stickers backed with lint, a tiny elephant from the toy box, a sugar packet from Lidia’s kitchen. Tonight, the last item was a plastic yellow sea horse the size of my pinkie finger. I touched the sharp ridges along its spine.

  “Where did you get this?” I said.

  His hands came up. Man give it to me.

  I signed: When?

  “Speak?” said Graham to me.

  “When?” I said to Frankie.

  Frankie looked back and forth between us, his mouth turned down at the edges and his shoulders slumped. You in kitchen, he signed. Washing dishes.

  I’ve been asked time and again—by doctors and speech therapists, who had failed to find anything physically wrong; by Lidia and my father; even by friends back in Illinois, whose calls I’d stopped returning as their children’s vocabularies multiplied—why sometimes I chose to sign instead of speaking. When I’d first started with the signing, not realizing how instrumental it would become, I’d pressed Graham to learn some basics. He’d said, “The boy can hear, right? Why are we doing this?” I’d said, “He can hear, but he can’t talk. I don’t want him to feel alone.” I hadn’t known why I was doing it until the words left my mouth. I knew people believed I should have been doing something quantifiable to help Frankie, and I didn’t disagree. But so far, no diagnosis or treatment had been chosen for him. And I believed strongly that until we knew why he refused to speak, we would not entice him to start.

  I cleared the table. Frankie’s eyelids were heavy, his stare unfocused. He made the sign for Sleep: one hand cupping his soft, full cheek. Graham lifted him and playfully slung him over one shoulder, then stooped to let me say good night before taking him inside. I poured myself a glass of wine. When Graham came back out, he stumbled over the doorway and dropped into a patio chair. He stretched his long legs and sighed. The Lullaby docked bow-in, so the wide stern patio—fully a third of the boat’s living space—faced the canal. Breeze trembled in the mangroves and across the surface of the water.

  “I like what you did with the—what do you call them—area rugs,” said Graham, his voice a little shaky.

  “We needed a little sprucing,” I said, but I could tell he barely heard me.

  Every few weeks it hit him, the need for sleep. I knew tonight he would take his pills, would lie down in our bed, and would fasten the soft black cuff that we’d leashed to the wall. He hated the pills, hated the cuff, but every couple of weeks he was forced to spend a few nights more or less the way regular people did. The cuff had come home with him after his third and final visit to Detention, after the incident on our anniversary. The doctor who gave it to him had said that he’d treated patients with such extreme parasomnia only a few times in his career. One patient had sex with strangers in her sleep; another stabbed her husband. He told Graham—and I hated that doctor for it, though I never met him or even knew his name—that the worst was likely still to come.

  I sipped my wine. I’d steam-cleaned the houseboat’s carpet after we’d moved aboard, but the industrial gray stuff remained faded and stained. Frankie and I had gone from store to store, digging through sale piles, until I’d found a jute rug for the deck, a small braided mat in sherbet colors for the kitchen, and a large, colorful wool one in Moroccan patterns for the salon. On the deck I’d hung hurricane lamps, and on the sofa I’d arranged bright pillows in orange, grassy green, magenta. The Lullaby was not pretty, no, but she was showing a little personality.

  Graham rubbed his eyes and tried to focus. He gave me an effortful smile.

  “Why don’t you lie down?” I said.

  “We should get a new mattress.” He’d lain on our mattress two or three times, total, since we’d moved aboard, and never for more than an hour or two. “That old one gives me the creeps.”

  “Good idea.”

  “And a new pediatrician, for heaven’s sake.”

  I said something about taking the time to interview a few doctors, to find someone who was a good fit.

  “Just ask Sally,” he said.

  My old friend and I had swapped messages but had yet to see each other. She had three boys under the age of eight; surely, she knew a good pediatrician. “It’s just the talking thing—I don’t want anyone too strict.”

  “Maybe strict would be good, babe.”

  It was a conversation we’d had a dozen times. Neither of us wanted to get into it. The plastic table where we sat—it had been included, along with all of the furniture, in the price of the boat—rocked a little. Graham pushed against it, then slogged inside and came out with a few paper towels. He kneeled beneath the table, stuffing them under one leg and then another. He had a restless, struggling energy about him. It might have been a cousin of unhappiness or anxiety—he’d been sent to a shrink by every sleep doctor he’d ever seen, with no clear diagnosis—but I didn’t think so. It seemed to me that when other people’s brains started to turn off at night, after the day’s work was finished, Graham’s struggled to stay on, as if sleep were a kind of death and only by remaining awake could he survive. Sometimes I wondered about the prohibition against alcohol. Graham seemed like a person who could use a drink.

  “Sit down,” I said.

  He continued to try to fix the table, one leg at a time. Finally, he gave up. “Your stepmother is driving me a little crazy,” he said.

  I shushed him. There was only the lawn between the Lullaby and Lidia’s house. “Don’t call her that,” I said.

  He reached over and pinched me lightly on the arm, pleased to have gotten my goat. He tried to whisper, but it was hard for him, his gruff voice. “All the jibber-jabber, every time I come up the driveway. It’s like she’s waiting to pounce.”

