Sea Creatures

by Susanna Daniel

  Alice Ferguson had been a year ahead of us in high school. Once, during a rare conversation, she’d told me that her boyfriend’s penis was the size of a McDonald’s French fry. I’d been horrified, less by the comparison than by the revelation itself.

  “I don’t remember her being that, exactly,” I said.

  “Anyway, she stops by my office this morning—she’s starting a party-planning business—and get this: she’s driving an Aston Martin convertible.”

  “Good lord,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “But who cares?”

  “I know,” she said. “No kids.”

  “What?”

  “Alice—no kids.”

  “Don’t be mean.”

  “I’m not. It’s just, you know, the water heater broke last week, and the roof’s leaking in Tuck’s closet, and Maxwell needs his teeth fixed, and Stanley works every goddamned weekend.”

  We looked inside, where the two older kids were sparring with wrapping paper rolls. The oldest had his father’s dark hair and wide cheekbones. His face was a little menacing until he smiled. As we watched, he trounced his brother and they started vying for head locks. I wondered if Sally would do something to break them up, but she just turned back to me.

  “But then there’s the love,” she said.

  “The love,” I agreed.

  She slapped my knee. “So you’re headed to the Keys?”

  This was a plan Graham had hatched just a few days earlier. There had been a vacation domino effect on his team at work: one of the lead investigators needed a day off, so his assistant took that day as well, and if they weren’t working, then Graham’s lead couldn’t really work, so he took off, and so on. I’d gotten the feeling from the way Graham announced it—less like it was a vacation day than a lottery win—that days off, in this job, would be in short supply. I’d known that Graham’s new position would involve an adjustment, though I’d underestimated the extent. In Illinois, he’d been home most afternoons, grading papers or preparing lectures in his study, the heavy double doors open to the rest of the house. Some days I’d set Frankie to play on the plush rug beneath Graham’s desk and use that time to cook dinner or run an errand. Back when I still had appointments with clients, Graham had been available to watch Frankie, even if I had to drop him off at the college. It wasn’t that Graham hadn’t been working hard when he worked at home—he had been, relentlessly, which is one reason the tenure decision was so tough to take—but having his body in the house had lightened my load.

  Without thinking about it, I’d assumed the position at Rosenstiel would be similar. Graham had warned me there would be hours at the lab in addition to the classroom, hours in committee meetings and writing grants and traveling, that research in his field was a team effort, and the team had to be present to work. But I’d been so desperate to leave Illinois that I’d heard only what I wanted to hear.

  We were headed to the Dry Tortugas to kayak and camp for two nights. Frankie would stay with Lidia and my father, which worried me a little. They would heap on the love and attention, sure, but would they hold his hand when crossing the street? Would they remember to buckle his car seat? I’d heard somewhere that most accidents happen when the parents aren’t around. I hadn’t wanted to be the kind of mother who was never apart from her kid, not for his sake and not for my own. Somehow, this is exactly what I’d become.

  “We leave Friday,” I said.

  “Before Carson was born, Stanley and I went to Sanibel for the weekend. All we did was talk about the boys and go to bed early, but it was nice.”

  “Three seems like a lot, I’ll say.”

  “It’s a lot.” She lay back and closed her eyes. From inside came calls of victory from Tuck and whines from Maxwell. “This is my favorite part of the day,” said Sally, which made me laugh lightly. “No, really. Stanley will be here soon and he’s all rules and table manners, and I can’t exactly blame him. In the morning it’s dressing and brushing teeth and finding sneakers and getting out the door. At night it’s cleaning up and baths and maybe, if we’re lucky, Stan and I will stay up for a quickie.” She sighed. “I remind myself every day to enjoy them, but then I forget again.”

  Carson had been tough to come by, same as Frankie. For both of us, there had been a regimen of pills and shots, disappointment month after month. Frankie was my fourth pregnancy in sixteen months. The first had made it to fifteen weeks, though the others had been briefer. After the third, Graham had lost the little heart he’d brought to the process. He’d begged me to stop trying. Then one night we found ourselves having regular, old-fashioned sex for no reason except boredom and friskiness. No one could have been more surprised than I to find myself without a period two weeks later. Just a week after that, Sally called with her news—she was halfway through by that point, but hadn’t told anyone until she’d started to show. We didn’t congratulate each other until each boy took breath.

