Sea Creatures

by Susanna Daniel

  The summer before, I’d worked at a bookstore, but that year my mother let me off the hook and even cut back on her own work hours. Somehow, Sally’s mother’s death had granted us all a suspended vacation. At the end of the summer, just before we left for college—Sally to the dorms at the University of Miami, where her father taught economics, and me to Northwestern—my mother took us on a cruise to St. Johns and let us drink real daiquiris and spend all night in the dance club with boys. It might have been, all told, the best summer of my life.

  We watched as across the canal the mother of the dark-haired family went from room to room, turning off lights. I refilled Sally’s glass. “How is your dad?” I said.

  “Looking for number three. Healthy. Plays a lot—and I mean a lot—of racquetball. How’s Harvey?”

  “In love.”

  “What do we think of her?”

  “She’s very nice.”

  “Vague.”

  “She treats Frankie like her own grandson.”

  “That’s saying a lot,” she said. Her voice changed. “You know, I really miss your mother. I miss her almost as much as my own.”

  I couldn’t speak for a moment. “Sometimes it feels like I’m the only one still thinking about her.”

  “I think about her all the time.”

  I’d often thought that if I were to be lost to Frankie while he was still young enough, I would want his new parent—another wife for Graham—to step so fully into the role of his mother that I would be digested by the gullet of history, leaving the merest residue of maternal love.

  At other times, I worried that I should have been recording every thought I wanted to convey, so that if I were lost to him in the physical world, he would still own me in the words I’d chosen for him, as he had owned me in the flesh.

  5

  FRANKIE AND I PRACTICED THE signs for canal, bay, ocean. (The one I remember best is ocean: both hands in front of the chest, pushing down and rising again, miming the surf as it surges.) It looked, when Frankie copied my hands, like he was doing a little dance, a kind of hip-hop move, and I laughed out loud. He smiled proudly. We agreed to use the capital C to refer to Charlie. Before leaving for Stiltsville the second time, I loaded five bags of ice into the cooler on the Zodiac, and Frankie propped open the top and sat inside, then signed, Cold butt!

  The sky was full of viscous white clouds. The air in the bay gusted against the brim of my hat and the hem of my skirt. Frankie wore a new, bright orange life vest cinched across his belly. The Zodiac’s engine gunned in the troughs of larger waves, and each time this happened we slid sideways for a breath, then found our way forward again. We arrived at the stilt house panting a little from the choppy crossing, relieved to tie up and step onto solid dock.

  Charlie met us downstairs wearing blue jeans and a linen shirt unbuttoned to midchest, the sleeves rolled to his elbows. “You’re here,” he said. He sounded as if he’d been waiting for us and was surprised to see us, simultaneously.

  “Hello!” I said, signing reflexively.

  He hefted a bag of ice onto one shoulder and I did the same. Frankie carried my tote. It was made of heavy cream-colored canvas, with straps as wide as his palms. When he realized he couldn’t hold it the way I did, over the shoulder, he resorted to dragging it behind him. We struggled up the stairs, then down again and back up. By the time all the ice was in the kitchen coolers, I was sweating. That morning, I’d trimmed a few branches from the bougainvillea in Lidia’s side yard and put them in a milk-glass vase I’d bought at a garage sale. Now I pulled the whole mess from my tote. I filled the vase at the sink and placed it on the kitchen counter.

  Frankie waved with both hands above his head to get Charlie’s attention, then signed: Flowers for you.

  “For me?” said Charlie. His eyes passed over my face. “Why?”

  “A token of appreciation,” I said. “For the job.”

  He came forward and studied the vase. Here in the middle of the bay, the bright blooms were misplaced and gaudy. I reached to arrange the branches a little—whether the flowers would last the day, I wasn’t sure—and an alarm went off in my brain. I turned. Frankie wasn’t there.

  It had happened a dozen times: that hysterical instant when I didn’t know my son’s exact location. It had happened in malls, grocery stores, the backyard. It had happened when he was standing immediately behind me, out of my peripheral vision. Each time, I’d been reminded that I’m no good in a crisis. My vision narrows and the recent minutes flee from memory, leaving me disoriented. Sometimes in my alarm, I don’t see Frankie even when he’s in my line of sight.

  I said his name loudly. Of course he didn’t answer. But as I started toward the open doorway to the front porch, he stepped from the hallway.

  “No,” I said, my voice shaking.

  I pulled him to the sofa and sat him down. I was reminded again that it was a dubious proposition, bringing a toddler to a place like this, so remote and lacking in physical barriers. What could be gained, when compared with what might be lost? I would have given anything, in that moment, to be in a place where there was no porch or dock to fall from, no ocean stretching in every direction. But there was nothing I could do to make the stilt house truly safe, so I had two choices: I could take us back to land and stay there, or I could teach Frankie what to fear, and trust that he would heed my warning.

  I signed: Look at me. He reluctantly met my eyes. “It’s not like on land,” I said. “You can’t walk away from me. I have to be able to see you all the time.” He looked down and I raised his chin. “Do you understand?”