  Lidia was a talker, it was true, but I had found I didn’t mind it. Those early days on the Lullaby would have been awfully quiet otherwise. “I miss privacy,” I said, and Graham sighed heavily.

  But our privacy had been compromised before we’d even left Round Lake. It had only been a matter of time before the neighborhood had known our business. Late one spring night, Graham had rung the bell of our closest neighbor. It was
after midnight. When she answered, he asked if she wanted him to build a bat house for her backyard, to keep the mosquitoes under control in the summer. (This was something we’d discussed doing in our own yard, but never got around to.) She’d said no, thank you, and closed the door, and once he was gone she debated calling the police. She didn’t call. I didn’t know this had happened until much later, when I read about it in the newspaper.

  Across the canal, inside the grand multilevel home, a family was seated at an enormous glass dining table, spotlighted under a pinecone-shaped chandelier. The parents, grandmother, and four children all had lacquered dark hair and caramel skin. Now the children wore pajamas, but I’d seen them in their matching church clothes, white shirts and navy knee-skirts for the girls, navy trousers for the boys. The word family—in my mind, both hands made the letter F, forming a semicircle away from the torso—encompassed so many possible configurations. What did we have in common with this neatly dressed brood in their enormous home?

  When I was a kid, roaming the decks of a cruise ship, I’d studied the families from behind my sunglasses. To me, they’d been unknowable as wild animals. They’d sulked and shouted and laughed and nagged. The fathers came from the blackjack table to dinner, suited and smelling of aftershave. I’d assumed that when I grew up and had a family of my own, we would resemble the families I’d observed, as they’d—at least from a distance—resembled one another.

  And there were moments when I thought we did resemble them. The weekend before, in fact, we’d driven down to Shark Valley and biked the trails, gawking at alligators and stopping every hour to reapply sunscreen. Graham had secured Frankie in a child seat mounted just behind his own, and spent a long time fitting Frankie’s helmet before starting out. Though Graham tended to bike fast, Frankie had only to tap his shoulder two times to convey that he wanted to see something—a gator or iguana or turtle—up close, and Graham would brake, prop the kickstand, and pull Frankie from his seat. I’d pedaled behind, studying them as they studied the wildlife.

  Graham’s head hit the back of his chair. I brought two pills from the stash above the sink and forced a cup of water between his lips. I coaxed him to stand and supported his weight through the salon, then eased him onto our mattress. His head thumped the wall and he moaned, then settled again. His eyes were almost closed but not quite. They never closed fully, even when he made it through the night. I pulled off his shoes and unbuttoned his shirt and pants. The cuff dangled from a bolt he’d drilled into the wall, the leash about two feet long, enough to allow some movement but not to get tangled around his neck or mine. The first one he’d brought home had secured with a nylon strap that was easy enough, we soon learned, for a sleeping Graham to unfasten himself. Now he wore a heavy leather version with an embedded lock. At the cottage, the key had gone in my nightstand. On the Lullaby, I put it on a high shelf in the kitchen, inside a Tupperware container. Graham could get himself into the cuff without help, but I’d gotten into the habit of doing it for him, of kissing the inside of his wrist before tightening the strap. I doubted I’d ever be entirely comfortable forcing him into captivity, but I didn’t like him doing it alone.

  The thing about pharmaceutical sleep, at my dosage but much more so at Graham’s, was that waking up was no minor matter. Before Frankie was born, I’d woken to the loud clanging of a twin-bell alarm clock Graham had ordered from a catalog. After Frankie, my insomnia disappeared and didn’t return for ten months. When it marched back arm in arm with my menstrual cycle just after Frankie weaned, it devastated me all over again. Frankie was big for his age and walked early, and by that time he was already climbing out of his crib, landing on his feet, and coming into my room to pull on my arm until I woke. He was running and jumping before his first birthday. After we moved him to a twin bed at the cottage, he figured out that the plastic pyramid-shaped object on his nightstand carried sounds from his room into mine, and stopped getting up to wake me. Instead, he would rap his knuckles against the monitor, which transmitted a series of jarring gongs to the speaker beside my head, and launched me from sleep with the force of a cannon. The first several times this happened, I shot up before my eyes opened, then asked myself where I was. My brain had to work to reorder itself, as if after a fainting episode or a stroke.

  Graham always claimed to know hours before bedtime whether the pills might work and he would be able to sleep. He’d fought the feeling for years, but it was never wrong. He said the foreknowledge felt like the taut vibration of a tuning fork inside him; there was no use trying to still it. Early in our relationship, I gave up even asking whether he planned to come to bed. It was an act of love, my letting go. Not only of trying to share a bed more than once in a while, but of the whole notion of the marriage bed. I knew he was grateful to me.

  Now, in the Lullaby’s cramped main berth, where Graham hovered in fragile presleep, one wrist leashed to the wall, eyes slatted, I realized that against all logic, some small part of me had hoped that uprooting our lives might have precipitated a change. Or even that the christening ceremony, the aptly named boat, might have sprinkled some magic over us.

  Graham licked his lips and made a sound. I leaned over him. “What’s that?” I whispered.

  He summoned the energy to speak. “My love,” he said.

