Sea Creatures

by Susanna Daniel

  I couldn’t help but wonder, at the time, how the same situation might have played out in Miami, which it seemed had a harsher but less passive-aggressive law enforcement culture. Maybe in Miami Graham would have been hauled off to jail, but there would have been no bones made about it, no soft-spoken cops repeatedly referring to my son by name, as if he were as much their responsibility as mine.

  Graham’s mother, Julia, came from Chicago. Reporters called. The lawyer haggled with the hotel and hashed out a figure for repairs. I drove over with a check and handed it to a jowly, silver-haired manager who lectured me about the difficulty of getting glass out of a deep-pile carpet. I reassured him that he would never see my family in his hotel again. The lawyer recommended that Graham check himself into Detention for a third, longer stint—this would look good to the court, he said—so we packed him up and drove him there right away. Kathy Lyman didn’t show herself. A neighbor I barely knew, an elderly woman who’d known Julia in the old days, stopped by with a basket of muffins. How news spread even before the newspaper ran the story, I didn’t know. “I’m so sorry for your troubles,” said the neighbor as she handed me the basket. She patted my hand. “Lord protect you.” It was the first spot of sincere kindness in the ordeal. I could have wept in her frail arms.

  Julia brought me the newspaper. There was no picture of Graham in his fugue state this time, but there was one of the broken window, taken from below, and one of Graham taken from outside his hospital room. In the photo, he scowled at an unseen person, an embittered expression on his face. I don’t recall any anger in Graham that night, so I don’t know how long the photographer must have waited to capture that look. When I think of Graham during those hours, the papery gown and the painkillers, his pliant answers to the unending questions, I recall only how dejected he was, how powerless and ashamed, when just the evening before he’d come whooshing out of a waterslide, his face as full of delight as I’d seen it. When I saw my husband’s disgust with himself, any notion I’d had about my obligation to take Frankie away simply dissolved.

  In the article, we were referred to as “eccentric neighbors,” which I never understood. Surely, to be labeled as such, there must have been something other than Graham’s parasomnia. Did it have to do with the fact that I hadn’t grown up in the area? Was it Graham’s prematurely white hair, his all-season bicycling and refusal to drive a car? Was there something about us I didn’t recognize, some odd mannerism or behavior? It was more likely sloppy reporting than anything else, but still, I was humiliated.

  The social worker visited me and Frankie at home every week. Her name was Claire David, and she was new to the work, perhaps a little out of her depth. There was Graham’s parasomnia, yes, but that was overshadowed by Frankie’s speech, which commanded the majority of her attention. She did not mention, not once, the possibility of a connection between the two. She sent a language pathologist to the house, and for two hours the pathologist watched Frankie and me play while scribbling in a notebook. A week later, I received a seventeen-page report in the mail, saying more or less what we already knew: there was no obvious learning defect. Frankie had great capabilities with sign language, and if signs counted as words, his vocabulary would have been par for his age.

  There was no law on the books with regards to property damaged during the act of sleepwalking. There was something complicated about choosing an insanity defense versus a guilty defense, and for a while we tried to sort out the best course of action, but in the end the charges were dropped, and Graham paid a fine. Claire David’s responsibilities toward us were dropped as well. Graham returned home after two months in Detention, his second leave of absence from the university, to find that he had not been granted tenure. Coupled with my business’s decline, it seemed to me as if the ground had swelled beneath us like a tidal wave, lifting us from every mooring. Then Larry Birnbaum called with news of the Rosenstiel fellowship, and Graham applied, and we found harbor.

  The night we decided to leave Round Lake, Graham lay down and I helped him fasten his cuff for the first time. Graham joked—our first joke, since!—that if I went to sleep angry he might never be allowed to leave the bed again. Then he lay very still, his eyes on the ceiling. His smile faded.

  “I’ve never been afraid like this before,” he said.

  “Not even after waking up in the street?”