  He nodded.

  “I need you to tell me you understand.”

  He put his fist to his forehead, then brought it down, pointing with his index finger.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I was never sure how much was sinking in, but time after time he surprised me. “A sponge,” Lidia had said the evening before. She’d handed him forks and told him to put one in front of each chair at the kitchen table, then marveled when he actually did it. While we ate, she’d watched him with his little fork, his slow bites and two-handed grip on his cup. “He takes it all in,” she’d said, and I’d said, “Now if only he’d let it out.”

  From behind me, Charlie said, “Does he swim?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll take him while you work.” Seeing my expression, he added, “Just in the shallows, right beside the dock. You’ll be able to see us the whole time.”

  Swim! Frankie signed.

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  “Kiddo,” said Charlie to Frankie, his tone conspiratorial. He smiled faintly, almost without moving his lips. There were pale lines of skin in the creases of his crow’s-feet. “What your mom doesn’t know is that I used to be a bona-fide sailor. Every week I swim miles around this house.”

  I love swimming, signed Frankie to Charlie, crossing his wrists, then moving his hands in a hasty breaststroke.

  “All right,” I said. “Enough with the hard sell.”

  Charlie grinned. So you have teeth, I thought.

  He led us down the short hallway and through one of the doors. There was a standing desk and wooden stool under the north-facing window, and two headboards and mattresses were propped against the wall in one corner. The wood paneling was a dingy white, and half of the linoleum floor was covered by bankers boxes stacked two or three high. On the desk was a ceramic mug filled with black pencils with very fine points, a gray rubber eraser the size and shape of a matchbox, and something brass and ridged, the size and shape of a child’s fist: a pencil sharpener.

  I remembered the bit of business I needed to convey. That morning, I’d called Charlie’s lawyer from Lidia’s kitchen phone, and we’d made an appointment for me to stop by his office to sign papers. “I meant to mention,” I said to Charlie, “Mr. Riggs says there’s a gallery that wants to be in touch. The Abyss, it’s called.”

  “Don’t call him Mr. Riggs. Makes you sound like a k
id.” His voice softened. “I’ll send a note.”

  Frankie looked back and forth between us. I stared at the piles of boxes.

  “I’ve been told I need to get organized,” said Charlie. “That’s where you come in.”

  He went to a box and lifted the lid. I peered in. On top was a drawing similar to the ones I’d seen at the printer: a lead-lined octopus, tentacles waving wildly across a book page dense with type. Underneath this piece of paper, which Charlie handed to Frankie, was another octopus, tentacles in a different configuration, eyes fiercer. There were another dozen boxes in the room.

  Frankie wandered away, staring at the octopus in his hands.

  “Hey,” I said to get his attention. I signed, rolling my hands over one another, Be gentle. To Charlie, I pointed to another stack of boxes. “May I?”

  Charlie nodded and I pulled off a lid. The drawing on top was of a sea horse, its equine nostrils flaring.

  “You drew all of these?” I said.

  He nodded, frowning. “I’m supposed to file them. Squid in one box, barracuda in another, that kind of thing. There’s a gallery in the Gables, they want a series of conflict scenes, dark stuff—they’re calling the show ‘Battles of the Deep.’ ” He rolled his eyes at the name. He was agitated, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet, as if the entire enterprise made him itch.

  “I think I understand,” I said.

  “Every time I try to make heads or tails, I think I might drown.”

  “Sure,” I said. And because it was the elephant in the stifling hot room, I stated the obvious. “You’re prolific.”

  He cupped his face in one hand. It was the oddest gesture, one of compliant self-regard and introspection, almost feminine. Then his hand dropped and he looked away. “I’ve been doing it a long time,” he said. “To tell the truth, I don’t even remember how I started.”

  I said, “I read once that when people say that—to tell the truth, or to be honest—they’re lying.”

  “I read that, too.”

  “You’ve been here ten years?”

  “A little over ten, yes.”

  “What did you do before?”

  He sighed and sat down on one of the file boxes, facing me. He tugged at the hems of his jeans, baring his ankles, then rested his hands on his knees. “I was an engineer.”

  “What kind of engineer?”

  “Civil.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Buildings, bridges, roads. Structural integrity.” He waited a beat. “What else?”

  “What else what?”

  “What else do you want to know?”

  “What’s my title?”

  “What do you want it to be?”

  “Errand girl? First mate?”

  “Runner.” He sighed again. “You’re my runner.”

  “What happened to your last runner?”

  “He quit a few months ago. He’s sailing around the world.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “He’s halfway across the Atlantic.”

  “And before him?”

  “Another fellow, a college student.”

  “And before that?”

  “Before that I had a boat.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “Sank,” he said.

  “So much for structural integrity.”

  To my surprise, he chuckled. He stood and pushed a box toward me with his foot. “I’ll get you a chair,” he said, and left the room.