  When Frankie was a baby, I’d overheard a largely pregnant woman in the waiting room of my doctor’s office, talking to another woman about anticipating her second. “They say the first one makes you a mother and the second one makes you a family,” she’d said, glassy-eyed. I’d glared at her back as she’d waddled off after a nurse. Then what the fuck are we? I’d thought.

  I’d been pregnant and I’d given birth, but I’d not gained admittance to that club of happy pregnant people planting and pruning their families like window boxes. To have considered another child would have been to consider another string of miscarriages. It wasn’t a question of whether or not the eventual healthy child, if one were possible, might be worth it. It was a matter of sanity, survival. It was also a matter of trying to be a person who is sated by what she has, ending the cycle of wanting more, more, more. When I looked around, it always seemed I was alone in this way of thinking. Sally would never have asked if I was planning to have another. Everyone asked—even my father, who’d known about the miscarriages—but not Sally. Needless to say, Graham and I had never broached the subject; to have done so would have been, on my part, a violation of our tacit agreement.

  At the dining table, a small negotiation was under way, an exchange of one color for another. Then both boys had their heads down again.

  Sally saw me watching them. “Carson’s my sensitive one. Late walker, late talker. They’re making noise about holding him back from kindergarten.”

  “Really?”

  She shifted toward me, gesturing with her elegant fingers. “There’s this thing he does. He takes a black crayon or marker, and he makes these little loops all over a sheet of paper, like a sort of free-form spiderweb.” She waited to see if I understood. “Then he meticulously—meticulously—shades each tiny section with a different color. He’ll do it over and over, for more than an hour at a time. He’s probably doing it right now. He needs the largest pack of crayons just to finish one, and even then he gets upset because he has to repeat a color once or twice. His teacher is alarmed. She called us in. She kept using the words obsessive and compulsive. Stanley was like, ‘What’s the problem? He’s making nets to catch the light.’ That’s what Carson calls it, since he learned about the colors on the spectrum of light: nets to catch the light.”

  “It sounds beautiful,” I said. I thought of the fan coral I’d seen just that morning, on a swim with Frankie and Charlie out at Stiltsville. Crooked jade hollows peeked between each ragged tooth of the coral, like rough sparkling gems.

  “We have a few framed. Maybe we shouldn’t encourage him, but he’s going to be who he’s going to be, I figure. Who gives a shit when he starts kindergarten?”

  There was something drawn in her appearance, in the half-moons beneath her eyes and the way she pushed her hair away from her face. I took a swallow of my wine. I said, “When I asked about the pediatrician—there’s some urgency. Frankie doesn’t speak.”

  She searched my face. “Not at all?”

  “Not at all.”

  “They check
ed his hearing?”

  I nodded. “We’ve been waiting and seeing.” I pressed my fingertips against the bridge of my nose. “Graham thinks I play it down. Maybe he’s right.”

  She squeezed my knee. “It’s probably nothing serious. Call Dr. Sonia. She won’t freak out about it.”

  There came a commotion from inside. The bigger boys tore through the living room toward the front of the house. Then Stanley rounded the corner, wearing a tie and wingtips, one child in his arms and the other clinging to his leg, and a new sound cut through the melee: a deep, voluminous monster-roar coming from Stanley. As we watched, he tromped into the living room and crashed with the boys into the pillowy fort, bringing the whole thing down.

  8

  SINCE I’D BE LEAVING TOWN on a Friday, when I’d normally work, I told Charlie as soon as we arrived about my trip to the Dry Tortugas. He rubbed his chin and frowned, then said, “I guess that’s fine.”

  He handed Frankie a small, rubbery orange octopus with catlike yellow eyes, and Frankie’s face lighted up and he signed his thanks. Charlie had given Frankie one toy creature every day we’d visited. Early on, I’d asked him to please not give Frankie gifts behind my back, if he wouldn’t mind. At this, he was unable to stifle a humoring smile. “Alrighty,” he’d said.