  “I’m not afraid of hurting myself,” he said, clenching his teeth.

  I knew the answer, but still I asked. “What are you afraid of?”

  He blinked at me. “Of hurting Frankie,” he said, then turned his back. He trembled and I wanted to reach out to him, but something kept me still. It was weeks before I allowed myself to take a sleeping pill again. Nights, I wandered the house, alert for noise. When I was forced to lay down, I lay in Frankie’s bed instead of my own, and held him until I was lulled to sleep by the tide of his warm breath.

  IT RAINED ALL DAY AFTER we arrived home from the Dry Tortugas. I dozed on the sectional sofa in the Lullaby’s salon, then woke to find Graham and Frankie sitting at the banquette. Graham had one leg crossed over the other—he wore his shirt tucked into his belted pants, and shoes laced up, even inside. Frankie sat on his knees in robot underwear and a T-shirt, a pair of blunt kid scissors in one hand. He leaned far over the table, looking as if he might tumble into his father’s lap. Graham was cutting even strips from cardstock, then folding each into a shape. Littering the table were pieces of Graham’s work: little boxes with folding lids, cranes with pointed beaks, accordions of various sizes.

  Frankie looked away from Graham long enough to squeeze one of the accordions between two fingers, then let it go. It soared over the table and landed on the floor.

  I watched them without moving or making any sound. Each piece Graham finished, he handed to Frankie, who inspected it from every angle. Then Frankie placed the treasure among the others, and looked eagerly to Graham to make another. Whether Graham gleaned any pleasure from impressing his watchful, adoring son, I couldn’t tell. After some time, Graham glanced toward the sofa, and his eyes found mine—I would have closed them and pretended to sleep, but I was too late—and I had a vision of us all sitting together, marveling over Graham’s creations. I saw how it might have been, him showing off and the two of us egging him on.

  Instead, Graham took my wakefulness as a cue to excuse himself. He stood, stretched, and walked into the main berth. Frankie sat back on his feet, opening and closing the lids of each little box, sending the accordions springing across the table. Maybe a different child, a child with speech, would have said, “Sit down? Play with me?” But not my son.

  I’d seen Graham’s origami skills before. On our fourth date, in an Italian restaurant in Wrigleyville, Graham made a tiny collared shirt from a dollar bill. I’m sure the look on my face as I’d watched his bony fingers work had been similar to Frankie’s. Graham had blushed as he passed the object into my hands. But for reasons I never understood, Graham had made the treasure for me willingly, a token of affection, while for Frankie he did it out of duty and boredom.

  Maybe it was unfair of me, but I felt a rush of anger when Graham rose from the table. My husband could have been a very good father—of this I am certain. He had it somewhere in him, the cells of parenting cancer. Instead, for reasons I will never understand, the cancer stopped growing midcourse, a kind of medical miracle.

  I wondered if by filling Frankie’s life, I’d eliminated any place for Graham. I wondered if Graham loved me in spite of himself, and he didn’t have room to love anyone else. I wondered if Graham gave up a piece of himself to make me a mother, and was resigned from the start to losing me in the process. Sometimes this is what I choose to believe—that he gave me himself, and when it seemed he wasn’t enough (might he have been?), he gave me more at his own expense.

  So what did I do? I got off the sofa and poured Frankie a glass of milk. I brought a stack of puzzles to the table and let him choose one for us to work on together. That nig
ht, sitting at the table on the back deck after Frankie was in bed, I gave Graham the cold shoulder. When he asked what was wrong, I seethed a minute longer, gathering my thoughts, then said, “Why don’t you like spending time with your son?” My voice was full of grit.

  He didn’t say anything. I turned toward him, primed to fight, but found him slumped in his chair, his forearm over his face, his long, angular body shaking as he silently sobbed. The advancing army inside me dispersed. I pulled his arm from his face and forced him to look at me.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said.

  “Something is missing,” I said.