  I opened another box and inside found another sea horse, then a clipper ship, then a detailed view of the Miami skyline from the perspective of the very room where I stood. All were drawn in fine, dark strokes, medical in precision, like something out of a textbook. You could study every vertebrae, every muscle, from one of these drawings.

  He came back with a mug. “Coffee,” he said. “A little creamer, no sugar.”

  “That’s fine.”

  I held up the drawing of the skyline to the window. I could see the real-life buildings and their replicas in one glance: the county courthouse, One Biscayne Tower, the bridge to Virginia Key and the larger one to Key Biscayne. “This is amazing,” I said. “They all are.”

  He cleared his throat. “Choose a dozen to take to Henry Gale. He’ll add color.”

  “Choose a dozen based on what?”

  He shrugged. “The word they used was dangerous, if I recall. I have some that should work. There’s an octopus bringing down Freedom Tower. An electric eel lunging for a barracuda. A shark hunting. That sort of thing.”

  I raised my eyebrows at him. “You need a system.”

  His jaw tightened. “My system is hiring you.”

  “Right.”

  “Be ruthless. Put the shit with the shit, label it shit, put it away. Most of it’s shit, to be honest.” He looked at Frankie, who was staring up at him. “Sorry,” he said.

  Frankie smiled mischievously.

  “To be honest,” I said.

  He started to move toward the door. “I’ll be back in an hour. Then we could go swimming—it’s okay?”

  Frankie looked from Charlie to me and back again. Swim, he signed again. Please.

  “You have to be very careful with him,” I said to Charlie. “I don’t know you.”

  “I told you,” he said. “It’s all uphill.”

  It was half an hour before I figured out a strategy. First I’d pulled out the contents of one box and started to sort into like piles, but after four similar octopi, each piece demanded a new pile: skyline, sea horse, nautilus, blowfish, brain coral, sea cucumber, sea urchin, needlefish, seashells, oysters, barracuda, whale shark, lobster, stone crab, and so on. Each creature was rendered so delicately, so fastidiously, that it seemed each must have taken weeks to complete, which could not have been the case. It was terrible, this wealth of detail, this avalanche of precision. I couldn’t look away, on the one hand, but on the other hand they swam in front of me, each more intricate and evocative than the last.

  There wasn’t space to make so many piles, and I couldn’t keep them all in my brain at once. I kept the ones of the skyline, the sea horses, and the octopi, put the rest back in their box, and moved it to the side. I opened another box, and the next four categories emerged: an octopus battling a clipper ship (this went into a pile for the gallery); a stingray, its fin swept up in motion; a scuba diver holding a brain coral in his gloved hand, a beam of sunlight breaking down through the water.

  I gave Frankie a coloring book and a fistful of crayons from my tote, and he ambled to the corner and squatted in his usual, seemingly uncomfortable way, knees squaring into platforms for his arms. Whenever he sat like this, concentrating on some task, I was reminded of something I had no business forgetting in the first place: he lived in his own world. He could forget I existed, for seconds or even minutes at a time. This was astonishing.

  By the time Charlie returned I’d made twelve good-size piles, and had sorted through about half of one box. Some pieces were dated, some titled, some signed, and some had no information at all. A handful were unfinished, as if deemed unworthy of further effort. These I put in their own pile. Every few minutes I came across a drawing I thought was hazier than the others, maybe done in dim light or with a less fine point on the pencil—but then I blinked and rubbed my eyes and second-guessed myself. Maybe, in fact, each was more precise than the last. I started to think about the tasks that would follow the current one, which in itself seemed endless. Every piece would need a signature and date and, if Charlie wanted, a title. And when finally the drawings were sorted by subject matter, each group would need to be sorted again by date. Or quality. Or something else I couldn’t yet define. Also, there would need to be a central inventory of the entire collection, a glorified list. The project ballooned.

  I found several pieces that might suit the gallery’s needs. In one, a squid and an octopus brawled, tentacles locked, while a barracuda looked on wearily. This one was titled Combat, and the date was January 11, 1985. Th
is man had lived in the middle of Biscayne Bay, drawing his pictures, since before Graham and I had moved into the cottage, since long before Frankie even existed.

  I heard a door open and shut and Charlie appeared. By this point, Frankie had arranged items from my tote in a line on a clear patch of the floor—a lip gloss, a pair of sunglasses, a pen—and was jumping over each, then spacing them farther apart and starting again, a rudimentary hopscotch. He was restless.

  Charlie had changed into green swim trunks and a white T-shirt. He carried a few business envelopes in one hand and held them out to me, watching Frankie as he hopped. “For Riggs,” he said.

  “I’ll take them today.” I put the envelopes in my tote.

  Frankie went up to Charlie and signed a few times.

  Charlie said, “Swim, swim, yes. Are you ready?”

  Frankie nodded.

  Charlie raised his eyebrows at me. “Are you ready?”

  “Right downstairs?” I said, forcing him to maintain eye contact. “Where I can see you?”