  Frankie had amassed a small gang of toy animals by this time, and he took them everywhere we went, all knocking around inside Graham’s old canvas Dopp kit, which had a zipper with crooked teeth, so it took a long time to open and close. Upstairs at the stilt house, Frankie wrestled with the zipper, then lined up the toys on the linoleum floor, as if preparing them for battle. An orange octopus, a turquoise squid, a clown fish, a black manta ray, a gray shark, and the original yellow sea horse. Then he arranged them into a circle, as if having them reconcile. Then he put them in pairs.

  In three weeks of coming to Stiltsville, I’d made it roughly a quarter of the way through Charlie’s work. I no longer fought a swell of alarm each time Frankie stepped into the Zodiac or climbed the zigzagging stairs. I no longer checked repeatedly that his life vest was fastened, though he still wore it all the time at the house, except during his nap. Also, Charlie had convinced me that he shouldn’t wear it swimming, that it would keep him from learning natural buoyancy. Each time we’d come, Charlie had fixed the same midday buffet, and once I’d teased him about his apparent aversion to cooking food, and he’d looked puzzled for a moment—I thought I might have crossed a line—then brought his fingers to his cheek. “You know,” he said, “I can’t remember the last time I so much as toasted bread.” I brought Tupperware containers of tabbouleh and hummus, which he regarded skeptically at first; two days later, the containers were empty and he asked if I wouldn’t mind bringing more. I told him about Lidia and her strict food schedule: Mondays were tuna casserole, Tuesdays lasagna, Fridays meat loaf. She ate fruit and deli chicken salad every day for lunch. The nights my father was at gigs, she either went out with her girlfriends or came down the lawn to eat with us. It was kind of her to cook for us three times a week, especially since preparing a meal in the Lullaby’s miniature galley was something I cared to do as rarely as possible. I found it fascinating and not a little admirable, the way she coped with her clear distaste for the culinary arts. Three meals, three nights, no substitutions.

  “And this meat loaf,” I said to Charlie, who for once listened with his gray eyes trained on mine. “It is really, really good.”

  Charlie had procured—I suspected Riggs visited regularly, but I didn’t ask—a purple plastic fishing pole, child-size but still a little large for Frankie, which Charlie leaned against the generator room beside his own. When they went downstairs, Charlie carried his own pole and Frankie carried the smaller one, and they went together to the far end of the snaking dock, the rods propped against their shoulders. This was something that, like my father leading Frankie up the steps, reminded me of my mother. Or not of her, exactly, but of her absence. The empty vessel that consumed so much space, the thunderous void. I didn’t believe in ghosts or spirits or even angels, though I’d always loved the idea of these things and wished I could believe—but how else to define the bellowing, chest-beating presence of absence?

  Above the bunk in Frankie’s shallow berth, I’d hung a photograph of Graham’s mother, Julia, holding Frankie when he was five weeks old. Julia was a fragile person, less because of age than comportment and personality, and I remember worrying that she would drop into sleep and he would roll onto the polished marble floor of her sitting room. In the photo, her eyes are cast downward and you can’t tell whether they are open, but there is a discernible tension in her arms, a mindfulness over the small life in her lap. I look at that photo, and I’m relieved that it exists and that I framed it, that it will not disappear down the sinkhole of photographs printed but never looked at again. But also, it gives me a pinch of regret. Naturally, there is no such photograph of Frankie with my mother. We started trying to get pregnant while she was still alive, but it took too long. As far as she knew, she had no grandchild.

  Charlie wanted to drive the Zodiac. We’d fallen into the routine of taking a break after Frankie’s nap for a swim around the house, but today he wanted to head out straightaway, before I got to work. He made the request while I was in the kitchen pouring water for Frankie. I had to ask him to repeat himself, he spoke so softly. He said, “I wondered if I might take us all on a ride in your boat.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “For a swim. There’s a good place, with shallows for the boy.”

  To Frankie, I said, “Let’s lather up,” and Frankie scrambled to get the suntan lotion from my bag.