  “I know it,” he said. “I do.”

  He never promised he’d try to change, never reassured me things would get better. He never lied to me—I did that for myself.

  11

  GRAHAM LEFT FOR JACKSONVILLE IN a van full of scientists at the end of that week. I got up early to drive him to Rosenstiel, and Frankie sat on my hip, waving sloppily at Graham while the van pulled away. We ate eggs at the dive bar at Dinner Key marina, watching the dayboaters maneuver from their slips, then headed out to Stiltsville. While I worked, Charlie and Frankie sat in rocking chairs on the porch. (When we’d first come, there had been only one rocker, but then two more showed up, which led me to think that Charlie must have had a house on land, where furniture remained as if in storage.) They were eating fruit Popsicles. I couldn’t see them from the office window, but I could hear the slurping.

  Every so often, Frankie’s noise paused.

  “What’s that?” I heard Charlie say.

  I had the urge to stop working and translate for them, but Charlie had been doing pretty well figuring out Frankie for himself.

  A motor chugged by. “Them?” Charlie said. “Just looky-loos. Smile and wave and they’ll go on their way.”

  Minutes later, a louder boat roared by, and Charlie said, “That’s more power than the fellow’s ever going to need, I guarantee you. And he’s going to run aground in—yep, there he goes.”

  I called out the window. “What happened?”

  “Guy ran aground,” called Charlie. To Frankie, Charlie said, “Stuck! How do you like that?”

  From across the water came a man’s faint curses.

  “That fellow is not happy, I’ll tell you,” said Charlie, chuckling. “No sir.”

  I thought I heard a soft giggle from Frankie, but I couldn’t be sure. The slurping resumed.

  That night, Sally came over after Stanley and the boys were in bed. We sat cross-legged on Lidia’s back lawn, a bottle of wine between us, a stone’s throw from the Lullaby, which was dark and still. Frankie was in bed. I told Sally about the Dry Tortugas—the fort, the sea turtle, the green flash.

  “I’ve never seen it,” she said about the flash. “But I hear it’s quick.”

  Across the canal, I could see the parents of the family that lived there carrying a couple of their kids to bed in a lighted room. Off went the overhead light and on went a lamp.

  I said, “Do you ever think about not being married anymore?”

  “All the time.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. The other day I was loading the dishwasher—for like the fifth time in a twenty-four-hour period, right?—and Maxwell comes in because he’s peed the bed. Stanley’s asleep in front of the TV with his shoes on, so I go and change Max’s pajamas and sheets and put him back to bed, and I put Tuck back to bed, because by this time he’s up, too, and then I go back to the living room and Stanley’s still there, still sleeping. So I go over and untie his shoes and slip them off, and I’m actually having this tender moment, thinking about how much I love all these slobs who live in my house. And I start to go back to the dishwasher, but out of the corner of my eye I see this white thing sticking out of the sofa cushion.”

  The swimming pool gurgled lightly. “Okay,” I said.

  “So this thing is right next to Stanley’s ass, and I go to look closer, and it looks to me like a sock—probably Tuck’s, because he likes to do this thing where he hides his socks—and when I pull it out of the cushion, ever-so-gently, I accidentally bump Stanley with my elbow, and he rears back like he’s been attacked. He has this look on his face like he’s going to kill me. Seriously. Then he realizes where he is or whatever, because he’s like, ‘Oh, it’s you. I was sleeping.’ ”

  I refilled my glass. The lamplight in the bedroom across the canal had gone out, and in another bedroom, a light went on. There were the parents again, with two more children.

  Sally went on. “So I walk back to the kitchen with this sock in my hand, and suddenly all I can see, all around, is the mess. Like this sock is covered in crumbs from beneath the sofa cushion, and how do you keep on top of that, anyway? And the living room is full of toys and the bookshelves are all askew, and I start thinking about the kids’ closets and what a fucking disaster they are. And I think, ‘I cannot do this one more day.’ ”

  “So what happened?”