  I kissed him. There was a hint of cologne long since applied. His lips were chapped from biking in the wind. I counted the days since he’d last come to bed, taken his pills, fastened his cuff. It had been more than three weeks, since before we’d left Round Lake.

  SALLY DROVE OVER ONE NIGHT after her kids were in bed. I waited on the upper deck of the Lullaby. Though it was unlikely that Frankie would get up in the night, and I doubted he could pull open the screen door even if he wanted to, I’d suspended a bouquet of bells from the door, to sound an alarm if it opened. After sleeping through the night three times that week, Graham was out with my father; the stint was finished. To the east, the coppery sunset bled through the banyans and royal palms. The water in the canal wore a sheer, golden cloak.

  Sally climbed the ladder to the roof deck with a bottle of wine under one arm and a bar of chocolate between her teeth, kicking off her heels. They landed on the pier.

  “I met your stepmother,” she said in a stage whisper. “My, she’s friendly. I think her perfume rubbed off on my neck.”

  After I recovered from the sight of her—we talked occasionally on the phone, but hadn’t seen each other in more than two years—we embraced. I spread my arms. “My new digs.”

  “You made it sound worse than it is.”

  “Don’t lie.”

  “I expected rats and an unidentifiable smell.”

  Sally was tall and wore her brassy red hair straight. Her skin was creamy—expensively moisturized, was my thought—and smooth. She wore a salmon-colored dress with a yellow belt, and diamond stud earrings. She was, as usual, unfussy and immaculate, just short of conventionally pretty, with her up-slanted nose and widely spaced eyes. She had what I thought of as a swimmer’s body, broad across the back and padded in the muscles of her arms and legs, strong and slender and flat-stomached, but far from slight. Her face, unmade, had a lunar quality, translucent and freckled and only subtly contoured. It was a face—I realized this in that moment—I’d been missing for years.

  I said, “I’ll give you the tour some other time.”

  She collapsed into one of the loungers and dropped a bare foot to the deck. “I feel as if I’ve escaped my life. Offer me shelter.”

  “Busy day?”

  “Little men, everywhere I look. They have their probes primed for me every morning.”

  “How are they?”

  “Let’s not talk about them. I want to hear all about Frankie, of course, but not tonight. Let’s pretend we’re unencumbered.”

  Before kids, Sally had worked long hours as a financial planner—her husband, Stanley, still did—but in the past years she’d cut back so severely that I had the idea she let months go betwe
en clients. She’d helped me get my own business started; we’d spent so many hours on the phone, faxing loan documents and my business plan back and forth, that I’d insisted on paying her. She’d never cashed my check. When my profits started to decline—a former colleague, Ross Stern, adopted my business model and improved on it, marketing not to teenagers but to fretful parents, offering a guarantee of college acceptance, emphasizing his experience as an insider and promising “tricks and tips no one else can provide”—I’d asked again for advice. It was her response as much as anything that forced me to face facts, though at the time I’d resented it. “There comes a point,” she’d said, “when it’s not investment anymore, it’s going down with the ship. You passed that point a while back.”

  I descended the ladder and went to the galley for glasses and a corkscrew. When I returned, Sally was lying on a chaise with her arms stretched above her head. “I feel like I’m in a tree house,” she said, smiling.

  “It’s not so awful,” I said. “But sometimes I find myself looking for the bilge pump.” I mimed pulling a plug.

  “I can’t imagine why.”

  The breeze through the hammocks gave off faint applause. Lying beside Sally on our twinned loungers reminded me of my childhood, of the physicality of friendship in youth. There was a time when not a week had passed when Sally didn’t hold one of my hands in her own and painstakingly paint each of my nails, then softly blow on them until they were dry. When we’d walked together, our shoulders had touched and neither of us shifted away. Did that ever happen with friends I’d made as an adult? Now it seemed we all treated our bodies like armored cars, unlocking for brief hugs and battening back up.

  “How do you like having a stepmother?” said Sally.

  “I don’t think of her that way,” I said. “How do you like it?”

  “They divorced last year. We weren’t close.”

  Sally’s mother died of melanoma two weeks before we graduated from high school. I’d barely known her mother; she’d worked as an attorney and wore fine, dark suits. Her father was well meaning but lost, after, and Sally spent that summer with me and my mother, sleeping over every night. I assumed there was some arrangement with Sally’s father that I never knew about. We spent much of the summer at the neighborhood pool, reading magazines and drinking virgin piña coladas. Afternoons, Sally and I would take my mother’s car to the beach or the movies and pick up my mother from Dr. Fuller’s on the way home. My mother would take us to the mall to get our makeup done, then give Sally the free samples from her purchases. She even gave Sally one of her own push-up bras, a blue satin one, and Sally wore it every day for weeks. When Sally cried, my mother held her and sang to her. She drew Sally a bath and poured in lilac salts, then sat on the toilet seat and gently probed Sally with questions about her mother. I lingered in the doorway, thinking that my mother was being rude, that surely Sally would have preferred not to talk about her mom, since every time she did it ended in tears. But then my mother brought her a towel warmed from the dryer and Sally’s tears dried and she returned to herself. I’d been proud of my mother, of the way she’d known what Sally needed.