  I’d gotten into the habit of leaving the keys on the boat while it was docked. Frankie took up his usual spot next to the captain’s seat, so I stood starboard of Charlie and gripped the metal rail that looped around the back of the bench. Charlie wore a canvas fishing hat with a strap tightened under his chin, and our hat brims collided when he turned to check the engine. “Excuse me,” I said, leaning away. He didn’t respond. His large hand pushed forward on the throttle, and he said, “Hang on,” and then we were spitting smoothly into the channel. We turned to cut across the flats between Charlie’s house and the house to the east—this was the stretch of shoal between houses, which in low tide was walkable and during very low tide broke the water’s surface—and I gasped, fearing we’d run aground. But it was high tide. Charlie glanced at me. “We’re fine,” he said over the wind, then—this was the most unexpected gesture from him—he raised an arm and waved as we passed a red-painted house where a man, woman, and teenage girl sat on rocking chairs on the porch. All three waved back. It occurred to me, though there was no clear evidence of this, that Charlie might have been proud to drive by his neighbors with a woman and a child beside him.

  I kept one eye on Frankie as we drove. I thought he might be wary of grabbing Charlie as he would me, if we bounced off a wave. I’d bought him little aviator sunglasses that slid down his fleshy nose and obscured much of his face, and he looked small but grown up, his gaze on the horizon.

  We wound up at Soldier Key, a lump of uninhabited island south of Stiltsville. The world stilled when Charlie cut the engine, then filled with the noise of water slapping the hull and rushing up on the brief, seaweed-laced beach. A pair of gulls took off squawking from the island’s thick mangroves. Charlie set the anchor while I helped Frankie into swim trunks patterned with cartoon turtles. He got Charlie’s attention over my head.

  Turtles, he signed, indicating his shorts.

  “Maybe we’ll see one for real,” said Charlie.

  Frankie saluted—this is something Charlie had taught him—and climbed onto the gunwale.

  “You’re in a good mood,” I said to Charlie.

  He frowned. “Am I?”

  The week before, a miniature mask and snorkel had shown up at the stilt house, and after every swim since Frankie had signed excitedly about the sand dollars and urchins and st
arfish he’d seen underwater, using his hands to describe the creatures when he didn’t know the words. Now Charlie fit the mask to Frankie’s face, then lowered himself into the water and told Frankie to jump down, which he did. Sally and I had hired a teenager to give Carson and Frankie weekly swim lessons, though they hadn’t yet started. I was wondering now if this was necessary. For Charlie, Frankie jumped through the air as if he’d never believed any harm could come to him by doing so, as if the act of falling into water posed no threat at all.

  I’d taken to wearing my swimsuit, a modest black halter I’d bought on a whim, under my clothes, so I could pull off my shirt and get a little sun on my shoulders while we crossed the bay, and also to dispense with any awkward ducking into the bathroom before swimming. Now I felt nearly naked standing alone on the warm deck, blowing up an inner tube. I eased into the water holding the inner tube in front of me, then kicked toward the beach. The water was warm and soft, and the sandy seafloor was gluey underfoot. Frankie and Charlie stood with their masked faces in the water, hands moving back and forth at their sides.

  Charlie took the inner tube from me and lifted Frankie into it, so he could hold on. They moved into deeper water, faces down and snorkels spiking into the air. I waded onto the beach and sat in the wet sand, shading my eyes. I could no longer hear Charlie’s words, but every so often he tapped Frankie’s shoulder, and Frankie’s head popped up, the mask overwhelming his face like a parasite. Charlie pointed under the water, and Frankie adjusted and dipped again. When Frankie rocked forward to put his face in the water, the little turtles on his trunks crested the surface. It was too deep for him to stand, and every so often it looked like he might topple forward out of the inner tube. Each time, Charlie put out an arm for balance.

  I had the thought that maybe Graham and Frankie and I could carve out some time to come to Soldier Key as a family, though my next thought was that this was unlikely. Graham didn’t have a lot of free time. On the weekends, he’d taken long bike rides in the mornings, before Frankie and I were up, then made breakfast for us all, then worked at the banquette or on the deck through the afternoon. In addition to doing his own work, he was studying the work of his new team members, as if there might be a test. Knowing Graham, he was compensating for something he suspected had happened. Maybe there had been a conversation or meeting where he’d felt insufficiently prepared. Anytime I mentioned how many hours he was working, he looked wounded, as if I were betraying some common understanding about the importance of what he contributed to our family. Our situations, in his mind, were equitable: he worked and I took care of our son. His job wouldn’t last forever, after all. If I wanted to stay in Miami, he would have to earn himself a more permanent place.