  “Nothing. I left the dishes. I went to bed. I don’t really want to do it all—I just want to stop feeling like I should be doing it all. Stanley came in and woke me up with his stupid snoring.”

  “So all’s well.”

  “No. I mean, yes, but there’s more. The next day I have to meet this client in Kendall, and it takes like half an hour to get there, so I put on public radio—sometimes I put it on, when I’m in a mood—and there’s this show on about a guy who, get this, was raped twenty years ago, when he was just eight, by a neighbor kid, who was sixteen at the time.”

  “I warn you,” I said. “My skin has thinned.”

  “I know. It’s the kid thing. But you’ve got to hear this.”

  “Go on.”

  “So the guy’s describing what happened while they’re at this older kid’s house and their parents are upstairs having cocktails, and the older kid is supposed to be showing him his action figures or something, and instead he tells him to take off his clothes and holds a knife to him until he does it.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “I know, horrible. I mean, I know kids get raped, right? I know sick things happen? But there’s something about this story, about the guy telling it so calmly on the radio, that makes me want to be right back there in that kid’s bedroom and just—” She strangled the air. “I get rattled.”

  “Right.”

  “So I can’t stand hearing it, but I can’t turn it off. And the guy describes how afterward, the kid made him watch TV until his tears dried, then let him go back to his parents.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “I know, I know. But wait. So I’m still driving, listening to this story, and I’m so upset that I feel physically ill. So I turn off the radio, and I just keep driving for a minute, but then I start crying so hard that I can’t see the road—because, you know, that poor kid, and also Tuck and Carson and Maxwell—so I pull off at a gas station and call Stanley. And he freaks out because he thinks I’ve been in an accident or something, so I tell him I’m okay. I can hear the boys in the background, fighting over something, and I start to calm down.”

  She shook out her hair, then continued. “So I finally tell him that I just heard this story on the radio, and I’ll never listen to public radio again, and he says—you know, he’s a Republican, so he says that sounds like a good decision. And then I tell him about that little boy, and the knife, and the goddamned TV. And he’s real quiet, and I can hear the kids hollering, and I tell him I don’t ever want our boys—any of them—left alone with a teenage boy, period. And he says, ‘Okay, okay,’ like he just wants me to calm down. And I tell him I mean it, not even Salvatore or Bryan—those are his sister’s kids. Never again.”

  Sally looked at me, gauging my reaction. She said, “So I think he’s going to get all reasonable with me, like he’s going to try to talk me down even though I still feel like I might be sick. He’s going to reason with me, I think, and defend Salvatore and Bryan, because of course they’re good kids
. But at that moment, to me, there’s no good teenage boy in the world. And bear in mind that I’m raising three boys, and one day they’ll be teenagers, and the thought of one of them doing that—I cannot stand it.

  “So I have this thought. I think that if Stanley does this, if he tries to reason with me, I’ll kill him. No, I won’t really kill him, but I’ll divorce him. I’ll take all his money. And the boys are whooping it up in the background and I know they’re about to need some intervention, but Stanley doesn’t hang up. He says, like it’s no problem, ‘All right. We won’t leave them alone.’ And I start crying all over again, from relief.”

  I exhaled. “Good for Stanley.”

  Sally’s voice was low and steady. “So I tell him that if anyone ever hurts one of our boys I’ll kill him with my bare hands, and Stanley says I’ll have to beat him to it.” She shook her head, as if willing the story from her memory. “Anyway, long story, I know, but after I hung up with him I had this thought: I don’t love him like I did. But I love him in a new way, and we are in this thing together. We are going to raise these children or die trying.” She finished her wine and pulled her knees to her chest. “Does that sound like I’m making excuses?”

  “No,” I said honestly.

  “I swear, if he’d gone the other way—if he’d told me to be reasonable—I think a little bit of the marriage would have died then and there.”